The Old Romantic Read online

  ‘Then the Rye Road and past the B&Q down into Guestling, then on down Rosemary Lane. It’s a very nice place, Fairlight. When you think about it, it’s as pretty as anywhere.’

  ‘How would you know? Where have you ever been?’ snapped

  Ken.

  ‘I’ve been to Wales.’

  ‘That’s all you bin to! Wales!’

  ‘It’s a very nice place, Wales.’

  ‘There’s nowhere like home.’

  ‘Maybe for you, but this is not my home.’

  ‘Thirty years you bin ’ere. You tell me then, where is your home? In the sky, is it?’

  ‘If He’ll have me!’ she trilled victoriously.

  ‘Just like Wales, is it, up there then?’

  ‘What we deserve comes to each and every one of us in good time, Kenneth.’

  ‘All in good time, she says,’ he repeated darkly. ‘There’s no good time. When He calls you, He calls and that’s that. But, oh no, she knows best. She knows better than Him.’

  Nick checked the driving mirror, to see the woman’s face. There was so much steely goodwill in her that with her mouth closed it came out through her eyes.

  ‘June? Hey. You must have been a saint to put up with this one,’ Nick said, catching her eye as they drew up at the lights.

  Her eyes twinkled and she reached for Ken’s hand, but his father’s hand remained crabbish on his knee with hers on top of it. He looked out of the window, his face bitter.

  Ken and June met on the promenade outside the White Rock in 1988, just a year after his divorce from Pearl, Nick’s mother. Unabashedly, she told him that she was a woman of some means thanks to her late husband. Not more than thirty minutes later, according to Dave’s version of events, the pair of them stood up with everything more or less arranged. It was a pragmatic alliance for Ken. Her money bought the next four flats that they developed and added to the company’s lettings.

  But June had different ideas about the marriage and, according to Dave, she set great store by the fact that Ken had bought her flowers and chocolates during their engagement and that they’d had the odd meal out. She had romantic aspirations.

  She was to be disappointed. Although there was the occasional outing to The Italian Way, on the seafront, Ken made sure never to have more than a bowl of soup out and was highly critical of ‘people’ who were greedier than him in public, such as June.

  ‘Tell ’em what I said on my birthday, June,’ Ken said now as they went up the hill of the Old Harrow Road.

  June leant forward, pleased to be called to bear witness. She looked like the sort of woman who would enjoy being in court. She looked like the sort of woman who didn’t get much in the way of company. ‘Seventy-eight years old and he says to me, if you please, the very first thing when he wakes, he says . . .’

  ‘November the twenty-fifth, it was,’ the old man put in.

  ‘He says, June. He says, This is the year I’ll die. I said, What a thing to say, Kenneth! Fancy waking up on your birthday and saying that . . ’ She burst into laughter. ‘It tickled me! What a thing to say!’

  ‘Same day every year, it is,’ Ken grumbled. ‘November twenty-fifth.’

  At the traffic lights by the Sainsbury’s on Sedlescombe Road North, with his arms embracing the steering wheel, and bent over it, Nick looked as if he were climbing it to get as far away from his father as possible. His focus trained on the red light, his eyes blinked like a digital clock.

  The light changed.

  When the car took off, the seat belts locked and pinned them to their seats.

  Chapter 5

  The first call of the New Year was from Dave to tell Nick that their dad’s sister, Auntie Pat, had died. Nick declined to go to the funeral. Dave called him again a month later, in February, at work.

  ‘All right, mate.’

  ‘All right, Dave.’

  ‘Know any good hymns?’

  ‘Good hymns? What for?’

  ‘For a funeral.’

  ‘What, Auntie Pat’s? I thought that was done and dusted, so to speak.’

  ‘No, Dad’s.’

  After a moment’s silence, Dave broke out into a throaty chuckle. ‘He’s what you call a hymn short of a funeral service, our dad.’

  Ken had become obsessed with death since Pat’s passing, he said. Talk about maudlin! He’d got himself a book on Victorian services of order and he wanted the whole shebang. He’d called them up at home and got Dave’s daughter, Emily, to look through her recorder book for school assemblies and play through this hymn and that hymn, and then he’d said, ‘No, that’s not the one,’ and put the phone down. He’d had Dave’s son, Matt, print off from the Internet some sort of order for non-intervention. He was in and out of the undertakers on Norman Road, leafing through funeral plans and making a nuisance of himself.

  ‘Get this, right, he had a bit of maroon-coloured nylon ruffle with him in his coat pocket the other day and he asked Marina what she thought of it. It was only flaming coffin lining.’

  ‘Silly old sod.’

  He seemed to have developed a crush on the funeral director on Norman Road, Dave said. ‘A woman.’

  ‘That’s something.’

  ‘Keeps on about her being a fine woman and such a shame he’s met her so late in life. I think he’s hoping for a discount or something. He’s gone and offered her his services.’

  ‘Christ. Has he got anything left to offer?’

  ‘Helping out, working at the undertakers as a volunteer. Well, he’s more or less retired from the business, thank Christ. Got no interest in it any more. Says property’s usury, or something. I don’t know. He likes his Bible these days.’ He was going to church of a Sunday and talking a storm about the big man in the sky, but in truth, as Dave put it, Ken was clueless. He was like a man in a bar trying to order something he’d had as a child by explaining how it tasted. ‘Oy, Nick, right, to him, right, God, it’s like Dandelion and Burdock or something.’

  He’d really gone downhill lately, Dave said. ‘Health-wise, I mean. He’s always been a bit bloody nutty, innie? But he’s frail with it now. ’

  He’d had prostate cancer the year before, and he had the beginnings of Parkinson’s now and didn’t drive. Dave didn’t like to ask, but he thought their father was probably having a bit of trouble with the waterworks too.

  He came to the point, in his way.

  ‘Look, you know, I mean, I know you’re going to say no, and you don’t have to and, I mean, why should you, know what I mean? If I was you, I wouldn’t, and you could say years have passed – too many, maybe – but, you see, well, I dunno . . .’

  ‘What?’

  Would Nick consider a get-together?

  ‘I don’t think so, mate.’

  Nick put him off, but Dave began to call every week and the calls become more and more burdened.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Yes. You?’

  ‘Yup. All right.’

  ‘So, what’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Busy?’

  ‘Yup. You?’

  ‘So-so.’ Pause.

  ‘Well, good talking to you.’

  ‘You too.’

  ‘Bye then.’

  ‘Yup. Bye, mate.’

  This was how Dave prevailed upon his elder brother and the pall of the silences spoke more to Nick’s heart than anything Dave could say.

  Astrid was as much prurient as compassionate when it came to Nick’s family. Very quickly, perhaps even before she’d thought it through, an outfit came to mind. She reasoned, pussy-bow blouse in mind, that they were so happy, nothing could touch them. You should make peace with your past, she said. After all, you’ve come home, haven’t you?

  Her eyes sparkled.

  Women, he’d said to himself, were the most mysterious of mates. Where a man wants to know what’s going to happen next, a woman wants to know what it means.

  Chapter 6

 
By the time they mounted the hill past Baldslow on the Ridge, there had passed several minutes of silence, punctuated here and there by a thrilled sigh from June as she recalled another part of what her husband had said on his birthday.

  ‘This your wife here, is it then?’ said Ken, pointing a finger at Astrid, to make it clear who he meant.

  Astrid turned and met his eyes.

  ‘Nope. This is Astrid,’ said Nick evenly.

  Ken’s chin jutted as he moved his head to see through the side window, up past the lodge into the car park of the cemetery and crematorium. ‘Nothing doing today then.’ He set his eyes on the road, scrutinizing it for potential accidents, grasping the back of Astrid’s headrest. ‘Astrid? What’s that – Danish, or something? Always has to be a foreigner, dunnit! Cor, that gel saw you coming – what was her name?’ He nudged June. ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Was it an Angelica who came with you to our wedding?’ June began. ‘Because after that there was a Lydia, wasn’t there, or something? At the christening, wore that – well, I call it mauve – frock. Lydia, that’s right, tall, or was it Laverne . . .?’

  ‘Or bleeding Shirley. Give over, woman!’

  ‘Annette! That’s right. I knew I’d get there in the end!’ Astrid’s fingers went limp on his knee and Nick squeezed

  them together with his own hand, but failed to catch her eye.

  When he saw the sign for his brother’s house, he slammed on the brakes and, under-geared, the car lumbered painfully up the potholed track to ‘Longwinter Farmhouse’.

  ‘Bleeding long way up this drive, it is,’ said Ken. ‘You couldn’t walk it, could you, June? With your legs.’

  ‘I daresay I couldn’t.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be able to go walking about in Wales, would you?’

  ‘I daresay I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Bit posh for you here, innit, June?’ Gripped with sudden delight, Ken’s voice quavered. He sounded like George Formby.

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  The old man gave curt instructions to his driver. ‘Pull up by the sheds there. That’s it. Stop there. Swing it in behind David’s car, that’s it. Come on! Plenty of space. Get a move on. Our dinner’ll be cold by the time you’ve got us there. Blimey. Take it easy. I say, June – I nearly lost my breakfast there.’

  When Nick had helped June down and set her in motion like a clockwork penguin towards the house, he went round to his father’s door.

  Ken lay a hand on each of his shoulders as he got down. Nick had to steel himself not to flinch from the unwelcome touch. His father’s eyes were a thin blue, paler than Nick recalled. He spoke in a fervent whisper. ‘Remember your mother and me, how happy we was when you was a nipper? Remember how she used to have a turn if you caught her singing . . .? She used to raise her fists to me when I come up behind her, she was a bit ’andy that way, wa’n’t she? She was what you call an honest woman, though, wa’n’t she? Wa’n’t she?’

  Nick glanced towards the house and saw June standing on the doorstep in her triangular coat, holding her bag with two hands, waiting.

  ‘Just a minute now, give your old man a minute of your time. I know you want to get in that house and get away from me. But give your old man a second now. It’s bin a long time, ’annit?’

  He tightened his grip on Nick’s shoulders. ‘Listen now, son. I’m going to die.’

  ‘We’re all going to die.’

  ‘Yes, but the odds is getting shorter for me though, a’n’t they?’ He rolled his eyes and tutted. ‘Now look, I might not of met my maker as yet, but I have met reality.’ He said the word as though it were holy. He meant a lot by it. He’d always had his favourite words. His father was not stupid; if he had a good thought, he hung on to it. ‘Do you know what I mean? Reality. What I done wrong. What I bin.’

  It was difficult. His father was holding him there, telling him to stay there, to heed him, and yet all they had between them was the air they were breathing. He’d long cultivated different tastes and different habits deliberately so as not to resemble him.

  ‘I’m your father. What’s in me, is in you. Wherever I’m heading, you’re right behind me. You’re walking in my footsteps. ’Cause I’m your father and you’re my son. And no one can change that.’ Astrid said to him once, with the laundry folded, supper cleared and Laura in bed, when they sat down for a glass of wine, that it’s only when you have children yourself that you can really love your parents properly. You see all the little things that took it out of them, the hot-water bottle, the clean sheets, all the things they did even though they were aching to sit down, even though they didn’t get thanks for the good things, only the blame for the bad things. They’d laughed at the injustice served by Laura who, when finding the joke shop by the station had closed down, wailed at her mother: ‘That’s your fault!’

  ‘Kids blame their parents for everything. It’s only when you have kids yourself that you stop being a kid,’ she’d said, her face the picture of innocence.

  ‘We’re blood,’ the old man insisted. ‘You and me. We’re father and son. Like it nor not.’

  ‘All right,’ Nick conceded. ‘All right, but let’s talk about it inside.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ken said, and he patted his son’s arm and looked towards the house, his expression both conciliatory and keen.

  Chapter 7

  Dave’s wife, Marina, was at the door with her arms folded, raising her shoulders and looking at the sky in comment on the miserable weather, and an invitation into the warmth of the farmhouse. She resembled an ostrich with the broad plumage of a big skirt, thin from the waist up in a ribbed polo neck, with a long neck and a beaky nose. The fuzz that burst from the hair clip was a top note of mayhem, Astrid noted, comparing herself favourably and donning a homely smile. Dave popped a tanned bald head out from behind Marina and emerged, hands in jeans pockets, sunny of smile.

  With one old-timer running out of clockwork and seizing up at the door, Nick propelled the next one forth. From behind, with his head nodding over the paving, Ken was clearly an old man, doddery and frail as Dave had said. Nick bit his lip. ‘You’re walking in my footsteps.’

  The old man stalled on the threshold of the farmhouse, gripping June’s arm and preventing her from entering until she had answered his urgent question.

  ‘Ain’t that right. June? Ain’t that right?’

  ‘If you say so, Ken.’

  Marina and Dave exchanged mournful looks at what was taking place and shared the same with Astrid and Nick, who were outside by the welly rack.

  ‘You can only love one person in your lifetime. You can only get married, in the eyes of the Lord, one time. That’s right, though, innit?’

  June laughed spiritedly and rolled her eyes. ‘Like I said, If you say so, Kenneth.’

  He released her arm and subsided, looking down at his polished shoes, mulling this over.

  ‘Come on in, Dad,’ said Dave. ‘Come on, now.’

  As Marina embraced June, she rubbed the old woman’s back in condolence. ‘You wouldn’t think it was spring, would you?’ The old boy piped up again from the doorway. ‘See, she and

  I, David, we’re just companions really. We was only married in registry anyway.’

  ‘All right, Dad. Come in, now. Let’s get Nick and Astrid in and close the door.’

  ‘Did I break your mother’s ’eart, do you think?’ And before Dave could answer, Ken was nodding miserably, ‘I did. I know I did.’

  Dave settled both him and June in the two carver chairs at the pine table, facing the length of the kitchen. Astrid gave a bunch of white lilies to Marina and the women exchanged cheek kisses and fell promptly into the self-deprecation that is the stock-in-trade of women who want to play nicely.

  ‘Oh, the wind’s wrecked my hair!’

  ‘Don’t worry, I look like that on a good day! Sometimes the most I can do is look clean – and sometimes I can’t even manage that!’

  ‘Oh, I know!’ cried Astrid, fulsome and fa
lse. She worked with women day in, day out. Marina was no threat; this was not a woman who’d sell her children to be thinner and younger. So she added for good measure, ‘I can’t believe how old I look without make-up these days!’

  ‘I don’t even bother! It has to be our anniversary for me to shave my legs!’

  Astrid gave Nick a triumphant smile. She’d done her part. Let family relations recommence.

  But the older couple were not at home and they declined to give their coats. When served a cup of tea, they sat stiffly holding the mugs, looking like a photograph from a bygone era.

  June was cowed, perhaps by the large kitchen and its chunky modishness – the Aga, the dresser with its natty chinaware, the table laid in bold colours with candy-striped cutlery and spotted napkin rings – or perhaps by the weight of the pint mug itself, or the hops hanging from the beams. Their dinner plates at home were the size of the side plates here. They drank their tea in Bulverhythe from small fluted cups with saucers. They kept their crockery in the plastic tub in the sink under grey water. They heated pre-packaged burgers in buns in the microwave or boiled water for packet soup. Dominating the display in their kitchen was a great economy-size bottle of yellow washing-up liquid. You didn’t sit people in your kitchen! You closed a door on it, in her book.

  When Matt sauntered through to help himself to a drink from the fridge, Ken’s eyes lit up and he gave June a dig in the ribs.

  ‘That’s the future there,’ he said. ‘In that boy.’

  Matt, with asymmetrical dyed black haircut, in a vest and low-slung jeans leant against the Belfast sink, can at his lips. His eyes didn’t show but the top of his boxer shorts did. There was a silver chain trailing from one pocket of his jeans.

  ‘Nice looking, innie? June? ’An’some. Like old whassisname, done the singing . . .’

  ‘Frank Sinatra.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Frankie Valli?’

  ‘No. Whassisname? Went round on the red bus with that bird from Worzel Gummidge.’

  ‘Cliff Richards?’

  ‘Thassim!’