Astrid was ‘taking family time’. She had Katie take over on the front desk at the spa. Ken had come to stay on what, Nick assured her, was a temporary basis for the sake of his health, mental and physical, so she said to Nick she’d take the time off to mind him and plan the wedding at the same time. She ran Ken back and forth from Pearl’s on a daily basis, leaving him there after school drop-off and picking him up before she went to get Laura. The arrangement suited; she got Ken off her hands, Pearl got garden help, and Ken was much obliged to the ladies all round, a condition he seemed to have become accustomed to quickly and happily.
‘I tell you what, Astrid, I tell you what, I’m a kept man, I am,’ he trilled several times a day. ‘A’n’ I?’
‘Yes,’ she said, every time.
‘A kept man!’
Astrid took to her new role with gusto. She dispensed with the cleaning lady and thereby scuppered that woman’s plan for a breast enlargement. She wiped the dust off the furniture with a pair of Nick’s underpants. She had a whimsical circulatory system for laundry; it began with Nick’s socks found next to the laundry basket, where he left them, which morphed into a single sock on the stairwell, and another behind the washing machine, which would become later a loose sock stuffed in a bag for the charity shop and another in the drawer. She did the ironing in the evening, hanging garments from the wall lamps around the room, while listening to Laura struggle through her homework, or Ken’s belligerence on the subject of licensing hours. The impact of an extra inhabitant was far-reaching. It seemed that subconsciously the others were fouling the house to help him feel at home. She took the plates and mugs which they left just next to the dishwasher, but not inside it, and stowed them herself with merely an intake of breath. She picked up snack wrappers from sofas. Lids were left off. Cushions were used for comfort, not decoration, and she had to rescue them from the floor after they’d served their purpose. She would have liked to bring the speed and conviction of the emergency services to all the messes, spills and upsets but she couldn’t get to them in time. The fridge shelves were sticky. The clothes in the drawers were creased. The kettle had crumbs in the creases of its spout. There were unassimilated items on floors and tables and the kitchen dresser. And inside bowls, which were for display only, were left combs or screwdrivers (Ken), hairclips (Laura), a Vicks inhaler (Nick), as well as a rusty key, a duff light bulb and a store voucher. So this is how it was; family life.
‘I like it messy,’ Nick said, with a frisson when he came in one night, as if it were something really kinky.
‘Because it’s like your mother’s house.’
‘No,’ he said, guardedly, ‘not because of that.’ She dreaded their help.
To the polite enquiry: ‘Can I help you?’ came her murmured rejoinder: ‘That’s the last thing I need.’
When Ken brought his smalls downstairs shyly and demanded the right to wash them in the sink, she denied it to him, so he insisted he place them in the washing machine himself. After that there were plastic carrier bags, knotted and left in the corner of his room.
He kept himself from under her feet in a very ostentatious way, pacing up and down clearing his throat, or sitting in the front room and coughing out of boredom. It was better when Laura was home. They played cards.
He was intrigued with Laura’s comings and goings and doings to the point that he commented incessantly upon them.
‘’Ere, Astrid, the kid, she’s laying daan outside with ’er ear to the ground. Funny, innit? Funny thing to do. Listening to the ground! Wish I could!’
When they went to Pearl’s at the weekend, Laura had permission to skip off to the shed and tinker with the wire and beads in there to make earrings, all the while listening on a battery cassette player to Pearl’s collection of musicals. Laura favoured Evita.
Every time Astrid drove Ken up the track to Pearl’s house, she’d slow to gaze at the babes in the wood. Something about their plastic melancholy struck her as metaphorical; little girls petrified in plastic, never to become women. They made her think about the spa. Ken didn’t say much on the way up there; he went quiet on the approach. From his side he had a view of the field of high grass. He was spruce and clean with a gift on his lap.
They’d stop on the way over at the farm shop for him to choose his gift. She waited in the car park. The first time, he came back with a box of Maltesers. She shook her head. ‘Try again,’ she said. He went back in and came back with a box of After Eights and some yellow flowers.
‘After Eights?’
‘She used to like ’em when we went out,’ he said defensively.
‘Used to give them to the boys.’
He was a slow learner when it came to romance, but death had much improved him. When she collected him on her way to pick up Laura from school, she’d quiz him on the events of the day.
‘Then ’er mood just seemed to change,’ he said, crestfallen one evening as they pulled into Laura’s school. So Astrid ran through things said and done to try to pinpoint the problem.
‘Should I just tell ’er then?’ he interrupted irritably.
‘Tell her what?’
‘You know.’
‘That you love her?’
‘Don’t be daft,’ he said and looked out of the window, across the school lawns, a muscle in his cheek going. ‘Too old for that caper.’