When their three faces pop up at the window, Marina waves the kids off with a brisk wrist. She is standing alongside Dave in the dining room. Because they resist, she taps on the window.
Pearl is leaning against Astrid, staring at her hands and smoothing over the recessed pale band of skin that persists on her wedding finger. ‘Somewhere in those woods the ring is.’
Her weight has Astrid pinned.
‘You won’t find it now.’
‘Don’t want to find it. That’s why I threw it away. I chucked it as far as I could.’
Coming back to sit on the sofa, Marina turns her head emphatically away from Pearl’s boast and scans the mantelpiece and counts two photos of Dave and three of Nick. Pearl seems to think women can speak their minds. She never had a mother to teach her; Pearl’s mother died from TB and she was brought up by her father, a smallholder. He was a hothead, by all accounts, an opinionated widower. Pearl had been made in his image. She behaved like a man, and upset people.
‘No, I wasn’t afraid to live on my own,’ she says, running on machismo boosted by the brandy. ‘I know some people are. Some people can’t bear to go five minutes on their own. Some women latch on to men and that’s it. Not you, Astrid.’
‘All right, Mum, give it a rest,’ says Dave, glancing at Marina.
‘I’ll speak as I find.’
‘Yes, but Mum, we’ve got our dad up there dead, haven’t we? It’s not a good time.’
‘I’ve had plenty of time to be quiet. I’ve had twenty years or more. I don’t know what I was punished for but I was punished all right. I don’t think you’ve asked me over to your place more than a handful of times. Not that I’d have gone. No, I’m a bloody nuisance, I am.’
‘Oh, Pearl!’ says Marina.
‘You don’t like me!’
‘That’s not true. It’s just too much gets said. I don’t know why we have to have it. I didn’t grow up with that sort of thing. It upsets me.’
‘Upsets you!’ Pearl says scornfully. ‘You’re terrified you’ll end up like me, you are. You think, Let the old witch stay put. You’re afraid of being me.’
Nobody says a word. Pearl may speak her mind, but no one else will. And it’s a mercy, Astrid thinks, because minds change.
She looks behind Pearl’s glasses. The glasses magnify her eyes but, behind them, the eyes are little frightened blinking things. Women, because they love, she thinks, have to be able to go back on things, so as not to lose what they love. No matter how Dave wants to dress it up, Ken has died alone.
The stairs shudder and Roger’s coming down backwards, as if from a tree house. He stands before them with his mouth open. He remembers to close it. He clears his throat.
‘Your father. He’s not dead, only sleeping.’
‘Thank you,’ says Nick, with a formal nod.
‘Yes, thank you,’ says Dave. ‘Do you need a hand to bring the body down now? Because I doubt that my mother is going to want to give the old man a bed for the night, if you catch my drift, and we’d best be moving things along now.’
‘He’s not dead, your father, only sleeping.’
‘All right, mate, that’s smashing. Very comforting, thanks, but it’s getting dark and we’d best think about getting the kids home. Come on, Nick, let’s go and see if we can bring him down between us.’
On the landing Dave turns, with eyebrows raised, to say to Nick, ‘Talk about gormless.’
They’re at the bedroom door, and tentative, when they hear Audrey saying, ‘I think I’ll need my aneurism hook.’
Dave throws open the door. The lampshade swings, light ranges around the room, swooning up and down the walls. The funeral director’s holding on to their father by his ears, shaking his head.
‘What’s going on in here?’ cries Dave.
The lamp steadies and the room comes to a standstill.
Ken blinks and licks his lips. ‘All right, boys?’