The Other Son Page 6

  ‘Well, quite. I think that’s why . . .’

  ‘She’s a selfish cow,’ Ken says. ‘That’s what I think. That’s what I’ve always thought.’

  ‘Selfish?’

  ‘Martin reckons she’s made off with a load of money, too.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘That’s what he said. That she stole a load of money from the joint account.’

  Alice frowns. ‘The joint account, you say? Now, let me see—’

  ‘A thief!’ Ken interrupts. ‘That’s the kind of person your best friend is. A thief who steals from her husband. Lovely.’

  ‘It’s their money, Ken. They’re married. It’s a joint account.’

  Ken laughs meanly. ‘You’re pulling my plonker, right? Dot’s never worked a day in her whole life. You know that.’

  ‘She’s brought up three children, two of whom weren’t even hers,’ Alice says, struggling to contain her own anger. It’s hard to remember that they’re talking about Dot here. It’s hard to feel that they’re not also talking about Alice. ‘That’s quite a lot of work, actually.’

  Ken’s jaw drops. He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘And how are they going to feel? The poor kids?’

  ‘They’re in their forties, Ken. They’re hardly kids.’

  ‘They’re still not going to think much of their mother abandoning their dad, are they?’

  ‘Abandoning? You make him sound like a do—’ Alice starts to say. But then she restrains herself. Ken’s going red, and that’s not a good sign. ‘Anyway, I’m sure it’s like everything. I’m sure there’s two sides to the story.’

  ‘Well, you’re not to see her any more,’ Ken says.

  Alice pulls a face. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You heard me. I don’t want you seeing her. I forbid it.’

  Alice laughs. Even though she regrets the laughter – it’s like a red rag to a bull as far as Ken’s concerned – she can’t help herself. ‘You forbid it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ken says, now removing the Sunday Times magazine from his knees and standing.

  ‘Last time I looked, we weren’t living in Saudi Arabia,’ Alice says. And then before Ken even has time to implode, she turns and walks from the room.

  ‘Alice!’ Ken calls behind her. ‘ALICE!’

  After a second’s hesitation, Alice walks to the front door and, ignoring Ken’s calls, lets herself out. She walks towards the car, then changes her mind – she’s too shaky to drive – and spins on one heel to head the other way, towards The Dell.

  Once or twice she glances over her shoulder to check that Ken isn’t following her, but she knows that he won’t be, not yet. It takes Ken half an hour to find his keys, and another half an hour to find his shoes. And after that he has to check all the locks on the doors and the windows.

  As the distance between herself and the house increases, Alice starts to feel calmer. Yes, Ken’s being an idiot, but it’s still a beautiful day. The sun is shining. She did the right thing by leaving. The argument about Dot was precisely the kind of situation where Ken’s anger gets out of hand. Because, though there’s nothing to be won by arguing, Alice knows that she was right, knows that she is not going to back down, is not going to accede to some crazy demand that she stop seeing her best friend. The problem is that Ken will never climb down, not even when he is patently wrong. ‘I’m sorry, I was wrong,’ are words that Ken simply cannot say. So the only way for this argument to end is for Ken to overreact to such a degree, for him to spin into a maelstrom of anger and violence that is so out of proportion to whatever is going on that even he can see that he has behaved badly. Only then does a path to contrition appear. Only then can he apologise, not for the original argument but merely for his overreaction. So Alice’s best bet is to stay out of his way long enough for him to calm down.

  She reaches the entrance to the nature reserve and weaves her way around the waiting cars in the car park. It’s a Sunday, so it’s bound to be busy.

  As she starts to walk along the little track into the woodlands, she crosses paths with a family – three generations out together, laughing and joking, the grandchildren tearing around the grandfather’s feet. She nods ‘hello’ to them, and tries to remember the last time she got to go out somewhere with Alex and Boris. Between crotchety Natalya and Ken, who complains like crazy any time he has to walk anywhere, such outings are getting rarer and rarer.

  On days like this she hates Ken, she really does hate him. Perhaps she should . . .

  She freezes. She takes in the sensations in her body. Because it’s there again. That feeling of youthful, crazy excitement. And this time she knows why. Suddenly she understands why Dot’s rupture with Martin, unimaginable only twenty-four hours ago, has left her feeling so edgy. It’s because Dot has opened a door. Dot has made the unthinkable appear to be not only thinkable, but really quite appealing. Should she, Alice . . . ? Could she . . . ? Is she really going to let herself even think that thought?

  She glances at the path behind her. If she goes back now, the storm will become a tornado. She could choose that though, couldn’t she? She could spin on one heel and walk right back into the firestorm. That’s all it would take to get the justification she needs.

  She winces at the thought and raises one hand to her cheek. Yes, she could simply go home, defend Dot and refuse to back down. Ken, she knows, would explode. Still caressing her cheek, she imagines herself turning up at Tim’s place in tears. ‘Look what he’s done to me,’ she would say, and then she would tremblingly lower her hand to reveal the bruise.

  But then she’d feel guilty, wouldn’t she? She would know that she had brought it upon herself. She imagines Tim saying, ‘Don’t be silly, Mum, you’re not going to leave him. You know you’re not.’ He has said it before, after all.

  She shakes her head and starts to walk deeper into the woods.

  It’s late afternoon by the time Alice returns home. She lets herself in quietly and stands in the hallway as she tries to get a feel for the atmosphere within the house. The smell of anger carries from room to room – you can pick it up from a distance if you’ve developed the knack. Surprisingly, everything seems calm, and when she peers into the lounge, she understands why. Ken is asleep on the couch, snoring lightly.

  She tiptoes through to the kitchen – she’s in no hurry to wake him – and gently closes the kitchen door, wincing as the catch of the door clicks into place. She crosses to the sink and looks out at the garden, at the beautiful green of the lawn and the elegant shapes cast by the shadows of the trees. Then she turns back to face the kitchen. Her sight falls upon the oven. She’ll bake a cake, she thinks. That’ll smooth things over.

  By the time Ken pokes his head through the door an hour later, the rich smell of Victoria sponge has filled the kitchen. Ken’s face looks puffy from sleep and, without a doubt, all the beer he will have consumed earlier in the day. ‘I slept too long,’ he says. Then, ‘Something smells good.’

  Alice lets herself breathe again. He’s not drunk and he’s not angry. They might get through this day without an actual fight. ‘I’m making a sponge cake,’ she says.

  Ken nods. ‘Nice,’ he says. ‘Make me a cuppa too, would you?’

  Alice reaches out to switch on the kettle. ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘Go sit down. I’ll bring it through.’

  When she returns to the lounge with the tea, Ken asks, ‘So, Dot . . . ?’

  Alice braces herself.

  ‘Did you see her?’ Ken asks.

  ‘No,’ Alice says, begging him silently not to ask if she intends seeing her, and wondering what she’ll say, what path she’ll choose if he does, if he forbids it again.

  But the silent begging seems to have worked. ‘Good,’ Ken says, taking the mug of tea from Alice’s outstretched hand. ‘Now, when’s that cake ready?’

  The next morning, Alice finds a note on the kitchen table. ‘At the accountant’s,’ it says simply. She wishes that she had remembered Ken’s appointment. She wouldn’t have lingere
d so long in bed had she known that he was out.

  She makes a mug of coffee and then phones Dot. ‘I was just going to call you,’ Dot tells her. ‘Can you take me to Ikea? I need plates and pans and things.’

  ‘Ooh, yes!’ Alice says. She finds the idea of a trip to Ikea quite exciting. ‘I could do with some new pans, too.’

  Not only is finding the entrance to the Ikea car park difficult, but the store itself would appear to have been designed to be as hellish as it can be, from the labyrinthine car park to their careering caddie to the one-way racecourse for aggressive caddie pushers they find themselves on. The entire store has been laid out so that it’s impossible to visit any one department without visiting every other part, so, like sheep, they follow the stream of other shoppers around the loop.

  But despite Ikea’s apparent worst intentions, shopping with Dot for furnishings feels youthful and fun. They argue good-naturedly about whether orange faux-fur cushions look modern or simply ‘tacky’. They bitch like an old couple about whether it’s best to buy the cheapest saucepans, or, as Alice believes, the ones ‘designed to last’. They slump in a big red sofa together and both agree that it’s too ‘squidgy’ and that it would be terrible for their ageing backs. And by the time they’ve negotiated the checkout queues, found the car and unloaded the shopping from Alice’s jam-packed Micra, it’s almost one o’clock.

  ‘I’ll put the rest away later,’ Dot says, chucking two cushions from the top of a blue Ikea bag on to her sofa.

  The sun is streaming into her apartment and the new cushions contribute to making the place look bright and optimistic.

  ‘I was wrong about the cushions,’ Alice admits. ‘They look nice. Not tacky at all.’

  ‘You see.’

  Despite Alice’s protestations that she needs to get home, Dot makes them sandwiches to eat. They slump on to the sofa, sigh simultaneously, and then laugh because of it.

  ‘I feel like I’ve done one of those army assault courses,’ Dot says.

  ‘Yes,’ Alice agrees. ‘Me too.’

  ‘I did buy a lot of rubbish I don’t need,’ Dot admits, glancing at the pile of bags by the door. ‘That’s the trouble with Ikea.’

  Alice laughs. It’s exactly what she kept telling Dot every time she added some new impulse purchase to the caddie. She closes her eyes and feels the warmth of the sun on her skin. It’s a funny little thing, but she always dreamed of having a sofa in the sun where she could sit and read her books. You wouldn’t think that it was a complicated ambition, but it was an important one, and it’s something they never quite managed. The windows and sofas, the east-west lie of the houses they lived in, they all conspired to make her sunny sofa a permanent impossibility.

  ‘Still, what the hell,’ Dot says. ‘You only live once, huh?’

  ‘Are you going to be all right for money?’ Alice asks. She can’t quite get her brain around Dot’s new-found independence.

  ‘I squirrelled away about five grand,’ Dot says. ‘So I’ll be all right for a bit. Plus the pension should be sorted out soon. I’m seeing some pension chap tomorrow to get them all separated out and everything. Then Martin’s will go to him, and mine to me. That’s the theory, anyway.’

  ‘Squirrelled away how?’ Alice asks.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘How did you manage to siphon off five grand without him noticing? You were always saying how mean he was.’

  ‘Oh!’ Dot laughs. ‘That . . .’

  ‘Yes, that.’

  ‘Cashback, love.’

  ‘Cash back?’

  ‘Every time I did the weekly shop, I added twenty or thirty quid cashback. It shows up on the statements as a single purchase so he never spotted it. Been doing it for years. I put all the cash in my Nationwide account.’

  ‘And he never noticed?’

  ‘Let’s just say I complained a lot. About the cost of living, like.’ Dot snorts. ‘Actually, Martin complained a lot, too.’

  When Alice gets home, she finds Ken at the kitchen table, eating. ‘You took your time,’ he says. ‘I had to make myself a sandwich.’

  ‘Poor you,’ Alice says, shrugging her way out of the coat. ‘That must have been exhausting.’

  ‘No,’ Ken replies, sounding confused by her sarcasm. ‘But I was worried about you.’

  Alice raises an eyebrow at this and pulls the two new frying pans from the Ikea bag and places them on the kitchen table. ‘We needed new pans. I left you a note.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ Ken says doubtfully. ‘I didn’t think it was going to take all morning though. I suppose you were with that friend of yours.’

  Alice returns to the hall to hang up her coat. ‘Dot?’ she asks lightly. ‘No, why would you think that?’

  ‘I know you were,’ Ken says when she returns.

  ‘Well, I can assure you that I wasn’t,’ Alice lies, looking Ken straight in the eye and smiling blandly. ‘Actually I don’t think I even want to see her at the moment. I’m finding all this separation business a bit disturbing.’

  ‘Oh. Well, good,’ Ken says. ‘So how much were these new toys?’

  ‘They’re not toys. They’re tools for making your dinner. And the big one was twenty, and—’

  ‘Twenty quid? For a saucepan?’

  ‘There’s no point buying rubbish,’ Alice says. ‘That cheap one you got hasn’t even lasted three months. And the small one was fifteen.’

  ‘So you’ve spent thirty-five quid on saucepans?’ Ken asks. ‘You’ll be the ruin of me, woman.’

  Alice laughs. ‘We can afford a couple of decent frying pans, and you know it.’

  ‘You’re not safe to shop alone,’ Ken says. ‘You always just buy the most expensive of everything. That’s how you choose. You just look at the prices and choose the most expensive one.’

  ‘You can come next time,’ Alice says. ‘You’ll love that.’

  ‘OK,’ Ken says. ‘I will.’

  Alice laughs again. ‘You like shopping like a ferret likes fennel.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t a ferret like fennel?’ Ken asks. ‘Jim Perry had ferrets and they ate just about anything you threw at them. I never actually saw them eat fen . . . Oh . . . You’re just being daft again. You and your ferrets!’

  Alice shrugs and turns her attention to removing the labels from the new frying pans. Fifty years together, and Ken still hasn’t got the hang of her funny similes. How can anyone be so resistant to humour? Alice wonders. Fifty years she’s been saying that things are as slow as a sausage, as quick as a quibble or as finicky as a finicky ferret, and still Ken doesn’t get the joke. It had been Joe who’d started that one, by describing an obnoxious bus conductor as being as fat as a ferret.

  ‘But ferrets aren’t fat,’ Alice had protested.

  ‘OK,’ Joe had retorted. ‘As fat as a fat ferret then!’

  Alice gently washes the remains of the labels from the pans. Yes, they’re just frying pans, but they’re really rather lovely. Heavy, and stainless steel, and smooth shiny Teflon. If you whacked someone around the head with one of these, they’d be a goner. And yes, they were expensive, but like Dot says, what the hell?

  ‘So are you going to make me an omelette in that new pan of yours?’ Ken asks.

  ‘I’ve just seen you finish a sandwich.’

  ‘It was just a sandwich, love,’ Ken whines. ‘A man can’t survive on a couple of slices of bread.’

  Alice nods slowly. ‘Maybe,’ she says, ‘if we have eggs. And if you’re nice to me.’

  ‘But I’m always nice to you!’ Ken says. He might be joking. And then again, he might not. He might just believe it.

  That night, Alice is awoken just after two. At first she’s not sure what woke her, but then the noise comes again: two cats fighting in the back garden.

  She closes her eyes and waits, but sleep does not return. Her knees and ankles ache for some reason. She wriggles in the bed, struggling to get comfortable. She rolls to the right and looks at the strip of moonlight shini
ng through a gap in the curtains. It must be a full moon. That’s why she can’t sleep. That will be why the cats are fighting as well. A doctor once told her that the psychiatric wards all fill up on full-moon nights, that the hospitals even lay on extra staff. It’s an actual fact, one of those commonly accepted facts of life that everybody knows to be true, but that no one can explain, that science will perhaps never explain.

  She rolls to the other side and looks at Ken’s shiny head. She sighs and then snorts gently in surprise at the fact that it’s there again – that thought, that forbidden idea. She’s thinking about leaving him again, actually playing the scene on the cinema screen in her head: Alice packing a suitcase; Alice walking away; Alice buying pans for her own little flat somewhere, perhaps in the same building as Dot; Ken sitting alone at the kitchen table, eating a sandwich, reading and re-reading her goodbye note. She wonders if he’d cry. She reckons he wouldn’t.

  It’s all madness though. The full moon has turned her into a lunatic. And isn’t the French word for ‘moon’ where the lune in ‘lunatic’ comes from, after all?

  Where would she live? What would she live on? She doesn’t even have her own bank account. And if it’s taken Dot three years to sort it all out . . . well . . . she’s almost seventy already.

  She’s not going to sleep now, she can tell. Those familiar insomnia sensations are with her – she’s thirsty and hungry. She’s achey and fidgety. She moves towards the edge of the bed, then gently eases herself into a sitting position. She doesn’t want to wake Ken up and have to share the early hours with him complaining about his lack of sleep. She really doesn’t want that. She listens to the ticking of the clock for a moment, then pulls her dressing gown on and sneaks from the room. To avoid the creaking floorboard on the landing, she edges along the wall like a cowboy in a shoot-out.

  Downstairs, she makes herself a cup of tea and a slice of toast. She sits and stares out at the garden. It looks alien and unfamiliar in the moonlight, like some photograph by a modern artist, like perhaps a dream scene. It’s almost like daytime out there, except that the colours are all wrong.

  She’s still thinking about packing a suitcase. It’s more of a feeling than a thought, really – a compulsion almost. Ideas that come at night-time are always more forceful, more obsessive, more seemingly clear-cut than the complicated real-life world of daylight. She knows this from experience.