‘What are you thinking?’ Astrid asked him, after they’d been sitting in silence on the motorway for half an hour. They were on their way to spend the weekend with Ed Crozier and family in Banbury. Nick narrowed his eyes as if scrutinizing each and every one of his motivations, behaviours and emotions to prise open his unconscious mind. ‘I was just wondering whether the bad smell I keep getting a whiff of isn’t my socks.’
They were side by side in the Range Rover, in their usual pose, her with hand in his lap. There were two cold stale coffees in cardboard cups in the cupholders from their last stop.
‘I should have called my mother. I said I would. I must. She was strange, you know, compared to other people. And I’m so conventional. Funny.’
Astrid rubbed his leg.
‘We’re so greedy, these days. We get greedier. We must be the greediest generation of all, you know. The thing about her, Pearl, was that nothing was ever rubbish. Nothing was ever no good. Me, I’m all for ditching things and moving on. That would be sacrilege to her.’
He’d popped into the shed that morning to put away the loose trowel and watering can that had been roaming around the windswept hilltop garden since the autumn. Stepping round the lawn mower to put them against the wall, he took in the artefacts of his former self ranged out there: the abdominal press, a rowing machine, a wetsuit, his cricket bag, a motorbike helmet, an industrial espresso machine, and his skis propped against the wall like a pair of fingers crossed. A Paul Smith holdall. He’d asked Astrid to get rid of them.
As a boy, he sat in the car, visor down, while his mother delved through skips, hauling out a mangle or a pram. Brass matchboxes, mottoed jugs, framed photos of someone else’s great-grandfather; these were the things she found that others had thrown away, and gave each one that unflinching eye of hers as she turned it to the light and granted it, for a while, a turn at the mantelpiece or her dressing table, or hearth. She directed them to find beauty in dirty places and commonplaces, everywhere. He felt once more the blow of Morwen’s depiction of him as a snob.
‘You know, the last thing anyone wants in a parent is for them to be enigmatic.’
Astrid tilted her head. ‘I suppose so.’
‘It’s like we want cartoon characters, or cardboard cut-outs; we want to be able to sum them up in a sentence when people ask. Oh, a parent can be larger than life for the purpose of an anecdote, but they must never be bigger than us, you see. I could never sum up my mum if you asked me to.’
‘Well, it’s not surprising. You’ve only got memories to go on, since you haven’t seen her for twenty years or whatever.’
‘No.’ He put his finger along his upper lip. ‘No, we don’t want them enigmatic or inscrutable or any of that malarkey because we are supposed to rise triumphant, aren’t we? We’re not supposed to have parents as complicated as us. We’re supposed to be far more fucked up.’
When he accused her of not being like other mothers, it tickled her pink because he’d hit the nail on the head. She did not conform to convention. They’d fallen in behind their father to try to make the witch abjure her magic and do the dishes and shut her mouth. ‘Sod you,’ was her reply. If that’s the way you want to play it, I’ll stop being a woman.
The way to eternal life was sexlessness. Some were ready for it sooner than others. He felt Astrid’s hand, nestling in his crotch.
Against his will, she had packed the Paul Smith holdall, dumping its former contents into a wet cardboard box in the shed.
‘Leave the stupid bag there. It’s too fey,’ he said the last time she wanted it in the house. ‘It belongs to the past.’ Inside it were framed photos of his university drinking clubs, showing young men, looking languid, feigning foppery as if they were born to it. The vivid colours of its stripes made it too conspicuously moneyed for his liking. He’d kicked it. ‘Bloody thing.’
It amused her. ‘I like that bag; it’s so trendy!’ she said, every time he took it back out to the shed like a bad cat.
This time she’d got it in the boot before he could object. When he saw it there, he knew it was there as a rebuke, but he couldn’t think what for. He used it last when he left Natasha and their flat in Wandsworth, four or more years back, and when he looked at it he could see himself swinging it down the stairs now, humming the tune from the bathroom radio, the Brian Ferry track – ‘Come on, come on, let’s stick together’ – and when it came to him out on the pavement what the hell he was singing, he’d felt bad and doubled back down the side alley and checked on her through the kitchen windows. She was dialling a number and chewing on a corner of toast. When the phone answered, her face changed; she came alive in anger.
Astrid had scrupled over the packing. She went for a single colour and that colour was beige. It was irreproachable. It took her close to a week to get the contents of that bag to be both minimal and opulent, making amendments and changes here and there, slipping in extra thongs, adding accessories on day six. After seven days it was done. And she saw that it was good.
‘There’s barely any room,’ she said to him, holding one of his shirts up with a critical expression.
‘I only need the one I’m wearing.’
‘That’s true.’
He said he didn’t want an extra pair of underpants but she put them in with ostentatious generosity, sighing and saying how she’d have to start again, that they’d fit but her palazzo pants might be creased as a result.
She had an A-line dress for dinner and a string of pearls, and a cashmere shawl-collared cardigan, vest and palazzo pants for the breakfast in the orangerie she imagined they’d have. She saw herself loafing elegantly like the models in the White Company catalogue. She would stand next to a piano, waiting for eggs Benedict, sipping on Buck’s Fizz, possibly running a long nail along the keys, elegant and thin.
Her restless hands gave away her nerves when they came off the motorway.
‘He’s a complete big softie, Bunny. You’ll love him.’
‘Hmm.’
‘He’s a twat. But in a good way.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘I don’t really know her. Seems nice enough; I’ve only met her the once, at Johnno’s wedding.’
‘Oh, who did you take to that?’
He drew a breath and considered; no, he couldn’t porky pie. ‘Natasha.’
‘Oh. So they’ve both met her then.’
‘I’ve known Dozie for twenty years, love! Actually,’ he wiggled in his seat, humour and vanity aglow in his eyes, ‘he’s always been a bit jealous of me. Used to have my cast-offs. So, you’d better watch yourself, Bunny.’
‘Ha.’
When he felt for her knee, she moved her leg. Was he missing something? Over the last few nights, since he came back from Wales, she’d begun to go downstairs and sit with a book as soon as she thought he was drifting off. As he grew more contented, she became more discontented and lately she sat brooding apart from him into the middle of the night.
Astrid was unhappy with his new docility, which was to her way of thinking a slur on her sexuality. Are we to shuffle into old age? she asked herself when she heard his snoring. Her parents had sustained the same lassitude over forty years and they called it a good thing, and people generally thought of it as a good thing, but she didn’t. Is this it? she said to him from time to time, poking him in the ribs, but he was too thickly asleep to hear her. She sat downstairs with a book open, picking her nails, biting them, going gently crazy.
When she moaned over breakfast about putting on weight and getting old, Laura asked her a question.
‘Will you still love Nick when he’s bald and wrinkly and a fat-guts? Even worse than he is now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mmm-hmm.’ And Laura gave her trademark eye roll to make her point clear.
Stay in bed and be cheerful, was the advice Nick gave Astrid when he joined her in the bathroom. She’d leant over the sink to brush her teeth and seen the shadow of her long eyelashes in the porcelain and been briefly happy. Then, straightening, she saw in the mirror the bags under her eyes that she knew nothing but a blepharoplasty could mend.