As there was no such thing as a Happy Eater any more and the Little Chef didn’t have rooms, they stayed at a Premier Inn. They drove for an hour before they found it. In the pitch dark and silence of the empty roads, when Ken seemed to be sleeping, Dave put his head close to Nick and whispered to him.
‘It’s a terrible thing, though – divorce – innit, Nick? Terrible. I couldn’t even think of it. To me, right, it’s worse than dying. Worse, because you got to live through it, you got to live with the mess all around you. I mean, seeing what happened . . .’ he lowered his voice further, ‘with Mum and Dad. Christ alive, it was bloody awful, wasn’t it? All my mates, right, they’re all divorced now. We’re the only ones, me and Marina, who’re still together. See, Nick mate, we need women, don’t we? We’re nothing without them. My biggest fear, right . . .’ (Nick looked sideways at his father; he looked like a cat concentrating on sleep.) ‘My biggest fear,’ Dave went on in a near hiss, ‘is being alone, or not just being alone but being without Marina.’ And he pronounced her name as if it were holy.
Nick made a small noise through his nose, so that Dave knew he’d heard him, so as not to wake his dad and because he had nothing to add. He knew what Dave meant. In the dark, in a strange place, on a lonely road, he missed Astrid sorely, as if she were his other half.
He was only himself, or the self he liked, when she was there. He was no longer his own invention; he was Astrid’s. At the luggage belt in Gatwick, when they came home, he had been much amused by the chit-chat of the very elderly couple next to him. They worried over every single suitcase that passed. Tired and desperate, the little old man no higher than Nick’s elbow made a panicking attempt to pull a suitcase from the belt now and again so that they could further investigate, but he never succeeded in removing one. It reminded Nick of the sword and the stone. This little old chap was clearly no Arthur, and Nick was about to offer his help, but his woman said, her voice thick with adoration, ‘If you can’t lift it, John, no one can.’ And Nick had had to smile at the way in which, when it comes to each other, we see what we want.
But Ken wasn’t asleep. He had his eyes closed so that he could focus and with every mile he was becoming more and more determined. The years were weighing heavily on him, forming a diamond inside of him, a decision made.
In the morning, Nick settled the bill at reception and they ate breakfast together. Ken didn’t respond to Nick’s counsel to patch things up with June. ‘If only for financial reasons.’
Dave sat glumly eating balls of cold green melon, because he said he felt obliged to, with it being on the buffet.
Nick reasoned, ‘Look, Dad. You and June. You’ve been through a lot. You’ve got stability. And security. You’re company for each other. And you’ve been together a long time now . . .’ Ken slurped his tea. ‘Couldn’t agree more. You’re dead right, son. It’s over.’
When at last they quit the M25, and took the A21 in the direction of Hastings, Dave, back between the tombstones of their front seats, began to go through the events of the night, lionizing each of them in turn. ‘And old Nick, right . . . and she, that Melinda, right . . . and I could have cacked myself when you, right, when you said, Dad, when you said, I won’t be made a monkey of. And you should have seen their faces! Ooh, for those eyes!’
Ken took up the baton. ‘And her standing there like that, smoking like a man and calling me Kin, and there’s old Queen Elizabeth, upstairs on the bingo, and ’im – where was he, Dave, that Andy, the great big girl’s blouse . . .?’ He passed it back to Dave.
‘He was writing his poems, she said, an epic love song or something . . .’
‘Epic! Not ’arf. What a carry-on!’
‘And them thinking June was on hunger strike!’ Nick joined in. Dave blew a raspberry and they all fell about, their father telling him to stop being so vulgar, through squeaking laughter. Dave would not stop. He blew another one on his arm.
‘Jesus Christ! Them vegetarians, they’ll be able to run that place on wind power next.’
‘Well, serve her right! Serve her right. She done it to get me to chase after her, didn’t she? One thing she’d always wanted, that woman, was a man to chase after her. Fat chance,’ he said. ‘You can’t fuss round a woman. They don’t thank you for it.’
But it fell flat. As soon as he’d said it, he looked out of the window. The car was quiet. Women, Nick gathered, tried to get a man to say what they wanted to hear or do what they wanted them to do without having to ask them directly. This was called romance.
‘Nice touch, though, Dave – taking her in the care pack,’ said Nick.
‘Well, I couldn’t leave her to them nuts and beans, could I?’ Dave had leapt out of the car in the few minutes before they left the house in Wales, and had taken in the carrier bag for June. He said he’d seen Andy come down the stairs and disappear back up them fast. ‘Well, I sin his trouser-legs anyway.’
‘What was in that bag you give her then, Dave?’ Ken asked him.
‘Some Polos, a big Twix, some Quavers – or did I eat them? Bacon Fries, Nobby’s Nuts and a couple of cans of Harp. I should have taken them out, but I didn’t think of it.’
‘Well, that was very good of you, son.’ Ken nodded gravely.
‘It was,’ said Nick. ‘I mean, it was really, really good of you, Dave. I mean, I’ve never seen a settlement like it. Goodbye, darling, we’re through, here’s a bag of crisps . . .’
‘Yup,’ said Ken sombrely. ‘He’s got a good ’eart, your brother.’
‘He has.’ Nick winked at Dave in the mirror.
‘I always said to your mother, It don’t matter he ain’t the sharpest, he’s got a good ’eart, that kid. Still, you’ve both been good boys to your old dad. I’m grateful. Don’t know how much longer I’ve got, but you came right in the end, the pair of you, and I can die a happy man.’
Dave’s hand was blasted away from his mouth first by the explosion of laughter. ‘’Ere, dad,’ he said, ‘why don’t you lay it on a bit thicker?’
The old man grunted. ‘You two’ll have plenty of time for laughing soon as you’ve left me on my tod in that shit’ole.’
Dave’s throaty chuckles and high dry-roasted snort infected Nick and Nick’s long wail at the end of each wave of laughter got Dave going again, and so they went on with the old man shaking his head and muttering, ‘Pair of bleedin’ numbskulls.’
‘So. What are you going to do about June then, Dad? No, seriously,’ Nick added quickly, hearing Dave start up, about to make some sort of joke, ‘Have her back? Take some time apart? Relationship counselling? What do you think? Is it over?’
‘Narrgh,’ he said, pulling on his lapels, trying one of his expressions and then the other. ‘Well . . .’
‘Don’t forget you’re entitled to half her bingo winnings . . .’
‘Money’s not everything, David. ’Ere, I know what it was I meant to say to you, Nick. I promised your mum you’d go and see her. That’s the thing. I promised it to her. She made me give her my word. Lying there, she was, at death’s door on the hospital ward when I saw her.’
‘Really?’
David put his head between them. ‘She’s broke her leg, but she’s back home now in a cast, Dad. I sin ’er last week. She’s all right.’
‘Poor cow. Abandoned there like yesterday’s newspapers. You’ll go round, won’t you, son?’ he said, and this time he put his hand on top of Nick’s on the gearshift and patted it briefly.
They bypassed the town that once you could only drive through, where they used to go to a pub with a fire for her birthday – it had been famous for its cherry pie and trout – and at the next village they drove across a crossroads with all of the local stores on either side closed apart from a Chinese takeaway. Then they went past an old haunt of his father’s, a roadside pub, closed too, and he pointed out what used to be a lorry drivers’ café in a lay-by, where he took the boys for egg and chips on the days they came to work with him.
‘I used to bring you back ’ome filthy, them days. She’d holler and shout at me and have you in the bath.’
When they put their boys to bed, Ken and Pearl took turns to poke their heads in to get the last word, and the boys competed to keep them at the door, calling out after them all the brightest and best things they could wish for them all: ‘It’ll be a nice day’, ‘We’ll have a cup of tea’, ‘The sun’ll be shining!’ Nick recalled this now, and looked at his father, and then at Dave. Sadness such as there was in their home wasn’t all cruel – no, not at all – some of the sadness was nothing to do with cruelty, or even each other.
‘She could remember every line of a poem she liked,’ said Dave.
‘That’s where you got your brains from, Nick,’ the old man said. ‘From her, not from me.’
It occurred to him that in this case the old truism about the journey being more important than the destination was right, but he didn’t say it, because it was lofty, and he didn’t want to set himself apart in any way from them. He wanted to be with them, and like them. He wanted to be in the car with his family. And he thought of how they came back from that cherry-pie pub on her birthday, mouths full with After Eight mints, his mother dispensing them from her handbag, fairly and squarely, and how he and his brother slept the sleep of angels in the back of the car, how sleep was never as good as that ever again, a rocking contentment, well fed, happy, with the rollicking of the car round the country lanes and the sound of his mother and father talking together, lurching in and out of his tubby little brother and ending up in their favourite arrangement, where he had his head on his brother’s back and his brother had his head on his lap. They pretended to be asleep when the car door was opened just to have the luxury of being lifted.
‘Aah. Look at them, Ken. My two little princes.’
‘Little sods, more like. Come on, I know when you’re having us on, you two.’