Serenity House

by Christopher Hope

Elizabeth’s drink went round and round and she kept the lights low. Both skills appreciated by her guests. When, on one occasion, Max had come upstairs and gaped at the company, like a small boy in his dressing gown allowed to stay up for just a few extra minutes before being hustled away to bed, he thought Lizzie’s friends, even the very young ones, all looked like frequently refurbished antiques. The moment the light hit their faces they showed all the tight effects of expensive glues and painful varnishes holding their heads together.

  There were dons down from Cambridge with names like Moggridge who understood all about supply side economics, with spouses who said out loud: ‘Fuck John Maynard Keynes, say I!’ There were portrait painters who brought their white cats. There were young women called Lady Debbie who brought their literary agents. There were actresses who divided their time between London and LA, and arrived on the arms of well-known Pakistani cricketers, and left almost immediately for clubs called Poison Ivy, and Wankers.

  Elizabeth did not have a Thai cook. She did not employ an Italian couple. She did not use caterers. She did as she liked and she did it herself. She had been known to order an entire dinner for thirty from the Green Dragon in Highgate Village and serve it straight from the brown bags with Chinese rice wine and prawn crackers. No less a figure than Lord Figgs, chief whip on the opposition benches, described it as ‘bloody good nosh!’

  Even Albert liked it. That was saying something. Albert said: ‘Bravo, old girl!’ and retreated to a corner to talk about attitudes towards the Argentine in the Ministry of Defence with the Duchess of Rutland. Lizzie tried to encourage her father to join in. She said: ‘Daddy, Lord Gribble will stop by tonight. The mad federalist who wants to see us tied to Europe with a ball and chain. He’s just back from seeing the German Chancellor, and you know how you hate the German Chancellor. Why not pop up and talk to Jimmy Gribble?’

  But after his one visit to the world above when he had thought Lizzie’s friends, even the young ones, showed their cracks and seams, and proved how imperfectly stitched together the rich were, how disappointingly plain so much of the time, Max refused: ‘No, no, no, Lizzie! I won’t impose on your life. You don’t want an old man slowing proceedings. Quite right, too. If I were you I wouldn’t invite someone like me to my parties. I’m happy down here in my quarters.’

  It all began in the bathroom, in a simple, innocent, seemingly friendly way, as befits bathrooms: places of chastened porcelain, lovely enamel, steam, scent, suds, and, only occasionally, a spider crawling nimbly up the plughole and running frantically along the back of towering white cliffs, impossible to scale. The spider’s Eiger. Ceramic alps of doom. Death in Switzerland. Poor creature smelling mortality in a place so clean.

  In his snowy bathroom Max looked at the steep sides of his shining bath and mentioned after a month in the new house, in a gentle, casual way, that he might, just might, need a little help getting in and out of the bath.

  ‘Oh, Daddy, you should have said!’ Elizabeth was embarrassed. ‘What have you been doing? How have you been managing if you can’t use the bath?’

  ‘The basin,’ replied Max shortly. ‘Why? Do I smell?’

  ‘Of course not, silly. It’s just that – oh – I wish you’d told me.’

  Elizabeth bought him, moulded in white plastic, a cunning little platform which lowered and raised the invalid in the ivory bath, a machine called a bathability stool. Max looked at the contraption with deep suspicion. ‘My God,’ he barked, ‘the bathyscope for the older man. What do you suppose Jacques Cousteau would say to that?’

  ‘You never know till you try. Why don’t I run you a nice big bath? And you hop in and try it out?’

  Five minutes later an outraged bellow summoned her back to the bathroom. There he sat, balanced on top of the bathability stool, looking rather like an Indian fakir, wearing an ancient sky-blue pair of bathing trunks, suspended above water and steam, his knees hugged to his chest, his face set in an expression of wounded anger. ‘Come in, come in! I’m decent! Damn thing won’t work.’

  ‘Just relax,’ Elizabeth said soothingly. And as she spoke her father, still looking annoyed, began sinking smoothly beneath the water, giving the impression of some rather strange and eccentric burial at sea.

  It never got any better in the following days. Either he wouldn’t go down. Or when he went down, he could not arise. Instead, when the water grew cold he would begin shouting, ‘I’m freezing to bloody death!’ And back she’d go to the bathroom to find that now he had dispensed with the formality of the costume and seemed not to care about exposing his lank, stringy, bony body to her gaze. ‘Just lift yourself slightly, Daddy, and the chair will do the rest.’

  ‘Don’t you think I’ve tried? Damn thing’s stuck. Shoddy workmanship, if you ask me. No wonder the Japanese are beating us hands down. Can you imagine what it’s like, sitting on some kind of portable camp stool that won’t go down when it’s supposed to go down and never comes up when you ask it to? What do you think would happen if the neighbours saw me now? What do you think would happen if I saw myself now? What do you think would happen if you look ahead into the years that will follow for you too, my darling, and see yourself sitting on a bathability stool in a steamy bathroom waiting to sink either into the water or into oblivion – whichever comes first?’

  Elizabeth would reach into the tepid water and watch as with folded arms and water streaming from the wispy grey hairs on his chest, like the raising of some improbable shipwreck, her father would slowly rise to the surface, looking into her eyes and saying mournfully: ‘I’m sorry if you find me a burden, Lizzie.’

  It got worse. With every move she made to help and soothe and compensate for his failing strength, it simply got worse.

  One morning he told her he was having trouble using the toilet. ‘It’s too low. Built for pygmies. I’m well over six foot four – if shrinking.’ She bought a raised toilet seat so that he wouldn’t have to bend. He discovered all the power points had been fitted in the skirting boards. ‘I should have been born a dwarf,’ said Max. She fitted power point raisers on all the electrical sockets so he wouldn’t have to stoop. Then his back gave trouble and she found him still in bed at noon: ‘I can’t get up, Lizzie. I’m stuck.’ She hung a rope ladder over his bed so he could pull himself upright when his back hurt. Max smiled grimly. ‘The geriatric trapeze. Don’t ever get old, Lizzie. The old are like budgies, always falling off their perches. Or hauling themselves aboard with trembling fingers.’

  ‘Don’t give in to it, Daddy,’ she encouraged in the early days. ‘Don’t accept it.’

  ‘My dear, I’m afraid it’s already accepted me.’

  Soon she was waging a war. She thought of ‘ancillary machines for the aid of the elderly’ – bought from the Age Concern catalogue – as tanks, pontoon bridges, artillery designed to fight the enemy of failing flesh. She even thought the machines might help her to win, until she encountered the enemy within. His incontinence grew worse. She’d hear him get out of bed cursing, and then stomping towards the lavatory. Always about the same time, four or four-thirty in the morning, there came the first call. By the time she reached the bedroom he had vanished and she’d find the bed awash. She took to setting an early morning alarm in the hopes of getting to Max before the deluge. ‘OK, Daddy,’ she murmured, slipping into the bedroom and touching his shoulder in the darkness, ‘off we go!’ When she did get to him before he woke, she hated herself for waking him. Grumbling, Max allowed himself to be hoisted from the bed. On those occasions when he had already wet the bed he went more easily at her bidding. When she felt the sheet was dry then she knew she could expect renewed complaint. It came once Max was seated on the toilet and he went supersonic, giving out a high-pitched whistle which faded only very slowly as the water came. In desperation and thinking that the situation might improve had he not to leave the bedroom at all and make his way to the lavatory, she bought him a wicker commode with elegant silver edging and a removable seat in flame retardant
foam. It didn’t help, the cry of the jet engine would ring out for what seemed like minutes. Albert groaned and pulled the pillow over his head. Then it would die to a murmur and Max, seated on his commode, Max the incontinent Boeing, pissed noisily into the plastic pot.

  Sometimes he sat in the darkness and talked, in tongues she did not understand, about events which meant nothing to her while she scrubbed the mattress dry, pulled on a fresh sheet and plumped his pillows.

  ‘Pańskie jutro, a zydowskie zaraz.’

  ‘What’s that, Daddy?’

  The voice from the darkness sounded faint and far away. ‘A Polish saying. It was collected near Cracow. There was a man who went round collecting such sayings from the Poles. The peasants had a very rich supply of them.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘The nobles tomorrow – the Jews immediately.’

  ‘But why would they say such things?’

  ‘Because they liked to. They were anti-Semites you see. They had lots of sayings like that, you could make entire collections of them. I seem to remember somebody did. In Cracow.’

  ‘What were you doing in Cracow?’

  ‘I’ve never been to Cracow.’

  ‘You’ve wet your bed again, Daddy.’

  ‘It has to be said Poland was a mess. A racial haystack. Full of ethnic splinters.’

  ‘Needles.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come back to bed, Daddy. I think you mean needles, not splinters. It’s needles that you get in haystacks.’

  There were variations in both conversation and behaviour. For Max, only intermittently incontinent from the bladder, felt the need from time to time to ring the changes. Sometimes he’d jump from his bed or chair and head for the commode, moving at a swift pace, most especially considering that he’d already taken the precaution of dropping his trousers and so had to hobble, his elderly shanks scissoring inside the hoop of his trouser waistband which lay in an untidy circle about his ankles. It was an adept, an extraordinarily swift, shuffle. The trick seemed to be to get successfully to the commode and then urinate triumphantly, allowing his daughter – oh, so briefly – to share his liquid achievement. Which she did, she did!

  It was about this time that Max, not otherwise discontented with his lot, began to grow rather concerned about Prince Philip. Max did not ask the usual questions about the Royal Consort. Who were his parents? Where did he grow up? What was Earl Mountbatten to him in his younger life? These were the delectable mysteries that interested the readers of Fealty to which for years Max had been a devoted subscriber. But these were not things Max gave his attention to. He had come across a photograph of Prince Philip in a boat on a river. The photograph showed the Royal Consort looking as mad as a hornet despite his comfortable old blue jumper. He noted the furious downward turn of the ducal mouth, the fly rod held delicately as a conductor’s baton in the right hand, the gull or curlew (or albatross? No, surely not an albatross) visible on the breast of the old blue jumper.

  And to think, as it turned out, that at the end of the day it was not the Duke’s car on the river bank after all. The offending vehicle illegally parked belonged to the very photographer whose picture of the Duke Max was studying in Fealty. No wonder Prince Philip looked hopping mad! Max hoped the overzealous policeman had been ticked off by his superiors – another of the Sergeant Pearce brigade. Forever arresting the wrong man.

  Studying the lean irascible face of the royal angler who seemed to be on the point of saying something characteristically terse such as, ‘Now look here, tosh!’ or ‘Get your finger out!’, Max strove to detect the slightest sign of Greekness. Nary a one! Any Hellenistic tincture that might have once complicated the look or character of the consort, was long gone. Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was as British as Max Montfalcon.

  Max has written to the Prince to assure him on that point many times. The Prince’s private secretary has replied thanking him for his concern and assuring him that His Royal Highness was proud of his British heritage.

  As the weeks of Max’s sojourn with his daughter passed into months in the big house on Highgate Hill which his money had bought her in exchange for – what was it now? – ‘a room and board and a little attention now and then…?’ – Elizabeth snatched at any alleviation of her unending labour. Albert had left her to her own devices, he spent more and more time at the House of Commons, returning now and then to say things like: ‘Bloody hell! This place smells to high heaven. I’ve heard of dirty old men but this is ridiculous!’

  The wrinkles Max devised were both cunning and cruel since they seemed to promise a little advance on what looked like an irresistible decline into dementia, only to disappoint so profoundly that sometimes Elizabeth thought she was going mad. He might, for instance, sometimes reach the commode without incident. Or, again, he might have left a pool of urine beside the bed before making his dash. He might, in fact he did on several occasions, leave a trail of small, round, shining stools like rabbit droppings behind him as he made his run. And as his daughter wearily cleared away the mess and fetched a flannel and vigorously soaped the rubbery ring of his anus (for if Max was to be believed he could now no longer clean himself) her father would refuse to see or admit any of the faecal damage he had committed. And since she could not allow him to return to bed in a soiled condition it no longer mattered whether she believed or disbelieved him, she had in a sense become his puppet and plaything. It felt as though he was controlling her. And Elizabeth began to close her eyes and grind her teeth and try not to hate him. He was her father. She did not hate her father.

  Albert no longer woke when she arose at four-thirty on her pre-emptive toilet strike. He slept through it just as he had when she had got up years before to change Innocenta when she was a baby. And it was, indeed, rather like having another baby in the house except that Max was no infant – he was fractious, cunning, remorseless, the horribly leaky adult who had once been, for reasons now she simply could not quite remember, her tall, handsome, dashing, loving, adorable daddy. And so the feeling that grew inside her was one of angry, bitter patience.

  Elizabeth did, for a while, stubbornly persist in giving very good parties in much the same way as Mr Kipling was said in the advertisement to bake very good cakes. But her parties decreased in number and dwindled to one a month. The strain was beginning to tell.

  ‘I came very close to strangling my father this afternoon,’ she told her friend Nancy Drummond during one of her celebrated take-away suppers as they delicately picked at slivers of beef in hot black bean sauce. ‘It’s like having a child in the house. A rather nasty, wicked child who is trying to drive me mad. Making me run down to him three times a night. Wetting his bed. Messing, messing … ’

  ‘We had something of the sort with Mummy,’ said Nancy. ‘In the end we had to put her in a place. Of course, we hated doing it. Promised Mummy, too. But what option do you have? If you like I’ll give you the name and address. It’s just around the corner. Take a look at it. You might do him some good, by taking him on a visit. Let it be known that this is what you’re considering.’

  ‘Threaten him? Behave – or this is where you’ll end up?’

  ‘Just warn him,’ said Nancy carefully. ‘You sometimes have to do that with them.’

  ‘He has taken to speaking Polish,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Oh, Lizzie, you poor darling. I know just how you feel. Mummy claimed to be speaking Croatian towards the end. When she could still concentrate. She was already in this place I mentioned. Luckily they were very good about it. If she wants to speak Croatian then let her, said the little man who runs the place. They sent her off on Sundays to a church service in Croatian though Mummy never understood a single word.’

  ‘I think Albert’s having an affair.’

  ‘Surely not?’ Privately Nancy could not imagine that Albert would find the energy for an affair.

  ‘I couldn’t care less. I’m getting rather sick of Albert, too,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I wish he’d run
off with her, whoever she is. He’s no damn good around the house.’

  ‘Shall I have a chat to him?’

  ‘About his affair?’

  ‘About your father.’

  ‘Fine. If you don’t mind conversations in words of one syllable. Don’t be surprised if he pulls a pillow over his head. That’s what he does when Daddy gets me up a third time in the night to change his sheets.’

  *

  To begin with Nancy got little reaction from Albert. ‘You mean she might biff the old boy?’

  ‘I think she might skewer you first,’ said Nancy pleasantly. ‘You’re not her favourite man.’

  Albert thought about this. He thought about the way in which Max’s money reached Elizabeth. He took out his diary.

  ‘What’s the name of this place where your mother had such a happy time speaking Croatian?’

  She soon came to realise that he knew just how to goad her. He seemed to have made it his special study – the steady pursuit of a dozen small but lethal ways in which to provoke and wound. To wind her up. To get her going. And so – at first to protect herself, or to save herself and then increasingly to assert herself and then even more so because she simply couldn’t bear him any longer – she began in similar small ways to discipline him.

  She left him in his flooded bed all night. He lay there until the sharp ammoniac smell of it had reached into every corner of the house and Albert said: ‘For God’s sake, the place reeks like a latrine! Do something, Lizzie!’

  Max, in his sodden bed, pronounced bitterly on her ingratitude. ‘That’s what I get for giving you everything. I only hope you never go through what I’m going through. I hope you’re never old and ill and at the mercy of a stone-hearted child.’

  Her response was to reach over, seize the mattress and tip him on to the floor where he landed with a series of dry clicks and without another sound – it was like the fall of a sack of firewood.

  He had bruises for days. They ran from his knees to his shoulders. His cheek was torn and a small, black and rather angry scab formed there which Max seemed to regard as a small badge of his victory, for he was forever tapping it and touching it. He was in fact quite cheerful for some days after the fall and talked again about Poland. ‘You see we proved there had been Germanic settlements in the Vistula region since primeval times. Settlements, pottery and grave-goods proved it beyond doubt. Germans had been the predominant ethnic group in the east. The samples we analysed had the typical long-heads of the Nordic West European group and all we wanted, and I tell you this truly, Lizzie, all I ever wanted was to establish the original facts in Poland.’