On their last night they sat on the most populous promenade, in need of other people without having spoken of it, and drank wine and ate pasta, crammed in between tables of couples, elbows tight to their sides. This was where the hoi polloi came for their suppers, the citizens of Syracuse and suburbs. This suited them so well they soon they fell into their old happy way of denigrating the people around them.
‘I can’t stand goatees.’
‘No. They’re either effeminate or pretentious.’
‘Or fat men use them to make a chin where there isn’t one. Sometimes you have someone more or less bald and they have one, and you sort of want to turn them the other way round.’ He’d felt that the past was like raised fist, ready to strike. But now he felt better. He had someone who believed in him so much, she’d fight for him.
‘Oh, Jesus. He’s wearing one fingerless leather glove, Nick! Don’t look! Can you see it? Oh shit, it’s got studs on the knuckles too.’
‘That’s Italian men for you – not afraid of looking gay!’ As their coffees were settled before them, he said, ‘I might have been clever at school, but I was a complete duffer when it came to . . .’
‘Matters of the heart?’
‘Yes. I mean, I wasn’t a complete prick. I felt sorry for both of them, you know, Ken and Pearl, not being happy. I was eighteen.’
In the swimming baths, his father, half-submerged, looking with hatred at their mother as she came down the metal stairs into the pool, and Nick saw her the way the old man saw her. His mother at the back door, handkerchief in hand, and Nick saw his father through her eyes.
‘I was more of a prig than a prick. You see, I’d decided to have a career in law, because I wanted to deal in truth. It seems laughable, I know. Anyway, Dad was away for a couple of months. He was just “away”. But a friend of mine saw him on a train with a woman. Her husband had left her a pub in Eastbourne, apparently, and he couldn’t resist it. Anyway, I decided I’d tell Mum, but that I’d do it when we were all there so it would all be above board. I think I thought we’d have it out in the open and somehow, them being the grown-ups, they’d make sense of it. Well, Ken went berserk. I’ll never trust you again, he said to me. He packed a bag and went to leave, and I think he asked her if it was what she wanted. And I remember all she said was, I suppose you’d better. And Dave, he went with him. I never expected that either. He said, We can’t just throw him out, he’ll be all alone! And there we were, she and I, Mum and me, in just the space of a few hours, together in that house, half a family. The woman wouldn’t take him in, so they ended up in the caravan park.’
‘I don’t know why he didn’t go back, Ken.’
‘He couldn’t. There was no way back.’
He could remember a shepherd’s pie on the side ready for the oven. She gave it to the dog after Ken and Dave left. She put the Pyrex on the floor. He could remember the noise of it on the tiles and hitting the skirting boards with the dog’s nose pushing it round and round and her watching, mesmerized.
He drank his coffee down. ‘And hey, so much for a mother’s love,’ he said, his voice tinged with the bitterness of the dregs. If he went to kiss his mother, she turned away from him. She hated him, that was plain. All right then, he said. In the summer, after his exams, he left home.
He called Dave from Cambridge during that first Michaelmas term. Dave and his father were sharing digs in Hastings then. He thought he might come down.
‘Best not, mate,’ said Dave. ‘Dad’s still hopping mad.’
There was only the communal hall phone in college. He called his mother a few times but had little in the way of a conversation, and gave it up. He spent Christmas in his room at Cambridge. He wasn’t supposed to be there, but nobody caught him. He’d left a back window open and climbed in on Christmas Eve. In the Lent term, the phone rang a couple of times and the girl who lived closest to it would shriek up the stairs, ‘Is there a Gary here?’ There was no reply. And after another call or two, she said starchily, ‘This is Downing College, Cambridge. We have no “Gary” here.’
And that was it. Apart from the occasional call from Dave, no contact. He didn’t ask anyone to his graduation. He moved to London to do his law conversion course. A year or two later, there was Dave’s wedding. A village-hall affair with heavy smokers in shiny suits, elbows out, jogging along to Level 42 songs, balloons in clusters of three, not much in the way of speeches, and a scuffle or two when the bar closed. His mother didn’t go to the party. His father made a song and dance about not speaking to him there. He was with June.
On a Christmas day in his twenties, after a few drinks, he called his old man to say he’d got a place in a firm, and his father told him he’d like to knock his ‘bleeding block’ off. You’re nothing to me now, he said. Apparently, his mother felt the same way for he heard nothing from her.
He had never imagined they’d turn on him as they had each other.
‘You’re lucky your parents are so normal,’ he said to her.
Her parents functioned as a couple; his didn’t. Ken and Pearl went straight to a scrap, were nimble with name-calling, quick to up the ante and reckless with ultimatums. When it came to his father’s chauvinism, his mother was his equal sparring partner; she hated men. If Astrid’s dad, Malcolm, would not exactly say sorry, he would take out the bins, mow the lawn, run a bath for her, make a cuppa. If her mum, Linda, would not exactly say sorry, she would at least call out that the programme was starting.
Ken and Pearl would finish the milk to mock the other’s tea, cook separate meals, sleep apart, begin the day in grudging silence and end it with a shrug or a curse. He’d go, or she’d go, for one night or two. The entire village would know about it. Time passed, wheels of the mind turning, turning, grinding meat into mince. And yet he could recall too some wonderful times, when they laughed with each other, and he and Dave egged them on, when they spoke in funny voices, like a comedy double act, their voices shrill and wild, and they seemed to reprise some old-time vaudeville act with him calling her ‘Mother’ and her calling him ‘Father’. And just occasionally there was something flirtatious to it and their dad would whisper something to her and all they’d hear was the sibilance of it – though maybe a whole word would slip out here and there – and then their mother would come over sly, then grab him and order him to kiss her. These were thrilling glimpses of the promise of adulthood for those two small boys.
‘It’s hard to know what love is,’ he said, ‘it takes some working out.’ He took her hand and kissed it. ‘She’s really something, though, my mother,’ he said.
‘That’s the first time you’ve said anything like that.’
‘You should meet her.’
She laughed. ‘Hang on, I’m just getting over Ken.’
‘I miss her,’ he said miserably.
He thought he saw Pearl in Tenterden, a couple of months back, coming down the high street, swaying with the weight of the bags she was carrying. It was hard to tell if it were her. She was wearing men’s clothes and her hair was salt and pepper. She stopped, grimaced, put down her bags, looked up at the church tower and unzipped her jacket as if she were having a hot flush. She resembled, he thought, her father.
Before they left Ortygia and the Hotel des Etrangers et Miramare, he and Astrid made quiet fierce love. They arrived in exhilaration at the same place at the same time, together, then fell apart, gradually extricating themselves bit by bit, swapping limbs, trading a leg for an arm, and sighing.
They slept holding hands.