‘What are you doing, Pearl? Pearl, you all right in there?’ Ken said, in a querulous voice, outside the downstairs toilet in his vest and underpants, squinting through the crack of the door to the light inside. ‘You been in there ages.’
‘I’m counting my dwarf beans, if you must know,’ came the reply.
‘Can’t sleep.’
‘Well, there’s nothing I can do about it!’
‘Just felt a bit lonely di’n’ I . . .’ There was the sound of the flush.
She came out of the toilet in her long nightdress with a stern look on her face. ‘I told you,’ she said, ‘how it was going to be. Don’t you think you can come here and start upsetting things or changing the rules. A dog has one master.’
‘I was wondering if we could watch a bit o’ telly, or something.’ He stepped backwards to allow her regal procession. She had in each hand, like orb and sceptre, a colander and the cardboard inner of a loo roll.
‘At ten thirty?’
‘There’ll be something on, Pearl. They have it on all hours these days.’
They went through to the living room. The dog made a break for it, but the hound’s black nose was squashed thoroughly back into the kitchen through the last inch of the closing stable door.
Pearl switched on the side lamp and brought a humble light to the corner of the room. She sat down on the sofa and thumbed through the Sunday supplement with the TV listings.
He perched himself at the other end of the sofa. The grandfather clock ticked. She took her time, now and again licking the edge of her thumb to use it to turn the page.
In their day’s work, when they stopped to take a cuppa, they’d have a laugh often as not, the pair of them, at the expense of their boys, just like they used to. D’you ’ear Davie? Still trying to win brownie points with his brother, innie? D’you ’ear the way Nick carries on? Tsar Nicholas! Always was like a member of the royal family, weren’t he? Used to ask if he was adopted, dinnie!
He looked at her now in the soft glow from the lamp. He could see the girl she was, the girl who sat in Jepson’s acting big, all a-twitch and flutter, with a clever turn of phrase, a right big mouth, and hurt at the slightest offence. And now he was an old man who longed for hot tea and warm wishes in that cold house, who’d got only the day he was standing up in.
But he was done with dying for good.
He told her it today, when he was doing the rhodies for her.
‘’Ere, Pearl,’ he said, putting down the hedge clippers, ‘I think I’m finished with that dying business.’
‘You keep going till you’ve got that done,’ was all she’d said to that, as she would to any other remarks she might consider sentimental or clever.
‘This looks good,’ she said conclusively, prodding the magazine, flat of mouth and not to be gainsaid.
‘Go on then, Pearl,’ he said, with girlish encouragement. She used the remote control, arm like a thunderbolt, just daring the TV not to work. There was a bounce of noise and light that shocked the night. ‘I’ve always wanted to know who took it and who gave it.’
‘How do you mean, Pearl?’ he asked, sidling across to her, tendering the chocolate box that had been on the arm of the sofa. He passed it over for her perusal.
Her fingers wandered over the chocolate box, bouncing and alighting as she felt the chocolates’ surfaces, smooth or crenellated.
‘You ain’t diabetic no more then, Pearl,’ he said.
Her shoulders set, her index finger and thumb stopped in a pincer poised over the central chocolate. Then her cheeks ballooned and her glasses rose on her nose and she gave a small snort which he thought might have been laughter caught short.
‘Them gays,’ was all she said, popping the chocolate into her mouth.
And Ken was obliged to watch an hour-long American documentary on the subject of homosexual intercourse, sucking on Pearl’s cast-offs – for, every few minutes, she’d take one out of her mouth and pass it his way, with an expression of displeasure, announcing ‘strawberry’ or ‘orange’ by way of explanation.
‘’Cause you don’t like the soft’uns, do you, Pearl?’ he said, ingratiatingly, now right beside her, close enough to smell her sweet breath.
‘I only like the nuts,’ she said, her brow grim, eyes narrowing to focus on the collection of rubber sex toys belonging to two Texan men.
On the window ledge, looking in, sat Pearl’s black cat, blinking at the curiously variable light of the television, which made the two beings inside appear both solid and immaterial, other-worldly and ethereal, like ghosts or gods.