In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  A thing of the flesh. As if David, or indeed any of us, would have given anything to have been spared things of the flesh, to be spared imperatives we could not control. This from a serial adulterer of the most resolute ilk. Which reminded me again of something my mother had said that summer in her house while playing Scrabble together. She said, ‘I’m not afraid of the actual dying, Tom, since I’ll be going home to glory of course, but cancer just smells so bad.’ And we were both thinking obviously of Father. Because he had smelled. There was no denying it. ‘Pounding flesh,’ David used to say when he was ‘out on a mission’. As I climbed onto the 65 I was acutely aware of a sharp, stabbing pain in my belly.

  ‘This is the sixty-five to Esher Central Station,’ a disembodied but definitely female voice was announcing. It’s interesting how frequently disembodied voices are female. I climbed on the bus with my bag and pulled out my wallet, only to realise I had no English cash to pay the fare; they would hardly take foreign credit cards on a red bus. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the driver said. Sir! I got off the bus, crossed the road to go back to the railway station and walked straight to the taxi rank.

  ‘You take cards?’ I asked the driver. A woman.

  ‘Reluctantly,’ she said.

  ‘Not as reluctantly as I take cabs.’

  Coming out with this sharp response immediately made me feel better. Combative. The pain eased. It was odd. You feel better when you get into some kind of rapport, I realised. As when you talked to the knitter with the dyed hair on the plane. When you engage with people. I need Elsa here. That is the truth. Elsa is my woman, I thought. ‘I’m going to Claygate,’ I told the driver. And to my sister I texted, ‘Send hospice address. In a cab. Don’t want to arrive late.’ Then I made a pact with myself not to look at the meter for the whole duration of the ride, not even to register the sum, mentally, when the driver finally pressed the button that stopped the figures creeping up; I would just hand her the credit card and tell her to add three quid for a tip. It would be fun discussing this detail with my shrink. The tip, I mean. No, five quid, I decided. Let’s give a stupidly large tip, against the grain, against the boy who is his mother’s thrifty son.

  I sat in the back of the cab suddenly drained of energy, staring emptily out of the window, and after some minutes realised that we were driving through Kingston. I knew because I saw the John Lewis I had been to with Mother one day that summer of four years ago, when she had wanted to buy me a teapot to take home as a gift for my wife. In the end, Mother was always more of a Kingston person than a Hounslow person. She should never have been living in Hounslow. And she always hoped that these small social rituals of gift-giving and birthday-card-sending would keep our marriage on the rails, despite the glaring evidence that the conjugal carriages had come uncoupled years ago. ‘What do I want with another teapot,’ my wife said, ‘when the only person drinking tea around here is you?’

  And why hadn’t it occurred to me that going south instead of north from Richmond, I was going closer to Dave and Deborah’s, not further from them? So if I didn’t spend all night with my mother, which seemed unlikely, I might as well make the effort and go and see Deborah and young Charlie, if it would help. Perhaps I could even sleep there. I had eaten with them in their Kingston home just once, as I recalled, something over a year ago, when the conversation over lunch in the garden – they had only recently moved into a truly magnificent house – had gravitated towards the delicate question of Charlie’s sexual orientation. The garden backed onto the river. Was this what Deborah was referring to when she spoke of my having once talked to him? Though I hadn’t actually spoken to Charlie at all. Deborah and David had waited until the children drifted away from the table to ask me was it true that Charlie had sent me some stories he had written, for me to read? One says children, but they were all in their twenties now. I had immediately been on my guard. I said it was true, yes – two stories, to be precise, in an email. He had mistakenly imagined, I said, meaning Charlie, that since I sometimes work for publishers I might be able to help him publish them.

  ‘But I actually am a publisher,’ David observed. ‘And one that publishes stories, not academic monographs.’

  ‘So you know how naïve he was being,’ I laughed.

  ‘And are they any good?’ Deborah enquired.

  I remember shrugging and saying that although I really wasn’t an expert on short stories, it was hardly my field, I tend to get hung up with syntax and lexical choices, they had seemed to me to be rather good, actually, yes. Certainly I had read them with interest. To the end. Which was rare. ‘But a bit sad,’ I added, hoping that this small extra scrap might be enough to round off and conclude a conversation that had caught me by surprise. Why Charlie had sent these stories to me, out of the blue, I really wasn’t sure. I didn’t even know how he had got my email address. And why, having sent them to me, he had then wanted to tell his parents he had sent them was even stranger. I certainly wouldn’t have mentioned it to them if they hadn’t brought the matter up. Or perhaps he had told his sister, and his sister had told his parents, which would make things even more delicate for me. But I couldn’t know that and certainly couldn’t ask.

  ‘Well, I’m rather intrigued,’ David said. ‘It’s great you think the boy can write. What are they about?’

  I took a deep breath and sighed. We had had a glass or two. It was a Sunday lunch, as I recall. There were bottles on the table. David and Deborah do drink. The house was wonderful. Their houses are always wonderful. Looking up, I guessed from something in her eyes that Deborah knew the truth. She was the boy’s mother, after all. Or at least she was afraid it might be that. While David was oblivious. David thought we were simply talking literary performance. He was a book man. And for a moment I was able to savour the irony of Deborah’s being largely unaware of her husband’s endless sexual adventures, but cottoning on fairly rapidly about her son, or so it seemed, and David’s living a life of extraordinary deviousness while remaining absolutely oblivious to Charlie’s identity crisis, a crisis intensified perhaps precisely by this lack of awareness on his father’s part. Perhaps deviousness obliges a man to be so focused on his own performance that he really doesn’t have the mental space for anyone else’s. In the end you can hardly expect a tightrope walker to help you with your bags.

  ‘He seems a bit shy of telling us what he writes,’ David prodded, smiling at me.

  David and I hadn’t spoken in a while, not since my separation anyway, and although in the past there had been times of exhilarating intimacy, these days we barely communicated at all.

  ‘Kids and their fathers,’ I said offhand. It must have been obvious I was hiding something.

  ‘Oh, come on.’ David poured himself more wine.

  ‘Love,’ I told him. ‘They’re stories about love.’ This was true. ‘Who would want their parents to read their love stories?’

  ‘Oh, romance!’ he exclaimed. ‘Wonderful! Sells books.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Excellent,’ David filled his glass. ‘Funny,’ he chuckled, ‘he keeps his women well hidden.’

  There was a moment’s silence. What was I supposed to say? Charlie hadn’t suggested that sending the stories to me – and they were as passionate and explicit as ever stories could be – was a way of coming out to his parents. He had simply asked me for a literary opinion. We had spoken about literature a few times in the past when I had stopped by at their house. We were all bookish people. And once, when my family visited theirs, we had played tennis together. Presumably Charlie had imagined I would be a sympathetic ear within his parents’ circle. I was the kind of low-church guy who swore at a high-church table. In particular, I was the close friend of a father who was jovially, insatiably heterosexual and never swore at table. And Charlie was right. I was a sympathetic ear. I really could not care if the boy was homosexual or not. I feel a deep sympathy for anyone pushed by fleshly imperatives to take decisions his nearest and dearest are not easy with. But then
I wasn’t his father. He wasn’t my son. And he hadn’t actually told me whether or not to say anything to his parents. He hadn’t asked me to tell and he hadn’t asked for discretion. I was simply sent two highly erotic, touchingly lyrical stories about adolescent homosexual love. However, there was the complication that while one of the stories finished happily, the other, which was by far the longer and more ambitious of the two, ended with an accident that might well have been construed as a suicide, a double suicide, perhaps even a death pact. At the end of the family holidays on which the two adolescents discover their sexuality, the evening before their parents are due to return to their strait-laced city lives, the two young men dive from a cliff into a tormented and rocky sea. What coast this was wasn’t clear, but their deaths were, as it were, taken for granted. That was the catastrophic tone of the final lines of an otherwise blissful story. It didn’t bode well for a coming out.

  ‘I guess if you want the details,’ I said, ‘you should ask him for a copy. I mean, I wouldn’t like to give away the end and spoil it for you.’

  ‘Damn, you’ve got me curious!’ David said. ‘Don’t tease, Tommy. Tell!’

  He filled my glass again. I sat smiling.

  Then Deborah said, ‘By the way, Tom, speaking of romance, Dave and I have a story of our own.’

  David pressed his hands on the table and rolled his eyes.

  ‘Do we have to?’

  Deborah was suddenly beaming. ‘Can you believe this old bear has agreed to marry me on my sixtieth birthday? Think of that!’ She actually clapped her hands. At once I realised she had been dying to tell me this all lunchtime.

  The truth was David had always refused to marry Deborah. They had lived together and had children together unmarried, in sin, despite her high-churchness. It had been hard for her. Officially, Dave’s refusal was ideological. Child of ’68, he was against all conservative institutions, he said. But unofficially I felt it was because, beyond the evident social and economic advantages of marrying a smart woman from a wealthy, well-connected family, who incidentally was five years older than he was and had always looked after him in every way, David’s flesh nevertheless warned him that Deborah was not, as he put it, his woman. However long they lived together, at the deepest level they would never truly be married, ceremony or not. He knew that. Except that now, rather surprisingly, he had agreed to marry her on her sixtieth birthday.

  ‘Better late than never! Congratulations.’

  ‘More attrition than romance,’ David commented. He was laughing, but it was cruel all the same. ‘Do we have to?’ he repeated when Deborah began to talk of the wedding-reception arrangements. Again it seemed cruel, but a cruelty born of unease. And now it was Deborah who, by ignoring his unease and cruelty, seemed determined to be cruel herself. The party would be on a boat on the Thames, she explained; which had the advantage of restricting the number of people who could come. Otherwise, marrying at sixty, there was simply no end to the people they might have to invite. ‘Even grandchildren,’ she giggled. Their eldest daughter was producing a second.

  ‘I won’t be sixty,’ David said, filling his glass yet again.

  ‘I suppose,’ Deborah laughed, ‘given what you said about the stories, Tom, we should ask Charlie if he has a partner to bring.’

  Why did she say that, I wondered, when it had seemed to me she had guessed why I hadn’t wanted to talk about them? Or was I wrong? Perhaps she just liked to throw out knowing glances from time to time.

  ‘Even two,’ David joked. ‘A few charming chicks would give us the excuse to exclude an old hen or two.’

  Deborah laughed with him. But I was unsettled. All at once I felt a powerful rush of impatience; no doubt it came in the wake of that tidal wave of emotions that had so recently swept away my own family life. I was fed up with charades.

  ‘I’m afraid they’ll be cocks,’ I said. ‘Not chicks.’

  ‘Where exactly in Claygate, sir?’ the driver asked.

  Thirty minutes in heavy traffic and I hadn’t thought of my mother at all. But nor had I thought of anal massage or bladder pains. I checked the phone, to find that my sister hadn’t answered my message.

  ‘It’s a hospice,’ I said. ‘In the Claygate area.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘A hospice. Those homes for people who are dying.’

  The taxi driver shook her head. She had a straight-backed, rather military look to her.

  ‘Near St Leonard’s Road.’

  ‘Do you want me to take you there?’ She began keying the name into her navigator.

  ‘I’ll see if I can get the address.’

  I phoned my sister now and, as I waited for the call to connect, wondered if my impetuous, perhaps unwise disclosure at Sunday lunch more than a year before – my telling my friend, albeit not in so many words, that his beloved younger son was gay – had perhaps set off whatever chain of events led to Charlie’s smashing a chair over his father’s head sometime in the early hours of this morning. The phone rang but wouldn’t answer. On the second attempt the call was rejected.

  ‘Okay, St Leonard’s Road,’ I said.

  The taxi stopped. When we’d finished sorting the money, the driver turned and flashed me a smile, a five-pound smile, I suppose.

  ‘Thank you, sir. Glad I overcame my reluctance.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ I told her. In other days I might have asked for her phone number. There was something about the woman. Perhaps a sense that she was doing a job she didn’t really want to do. Conflictedness can be attractive. As it was, I climbed out of the car to find myself in a long and leafy suburban street, the kind of place someone like myself should be living in – would be living in, I thought – had I played all my cards in the conventional fashion.

  Where was Mother?

  V

  Climbing out of the cab onto the lamplit pavement in St Leonard’s Road, I phoned Elsa. This wasn’t so much a decision as a compulsion. The events of the last few hours had disoriented me. I needed to remember I was a happy man who had made the right decisions in life.

  Then, waiting for the call to connect, looking up and down the pavement for someone to ask where the hospice was, and it seemed rather strange to me that there was no one out and about here, in the kind of pleasant suburban street so many people would kill to live in, I suddenly found myself muttering the words, That a love should be. ‘That a love should be,’ I said out loud in St Leonard’s Road, my voice drowned out by passing cars, passing cabs. Even the number 65 now. The big red bus came thundering by. I had gained nothing with my taxi fare.

  People were in their houses, of course, where else? It was after nine. Fine semi-detached structures set well back from the brisk traffic, looming darkly behind winter branches and glossy shrubs. Perhaps I should knock and ask, I thought. There were chinks of light behind the curtains. Excuse me, where is the local hospice? The local place to die. They were the kind of properties professional couples slave to bring up A-grade children in, as my wife and I had slaved many years for a beautiful property to house our happiness and ambitious children. We weren’t happy. Ambitions are a torment. The line was taking longer than seemed possible to connect. Elsa, I muttered. Much of what we pass on to our children is torment. Probably I should check how much credit I had. I started to walk towards the bus stop, where three or four people had got off. Somebody must know where the hospice was.

  ‘That a love should be,’ I told the shrink. They were the first words finally spoken through a storm of tears on that initial, historic encounter with this small, unremarkable woman. In St Leonard’s Road I walked, Nokia at my ear, towards the alighting passengers, who had all set out in the opposite direction. It had come on to drizzle. Would the hospice have some kind of sign, I wondered, in wrought iron or neon? Abandon all hope, ye who …

  ‘What do you mean by that exactly?’ the shrink asked.

  A man in his fifties wearing respectable city clothes had stumbled into her office in central Madrid, tried to ex
plain his problems and burst into tears. Then every time this solid, middle-aged Englishman – perhaps his jacket was a little the worse for wear – appeared to be calming down, every time he tried once again to articulate, in Spanish, some explanation for his urgent request for an appointment, once again he burst into tears. Whenever I wonder if I could have stayed with my wife, if I could have stayed in our beautiful house where we worked so hard to have our children become what we thought children ought to be, my mind returns to this historic first encounter with the shrink: a meltdown.

  ‘Tell me why you’ve come,’ the woman repeated evenly.

  In her late sixties, if not older, the shrink lit a cigarette, a long slim menthol thing. Retrospectively, I would be surprised that in a so-called caring situation a health professional, so-called, would smoke cigarettes. It was a place of work after all. At the time I barely registered the fact. For years I had wondered if I should go to see a shrink. For years the answer had been no. You can handle this on your own. What on earth do you need a shrink for? Because you are unhappy? Because you have chronic stomach pains? Isn’t it the rule to be unhappy? Aren’t there medicines for stomach pains? Scalpels, if need be? ‘Part of the modern malaise,’ my mother had frowned, when I confessed to her during that long summer in her tiny house that sometimes I did think perhaps I ought to see a shrink – no, ‘analyst’ would have been the word I used with her; it was quite possible my mother did not know the word ‘shrink’, had not registered it, as she would say. This was some time before the memorable evening when she spoke to me so confidently of her funeral arrangements. Psychoanalysis was part of the modern malaise, she said. People were too proud to look into their hearts and confess their sins and receive the comfort their saviour so generously offered. Instead they went to so-called analysts to seek justification for some evil they were doing that made them unhappy. If one was unhappy, it was because one was doing some evil that contradicted God’s plan. Or to find someone else to lay the blame on. Their mothers, most likely. ‘I never would on you, Mum,’ I laughed, ‘with the quality of your apple crumbles these days.’ She laughed too. She said she was always ready to pray with me, if only I would say the word. Imagine how odd, then, and oddly exciting, when I heard a couple of years later, from my brother, that in his early fifties my father of all people, the Reverend Edward Sanders, had been to see a shrink. ‘But he stopped after two or three sessions.’ Where my brother got this information, I have no idea. Who would have told him? ‘Complete waste of time,’ my brother added. He too had given up on his shrink after just a few sessions. ‘You wonder what on earth you are paying them for,’ he said.