The summer came, as rain and rose petals fell to the ground in big sorry clumps like wet loo roll.
Dave had already called Nick a couple of times from Spain; they were having a good time, he said, but he was keen to get back.
‘Because it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, this luxury holiday lark, right, mate? Right?’
‘Just enjoy it, Dave, while you’re there. Just relax, mate.’
‘Yeah.’ He didn’t sound comforted. ‘You all right?’
‘Yup.’
‘Dad?’
‘He’s fine.’
‘Mum?’
‘Yup.’
‘Right.’
‘Right.’
‘No news then.’
‘Nope.’
There was a silence. ‘Nick?’
‘Yup?’
‘We all right, you and me?’
‘Yup.’
‘After what I said.’
‘We’re all right, Dave.’
‘Right then.’
‘Right.’
‘Can’t wait to get home. Could murder a roast pork. Bye then.’
‘Bye.’
Nick hung up. ‘Idiot,’ he said, shaking his head and going back to the papers on his desk pertaining to Ken’s divorce.
‘You’re under that Astrid’s thumb, you are,’ his father said to him that evening, when Nick was peeling the potatoes for supper.
‘I say, Astrid, women’s work, innit?’ he called out after her, delighted with his own temerity, and Astrid came in and used the teacloth to whip at his backside and ordered him to get peeling too.
‘She’s beatin’ me up, son!’ he said, elbowing Nick, and the old fool broke into his 1950s routine minus the ukulele, shining and wheezing with excitement. ‘Oy, Mother, any chance of a cup of tea for the workers? I bin slaving away all day, I ’ave.’
He had been working hard, that was true. Pearl had shown Astrid the fruits of their labours that morning when she dropped off the work detail. Ken had helped her bury the wire fence for the chicken coop in the ground. Her pact with the Devil was not working out. For many months she had served dinner at seven for the foxes and they came from far and wide, males and females, to dine on the lawn on off-cuts Pearl claimed from the butcher’s, and in return they’d let her chickens alone. But a week ago, one of her ladies, as she called them, had gone missing. She and Ken had spent the week securing the premises.
They’d stood there, the three of them, by the coop, watching the old biddies pick about, making their tremulous quibbling noises, feathers fluffed up and prudish, and Ken was proud to reel off the name of each one.
‘And that’s old Edna.’
She was the blind chicken who the deaf cock liked to give a regular seeing to, Pearl explained, adding with her customary cynicism, ‘That’s what you call a blessed union.’
Then Pearl bent over to pick up the little blind chicken and put it to her face, put her cheek to its yellow feathers and cradled it under her chin, stroking it and making comforting noises, and she smiled and swayed, like a girl. It was the most stunning transformation, and with the dust clouds of gnats and the haze of the early sunshine and the thick smell of the horse manure on the vegetable compost, Astrid felt quite overcome.
She looked back in the driving mirror at the pair of them, when she drove off. There they were, Pearl and Ken, standing again on the kitchen path some thirty years after they first stood there, in a less than blessed union. Now they stood there, an old man and an old woman, like doting parents, with the blind chicken between them.