I didn’t know what to expect—anger and remorse, probably. But next morning, my parents out again, I went to her while she was hoovering, and we walked wordlessly upstairs. Neither of us quite understood what was happening: it was innocent, clitoral, barely-penetrative sex, though that morning I ruptured the little thread at the back of my foreskin: there was blood all over the place, but it was me whose hymen had been broken, not her. She told me later that she had lost her virginity to a friend of her father’s when she was fifteen—her only time. She never did sleep with Steve.
We went on having sex for six months, a year, till she found a proper boyfriend and left. It was usually on Friday evenings during term-time, when no one else was in the house, though we took our chances when we could. We’d be up in her bedroom, under the open window, listening for the sound of my parents’ car coming up the drive, the door slamming in the yard or the key in the front door. And this meant it was a detached, alert, silent kind of lovemaking, one ear open above the swoosh of the flesh. We were both terrified of my father walking in on us.
‘It’s all a long time ago,’ she says, moving her stool under another stretch of pot rail.
‘Yes, we were more or less kids.’
‘The last time was after that friend of yours was killed.’
‘Nick Proctor, you mean.’
He had died in a car crash one Christmas, some time after Sandra had gone. Four of them had been on their way to a party I’d told them about in Barnoldswick—Brian Smith and his cousin Bernie in the front, Bob Skelton and Nick in the back. The Rover they hit on a bend at Broughton sent the back of their Mini into a low wall with trees behind it. My father, drinking in the local pub, The Bull, was early on the scene. Brian led him to where the bodies lay among elm and drystone and metal, Bob already dead, Nick clearly dying. At Airedale Brian met me histrionically: ‘Look at these hands—that’s Nick’s blood.’
‘I remember,’ I say. ‘I stopped off on my way back from the hospital.’
‘Bit of a risk. I’d broken up with Mick by then, but he sometimes came round when he was drunk. And there was the baby.’
‘I was upset. I realized you weren’t keen. It was a bit like this—a death.’
‘Wanting comfort, yes, I understand that. But I’ve given up, I told you.’
‘If you change your mind …’
My father had found out of course, after a bit, I’m not sure how. He met me off the school bus, and was oddly understanding: we were young, we’d been alone in the house, it was innocent and natural, he wasn’t going to tell Mummy. But what we had done was also very wrong: we must never never do it again or he would have to kick me out. If I’d been more mature I would have seen he couldn’t have meant the last bit: the obvious solution to this teenage sex problem would have been to dismiss Sandra, not expel me. But he didn’t do that either: she, too, was given a (rather heavier) lecture and allowed to stay. Later, looking back, I thought it to his credit that he hadn’t done the expected middle-class thing and sacked her (it was me who had done the expected middle-class thing and fucked her). Perhaps, too, I wasn’t so scared by him as I thought I was: within weeks, we resumed.
But sex after that always seemed a thing to be done furtively and silently: terrible retribution might be walking up the stairs. In my callow, febrile way I wondered if my father and Sandra might be doing it too: that would explain why he hadn’t given her the push—so as to carry on, or not risk her exposing him. But she denied this, and in the end, when I understood their relationship better, I believed her: she was more surrogate daughter than surrogate wife. Less easily suppressed was the suspicion that he took a vicarious thrill in trying to catch us out. One night, in bed with Sandra, I heard the tiniest click of the key in the front door and fled naked to my room. He crept up the stairs and walked straight into her bedroom, where he found her sitting, just a towel round her waist, at the dressing-table. She covered herself and was indignant: what did he mean walking in without knocking? He came into my room, where I feigned sleep. There was nothing he could prove.
I never talked to him, later, about what had happened, but I can imagine his pragmatic way of shrugging it off: ‘Leave two men together in a room for long enough and they’ll kill each other. Leave a man and woman alone together in a room for long enough and they’ll screw each other. No way round it—law of nature. There are worse things in life than what you two did.’
‘You forget,’ I say to Sandra, leaning against the doorframe while she dusts on, ‘You were my first love. You predate everyone.’
‘Hum. I suppose.’
‘It never felt wrong.’
‘Not for you maybe.’
‘It still doesn’t.’
‘You don’t give up, do you—you think you’re different but you’re just like all the other fellas. Tell you what: how about making us another cuppa?’
I leave the room, and put the kettle on, half-ashamed of my flirtatiousness, needing the escape and obliteration of sex, but hating the hard little bit of myself I’ve just been hearing, so manipulative and opportunistic. Is it unnatural to want her now? Or would it be unnatural not to?
‘Here you are,’ I say, putting a mug of tea down by her feet on the stool, ‘I’ll have to go. My mother will be waiting.’ And she is, with her funeral hairdo.
That night I dream Sandra comes to my bed. She drives up to Thornton, lets herself in with her old Union, and silently climbs the stairs. ‘Here’s that tea,’ she says, and when she puts it down I see the glass half-pint tankard my father took his last sip from. It’s five in the morning and I’m wodgy with sleep, but not so much that I can’t work out why she is here. She is wearing a baby-doll nightdress from the mid sixties and I try to pull her into bed. She resists at first, changing her mind or preserving her dignity, but soon she lies beside me on the blankets, then under them. I touch her breasts, her neck, her navel—a nineteen-year-old’s. Even the noiselessness is the same, the stroking-more-than-kissing, the ear open for trouble—for what if my mother should wake? Sandra is worried, too, I can tell. I come at once, the premature ejaculator of fourteen.
‘Better go,’ she whispers into my head.
‘Sorry, I wanted it to be longer, I wanted to do it properly.’
The dream seems to be over then, because I’m downstairs in the kitchen and can feel the teapot cooling on the Aga. But the tankard in my hand is full of blood, not tea, and I swill it away, rinsing the glass to transparency. I must find my father, I think, but my mother is in bed alone, deeply asleep, a Dick Francis novel face down on the floor, her arm hanging out as if to retrieve it. Upstairs again, I check the door to my room (closed), then to Pat’s room (locked), and come to the spare room, which is open.
‘You’re still here,’ I say.
‘I was always here. It was you who left,’ says Sandra.
I close the door behind me, and get into her bed and into her. It is the same long dream of memory, but better this time, wetter, less awkward, no guilt. We hang on to each other, rocking the cradle of childhood together, calling back the old days, wanting to hear his car on the tarmac, his key in the front door, his footstep on the stairs. We’re noisy now, to wake him, we push and rock and come, but my father does not come, will never hear us now, though we hold each other in his memory, in the daze of his loss, hoping beyond hope that now, finally, he will walk in on us.
Funeral
HAIL AND FAREWELL . Snow on Pendle. Gales. Storms. A great sweeping coldness. The Aire has flooded its banks from Skipton through to Otley. In the hurled elms the rooks’ nests look like blood-clots, not about to be shifted.
The Craven Herald has a fame beyond Skipton because it’s one of the last newspapers in the country to devote its front page entirely to advertisements. Here they all are. Skipton Auction Mart announces the sale of 722 store and breeding sheep, 600 store and suckler cattle with young bulls, 209 in-calf dairy cows and heifers, 23 young feeding bulls, 250 gritstone ewes and shearlings, 127 hogs, 5 rams, 1
Lim X heifer with calf at foot. In the Soroptimist Rooms, Skipton Bookmen have a discussion by D. Price of Great Expectations . The Plaza is showing Home Alone . There are jumble sales, civic balls, car boot sales, barn dances, coach excursions for Christmas shopping at the Gateshead Centre, carol services, parties and bazaars. North Yorkshire County Council confirms the order to divert the bridleway from grid reference SD 8329 6509 south east to a new route at the C393. The Personal column offers clairvoyance and tea-leaf readings and bunny kissograms.
When the last-but-one editor, barely thirty, took over the Craven Herald , there was speculation that he’d end the tradition of these front page ads. But he’d barely had chance to settle into the job when he died in a potholing accident up in Malham. The current editor is sixtyish, an old friend of my father’s, and not about to change anything.
I’d feared what he would write in his obituary. When he came the other day he didn’t seem much interested in the shilling-life facts we had prepared for him; indeed we barely got a word in between his orotundities. It is so gracious of you to receive me in such a time of distress—would that it had been in happier circumstances.’ ‘Let it not be said that Arthur was a retiring man, for all that he had retired: some would say that, au contraire , he verged on the interventionist, nay even bullying.’ it seemed odd hearing this Latinate purple coming from a red-faced Yorkshireman, and I wondered whether it wasn’t meant for me, or in parody of me—the boy who’d gone off to London and written books. But I underestimated him: among the stories of repossessions and GBH, today’s paper carries a long piece, boxed off and brought forward from the obituaries page, informed by deep affection. The Barnoldswick and Earby Times , by contrast, has set a cub reporter on the job, who attributes my father’s pugnacious village spirit to his ‘RAF background’ and makes him sound like a militaristic busybody. But perhaps I’m bad-tempered because this paper makes its front page lead not my father (who is down below the centre-fold) but a woman celebrating her hundredth birthday, smilingly marking up a quarter century he never had. I feel the same looking at the obituaries in the Yorkshire Post : my poor dead father, a spring chicken among columns of octo-and nonegenarians. At least no one could mistake that he is dead: everybody else has merely passed on or fallen asleep .
The hail begins to turn to snow. At my mother’s behest, I go through my father’s wardrobe, his drawers, his bedside cabinet, in search of things I’d like to keep. It’s a scene I’ve always dreaded, the great elegiac moment of coming into my father’s clothes, but I’ve been through too many dress rehearsals for it to hurt, and not just in my head: ever since he retired my father has been handing down his shirts, his shoes, his money—‘You can’t take them with you,’ he’d say. So I would rummage about, trying not to show how badly I wanted to wear some of the things he’d worn when I was a child—his 1947 white cotton tennis shirt with his name-tag sewn in red on the collar; his bomber jacket, his velvet waistcoat, his flat golf cap, his black-and-white spotted silk scarf, his Tootal and Kendal Milne ties. ‘Are you sure you don’t want this … ?’ I’d say. ‘Go on, take it, I’ve not worn that for years.’ But now that he’s gone, I feel like a grave-robber. I take three jumpers, a dozen pairs of socks, two pairs of brown leather shoes, some cuff-links, and stash them in an old RAF travel-bag of his. Then I put on his white nylon shirt, black tie, grey suit, black woollen socks, black shoes. I am going to his funeral in his clothes.
Back in the living-room, the snow is creeping up the double-glazed doors. Every minute it rises a little further, a wind-drawn tide of nothingness. Who will brave the roads in this? There are friends and relations due to come over the Pennines—will they get through? All the while the wind gets stronger, the snow thicker, and the hills my father built this house to look out on can no longer be seen. My sister arrives with her children and husband, who says: ‘We might have known he’d choose a day like this, gales and hail and every bloody thing. I bet he’s up there, pulling the strings, having a good laugh.’
At twelve the two funeral cars come, the hearse waiting at the bottom of the drive. We are not due at church, two minutes’ drive away, till twelve-fifteen. Malcolm, the boss, drives up in a fourth car, his Escort estate. He comes to fetch us from the front door, and takes me aside a moment to hand over the pacemaker scalpelled from my father’s chest. It is the weight and size and shape of a stopwatch. I turn it over to find the clock-face and, when no one’s looking, hold it to my ear to listen for ticking. I clutch the pleasant plasticity of its sides, as if it were a precious stone—the talisman of my old man. I put it in my trouser pocket to fondle through the funeral, not letting go.
There is a wide tarmac area in front of the house, room enough in normal conditions for the two big black death limos to turn around, but in the ice and snow the manoeuvre is causing them trouble. Finally the cars are pointing in the right direction and—not rushing, not wanting to arrive early—we climb in. The front car moves towards the corner by the garage to turn off the forecourt into the drive. The capped chauffeur has not left himself much room. At the corner, between the drive and the garage, is a small path, edged with kerbstones, which deepens as it goes. When the front wheel crosses this it slithers down. The chauffeur stops, then revs and plunges forward to retrieve the damage, but only forces the front of the car deep and insurmountably down the path. He reverses, but he does not retreat far enough, and when he moves forward again, engine revving, he makes the same mistake. This time the back end of the car has slewed round and is no more than three inches from the garage wall.
We get out and have a look. It’s agreed we should stay out—our weight may be making things more difficult. It is now twelve-fifteen. The chauffeur is looking flustered, removing his cap—its chiselled line in the sweat of his hair. Four of us get our hands under the rear bumper and bounce the car further from the wall, laughing as we do so. My brother-in-law slides a fallen tile under the rear nearside wheel. The chauffeur climbs back into the driving seat, reverses over the tile and back about three feet, then drives forward with steady intent, no high revs. The result is the same, or slightly worse: front end down the gutter, back end slewed an inch from the wall.
By twelve-twenty, we’re resigned to the side of the car being damaged; only Malcolm is not. He stands there in the icy wind, fondling his chin, watching his profit margin being wiped out. Expenses: coffin/carpentry 500 pounds; hire of chauffeurs/pallbearers 200 pounds; cost to client 1,100 pounds; profit 400 pounds. A 500-pound repair on the Bentley would see that off. I can see his mind ticking over like a taxi meter, two sorts of panic wrestling in him—humiliation at getting the client late to the church, desperation not to let his car be scratched.
Now my brother-in-law remembers the pile of sand my father has accumulated nearby—a sandpit for the grandchildren it was going to be. He gets a spade and scatters the sand under the rear wheels of the car, the path, the drive, the forecourt. We bounce the car clear of the wall, as before, and this time the chauffeur backs slowly over the broken tile and sand, gives himself a long run and negotiates the corner safely, it is twelve twenty-five.
We climb in again and join the hearse down at the bottom of the drive. ‘I always used to tell him: you’ll be late for your own funeral,’ my mother says.
She’s been distracted, like the rest of us, by the thought of people in church sitting and freezing and wondering what’s gone wrong. But now there’s no ignoring the coffin in the hearse just ahead of us and her top lip trembles. We need not have worried about a poor turnout. It’s a quarter of a mile to the church, but before we’re halfway there we see the cars parked on either side of the road. And as we pull in by the church gate, three spaces reserved for us, we see the cars stretching on towards Barnoldswick. We huddle in the wall by the church gate, hailstones slanting past, slashing slow snow, my mother pulling her black fur coat more tightly over her black cotton jacket.
Four pallbearers slide the coffin out and up on to their shoulders. There is a standard-bea
rer, too, a guard of honour from the British Legion: my father was president of the Earby branch for thirty-five years, and this man has been sent to walk immediately ahead of the coffin while my mother, my sister and I walk immediately behind. As we move inside the church I have an impression of large numbers, of rows and rows of heads as far as you can see. I stare down at the stone flags, their familiar cracks and stains. One Christmas I stood here and sang the first verse of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, suspecting that the mantle of soloist had fallen on me (like captaincy of the village cricket team, like the local reporter’s weekly attention to my soccer performances) not out of any merit but because I was the doctor’s son, or doctors’ son.
Now the doctors’ son, or doctor’s son, is following the doctor up the aisle, for the first and last time. We step in time, my sister and I, she on my mother’s left arm, I on the right, and just before we reach the front pew I risk lifting my face between the backs of necks and see ahead Heather and Amanda, the wives of my two cousins, weeping in the choir-stalls: this is for them that moment when you see the coffin and think of the body inside and the word ‘dead’ sinks home. We shuffle into the cold pew, and the first hymn starts up, ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’—my choice, though I’m wondering now about its aptness, the bleakness of its vision of human ephemerality: ‘They fly, forgotten as a dream/Dies at the opening day,’ we sing, but didn’t our wreath say: ‘We will never forget you’? I lift my head again, and see my cousins’ wives still crying, and hear my daughter and her cousin in the row behind start to cry. ‘Time like an ever-rolling stream/ bears all its sons away’ makes me think of the moment during cremation when the curtains close and the coffin rolls away.
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 17
