In the morning sunlight, Nick drove past the picture-book castle at Bodiam, then took the humpback bridge his mother used to floor the car to fly over, and crossed the steam-railway track with the sound of their boyish cheering still ringing in his ears. On through Cripps Corner and Sedlescombe the car followed the lanes, dipped and ducked, rollercoastering up and down the rise and falls of the Kent and East Sussex border, plunging into shadow from light. On rainy days these roads ran like rivers; they were valleys cut into the land, prayed over by chestnut trees. Their steep banks were root-clad and their rich soil fed the springtime show of primroses. He left the countryside behind at the archway of the Ridge where a sign salutes one’s arrival in Hastings, the birthplace of television.
From that point it was all downhill, in staggering semis, until the sea washed in and washed out again. He drove along a grim line of disused retirement homes, bungalows and pylons towards Rye, to pick up Dave in Fairlight first.
His brother was ready for his day out, standing outside the door with a carrier bag in one hand. He was dressed like a teenager, wearing a hoody and sweatpants, and was all giddy anxiety, wheezing and sniffing. Once in the passenger seat, he talked ninety to the dozen, going between Marina’s foreboding and the old man’s bull-headed determination to recoup his money, which caused him excitable disbelief.
Dave worked a dissent the way a sheepdog worked a flock. He was saying of both June and Ken, ‘Course you can see it from her point of view,’ or, ‘You can’t blame him, right?’ And before they’d even got to Bulverhythe, Nick had noticed how his brother finished every sentence with ‘right?’ or ‘eh?’ in his ruthless pursuit of consensus.
The old man, immaculate in a black suit, took the front seat after Dave hopped out and got in the back.
‘All right, Dad?’
‘All right. Let’s get going.’
Ken sat stiff-legged, a hand staking each knee while from behind Dave subjected him to a gentle ribbing about being dressed for a funeral. Ken merely sat there, his forehead glittering in the sunlight.
They were at Clacket Lane services when, too late for Nick to make the exit with grace, Ken shouted out, waved and pointed and ordered him to pull over. Nick threw the wheel to the left, with his right-hand tyres just scraping the grass verge. His father clung to the side of his seat with one veined hand and to the door handle with the other. They pulled to a stop in the car park and Dave fell back into his seat. Ken moaned about nearly piddling himself before he got to the loo, then got out of the car with one, two, three efforts and went hopping off towards the side of the services. Dave jumped out too and Nick sat there, running his finger along his top lip. The old git! It beggared belief.
After a while, Dave came back with another carrier bag, stopped, smacked his head with his palm and said through Nick’s open window, ‘Blimey, mate, do you want something?’ He proposed a coffee and a doughnut, or a bacon sandwich or a Big Mac and, having been turned down on these, went rifling through his bag to offer in the alternative a Yorkie and a Lucozade.
With Ken back in the front seat, they hit the motorway again and Nick heard the noise of a ring pull. He looked in the mirror to see his brother sipping on a Carlsberg. He checked the clock on the dash. It was five past twelve.
His brother’s eyes were wide and blue and innocent. ‘What?’
‘You all right there, Dave, are you?’
‘Yeah. Great. Thanks.’
‘Having a nice day out, are you?’
‘Yeah. Anyone want a crisp, Dad?’
Ken shook his head. ‘Get under my plate.’
‘Nick?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Suit yourselves.’
They fell silent again for some twenty miles or more. Nick enjoyed driving and usually found it meditative. The peace was interrupted now and again by a slurp or belch, the smell of which named and shamed the culprit as either bacon or beer and obliged Nick and his father to lower the windows from time to time.
Astrid had received the news of this trip to Wales coolly, and the dog had looked with insight and pain from one to the other as they discussed it, his brown eyes straining to see into them.
‘You’re going to Wales then,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’ll look up your old girlfriend.’
When he told her Morwen didn’t live in Wales, and that he’d no interest in seeing her anyway, she softened and gave him his cheese and biscuits in front of the TV.
Unable to bear silence, Dave, with his head wedged between their seats, held forth. ‘And Matt, right, I’m playing that Xbox game with him, right, last night, and I’m, like, driving the quad but I can’t get the hang of it and I keep crashing it and so the little sod, right, he wallops me round the head every time I get it wrong with the butt of his gun. In the game, right, not in real life, but in the game. But your handset vibrates, you know. Just slaps me in the head. I mean, I got the giggles, right, didn’t I? I was cacking myself laughing and Marina comes in to see and I’m, like, the kid’s duffing up his dad for his driving and old Matt’s got the giggles as well and then I’m in such a state, right, that I just total the quad and we fall out, the pair of us. He’s this huge green soldier and I’m in bleeding pink, of course, and he takes his gun and puts a bullet into my head, right behind the ear, ever so neatly, and that’s me done, dispatched to the great beyond.’ He raised his can to his lips. ‘I tell you what, mate, I was crying tears.’
Ken’s jaw was clenched, Nick saw.
‘I suppose your, um, your Laura gets you playing them games, does she, Nick?’ Davie finished the can and scrunched it in his hand. Ken flinched.
‘Not really, no.’
‘You should give them a go, mate. I mean, even though us lot, our age, we’re total spazzers compared to the kids. You all right, Dad?’ he asked, raising his voice.
Ken covered his ear. ‘I’m not Mutt ’n’ Jeff.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You reek of beer.’
Dave opened another can.
‘What’s wrong with you, David?’
‘It’s just the one or two, Dad. For the journey.’
‘Bleeding good thing you ain’t driving, innit?’
Dave was sandwiched between their two seats, a hand on each of their headrests, almost panting with enthusiasm.
‘It must be more than twenty years since we was all in a car together.’ Ken ground his teeth. Nick peeped under the visor to see the motorway sign. Dave looked like he was in a rugby scrum, with his face squashed on either side by the seats. ‘Do you remember, Dad, how we knew you was home of an evening because we heard the horn on your car? BEEEEEEEEP it would go, round about midnight like that, and you’d driven into the back of the garage, pissed. And your head fell on the wheel and me and Mum one time, right, we had to go and pull you out the driver’s side. Do you remember that, Nick?’
‘What a load of cobblers. You’re talking out your be’ind,’ said Ken, feeling for his lapels. ‘I never done drink-driving.’
‘You lost your licence, Dad,’ said Nick. ‘For a year. You got that Irish navvy chap to drive you.’
‘I was stitched up for that by old Shit-for-Brains – what was his name? – the publican at The White Hart. He was matey with the copper, wer’n’ ’e.’
‘Mum was wild.’
The old boy took off his glasses and wiped them on his jacket.
‘Coo dear, boys, she could scare the livin’ daylights out of you, couldn’t she? Coo dear. What a gel. Never seen nothing fiercer in a housecoat in me life. They was all scared of her down on the site. Here’s your fucking sandwiches, she used to say when she came down. Choke on ’em for all I care, sod ya. Coo dear, the blokes used to laugh and she’d turn on them. What you effing laughing at, monkey face? she used to say. Nothing, Pearl! She’d turn them to jelly. Women didn’t eff and blind in them days.’
‘She made you sleep in the garage once, didn’t she, Dad?’
‘That was when I brought that polecat home from the pub and set it off round the house and it bit ’er. She was always trying to get me out in that garage, but I could worm my way round her all right, back in them days. I used to say to her, Don’t do it, Pearl, my darling, be a sweetheart now . . .’
‘You used to sing her that song, Dad. The one about the dear silver that shines in her hair.’ Dave’s nose was at his father’s sleeve.
‘“Mother Machree”,’ said Nick.
Then Ken started singing it in the same way he used to, with a pleading warbling voice, full of penitence.
I love the dear silver that shines in your hair,
And the brow that’s all furrowed and wrinkled with care.
I kiss the dear fingers, so toilworn for me,
Oh, God bless you and keep you, Mother Machree.
In the driving mirror, Nick could see Dave’s face soft with longing, his eyes gleaming, his face smooth and wrinkle-free, and he remembered the boy on his birthday – first down at the table, not so worried about the presents, just ready to be important. And he remembered him dressing up like Action Man and marching up and down the front room while his father slapped his leg to keep time, and he remembered him standing to attention during the Queen’s speech, so his father could approve – anything to gain points. He remembered too how he’d reappear after a falling-out, his eyelashes in spikes. And when Nick ribbed him, on and on, accusing of him of having cried, he’d deny it.
‘She used to say, I ain’t got no grey hair – didn’t she, Dad? I used to cringe at her calling the blokes who worked in the garage dirty filthy bastards and all that. But, get this right, they ask after her even now. How’s old Pearl, they ask me. She’s wicked, your mum, they say. Funny, because we was so embarrassed by her as kids! Weren’t we? Do you remember, you brought some girl home, Nick, and Mum was laying into the dog? Just screaming at the poor sod, calling it a bleedin’ little bastard, and it had only chewed up a slipper, or something, but she could go off on one, couldn’t she? She’d just sort of go mental, and then the next minute she was all right again and calling you duckie.’
Drop me off here, Nick used to say to her, well before the school gates. Isn’t that your mother? they said from the side of the stage, before the play started. Oh God, I told her not to come.
And now it comes back to him. She did call him after Cambridge. She called him when he was taking articles in London. I’m working, he said. I can’t talk here, now – as if he were developing some sort of life-saving medicine. She may have called when he was at Cambridge too. He can’t remember.
But he does remember how Dave had to fight for her love, because he, Nick, was the golden boy, the one who got a scholarship to private school, who went to grammar school, the one she talked to her friends about in sustained bafflement, and it was Nick who got the boiled egg and soldiers while Dave hunted around for a bit of bread to toast. And it hurt him to look in the driving mirror at his brother, nigh on forty, still trying so hard to find his place and to look too at his father, glowing with the talk of their mother.
She was missing. They were there but she was missing.
‘She’d ’arp on a bit but she used to let me kiss her,’ said Ken.
‘She ’ad them cheeks like peaches. She was a good woman, no matter all her hard talk. She was what you call lenient underneath it all. A heart of gold. And loyal! She could call you all the names under the sun but she wouldn’t stand for it from no one else.’ He put a hand to his chin and rubbed it, his eyes narrowing as if seeing the past through a keyhole. ‘It was only that she was disappointed, see, and it crushed her some’ow.’
Nick saw that Dave’s buoyancy, an extravagance, was slipping away from him and the years were coming back and claiming his face. His eyes started to dart, to run for cover. ‘Yeah but, Dad, you was good friends, weren’t you? I mean, you used to laugh. I remember the time of the Jubilee, when you dressed up . . .’
Their father turned his head to look out of his window and
Nick could see the muscles in his cheeks working.
‘She’s not dead. We’re talking about her as if she were dead,’ said Nick.
His father was silent. Dave sat back in his seat and Nick simply gazed at the road. They had another two hundred miles to go to recover something his father didn’t need from a woman he didn’t love. They were making the wrong journey, but they were doing it together.
After a few minutes, Ken piped up with sudden sprightliness,
‘Here we go! That Irish bloke what did the driving! Kevin! He said to me one time it was Irish for your ’eart, Machree was. That’s what it come from, the Irish!’
‘Your heart?
‘Mother my heart,’ said Dave.
And nothing more was said until they were just about to pass the next services, when the old man threw his left hand in the air like he was hailing a cab, and after he caused the car to swerve off the road once more, he fell to bemoaning his driver again and hobbled off with thunderstruck face and a curse on those who held the doors open for him.