by Louise Dean
‘No, he’s only interested in birds.’
‘You see, son, you can’t change what you are overnight.’ Nick goes to the bedroom window and looks out at the garden. Roy, a spaniel, chases birds. A rabbit can thumb his nose right at him and Roy will run right by him into the bracken, looking for tail feathers. Generations of breeding have made him so. And he and his brother, like Ken, were sons of this land, this corner of England. This land made them, it made the people who made them, and gave them certain interests and manners that you couldn’t change in one lifetime.
‘Come on then, Dad,’ he says, turning round. I suppose this is how he’ll look when he’s dead, he thinks. ‘Come on, Dad.’
The clouds move and the sunlight withdraws. It will soon be evening.
Nick goes over to his father and shakes Ken’s arm a little, then more, and brusquely. The arm falls away and hangs over the side of the bed. The expression on the old man’s face doesn’t change. Then it comes to him: my God, he’s not sleeping; he’s dead.
Chapter 52
From his early intensive studies, Dave has come to know Nick’s every expression and what it means. He meets his brother’s eyes and puts his mug down.
Pearl’s pouring some of the brandy into her own mug.
‘Congratulations!’ She raises her mug at her elder son as he comes across the lawn.
The whole scene seems to expand and vacillate like a bubble. The sky stares. The ground gives. He’s having déjà vu. He knew it would be like this. He’s seen this before. They’ve always been arranged like that, waiting for him to come and say this. The children are giving the dog a drink from the hosepipe and, yes, that’s part of it too. It is all as it should be.
‘Something’s not right with Dad,’ he says, and the bubble pops.
Dave makes his way round the table and comes across the lawn to him. Nick steps backwards into the kitchen to receive him, hidden. He whispers, ‘I think he’s dead, mate. I thought he was sleeping but he didn’t answer and I tried to wake him, but he didn’t stir. Then I looked at him and he looked totally different; dead, you know.’
The dog stirs. The top of the stable door squeals and bangs the wall, the latch rattles, the floor receives three thudding steps. The stairs brace and sigh as he comes aboard; Dave goes up them two at a time and the floorboards on the landing protest at the extraordinary fuss. Dave shoves the bedroom door farther and harder than it’s ever been shoved and it smacks the wall. He falls down on his knees by the side of the bed, in the crack of space alongside the wall. He puts a hand on his father’s face, a thumb on his cheek and fingers on his brow. ‘Dad,’ he says, ‘Dad, time to get up now, mate.’
He gives him a little shake by the shoulders with both hands. He picks up the loose wrist that’s hanging over the side of the bed, and feels for a pulse with his fingertips. He leans over his father and puts his ear against his chest. He sits back, in a crouch.
‘Dad,’ he says and puts the pad of his thumb to his father’s eye. Just as he’s about to pull back the hood of his father’s right eye, he hears the snap of glass; he has put his elbow on the photo frame. He picks it up. The glass has a break across it. He looks at the picture, then shows it to Nick. His eyes fill.
‘This is how he wanted it, Nick. This was what he wanted,’ he says. He takes the loose hand and kisses the back of it. ‘This was all he wanted, to be back here.’
Nick goes back over to the window and looks again at the field and brings to mind the path that once ran through it, up the hill in long grass – the way out. He never looked back when he took that short cut. Even though he knew she was standing here, watching them go. And he and his father stood on the brow of the hill on Christmas Day 1986, in the first hour of that day, twenty-two years ago, on their way back to church, and swapped confidences. It was a goodbye and a farewell; they knew each other well enough to know they’d soon be going their own ways. They knew each off by heart. He half expects to see the old man standing there now.
Chapter 53
Downstairs in the cold dining room, Dave uses his mobile to call Audrey Bury. ‘He said, First thing you do is call that Audrey. She’ll know what to do.’
The grandfather clock ticks; the dog’s nose nudges the stable door. Nick feels inside of him a low growl: Your father is dead.
Then Dave begins to speak.
‘If you can,’ he says.
‘We appreciate it,’ he says.
‘Thanks so much,’ he says.
It’s in his nature: kindness. Even at a time like this, he’s thinking of the other person, Nick marvels.
‘No rush, I s’pose, is there? Not being funny.’ He closes his phone, runs his hand over his chin. ‘Right. That’s done, mate. They’re on their way. It was a chap. Said he’d call Dad’s doctor for us.’
‘Well done, mate.’
‘The tricky part is going to be telling Mum, Nick. She’s not that stable, is she? I mean, who knows how she’ll take it.’
‘Do you want me to do it?’
‘No, no, I’d best do it.’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure. Come with me, though.’
When they turn to step across into the sitting room, they see their mother is sitting on the sofa there and is bound to have heard them.
‘You give Ken an inch and he takes a mile.’ She gives Davie a half-smile. He puts out a hand to touch her shoulder, but she looks away and sighs. ‘Best bring the others in, duckie. No point in them standing out there worrying.’
The dog counts them in with his wet nose, marking the hand of each as they go through. Pearl sits and looks at the black screen on the television and watches it fill with the reflections of her family as they come in. So many evenings Pearl has sat there without noise or life other than that given to her by the TV, and now this.
The two grandchildren sit on the tiles in front of the fireplace, backs to the wood-burning stove. Dave’s over at the window, Nick’s by the stairs, and Marina’s beside Pearl on the two-seater. Pearl’s leg in its cast is stuck out straight into the rug like a teaspoon on a saucer. Astrid takes Laura on her lap on the armchair.
Dave does the talking, and they each use the cover of it for their own thoughts. Astrid is wondering whether the wedding plans will go ahead. Marina’s thinking about June, and that Dave should call her. She’s thinking too how her husband was always the elder brother in reality. She looks at Nick and thinks how a face can be handsome and mean nothing to you too. She’s thinking how she dislikes him in proportion to how much Dave loves him.
Feeling her eyes upon him, Nick gives her a small perfunctory smile and she returns it because she was brought up to hide her feelings and not be caught out, and also because Dave is her world. But Nick sees the smile die too soon to have been real and looks down at his feet. Shoes. They were never allowed to wear shoes in there. He sees that Dave’s in his socks. When did he find time to slip off his shoes? It must have been force of habit. Next to him, at the foot of the stairs, are their Dad’s winkle-pickers, a slight brogue effect, highly shined, and the shape of his toe knuckles in the worn leather.
Laura gets up and goes and sits with the other kids on the hearth. ‘Have you ever seen anyone dead before?’ she asks them quietly.
‘No,’ says Emily, her face making space for fear.
‘I want to see him,’ says Matt.
‘Everyone’s to just stay down here, please,’ Dave says, his flat hands bobbing as if to keep evil spirits from rising.
Matt lets his fringe fall over an eye. He wants to see what a dead man looks like. He looks at Laura and thinks she’s pretty. He looks at his mother and wonders whether she loves him. He looks at his father and thinks he’ll never be like him. They’re all fakers, he thinks, adults. Reality is upstairs.
‘In a way, though,’ Dave’s saying, ‘I mean, I know it’s a funny thing to say, but it’s what he’d have wanted . . . right, Nick?’
Nick meets Matt’s eyes and thinks about him using the Internet. M
arina’s son, he thinks, is secretive and sly like his mother. Marina seized upon his brother, so open and good-natured, and in her his brother thinks he found a more ordinary mother. For himself, he’d take the rough ways and honest talk of Pearl any day over all that is not said.
He puts a hand on Astrid’s shoulder; light and fair and good was how she first appeared to him. Now he knows there’s more, and there’s dark. She loves him. She’ll fight for him. She needs him and he needs her. These are the only things he has to know.
He looks at the stable door where his father stumbled and hit his head and he hit it back, his father – he punched it with his fist. And Nick said, ‘It’s the truth!’ As if the truth were anything real, or anything at all.
‘I mean, he more or less said so to us, didn’t he, Nick? When we was in Wales. I mean,’ Dave looks at Pearl, ‘he was just desperate to see you, Mum, and for all of us to be together again. If you think about it, he brought us together, didn’t he? He made this happen. He knew he didn’t have long.’
Matt lets a tear slide down his far cheek where no one can see it. He shifts on the cold tiles and glances at the ceiling. He’ll probably not get to see him at all, ever again. He could ask, but he won’t. They’ll think he’s weird. Emily turns her head sideways and looks at Laura, who’s holding her shins with her head on her knees too, as if they’re in assembly.
‘I couldn’t live with him. I couldn’t live without him,’ Pearl says. ‘That’s what they say. We loved each other, we hated each other, we could have killed each other. I feel numb, as a matter of fact. I’ve done my grieving, you see.’ She pulls a handkerchief from under the sofa cushion. ‘The truth is,’ she says, ‘I’ve been happy on my own. The time’s gone slower. I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve done what I wanted when I wanted. Every day’s been magical in its way. I’ve been free, which I could never have been with him.’
Marina crosses her knee away from Pearl. Dave winces. ‘All right, Mum.’
Astrid does not know what kind of grief there is here. Of all of them in that room, she suspects her Nick is the one in the most trouble. She can feel his hand on her shoulder, his fingertips around the clavicle.
He wants her help, but he can’t ask for it. When she leans forward to pull her shoe back on to her heel, his fingers slip and he looks in alarm at her back as if a boat were slipping out of its docks.
‘I used to shake when I saw him,’ Pearl goes on. She blows her nose. ‘But I don’t know now if that’s what you’d call love.’ She gets up and goes out to the kitchen, closing the stable door, top and bottom. Privy to her next actions in their imaginations only, Dave sees her at the sink, leaning on it, looking out down the garden path as she used to when Ken was due home. Nick sees her kneeling on the floor with the dog, burying her face in the long soft hair at its neck, like a girl. Marina sees her making tea, and Astrid sees her going out to the garden to fetch the brandy bottle and taking a good long draught of it to burn away any love left.
Astrid believes that Pearl loved Ken the way she loves Nick, that Pearl never really thought Ken would go and Ken never really thought he was gone. Nick has never impressed her. He has moved her to compassion, and maternally so; there’s some condescension in it. The passion in it has come from the chance to make one another new, from inside out, to swap pieces. Done too fast, it could run to destruction. Pearl and Ken were impatient; Astrid and Nick are patient.
She turns her face into Nick’s hand, and kisses his palm. She kisses it hard, for Pearl’s sake and for Ken’s sake, for each and every love is also our own.
Chapter 54
‘He knew it was his time, Rodge. It was like some sort of animal instinct. This is the place he chose,’ Audrey says as they turn up the unmarked track. ‘Where are we then, Roger? Where are we now?’
He gives her a shrinking look and colours; he knows from her tone that the punchline is coming.
‘Glassenbury?’
‘No, Roger. This is his first wife’s home. The mother of his children. See? It’s like an animal going back to its den.’
This unmade road, all ditches and rocks, is going to give the hearse a lot of gyp, he thinks. We won’t take the van, she’d told him. The family’s all there; it’s got to be the hearse. ‘Decorum’ was what Ken wanted.
They have slowed down to a creeping pace.
‘Christ,’ she says, nodding at the suspended wax effigies, turning in the headlights. ‘It’s like voodoo or something.’
‘Dolls,’ he says.
She touches the hair on the back of his neck. ‘Had they called a doctor, did they say, Rodge?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. So you did, I assume?’
‘Assume nothing, you always say.’ He gives her an apologetic smile.
She shakes her head and takes out her mobile phone. ‘It’s like The Shining out here, Rodge,’ she says, texting and flinching as a Cabbage Patch doll swings into the side mirror, leering at them with a one-toothed idiot grin, his fat fabric gut green with moss. The hearse lurches from side to side and wobbles up the slight incline towards the cottage. She sends the message. ‘Ken would have been very pleased with this for an ending.’
Where the track ends, Roger extinguishes the engine. They’re in the full rig. They’ve even got gloves on. After all, as she said to Roger when they got dressed, it’s not like she didn’t know what the punter wanted.
‘This is one of those rare occasions, Roger, in which your punter is the deceased, and that makes it special. All of this can be done just as he’d have liked. And paid up in full.’ She’d placed one shoe, then the other, on the bed and wiped the toes over with a face flannel. ‘There’s nothing better than things working out as you planned them. Nothing.’
He’d been doing his tie in the rolling mirror, one knee up against it to stop it rolling.
‘Did you see things working out this way?’
‘No,’ he said and tucked the tie inside his jacket.
She grabbed his lapels when he turned, and kissed him.
‘What did you see foresee, Roger?’
‘Booze.’
She swayed against him. ‘And are you happy? Do you feel like you’ve come home after a long time away? Do you feel loved?’
‘Yes,’ he said and, because it seemed to be a special occasion for which he had no card, added, ‘thank you very much.’
He’d stood before her with his hands in his pockets, lifting his trouser bottoms from his shoes, waiting for his orders. And now he stands doing the same at the back door to the cottage.
‘Jesus Bleeding Christ, dog, if I’ve told you to stay in your bloody bed once, I’ve told you a hundred times!’
The door opens.
Pearl addresses them curtly, as if they’ve come to read the meter, ‘Come on, come in. He’s upstairs.’
Audrey puts her head on one side. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’ Pearl nods.
‘He was a lovely man.’
‘You didn’t know him well then.’
‘Yes,’ Audrey counters, taken aback, ‘I did know him quite well; he was a friend and we did business together, but I knew him latterly when his sister died . . .’
‘Pat.’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you bloody be-have!’ Pearl screams, pulling on the choke chain, as the dog uses its paw to scratch its collar. ‘She was a saint, that woman.’
‘She was.’
‘If you like that sort of thing. She couldn’t ’alf make your life miserable, if she wanted to. Still, we’ve all got our failings. Talking of which, you’ll find him upstairs.’
‘Sorry for your loss,’ mumbles Roger, passing by.
‘That’s all right, sunshine,’ she says.
Cap clasped to his chest, Roger bobs his head at the company assembled in the front room. Audrey asks if anyone’s called the doctor. They shake their heads and look at each other.
‘He said to call you first. He thought a lot of you, Mrs Bury,’
says the bald son,
David, coming forward to offer his hand.
‘We’re his sons.’ Nick extends his.
‘He was a lovely man, your father,’ Audrey says again.
‘There weren’t many like him,’ says Dave.
‘Thank Christ,’ says Pearl. She looks unsteady and flushed. Audrey steps back out of the woman’s breath.
‘Mum, have you been drinking?’ Dave asks her. Their mother’s never been able to hold drink.
‘I might have had a little something to settle me!’ she says, with a crazy movie-star smile which she directs at the three children on the hearth. Marina suggests the kids all go outside for a while until everything’s sorted out.
‘That’s right, that’s right,’ says Pearl, ‘give this lot some space to bring the old goat down.’
‘Is he upstairs?’ Audrey asks Dave, touching his arm.
‘Oh yes, yes, he is. Just up the stairs and to the right. Help yourself.’
The couple in black go up the stairs, her first with her case, and then the chap with gloves, holding on to the banister as if there’s a gale blowing.
Dave turns to look at Nick. ‘Christ, did you hear what I just said?’
‘Don’t. We’ve got enough trouble here.’ Nick nods in their mother’s direction.
Pearl’s sitting on the arm of the chair, above Astrid, looking over her glasses and trying to fix her eyes on Astrid’s, but it’s like trying to pin a tail on a donkey. ‘I suppose you think he loves you,’ she says eventually. ‘I thought he loved me,’ she throws her head to the ceiling. ‘More fool me.’
‘I know Nick loves me.’ Pearl gives a bitter laugh.
It was the third day Astrid had not put on more than a touch of mascara. She’d not done more than brush her hair, nor worn anything new, and he’d not said a thing. It had occurred to her that morning that it wasn’t necessarily that he didn’t notice but that it didn’t matter. It was possible that when he looked at her, he saw the woman of his imagining just as she saw the man of her dreams. The rest was mere detail.