1
People seem to tumble down to Hastings and not get up to go home again. It’s where they turn up, every Jack and Jill that ever fell out with the family, lost a job, had half an idea, got a bad habit. The town is a huddle of administrative towers and downat-heel shops with their backs turned on the sea views.
Poor Hastings. The steam train once chuff ed proudly into Warrior Square where the statue of the Empress of India stood with her hooded eyes on the sea. The minor royals played here for a season, the gentry’s carriages drew up at the West Hill lift, the bourgeois bought villas in St Leonards. But now the Olympic-sized bathing pool is gone, the model town vandalized and the pier closed. Lettered rock congeals in cellophane under blow heaters and steel udders drop soft whip in souvenir shops. In the tuppenny arcade, on any given day of the week, there’ll be an old man feeling for change in the trays.
The seafront west to St Leonards is a parade of four-storeyed Regency guesthouses that display ‘For Sale’ or ‘To Let’ signs. In size and colour, they are as uniform as a pack of custard creams and nothing bothers the skyline until the end of the promenade where ‘Marine Court’ soars – a 1930s fantasy, a block of flats masquerading as a cruise liner.
Where the seafront ends, the buildings kneel, going from three storeys to two, and the twentieth century bobs and jogs along in semis until it’s brought up short at the Bo Peep pub. On a blackboard tied to a lamp post, the pub has two bands chalked up for this weekend; Friday night’s ‘Shameless Behaviour’ will be followed on Saturday by ‘Dirty Shoes’. From here on is the road to Bexhill, a few miles of terraced houses, lining a corridor through which the traffic is relentless. This is the area known as Bulverhythe; it is where his father lives now.
Nick’s shoulders round as he scans the house names. He ducks when they pass under a railway bridge, and slows the Range Rover to a crawl. Those obliged to go round him honk censoriously, all the heavier on the horn because of the car it is.
‘A bungalow,’ Dave said. ‘You’ll find it.’
His father’s is the only house reduced to a single storey of meanness on this street and it’s the worst placed. Two lanes of traffic careen down the steep hill from the right and spill cars outside the old man’s place, branching left and right at his very front door. Ken lives slap bang on the junction, and in between the traffic lights.
Nick pulls up on to the pavement without indicating, and the pair of them, he and Astrid, sit tight with the great car rattling and shuddering in the wake of the abuse and hooting of the passing cars.
It is fifteen years since he last saw his father.
2
This is not his town; this is his father’s town. This is not coming home. He did that when he moved back to the Weald, where two counties meet in hills and valleys, in a hinterland of hop bine and tractor track, white weatherboard cottage and oast house, fruit field and orchard. That morning when he walked the dog, with woodsmoke forming halos above the dwellings, the countryside of his childhood seemed primitive to him – with no tarmac, no pylon, no telephone mast visible at all. Walking
brings back memories. He likes to potter into the past and nip into the future, the way the dog moves, a waggy-tailed waverer on the scent of something good and aware too of other pleasures all about.
When they went over the stile on to the newly ploughed field, the dog ran at its centre and rooks took to the skies vexed and carping and cawing, circling in a posse. It was March, but winter presided despite the farmer’s eff orts to kick-start spring. The field reeked of manure, and Nick had a flashback of his brother Dave squatting on the white seat of Nick’s new Raleigh bicycle, bought for him for getting the scholarship to private school, as he wheeled him home.
‘Don’t tell Mum, right? You won’t tell Mum, will you?’
And the first thing he’d said, bursting through the kitchen door: ‘Dave’s shat himself, Mum! He’s got it all down his legs!’
All sorts of betrayals, he’d thought sadly, remembering his brother’s face, all sorts of betrayals to get ahead. An elder brother is always on the make. His little brother was dismayed, on the other hand, if he got anything at Nick’s expense. Whether it was merely a good stout stick or a brand-new toy, Dave would look at it, then look at Nick. ‘We could share it,’ he’d say, ‘or you could just have it.’
Before Christmas, his only contact at all with his mother and father was through his brother.
‘They’ve not spoken in ages. Donkey’s years,’ Astrid says in company and he lets it pass, nods it on its way, this shorthand, this convenience, and gets in the next round. But there is no nonchalance, never mind the number of years. Poor put-upon Dave has been duty-bound to all parties to pass unkindness back and forth; and he’s done so, too good-natured to be good. The hurt is thus still keen.
‘God almighty,’ Nick says to Astrid now, peeping at his father’s house, humorous and rueful, ‘I did mention to you that my father was a touch working class, didn’t I?’
‘Perchance’ is the name painted on to a cross section of a log, varnished and tacked to the guttering over the front door of the bungalow. The front garden is concrete. The other houses have two-foot-high walls for decency’s sake but his has been demolished. Weeds have sprung up in the cracks of the forecourt. There’s a lean-to shelter outside the bungalow with a corrugated yellow plastic roof and under it is a tall set of shelves stacked with various plastic bottles, some with their heads cut off : cooking oil, window cleaner, plant food. There is a decrepit Christmas tree in a pot, and an old Queen Anne wing-backed chair bearing a large string bag of onions.
They sit there with the engine running. She turns the bracelets on her wrist. ‘Grim,’ she says lightly.