by Louise Dean
There were all sorts of things about love he didn’t know before her: the emergency of wanting to be honest which, it seemed to him, was what real love did to you; the fear of loss; and the risk of becoming ordinary.
In the early months, when they set up home together, he came up with a working model for the smooth running of the domestic machine: A man wants to be good and a woman wants to be beautiful. But that was only valid in the courtly phase. After that, there was sustaining the relationship. That needed a rule too, and he had that down: Do not call the other person a piece of shit. Don’t see through them.
Paying for private school for Laura gave him a paternal role in her life and helped found the family. He likes to drive her in to school, turning up Girls Aloud on the radio, and imagining himself the fond papa. It was all like playing Mummies and Daddies. Nobody minded when he was mistaken for Laura’s father, except for Laura. ‘Because I have a daddy already, you see,’ she’d warned him. There’s a little bit of Margaret Thatcher in that girl, he’d thought, swallowing his pride.
He loved them with practical acts: he made the fire, carried the shopping, cooked a breakfast or took Laura to the pictures when Astrid was tired. That was the life he wanted. He had his fire and game pie.
What he didn’t want was arguments. He had enough of it at work. His clients all said the same thing: ‘We want this to be amicable.’ He could punch the air every time he heard it. He didn’t. Instead, he said: ‘We want that too,’ and added, for the sake of candour, ‘but it never seems to go that way.’ It never did.
The ‘D’ words were best avoided; you can’t avoid death once you’re born and you can’t avoid divorce once you’re married, that was his drinking brag.
Every day he looked down from his office on to the shopping street and saw people struggling to get home; good people, and yet if he got any of them into the chair in his office they’d sit as they all did, shaking and tongue-tied, using pseudo ‘legal terminology’ and going on about fair play, but it was stunning how quickly a short course of shock therapy by correspondence could unravel in any one of them a murderous hatred.
Their home was a haven from it all, until just before Christmas. They’ve had to unplug the phone some evenings. Astrid says she doesn’t understand it, and he doesn’t either. But she goes further. She says she can’t understand why he rises to it, why he starts shouting and swearing back. ‘That’s another evening spoilt,’ she’ll say. Like it’s his fault! He doesn’t like the way she looks at him nowadays, with her hands on her hips; she stands before him face to face, mannish. She looks him in the eye. Like Artemis, he thinks sourly, leaving some change on the table and heading back towards the newspaper shop. He can’t reconcile this Astrid with the girl he met in Rye, whose eyes drank him in, whose smile was pure praise.
‘It’s so childish the way you and your father go on and on at each other,’ she said.
But he knew from his work that this type of thing, this raging, this ranting, this haranguing, this hating, was in fact quite common between grown-ups. It was just that he never thought he’d be susceptible to it himself.
Chapter 15
‘Gary Goodyew!’ Her smile knocks him back.
Nick’s standing between magazine racks. He’s opening and closing his mouth, running his hand through his hair. He’s been lucky, too bloody lucky. In going back to Kent he’s not met one of his old girlfriends and now, here in Sicily, it has to happen. Ah shit, he thinks, this is the last thing I need.
‘Morwen.’
He gets a shove; a man pushes past him to the counter. ‘You look good,’ he says, using the muscles honed by half a lifetime’s insincerity even though he means it.
‘You look just the same!’ The teeth have been set straight, he sees, but, as if her mouth hasn’t had the news, her lips stay parted after she speaks.
He has a flashback of them on the floor in Toby Farrow’s sitting room. He kept his coat on. Why? Was it cold?
‘I can’t believe it!’ When his dreaming brain is seeking a guilty feeling, it goes straight to the image of her – and there she is, centre stage, on a surreal scene, toothily dismayed, something like the ghost of Christmas fucked up. He can see her when she came into school after the announcement was made, when she was received in the quad, duffle-coat hood up, with all the fuss she’d never had before, the pats on the back and the girls bending down to peer into her face, keen to see what tragedy looked like. ‘I’m an orphan now,’ she said to him, when they walked to school. She had hairy knees, he recalls.
‘Twenty-three years it is, Gary!’
He lets himself be jostled with her out on to the street. ‘On holiday?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Good.’
‘You?’
‘Yes. Husband? Kids?’
‘No, I’m afraid not. I was married, Gary, but we got divorced.’
‘Never mind.’
‘Are you divorced then, Gary?’
‘No. No, no, not me. It’s my business. I’m a solicitor. Family law.’
‘You always was a clever boy!’ She stops to marvel at him, standing in the sunshine, just beatific, hands on hips. He never did know whether she was innocent or a touch slow. ‘It’s amazing the way our minds play tricks. I mean, I don’t see a line on you or nothing, Gary; you’re just the same.’
‘Oh no! Jesus. Let me help you there,’ he points to his forehead, ‘hair gone there,’ and to his waist, ‘and an extra couple of pounds there, I expect.’
‘What about there then?’ she says, poking his chest. ‘Your heart, Gary. Anyone claimed that?’
‘Oh, that’s all in order, just about! The occasional run, you know, to keep in shape.’
‘You sound so upper class, Gary!’ He is speechless.
‘Fancy meeting you again, and here! I don’t know! It’s like a dream come true.’
‘Yes.’ He rolls on the balls of his feet. Her eyes glisten as her smile spreads.
‘Well,’ he goes on, his mouth running ahead, ‘come and have a drink with us, if you’d like to. My girlfriend’s at a table in a little restaurant just down here. Come along, if you’d like. It’s a bit crowded, but I expect they can find us another chair. Or we could have a drink later on, or another day . . .’
‘All right then, I’ll come along for a quick one! Why not? We’re on holiday, aren’t we, Gary?’
Morwen, who was so under-prepared for adulthood, has aged well; she still looks girlish. They’d called her ‘Kipper Chest’ at school. No one asked her out. She wasn’t asked to dance at the disco. She wasn’t picked for any team or party. Even puberty left her out. She was the girl who hung around with the asthmatics, eczematics and gender uncertains who ate their lunches in the lab, afraid to brave the open spaces. And when everyone else was affecting world-weariness, she was utterly ingenuous. She came from the state system and was thrilled to be at grammar. She kept her socks pulled up. But, though he kept it a clandestine arrangement, they used to walk to and from school together every day for four years, only meeting up well out of sight of the school’s bounds. Then, at seventeen, she lost her parents; they were killed in a car crash on the A21.
He indicates the door of the restaurant to her, and lets her pass before him, but cranes his neck round her to left and right. Parting the bamboo blind, he is ready to see Astrid’s smile like a flick knife, transforming woe to a bright greeting. But the table is empty and the owner is standing there with a pained expression on his face.
‘Sir, your wife, she has gone away.’
‘Oh, great,’ he says with relief, ‘good, thanks, that’s fine. All right at the same table?’
All the forty years of his life push him towards the seat he sat in, opposite the woman he loves, to sit now opposite the woman that on balance he’d probably least like to have seen again, give or take one or two others. He alternates grin with grimace, clutches the menu, cranes his neck for the waiter, and she sits there just plain happy, fanning herself, moving her
head in wonderment.
When he put an arm around her in the church porch that day, after the announcement, she closed her eyes and opened her mouth. He’d had to kiss her. Then she said, ‘Are we going out now?’
The owner comes and changes the tablecloth, with the sniffy air of room service changing sheets.
‘Won’t she mind, though, about you being here with me, your girlfriend?’
‘No, not at all. Why should she? Hmm?’
Nick orders a bottle of the same wine and she draws closer to the table in jolts, holding the chair
‘You look even more handsome actually, Gary.’
‘Oh no!’ He slumps. He puts his head in his hands. ‘Morwen. You’d lost your parents and by Christ I let you down. I am so sorry. You see, well, I just couldn’t . . . at that age . . .’ he feels for the most hygienic lie, ‘get my head round your loss.’
‘Gary, I understand. Don’t feel bad about it. Death, you see, it’s tricky. No one’s comfortable with it, are they? Tell me now, do you still bum-suck a cigarette?’
He has never bum-sucked a cigarette, and he doesn’t smoke nowadays except in emergencies.
‘I’m afraid so!’ He affects a wry look. Would she like to eat something? He drums his fingertips on the table.
‘To be honest with you, Gary, I’ve stuffed myself with cake this morning. Have you tried the cannoli?’
‘No, is it good?’ He glances at the door as the strings jangle in the wake of someone leaving. Most of the tables are now empty.
‘Holy cannoli!’ she says with a little musical laugh and shows her teeth. ‘They’re little sort of flute things and they fill them with this sort of patisserie cream,’ she makes a circle with her fingers and thumb and pokes it through a few times with the forefinger of her other hand. He gives her a damp smile; it’s an unfortunate gesture. ‘Mmm,’ she licks her lips, ‘they’re so delicious. You don’t know whether to suck the cream out of them first or just bite right into them. I suppose you remember my little weakness, Gary?’
‘No.’
‘Chocolate fridge cake? Hello?’ She waives the owner’s offer of tasting the wine, ‘No, you go ahead and pour it, love,’ and when he turns the rim and lifts the bottle, she says ‘a bit more,’ and then she raises her glass. ‘To old friends.’
‘So. What do you do now, Morwen?’
‘Well, I have my own bookshop! And we do jacket potatoes and things too.’
‘Nice.’
‘Yes. It’s lovely. Seriously, you should come and visit! You’d love it. All those books!’ She sips on her wine, likes it, and gulps at it. ‘I was never as clever as you lot, of course, but one thing I do have, Gary, is a good memory.’
He can see her now, sitting on that hillock waiting for him when she was all centre parting and solicitation: ‘I wish I could get the hang of this maths. I wish I had someone clever to show me how to do it . . . Cor, aren’t you clever, Gary? You do it just like that, don’t you, and it takes me hours . . .’
She was his starter girlfriend. Nobody knew.
‘I remember you was my first kiss,’ she makes a face, grins sheepishly. ‘And the rest!’
‘Ah.’ He winces. ‘That.’
Then all the intrigue and bravura drop clean off her face and the naked sadness brings to mind how Laura looks on a Sunday evening, when they pick her up from her dad.
‘I let you down,’ he says. He offers her his napkin. She takes it from him and touches the tip of her nose. ‘About your parents.’
‘I have a very nice little cottage of my own in Peterborough,’
she rallies. ‘I’ve done all right. Not by your standards. Oh, Gary. You were such a lovely boy! When we used to play Monopoly, you used to let me win, you did. You was a really good person, once – you know, before you got popular. Before the world got hold of you. Can we go outside and smoke a cigarette, Gary? That all right?’
He trots after her. They stand just round from the restaurant in a side alley, below its windows. He lights a cigarette for her and one for himself. She clasps her thin arms as she exhales.
‘I don’t really smoke any more,’ he says.
‘Classic! You got me smoking and now you’ve quit and I can’t give it up! I only done it to impress you! That says it all! I did try and contact you at Cambridge, to be honest. They couldn’t find you. Oh, Gary, you was my first love.’
He pulls her to him and hugs her and pats her back. Inside the restaurateur draws a breath as he reaches over the plates of antipasti and draws the blind on them.
When they go back inside there is an atmosphere, Nick finds. The owner has put on the television and stands with his back to them, arms folded, to watch a dubbed American soap.
The slippery little sidekick sidles over to their table.
‘We close now,’ he says, but he uses his hands in a placatory way to indicate they should stay sitting. ‘No, no, Signor, you please stay here and it is no trouble but we do not need more people. Like you.’
‘We do not need more people like you,’ Nick repeats in amusement for what he supposes to be a bad translation.
She laughs. ‘Oh, Gary! You are funny!’ She’s sitting there, with her chin resting on a hand, beguiled. ‘Gary,’ she muses, heavy with nostalgia.
‘I have to tell you,’ he says, with comedic confidentiality, glancing left and right, ‘when I left school I dropped “Gary”, and since then I’ve used my middle name. Most people know me as Nick.’
‘Nick?’ she says, stricken. She sits up and her hands fall away from the table. She looks askance, across the room.
‘What? It’s just a name.’
‘Then why change it?’
‘Because it’s a bloody awful name.’
‘So’s Morwen.’
‘Well, yes,’ he concedes.
‘So, you just don’t like “the sound” of it, your given name, Gary.’
‘No.’
‘Now I don’t know whether to call you Gary or Nick.’
‘It’s really not important! It hardly matters, a name after all, what’s a name? I could be Ricardo or Bernardo or . . .’
‘Yeah, but you wouldn’t have changed it to Lee or Barry or something, would you? I mean, all the time I was looking for Gary Goodyew . . .’
He yawns exaggeratedly, leans back in his chair. ‘Look, it’s hardly as if one’s Christian name reveals some sort of hidden truth, is it?’
She holds his eyes with her own. ‘Do you know what, Gary . . .’ He raises an eyebrow.
‘You make this journey alone, whatever your name is. Some people can’t take that and all they can do is pretend it’s not true. Me, I used to listen to the rain on the windowpanes at night, and I got to love the feeling of being alone after Mum and Dad died. I sort of trained myself to it. That’s the truth of things, you see. We are alone. I know it and other people are pretending. So change your name, change your game, whatever you want, I don’t care, pretend if you want to, but surely a clever boy like you knows when he’s pretending.’ She drains the glass.
‘Do me a favour.’
‘You think I’m shallow.’
‘You are what you are. Or maybe you’re not. Perhaps you’re just a face you borrowed or a voice you heard. Perhaps you got yourself off TV or out of a book. Perhaps you’re someone you saw on a train. I don’t know. That trench coat!’
‘We all wore trench coats!’
‘We was supposed to meet on Big Side the day I left, and you never came. You never even said goodbye, Gary. I overheard that Sebastian Double-Barrelled-Cockface saying to you one time, in the common room, Find someone your own class, man. Now, what does that mean?’
He puts a hand in the air.
‘What does that say about you?’ He asks the sidekick for the bill.
‘You were a snob, that’s what it says. The sort of bloke who’d sell his own parents for membership of the right club.’
It occurs to him this is not what most people mean when they talk about meeting up wit
h old friends and getting to know each other again. He wants to run to Astrid and smell her good hair.
Chapter 16
On the way to St Leonards you pass through Silverhill, a crossroads of discount carpet stores and blacked-out pubs resembling any South London intersection, and it’s there on the brow of the hill: the sea. The ground drops away from beneath you and, shaped by the buildings either side of London Road, it’s like a glass raised for a toast.
Ken steps off the kerb to cross London Road to Norman Road. He’s on his way to see Audrey at Bury and Bury Funeral Directors. It’s like a sanctuary; when Ken goes through the doors, he’s back in the past where everyone was courteous and decent and hard done by and hopeful.
It breaks his heart that that world’s gone. He’s so lonely in this one. June is a modern woman and no good, he’s decided. The nearest he gets to feeling right again is in Audrey’s funeral parlour. What a woman she is! Women like her used to live on every street, in every village – they’d help with the birthing and the laying out – a strong pair of hands. Old mother Perry came to their house when his mother died, and stayed on and taught Pat how to cook and look after them. Women weren’t all for themselves in those days. Dave told him how Pearl said to him, last time he saw her, be it long or be it short, she was devoting her life to growing vegetables. Send her my regards, will ya? he’d said. But whether she got them or not, he didn’t know. There was no word back. Well, his life, be it long or be it short, he was going to spend in the company of good persons. Like what his Pat was. Persons what thought more about people than they did their china animals and buying things and gambling and spending money. Kind sorts. Not persons always trying to have one over on you. Persons he could trust, who cared about him. A good woman was what he was after now, most urgently.
He told Pat, Don’t you worry, sweetheart, don’t you worry about nothing, the angels will be handing you right into the Lord’s arms themselves, girl. She didn’t want to do it, she was against it, you could see that, but he’d left the window open like Audrey said to and there was the singing of the birds as the sun come up. Daft little sods, he’d thought, singing their little hearts out as if every day were the Creation. And he sat with her there, holding her hand, and he was holding it tight when she took her last breath.