When he walked the dog, on Sunday, he found spring had thrown up its last but best: bluebells, little pink milkmaids, and the white greater stitchworts with their little yellow pincushions set amid white petals. Passing the empty larder of a bramble thicket, the spaniel poked his head in and out of the warren holes with the ghastly fake smile of someone enquiring through a serving hatch as to dinner’s imminence. Elsewhere a rabbit ran for its life.
He gladdened his step, up the hill, out of the woods, coming up by chalet bungalow and terrace row, keen to find Astrid.
His father would be lonely now, he thought. He’d made sure they knew it when they dropped him at the bungalow in Bulverhythe. Ken had stood on the pavement, hands in pockets, wind at his hair and coat, making sure that should they look back they’d see him like that.
‘You’ll enjoy the peace and quiet, Dad,’ said Dave. ‘You’ll be a bachelor boy again.’
‘Job’s comfort, you are,’ his father had retorted.
Outside, on the lane, the dog hunched, concertina’d on the cusp of next door’s driveway, giving him an awkward look as if to say, Come on, be fair, look the other way. Then as a last gambit the dog scarpered on past the house. Nick called him back, whistled too, and praised him when he skidded to a halt and turned back, tongue like a scarf.
There was only one thing amiss at home, it seemed, and that was Laura. She seemed a different girl, withdrawn and diffident, who barely answered questions apart from with ‘I don’t know’. Sensing something was wrong the night before, he’d made cheese on toast. He was scraping the burnt edges off the toast, talking to her and the dog by turns, when out of the corner of his eye he saw her put her head on the table. Her arms hung either side of her and she simply turned her chin and let her cheek rest on the smooth surface, and a tear rolled down the cheek and on to the table.
Astrid had bustled in and busied the girl about getting her schoolwork together. She asked her daughter, sharply, what was wrong,
‘It’s just,’ Laura said in a small voice, ‘that I worry about him.’
‘Who?’
‘Dad.’ Her throat tightened around the word.
In the beginning, in the early days, he’d complained to her about Laura, as if he could thwart that great love of theirs.
‘She moans so much, don’t you think?’ He’d put his criticisms slyly, as if a question, as if it were a matter of education or improvement. ‘She doesn’t read much, does she?’, ‘She doesn’t seem to have any curiosity . . . like we did as kids, our generation.’
Then he learnt, in loving Astrid, to emulate her, to speak only of the good things that Laura did. In fact he could beat her at it. He mentioned them first – how Laura had good manners, how she was a brave girl, how she came out with such funny old-fashioned things . . . And this worked well. Astrid was happy, and it worked for him too; he looked for the good in the child and found it.
‘She certainly dotes on Danny, doesn’t she? But why is she coming back a touch hostile to us?’ he’d asked Astrid.
‘Well, every child wants its parents back together, deep down, don’t you think?’
Nick had met Danny a number of times at station gates and, in exchanging plastic bags with him, found a slight man eager to please. For some reason, and he could not explain it, their eyes lit up when they saw each other, and smiles sprang to their faces. Perhaps it was that they hoped the other was decent and good and fair so very much. Perhaps it was because of Laura. He daydreamed of standing with Astrid at Laura’s graduation. He went to the lacrosse fixtures and flinched and ducked with the other dads, and he went to the school play early to secure them places at the front.
But it wasn’t him that Laura wanted.
Astrid was standing in the stuffy heat of the conservatory, waiting, when he and Roy got back from their walk. He assumed a frown, keen for Astrid to see his readiness for tasks numberless, and to appreciate him anew.
‘Shed door needs fixing. Dog took a shit on the neighbours’ drive again. And Dozie, Ed Crozier, called on the mobile. When are you coming to stay? I forgot I’d said we would. I don’t fancy trekking up to bloody Oxfordshire, do you?’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘It’s always the same old stories, you know. But, you see, I did promise we’d go and stay, just the one night.’
‘When?’
‘Um. Next weekend. Laura’s with her dad, right?’ She nodded.
‘You’re OK with that then, are you?’
She touched his face and he went to kiss her hand and saw that her eyes were red and that she’d been crying.
‘What is it?’
Laura had started her period. He had to steady himself and pull himself together, so strong was his discomfort.
‘She didn’t want me to tell you,’ Astrid said, her hands moving up and down either side of his arms. ‘She was worried she wouldn’t be a little girl any more. That we won’t love her any more. I remember thinking that my father wouldn’t love me any more when I had my first period. I know it’s silly.’ She tendered him a little faithful smile.
‘Tell her not to worry. It doesn’t make her a woman, does it, Astrid? It’s only that she’s growing into one. She’ll always be our little girl,’ he added with conviction, and he surprised himself with the emotion he felt saying ‘our’.
‘I want Laura to feel she can do anything.’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, bloody Danny keeps on to Laura about how unhappy and how unlucky he is. He says he might die. It’s the booze and drugs but he doesn’t tell her that. Did you know she writes letters to him?’
‘No.’
‘She sends him chocolate bars.’ Astrid smiled thinly.
‘More like a fiver he wants, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t. That’ll be next. Nick, I love her but I am going to have to let her go one day. And best if she’s strong. Like your parents did, Nick. They made you strong and they let you go.’
‘Well, I’m not sure that was the plan.’
And she sat with her daughter in the front room and introduced the young woman to the salve of chocolate, a soap opera on TV and a hot-water bottle, and they sat feet up, cuddling close. They could hear poor Nick, edgy, moving around the kitchen, putting the dishes away, something he’d not done before, and coming in and out of the front room, to ask where a bowl or a spatula went.
After a few minutes he came and sat next to them, yawning in his feigned way and turning down their offer of chocolate most politely. Then he went back out to the kitchen, and came back in with his plate of cheese and biscuits.
‘I know it’s a bit . . . well, you know . . . unfashionable, but in my book you can’t beat a Jacob’s Cream Cracker,’ he’d said, sitting back alongside them, giving Astrid one of Roy’s ingratiating looks and holding up an oatcake for reference.
‘I’ll get some,’ said Astrid. ‘Next time I’m at the shops.’ Laura made sure the blanket was extended to his knees too. When he went up to kiss Laura goodnight, he saw on her bedside table arranged meticulously were the things she’d bought in Boots with her mother: toe separators in pink foam, a small bottle of nail varnish, a soap in the shape of a strawberry, some hair slides still in the plastic, and a glitter lip gloss.
‘Don’t grow up too fast, darling,’ he said to her. Stay a child in some part of you, he thought.
The seasons were changing every day, it seemed. The world was turning too fast, his hair was thinning, and it seemed that the end was coming for him too, after all, not just for the old man. And it was coming neither dramatically nor brutally, like the stage villain he’d anticipated, but unexpectedly fleet of foot, and with a woman’s touch somehow.