On the way to St Leonards you pass through Silverhill, a crossroads of discount carpet stores and blacked-out pubs resembling any South London intersection, and it’s there on the brow of the hill: the sea. The ground drops away from beneath you and, shaped by the buildings either side of London Road, it’s like a glass raised for a toast.
Ken steps off the kerb to cross London Road to Norman Road. He’s on his way to see Audrey at Bury and Bury Funeral Directors. It’s like a sanctuary; when Ken goes through the doors, he’s back in the past where everyone was courteous and decent and hard done by and hopeful.
It breaks his heart that that world’s gone. He’s so lonely in this one. June is a modern woman and no good, he’s decided. The nearest he gets to feeling right again is in Audrey’s funeral parlour. What a woman she is! Women like her used to live on every street, in every village – they’d help with the birthing and the laying out – a strong pair of hands. Old mother Perry came to their house when his mother died, and stayed on and taught Pat how to cook and look after them. Women weren’t all for themselves in those days. Dave told him how Pearl said to him, last time he saw her, be it long or be it short, she was devoting her life to growing vegetables. Send her my regards, will ya? he’d said. But whether she got them or not, he didn’t know. There was no word back. Well, his life, be it long or be it short, he was going to spend in the company of good persons. Like what his Pat was. Persons what thought more about people than they did their china animals and buying things and gambling and spending money. Kind sorts. Not persons always trying to have one over on you. Persons he could trust, who cared about him. A good woman was what he was after now, most urgently.
He told Pat, Don’t you worry, sweetheart, don’t you worry about nothing, the angels will be handing you right into the Lord’s arms themselves, girl. She didn’t want to do it, she was against it, you could see that, but he’d left the window open like Audrey said to and there was the singing of the birds as the sun come up. Daft little sods, he’d thought, singing their little hearts out as if every day were the Creation. And he sat with her there, holding her hand, and he was holding it tight when she took her last breath.
‘That there is the only woman who’s ever loved me proper,’ he’d said to Audrey when she came in.
In the middle of the road, on a traffic island, he takes a buffeting from the wind as he faces the sea. He stands there, hopeful of something from it. But since Pat never said anything to him about the sea, since she only gave it a cold shoulder, nothing helpful comes to mind.
She relied on people, did Pat, on the goodness of people, and she gave some credit to flowers and dogs but, though they lived by it all his life, she never praised the sea. She didn’t like cats neither. She was seven years older than him, his sister, and she was like a mother to him and she took real joy from doing the things he wanted to do. She was only twelve when their mum died, and she was eighteen when their dad joined up.
From time to time, on a fair day during the war, the two of them sat up on the shingle of the beach, with her calling out after him, even though he was yards from the waves, ‘Careful you don’t catch it,’ or, ‘Watch you don’t get a soaking,’ and he ran at it, made a small hullabaloo, and then ate his sandwiches next to her, keeping an eye on the demon tide she dreaded, scrutinizing it between his toes, heard its rushing and hushing
in between their chatter. They’d stay until Pat was ‘proper browned off ’ with the seagulls. ‘Gerroff out of it,’ she’d cry with a ghastly shudder as they swooped in on the scraps, and he’d chase them away for her. At the end of the picnic, tidying away, exchanging admonitions one to the other in apprehension of mess, they shook out the crumbs from the blanket and shut the tin tight, the two of them pressing it down together.
Those were the happiest days of his life.
So now, when he looks at the sea, he is appalled that it’s still there and just the same – a pale snoring ogre. It appears smooth and inscrutable, vast as any notion of God, but it’s troubled and, like a disturbed mind, it turns its problem over and over. With its undercurrent on the prowl, it’s ready to take each of us by the ankles and lay us out.
Roger’s on reception when he steps through the door. His face falls. Roger is the driver and coffin maker. He’s a loafer and slow with it, Ken thinks.
He has Roger call Audrey for him. He takes a chair and waits. Roger hands him the phone, blushing.
The man’s always blushing – more or less a simpleton, he is – and Audrey would do much better to have a pair of hands with a bit of something up top an’ all.