by Louise Dean
Chapter 46
The sun was pestered by clouds, and every time it gave them the slip they found it again. Outside, Ken was in the garden in his mac, sitting on the same chair, fixated on the place on the fence where the robin had been the day before. Astrid asked him if he wanted a cold drink. He shook his head. He was waiting to go to Pearl’s. He would have to wait four more hours.
The sun flexed its muscles and Astrid was impressed. She got the fold-out sunloungers from the shed and put them both up, then she went upstairs and changed into a dress and feeling her legs with her hands, she went to the shower and used the hand-held shower mixer to wet them and shave them, not too well. Her shinbones were orange and sore afterwards. She salved them with cream. She put her hair up in a clip, found the magazine section she was after among the Sunday papers, poured herself a glass of water with a dash of lemon juice, took her sunglasses out of her bag and went outside. The clouds had moved and it was cold.
She went back inside, took one of Nick’s jumpers off the hook on the door and put it on, went back outside and sat down. The phone rang and, with relief to get out of the cold, she went inside.
Ken sat all the while in the same place, stiff-legged, bearing down upon the uncomfortable chair, buffeted more by memory than weather.
It was Big Katie saying she was ill and wouldn’t be in to work the next day. Astrid went and got her diary to see who else was on. She noticed she had scrawled a big ‘P’ next to tomorrow.
She had felt bloated for a couple of days and, wondering when she’d be having a period next month, she started to look back through the diary to check the interval in days and then plan forward.
Ken came in. ‘Where’s Laura?’
Still counting, Astrid put a finger in the air to pause him.
‘Where’s Nick?’
‘Twenty-seven, twenty-eight . . . Well, now, hang on a minute! I don’t need to do that, do I!’
‘What’s that then?’
‘Counting the days of my menstrual cycle, Ken.’
His top lip snagged.
‘But, as it happens, I needn’t bother.’ She closed the book.
‘Jolly good,’ he said. He’d never heard a woman speak of it in such a way, not in his whole life, as if it were a thing of interest, or for public conversation. Pat kept it quiet; you wouldn’t have known she had them. Pearl glowered, and you only knew because she was particularly angry, but otherwise there was no talk of it. June used to turn over when an ad came on the TV and they poured the blue water on to the sanitary towel. ‘Don’t want you put off your cheese,’ she’d said.
But this young woman was barefaced about it!
‘Because, it’s incredible really, because my monthly period falls, and has fallen for more than six months as far as I can see, on the day of the month when there’s a full moon. It’s in the calendar marked with a little dark circle, you see. And every month that’s when I start. Amazing, isn’t it? All the while, without even knowing it, I’m being ruled by the moon.’
‘Nick about?’ he said, edging in a cowardly way to the stairs and craning his neck. ‘Nick? You up there?’
‘Full moon, blood flows. Incredible.’
‘Nick? Laura?’ he called plaintively into the vacuum.
‘So, can I make you some breakfast, Ken?’
‘No, ta.’
‘Maybe some toast and jam? No? Well, I’ll make us some tea then.’ And Astrid went, in a bustle, to the kettle. She was wearing a 1950s dress, tight at the waist and big over the hips. Her tummy was round and tight as a drum with the period coming. She turned on the tap and the water went in noisily.
Ken stood there with his hands in his pockets, wretchedly awkward.
‘You know, I sometimes think that in the story of the oppression of women,’ she flicked the kettle switch, and put her hands to the small of her back, ‘beauty and being young and being thin are just the latest chapter.’
‘You could say that,’ he said, rooted to the spot. He looked from door to door.
‘But the problem is, we’ve always been willing to do each other down, us women; it’s been about elbowing each other out of the way to end up with the man. That’s the problem.’ The way she stood there, facing him, the way she was talking, it all seemed to point to one culprit.
‘I daresay,’ he said.
‘A bunch of turncoats. At least you men stick together.’
Ken rubbed his chin. ‘I’ve come to have a lot of respect for women lately. Because of Audrey, see. The undertaker lady. I’ve known her fifteen years or more, knew her parents too. I used to call on their services, see. When I had a tenant kick the bucket, they’d come right round and sort it out and never a complaint. You know, all hours. Well, you’d never expect to have a woman show up, would you? I wasn’t ’alf surprised when Audrey come by. We had this one old geezer in one of our places and, well, it turned your stomach. But she came in and, well . . . how do you put it . . .?’ He squirms, ‘She was tender. Like he was someone once. Anyway, I bin working for her for a while now, ’elpin’ out. The things you see ’er do. Just takes it in ’er stride. An ’eart big as an ’ouse.’ He sat down at the table. Astrid poured the hot water into the teapot. ‘I thought that women was whiners, you know, not much chop. I thought that of Pearl too but it turns out, ’cording to Dave, that she’s done all right on her own without me.’
Astrid set the teacup before him with the bowl of sugar. ‘Help yourself, Ken.’
‘I don’t like being alone, Astrid. You wouldn’t want to be on your own, wouldya? Young woman like you?’
‘Well, I’d prefer to be alone than to be with someone I didn’t like.’ She went to the pantry and took out a pack of biscuits and opened it and put those before him too. She touched his back as she set them down. ‘Have one of those to dip in your tea. You see, the thing is, if a man marries a woman he thinks is stupid and grumpy, it’s amazing how quickly she becomes it. But luckily,’ she said, sliding a biscuit from the pack and biting it, ‘there’s a cure.’
She sat down next to him in a big flump. ‘I was alone before I met Nick for a while. And,’ she bit into a biscuit and chewed ruminatively, ‘we are happy. It’s just that I worry about things I didn’t have to worry about before.’
Ken took a long slug of the tea in shaky gulps. ‘Pardon me,’ was all he said, and his eyes remained on the cup, and it seemed like she’d lost his interest since he sat, arms folded, looking at the steaming cup with cold eyes as if cooling it by will. Then after a while, he said, ‘It’s sufferin’ what makes a person strong.’
She sipped her tea.
‘I don’t remember me own mother really, but it was my sister Pat what brought me up and she was a good woman but, well, she was me older sister, weren’t she? See what I mean? But with Pearl, she looked to me, see. And Pearl, she was always crying. Nick’ll tell you that. She couldn’t ’elp it, I daresay. But the slightest thing set ’er off. When the film started, she’d start with the crying and when it ended, she’d start again and all the way through and I just didn’t pay it no ’eed. But I couldn’t,’ he shook his head, ‘I couldn’t work it out, you know, the crying.’ He looked her in the eyes.
‘People cry, Ken, because they’re sad,’ she said, but he didn’t seem to hear her; he was being absorbed rapidly back into the past again. He was in another kitchen, standing behind Pearl, looking over her shoulder into the mixing bowl of flour, sugar, margarine and tears, which were falling into the bowl off her chin, and her hands were working it all together, her wedding ring caked with dough.
Chapter 47
Down in the dell where the beech trees jostle to see in the stream which is prettier, Ken follows Laura through the ragged bluebells, in and out of pockets of midges, clearing twig and leaf from his nearsight.
Suddenly he hears her cry out, and in the dappled sunshine he sees her flying through the sky like a forest fairy. She has taken to the air on a rope swing and is dipping in and out of shadow and light, with her f
eet touching the top of a gorse bush and her hair trailing behind her in the leaves and brush of the bank. The great beech tree seems to bend at the knees to take the strain.
He stands open-mouthed, watching her.
‘Come on! Try it!’ she calls out and in a second she’s on the woodland floor on all fours, then she stands to brush herself off.
He nearly trips down the bank, totters across the shallow stream, then goes to great effort to heave himself up the bank, using the tree roots as banisters; it’s a miracle that he makes it at all. The smell of wild garlic wrinkles his nose. He’s out of puff when he gets to the beech tree.
Merciless, she shows him the short plank that is the swing seat. She taps it.
One thing he has become afraid of as he’s gotten older is being unsteady on his feet, not to mention being uncertain at all, and this is precarious.
‘No, ta.’
But she cajoles him and exhorts him. ‘It’ll change your life, Ken. I promise.’
‘Don’t be daft.’
She shows the seat to him and shakes it. He manages to slide the plank between his trouser legs. He stands a minute, while she arranges his mac via its back slit, to divide it to either side of the plank. She pronounces him ready.
‘No,’ he says, stock-still. He is not ready.
‘There’s nothing to be scared of !’ she says with incredulity.
‘Of course you can do it! Anyone can do it! Go on!’
He lifts his heels, tests the notion, then drops them. ‘No.’
‘Shall I give you a push?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘Don’t you do that. You stand back.’
‘Oh, come on!’
And suddenly he’s aloft and falling and rising. He doesn’t know what possessed him. As soon as his feet lift, he feels joy. Fear to joy, fear to joy; he can hear a whirling sound in his ears as he travels over the earth. He’s hanging on to the rope with both hands. His vision swoons from leaves and sky to earth and nettles and back, and in his nose is the smell of soil and the fragrance of the bluebells, and the world is rushing fast at him and away from him and for music there is the laughter of the girl. He closes his eyes and bobs, hanging limp in the hands of gravity.
‘You did it!’ she says when his heels strike earth and he comes to a standstill. ‘I told you it was easy! Now you won’t be scared to do it again, will you?’
He slides the plank from between his legs and, staggering backwards, remembers the painful feeling of being articulated to stand on the earth. He wishes to lie down; it is only lying down that he’s at ease.
‘I shan’t never do it again,’ he says severely.
They walk back up the hill, where the forget-me-nots and the hogweed are out in the hedgerow, and she stops to pick a posy and to lament the passing of the primroses, with their demure mob caps, in favour of the flashy satin buttercups.
‘I love the primroses,’ she says. ‘I love the smell of them. I wish they didn’t have to go away.’
‘Them primroses’ll be back, Laura,’ he pants. ‘Their roots, see, they’re just ’iding, see, beneath the ground. You can’t see ’em, but they’ll be back,’ he says, barely finding the breath to say the words.
They are at the iron gate and, drawn to it, he staggers over and leans on it to recover, standing where his son has stood many a time.
‘Nice view from ’ere.’
‘Ken?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does God exist?’
‘Course ’e does.’
‘You know you ask people whether there’s a God or not and they never give you a straight answer, do they?’
‘That’s right. You’re right there, mate.’
‘So, how do you know He does?’
‘How do I know? Because ’e’s inside of me, innie? I can hear ’im, and I can feel ’im. And ’e gives me a bloomin’ great shove, now an’ again. Like ’e did down there on that swing.’
Laura is pleased someone has finally cleared up the matter for her.
Chapter 48
The gamekeeper’s cottage smells of mildew and apples stored over winter. It is damp, with thin windows knocking in their frames. It was never meant nor made to welcome guests. It was not conceived for ‘entertaining’. It was made to provide recourse from extremes of weather, but not the basic cold which is the birthright of the Englishman and certainly the due of a game-keeper. It was built proud and pretty enough to make coming home across the fields an agreeable end to the day. It’s grandfatherly Victorian exterior with its gabled eyebrows and finger-to-lips front door seems to say: Come in, eat and go quietly to bed.
Its construction didn’t reckon on any untoward physical activity. The floorboards resent agitated footsteps. Under Pearl’s regime, with its thin curtains and carpet, its pine furniture and its piles of precarious bric-a-brac, it is not the sort of house that could brook much jumping about.
They never had friends come and stay when they were kids. Even now, there are no guests, there are only trespassers. The dog sees off those who stray from its brick pathways. Pearl doesn’t admit anyone to the interior. Today, the most they each get is a peek into the living room, over the stable door at the kitchen. Heading them off, the great mongrel bouncer swings saliva in a sort of rope chain. They drag their feet, crane their necks for glimpses, like paying visitors to a country home keen to see ‘where the family live’, until Pearl pulls the upper half of the door to and gets them to do as she asked, which is to carry the trays into the garden.
She seems eager to get it over with. She greeted them with no more than nods. On her crutches, with a lower leg in plaster, she still manages to keep a hand on the dog’s collar, holding it back, and scolding the mutt with such colourful rage as to make the three children hang back in trepidation.
‘Stay back, sod you!’
Whatever social manners Pearl might have had, have been left long ago in built-up places.
‘Mad,’ whispers Matt with a note of reverence.
* * *
On the long drive up the unmade track to the house, which is now almost entirely grown over with chestnut trees and rhododendrons, Laura pointed out dolls hanging from the trees.
Nick braked. ‘Decoration?’ he offered uncertainly.
As the Range Rover moved forward again, the four of them looked through Astrid’s window, safari-faced. From every other tree there were plastic baby dolls, suspended by a leg, or upside down, or more often squashed into the crook of a branch, one eye stuck closed. Naked, they were ghastly in a way, green-haired from the weather or bald and threadbare. Made originally for the delight of maternally minded little girls, their once cooing expressions seemed creepy here in the woods; they were like vulgar harpies jeering at the traffic.
‘Grim,’ said Astrid.
* * *
In the middle of the back lawn, on a trestle table covered with a lace-edged tablecloth, there is an assortment of plates of cakes and scones. There are a few odd glasses and there’s an enamel jug. The chairs are ranged about the table on the lawn uneasily, some upholstered, some wicker, and at the head of the table is a broad oak dining chair with a patchwork cushion in its seat.
The garden is tropical today, wet and lush and redolent of honeysuckle. The wisteria weeps. The roses are pressing for the birth of their blossoms. In dank gutter-grates toads hunker down, waiting for frightful things to pass them by.
Pearl takes the oak chair and is the first to serve herself. She does so generously, slathering her scone with margarine before passing anything to anyone else. She chews, only half listening to Ken’s fawning words. The others help themselves one by one to seats then scones.
Marina pours the tea.
With his high-pitched noises, Ken goes between simpleton and naughty schoolboy, whimpering and simpering, complimenting the garden, complimenting the spread, thanking her and commending her.
‘She’s a wonderful woman, your mother, i’n’ she? Always was.’
At the far end of the table, L
aura stands to pour squash into cups. The children taste the drink and show each other their tongues. ‘What is it anyway?’ Emily whispers.
‘LSD or something,’ says Matt, then with all eyes on him, looks dashed.
‘This garden ’ere’s a paradise, Pearl. I don’t know how you keep it up,’ says Ken.
‘You never did know anything about gardening.’
Dave does the best he can. ‘Well, Dad used to help a bit, didn’t he? I remember we all did a bit. I used to get a penny a dog turd, didn’t I? Well, I got a ha’penny actually, after I’d given Nick his share.’
‘Oooh?’ barks Ken. Under his breath Matt mimics the crazy sound and Emily shows the yellow crumbs in her brace.
‘Nick,’ says Pearl harshly. ‘Nick, he said.’
Her eyes fall on her elder son for a moment, as he slices his scone open and tries to make sense of the butter that’s hard as cheese. Having crumbed the stick of butter and left the scone unscathed, he catches her eye in his moment of failing – just as when he was a child. But she passes no comment. Her face is obscured by weather and age now, like the bricks of the house; her cheeks are no longer coral but ruddy and her face is crowded by unkempt hair and large glasses.
When Emily upsets her glass, Pearl sighs heavily and lifts herself up with difficulty, hoisting herself on to her crutches, going in to get a cloth, ignoring the protests of both her sons. The two couples and the three children dare to look at each other. This is no picnic, much less a tea party.
‘I could murder a drink,’ says Dave.
Nick rises and follows his mother out to the kitchen where the dog is getting the rough side of her tongue for having ventured out of its bed again.
‘Didn’t I tell you to stay there? I don’t want your sodding hair all over the place . . .’ The more the dog cowers, the more her voice rises. And outside, with clouds gathering overhead, her family sit, shoulders hunched and uncomfortable.
