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.