The phone went at just after six and Ken got himself out of bed with what he deemed discretion. June rose and fell several times in his wake, as if on a raft, and received a stray cuff as he flailed about. The carpet rose and fell, and the furniture whinnied and clanked, and the last noise to betray his clandestine exit was finally and explosively a trombone salvo from the bathroom. He had misplaced faith in the thickness of those walls.
Where he goes when the phone rings, she knows very well. He is at that woman’s beck and call; she has only to snap her fingers. June knew it was her as soon as she clapped eyes on her. She met her at Pat’s do. The vol au vent cases June got from Lidl, forty-eight of them, and filled them herself. That woman – Audrey – gorged herself on them. She must have had four or more. And Ken! He hung on to her every word, as if he were catching her crumbs. June asked people what they thought of the vol au vents and got some very kind words, but nothing from Ken. He was too busy ogling the greedy undertaker.
She has given up hope of much in the way of affection from Ken. She does feel lonely, but she’s of the generation that understood very well, thank you, that no one likes a sourpuss, or a moaner, so you keep your troubles to yourself.
She has a nice son who is forty-six and lives in Wales in the countryside and runs a holiday camp for artists. He has an Australian wife. She has the school photographs of their twin children – Jeremy and Jemima – above the gas fire. Once in a blue moon they come to Hastings and stay in the caravan park.
The day before they come, Ken picks a row, so they have a miserable time of it with him griping and carping. And when they go, he’s all good-natured – he has a certain spring in his step – and he has the cheek to ask her if she wants to say sorry to him for her behaviour of the last few days. Then he takes her out to The Italian Way and stands up at the counter, reminiscing about the days when the Dimarcos ran it and he and the Teddy Boys hung out there looking mean. As in tough, not tight, which is what he looks, standing back when the waiter brings the little plastic tray. Her purse snaps back and forth and provides the right money down to the last penny. It’s never more than eight pounds. Seven pounds eighty as a rule for two minestrone soups with rolls. And then they’re all done and back to normal again.
‘I’ve been a fool for those eyes,’ she says, lying there, hot and heavy of leg, rheumatism aching right through her, a bad taste in her mouth.
What a life. You never know how it’s going to end up, but you don’t imagine it will be like this. They ought to warn girls how it is, how it really is.
She gets up in time to see Ken, a stick figure in his black suit, up the far hill. She phones her son and gets his wife, Melinda.
‘You never imagine your husband will get a thing for an embalmer – and an outsized one at that – that’s one thing you don’t imagine. Now the thing is . . .’ she coughs, ‘excuse me,’ with nerves, ‘and I don’t know whether you should tell my Andrew this or not – you know how sensitive he is. The thing is that Ken says he wants a divorce. It’s because of her, Audrey Bury, Hastings’ biggest funeral director. Ooh, it’ll be for the money, I know that much. She’s rich, that woman, rich. Rich from cheating widows. Rich from all the gold teeth.’
Then Melinda gives her a piece of her mind and afterwards June sits down, looking at the twins in their brown and gold cardboard frames and wondering if her daughter-in-law’s fury didn’t amount to some sort of abiding affection emanating from Wales and from the hearth of her own family.
She decides the best thing to do is to eat a pack of Bourbons right now, then starve herself in front of him until he notices. But she’d best prepare herself for the worst. At the small table in the kitchen she sets out the Basildon Bond pad with its ruled guidance page underneath the top sheet and in her bird’s-foot writing she picks out the following as a note to herself, to fold and keep as a moral stiffener: Dear June – that made her feel better in itself – When you go away from Ken to Wales, please remember that he will not come after you because he’s never done it before and it’s not in his nature. When you leave Hastings, you leave Ken for good.
She won’t think about those eyes, though they’re there between the loops of the ‘o’s. She folds the note and puts it in her bag. She makes a cup of tea and puts on the wireless. On comes Otis Redding with ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’. She sits and listens to the song the whole way through, unsandwiching the chocolate Bourbons, dipping the dry sides into the tea – Ken’s way of eating them. Otis finishes things in a strangled sort of way and, when he’s done, she switches off the radio and puts the empty biscuit packet into the bin.
In the beginning she’d gone off for hours and hours after rows with him, but he never came after her and, goodness knows, she dithered by the bus stop. She was a bus-stop dallier; she’d annoy the drivers with her umming and erring, her toe pointing in, pointing out. ‘No, thank you, I’ll wait for the next one.’ And the bus would serve off in an angry manoeuvre, rejected by a little old lady with a handbag. Oh, she dreamed of seeing her Ken come up the hill for her sake, to stop her boarding the bus! ‘Dream on,’ Ken would have said.
She takes a walk up to Lidl for a look-see later on that morning, going up the hill with her heart heavy, thinking about the very idea of leaving him, her last love, and she comes back down it again with placatory words on her mind, blinking at the sea. He can’t help what he is, and she loves him! Oh, for those eyes! And the way he helps himself to a cream cracker and a bit of red Leicester in the evenings, bouncing the little plate on his knee as they watched the news together. That’s happiness enough, surely. And of course you have to bear in mind he’s never had a mother.
This is the way her thoughts are going, and she’s thinking of doing a posh dinner for him – she’s got a ready-cooked roast chicken in her bag – when towards her comes a blue double-decker bus bound inland. She loves the smell of the back-draught as you board and the comfort of the seats, so nicely sprung. That bus could take you anywhere. It’s marked up as going to Hawkhurst. From Hawkhurst you could get anywhere – London certainly, or Wales.
The bus driver is a woman. She has her head out of the side window and her hair is long and auburn, tresses and tresses of it flowing in the wind. It’s truly something to behold. It is a sign.
‘Just like Boadicea,’ June says to herself, stopping and changing the bag to her other hand. ‘Oh dear, oh dear.’
When she gets in the bungalow, she sits down in her coat in the kitchen and takes the letter out of her bag, unfolds it and reads it through once more.
‘Hawkhurst,’ she says. She pushes up her glasses on one side of her face to wipe the corner of her eye. ‘That’s where I’m bound.’