by Louise Dean
‘Mum,’ Nick says.
‘I’m bringing the cloth now!’
‘Never mind the cloth, Mum, it’s only a drop she’s split. Why don’t you come and sit down and enjoy yourself ?’
‘It’ll spoil the table.’
‘Mum.’
‘What is it now?’
‘Mum. I am so sorry.’
Her back rounds over the crutches, her head dips. ‘What are you sorry for,’ she says, not turning, ‘you got nothing to be sorry for, you done nothing to be ashamed of, have you?’
He comes behind her, and looks at the hands on the counter and the strong short fingers that grip all the time now, with arthritis in them. Those hands were his first toys, followed by her feet, on winter’s evenings when he’d call the hands crabs and the feet lobsters and invent seaside stories with her cackling at the tickling. She’d flinch and jerk and hoot and it would end in her getting him by the ribs and poking him savagely, making him scream and threaten to wee himself.
‘Mum. I am so sorry for everything.’
When she turns round, her mouth is loose and her eyes are briny and she says to him, ‘Why shouldn’t I just carry on living without you?’
‘Because I’m sorry.’ His lips blurt, ‘I’m so sorry, Mum.’ His eyes are hot and tears come and he puts his arms around her and kisses the crown of her head. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He wants to say sorry again and again to relieve the pain but she is holding him fiercely and saying into his shirt, ‘No, no, don’t say it. I’m proud of you. It was what I wanted. I wanted you to do well. I’m proud of you.’
They are gripping each other tight when Dave pokes his head in the kitchen.
‘Everything all right?’
Nick releases her and turns round and his mother hides her face with her sleeve, wiping it. Dave is standing at the back door with big anxious eyes, not daring to come in.
‘Come in, Davie,’ she says, sniffing. ‘Where is that bleeding cloth? Will you please go in your bed, dog!’
‘Sorry to interrupt.’ Dave evades Nick’s eyes as he ducks in under the door frame. ‘Shall I take the cloth out for you, Mum, and wipe it up?’
‘Yes, you do that, thank you, Davie,’ she says and hands him a grey string cloth.
Dave gives Nick a look, then retreats.
‘The prodigal son, you are,’ she says with a short laugh, wiping her glasses.
‘Something like that.’
‘Any chance of a cup of tea, Mother?’ comes Ken’s voice from the garden. This was his catchphrase back in the old days, and the request that was most likely to get Pearl into a lather. The response was reliable: ‘Do it yourself, fuck you.’
But now, Pearl says, ‘Ask the daft old shit if he still has sugar.’
‘Two sugars, Mother!’ comes the voice, and there’s laughter from the table. ‘If you don’t mind!’
Pearl takes the dirty teaspoon from inside the sugar jar and measures a level teaspoon of sugar into the cup. ‘One’s enough for him,’ she says.
Chapter 49
Hopping behind Ken’s chair, crutches wobbling under her elbows, she pulls the half-scone off Ken’s plate.
‘Come on, that’s enough!’
He shoves what’s in his fingers into his mouth post-haste, shoulders high in alarm. She puts a slice of bread on to his plate and reaches round him for his knife; she plunges it into the jam jar she’s holding and spreads something dark, thickly.
‘Taste that.’ They all look.
‘Go on, taste it.’
He brings it to his nose, sniffs first. A smile starts on his mouth before he bites into it. He chews with obvious pleasure.
‘I never thought I’d taste that again in my life.’
‘You won’t. That’s your lot. Too good for you,’ she says, with a sideways grin, and Nick and Dave laugh.
‘Don’t be like that, Pearl,’ says the old man. ‘I’n’ she awful to me? She always was ’orrible to me, you know,’ he confides across the table to Matt.
‘What is it then, Dad?’ asks Dave.
‘It’s what my old mum used to make. Elderb’ry jam.’
Pearl puts a forefinger where the knife went and tastes it herself. ‘Too much sugar, but it’s a devil to set without it.’
‘You’re being spoilt, Dad,’ says Dave eagerly.
Pearl sits back in her place. ‘Help yourself to cake, girls. And you, Matt.’
‘It’s a lovely tea, Mrs Goodyew,’ says Laura.
‘Yes, it’s all worked out all right in the end, hasn’t it?’ says Pearl. When she smiles, she’s a different person. She looks young. ‘I was worried about the scones, but they’re not bad.’ Her big cheeks rise and she helps herself to another of her scones. When Nick looks at her, he sees winter setting in too, as with his father. They are being run down by nature and time, the white in her hair taking over from autumn colours, yet their eyes are lights, they flicker and crackle; it was these lights that set alight most of the other lights around this table, that set certain eyes seeing.
He swallows. He looks around the table and sees Dave’s eyes on Emily, Astrid’s on Laura’s. He swallows again; there is nothing he has lit. Catching his eye, Astrid gives him a full happy smile.
After tea, the children go off to explore the orchard that’s now full-grown, with Laura asking Matt about bands and websites. While they are dubbing this rapper cool and that girl band uncool, Emily suggests they play hide and seek. And though Matt pooh-poohs the idea at first, when Laura agrees he says that Emily should do the seeking. They go into the chestnut wood and Laura finds a bower that she dubs an igloo, and the two of them squat inside it and tell each other the most outlandish stories they’ve heard, forgetting all about Emily. After a while Emily, discovers them and, standing outside, knees level with their eyes, she says several times with increasing hostility, ‘I could hear you. I could so hear you.’ But they have forgotten the game. She stands awhile with her arms folded and her chest rising and falling, hurt to hear their laughter and be outside of it.
When she gets back to the table, it’s just the four of them sitting there: her dad, her grandfather, her grandmother and Uncle Nick. Her mother and Astrid have wandered off to see the magnolias. She goes to the car and gets her recorder. When she comes back, she offers them a tune. Nobody seems keen.
She begins earnestly piping, going from one of the five notes she has to the other, giving each one all of her puff, and roughly conveying ‘Lord Of All Hopefulness’ and though they clap and praise her and thank her after every chorus, she makes sure they get the full song.
As a final flourish, she makes a shape in the air with the butt of the recorder.
‘That’s the one, that is!’ says her grandfather, and he slaps the table. ‘That’s the one I was after! That’s the one I’ll ’ave,’ Ken says, fixing her with a squint as if he’s seen something important in her, ‘. . . “’oose presence is balm”.’
‘For your funeral, I suppose,’ says Dave, rolling his eyes.
‘That’s right. Got it all planned, a’n’ I?’
‘Got your rig out, have you? Got it on the bed waiting?’
‘Naargh. Nothing wrong with this suit, is there?’
‘You’ve come oven-ready then, have you, Dad?’
‘I’m always ready.’ He throws a meaningful look up at the sky.
‘Come on and I’ll show you something, Ken,’ Pearl says to him. Dave jumps up to help and misses the chance. The pair of them go in under their own steam.
‘’Ere, Nick, right, you don’t think they’re going to rekindle any of the old magic, do you?’
‘He told me himself those days are gone.’
‘Thank Christ for that. I thought he was going to proposition that undertaker woman.’
‘Did I tell you I’d proposed to Astrid?’
‘No, mate, no, you didn’t. Bloody hell.’ He runs his hand over his head. ‘Seriously, mate, that’s great news. She seems like a nice girl.’
&
nbsp; ‘She’s not.’
‘Even better. Listen, mate – seriously, though.’ Dave moves forward and speaks out of one side of his mouth. ‘Best tell you while I can. Dad’s only had Matt looking up how to top yourself on the Internet. I think he’s a bit doolally. That, or he’s ill, or something. He said anything to you?’
‘No, nothing. He does bang on about it all, the grand finale and that, but no, I don’t think he’s going to end it himself when he can get it for free.’
‘True.’
‘Christ, he’s not going, not while he’s in the limelight. No, listen, Dave, it’s just a way of getting attention.’
‘But he shouldn’t be getting a kid to sort him out with arsenic on the Internet, should he?’
‘Arsenic?’
‘He got him researching death drugs. It’s not right, getting a kid to do that. I could kill ’im.’
‘Problem solved.’
‘Yeah. There is that.’
‘It’s not working, him living on his own.’
‘I know. He’s on the blower all the time. He still calling you?’
‘All the bloody time. He’s being nice as pie, though.’
‘Christ, he must have seen the Angel of Death.’
When the women come up from the garden, they see the two brothers at the table in cahoots; Dave is up close to his brother, his hand gripping a spindle on the back of his brother’s chair. ‘Right, Nick? Right?’
Chapter 50
‘Shoes off.’
Ken sits at the bottom of the stairs and removes them with effort, wincing and exclaiming.
Abandoning her crutches, Pearl goes up the stairs backwards, hoisting herself with her arms and taking a step at a time. He comes up frontwards, using his hands, moaning under his breath but stopping himself from complaining about the tiny ‘bleeding’ stairs like he used to.
Look at the pair of us now, he thinks. People used to say we was a handsome couple. We used to chase each other down on the beach. We used to go to dances on the pier. We was at it like knives in the old days.
In the bedroom, things are just as they were. It’s like stepping back in time, not that things could stand much rearranging in such a small room – no en suite here, no master this and that, no dressing room. There’s space for a wardrobe, a bed and a dressing table and that’s it. The bed with its faded pink-buttoned velvet headboard fills the room.
Hiding the fireplace is the pine dressing table she fixed up, with its carved mirror and modest drawers. On a white lace cloth, like an altar cloth, arranged devotionally are photo frames; the larger to the rear are of her parents and the smaller ones to the front of her children and animals. And in the middle, just as he remembers, in a 1930s Odeon-style frame, there’s the picture of him and his old mum, taken when he was three years old. She’s behind him, with a hat on, her coat done up, and he’s there in socks and shorts and a sleeveless Fair Isle jumper.
He shuffles round between the side of the bed and the dressing table. He sits down on the bed and his greedy fingers reach for it.
Standing to the side of him, she feeds his hands.
His neck buckles under the weight of feeling, and his chin hits his throat. After a minute or two, he wipes his nose with the back of his hand.
‘I’ll leave you with her then,’ says Pearl, going out and pulling the door to.
She stands there a minute, looking over the view across the fields to the orchard and remembers the day the gamekeeper’s granddaughter stood facing the house. She has stood there many times, seeing eye to eye with that woman, long gone. She hears the bed creaking and the headboard tapping the wall. She looks through the crack of the door and sees Ken settled on to the bed, feet crossed, contemplating the photo of him as a three-year-old boy, with his mother, nearly seventy-seven years ago.
Chapter 51
Downstairs, Pearl produces the greatest of all her curios, a bottle of brandy kept for many years under the sink, and in the garden Dave and Nick sip it from mugs and it warms Dave up to telling stories about Pearl’s father, their grandfather.
‘He was a funny one.’
‘People were funny in those days.’
‘For his twenty-first birthday, right, he asked his dad for a grandfather clock, dinnie, Mum?’
‘He did. It’s in the dining room. Still going. I wind it once a week.’
‘I mean, you couldn’t see Matt asking us for one for his twenty-first, could you, eh, Marina? Eh?’
‘No.’
‘’Ere. Listen to this, girls, right. Mum, Mum, he come round
’ere, didn’t he? One Christmas when Gran died. And he sat and never spoke all day and when Dad asked him what was up with him, he said, I never bin the same, Ken, since that Indian doctor stuck his finger up my arsehole.’
‘That’s right,’ says Pearl, spitting crumbs and reddening and chortling and wiping her face with her hand. ‘He did.’
‘D’you remember, Nick?’
‘No.’
‘Come on, you must.’
‘Was I here? Maybe it was after I left?’
‘Course it wasn’t. He died when I was thirteen, you were fifteen. Don’t you remember?’
Nick looks at Astrid. ‘I can’t even remember the funeral,’ he says.
‘Neither can I,’ puts in Dave. ‘Think it was just something up the crem. He was a character, though, wasn’t he, Mum? Your dad.’
But he’s lost her; her eyes are unfocused, her face twitches.
‘Wann’e, Mum? Old Albert?’
‘Better check on your father,’ she says, coming to. ‘He’s been up there ages.’
‘I’ll go,’ says Nick.
‘I’ll come,’ Dave adds, swigging his brandy. ‘Just finish this. Won’t get a chance to enjoy it when Holy Joe comes downstairs.’
Pearl looks them over as if inspecting them for dirty faces.
‘Go on then. He’s been in there long enough. But come right back the pair of you, please. Don’t dawdle.’
‘He’s probably on the toilet,’ says Dave, keen for more easy laughter.
The dog shudders and startles when Nick pushes at the stable door, he sniffs at the garden romantically but dares not move even though Nick’s left the back door open for Dave.
The temperature drops by about ten degrees as you round the stairs that divide sitting room from dining room, where the gamekeeper’s little girl died. Nick looks at the window and thinks of the brothers and sisters arrayed, waving her goodbye. He glances at the sitting room where they all once sat. It’s such a small space. He’s surprised. With its sofa and armchair (where once there was another sofa) those sitting would be in such proximity as to touch knees or smell breath. The sofa is capacious and slovenly. The throw cushions look like they’ve been punched, and littered on the sofa is a newspaper, a ransacked box of chocolates and another unlidded chocolate box full of pencils and biros. Down the side of the armchair cushion is a torn envelope, and on the back of the envelope is a list in her handwriting, a sort of copperplate. In the fireplace there is a wood-burning stove with a mantelpiece above it, crowded and cramped with ornaments and photo frames. There is nothing under fifty years old and no photograph under twenty years old. Time stood still here, when they left. Like a brute intruder, there is a great hulking old-fashioned television on a wooden box in the alcove to the left of the fireplace. In the right-hand alcove is a modest set of pine shelves stacked with books on Tudor and Elizabethan times, written in the twenties and thirties, and D. G. Hessayon’s complete library of expert guides to hampering, outwitting and killing everything that bedevils the good gardener.
It is truly lovely, he thinks. He looks at the sofa and longs to sit on it, to bring his knees up, as he did as a boy, to stuff his feet into the corner of it, to let his head rest on the arm of it. To smell it. To listen to the hum and snare and buzz and roll of the TV, to have the night lick the windowpanes, and the rain and wind threaten and gasp, and to hunker down further into that smell, that lesser-was
hed smell, the faint fug of home, of apples, damp and Mum.
Up the stairs he climbs, a hand on the single banister, encouraged by the stalwart ticking of the grandfather clock that reverberates on the parquet floor of the dining room. The landing creaks under his weight. He pauses at the middle window with its view on to the orchard field, remembering when he and Dave cut across there, their long trousers wet to the knees by the time they reached the main road. Dave used to stop and fiddle about, trying to roll his trousers up, and Nick would leave him behind and make his way ahead, heedless of his brother’s calls.
He pushes the door to what was his parents’ room.
‘Dad.’
Ken’s lying on the bed, feet up, head on the pillow.
‘You’re missing it all in here, you know.’
Nick smiles to see him there, mouth open, arms at his sides, and on his chest a photo frame, picture down.
‘Dad,’ he says again, softly. He catches sight of the dressing table and goes round the end of the bed, and sits. He picks up a small photo frame, its brass stand too weak to hold it well, and sees a teenage photo of himself, sulking, with his head half down, his fringe hiding his eyes. He has the miserly look of Ken, he thinks. He glances over at his father.
Let him have his nap, he thinks. It’s so calm and good in here. It’s like the nave of a church. And he closes his eyes a moment too and there comes to him the smell and feel of the rubbing of a dock leaf on his knee, over the little nettle bumps, the hoot of the wood pigeon, then the sound of his father’s car coming up the last of the track, the crackling and splitting noise of gravel and stone and brick and mud, an ominous feeling in his chest, the sharp call of his mother, he and Davie running; running to be first to get to their dad.
This is where I come from, he says to himself. This is who I am.
When they left the house that afternoon to come here, shutting Roy in behind the gate, Ken said, ‘That dog of yours, that spaniel, he don’t chase rabbits, does he?’
