The sun was pestered by clouds, and every time it gave them the slip they found it again. Outside, Ken was in the garden in his mac, sitting on the same chair, fixated on the place on the fence where the robin had been the day before. Astrid asked him if he wanted a cold drink. He shook his head. He was waiting to go to Pearl’s. He would have to wait four more hours.
The sun flexed its muscles and Astrid was impressed. She got the fold-out sunloungers from the shed and put them both up, then she went upstairs and changed into a dress and feeling her legs with her hands, she went to the shower and used the hand-held shower mixer to wet them and shave them, not too well. Her shinbones were orange and sore afterwards. She salved them with cream. She put her hair up in a clip, found the magazine section she was after among the Sunday papers, poured herself a glass of water with a dash of lemon juice, took her sunglasses out of her bag and went outside. The clouds had moved and it was cold.
She went back inside, took one of Nick’s jumpers off the hook on the door and put it on, went back outside and sat down. The phone rang and, with relief to get out of the cold, she went inside.
Ken sat all the while in the same place, stiff-legged, bearing down upon the uncomfortable chair, buffeted more by memory than weather.
It was Big Katie saying she was ill and wouldn’t be in to work the next day. Astrid went and got her diary to see who else was on. She noticed she had scrawled a big ‘P’ next to tomorrow.
She had felt bloated for a couple of days and, wondering when she’d be having a period next month, she started to look back through the diary to check the interval in days and then plan forward.
Ken came in. ‘Where’s Laura?’
Still counting, Astrid put a finger in the air to pause him.
‘Where’s Nick?’
‘Twenty-seven, twenty-eight . . . Well, now, hang on a minute! I don’t need to do that, do I!’
‘What’s that then?’
‘Counting the days of my menstrual cycle, Ken.’
His top lip snagged.
‘But, as it happens, I needn’t bother.’ She closed the book.
‘Jolly good,’ he said. He’d never heard a woman speak of it in such a way, not in his whole life, as if it were a thing of interest, or for public conversation. Pat kept it quiet; you wouldn’t have known she had them. Pearl glowered, and you only knew because she was particularly angry, but otherwise there was no talk of it. June used to turn over when an ad came on the TV and they poured the blue water on to the sanitary towel. ‘Don’t want you put off your cheese,’ she’d said.
But this young woman was barefaced about it!
‘Because, it’s incredible really, because my monthly period falls, and has fallen for more than six months as far as I can see, on the day of the month when there’s a full moon. It’s in the calendar marked with a little dark circle, you see. And every month that’s when I start. Amazing, isn’t it? All the while, without even knowing it, I’m being ruled by the moon.’
‘Nick about?’ he said, edging in a cowardly way to the stairs and craning his neck. ‘Nick? You up there?’
‘Full moon, blood flows. Incredible.’
‘Nick? Laura?’ he called plaintively into the vacuum.
‘So, can I make you some breakfast, Ken?’
‘No, ta.’
‘Maybe some toast and jam? No? Well, I’ll make us some tea then.’ And Astrid went, in a bustle, to the kettle. She was wearing a 1950s dress, tight at the waist and big over the hips. Her tummy was round and tight as a drum with the period coming. She turned on the tap and the water went in noisily.
Ken stood there with his hands in his pockets, wretchedly awkward.
‘You know, I sometimes think that in the story of the oppression of women,’ she flicked the kettle switch, and put her hands to the small of her back, ‘beauty and being young and being thin are just the latest chapter.’
‘You could say that,’ he said, rooted to the spot. He looked from door to door.
‘But the problem is, we’ve always been willing to do each other down, us women; it’s been about elbowing each other out of the way to end up with the man. That’s the problem.’ The way she stood there, facing him, the way she was talking, it all seemed to point to one culprit.
‘I daresay,’ he said.
‘A bunch of turncoats. At least you men stick together.’
Ken rubbed his chin. ‘I’ve come to have a lot of respect for women lately. Because of Audrey, see. The undertaker lady. I’ve known her fifteen years or more, knew her parents too. I used to call on their services, see. When I had a tenant kick the bucket, they’d come right round and sort it out and never a complaint. You know, all hours. Well, you’d never expect to have a woman show up, would you? I wasn’t ’alf surprised when Audrey come by. We had this one old geezer in one of our places and, well, it turned your stomach. But she came in and, well . . . how do you put it . . .?’ He squirms, ‘She was tender. Like he was someone once. Anyway, I bin working for her for a while now, ’elpin’ out. The things you see ’er do. Just takes it in ’er stride. An ’eart big as an ’ouse.’ He sat down at the table. Astrid poured the hot water into the teapot. ‘I thought that women was whiners, you know, not much chop. I thought that of Pearl too but it turns out, ’cording to Dave, that she’s done all right on her own without me.’
Astrid set the teacup before him with the bowl of sugar. ‘Help yourself, Ken.’
‘I don’t like being alone, Astrid. You wouldn’t want to be on your own, wouldya? Young woman like you?’
‘Well, I’d prefer to be alone than to be with someone I didn’t like.’ She went to the pantry and took out a pack of biscuits and opened it and put those before him too. She touched his back as she set them down. ‘Have one of those to dip in your tea. You see, the thing is, if a man marries a woman he thinks is stupid and grumpy, it’s amazing how quickly she becomes it. But luckily,’ she said, sliding a biscuit from the pack and biting it, ‘there’s a cure.’
She sat down next to him in a big flump. ‘I was alone before I met Nick for a while. And,’ she bit into a biscuit and chewed ruminatively, ‘we are happy. It’s just that I worry about things I didn’t have to worry about before.’
Ken took a long slug of the tea in shaky gulps. ‘Pardon me,’ was all he said, and his eyes remained on the cup, and it seemed like she’d lost his interest since he sat, arms folded, looking at the steaming cup with cold eyes as if cooling it by will. Then after a while, he said, ‘It’s sufferin’ what makes a person strong.’
She sipped her tea.
‘I don’t remember me own mother really, but it was my sister Pat what brought me up and she was a good woman but, well, she was me older sister, weren’t she? See what I mean? But with Pearl, she looked to me, see. And Pearl, she was always crying. Nick’ll tell you that. She couldn’t ’elp it, I daresay. But the slightest thing set ’er off. When the film started, she’d start with the crying and when it ended, she’d start again and all the way through and I just didn’t pay it no ’eed. But I couldn’t,’ he shook his head, ‘I couldn’t work it out, you know, the crying.’ He looked her in the eyes.
‘People cry, Ken, because they’re sad,’ she said, but he didn’t seem to hear her; he was being absorbed rapidly back into the past again. He was in another kitchen, standing behind Pearl, looking over her shoulder into the mixing bowl of flour, sugar, margarine and tears, which were falling into the bowl off her chin, and her hands were working it all together, her wedding ring caked with dough.