Now, like my father when he was robbed by Hamlett Isaacs, I too entertain murderous thoughts.
CHAPTER 24
Three women (Part one)
‘There were three of us in the marriage, so it was pretty crowded.’
PRINCESS DIANA TO BBC PANORAMA
I am so anxious waiting for the news about whether my father has passed the requirements for admission to Nightingale House that I can find no useful way to make the minutes pass. I dare not leave the phone or my mother for more than a few moments. My neck and shoulders ache with a burning tension, I am so stiff I can barely turn my head. After days of unbearable suspense, the social worker calls and cannot conceal his pleasure in giving me the good news. At last, something positive.
Jubilant, I grab a bottle of champagne, jump on the bus and thrust it into his hands. He looks puzzled. ‘I was just doing my job,’ he says. ‘But thank you, and good luck. Your father is one of the lucky ones.’ It’s hard to see it like that but I remind myself that I must.
At home, in a rare moment of respite from the gloom, my mother insists on opening more bubbles, a small celebration of a big victory. ‘To you,’ she says and I feel my heart ready to split. Mission accomplished, I book my return journey to Australia. I have no idea how my mother is going to cope on her own, but I simply have to leave. She gives my decision her blessing, but cannot conceal her dread. I promise to return in six weeks.
The day after I leave, my father is transferred by ambulance to his new home. He is calm but disoriented. The reception he gets could not be kinder or more thoughtful. My mother reports that staff lined up to greet him like a VIP. The carers made him a special cup of his favourite weak tea with lemon to help settle him. On the phone my mother sounds drained but relieved.
Papa is dosed with powerful antipsychotic medication but it is weeks before it takes effect. Meanwhile he wanders the corridors, intruding on other residents, sometimes attempting to get into bed with them as he did in hospital. Undeterred by the gate on the stairs, code on the lift and security at the front door, he persists in trying to escape. He steals clothing and chocolate and makes lewd comments to visitors.
When I visit a few weeks later, I often find him reading the papers. On closer inspection I notice they are upside down, but he seems to enjoy turning pages. He worries at the zipper of his document case obsessively and is endlessly searching for his car keys. I bring a bunch for him to play with and this appears to soothe him. Anything he holds is impossible to prise away, held by fingers like steel rods. He still has the power to hurt by crushing bones and biting. Mercifully, he appears undisturbed by a very distressed woman who sits nearby in the lounge screaming for hours on end ‘I CAN’T SEE!’ and whom no one can quiet. Although sighted, she is apparently reliving a traumatic memory of her childhood in the London Blitz.
At first, colleagues visit but they find the sight of my father so diminished too painful to endure and disappear, never to return. They are too ashamed to tell my mother how they feel and she is so angry with them that her resentment keeps them at bay, isolating her even further.
My father’s old business brain has decided that he is staying in a poorly run hotel. One day he commandeers the nurses’ station as his office and refuses to move. Repeating gestures hardwired into his deepest being, he finds a blank sheet of paper in a drawer, and scrawls a barely legible letter recommending a pay rise for all the staff. This endears him to his carers no end, earning him extra tea and biscuits. My mother, playing up to his general manager role, brings in his briefcase. While he is still mobile, he shuffles to and from his preferred chair, holding the case as if setting off for a meeting. Sometimes he cries in the middle of an incomplete sentence but it is like a spring shower and passes quickly. Maman feeds him with a spoon, as he fed me when I was a baby, pretending each was a different plane. ‘Here comes a Caravelle, here comes a Boeing,’ he used to say with each mouthful that landed. Now she does the same and he opens his mouth with mechanical obedience. The nurses claim he smiles if they mention my name.
He responds to an ever diminishing set of stimuli. Live music is performed regularly at Nightingale. One day a young soprano, part of a lunchtime concert trio, kneels at his feet to sing him an aria from Carmen, gently stroking his hand.
A year after our French reconciliation, my father turned eighty. To mark the occasion, he said he would like to hear Simon Rattle conduct Wagner’s Ring Cycle at Aix-en-Provence. If I could secure the tickets, he would pay for the trip. We had a deal. What a long way we had come, he and I, since the first time he subjected me to Wagner at the preposterously precocious age of twelve, expecting me to sit through the tedium of a performance of Das Rheingold so I could have the privilege of seeing Herbert von Karajan conduct. As if I cared. The experience had exactly the opposite effect to the one my father intended: it put me off opera for the next decade. When I came round, I did so gradually, persuaded first by Mozart, then Bizet and Puccini. Wagner took another ten years.
Now those days glow in my memory like amber: long lunches on the terrace of the café where Cézanne had been a regular. Dusky pink suede peaches blushing in the market. And at night, we are transported to Valhalla: a monstrous family way more dysfunctional than ours playing out its warped destiny to the most sublime, transcendent anthems on earth. My father rises to his feet, part of a thunderous, tribal ovation. We hoot like the Valkyries, we bay like wolves, as only fanatics can. We are elated, freed of all our own ridiculous posturings by the absurd vanity of the gods.
I am so grateful for those precious halcyon days together, watching Papa now as the kind young singer takes his hands in hers and shows him how to clap. He repeats her gesture, fingers splayed like a child, tears rolling down his cheeks.
When he is taken on outings and stares out of the window of the Nightingale van, my mother, always by his side on these occasions, notices that he looks at the cars with more animation than usual. Once, seeing a Jaguar, he gives an almost imperceptible nod, as if saluting an old friend.
Several weeks after my father’s move to the nursing home, I got an email out of the blue from a stranger in the UK. I’ll call her Moira. She’d stumbled across an interview I’d given to BBC Radio Yorkshire on the seventieth anniversary of Kindertransport. Since my father was too ill to participate, I felt I should mark the occasion on his behalf, and had written a piece for a commemorative exhibition and anthology of memories by children and some of the families who took them in. The local BBC station asked me to elaborate on what I’d written and in the course of the conversation I explained that my father was now unable to recall this episode from his past.
Moira wrote that she was distressed to hear my father was unwell and wondered if I could tell her more. She had been a colleague and also his girlfriend before he married my mother and they had stayed in touch over the decades. She had married and been widowed for thirty years, had many grandchildren, and sounded active and independent. She had last seen my father in 2004, when he had taken her out to lunch.
I love the serendipity of such connections, the way strangers can find each other through the ether and how people with a tenuous link can choose whether or not to strengthen that bond. I wrote back and told her what I could, as gently as possible, suggesting that if she was thinking of visiting him, some times were better than others. I mentioned her to my mother. The two had never met, but my mother was aware of Moira’s existence. ‘Your father was still seeing a bit of her when he started seeing me,’ she said. She was surprised but not upset to learn that my father had kept up his contact with her until so recently, even offering to accompany Moira to see my father to make it easier. It was a generous offer from someone normally wary and suspicious of strangers. My mother was changing and I could see it in the way she dealt with this moment. She absorbed the fact of this woman without hostility. Where once she might have shrugged the incident off as yet another minor annoyance, now she was acting with compassion. I admired her generosity. It took guts.<
br />
Showing equal pluck, Moira could not wait and drove herself all the way from Winchester to see my father unannounced. The visit was not a success and distressed her considerably. ‘He did not open his eyes once while I was there,’ she wrote in a subsequent email, ‘and the only word he said over and over was “beast”.’ Undeterred, she returned a few days later, again alone. Afterwards, she spoke to my mother on the phone.
‘I hear you had a special visitor,’ my mother said the next day when she visited my father. No response. ‘Moira?’ she prompted, stroking his arm in encouragement. Waking from his near permanent stupor of dozing, he opened his watery eyes briefly and replied ‘Yes’ with a fleeting smile. So he remembered something, perhaps. Or maybe the sound of her name simply triggered a deeper memory.
Although her emails revealed strength of character, Moira was not ready to meet my mother. She wrote to me that when she had last seen my father, she had noticed tiny anomalies that perhaps family members would not pick up on, like the fact that he seemed unable to calculate the change to leave as a tip, which was extremely uncharacteristic given his talent for rapid mental arithmetic. She also said he had admitted that he and I were not on good terms. This was one year into our estrangement. I felt a stab of shame, imagining him telling her how disappointed he was in me.
By the time I was an adolescent, my father had gathered a strong and loyal team around him, including several women whom he promoted to senior positions, loyal deputies who proved they had his stamina for long hours and who seemed able to weather his tantrums, withering invective and irrational tyrannical edicts: he once pronounced in deadly seriousness that the wearing of culottes, which were fashionable at the time, was a sackable offence. Most of these female staff were single. Husbands or boyfriends would have resented my father’s intrusions on weekends and evenings, and talked their partners into less demanding positions.
Increasingly, he was not home for dinner during the week. A husky voice became familiar on the phone—Helena, his trusted ally, his number two, ringing to say he was on his way. When I met her for the first time, I saw in her petite presence my mother in miniature: same olive skin, similarly strong nose, dark hair, dark eyes, definite foreign accent. But the similarity did not register as especially significant, given the stark difference: Helena was wedded to her career. She was all business, a professional woman who talked shop, went to conferences, attended meetings, talked about brochures, balance sheets, clients, destinations and hotel rates. She was always formal and polite to my mother and somewhat condescending to me. It was only many years later that my mother told me she had guessed that my father was having an affair with Helena.
No child wants to contemplate their parents’ sex lives. I knew enough to tell me that my parents had long ceased to have any kind of intimate relationship. There were no Saturday afternoons when they closed the door of their bedroom on the sly pretext of a nap. My mother had dropped sufficient hints suggesting sex was never a source of pleasure and that it was only ever the means to an end: to have a child. Once that goal was achieved, she moved to another room where she slept in a single bed. The message was plain enough: from then on, conjugal rights were, I suspect, off the menu.
Little wonder that my father, for whom sex was probably a necessary recreational release, went looking elsewhere. Fair enough, I say, but by the same token I understand my mother’s inability to satisfy his needs. Perhaps she was not an especially sexual creature, perhaps they were not compatible, or perhaps the secret trauma of rape never released her from its grasp. Despite this fundamental mismatch, in good times, my parents were affectionate towards each other. They walked down streets hand in hand or arm in arm. They hugged, and my father kissed my mother on the cheek when she cooked a favourite dish or looked especially smashing, to use one of his favourite compliments.
Eventually my father set Helena up in her own business, perhaps as a way of making up for not keeping more personal promises to her. He was extremely loyal and generous, if you looked at it one way, or controlling and paternalistic if you looked at it another. To him, Helena was family and he expected us to see it that way too; he had met her relatives overseas, stayed in their homes, and he relished the role of senior adviser and confidant over every move she made. He expected her to be present at major celebrations. When I arranged a small gathering at home to mark his seventy-fifth birthday, she was there to watch him blow out the candles, although my mother would much have preferred her not to be. The two maintained a civil façade though it was never more than cordial.
When Helena came to Sydney for a conference, my father wrote instructing me to take her out to dinner at the best restaurant in town and offering to pay. I settled for something a little less showy and we had a very pleasant adult evening together during which she told me that my father had promised to marry her. She was not bitter about the fact that it never came to pass. Perhaps she was even secretly a little relieved, as he was now frankly something of a nuisance, offering unsolicited advice on everything from where to take a holiday to where to buy property. She agreed that he had not prepared for retirement, that it did not suit him, that he was lost and bored and prone to stubborn prejudices and wild entrepreneurial schemes—all said in the slightly patronising but still lingeringly affectionate tone unique to former girlfriends and mistresses.
‘He was so promiscuous,’ she said of his careless way of buying gifts for her, later discovering that he had bulk-bought multiples to give to his wife and other female associates. I suddenly remembered an evening when I was ten or eleven and we were dining out overseas with business partners, including a tall, lean and stylish American woman with short cropped curls, long legs and throaty laugh I found thrilling. My mother admired a very modern, sculptural gold ring she was wearing.
‘I have one just like that,’ said my mother, genuinely amazed at the coincidence. Sure enough, my father had bought them both. My mother made a scene about it when we got back to the hotel.
When my father was diagnosed, Helena was loyal. Where other colleagues fell away spectacularly, Helena came to spend time with him regularly and always called my mother. The two became somewhat grudging and awkward allies. Though her manner was often frosty, my mother was grateful to Helena for not abandoning my father when he could no longer be of use to her.
I wish I could ask Helena what she saw in my father that made her cross the line from employee to lover. I don’t want sordid details but I want to know whether the attraction was simply the headiness of doing deals together, winning business, wooing clients, pulling off bigger and bigger projects, seeing the cash flow and the stakes rise as the business’s reputation grew and grew. Most probably it was that, together with the complicity that comes from being away, somewhere anonymous, in a good hotel. That’s sexy enough when things are legitimate, but when they are not, it becomes truly intoxicating.
Am I promiscuous too? If not sexually, then socially: gathering people up with sudden enthusiasm and then being slightly cavalier about their feelings when their novelty fades? It is an accusation that has been levelled at me more than once.
I don’t blame Helena for wanting my father to leave his family. At the time, there was nothing I wished for more. During one particularly nightmarish skiing holiday in my mid-teens, I sat my parents down and begged them to get divorced to stop the fighting. My mother would not countenance the idea.
Many years later, when my first marriage broke up, my father wrote to me that, in 1983, keenly aware of the historical symbolism of the location, he chose the forest of Compiègne where two armistices between the French and the Germans were signed in 1918 and in 1940 as the site for a solitary walk. Taking his cue from that anniversary, and defeated by my mother’s sustained assault of tears, he privately negotiated his own peace treaty. Later he may have come to regret it, given that theirs was always an uneasy truce: they never seemed to achieve the autumnal harmony that other couples sometimes manage after spells of turbulence. There was no ser
enity between them, just milder or sharper tones of needling and wheedling.
But he did not give up his ways. Out of the blue he decided to quit smoking, having been a sixty-a-day man for decades. Recognising his habit was hardcore, he suddenly announced that he had booked himself in with a Russian hypnotist in Chicago for a weekend. When he came back, he never smoked again. Why did he resort to such extreme measures without notice? And why did he have to go to America to cure himself of the habit of a lifetime? Was it to please the wife and daughter who had been begging him to stop? I doubt it, as he had been ignoring our appeals for years. I suspect that it was to please someone with whom he was involved.
Several years later, another alarm bell rang when my father turned up with an uncharacteristic purchase: a pair of trainers. My father has never worn any kind of sports shoe. I have seen him walk through thick snow and on hot sand in leather loafers. Something was quite literally afoot.
Under sustained cross-examination from my mother, he confessed: he had planned to go walking with a younger acolyte from South Africa whom he had met at a conference many years earlier. I will call her Amber. He admitted they had been involved, but swore the relationship was over. Later, my mother, who was not normally a snoop, found the carelessly left receipts that so many wives seem destined to find when getting their husband’s clothes ready for the drycleaner.
Scenes ensued. Amber was brazen enough to ring the house occasionally, and my mother would slam the phone down on her. My father played victim, claiming that he was being stalked and harassed. But my mother found out that my father was sending Amber money and managing her financial affairs, so the connection was not entirely broken. She worried he might change his will.
One day shortly after my father had become a Nightingale House resident, the postman making his rounds accosted my mother in the foyer of her building. ‘Excuse me, Mrs Baum, your post-office box has overflowed and I haven’t seen Mr Baum for some time so I thought I’d bring you your mail,’ he said helpfully. My mother was not aware of having a post-office box. When she examined its contents, it turned out to be dozens of lottery notices, mixed in with letters postmarked from South Africa. My father had been devious enough to divert his mail to a secret address to hide the extent of two betrayals: one financial, the other emotional.
Only Page 24
