‘I tell you what, Astrid,’ he says on the Saturday morning they’re off to the airport, swapping with her at the bathroom sink.
‘Listen to this. My mum used to say to me and Davie, I’m not kidding, I’ll flay you alive . . .’ He cracks a smile over the side of his face free of shaving foam. ‘I’ll give you the hiding of your life. That was another one. Not your everyday humdrum beating but something to remember.’ She loves it when he shaves the little indented furrow under his nose, the strip above the middle of his lips; what a funny face he makes then, he looks so proper. ‘Mind you, it was only talk.’
He wipes each side of his face, leaving blobs of shaving foam on his earlobes. (‘Oh, the way he holds himself, you can see he thinks himself a very fine gentleman,’ her mother said to her once, unkindly.)
‘Ken met his match with Pearl; they were both completely bloody-minded.’ The iced gem of foam on his Adam’s apple falls on to his chest. He unwraps the towel from his waist. ‘He was forty-odd when he married Mum, and he only did it because her dad died and she came into a bit of money. Sure of it.’ He opens the glass door to the shower, the frame shaking in his wake. He turns on the tap. They stand there, dark and light, facing each other, the plain glass between them. Suddenly he’s doused in water and his hair is flat to his temples.
‘Mind you, they could both scream and shout. Christ! Even the dog was a nervous wreck. You’ve never seen a dog with diarrhoea like ours had.’
He sluices under each armpit with the soap. The glass screen is splattered with soapsuds. He puts shampoo on to his head as if he’s cracking an egg on to it. His mouth bursts open into gasps, and his eyes screw tighter in the onslaught of the stream of water as he rubs and rubs his head. He looks so sweet, her one-man storm in a teacup. She puts two fingers to her lips and touches the glass screen and leaves him there.
Ten minutes later, he comes downstairs dressed as the country gent in his careful clothes, the check shirt and cords. ‘Ready?’ She trims her grin, recalling how pleased he’d been to go to Laura’s first sports day at school and been gutted to find himself opposite another father who’d been wearing identical clothes:
coral trousers, Barbour and leather hat.
They’re off to Gatwick, bound for Sicily. It will be good to have a break from this whole business with his father.
Just that very morning the phone rang at seven and it was Ken asking for the number of a fish and chip shop in the old town. ‘Silly old fuck,’ Nick said, hanging up. ‘Why call us for that?’
‘We’re not bloody directory enquiries,’ Astrid had griped from under her pillow.
According to Dave, Matt used the Internet to switch the old man’s telecoms provider to one offering free calls evenings and weekends. Great, said Nick, good on him, the little shit.
The two larger cases are in the conservatory, waiting for Nick to put them in the car, and he stands looking at them, bracing himself. The dog, their brown and white springer spaniel, peers in at them, too dirty for admission, his face craven, ready for the jackpot of a welcome as much as for the disaster of dismissal. He cocks his head.
‘Dirty old dog,’ says Astrid. ‘He knows he’s off to kennels. Bugger off, Roy.’
They thought it funny to name him this, to call out: ‘Roy, Roy . . .’ But Laura doesn’t think it’s funny; she wishes the dog were called Biscuit. ‘Whose idea was it anyway, Mum, to call him Roy?’ she asked once on the way to school and Astrid knew, sliding her eyes and pausing before answering, that in such questions there was a subtle evisceration of Nick. ‘Mine,’ she lied.
‘Yes, he knows we’re going,’ Nick says sadly, looking at Roy through the glass with a deeply sympathetic look.
They have time to lie down together and kiss before they go, don’t they? she asks him, a hand on his arm. He taps his watch and sighs as if it’s against his will. This is their shtick; he jokes that she badgers him for sex.
‘I’d best get the other bags, love.’ He plods upstairs dutifully and she follows him up, but he surprises her with an ambush at the bedroom door.
From the first night, he appointed their sides of the bed – he to the right, she to the left – and this is how he arranges them now, pulling her across him. They kiss on their bed.
‘Handsome,’ she tells him.
But he resists the tip of her tongue and jumps up. ‘Enough of this lolling about, we’ve got a holiday to get on!’ He gets up to zip the bags.
She lies there, her thoughts cramping at this small spurning. One thing leads to another: being girlfriend not wife; having no children of their own; her age; other women. This is always the terminus for this line of thinking, and on its benches sit beautiful women. Sometimes it seems to her that she lives in a flat world, like the bed they lie in. Jealousy to the east, doubt to the west, the past to the south, the future to the north – all pits to fall into.
‘Come on then, we don’t want to miss the plane,’ he calls up the stairwell.
There are fifty women to every straight man these days. She has to be vigilant. Women are fighting – liberation’s over and now it’s civil war – and she’s in the armaments industry: beauty. The other woman is rattling the handle of the bedroom door, a true competitor, just a dress size away. The sweet spot is the fear. Her fantasies thrive there; lust is a kind of terror.
When he takes Roy into the kennels, she checks her crow’s feet in the mirror. You can never be the most beautiful woman, no matter how beautiful you are, she thinks. She hopes that this Sicilian destination will not present the problems of a Caribbean or, worse, a Brazilian resort. It has scarcely any beach, so it ought to be safe from sun-worshipping nymphs. She purposely chose a place that seemed a little middle-aged so that she’d compare well. When he gets in the car, she slaps the visor to and smiles guardedly. A true smile. A grin – God forbid, a guffaw – would show her age.
When they pass the exit signs on the motorway and he has difficulty reading them, he says he thinks he might need glasses.
‘My eyesight’s not what it used to be.’
She’s pleased; every Delilah wants her Samson blind.