‘Shoes off.’
Ken sits at the bottom of the stairs and removes them with effort, wincing and exclaiming.
Abandoning her crutches, Pearl goes up the stairs backwards, hoisting herself with her arms and taking a step at a time. He comes up frontwards, using his hands, moaning under his breath but stopping himself from complaining about the tiny ‘bleeding’ stairs like he used to.
Look at the pair of us now, he thinks. People used to say we was a handsome couple. We used to chase each other down on the beach. We used to go to dances on the pier. We was at it like knives in the old days.
In the bedroom, things are just as they were. It’s like stepping back in time, not that things could stand much rearranging in such a small room – no en suite here, no master this and that, no dressing room. There’s space for a wardrobe, a bed and a dressing table and that’s it. The bed with its faded pink-buttoned velvet headboard fills the room.
Hiding the fireplace is the pine dressing table she fixed up, with its carved mirror and modest drawers. On a white lace cloth, like an altar cloth, arranged devotionally are photo frames; the larger to the rear are of her parents and the smaller ones to the front of her children and animals. And in the middle, just as he remembers, in a 1930s Odeon-style frame, there’s the picture of him and his old mum, taken when he was three years old. She’s behind him, with a hat on, her coat done up, and he’s there in socks and shorts and a sleeveless Fair Isle jumper.
He shuffles round between the side of the bed and the dressing table. He sits down on the bed and his greedy fingers reach for it.
Standing to the side of him, she feeds his hands.
His neck buckles under the weight of feeling, and his chin hits his throat. After a minute or two, he wipes his nose with the back of his hand.
‘I’ll leave you with her then,’ says Pearl, going out and pulling the door to.
She stands there a minute, looking over the view across the fields to the orchard and remembers the day the gamekeeper’s granddaughter stood facing the house. She has stood there many times, seeing eye to eye with that woman, long gone. She hears the bed creaking and the headboard tapping the wall. She looks through the crack of the door and sees Ken settled on to the bed, feet crossed, contemplating the photo of him as a three-year-old boy, with his mother, nearly seventy-seven years ago.