by Louise Dean
‘Really?’
David put his head between them. ‘She’s broke her leg, but she’s back home now in a cast, Dad. I sin ’er last week. She’s all right.’
‘Poor cow. Abandoned there like yesterday’s newspapers. You’ll go round, won’t you, son?’ he said, and this time he put his hand on top of Nick’s on the gearshift and patted it briefly.
They bypassed the town that once you could only drive through, where they used to go to a pub with a fire for her birthday – it had been famous for its cherry pie and trout – and at the next village they drove across a crossroads with all of the local stores on either side closed apart from a Chinese takeaway. Then they went past an old haunt of his father’s, a roadside pub, closed too, and he pointed out what used to be a lorry drivers’ café in a lay-by, where he took the boys for egg and chips on the days they came to work with him.
‘I used to bring you back ’ome filthy, them days. She’d holler and shout at me and have you in the bath.’
When they put their boys to bed, Ken and Pearl took turns to poke their heads in to get the last word, and the boys competed to keep them at the door, calling out after them all the brightest and best things they could wish for them all: ‘It’ll be a nice day’, ‘We’ll have a cup of tea’, ‘The sun’ll be shining!’ Nick recalled this now, and looked at his father, and then at Dave. Sadness such as there was in their home wasn’t all cruel – no, not at all – some of the sadness was nothing to do with cruelty, or even each other.
‘She could remember every line of a poem she liked,’ said Dave.
‘That’s where you got your brains from, Nick,’ the old man said. ‘From her, not from me.’
It occurred to him that in this case the old truism about the journey being more important than the destination was right, but he didn’t say it, because it was lofty, and he didn’t want to set himself apart in any way from them. He wanted to be with them, and like them. He wanted to be in the car with his family. And he thought of how they came back from that cherry-pie pub on her birthday, mouths full with After Eight mints, his mother dispensing them from her handbag, fairly and squarely, and how he and his brother slept the sleep of angels in the back of the car, how sleep was never as good as that ever again, a rocking contentment, well fed, happy, with the rollicking of the car round the country lanes and the sound of his mother and father talking together, lurching in and out of his tubby little brother and ending up in their favourite arrangement, where he had his head on his brother’s back and his brother had his head on his lap. They pretended to be asleep when the car door was opened just to have the luxury of being lifted.
‘Aah. Look at them, Ken. My two little princes.’
‘Little sods, more like. Come on, I know when you’re having us on, you two.’
Chapter 34
When he walked the dog, on Sunday, he found spring had thrown up its last but best: bluebells, little pink milkmaids, and the white greater stitchworts with their little yellow pincushions set amid white petals. Passing the empty larder of a bramble thicket, the spaniel poked his head in and out of the warren holes with the ghastly fake smile of someone enquiring through a serving hatch as to dinner’s imminence. Elsewhere a rabbit ran for its life.
He gladdened his step, up the hill, out of the woods, coming up by chalet bungalow and terrace row, keen to find Astrid.
His father would be lonely now, he thought. He’d made sure they knew it when they dropped him at the bungalow in Bulverhythe. Ken had stood on the pavement, hands in pockets, wind at his hair and coat, making sure that should they look back they’d see him like that.
‘You’ll enjoy the peace and quiet, Dad,’ said Dave. ‘You’ll be a bachelor boy again.’
‘Job’s comfort, you are,’ his father had retorted.
Outside, on the lane, the dog hunched, concertina’d on the cusp of next door’s driveway, giving him an awkward look as if to say, Come on, be fair, look the other way. Then as a last gambit the dog scarpered on past the house. Nick called him back, whistled too, and praised him when he skidded to a halt and turned back, tongue like a scarf.
There was only one thing amiss at home, it seemed, and that was Laura. She seemed a different girl, withdrawn and diffident, who barely answered questions apart from with ‘I don’t know’. Sensing something was wrong the night before, he’d made cheese on toast. He was scraping the burnt edges off the toast, talking to her and the dog by turns, when out of the corner of his eye he saw her put her head on the table. Her arms hung either side of her and she simply turned her chin and let her cheek rest on the smooth surface, and a tear rolled down the cheek and on to the table.
Astrid had bustled in and busied the girl about getting her schoolwork together. She asked her daughter, sharply, what was wrong,
‘It’s just,’ Laura said in a small voice, ‘that I worry about him.’
‘Who?’
‘Dad.’ Her throat tightened around the word.
In the beginning, in the early days, he’d complained to her about Laura, as if he could thwart that great love of theirs.
‘She moans so much, don’t you think?’ He’d put his criticisms slyly, as if a question, as if it were a matter of education or improvement. ‘She doesn’t read much, does she?’, ‘She doesn’t seem to have any curiosity . . . like we did as kids, our generation.’
Then he learnt, in loving Astrid, to emulate her, to speak only of the good things that Laura did. In fact he could beat her at it. He mentioned them first – how Laura had good manners, how she was a brave girl, how she came out with such funny old-fashioned things . . . And this worked well. Astrid was happy, and it worked for him too; he looked for the good in the child and found it.
‘She certainly dotes on Danny, doesn’t she? But why is she coming back a touch hostile to us?’ he’d asked Astrid.
‘Well, every child wants its parents back together, deep down, don’t you think?’
Nick had met Danny a number of times at station gates and, in exchanging plastic bags with him, found a slight man eager to please. For some reason, and he could not explain it, their eyes lit up when they saw each other, and smiles sprang to their faces. Perhaps it was that they hoped the other was decent and good and fair so very much. Perhaps it was because of Laura. He daydreamed of standing with Astrid at Laura’s graduation. He went to the lacrosse fixtures and flinched and ducked with the other dads, and he went to the school play early to secure them places at the front.
But it wasn’t him that Laura wanted.
Astrid was standing in the stuffy heat of the conservatory, waiting, when he and Roy got back from their walk. He assumed a frown, keen for Astrid to see his readiness for tasks numberless, and to appreciate him anew.
‘Shed door needs fixing. Dog took a shit on the neighbours’ drive again. And Dozie, Ed Crozier, called on the mobile. When are you coming to stay? I forgot I’d said we would. I don’t fancy trekking up to bloody Oxfordshire, do you?’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘It’s always the same old stories, you know. But, you see, I did promise we’d go and stay, just the one night.’
‘When?’
‘Um. Next weekend. Laura’s with her dad, right?’ She nodded.
‘You’re OK with that then, are you?’
She touched his face and he went to kiss her hand and saw that her eyes were red and that she’d been crying.
‘What is it?’
Laura had started her period. He had to steady himself and pull himself together, so strong was his discomfort.
‘She didn’t want me to tell you,’ Astrid said, her hands moving up and down either side of his arms. ‘She was worried she wouldn’t be a little girl any more. That we won’t love her any more. I remember thinking that my father wouldn’t love me any more when I had my first period. I know it’s silly.’ She tendered him a little faithful smile.
‘Tell her not to worry. It doesn’t make her a woman, does it, Astrid? It’s only that she�
��s growing into one. She’ll always be our little girl,’ he added with conviction, and he surprised himself with the emotion he felt saying ‘our’.
‘I want Laura to feel she can do anything.’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, bloody Danny keeps on to Laura about how unhappy and how unlucky he is. He says he might die. It’s the booze and drugs but he doesn’t tell her that. Did you know she writes letters to him?’
‘No.’
‘She sends him chocolate bars.’ Astrid smiled thinly.
‘More like a fiver he wants, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t. That’ll be next. Nick, I love her but I am going to have to let her go one day. And best if she’s strong. Like your parents did, Nick. They made you strong and they let you go.’
‘Well, I’m not sure that was the plan.’
And she sat with her daughter in the front room and introduced the young woman to the salve of chocolate, a soap opera on TV and a hot-water bottle, and they sat feet up, cuddling close. They could hear poor Nick, edgy, moving around the kitchen, putting the dishes away, something he’d not done before, and coming in and out of the front room, to ask where a bowl or a spatula went.
After a few minutes he came and sat next to them, yawning in his feigned way and turning down their offer of chocolate most politely. Then he went back out to the kitchen, and came back in with his plate of cheese and biscuits.
‘I know it’s a bit . . . well, you know . . . unfashionable, but in my book you can’t beat a Jacob’s Cream Cracker,’ he’d said, sitting back alongside them, giving Astrid one of Roy’s ingratiating looks and holding up an oatcake for reference.
‘I’ll get some,’ said Astrid. ‘Next time I’m at the shops.’ Laura made sure the blanket was extended to his knees too. When he went up to kiss Laura goodnight, he saw on her bedside table arranged meticulously were the things she’d bought in Boots with her mother: toe separators in pink foam, a small bottle of nail varnish, a soap in the shape of a strawberry, some hair slides still in the plastic, and a glitter lip gloss.
‘Don’t grow up too fast, darling,’ he said to her. Stay a child in some part of you, he thought.
The seasons were changing every day, it seemed. The world was turning too fast, his hair was thinning, and it seemed that the end was coming for him too, after all, not just for the old man. And it was coming neither dramatically nor brutally, like the stage villain he’d anticipated, but unexpectedly fleet of foot, and with a woman’s touch somehow.
Chapter 35
‘What are you thinking?’ Astrid asked him, after they’d been sitting in silence on the motorway for half an hour. They were on their way to spend the weekend with Ed Crozier and family in Banbury. Nick narrowed his eyes as if scrutinizing each and every one of his motivations, behaviours and emotions to prise open his unconscious mind. ‘I was just wondering whether the bad smell I keep getting a whiff of isn’t my socks.’
They were side by side in the Range Rover, in their usual pose, her with hand in his lap. There were two cold stale coffees in cardboard cups in the cupholders from their last stop.
‘I should have called my mother. I said I would. I must. She was strange, you know, compared to other people. And I’m so conventional. Funny.’
Astrid rubbed his leg.
‘We’re so greedy, these days. We get greedier. We must be the greediest generation of all, you know. The thing about her, Pearl, was that nothing was ever rubbish. Nothing was ever no good. Me, I’m all for ditching things and moving on. That would be sacrilege to her.’
He’d popped into the shed that morning to put away the loose trowel and watering can that had been roaming around the windswept hilltop garden since the autumn. Stepping round the lawn mower to put them against the wall, he took in the artefacts of his former self ranged out there: the abdominal press, a rowing machine, a wetsuit, his cricket bag, a motorbike helmet, an industrial espresso machine, and his skis propped against the wall like a pair of fingers crossed. A Paul Smith holdall. He’d asked Astrid to get rid of them.
As a boy, he sat in the car, visor down, while his mother delved through skips, hauling out a mangle or a pram. Brass matchboxes, mottoed jugs, framed photos of someone else’s great-grandfather; these were the things she found that others had thrown away, and gave each one that unflinching eye of hers as she turned it to the light and granted it, for a while, a turn at the mantelpiece or her dressing table, or hearth. She directed them to find beauty in dirty places and commonplaces, everywhere. He felt once more the blow of Morwen’s depiction of him as a snob.
‘You know, the last thing anyone wants in a parent is for them to be enigmatic.’
Astrid tilted her head. ‘I suppose so.’
‘It’s like we want cartoon characters, or cardboard cut-outs; we want to be able to sum them up in a sentence when people ask. Oh, a parent can be larger than life for the purpose of an anecdote, but they must never be bigger than us, you see. I could never sum up my mum if you asked me to.’
‘Well, it’s not surprising. You’ve only got memories to go on, since you haven’t seen her for twenty years or whatever.’
‘No.’ He put his finger along his upper lip. ‘No, we don’t want them enigmatic or inscrutable or any of that malarkey because we are supposed to rise triumphant, aren’t we? We’re not supposed to have parents as complicated as us. We’re supposed to be far more fucked up.’
When he accused her of not being like other mothers, it tickled her pink because he’d hit the nail on the head. She did not conform to convention. They’d fallen in behind their father to try to make the witch abjure her magic and do the dishes and shut her mouth. ‘Sod you,’ was her reply. If that’s the way you want to play it, I’ll stop being a woman.
The way to eternal life was sexlessness. Some were ready for it sooner than others. He felt Astrid’s hand, nestling in his crotch.
Against his will, she had packed the Paul Smith holdall, dumping its former contents into a wet cardboard box in the shed.
‘Leave the stupid bag there. It’s too fey,’ he said the last time she wanted it in the house. ‘It belongs to the past.’ Inside it were framed photos of his university drinking clubs, showing young men, looking languid, feigning foppery as if they were born to it. The vivid colours of its stripes made it too conspicuously moneyed for his liking. He’d kicked it. ‘Bloody thing.’
It amused her. ‘I like that bag; it’s so trendy!’ she said, every time he took it back out to the shed like a bad cat.
This time she’d got it in the boot before he could object. When he saw it there, he knew it was there as a rebuke, but he couldn’t think what for. He used it last when he left Natasha and their flat in Wandsworth, four or more years back, and when he looked at it he could see himself swinging it down the stairs now, humming the tune from the bathroom radio, the Brian Ferry track – ‘Come on, come on, let’s stick together’ – and when it came to him out on the pavement what the hell he was singing, he’d felt bad and doubled back down the side alley and checked on her through the kitchen windows. She was dialling a number and chewing on a corner of toast. When the phone answered, her face changed; she came alive in anger.
Astrid had scrupled over the packing. She went for a single colour and that colour was beige. It was irreproachable. It took her close to a week to get the contents of that bag to be both minimal and opulent, making amendments and changes here and there, slipping in extra thongs, adding accessories on day six. After seven days it was done. And she saw that it was good.
‘There’s barely any room,’ she said to him, holding one of his shirts up with a critical expression.
‘I only need the one I’m wearing.’
‘That’s true.’
He said he didn’t want an extra pair of underpants but she put them in with ostentatious generosity, sighing and saying how she’d have to start again, that they’d fit but her palazzo pants might be creased as a result.
She had an A-line dr
ess for dinner and a string of pearls, and a cashmere shawl-collared cardigan, vest and palazzo pants for the breakfast in the orangerie she imagined they’d have. She saw herself loafing elegantly like the models in the White Company catalogue. She would stand next to a piano, waiting for eggs Benedict, sipping on Buck’s Fizz, possibly running a long nail along the keys, elegant and thin.
Her restless hands gave away her nerves when they came off the motorway.
‘He’s a complete big softie, Bunny. You’ll love him.’
‘Hmm.’
‘He’s a twat. But in a good way.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘I don’t really know her. Seems nice enough; I’ve only met her the once, at Johnno’s wedding.’
‘Oh, who did you take to that?’
He drew a breath and considered; no, he couldn’t porky pie. ‘Natasha.’
‘Oh. So they’ve both met her then.’
‘I’ve known Dozie for twenty years, love! Actually,’ he wiggled in his seat, humour and vanity aglow in his eyes, ‘he’s always been a bit jealous of me. Used to have my cast-offs. So, you’d better watch yourself, Bunny.’
‘Ha.’
When he felt for her knee, she moved her leg. Was he missing something? Over the last few nights, since he came back from Wales, she’d begun to go downstairs and sit with a book as soon as she thought he was drifting off. As he grew more contented, she became more discontented and lately she sat brooding apart from him into the middle of the night.
Astrid was unhappy with his new docility, which was to her way of thinking a slur on her sexuality. Are we to shuffle into old age? she asked herself when she heard his snoring. Her parents had sustained the same lassitude over forty years and they called it a good thing, and people generally thought of it as a good thing, but she didn’t. Is this it? she said to him from time to time, poking him in the ribs, but he was too thickly asleep to hear her. She sat downstairs with a book open, picking her nails, biting them, going gently crazy.
