Downstairs in the cold dining room, Dave uses his mobile to call Audrey Bury. ‘He said, First thing you do is call that Audrey. She’ll know what to do.’
The grandfather clock ticks; the dog’s nose nudges the stable door. Nick feels inside of him a low growl: Your father is dead.
Then Dave begins to speak.
‘If you can,’ he says.
‘We appreciate it,’ he says.
‘Thanks so much,’ he says.
It’s in his nature: kindness. Even at a time like this, he’s thinking of the other person, Nick marvels.
‘No rush, I s’pose, is there? Not being funny.’ He closes his phone, runs his hand over his chin. ‘Right. That’s done, mate. They’re on their way. It was a chap. Said he’d call Dad’s doctor for us.’
‘Well done, mate.’
‘The tricky part is going to be telling Mum, Nick. She’s not that stable, is she? I mean, who knows how she’ll take it.’
‘Do you want me to do it?’
‘No, no, I’d best do it.’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure. Come with me, though.’
When they turn to step across into the sitting room, they see their mother is sitting on the sofa there and is bound to have heard them.
‘You give Ken an inch and he takes a mile.’ She gives Davie a half-smile. He puts out a hand to touch her shoulder, but she looks away and sighs. ‘Best bring the others in, duckie. No point in them standing out there worrying.’
The dog counts them in with his wet nose, marking the hand of each as they go through. Pearl sits and looks at the black screen on the television and watches it fill with the reflections of her family as they come in. So many evenings Pearl has sat there without noise or life other than that given to her by the TV, and now this.
The two grandchildren sit on the tiles in front of the fireplace, backs to the wood-burning stove. Dave’s over at the window, Nick’s by the stairs, and Marina’s beside Pearl on the two-seater. Pearl’s leg in its cast is stuck out straight into the rug like a teaspoon on a saucer. Astrid takes Laura on her lap on the armchair.
Dave does the talking, and they each use the cover of it for their own thoughts. Astrid is wondering whether the wedding plans will go ahead. Marina’s thinking about June, and that Dave should call her. She’s thinking too how her husband was always the elder brother in reality. She looks at Nick and thinks how a face can be handsome and mean nothing to you too. She’s thinking how she dislikes him in proportion to how much Dave loves him.
Feeling her eyes upon him, Nick gives her a small perfunctory smile and she returns it because she was brought up to hide her feelings and not be caught out, and also because Dave is her world. But Nick sees the smile die too soon to have been real and looks down at his feet. Shoes. They were never allowed to wear shoes in there. He sees that Dave’s in his socks. When did he find time to slip off his shoes? It must have been force of habit. Next to him, at the foot of the stairs, are their Dad’s winkle-pickers, a slight brogue effect, highly shined, and the shape of his toe knuckles in the worn leather.
Laura gets up and goes and sits with the other kids on the hearth. ‘Have you ever seen anyone dead before?’ she asks them quietly.
‘No,’ says Emily, her face making space for fear.
‘I want to see him,’ says Matt.
‘Everyone’s to just stay down here, please,’ Dave says, his flat hands bobbing as if to keep evil spirits from rising.
Matt lets his fringe fall over an eye. He wants to see what a dead man looks like. He looks at Laura and thinks she’s pretty. He looks at his mother and wonders whether she loves him. He looks at his father and thinks he’ll never be like him. They’re all fakers, he thinks, adults. Reality is upstairs.
‘In a way, though,’ Dave’s saying, ‘I mean, I know it’s a funny thing to say, but it’s what he’d have wanted . . . right, Nick?’
Nick meets Matt’s eyes and thinks about him using the Internet. Marina’s son, he thinks, is secretive and sly like his mother. Marina seized upon his brother, so open and good-natured, and in her his brother thinks he found a more ordinary mother. For himself, he’d take the rough ways and honest talk of Pearl any day over all that is not said.
He puts a hand on Astrid’s shoulder; light and fair and good was how she first appeared to him. Now he knows there’s more, and there’s dark. She loves him. She’ll fight for him. She needs him and he needs her. These are the only things he has to know.
He looks at the stable door where his father stumbled and hit his head and he hit it back, his father – he punched it with his fist. And Nick said, ‘It’s the truth!’ As if the truth were anything real, or anything at all.
‘I mean, he more or less said so to us, didn’t he, Nick? When we was in Wales. I mean,’ Dave looks at Pearl, ‘he was just desperate to see you, Mum, and for all of us to be together again. If you think about it, he brought us together, didn’t he? He made this happen. He knew he didn’t have long.’
Matt lets a tear slide down his far cheek where no one can see it. He shifts on the cold tiles and glances at the ceiling. He’ll probably not get to see him at all, ever again. He could ask, but he won’t. They’ll think he’s weird. Emily turns her head sideways and looks at Laura, who’s holding her shins with her head on her knees too, as if they’re in assembly.
‘I couldn’t live with him. I couldn’t live without him,’ Pearl says. ‘That’s what they say. We loved each other, we hated each other, we could have killed each other. I feel numb, as a matter of fact. I’ve done my grieving, you see.’ She pulls a handkerchief from under the sofa cushion. ‘The truth is,’ she says, ‘I’ve been happy on my own. The time’s gone slower. I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve done what I wanted when I wanted. Every day’s been magical in its way. I’ve been free, which I could never have been with him.’
Marina crosses her knee away from Pearl. Dave winces. ‘All right, Mum.’
Astrid does not know what kind of grief there is here. Of all of them in that room, she suspects her Nick is the one in the most trouble. She can feel his hand on her shoulder, his fingertips around the clavicle.
He wants her help, but he can’t ask for it. When she leans forward to pull her shoe back on to her heel, his fingers slip and he looks in alarm at her back as if a boat were slipping out of its docks.
‘I used to shake when I saw him,’ Pearl goes on. She blows her nose. ‘But I don’t know now if that’s what you’d call love.’ She gets up and goes out to the kitchen, closing the stable door, top and bottom. Privy to her next actions in their imaginations only, Dave sees her at the sink, leaning on it, looking out down the garden path as she used to when Ken was due home. Nick sees her kneeling on the floor with the dog, burying her face in the long soft hair at its neck, like a girl. Marina sees her making tea, and Astrid sees her going out to the garden to fetch the brandy bottle and taking a good long draught of it to burn away any love left.
Astrid believes that Pearl loved Ken the way she loves Nick, that Pearl never really thought Ken would go and Ken never really thought he was gone. Nick has never impressed her. He has moved her to compassion, and maternally so; there’s some condescension in it. The passion in it has come from the chance to make one another new, from inside out, to swap pieces. Done too fast, it could run to destruction. Pearl and Ken were impatient; Astrid and Nick are patient.
She turns her face into Nick’s hand, and kisses his palm. She kisses it hard, for Pearl’s sake and for Ken’s sake, for each and every love is also our own.