by Louise Dean
‘You’re under that Astrid’s thumb, you are,’ his father said to him that evening, when Nick was peeling the potatoes for supper.
‘I say, Astrid, women’s work, innit?’ he called out after her, delighted with his own temerity, and Astrid came in and used the teacloth to whip at his backside and ordered him to get peeling too.
‘She’s beatin’ me up, son!’ he said, elbowing Nick, and the old fool broke into his 1950s routine minus the ukulele, shining and wheezing with excitement. ‘Oy, Mother, any chance of a cup of tea for the workers? I bin slaving away all day, I ’ave.’
He had been working hard, that was true. Pearl had shown Astrid the fruits of their labours that morning when she dropped off the work detail. Ken had helped her bury the wire fence for the chicken coop in the ground. Her pact with the Devil was not working out. For many months she had served dinner at seven for the foxes and they came from far and wide, males and females, to dine on the lawn on off-cuts Pearl claimed from the butcher’s, and in return they’d let her chickens alone. But a week ago, one of her ladies, as she called them, had gone missing. She and Ken had spent the week securing the premises.
They’d stood there, the three of them, by the coop, watching the old biddies pick about, making their tremulous quibbling noises, feathers fluffed up and prudish, and Ken was proud to reel off the name of each one.
‘And that’s old Edna.’
She was the blind chicken who the deaf cock liked to give a regular seeing to, Pearl explained, adding with her customary cynicism, ‘That’s what you call a blessed union.’
Then Pearl bent over to pick up the little blind chicken and put it to her face, put her cheek to its yellow feathers and cradled it under her chin, stroking it and making comforting noises, and she smiled and swayed, like a girl. It was the most stunning transformation, and with the dust clouds of gnats and the haze of the early sunshine and the thick smell of the horse manure on the vegetable compost, Astrid felt quite overcome.
She looked back in the driving mirror at the pair of them, when she drove off. There they were, Pearl and Ken, standing again on the kitchen path some thirty years after they first stood there, in a less than blessed union. Now they stood there, an old man and an old woman, like doting parents, with the blind chicken between them.
Chapter 59
The tulips had already loosened their stays and now they went right ahead and dropped their drawers, and the garden ran riot in an excitement of colour. The breeze was wet and creamy with the scent of its blooms, and the perfume of the tiny daphne, which Pearl brought as a sprig to Ken to smell, was so beguiling that he kept it in his pocket. When Pearl was out of sight, he sniffed it and said, ‘Beau’iful that is, really beau’iful.’
They had their mid-afternoon cuppa in the kitchen after Ken had wheelbarrowed the compost to the vegetable garden and spread it with the pitchfork.
‘They set a date?’ Pearl asked him.
‘Ooh?’
‘Nick and Astrid. Have they set a date for the nuptials?’
‘Well . . .’ He prevaricated, as he did when searching his memory for things that were of no immediate concern to him, hoping he’d find a small note someone else had left behind. ‘I don’t think so. No, tell a lie, I ’eard ’em last night saying they was going to get on with it and do it sharpish. Might as well.’ He sniffed, giving half of his biscuit to the dog. He dipped the other half in his tea. ‘Reminds me of me and you, you know, how we was once.’
‘Get back in your bleeding basket, will you!’ Pearl growled at the dog. ‘Do you have to bring your filthy ways into my house? Just eat the bloody thing. I don’t want a load of mush in the bottom of the cup to wash out, do I? For Christ’s sake. You must be making a right nuisance of yourself round their place.’
‘They don’t mind,’ he said faintly.
She let out uproarious laughter.
‘They don’t!’
She shook her head and sipped her coffee.
‘Mind you, it dun ’alf creak, that floor upstairs.’
‘Have you ever once in your life stopped to think about other people?’ She was judge and jury. ‘You haven’t, have you? Not once.’
He looked discomfited, but didn’t deny it.
‘Well, I’ve thought it all through,’ she said, wiping the stain underneath his mug. ‘You’d best move in here.’
He blinked.
‘You might as well be useful somewhere. On a trial basis. In the spare room. We’re too old for bunking up.’
‘I’ll be a nuisance to you, Pearl. I’m not in good ’ealth. I’ll be a drain on your ree-sources,’ he waffled. ‘I’ll get on your nerves. I’m no use to anyone.’
‘You can carry on helping me round the garden. Can’t you?’
The dog looked up at him, his amber eyes full of appeal.
‘It’s like this.’ She tapped the palm of her hand with a pointed finger. ‘I’m not doing any cleaning or tidying. Unless I feel like it. That’s none of your business. I’ll cook when I want and you can have some. You can give me your pension to pay the bills with. You’re not to wander off when there’s work to be done. I don’t want shirking or skiving. I won’t have it. I’ll do your washing, but don’t change your clothes more than once a week. You can take a shower every day, though – I don’t want you round here smelling like shit. And don’t use all the milk up when you make your tea. Is that agreed?’
‘Your rules, Pearl. That’s good enough. It’s very kind of ya. I’m much obliged, thank you. Just bein’ ’ere and bein’ with you, that’s all I want, Pearl.’
They turned away from each other quickly, she to berate the dog, he to adjust the cuffs of his cardigan.
‘Get in your basket, sod you! Do I have to keep telling you? You’re driving your mum crazy!’
The dog lifted its nose and gave its ‘mum’ a woeful look, then donned a noble expression, seeing on the window ledge the cat blinking at his disgrace, and slumped. When he felt her hand caress his head, the dog put his nose in his tail.
Chapter 60
‘What are you doing, Pearl? Pearl, you all right in there?’ Ken said, in a querulous voice, outside the downstairs toilet in his vest and underpants, squinting through the crack of the door to the light inside. ‘You been in there ages.’
‘I’m counting my dwarf beans, if you must know,’ came the reply.
‘Can’t sleep.’
‘Well, there’s nothing I can do about it!’
‘Just felt a bit lonely di’n’ I . . .’ There was the sound of the flush.
She came out of the toilet in her long nightdress with a stern look on her face. ‘I told you,’ she said, ‘how it was going to be. Don’t you think you can come here and start upsetting things or changing the rules. A dog has one master.’
‘I was wondering if we could watch a bit o’ telly, or something.’ He stepped backwards to allow her regal procession. She had in each hand, like orb and sceptre, a colander and the cardboard inner of a loo roll.
‘At ten thirty?’
‘There’ll be something on, Pearl. They have it on all hours these days.’
They went through to the living room. The dog made a break for it, but the hound’s black nose was squashed thoroughly back into the kitchen through the last inch of the closing stable door.
Pearl switched on the side lamp and brought a humble light to the corner of the room. She sat down on the sofa and thumbed through the Sunday supplement with the TV listings.
He perched himself at the other end of the sofa. The grandfather clock ticked. She took her time, now and again licking the edge of her thumb to use it to turn the page.
In their day’s work, when they stopped to take a cuppa, they’d have a laugh often as not, the pair of them, at the expense of their boys, just like they used to. D’you ’ear Davie? Still trying to win brownie points with his brother, innie? D’you ’ear the way Nick carries on? Tsar Nicholas! Always was like a member of the royal family, weren’t he? Used to as
k if he was adopted, dinnie!
He looked at her now in the soft glow from the lamp. He could see the girl she was, the girl who sat in Jepson’s acting big, all a-twitch and flutter, with a clever turn of phrase, a right big mouth, and hurt at the slightest offence. And now he was an old man who longed for hot tea and warm wishes in that cold house, who’d got only the day he was standing up in.
But he was done with dying for good.
He told her it today, when he was doing the rhodies for her.
‘’Ere, Pearl,’ he said, putting down the hedge clippers, ‘I think I’m finished with that dying business.’
‘You keep going till you’ve got that done,’ was all she’d said to that, as she would to any other remarks she might consider sentimental or clever.
‘This looks good,’ she said conclusively, prodding the magazine, flat of mouth and not to be gainsaid.
‘Go on then, Pearl,’ he said, with girlish encouragement. She used the remote control, arm like a thunderbolt, just daring the TV not to work. There was a bounce of noise and light that shocked the night. ‘I’ve always wanted to know who took it and who gave it.’
‘How do you mean, Pearl?’ he asked, sidling across to her, tendering the chocolate box that had been on the arm of the sofa. He passed it over for her perusal.
Her fingers wandered over the chocolate box, bouncing and alighting as she felt the chocolates’ surfaces, smooth or crenellated.
‘You ain’t diabetic no more then, Pearl,’ he said.
Her shoulders set, her index finger and thumb stopped in a pincer poised over the central chocolate. Then her cheeks ballooned and her glasses rose on her nose and she gave a small snort which he thought might have been laughter caught short.
‘Them gays,’ was all she said, popping the chocolate into her mouth.
And Ken was obliged to watch an hour-long American documentary on the subject of homosexual intercourse, sucking on Pearl’s cast-offs – for, every few minutes, she’d take one out of her mouth and pass it his way, with an expression of displeasure, announcing ‘strawberry’ or ‘orange’ by way of explanation.
‘’Cause you don’t like the soft’uns, do you, Pearl?’ he said, ingratiatingly, now right beside her, close enough to smell her sweet breath.
‘I only like the nuts,’ she said, her brow grim, eyes narrowing to focus on the collection of rubber sex toys belonging to two Texan men.
On the window ledge, looking in, sat Pearl’s black cat, blinking at the curiously variable light of the television, which made the two beings inside appear both solid and immaterial, other-worldly and ethereal, like ghosts or gods.