The Other Son (7 page)

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 d–” 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 anymore,” 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 would have got out of hand. Because, though there’s nothing to be won by arguing, Alice knew that she was right, knew that she was not going to back down, was 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 overreacting so badly. So Alice’s best bet is to stay out of his way long enough for him to calm down.

She reaches the entry 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 can 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’d 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 will 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 her 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 lingered 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 have 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 onto 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 onto 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 syphon off five grand without him noticing? You were always saying how mean he was.”

“Oh!” Dot laughs. “That...”

“Yes, that.”

“Cash-back, love.”

“Cash back?”

“Every time I did the weekly shop, I added twenty or thirty quid cash-back. 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 one 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 metaphors. 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 had 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.”