The Other Son (5 page)

Jean, already at the lectern talking tearfully about her husband, catches Alice’s eye, pauses, nods, and then continues. “It’s left such a big ‘ole,” she says, sounding with her dropped ‘H’s a bit like Pat from
Eastenders
. “That’s the fing. It’s so ‘ard to know ‘ow to carry on.”

Alice observes Jean struggling to speak, watches the tears running down her cheeks, notes the shuddering shoulders of those in the front row, and then begins to cry freely herself.

In the car on the way here Alice had found herself thinking a shameful thought. She had wondered if she would cry if Ken died, and had found herself coldly imagining the sheer embarrassment of a funeral where she might fail to summon a single tear for her dead husband. She had pushed that thought from her mind and had labeled herself a terrible person for even thinking it, but she realises now that she needn’t worry – of course she would cry. Even Alice isn’t hard enough to go to a funeral and
not
cry.

She looks at the plinth supporting the coffin and wonders if it will smoothly vanish the way it did at Betty Johnson’s funeral.

That unexpected movement, that silent slither from view, had seemed creepy and somehow too smooth, too technologically perfected to be suited to the occasion, as if the process of death needed perhaps to be violent and shocking rather than sleek, sanitised and aesthetically pleasing.

She wonders, as she wondered at Betty’s funeral, if they burn the coffin – which would seem a waste – or if they remove the body and reuse it – which would be a little gruesome. She wonders what the ovens look like, if they are in the same building, wonders if they are the same kind of thing the Germans used during the war. She read somewhere that Siemens had made those. They have a Siemens oven at home. It’s very fast to heat up, very efficient. Alice shudders.

Friends are taking it in turns to speak now, and they all agree on one thing: what a marvellous guy Mike was. Despite the fact that Ken worked with Mike pretty much his whole life, Ken has declined to speak today, thank God. Ken has never had much sense of decorum and Alice can just imagine the sort of toned-down wedding speech – all anecdotes and inappropriate jokes – that Ken might have delivered.

“He was always there,” a middle aged man is saying now, his voice gravelly with emotion. “That’s the thing. You could always rely on Mike.”

Alice reflects on the fact that every person you pass on the street, every person you have dealings with at the post office, every person your husband ever worked with, has been important to someone. Everyone has, at some point, deeply touched the lives of those around them. Even racist, bolshie, flashy Mike.

The man sits down and is replaced by Mike’s daughter Linda. “This is really hard,” she says, her voice wobbling like a toy that needs new batteries. “So I’m not gonna say much, except that he was the best dad that anyone could have. He was my whole world, really...” Linda collapses into tears and is lead away by a very good looking young man, presumably her new husband. Alice pulls a tissue from her sleeve and dabs at her eyes prompting Ken to reach for her hand and she lets him take it and squeeze it.

Alice wonders if Tim and Matt would say the same thing, if they would say, “She was the best mum, he was the best dad...” She doubts it, because they weren’t the best mum and dad really, were they? Even if they did do their best.

She had been too soft on them, and Ken, no doubt about it, had been too hard. She should probably have stood up to Ken more about that, but he was never an easy man to stand up to. So no, they hadn’t been perfect parents by any stretch of the imagination, but she truly had given it her best shot.

Nobody taught you how to raise children back then, that was the thing. These days there’s the television and the self-help books, there are pamphlets to read and the school psychologist to fall back on. In Alice’s day, you just had to wing it, you just had to get on with it as best you could.

They hadn’t been exactly
bad
at it, either. There had been worse parents around, parents whose kids ended up killing themselves, parents whose kids died of overdoses or ended up in prison. Her own parents had been very cold, very distant – they hadn’t seemed to consider it their role to adapt themselves to their children in any way – it had been the child’s role to be quiet, to shut up, to fit in. “Children should be seen and not heard,” they used to say. “Children should not speak unless spoken to.”

At least Tim and Matt will never have doubted that they were cared for. At least they have known that they were loved, even if Ken’s parenting did become increasingly authoritarian as they got older. At least they must never have feared that their parents were indifferent to their fates.

Mike’s son is reading a poem now – it’s the one from
Four Weddings and a Funeral,
that poem by Auden that everyone and his dog seems to have chosen for every funeral ever to have happened since that film came out. Alice groans internally.

It’s a lovely poem, but honestly, you would think there were no other poems out there. Alice must remember to tell someone that she doesn’t want Auden read at her own funeral. She can’t think of anything worse. She wants something quirky, something unusual from her big poetry book. Something by Sylvia Plath, perhaps.

Alice wonders who will die first, she or Ken. Generally, it’s the men who go first, but you can never be sure. Betty Johnson was five years older than Will, so no one expected her to go first. It’s the men who go suddenly, as far as she can see. Like Mike, one minute laughing, and the next just gone. The wives tend to favour years of battle with repeated surgery and toxic chemotherapy drips, before finally expiring in the cold light of a hospital ward, dosed to the eyeballs on morphine. Better to die like a man, Alice thinks. Better to suddenly, unexpectedly check out. Better to go laughing, like Mike.

She tries to imagine how she’d feel if Ken suddenly keeled over, but her mind comes up a blank. Perhaps it’s just too massive to be imagined. Or perhaps it’s too insignificant. Perhaps its significance would turn out to be precisely its
insignificance.
She thinks of a character in a novel she read a few months back. The girl in the novel kept waiting for her break-up to hit her, kept waiting to collapse over the unceremonious way her boyfriend had dumped her (by text message) only to realise eventually that she was happier without him. Could Alice’s biggest life trauma turn out to be losing her husband only to discover that her single fifty-year relationship hadn’t been that important after all?

It crosses Alice’s mind that if Ken died, she could go to Spain with Dot. She could go to Spain every year. She could go and
live
in bloody Spain. Disgusted at her own thought processes, Alice glances guiltily across at Ken. He looks up at her. His eyes are shiny with tears.

“You really are a terrible person,”
Alice tells herself again.

Back at Jean’s house, Alice nibbles a sandwich and makes conversation with first Jean herself (It will get easier, I know it doesn’t feel like that now, but it will) and then with surprisingly together daughter Linda and her husband, James. They’re both rather lovely.

Beside her, Alice can hear Ken having one of his pointless blokey conversations about cars and routes and traffic. Something about the A58.

“And what about your lads?” Linda asks. “They’ve got two sons the same age as me and Doug,” she tells her husband as an aside. “We used to play together when we were kids.”

“They’re well,” Alice tells her. “Tim’s married with kids. He works in finance, which he seems very good at. He was the only child I ever knew who had more money at the end of the week than when you gave him his pocket money! He actually used to lend money to Matt with interest, can you believe that?”

“I think I remember that,” Linda says. “And he’s still with...?”

“Natalya,” Alice says. “Yes. And the boys are lovely. Boris and Alexander.”

“And Matt? What’s he up to?”

Alice clears her throat. “He’s good. He’s in France at the moment.”

“France! What’s he doing in France?”

Alice licks her lips. For how can she tell Linda that she doesn’t have much of an idea what Matt’s doing in France? How can she say that without sounding like an uncaring mother?

“He’s working in a hotel,” she says finally, “and working on his French.” And it’s only half a lie. Working in a hotel is the last thing she can remember Matt doing. And seeing as he’s in France, he’s bound to be working on his French.

“And he’s still single?” Linda asks. “I was a bit in love with Matt,” Linda tells her husband in a confidential tone of voice.

“I’m not sure how I feel about that,” James says.

“Oh, it was when she was about ten!” Alice explains. “And yes. He’s still single.”

But the truth, again, is that Alice has no idea if Matt is single or not. He has been gone so long – almost three years now – and even before he left he was always such a private person, such a secretive child. Neither she, nor she suspects, Ken, ever had much of a sense of who Matt really was or what kind of person Matt would end up with.

From his lack of competitive spirit to his dark, grungy clothes (what was it he called them? Goth?) From his strange friends to his penchant for dead pop stars, he was always somehow ‘other’ to them. He was always just out of reach.

Tim had been the only person who seemed to understand Matt, and even then it was only up to a point. They had always seemed close, at least until Matt had gone travelling. But even that closeness looked more to Alice like a kind of blanket acceptance on Tim’s part than any profound understanding of what made Matt tick. “It’s just how he is, Mum,” Tim would say whenever Alice asked him about Matt. “Why is all his music so dark?” she would ask. “Why do all of his clothes have to be black, Tim?” “Why is he wearing black eyeliner?” “Why would anyone get their nipple pierced?”

“That’s just Matt,” Tim would reply. “Don’t worry.”

The one reassuring thing was that Matt did tend to land on his feet. Despite failing all of his science subjects, he had managed to get into university to study art. And he’d been good at it, apparently. When he had dropped out, Matt had been, Tim said, in line for a first class degree. It had been just months before his finals.

Alice had so been looking forward to that ceremony. She had chosen a dress for herself and had been eyeing up new suits for both Ken and Matt. She had never even seen Matt in a suit before and had spent happy hours imagining the pride she would feel when they handed him his degree.

With both sons long gone from the family home, she had been well into the lonely phase of her marriage by then, and had learned to cling to such scheduled moments of happiness like a monkey to a tree in a hurricane. But then Matt had phoned home – he had wanted to borrow some money – and Alice had asked him to confirm the dates of his final exams, and he had admitted that he wasn’t even in Manchester anymore. He was in London, he said. He was living in a squat.

The phone call over, Alice had sat and wept at the telephone table, not for Matt, but selfishly for herself, for the dress she would no longer get to wear, for the hotel in Manchester that Ken wouldn’t book, for the restaurant where they would no longer celebrate, for the pride she wouldn’t get to feel. And when she was done with feeling sorry for Alice, she had sat and chewed her nails and worried, yet again, about Matt. But Matt bounced back. Matt always bounced back, and often this actively annoyed Alice. She frequently wished that life would teach Matt a lesson once and for all. Was that mean of her, to want her own son to stop getting away with blue-bloody-murder? Partly it was, she supposes. But partly it was borne of a genuine fear that if Matt didn’t learn soon that life wasn’t all-forgiving, then he’d end up falling out of the tree.

But life, it appeared, wasn’t out to teach Matt harsh lessons. Not this time. Not, seemingly, any time. Within a month of moving into the squat he had found a job – a good, well paid job working as a graphic designer in an advertising agency. Not that he would deign to stay there for long. He must have had ten jobs in the ten years he was in London. He would just walk out of a job any time anyone annoyed him. And that was often. Yes, he would walk out and never go back, as if jobs were unlimited. And for Matt, it seemed, they were.

And now he’s travelling.
Travelling!
As if travelling were a “thing”. As if travelling, like life, wasn’t meant to be about actually trying to get somewhere.

“We were going to move down to Manchester,” Linda is saying when Alice tunes back in. “We even had a house lined up, but we’re thinking we might stay here a little longer now, you know, for Mum.”

“Yes,” Alice says. “Yes, I’m sure she’ll appreciate that.”

She attempts to take a deep breath, but fails – it feels as if someone is sitting on her chest. She turns to Ken, still citing the numbers of various A roads to the man beside him. “I need to get a breath of fresh air,” she tells him. “I’ll be out in the garden.”

Alice steps out of the kitchen into the chilly twilight of the garden. It’s a long strip of land leading down a gently curved hill to a pvc-and-glass summerhouse at the bottom, lit by the almost blood-red sun which is setting behind it.

Drawn by the pretty summer house, Alice starts to cross the garden, her shoes crunching on the frost of the immaculate lawn. It’s literally freezing out here, and the air makes her lungs smart as she struggles for those still-elusive deep breaths. She thinks about this breathlessness, now so well known to her, so familiarly linked to thinking about, to
worrying
about Matt.

But it’s not just Matt, today, she realises. It’s a kind of all encompassing anxiety about... what exactly? As she walks she tries to break down, to categorise, to analyse the component parts of this strange mix of emotions.

She’s feeling a little ashamed, she realises. That’s part of it. She’s ashamed by her lack of relationship with her second child, of her inability to even speak confidently of his whereabouts. She’s also, if she thinks about it, ashamed of her relationship with Ken.