He met her in Rye two years before. After a shabby one-night stand fuelled by silly drinks in a silly bar, he fled to a place he remembered as being thoroughly proper, if not positively fuddy-duddy, for redress. Rye was not unlike Ortygia; both were island citadels.
He stops at the newsagent’s now and consults a guidebook in English. This is the right thing to do. He will use erudition to bolster himself, to prove himself to both of them. This is who he is. He checks his watch. Five thirty. He will give it ten minutes before he goes back in. He flicks through the book and looks sideways, left and right, and then up and around. It is certainly more Catholic than Rye, Ortygia. He can see what they meant in the guidebook about its baroque excesses, a place where wrought-iron balconies bulged, critters on cantilevers cowered, architraves leapt with nymphs on the hoof, balusters dripped foliage and bas-reliefs trembled, with ancient scores being settled in fretwork.
Nice, he thinks, if a trifle over the top. Rye is far more demure. On Piazza Archimede, he takes a seat and orders a coffee granita. Over the fountain soft-breasted Artemis is posed in eternal provocation with a bow slung across her and arrows behind in her sheath. Something about her forthright expression reminds him of Astrid.
Rye was not burgeoning with immortals in marble. Rye was where mortals panicked, and strove to catch their breath. Rye was rather like a Walnut Whip whose cobbled streets mounted steeply in tiers to a conical form. ‘For our time is a very shadow that passeth’ was the motto on the church that crowned the summit.
The isle of Ortygia is quite flat, it makes a good stage. A policeman remonstrates theatrically with a lone moped driver. He has stopped the traffic on the piazza, and now Nick sees why. Twelve medieval drummers come round the fountain with long cloaks and leather boots, making mincing steps, followed by a procession of maidens each holding petrol-station posies.
He’d gone to Rye that time to embrace getting older. He persuaded himself he was more game pies and log fires than he was strobe lights and hand-shandies. He knew Rye as a boy. For a number of years his mother had a stall in Rye’s Thursday market. He used to sit under it on school holidays, reading books, or else he’d wander its streets, treading the ankle-turning pebble-set hills, and browsing bookshops with an aloof adult manner ready for any challenge, with twenty-five pence in his pocket. The book, the mere fact of it, distanced him as much as the seclusion of the under-stall. He was glad enough to remove himself from the squalor of the cattle market, with its pens and poo, giving in to poor offers on chipped bric-a-brac.
‘Would you take twenty pence for it, darling?’
Dave was motivated sufficiently by the prospect of a bag of chips in payment to run around getting Pearl and the other stallholders their teas.
And of course he’d share them with Nick. Sometimes they would sit with their chips and wooden forks and watch the man with the Kevin Keegan haircut lift the side of the lorry, to display shelves of packaged goods. He’d begin with an item at a time, usually electrical, occasionally cosmetic, proclaim its many merits, then start dropping the price wildly. The boys would nudge each other when they spotted the stooge and, sure enough, a woman would pipe up from the crowd, ‘How much? Blimey, that’s cheap!’ Then, in a loud aside, as if confidentially, ‘I bought a telly off him last month and it was top quality.’ Waving a crisp note in the air, ‘They’re up Argos for twice that price! Over here, mate! I’ll ’ave one darling!’
They enjoyed those shows, and he’d have the rest of Dave’s chips after he finished his own. ‘You can ’ave ’em, I’ve ’ad enough.’ Good old Dave. It wasn’t for the bookshops, or the fuddy-duddies, that he was drawn back to Rye that weekend, he reflected, watching the medieval crowd toss their flags on high, it was something to do with the taste of weak vinegary sweet ketchup. He could conjure its taste even now. It was certainly not Heinz. Watered down, it ran along the chips and dripped out of the bag rather than congeal. To his mind’s eye comes now the vision of Dave with his mouth round and open, not daring to close it, in a quandary as to what to do, because the chips were so hot. ‘’Ot, innit!’
He went back to Rye because he missed them. And he found Astrid.
On the street that ran above the marketplace, parallel with the train tracks, there stood a renovated warehouse, dubbed ‘Rye Spa’. He was stopped in his tracks by the herbal fragrance from its open doors. It reeked of purification and he weakened. He wanted cold alabaster hands on him, water over his head, shorter cleaner hair.
Astrid appeared to him as light: smooth, shining and fair. She came towards him from the desk and said she’d take him herself. She was dressed all in black with a pale blonde bob and red lips. For a person to look like that, their home too had to be immaculate, their handbag had to be neat, their toenails trim, their relationships kind and tolerant. He asked her out to lunch.
From the first heady days of car-park kisses to the hand-in-hand walks with the dog two years later, through talking – talking in wine and talking in bed – they learnt how to work in unison. She put him first, even above Laura, and they’d had little cause for quarrel thus far.
Given the Tom and Jerry model of a marriage he’d witnessed growing up, it was perhaps no surprise that before Astrid he chose the weakest of potential enemies: girls who were at a disadvantage to him – dimmer, younger, less educated, poorer, speaking a foreign language. Sure, for the most part they connived in his superiority. He knew that they played dumb, but that suspicion was generally the last thing to be aroused.
At first his relationship with Astrid seemed to offer elements of the old; she’d only stayed in school to sixteen, and she was feminine, almost submissive, in her mannerisms, but she owned the spa, a profitable business, and she was his age. In bed with her or talking to her, he felt two things he’d never felt before: exposed and grateful.
There were all sorts of things about love he didn’t know before her: the emergency of wanting to be honest which, it seemed to him, was what real love did to you; the fear of loss; and the risk of becoming ordinary.
In the early months, when they set up home together, he came up with a working model for the smooth running of the domestic machine: A man wants to be good and a woman wants to be beautiful. But that was only valid in the courtly phase. After that, there was sustaining the relationship. That needed a rule too, and he had that down: Do not call the other person a piece of shit. Don’t see through them.
Paying for private school for Laura gave him a paternal role in her life and helped found the family. He likes to drive her in to school, turning up Girls Aloud on the radio, and imagining himself the fond papa. It was all like playing Mummies and Daddies. Nobody minded when he was mistaken for Laura’s father, except for Laura. ‘Because I have a daddy already, you see,’ she’d warned him. There’s a little bit of Margaret Thatcher in that girl, he’d thought, swallowing his pride.
He loved them with practical acts: he made the fire, carried the shopping, cooked a breakfast or took Laura to the pictures when Astrid was tired. That was the life he wanted. He had his fire and game pie.
What he didn’t want was arguments. He had enough of it at work. His clients all said the same thing: ‘We want this to be amicable.’ He could punch the air every time he heard it. He didn’t. Instead, he said: ‘We want that too,’ and added, for the sake of candour, ‘but it never seems to go that way.’ It never did.
The ‘D’ words were best avoided; you can’t avoid death once you’re born and you can’t avoid divorce once you’re married, that was his drinking brag.
Every day he looked down from his office on to the shopping street and saw people struggling to get home; good people, and yet if he got any of them into the chair in his office they’d sit as they all did, shaking and tongue-tied, using pseudo ‘legal terminology’ and going on about fair play, but it was stunning how quickly a short course of shock therapy by correspondence could unravel in any one of them a murderous hatred.
Their home was a haven from it all, until just before Christmas. They’ve had to unplug the phone some evenings. Astrid says she doesn’t understand it, and he doesn’t either. But she goes further. She says she can’t understand why he rises to it, why he starts shouting and swearing back. ‘That’s another evening spoilt,’ she’ll say. Like it’s his fault! He doesn’t like the way she looks at him nowadays, with her hands on her hips; she stands before him face to face, mannish. She looks him in the eye. Like Artemis, he thinks sourly, leaving some change on the table and heading back towards the newspaper shop. He can’t reconcile this Astrid with the girl he met in Rye, whose eyes drank him in, whose smile was pure praise.
‘It’s so childish the way you and your father go on and on at each other,’ she said.
But he knew from his work that this type of thing, this raging, this ranting, this haranguing, this hating, was in fact quite common between grown-ups. It was just that he never thought he’d be susceptible to it himself.