By the time Richard and Edward arrive an hour later, he’s sitting in his chair by the fire, head bowed, shirt open, modesty hankie in position. They had expected, from our phone call yesterday, a man close to death, but the one in the chair who lifts his head is comparatively sparky. Richard has come from Manchester, Edward all the way from London, though both pretend they just happened to be passing: they don’t want him to think there’s anything unusual about their being here, don’t want to alarm him. I feel guilty, as if we’ve got them here under false pretences: there’s no knowing, he might still be alive in three months. This is the rollercoaster of terminal illness, and already I can hear a little voice in me starting up that resents his tenacity, his ability to pull himself back up off the floor, that whispers, beneath the spoken pieties: Just die, will you . Even his cheeriness is needling, ‘it’s no fun having a major operation,’ he says, adding: ‘But there’s a long way to go yet.’ He drifts off—until we start talking about getting Kela’s car started in the heavy frost, and he wakes to issue instructions about a battery charger and jump leads.
Later, I wheedle my cousins to the pub. The fields crunch under our feet like cereal flakes, whiteness all the way to heaven. The double canal bridge at East Marton looks at itself several times in the water. Just above it is the Cross Keys, one of my father’s two locals, the pub he began going to when it was taken over by Hilly and Brian Thackeray, who became close friends. From the bar where we drink our bitter, I see a face I half-recognize, and which seems to half-recognize me. It’s a rather sulky, broken, impatient face, which—as I sneak looks at it through my glass—pieces itself together as an old schoolfriend, Charles Torrance. One summer I’d gone on holiday with his family to Seahouses, in Northumberland, and played cricket all day every day on the long, white, windy beach. Another summer he worked with me behind the bar of a club on a caravan site in North Wales, before he ran into trouble for refusing to serve (an eighteen-year-old’s mad moral fervour) a fat blonde woman known to be having an affair with the site plumber. I hadn’t seen him for twenty years but here he was now, unmistakable in his red golf club sweater, the same odd mixture of priggishness and nerves.
‘Charles,’ I say, walking over.
‘Blake—I thought it was you.’
We talk for a minute as his son bleep-bleeps away on his Game Boy. Charles too has moved away, lives in Sussex now, a solicitor, here for the weekend. He asks after my father, and I remember his, Tim, also a doctor, but grander, a consultant, dapper, with a striped blazer and tie, in his youth a county schoolboy cricketer. At my parents’ New Year parties, Tim had usually been the one who opened the piano lid and began to play. And when my father pressed me to continue with piano lessons it was always Tim’s example he cited (’Marvellous to have a musical gift’), success in this field meaning not a faultless performance in a concert-hall (my father had never in his life been to one of those: ‘A lot of people paying a lot of money to see something that’s meant to be heard: no thanks’) but a drunken singsong round the Joanna. To my father’s chagrin, I soon gave up on the piano—and playing the drums later for a group called The Crofters was no compensation, since we performed just the once (coming second out of two in a Gargrave talent contest) and our one song was a plaintive tune which he mockingly christened ‘The Camel Driver’s Lament’. Often, though, watching Top of the Pops , he’d enthuse over the power of music to ‘send people’, and I knew he must have envied Tim his musical talent. He himself could only whistle, and then just a few bars of the one tune he knew: ‘Put Another Nickel In’.
Sitting here listening to the jingles of the Game Boy, I remember other things about Tim: how he had taken to calling on my mother for a late-afternoon or early-evening drink, and how they’d talk in hushed voices in front of the wide living-room windows. In some ways they seemed more suited than my mother and father were: Tim was clever, and I suspected my mother of being cleverer, academically at least, than my father. Tim was chivalrous too, like something out of a Noel Coward play, and my mother, as a young woman, had evidently been used to chivalry (one summer I’d found on her shelves a privately printed book of poems by one Michael McKenna, with the poet’s inscription: ‘To my love Agnes, with all my heart’). Tim belonged to her lost world of love and music. He even had a romantic’s self-destructive streak—a drink problem. Sometimes he’d stay on all evening and have to be driven home in his Rover, my father plonking him in the passenger seat and taking the wheel, my mother following behind in our car to get my father home again—the alcoholic’s convoy. Tim had died of a liver complaint, much too young. My mother had been one of the few people to visit him in hospital.
Now I’m sitting here with his son, sour-faced and tense as ever, and his son, more of a charmer like Tim. We talk with my cousins, over another pint, of the pressures of work and mortgages. We agree it’s time we abandoned our complex, urban, high-pressure lives, and moved here to live simply in the Dales. And all of us know that none of us is going to do it.
Back home, Richard, Edward and Kela gone, my father asleep, my mother and I sit at the foot of the bed, drink and death strengthening the feeling that there need be no secrets now, that anything can be spoken.
‘There must have been things you’ve missed, living with Dad,’ I say.
‘Like what?’
‘Oh, I don’t know—books, music, company.’
‘Company! You must be joking—you know how sociable he is, always at the pub, always asking people back.’
‘But your sort of company—dinner parties and so on.’
‘Oh, he hates dinner parties—going to someone’s, and then feeling you have to have them in return. We’ve never once held a dinner party. He’s very unsure of himself, though he never lets on, and I think that’s part of it: at a dinner table, if the talk turns to things he doesn’t know about, he feels trapped—whereas in the pub he can always go and buy a drink and talk to someone else. He won’t even play Trivial Pursuit in case he shows his ignorance. And he can be a real sod. I remember when we first moved to Earby, the Melwards, a nice couple, asked us to a concert. He wouldn’t go, of course, but I did and enjoyed it, and we must have stopped off for a drink on the way home, but it wasn’t late, only ten-thirty, so I asked them in for a coffee—and there he was opening the front door in his pyjamas and asking where we’d been: I could have died of shame. Naturally, they never asked me again after that.’
‘He doesn’t read either.’
‘And doesn’t go to plays or exhibitions, and uses the television to fall asleep to: I know. I sometimes feel sorry for him not reading. I feel guilty in bed, looking forward to the moment he says, “Well, goodnight, love,” and is snoring, so I can turn the light back on. After all, Granny used to read, and Mary, and my mother, too—all day long.’
‘Was that why you liked Tim?’
‘Oh, Tim was so sad,’ she says, ‘so many talents, so wasted. It was an unhappy marriage—Cheryl was always nice and disapproving.’
‘He was keen on you, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, I suppose, but I wasn’t the type for affairs and I wouldn’t have wanted to hurt Cheryl. It was better left as it was, just drinks and chat.’
‘But no one would have blamed you. It would have made you feel better, getting your own back on Dad.’
‘For Beaty, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘But I don’t think that was an affair, not physical. I think Dad just felt sorry for her. That was such an unhappy marriage, too.’
‘So you knew all about Beaty and Dad?’
‘Yes. He was very open. I suppose I behaved like a doormat, but I thought: if I just sit this out it will peter away. Which it did.’
‘But it went on a long time.’
‘Ten years. And it hurt, of course. But I couldn’t ask him to leave. And I knew if I ever tried to leave with you and Gillian he’d come after me, wherever I was—he idolized you both. And I couldn’t have left you either. So I had to put up w
ith it.’
‘It surprises me he wasn’t secretive about it; he was in other ways.’
‘He told me once in the billiard room that it was possible to love two women. And he did—I was his first love, he said, and she was his second, but in a different way.’
‘Not everyone would have stuck it.’
‘I could never argue with your father—no one could. There was one holiday when he suddenly announced we must take Beaty and Josephine, too. I thought it was outrageous—we were staying at a friend’s, it wasn’t our place to be inviting others along to. But in the end, of course, he got his way.’
‘I can remember her coming.’
‘But I still think it wasn’t sexual. Oh, I suppose after Gillian I got post natal depression and wasn’t much fun to be with. And she had the golf club and loved to drink. He started taking her out once a week. It became a ritual—Monday nights, giving her a good time, because things at her home were so miserable and Sam such a wet. Dad went to fetch her straight from surgery those evenings, never came home. I had to cover for him. I often wondered if you guessed when I said he’d gone to see J.J. Duckworth or to the Rotary Club. There was once he took her to a club in Blackburn, and met someone we knew—eventually that got back to me. And then his father died, and he hadn’t seen much of him just before and he was devastated . And I suppose maybe Beaty offered him more sympathy than I did. Granny came to live with us, because Grandpa had said in a note that, if he died before her, the one thing he asked of Arthur and Mary was that Granny never spend a single night alone. So Dad moved her in and also insisted that I sleep in the same room—the back bedroom. Sometimes he’d come in at three, and I’d go through and ask, “Where have you been?” and he’d say, “Out.” I discovered later he used to drive up on to the moors on his own and just sit there.’
‘He told you that?’
‘Yes.’
‘I remember you packing your bags once.’
‘Maybe. I went to stay with friends a couple of times. But I could never have left you.’
‘And in the end it paid off.’
‘Yes, it faded out.’
‘And Josie isn’t my half-sister?’
‘No. How could you even think it?’
‘I convinced myself there was a physical resemblance. And I remember him taking us to the maternity hospital to see her. Years later I thought I could see it all suddenly making sense.’
‘He never takes any interest in Josie now, never even mentions her: if she’d been his surely he would have.’
‘No, I see I was wrong.’
‘Well, then …’
‘And Uncle Sam put up with it all too, just like you.’
‘Yes, I suppose he hated Dad’s guts, but there wasn’t much he could do.’
‘And you’ve been happy since?’
‘For the past twenty years your Dad and I have got on better than ever. He said to me, that long day we had before his operation: “We’ve been happy, pet, haven’t we? I was a bastard to you sometimes, I know, but we were happy.” All marriages have their difficulties. We got through ours in the end.’
Her eyes are red-rimmed as she tells me all this, though she doesn’t cry and even if she did I wouldn’t know the reason—for my father’s approaching death, or for the freshened memories of what he’d done to her in his life.
The Man who Invented the
Outdoor Sleeping-Bag
THE SKY IS clear and my father is smiling. In public, at work, he smiles on principle: sociability demands it; a frown or deadpan look he deplores as ‘ignorant’ or ‘pig-ignorant’. Today, though, just family, he’s smiling because he’s happy. He’s sitting outside our newly-acquired second home, a caravan, or ‘chalet’ as we’re taught to call it, perched on a sand-dune in Abersoch, North Wales—his favourite place, venue of his childhood holidays, source of all requirements for a happy life: sun, sand and sea. Over his shoulder is a bank of marram-grass and, beyond, white beach, a frill of breakers, two islands floating in the bay. He’s smiling because it’s warm—he has no shirt on, only a pair of shorts. He’s smiling because he’s working, cranking the wheel of an ancient sewing-machine, which whirrs and clicks under his hands. And he’s smiling because these are the final touches to his latest invention, a sleeping-bag that will allow him to sleep in comfort outdoors.
Worldly rationalist though he was, or liked to think he was, my father had an eccentric side, which expressed itself every decade or so in A New Invention. He spoke often of the ‘genius’ of the man who invented Cat’s-eyes for night driving, and he aspired to a similarly grand scientific breakthrough. His first effort, or the first he thought worth approaching the patents office about, was the electric toothbrush anti-gunge protector. When he enthusiastically bought an electric toothbrush shortly after they were introduced in Britain, his one complaint was that the water and toothpaste tended to slide down the brush into the battery-operated base and to reduce efficiency. He designed a new sort of brush with a series of spiky protrusions which would deflect the gunge away from the base, and he sent off his design to the manufacturers. Disappointingly, they seemed to have felt that as well as deflecting gunge, the spiky protrusions would also tear into, perhaps even tear apart, the mouth and gums of the user—at any rate, my father received only a polite acknowledgment of his ‘interesting proposal, which we have passed on to the relevant department.’
His Elsan Enhancer perhaps deserved a better fate. He had often complained, on having to use Elsans—non-flush toilets—on camp-sites or at large outdoor events, that the smell of other people’s bodily waste was one thing, the sight of it another. Wouldn’t the whole experience be more bearable if the Elsan contents, whether low in the well or (worse) rising towards the seat, could be concealed? He came up with the solution—a circular white disc, made of lavatory paper, but perhaps rather thicker in texture, to be dropped or lowered into the Elsan after use, thereby hiding the horror-show below. I expressed my concern that the white disc, even if people did take the trouble to use it, would sink out of sight or lose its whiteness. But he dismissed my reservations and wrote confidently to the manufacturers, expecting, I think, an enthusiastic response, a cheque, a consultative role to the Elsan Design Dept or even an honorary place on the board. He received no reply, not even to his second letter, and the Elsan Enhancer went the way of his other inventions, just as Elsans themselves (as he later vengefully liked to point out) became scarcer and scarcer in the age of flush-toilet affluence.
Chastened by these experiences, my father kept his next, and last, invention to himself.
Throughout my childhood he had been in the habit of sleeping outdoors whenever the weather was warm enough to permit it, and sometimes when it wasn’t. He slept on the back lawn, outside the front porch, down the drive and (when I was grown up) on the roof terrace of my flat in Greenwich. But his favourite venue was the terrace of his chalet. Baden-Powellishly full of the joys of the alfresco kip—‘Marvellous. Fresh air. Nothing between you and the sky. Can’t beat it’—he seemed to spend more and more of each summer away from his bed. I worried what it signified, but my mother never complained of his habit, beyond a wry comment or two when clear night skies turned to rain by morning. His one complaint was that his sleeping-bag, which he would sleep in fully dressed on a camp-bed, always ended up damp and clammy, whatever: ‘It’s either rain or condensation. No bloody way round it.’
But finally he thought of a way. Suppose he were to place the sleeping-bag inside another sleeping-bag, made of plastic, like an envelope slipped inside a second, tougher envelope. He got hold of a reject roll of plastic from Armorides, the local factory, and cut it into two coffin-sized strips. Then he taught himself how to operate my mother’s sewing-machine, a victory of will-power over instinct, since my father had not previously mastered, or shown signs of wanting to master, any domestic task he considered ‘feminine’. He had never, to my knowledge, darned a sock, sewn on a button, boiled an egg, washed or ironed a shirt, sw
ept the floor, cleaned the cooker or vacuumed the carpet. And it was only once he’d retired that, after a fashion, he attempted the washing-up: spurning the Fairy Liquid bottle, he’d hold items of cutlery or crockery one at a time under a trickling hot tap and scrub them shiny-clean with a nail-brush. But he did always insist on dressing crabs: no one else, he thought, could be trusted to remove the dead men’s fingers. And now in his fifties he taught himself to sew.
His first sleeping-bag took some time to complete. But having succeeded, he decided he might as well make three more, ‘for all the family’, then another two, ‘for when you have friends down … Pity to waste the plastic.’ He was so pleased by what he saw he’d have gone on to make a seventh, but he had run out of material. I have a photograph of him grinning like a crazed scientist at the wheel of the sewing machine. The first time I made use of his invention, with him eagerly monitoring my reactions from the next camp-bed, must have been around the time the photograph was taken.
‘What a spectacle,’ he said as we lay in our outdoor sleeping-bags looking upwards into a night slashed and grazed by shooting stars, ‘doesn’t it make you feel small?’
It was a Saturday night, and for once, instead of the wind clinkety-clanking in the boat rigging like a Hare Krishna troupe, the air was silent, the sea calm as stone.
‘Have you ever thought,’ my father went on, ‘that just as we are like tiny atoms in the universe, so the universe itself might be just a tiny atom in another universe? Or that each atom in your body might be a universe in a different dimension? Weird thought—sort of scares the shit out of you, space does.’
There were shrieks from the shoreline: someone larking about, a swim in the phosphorescence.
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 10
