And When Did You Last See Your Father

by Blake Morrison

  I feel like an interrogator myself. ‘When did you last see your father?’ I want to warn people: don’t underestimate filial grief, don’t think because you no longer live with your parents, have had a difficult relationship with them, are grown up and perhaps a parent yourself, don’t think that will make it any easier when they die. I’ve become a death bore. I embarrass people at dinner parties with my morbidity. I used to think the world divided between those who have children and those who don’t; now I think it divides between those who’ve lost a parent and those whose parents are still alive. Once I made people tell me their labour stories. Now I want to hear their death stories—the heart attacks, the car crashes, the cancers, the morgues. I start to believe that there’s such a thing as a ‘good’ or ‘easy’ death, just as there is a ‘good’ or ‘easy’ birth. And I start to write to friends when their fathers die, something I never used to do, something I feel ashamed at not having done before.

  Letters come to me, too. Nearly always they begin: ‘I know no words can help at such a time.’ Words like these do seem to help, a bit: to have acknowledged the uselessness of words seems to guarantee that the writer understands. No one can live inside another person’s body; no one can feel another’s pain; grief, like joy, must be a state of isolation. But the letters suggest something different, a commonality, a hug of empathy, and this is both a solace and chastisement. Others have known worse; how much worse for a spouse than for a son; how much worse to die in your thirties (as a beautiful intelligent woman I sit next to at a dinner does, of cancer, two weeks later) than to die at seventy-five like my father.

  Consolations. Beside me on the desk is a new anthology to review, A Book of Consolations . There are plenty of brisk, snap-out-of-it sorts in there, like Walter Raleigh (‘sorrows are dangerous companions … the treasures of weak hearts’), or Dr Johnson, who thought sorrow ‘a kind of rust of the soul’ and recommended, much as my father would have, the healing powers of fresh air and exercise. There is plenty of speciousness about death, too: nothing to worry about, says Plato; a ‘dreamless sleep’, a migration of the soul; the ruins of time becoming the mansions of eternity. I hate all this lying cheeriness and evasion. I’m more consoled by the person, lost and awkward down the phone, who says: ‘Never mind.’ Or by someone who holds me and says: ‘They reckon losing a parent makes you grow up; if that’s so we’d all choose to remain children for ever.’ I think of Larkin in ‘Aubade’ seeing off the solacers, seeing off religion,

  That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

  Created to pretend we never die,

  And specious stuff that says No rational being

  Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

  That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,

  No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

  Nothing to love or link with,

  The anaesthetic from which none come round.

  Bleakness like this—vivaciously denying a life beyond life, brightly expressing dark and nothingness—is the nearest thing to comfort I can find. But even Larkin, in the end, can do no good. Stand them up against grief, and even the greatest poems, the greatest paintings, the greatest novels lose the power to console. I used to think that solace was the point of art, or part of it; now it’s failed the test, it doesn’t seem to have much point at all. FICTION FICTION FICTION the shelves scream in bookshops. But to invent or be artful seems indecent to me now. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to imagine. The music of what happened is the only music in my head.

  The cursor pulses on the screen in front of me. Some of my friends and contemporaries have written moving elegies for their fathers. Even when my father was in the best of health, I used to sit mooning and tearful over these poems as if they were for me, as if I’d written them myself. I wanted my father to hurry up and die so that I could join the club. I wrote an elegy for a friend of his, as preparation. I ran elegiac lines for him through my head. Now he’s given me my opening, and the poems won’t come.

  Not that he’d mind much. He thought poetry all right in its way, so long as he didn’t have to read it and I didn’t suppose it a proper job. He was proud of me when I began to get poems published, but he said he couldn’t understand them, and to me that was the ideal arrangement. I’d begun writing to escape him, to enter a world outside his control, so why would I have wanted him to get interested in my work? Perhaps the obscurity of some of my poems was there to keep him away—just as, I now guiltily recognize, I put him off coming to the London newspaper offices I worked at and which he wanted to see (‘It’d be nice to get an impression—how many people did you say you have under you? only two?’), and which he thought were regrettable but necessary steps towards the summit: a job in Leeds or Bradford (‘just down the road from here—you could do it in fifty minutes’) on the Yorkshire Post .

  Only once, with the poetry, did I relent. It was 1985, and I’d won a prize, and invited him to the awards ceremony in County Hall. He turned up in his yellow-and-white Dormobile with stickers of the places he’d visited on the back window. It was loaded with wood he’d brought down from Yorkshire because my garden, he’d decided, was in need of some rustic fencing. In a big room overlooking the Thames, surrounded by poets, publishers, literary agents, people from the Arts Council, he seemed small, shrunken, at a loss, a wine glass not a pint tankard in his hand. He wanted to enjoy himself, but he had a frowny, intimidated look about him, and I waited for him to make some withering remark about the company: ‘Clever lot of buggers they think they are, eh?’ Ken Livingstone was supposed to present the prize, and I knew my father had heard of him , but at the last minute Livingstone dropped out and another GLC lefty high-up, Tony Banks, made the speech instead. Afterwards, someone asked my father what he thought of the poem I’d won the prize for, ‘The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper’, and he replied: ‘The Yorkshire Ripper? Nothing very poetic about that bugger.’ He seemed to enjoy himself after that. We were supposed to go on to a meal somewhere, and he began trying to organize a large party, as if it were a midnight swim at Abersoch, everyone together, no shirkers, one big happy family. A large number of people were urged into the back of his Dormobile, between the rustic poles. I have suppressed the memory of who exactly he did give a lift to that night, but in my dreams Joseph Brodsky, Martin Amis, Craig Raine, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Dylan Thomas’s daughter are driven over Westminster Bridge while my father explains that when you’re putting up rustic fencing you must be sure to use six-inch zinc nails not four-inch iron.

  Dreams? In truth, I don’t dream of him. I dream of the vast ribcage of a bison lying on the sheet of the desert and being picked clean by vultures. I dream of blistered skin and crumbling parchment and a cyclone of paper bits, a lost masterpiece blowing about the sky. But I don’t dream of him. I’ve seen his initials on a car number-plate: ABM 179X. His voice was on the answering machine for a while, a long message about bank statements, until someone left a longer one. I heard rasping breaths from his bedroom, but they died when I walked in. I woke once to strange sounds and strange red light after falling asleep watching television, but it wasn’t him. I haven’t the comfort of religion. I’m not like the boy in the Yeames painting, who knows his father is only missing, not dead. You don’t expect afterlife of an atheist. And even if my father has found an afterlife, he’ll be damned if he comes back and admits it: ‘I may not be right, but I’m never wrong.’

  His only afterlife is in the will he made, more than enough to be going on with. In his last year he added a codicil, which changed the names of his executors, which made his executors ex-executors. We didn’t know this until we opened the safe after the funeral. Had he done it because he was ill or brain-storming? Or to set the cat among the pigeons, to manipulate us from the grave? The books here on my shelves have countless examples of similar behaviour: what the dying do to the living—Mrs Wilcox in Howards End bequeathing the house to Margaret Schlegel rather than her family. Everything I co
nsume these days seems to offer some parallel. Hospitals, deathbed scenes, farcical funerals, exploding pacemakers, the art of embalming, how to cope with bereavement, the cruel C: whatever paper I read or book I open or programme I turn on is certain to be about one of them, it makes me feel unoriginal. It makes me feel I’ve been caught up in a Zeitgeist of morbidity, a sickly fin- de- siècle where death is the only theme ever discussed.

  My father wouldn’t approve of morbidity. When I hear his voice in my head appraising what I’m writing about him, he doesn’t approve of that either: ‘You fathead. Seventy-five bloody years, over forty of them while you were alive yourself, and all we get is me looking like death warmed up. You daft sod—do you think that dying is anything to write home about, that it’s any sort of story? Let’s hear about some of the good times, the holidays, the golf and tennis. What’s the big deal about death? No, tell them how good with my hands I could be, all the fun we had and things we built, how I loved you and Gill and Mummy, how I tried to leave the world a better place. And leave Auntie Beaty out of it: it was a phase, no more. There are people who have to be protected here. What else is there to say?’

  Yes, Dad, I know I should leave Beaty out, but she is part of your story, and of mine. ‘Auntie’ Beaty, rather: you always called her that, as if the name could give her status as one of the family, as a relation or godparent, one of us , or perhaps because it seemed natural to a man who called his wife ‘Mummy’ to call the other woman he loved ‘Auntie’.

  Now that you’re gone she has taken to ringing me. Fluttery, giddy, birdlike, she tells me how like you I sound. If she could see me as I stand there trying to make sense of this—in your shoes, your socks, your jumper, your blazer—she’d say I looked like you, too. For years I’ve sat among your hand-me-down furniture, lived off your money, driven your two-year-old cars (each time you bought a new one, you’d trade in mine and let me have your better one for nothing). Now there’s something more—your face staring back each time I look in the mirror. ‘Oh, you’re just like him,’ Beaty says. Maybe I am you.

  She rings Mum, too—and has been to see her. Odd to think that one of the first people to stay with my mother—after the relations from Ireland, after Auntie Hilly, after Kela—should be Beaty, who once caused her such pain. Odder, even, than thinking that Beaty would want to go and comfort the woman who kept you from her for more than a few hours a week. I can see they have something in common, but this common ground must also be a great source of pain. What have they to talk about but you? And what could be harder for them to talk about than you? I used to think they were friends only for appearance’s sake, because you gave them no choice. Now it’s what they choose. And Beaty, no doubt of it, is good for my mother—cheers her up, takes her out of herself, makes her feel better. Beaty is her friend.

  A few days after she’s left my mother, Beaty sends me a letter—photographs and chit-chat mainly, but with a sealed envelope as well, marked BLAKE: PERSONAL . I think this inner letter must be the confession I’ve been waiting for, the key to everything, but when I open it I find not revelations but Revelations—a rush of spiritual fragments and poetry: ‘Without him, the world is going to feel empty, like a shell—I must be in heaven’; ‘As I glanced back at the coffin my soul cried out in pain: how could we leave you there?’ ‘I loved you so, but as the family did.’

  I pore over the last words and write back the next day, in a sealed envelope, the same protective device. I tell her I know something of your relationship. I invite her to tell me more—I don’t mind what she tells me, I say, so long as she feels able to grieve for you like the rest of us. I write that it was all a long time ago, that time is a great healer, that I’m an adult now, whom she can address as an adult. I realize there’s something calculating in these kind, forgiving words, that they’re there in part to draw her out, to snare her like a robin in the snow. I know that I’m angry with her on some level, too, or had been angry once—angry on my own behalf, resentful of the secrets you pretended weren’t there but which I sensed were there, and were important; angry on my mother’s behalf, with her suddenly-packed suitcase at the bottom of the stairs. With a letter, though, that anger might be allayed. A few days later it comes:

  Dear Blake,

  Arthur always said never to put anything in writing. But hopefully here are some pieces in your jigsaw.

  Your mother asked me the afternoon I got there. I was sitting on the stool in the kitchen, frozen from the train and hugging the Aga. ‘You two had a long affair, didn’t you?’ I think I’d rather she’d hit me, not stay so calm.

  You know, Blake, Arthur was always the patron saint of lost causes—in his compassion he could see mine was a sad marriage. I was so alone. It was only because of him I could laugh—now I don’t know how to get through the day. I have lost my mentor, and so have you.

  I know he loved your mother more than anybody on earth. He loved Gill and you so very much. He was proud of and loved you all.

  Please leave me one last small piece—it’s mine.

  Whatever sadness I am sorry for.

  Your loving Beaty

  ‘Please leave me one last small piece. It’s mine.’ Simple, obvious, unanswerable—why hadn’t I anticipated it? People had told me I was arrogant, prying into my father’s private business, thinking I had some right of access. But I thought since I was forgiving Beaty I was entitled to some knowledge in return. I convinced myself that without that knowledge I could never make sense of my childhood or of my present—my work, my marriage, or the bits of them that seemed to be connected with being my father’s son. Perhaps I even thought that if she told me everything I’d get him back—that he wouldn’t be dead. Now I know that’s wrong. I’d been behaving as my father used to when he walked straight into patients’ homes without knocking. Now I see the doors are locked. Now I know I’ll never know the truth about him and Beaty. Even if I did, it couldn’t matter. My father’s affair is his affair. His story is not my story. And Beaty doesn’t have the missing piece. There is no missing piece, only grief.

  I tell the therapist this, as if it were a great discovery. Yes, Dad, a therapist. I know you don’t approve, I know you’re pretty down on analysts, male or female (and this one’s female), and yes of course I should have shopped around and found a cheaper one, or at least should have asked this one, instead of supinely writing the cheque: ‘How much for cash?’ But I do have to talk to someone; I’m not going to get through this alone. Not that we hit it off together all that well, she and I. There is no couch in her room, though there are beanbags, and a baseball bat to hit them with. Myself, I don’t use the baseball bat, nor scream, nor weep. I sit in a white canvas chair, the sort film directors have, and I play her back bits of my life. She catches me smiling at critical points of my psycho-story, and this, she says, or gets me to say, is because I’m trying to distance myself ironically from my emotions. She tells me I’m a poor communicator, that I don’t listen to what my body’s telling me, that I give out ambivalent signals. All of this is true, and helpful—so helpful that soon, I think, I shall stop seeing her.

  In July I go up to Yorkshire—the first time in seven months. The village wants to remember you, Dad. You were going to be a bench at first, but there is a bench already, for someone else. Then you were going to be a tree, but they worried that in digging the hole they’d sever gas pipes or electric cables. So you have become a sundial instead—watching for the sun (as you always did), sleeping out overnight, plenty of fresh air. Under the trees we planted at the front of the old house, the trees that for years wouldn’t grow in the clay but are tall now, under those trees, out by the road, they erect a sundial. Back at the house, the wind blows through the delphiniums and the roses not yet deadheaded. The rustic fencing you put up rots at its own feet. The raspberries have mildew—they’re grey and ashy like a dead mouse, and dissolve in the wind.

  The ashes themselves, your ashes, have been kept in a big sheeny-brown plastic jar at the bottom of the wa
rdrobe, and we’ve chosen today to scatter them. I take the jar down the garden, unscrew the lid, dip my hand in and taste a few grey specks: a smoky nothingness on my tongue. You, or your coffin, or a crematorium pick ’n’ mix, how can I tell? My mother and sister come, and we start to pour helpings of you among your favourite bits of the garden. We take it in turns, filling the lid of the jar with fine shale (like those upturned lids we used to fill with mouse poison and leave behind the fridge), then tossing the shale to the wind. The wind blows powder back in our faces; a speck catches in my sister’s eye, her good eye; my trouser bottoms are sifted in volcanic dust. You cover the flower-bed like fine spray, every leaf variegated. We keep on scattering till the jar is tipped up for the last time. My mother hugs my sister. I walk off with the jar, which is like a giant pill-box, and hear your voice in the wind: ‘Useful container that—I should hang on to it.’ I stow it in the garage between the jump leads and a shrunken plastic bottle of antifreeze.

  In London again, at Greenwich District, I check my heart out. ‘Always listen to your own heart,’ didn’t you say, and I have been, to those extra-systoles and odd hollowings-out and things that go bump in the night. ‘A bit slow if anything,’ says the cardiologist as I lie there, a row of milking-teats wired to my chest. I leave feeling like a hypochondriac, afraid of becoming the kind of patient you always hated, who’d turn up at the house—at the house , not surgery—unannounced.

  In August I go back to Yorkshire. Eight months on and you’re still in the headlines. SUNDIAL MEMORIAL STOLEN AFTER TWO DAYS , the paper says: ‘A plaque to local doctor Arthur Morrison, cemented in place on Friday, was vandalized and removed by Sunday.’ The parish council has had a re-think: you are going to be a bench after all. I sit with my mother outside the study, two recliners and two teas in the wind, and her words stream over me—an undammed beck, the release and relief of talking to someone. The hay has turned from green to brass, and the wind passes through it like a flu-shiver. It’s more beautiful than I’ve ever seen it—even after the tractor has been, cutting the field in an hour, the rows of hay like bodies after a plane crash waiting to be identified. ‘How’s your saga coming along?’ she asks, meaning these words I’ve been writing about you. I show her a bit. ‘It’s good about Dad,’ she says. ‘True to life. But this stuff about Beaty and Sandra …’ We sit on, inhaling the new-mownness, not wanting to give up, not wanting to let go.