Ken would not go in the house, no matter how she entreated him. The best she could do was take him out a chair from the kitchen. He sat outside, training his eyes on the movements of a robin redbreast while ruffling Roy’s head. In the distance, a muffled gunshot went off every fifteen minutes in the cherry orchard to scare the birds off the new fruit. Ken jumped every time, but that was the only movement he appeared to make. Astrid brought him out a cup of tea. Her small talk in the car had amounted to nothing; it had been a one-way exercise, more to reassure herself than him.
When she gave him the cup of tea, a meek smile came to his face as if seeing her for the first time.
Nick called her from his mobile later in the afternoon. He’d dropped Laura off and been introduced to a scrawny woman, keen to demonstrate her intimate knowledge of the place and her rights to it by asking him in and making the coffee in her nightie. Laura had rolled her sleeves up and gone to clear the sink, and Danny had stood, gauche as a boy, allowing Nick to talk traffic and miles per gallon and the congestion charge and agreeing with almost anything he said. He asked what time he should pick Laura up and Danny had looked so open to suggestion as to imply now would be a good time. And when Laura, mid-ashtray-emptying, had looked round at her father and said, ‘Aren’t I staying the night?’ the woman had reminded Danny they were going to a party, and when Laura had said, ‘Cool,’ Danny decided to be the grown-up and tell her it wasn’t the sort of thing a little girl could go to.
Nick took a stroll through the park and returned for Laura after an hour, finding her more than ready to go.
On the way home, she commented on her father liking really skinny women. ‘Like boys, I mean,’ she chattered on candidly.
‘Dad will never be fat. Thank God,’ she said, scoffing at the very idea of it. ‘I mean, I hope I take after him. I’ve been dieting since I was born. It’s so hard, though.’
Nick had a feeling at times she played games with him, as if she were going through her fancy-dress trunk, trying on different people.
‘He’s very cool, my dad, Nick.’
‘Yup.’
‘No offence.’
‘None taken.’
‘I mean, his clothes and everything. He listens to, like, um, drum and bass and stuff.’ She was using an American inflection, he noticed. ‘He has the coolest decks.’ But here she ran out of anything else to say and he saw that she folded her hands and sat as primly as a little old woman at the front of the bus, and she fell silent until they reached their village.
‘He doesn’t need me,’ she said when they turned off the main road into their lane.
‘Well, it’s good he has someone in his life to look after him,’ Astrid said, pressing her advantage when they had a cup of tea together.
The old man was outside. The clouds had come over and still he sat there. Nick greeted him and touched his shoulder when he came home, and Ken touched his son’s hand with a small pat but sat there stiff-backed as if on sentry duty.
‘Who’s he expecting to come up that hill anyway?’ Astrid peeped out at him through the kitchen window.
Phone under her chin as she rang the babysitter, she looked at her hands as she chopped vegetables for Laura’s supper and saw those of an old woman. They were rippled when laid flat, as if a stone had been dropped into a pool. She was taken aback. There was no way of stopping it then: getting older.
She felt her daughter’s head on her back and her hands around her waist. ‘You’re home now,’ she said, turning round to enfold her. ‘We’re all home together,’ she said, seeing Ken come in. He came in as far as the kitchen table and stood in front of them all and, after a moment, yawned.
Laura and Astrid exchanged smiles. Laura took charge. She invited Ken up to ‘settle in’ to his room. ‘Perhaps you’d like to freshen up?’
When she got up to the spare room, she went back halfway to see where he was. He was very slow coming up the stairs.
‘This is the guest room. You can put your things in the drawer,’ she said, when he got there at last. He appeared to have nothing with him. This was a disappointment. ‘Oh, well. You can take your coat off.’
But he declined.
‘There is an en suite,’ Laura said in the manner of her grandmother, Linda, ‘and there are some little bottles in there Nick has stolen from hotels, which you can just help yourself to. It’s a shame there aren’t tea- and coffee-making facilities,’ she said.
‘Isn’t it?’ She checked his face.
‘It’s very nice, thank you.’
‘Well, we’ll watch some television now, shall we?’ she said, with the authority of a matron.
She sat next to him on the sofa downstairs, not too close, checking his face for vital signs every time a joke was made on the television.
‘He’s very silly,’ she said hurriedly about the TV host, seeing Ken’s blank face. ‘Perhaps you’d like Noel Edmonds better?’
‘Oooh?’
‘Noel Edmonds. Or there’s an old programme on you might like. Morecambe and Wise.’
‘When he says “who”,’ Laura observed to Astrid in the kitchen, ‘it’s as if he’s pulled a sock inside out. It’s all the wrong way round. The “w” is at the end not the front.’
She took him in a small plate with three biscuits.
‘Help yourself.’
‘No, ta.’
‘You can put your feet up, if you want,’ said Laura.
‘On the table?’
‘Yes, we all do.’
‘No, ta.’
‘Shall I help you put them up?’ And she began lifting them one at a time, squatting down to do it, with him wheezing with laughter and telling her to leave off and calling out to Nick, ‘’Elp me, son, ’elp me, ’ere, Nick! Nicholas! This young lady’s roughing me up in ’ere, an old chap like me . . .’ His voice was high and loony.
‘You’ll be much more comfortable with your legs up.’
Laura had another patient. And the little match girl, the daft old sod, the bighead and the beautician all sat side by side on the sofa, watching TV with Roy making occasional attempts to mount Ken’s leg.
When there was a close-up of a young girl on the television, Astrid said, just as the thought came to her, without censoring herself first, ‘She’s beautiful.’
‘Not as good-looking as either of you two gels,’ said Ken, shaking off Roy, who was straining to get to the biscuits. ‘Cor, get ’im off me, will you, dear? ’E’s trying to have it off with me leg.’
‘Would you like a blanket?’ Laura asked him.
‘We’ve got the babysitter coming any minute, Laura,’ said
Astrid.
‘Lovely being ’ere, innit?’ Ken said, giving the mantelpiece a dusting with his melancholy eyes. There was no photo of him there. ‘What a nice home it is,’ he said sadly.
‘Don’t get too used to it, Dad,’ said Nick, and he got an elbow in the ribs from Astrid.
‘Well,’ he said to her when they were upstairs, changing, ‘corny old sod, buttering you up with all that rubbish.’
She sprayed her collarbone profusely with the scent of Mimosa and he squirted a mean drop of his aftershave on his own neck and, on patting each place dry, removed the scent to his palms. Then, wiping his hands on his trousers, he pronounced himself ready.
‘Like father, like son,’ she said, looking down at his slightly pointed new shoes.