“We’d like to foot the bill,” said Ray, “unless you have any objections. I mean, you’ve already had to do it once.”
“No. You shouldn’t have to pay,” said George, glad to be able to pull rank a little. “Katie’s our daughter. We should make sure she’s sent off in style.”
“Fair play to you,” said Ray.
It wasn’t simply that Ray was working class, or that he spoke with a rather strong northern accent. George was not a snob, and whatever his background, Ray had certainly made good, judging by the size of his car and Katie’s descriptions of their house.
The main problem, George felt, was Ray’s size. He looked like an ordinary person who had been magnified. He moved more slowly than other people, the way the larger animals in zoos did. Giraffes. Buffalo. He lowered his head to go through doorways and had what Jamie unkindly but accurately described as “strangler’s hands.”
During thirty-five years on the fringes of the manufacturing industry George had worked with manly men of all stripes. Big men, men who could open beer bottles with their teeth, men who had killed people during active military service, men who, in Ted Monk’s charming phrase, would shag anything that stood still for long enough. And though he had never felt entirely at home in their company, he had rarely felt cowed. But when Ray visited, he was reminded of being with his older brother’s friends when he was fourteen, the suspicion that there was a secret code of manhood to which he was not privy.
“Honeymoon?” asked George.
“ Barcelona,” said Ray.
“Nice,” said George, who was briefly unable to remember which country Barcelona was in. “Very nice.”
“Hope so,” said Ray. “Should be a bit cooler that time of year.”
George asked how Ray’s work was going and Ray said they’d taken over a firm in Cardiff which made horizontal machining centers.
And it was all right. George could do the bluff repartee about cars and sport if pressed. But it was like being a sheep in the Nativity play. No amount of applause was going to make the job seem dignified or stop him wanting to run home to a book about fossils.
“They’ve got big clients in Germany. The company were trying to get me to shuttle back and forth to Munich. Knocked that one on the head. For obvious reasons.”
The first time Katie had brought him home, Ray had run his finger along the rack of CDs above the television and said, “So you’re a jazz fan, Mr. Hall,” and George had felt as if Ray had unearthed a stack of pornographic magazines.
Jean appeared at the door. “Are you going to get cleaned and changed before lunch?”
George turned to Ray. “I’ll catch you later.” And he was away, through the kitchen, up the stairs and into the tiled quiet of the lockable bathroom.
5
They hated the idea. As predicted. Katie could tell.
Well, they could live with it. Time was she’d have gone off the deep end. In fact, there was a part of her which missed being the person who went off the deep end. Like her standards were slipping. But you reached a stage where you realized it was a waste of energy trying to change your parents’ minds about anything, ever.
Ray wasn’t an intellectual. He wasn’t the most beautiful man she’d ever met. But the most beautiful man she’d ever met had shat on her from a great height. And when Ray put his arms around her she felt safer than she’d felt for a long time.
She remembered the grim lunch at Lucy’s. The toxic goulash Barry had made. His drunken friend groping her arse in the kitchen and Lucy having that asthma attack. Looking out the window and seeing Ray with Jacob on his shoulders, playing horses, running round the lawn, jumping over the upturned wheelbarrow. And weeping at the thought of going back to her tiny flat with the dead animal smell.
Then he turned up at her door with a bunch of carnations, which freaked her out a bit. He didn’t want to come in. But she insisted. Out of embarrassment, mostly. Not wanting to take the flowers and shut the door in his face. She made him a coffee and he said he wasn’t good at chatting and she asked if he wanted to skip straight to the sex. But it sounded funnier inside her head than out. And in truth, if he’d said, “OK,” she might have accepted just because it was flattering to be wanted, in spite of the bags under her eyes and the Cotswold Wildlife Park T-shirt with the banana stains. But he meant it, about the chatting. He was good at mending the cassette player and cooking fried breakfasts and organizing expeditions to railway museums, and he preferred all of them to small talk.
He had a temper. He’d put his hand through a door toward the end of his first marriage and severed two tendons in his wrist. But he was one of the gentlest men she knew.
A month later he took them up to Hartlepool to visit his father and stepmother. They lived in a bungalow with a garden which Jacob thought was heaven on account of the three gnomes around the ornamental pond and the gazebo thing you could hide in.
Alan and Barbara treated her like the squire’s daughter, which was unnerving till she realized they probably treated all strangers the same way. Alan had worked in a sweet factory for most of his life. When Ray’s mother died of cancer, he started going to the church he’d gone to as a boy and met Barbara who’d divorced her husband when he became an alcoholic (“took to drink” was the phrase she used, which made it sound like Morris Dancing or hedge laying).
They seemed more like grandparents to Katie (though neither of her own grandfathers had tattoos). They belonged to an older world of deference and duty. They’d covered the wall of their living room with photos of Ray and Martin, the same number of each despite the unholy mess Martin had made of his life. There was a small cabinet of china figurines in the dining room and a fluffy U-shaped carpet around the base of the loo.
Barbara cooked a stew, then grilled some fish fingers for Jacob when he complained about the “lumpy bits.” They asked what she did in London and she explained how she helped run an arts festival, and it sounded fey and crapulous. So she told the story of the drunken newsreader they’d booked the previous year, and remembered, just a little bit too late, the reason for Barbara’s divorce and didn’t even manage a graceful change of subject, just ground to an embarrassed halt. So Barbara changed the subject by asking what her parents did and Katie said Dad had recently retired from managing a small company. She was going to leave it there but Jacob said, “Grandpa makes swings,” so she had to explain that Shepherds built equipment for children’s playgrounds, which sounded better than running an arts festival, though not quite as solid as she wished.
And maybe a couple of years ago she’d have felt uncomfortable and wanted to get back to London as fast as possible, but many of her childless London friends were beginning to seem a little fey and crapulous themselves, and it was good to spend time with people who’d brought up children of their own, and listened more than they talked, and thought gardening was more important than getting your hair cut.
And maybe they were old-fashioned. Maybe Ray was old-fashioned. Maybe he didn’t like vacuuming. Maybe he always put the tampon box back into the bathroom cupboard. But Graham did tai chi and turned out to be a wanker.
She didn’t give a toss what her parents thought. Besides, Mum was shagging one of Dad’s old colleagues, and Dad was pretending the silk scarves and the twinkle were all down to her having a new job after thirty years of motherhood and housework. So they weren’t in a position to lecture anyone when it came to relationships.
Jesus, she didn’t even want to think about it.
All she wanted was to get through lunch without too much friction and avoid some grisly woman-to-woman chat over the washing up.
6
Lunch went rather well, right up until dessert.
