by Alan Clark
Then as I peered down at the mummified thing, the eyelids shot open. I leapt back before she grabbed my throat like in fucking Carrie. The eyes were unchanged, still the same blazing blue that could either make your day or freeze you like a dentist’s needle. Inside the body of the ancient child, the woman I used to know was instantly there again.
‘Hello Granny,’ I said, unable to expel more than a whisper.
The twisted mouth tried to produce some words, but all that came out were a string of drool and an incomprehensible high-pitched squeak, like the Weed in Bill and Ben, The Flowerpot Men. I realized she’d not be up for my Belgian chocolates. Then the eyelids fell shut again.
From a dark corner came a sudden gargling snore. I’d not even noticed the fat old man dozing in an armchair; mouth lolling open, a magazine splayed across his belly. He’d woken himself up and looked a bit dazed.
‘Hey, we got company,’ he said after a moment, his wide face flooding with a smile. In an expensive cream suit, pink shirt and matching tie, he looked a bit overdressed for the occasion. A stick was hooked over the arm of the chair.
‘Give us a hand up, will you, toots?’ he said. ‘Got a dodgy leg, or mobility issues as they say in this shithole.’
It was an odd accent, pitched somewhere between Bermondsey and Broadway. I pulled him to his feet, but he kept hold of my hand and pumped it greedily which sent a thick wave of white hair tumbling down across his forehead like snow sliding off a roof.
‘The grandson, I presume?’ he said ‘I’m Vic d’Orsay. You might have heard of me.’
‘Don’t think so, sorry.’
‘Fuck you then,’ he laughed. The smile never seemed to entirely disappear; it just went up and down as if on a dimmer. ‘Doesn’t Sibyl look nice? I make her face up every day. I just know it cheers her up.’
As he admired his handiwork, there was a long wretched moan followed by an overwhelming smell.
‘Oh Sibyl, honey, I told you before,’ said the old man, going over and patting her arm. ‘Never trust a fart once you’ve turned sixty. But chill Sibyl, chill. We’ll soon have that old pussy smelling like Harvey Nicks.’
He pointed to a chest of drawers.
‘There are clean sheets in there. Would you get them for me?’
‘Aren’t you going to call someone?’
‘No need, toots,’ said Vic d’Orsay. ‘We can do it ourselves. I’m supposed to take a little light exercise every day now. You’d be amazed how many calories wiping an ass consumes. Nothing like it for increasing the pulse-rate.’
He took off his jacket, folded it neatly over a chair, removed a pair of cufflinks the size of gobstoppers and rolled up his sleeves. When he pulled back the bedding the stench swamped the room. The taste of the bacon roll I’d bought on the motorway returned to my mouth. Vic d’Orsay threw the window wide open and directed me to a conservatory next door. As instructed, I returned with a big bowl of pink and white flowers.
‘Nothing like brompton stock to obliterate the smell of shit. It’s a horticultural SAS,’ he said, whipping off my grandmother’s nightgown like he was skinning a rabbit. She can’t have weighed more than a few stones now. The old woman started to cry a little; he leaned down and kissed her forehead.
‘Air-freshener’s no goddam good in places like this. All the pee and poo; the walls soak it in and breathe it out again like halitosis.’
He went into the adjacent bathroom, returning with a bowl of warm soapy water and a flannel. I had to look away.
‘Stargazer lilies are pretty effective too,’ said Vic, wittering on as he worked. ‘And hyacinths of course, but they’re so Victorian now. Luckily the gardener here knows the score. Look out of that window.’
Sure enough, from the blustery April garden, endless rows of pink and white flowers waved back at me like hankies on a dockside.
‘Right. I need you to hold her now while I put the clean sheets on,’ said Vic. I walked up to the bed and hesitated.
‘Come on toots, move your ass,’ he ordered. ‘Just roll her over gently while I slide the sheet onto one side of the bed, then same again other side.’
I looked down at my grandmother. Her eyes had closed again; full of drugs no doubt. But I still couldn’t believe they might close forever, it was too against the grain. Amazingly, beneath the scent of the flowers and the reek of the shite, I could still just detect the smell she’d always had; the one I’d known since I’d arrived at Mount Royal that day long ago when, like the house itself, her arms, now shrivelled and useless, had wrapped themselves around me and felt so strong and sheltering.
That summer when I was seven, my father, half-pissed as usual, had put his Rolls into reverse and shot backwards off the ferry to Skye, drowning himself, my mother and a pair of lesbian hitchhikers in Mallaig harbour. That was when my English grandmother, till then just a distant, half-drawn figure, had exploded into my existence like shrapnel. I knew quite well there were pieces of her still in me, though I’d tried so hard to pick them out. I also knew that, for the years we’d spent together, we’d saved each other’s lives. And then, in one terrible instant, it had all gone wrong and we’d both been left to fend for ourselves. For neither of us had it gone particularly well.
Now this fat smiley old guy wanted me to touch her, to hold her again. Christ, how many times along the years had I imagined doing that? In touching, slow-motion scenes of reconciliation, accompanied by the strings of Mantovani.
‘I’m sorry, but I just can’t do this. I need to go.’ I said, striding to the door. ‘I’ll send a nurse in to help you.’
‘Ok toots,’ said Vic, the smile dimming a bit. ‘Go grab two chairs in the lounge and order coffee. I’ll be there in ten.’
There was another moan from the bed. My grandmother was looking straight at me. She tried to raise herself on her pillows, the scrawny shoulders trembling. She was struggling to say something. The old guy put his ear to her mouth; he seemed able to understand her.
‘I think she’s asking if you’re Archie,’ he said.
I forced myself back over to the end of the bed.
‘No Granny, it’s Rory.’ I said, ‘Rory, your grandson.’
The blue eyes peered, widened for a moment, then screwed tight shut against me. The skull under the dyed golden frizz began to thrash from side to side on the pillow, so violently that I thought it must splinter.
‘Go, Rory Blaine,’ said Vic. ‘Go now.’
*
Vic d’Orsay limped into the lounge, his belly preceding him like the page-boy of some Oriental potentate. Coffee was brought by a teenage girl with bad skin. Vic was irritated by the scruffy layout of the tray.
‘You’d think this was some goddam Little Chef rather than an extremely expensive nursing home,’ he said. ‘Bet she knows how to lay out a line of coke though. Apparently the staff-room here’s like something out of William Burroughs. And this is fucking Beaconsfield.’
I found myself a tad shocked by this old guy using expletives and wondered at exactly what age I’d have to stop swearing in order not to distress the younger generation.
When I’d entered the lounge, I’d pulled two of the winged chairs together by a window, causing heads to turn.
‘Good afternoon,’ I’d said politely to the nearest tweedy waxwork, but it had turned away again.
In his flashy clothes, Vic looked like a peacock in a chicken coop. A middle-aged woman, visiting one of the winged chairs, crept over and asked for his autograph. Her husband had proposed while Vic was singing Moonlight In Amalfi on the car radio, they now had four children, a golden retriever and an apartment in Croatia. Vic said he was honoured to be ‘a figure on her landscape of love’. He signed a paper napkin, kissed her on both cheeks and patted her bum as she turned to go. She was thrilled.
‘You’ve never heard of me, have you, toots?’ he asked, pouring the coffee.
I lied and said that I thought his name was coming back to me.
‘Vic d’Orsay, also known as
The King of Croon. Five Top Ten singles, three gold albums, one platinum. Second in the Eurovision Song Contest, six Royal Variety Performances. There might have been a seventh but I flashed my dick at the Singing Nun and was never asked again. Oh yeah and an honorary degree from Lowestoft Poly, now called the University of the Fens.’
He put down his cup and peered at me with blatant curiousity.
‘You all right now?’
‘Oh yeah, sure.’ I lied again, but I don’t think he was fooled this time.
‘Well, well, the grandson,’ he said.
‘I’m surprised anyone here knew she had one.’
‘Oh I did,’ said Vic. ‘I knew Sibyl slightly many years ago, though she doesn’t remember me at all now. It was me who tracked you down. Not difficult in these Googling times. I knew you were estranged but I thought it was right.’
‘I nearly didn’t come.’
‘So why did you then?’ he asked, cutting us both more Madeira cake. I bit into mine, shuffled a pack of answers in my head and, to my surprise, heard myself dealing the honest one.
‘I wanted to find out if there was anyone to visit.’
‘And is there?’
‘Not on today’s evidence,’ I said.
‘She’s ill, confused, easily upset,’ said Vic. ‘Give it another go. You might not have much time to fix whatever it was that broke.’
That last sentence was spoken in an odd shifty way, as if he already possessed the information. But I couldn’t imagine Granny ever unlocking her skeletons, even when faced with the imminent prospect of turning into one herself.
‘Hey look, it wasn’t the loot, my coming. I knew I’d have been dumped decades ago,’ I said. ‘Anyway who is the heir to Mount Royal these days? Battersea Dogs Home or that crowd of loonies she hangs out with?’
‘The loonies, I’d guess. It’s not right. Not the way things should be.’
For the first time, Vic d’Orsay’s smile completely disappeared. He looked quite different without it. I almost felt I should turn away, like I was seeing him undressed. He twisted in his chair, spilling crumbs onto the pink silk tie.
‘Forgive me, but am I right in thinking you’re Jewish?’ I asked.
‘Well Barbra called my agent about Yentl but the part just wasn’t me.’
‘So how come a Jew is wiping the arse of a notorious fascist and anti-Semite?’
Vic put down his cup and brushed the cake crumbs from his tie, creating a yellowy smudge. The tie was ruined. He shrugged.
‘Because all of us reach a stage in our lives where everything can be, has to be, forgiven. Everything. Even the very worst things.’
‘I don’t think I’m quite there yet,’ I said.
‘You will be. At least I hope you will,’ he replied. ‘Anyway, I just felt sad for her when I found her here in this state. I thought she needed a friend. There didn’t seem to be many others.’
‘How long have you been here, Sir?’
‘Jeez, call me Vic or you’ll make me feel as old as Max Bygraves,’ he replied. ‘Two endless, fucking months. Just a minor stroke, nothing like as bad as Sibyl’s. Leg still a bit screwed, that’s all. But I needed looking after for a while, so I had to come here.’
He leaned in closer.
‘No little woman at home, you see,’ he said. Bright pink indicator lights flashed onto his cheeks and two untamed eyebrows did a wee jig. It was said.
I looked around the soulless room. The silence was broken only by dozy breathing and soft, scattered sighs.
‘Why does nobody here speak?’
‘Nothing much left to say. We know all about each other’s lives, or as much as each of us chooses to weave tales from.’
‘What tales do you tell then, Vic?’ I asked.
‘Only the ones which make it easier to fit in.’
‘And do you?’
‘Well it’s either this place or another like it,’ said Vic. ‘Anyway, I can play the part. I learned the lines a long time ago and I’ve been speaking them ever since. The King of Croon, arch-celebrant of heterosexual love. In lots of ways, I’ve become the part, as they say. And I’m not the only one. There are two or three other men and women in this place who I strongly suspect are playing it too. Mind you, poor old Dickie over there is so ga-ga now he can’t keep up the performance any more. That makes life here a bit hard for him.’
An emaciated, daddy-long-legs of a man was snoozing over by the door; his chair at a distance from the others, bony fingers clawing at his chest as if sleep brought him no peace.
‘But I’m lucky,’ Vic went on. ‘I’m only here on remand till proved well enough to leave. Most of these folk are sentenced to life, to use a very inappropriate noun.’
Despite his leg, Vic insisted on walking me out to the Merc. As we passed the daddy-long-legs, a hand shot out and grabbed my arm.
‘I was fucked by The Master,’ The voice was wheezy, androgynous, but the eyes begged me to believe him. ‘I was fucked by The Master.’
‘Which school were you at then, Sir?’ I grinned.
‘Hush now Dickie,’ said Vic gently. ‘He means Noël Coward. Dickie was a chorus-boy in his day.’
‘Well I can see that,’ I said ‘You’ve still got the legs for it, Sir.’
Dickie gurgled with pleasure. As we went out of the door, the sexless voice called after us.
‘I was fucked by The Master.’
‘Be quiet, you disgusting old man!’ shouted a woman in a champagne-coloured wig. ‘It’s intolerable to have to live with people like you. I served in the ATS.’
‘And Dickie served in the Royal Marines, Mrs Parker-Brown,’ Vic replied, ‘where he won the DSM.’
‘For buggery, no doubt,’ the woman snapped, before returning to her copy of The Lady.
‘I hope that by the time you ever need a place like this, things will be different,’ said Vic as we reached the lobby. ‘But I’m ashamed to say a lot of my generation would still shove Oscar in Reading Gaol with a much longer sentence and no hope of parole.’
Outside, the sky had darkened and the Merc was sequinned with raindrops. Vic was much taken with it. He’d had one himself long ago, bought from Tom Jones. There’d been a pair of panties still in the glove-box.
‘Well, if I come again, maybe we could go for a spin to the nearest pub.’ I said, realizing that I actually meant it. I often say things I don’t mean; it’s an occupational hazard in advertising. But was I going to come again? It hadn’t exactly been a success. Vic d’Orsay seemed to have read my thoughts.
‘Listen toots, I know this has been rough,’ he said. ‘But try again. Just be here. Words don’t always matter.’
I reached out to shake his hand, then, on an impulse, gave him a swift manly hug. I felt him flinch for a second but, when we broke apart, the smile was back at full blast.
‘Sorry, shouldn’t have done that,’ I said, glancing back at the windows of the lounge. ‘I hope nobody was watching.’
‘Thanks anyway’ said Vic. ‘That’ll keep me going for weeks.’
When I was turning round the gravel circle towards the head of the drive, I saw Vic watching from the lounge. As the car rolled past the window I stabbed the horn, but he’d already turned away and been swallowed up by the room.
*
I’d walked across to the pretty middle-aged lady with the diamonds on her head, handed her the bouquet and bowed. Granny and I had been rehearsing it for weeks. The Queen had asked if I’d travelled far. Only from Hampstead, I’d replied, though I went to school in Scotland. She’d thought that was very interesting and thanked me for coming. I’d told her it was okay, I’d not been doing anything else that night anyway. She’d said I had lovely golden hair. I’d said hers was nice too.
Granny hadn’t been able to curtsey of course, not with her leg. The film première had been in aid of her disabled charities. Afterwards at the Savoy, we’d hobbled round the dance floor together, the brave aristocrat and the sweet orphaned grandson. There had bee
n a pic in the posh magazines. ‘Lady Sibyl Blaine and Master Rory Blaine,’ the captions always read as Granny trotted her miniature escort round the social circuit. We’d become quite a celebrated pair, smiling out at unknown readers in dentists’ waiting-rooms.
Not long afterwards, she’d announced that we’d both go up to Scotland a week before the autumn term started at Glenlyon. I must have been about ten by then. There was something we ought to do she’d said. This was strange because Granny never went to Scotland. She’d often declared that three years of it had been enough to last a lifetime. But having made the decision, she’d seemed determined to make it a great treat, as was her way. And so we’d been chauffeured round the Lake District, the great abbeys and houses of the Borders and then to Edinburgh; St Giles Cathedral, the National Gallery, Holyroodhouse. I’d tried to play guide; history was one of the few things I was good at. I’d wanted to show her my country wasn’t the backward puddle of a place she mocked before her important guests at Mount Royal. On a chilly late August evening, we’d huddled under a blanket on the Castle Esplanade as the pipes and drums skirled and strutted past us. Granny had given me a wee nip from her flask. A man on her other side said he worked in childcare and that he’d report her. She’d laughed so much he’d moved his seat. I’d laughed too of course. I was never shy with Granny. I was a different person when we were together.
And then we’d taken the road to the isles. On a crisp clear morning, we’d stood together on the pier that jutted out into the blue-grey waters of Mallaig harbour. The air was sharp with the smell of the sea and the coming of autumn. Each of us had carried a bunch of white lilies.
‘I rather thought we should both come here, even if just the once.’ she’d said. ‘I felt you were ready now, my darling. I do hope I wasn’t wrong.’
