‘There you are,’ my father says, from the doorway of the twin-bedded room I’m sharing with him, chaps—chaps/girls—girls being the way my parents—or, rather, he —has chosen to divide things up, instead of husband–wife/daughter–(third room or dividing curtain) son. ‘Bit antisocial wasn’t it to skip off like that? We didn’t know where you’d gone.’
‘I said, Dad. I’ve got this work to do.’
‘Well if you said, I never heard, you mumble so much. Look at you: unshaven, scruffy hair, in need of fresh air and exercise.’
‘I wouldn’t be getting that in the bar, would I?’
‘Don’t get smart with me. We’re all family together. Come on, it’s time to eat.’
At the next table sit a pair of middle-aged Scottish women, who when greeted by my father—‘Nice day on the slopes? Snow to your liking?’—seem even bonier, pricklier and more dour than they were last evening.
‘Rather puir conditions. And the queues to the chair-lift wair tairrible. We took a little lunch: would you believe it, two sandwiches and two lemon teas came to over five pounds?’
These ladies are on the same package as ourselves, and I wonder whether their relentless itemizing of the holiday’s shortcomings have contributed to yesterday’s sudden departure of the tour rep—a muddly fuzz-blonde from Manchester—to ‘a meeting back at head office.’ The Scottish ladies turn disapprovingly back to their meal. I reach for another glass of Liebfraumilch.
‘Dr Morrison, I presume?’
A young woman is standing beside the table. She is tall, dark, with big sensual lips, heavy make-up, a long nose and hair down to her shoulders. She looks as if she has just stepped out of one of those plays I’ve been reading, or dreams I’ve been dreaming.
‘I’m Rachel Stein, your new rep. This must be your family. I hope you’re all having a good holiday.’
‘Smashing, love,’ says my father, pulling over an extra chair beside him and ordering her a drink before she has time to refuse. He takes it upon himself to fill her in on the hotel, the town, the best ski-lifts to use, the restaurants to avoid, the deficiencies of the laundry system. He also fills her in on where we live, what he does, what we’re all called, our ages, our stages-in-life. When he talks proudly of me at school and now university, I wait for recognition to flare in her eyes, for her to acknowledge the feeling which I’m feeling and she surely must also feel. But she looks back to my father. A second drink arrives. The Scottish ladies, her other charges, to whom she has nodded a brief hello, look on frostily as she begins to talk. She is due to read English at Bristol University next autumn, she says, but is having a year off first—the travel company which took her on has a super scheme for reps, a month here, six weeks there, always on the move, she had Agadir in Morocco last, and it will be Greece next. She’s used to moving around: her father worked abroad a lot, his firm would uproot him every two years, she spent much of her childhood on planes between boarding-school and home.
Her eyes swim suddenly: ‘My father died last year. My mother thought it would do me good to get away, though I miss her.’
She is on her third beer. We are on sweet and coffee. I am in love, and she has barely looked at me yet. How artful of her to seem to be so interested in my boring old Dad, not me. Suddenly she’s up and gone in pursuit of the Scottish ladies—‘must catch a word with them: they’re sisters you know, the Misses Laidlaw from Kirkcaldy.’ We watch her swanning off into the distance.
‘Always a good idea to get on with the rep,’ my father says. ‘Nice girl—she’ll look after us.’
She certainly looks after him. Over the next evenings it becomes a ritual for her to join us at the table, and for my father to relate the events of the day, every little skiing feat and mishap. Even with half a bottle of wine inside me, I’m out of my mind with embarrassment at his banal chat (how does she hide how bored she must be feeling?), and veer between looking away in shame and trying to catch her eye. She speaks often of her poor little rich girl’s childhood, and I want to take her away from all this and comfort her in her pain and loss. I wait vainly for my mother to help me out by signalling some disapproval of my father’s monopolizing of her. I wait vainly for my father to say: ‘Why don’t you young people take off for the evening?’ But he’s too obsessed with Rachel, even by his own obsessive standards, to let her go. Despairingly, I join my mother and sister in the television room while my father and Rachel sit on high stools at the bar.
Back in our room, my father’s snores reverberating round the pine and whitewash, I think of how the bit of him that wants the best for me, makes things easy for me, takes pride in me, is up against a different, more competitive bit I haven’t admitted to seeing before. Last June, when he came to collect me at the end of my first year at Nottingham, he insisted we play squash, which I had recently—at his encouragement, seeing my face pasted by two terms of parties and drugs and seances—taken up: ‘Perfect game for busy people: short, sweet and very active. I got quite good at it myself when I was a medical student.’ He turned up at the hall of residence with his shorts and racquet, and, seeing friends of mine slumped about the place, with nothing better to do, he insisted they come along and watch. I anticipated a gentle, non-competitive knock-up as the best thing for both of us: I’d not slept the night before, and he hadn’t (he claimed) played for twenty-five years. But after a few minutes’ limbering up, he said ‘What about a game then?’ He was stiff and erratic, and though I’d have liked to have been feeling more in control of my play, I knew I was losing mainly out of gallantry and that, if I let him have the first game, I should be able to crank things up in the second and third.
What I hadn’t reckoned with was me getting worse and he more confident. But as he cracked his shots low and irretrievably into the court’s four corners, or sent me scrambling in nausea after one of his feinted drop-shots, and the whoops and ironies echoed from the dozen or so invitees in the gallery, I realized that he was simply better than me at this, that I was not only not going to beat him, but was going to be trounced. He eased off a bit towards the end to give me a chance, but that only made me angrier and more wayward than ever. He took the third and final game with a shot against the back wall which fell, unliftingly and unliftably, on the opposite one. He shook my hand and said: ‘I thought you’d have run me closer than that.’
Now, as his snores vibrate through me, I see this is what it’s been like for at least five years now. I learned to water-ski; so did he. I invited friends down to our North Wales caravan; somehow, on those weekends, he always happened to be there. I talked them into going for midnight swims; he was the first out into the night-cold in trunks and towel. Lately I’ve mentioned a vague plan to go to Canada, to read for an MA, after I’ve graduated. ‘Great,’ he said: ‘Gill and Mummy and I will sail out and join you. We’ll buy a Dormobile and get it kitted out and we can tour North America. I’ll have four months off and hire a locum. Why not?’ Why not, except that this was a man who, when I was small, never had time for a holiday; why not, except that the whole point of Canada is to get away from him. It isn’t just a matter of his not letting go, but of needing to prove himself better. When is the old bugger going to admit he’s old? Why does he make me feel, and behave like, the old one? I sink a little deeper into Webster. Next thing my father will be telling me he’s given up medicine and applied to read English at Nottingham.
Not quite: the next thing he does is to announce, when he wakes up, that he has strained his back in some way, that he thinks it unwise to ski today, and in any case fancies a day off sitting on his balcony in the sun. My mother jokes, as the three of us troop off to the slopes, that he’ll ‘no doubt be seeing his girlfriend.’ It is the kind of thing she’s said before, about other women he’s latched on to, as if calling them ‘girlfriends’ is her way of convincing herself that they aren’t. I leave my mother and sister on the nursery slopes and join my own class higher up. We’re practising parallel turns, and with my father absent I seem to
get the hang at last. After lunch, on the chair-lift, I become fascinated by the figure in the chair ahead as she reclines languidly and unfazed above all that empty air, long blonde hair pouring from beneath her hat. I prepare myself to say something as I come in behind her at the landing stage. I’ll quote Eliot maybe, ‘Here in the mountains you feel free,’ and then, if she seems uncomprehending, the German bits—‘Frisch weht der Wind/Der Heimat zu ,’ terribly genteel and polyglot. She’s almost into the station now, that last bit where the chair tips to a new angle and you jump off before it hurtles forward. I swing my bar up in readiness to leap out. Twenty yards ahead of me she alights and turns and as I open my mouth to Waste-Land her I see she has bad acne and a large belly. I also see that she is a man.
Back in the room, at dusk, my father and Rachel are sitting on the balcony: they have drinks in their hands and are smoking and, with the mountains and ice-blue skies beyond, look like a Martini advertisement. I pour myself a whisky. My mother begins to witter about our time on the slopes, and they listen politely, like a married couple smiling condescendingly at a nanny or grandma’s account of her day out with the little ones. I look at the bed—unrumpled, but they’d have had time to straighten it, so who can tell. I feel a sudden disgust—not just with him, for stealing Rachel before I could even get hold of her, but with her, for her sophistication and cosmopolitanism and orphan’s wide-eyed fascination with an older man. As soon as I can, I flounce off to read some more of The White Devil :
To dig the strumpet’s eyes out; let her lie
Some twenty months a-dying; to cut off
Her nose and lips, pull out her rotten teeth;
Preserve her flesh like mummia, for trophies
Of my just anger! Hell, to my affliction,
Is mere snow- water …
Dinner is special. It’s fondue evening, and Rachel has encouraged us to choose it as an alternative to the usual drab three courses—‘all part of the package.’ The Scottish ladies join us. In the witchy candlelight, two fondue pots bubble on spirit lamps and the seven fondue forks look like the forks devils hold in medieval paintings. We spear chunks of French bread and dip them into the creamy sauce, Emmenthal and Gruyère melted in wine, herbs, garlic, lemon juice, Kirsch and cornflour. ‘There’s a tradition,’ says Rachel, ‘that if a man drops his bread in the sauce, he must buy a bottle of wine.’ My father dips his fork in and it comes up empty. Rachel laughs. Even the Misses Laidlaw laugh: they’ve been persuaded to have some of the first two bottles, and now we’re ordering a third. As we finish the bread and cheese, the waiters bring new pots, salad bowls and a dish of meat chunks: we dip the meat in boiling oil, then into a choice of sauces, Béarnaise, Andalouse, rémoulade. The heat and candlelight, the talk and laughter, the wine and bread and meat, melt the distances between us. We’re one flesh, dipping in and out of each other’s lives.
‘There’s another tradition,’ says Rachel, ‘that if a woman’s fork comes up empty she must kiss all the men at the table. Come on Mrs M, be a sport.’ My mother won’t play along, and nor, I hope, will any of the other four women, not even Rachel, not like this, not here, round a table where ‘all the men’ means my father and me. The mood stiffens a little, and the fourth bottle of wine, far from easing it, seems to heighten the tension. The cherry tarts to follow lie untouched. The bonhomie’ s gone. The waiter brings the bill.
‘I’ll pay for the wine,’ says my father, ‘and Rachel’s meal is on the house, so if I divide the rest, your share’—this to the Scottish ladies—‘will be a third, won’t it.’
‘But we thought it was all on the house,’ says Miss Laidlaw.
‘You alleged it was pairt of the package, Miss Stein,’ says the other Miss Laidlaw.
‘Instead of the usual evening meal.’
‘At no extra charge.’
‘I’ll go and see,’ says Rachel, disappearing into the kitchen. My father tries soothing the Misses Laidlaw: a third of the charge, with his bearing the cost of all the wine, will be in the region of twenty pounds, no more.
‘Twenty pounds?’
‘If she’d said ten pounds a head, we’d cairtinly have refused.’
Rachel returns. ‘I’m sorry, it is a special meal, you see, and they have to charge or they can’t offer it to residents. The people who come in from the town pay much more than you will—the allowance for your evening meal has been deducted.’
‘But we didn’t know we’d have to pay,’ says Miss Laidlaw.
‘And if we’d known we’d not have had it,’ says the other.
There’s an awkward pause.
‘The trouble with you,’ a voice is saying angrily to Rachel, ‘is that you don’t think. It’s never crossed your mind what it’s like to be someone who saves hard to come on holiday. You shouldn’t have made airy-fairy promises. Not everyone is as well off as you.’
There’s silence. Everyone seems a bit shocked by the voice. I’m especially shocked, because the voice appears to be mine. And it’s not finished yet.
‘All week we’ve listened to how you suffered as a child because your parents were always on the move and you had to fly back from boarding-school during holidays to visit them. Well, a lot of people would think themselves bloody lucky to go to posh schools or fly in an aeroplane at all. You’ve no idea, have you? We’ve sat here eating under false pretences. We thought you were looking after our interests, like a rep should. You’ve led us on.’
More silence. Rachel looks close to tears. It’s the first time I’ve spoken more than a sentence to her and I have come on more priggishly than three generations of the Laidlaw clan could have.
In the end my father offers to pay for the whole meal, but the Misses Laidlaw, whether shocked or cheered by my blast, will have none of it, and come up with the twenty pounds. Rachel looks away, as if I’d neyer said a word to her, which only makes it worse. I slink off to bed. Serves that rich bitch right a part of me is saying, but it’s a very small part compared to the huge raw-shamed part that says: You utter prat. You’ll never get to sleep with her now .
When I wake next morning, my father’s not there. I find him with my mother, in her room. They’re giggling together. There’s an odd pranky collusiveness between them.
‘Shall we do it now?’ my father asks.
‘Yes, ring her,’ my mother says.
‘What’s this about?’ I ask.
‘You’ll see—just keep a straight face.’
My father dials three numbers. ‘Could you come to Kim’s room,’ he mutters bleakly into the receiver. ‘Something terrible has happened.’
Rachel is up two minutes later. She looks pale, worried, no make-up, her face the colour of a Russian winter, her lovely black hair without its sheen.
‘What happened?’ she asks.
‘There was this man on the balcony,’ my mother says, sitting on the bed, her head bowed, wringing her hands.
‘When was this?’
‘Last night, when I came back to my room—Gillian was already asleep, thank God.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He just stood there.’
‘He didn’t come in?’
‘No.’
‘But you were frightened? You thought he was going to come in?’
‘More than that.’ My mother looks down at her hands. ‘He … you know.’
‘You mean he exposed himself?’
‘Yes, he got out his, you know, and just stood there.’
‘What did you do? Did you ring reception? You should have rung reception, or screamed, or something.’ Rachel is sitting on the bed beside my mother, stroking her hands.
‘I was going to, but next thing he disappeared.’
‘But this is terrible. You must have been horribly frightened. You didn’t sleep?’
‘No.’
‘Right,’ says Rachel, getting up from the bed, ‘I’m going straight down to reception to report it and to get on to the police.’
‘There’s one other thing
you should tell them,’ my father says.
‘What’s that?’
‘That it’s April the first.’
‘Sorry. I’m not with you.’
‘It’s April Fool’s day.’
‘I still don’t …’
‘You’ve been April-fooled,’ my father says. ‘Kim made it up, it didn’t happen, it’s a story, we were having you on, love.’
Rachel sits down on the bed again and bursts into tears.
They give her coffee, calm her down, say: ‘There, there, you’ve had a nasty shock, love,’ themselves shocked that the joke has worked too well. She still really doesn’t see it, and nor do I see my father’s motive. For my mother to invent a tale of sexual violation made sense: it’s probably what she’s been feeling for several days. But the idea had come from my father, not my mother—and what was in it for him? Is it because he slept with Rachel and wanted to punish himself for it—the joke as atonement? Or that he hasn’t slept with her and wants to punish her for it—the joke as revenge?
We leave for the airport that evening. In reception, as we stand among our cases, Rachel kisses us all, but there’s a wariness and distance about her: she seems young and vulnerable, not the worldly sophisticate to whom we have, in our different ways, been horrible.
‘TTFN,’ my father says.
‘Take care, all of you,’ she shouts back.
Some months later, my parents show me a letter they’ve had from Rachel, describing her first term at Bristol University. It is, I’m relieved to find, shallow, childish and untouched by feeling.
Death
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 12
