The House Martin

by William Parker

  I am too shy to ask you directly what the trouble has been, my dear Pamela, but may I say that when you are returned to full health that you might think over once again the sincere offer that I made to you in London in April. I wish that you might fully consider it without haste over the next few months. You know very well that I have all the time to wait for your reply.

  I am most concerned that you need to rest further, and I would like to suggest to you that now Benjamin has returned to school, you might consider that you stay at my apartment in Paris for a few weeks? You will be quite alone and unmolested there since I have business that keeps me in the Middle East for at least the next month. You have only to say the word and my staff will make the necessary arrangements for your visit. The Grand Salon of the apartment overlooks the Jardin de Luxembourg which is glorious in these autumn days and is now returned to tranquility after the events of the students’ disturbances in the earlier part of this summer—the trees are changing colour and the fruits in the horticulturists’ area are ready to be picked! It is truly the most ideal time to be in Paris. Might you consider this visit? I know it will do you so much good. Contact me as soon as you are able. I am sending you all my love,

  Ramzai

  6, Hawthorn Close,

  Sutton Polestead,

  Nr Guildford, Surrey

  21/9/68

  My dear Ramzai,

  Thank you so very much for your letter and once again, please forgive me for not having been able to contact you over the summer. I can’t express to you how terribly touched I’ve been by your letters expressing such concern, but I do really seem to be on the mend now after two or three very difficult months.

  You’ve no need to feel shy—as you so sweetly put it—about asking what the problem with my health has been, but in fact, no one has really been able to tell me, even after many exhaustive tests. They begin to think that I suffered some sort of allergic reaction that had the effect of making me terribly weak and anaemic, but even now they are very far from certain. But the wonderful news is that every day I seem to be getting stronger and stronger. I say let it remain a mystery as long as I am better!

  How incredibly kind of you to offer to open up the apartment in Paris for me. I have wonderful memories of the Jardin de Luxembourg from when I was very small, just before the war. I was there for a few days with my father, and it must have been just this time of year, since I remember quite clearly an area of the park where they grew all sorts of varieties of peaches and apples—I even seem to recall beekeepers dressed in funny mesh hats collecting honey from hives. I had a falling out with Papa when there wasn’t time for him to keep his promise to let me have a ride on one of the donkeys because we had spent too long looking at the huge grey fish in the round pond in front of the Palais! I have been back since, but nothing touches you like your first memories of something, don’t you think?

  I cannot thank you enough for your generous offer, Ramzai, but I’m fine now and really feel that I need to be at home for a while. Ben will be coming back for his half term break in a few weeks, and I must be here. I think he was quite badly affected by my illness and then by my absence through most of his summer holidays, and it is very important to me that he sees that everything is now returning to normal. He is a very sensitive boy, and though he tries to keep himself to himself and struggles to pretend to be grown up, I’m aware that he has been suffering. He became terribly stressed during the summer which led to a dreadful incident at school and as a result, he had to miss nearly half of the term while he recuperated at home with his father, who is a truly good man, but not—as you know from our conversations—the most patient of people. I desperately need to spend some time with him to reassure him that everything has returned to normal.

  Ramzai—this now brings me to the real point of this letter. I can’t begin to tell you how difficult it is for me to write this, but I cannot leave Adrian. It would break his heart, and I do not think I could ever bear the guilt of that. But above all things, I cannot abandon my son. He’s everything to me, and as I’ve tried to explain, I need to be at home to look after him and to try to repair some of the damage of the last few months.

  I am so very sorry, especially when you are offering so much, and, in spite of what my heart would have me do, I have to listen to my conscience. Please believe me when I say that I’ll never forget the sweetness of our few days together in London, and your extraordinary kindness and generosity. They meant the world to me.

  I’m praying that eventually, however hurt you are by my refusal, you’ll be able to understand because of your own feelings for Leila and Fareeda, who have so recently had to come to terms with losing their mother. Above all, they now need the constant, loving comfort and support of their father, just as Benjamin needs that of his mother. You, above all people, have such a feeling for…

  She never finished writing that letter—and she never sent it because I think she couldn’t really make up her mind where she wanted to be.

  In the end, she didn’t want to be with Pa, she didn’t want to be with Trotsky John, she didn’t want to be with Ramzai Abu’ilam, and she didn’t want to be with me. What she says in the letter about looking after me just wasn’t true.

  I’m like her. Just exactly the same. I see her every single time I look in the mirror. I’ve even got a small mole underneath my collarbone, just like she had. My hair’s just about the same colour, I’ve got her eyes and the same nose, and when I see something squeamish, my mouth turns down at the ends just like hers used to. When I’m reading a good book, I automatically curl my legs up underneath me on the sofa and start to twizzle a bit of my fringe round my fingers just like she used to, and when I do it, the boys in the library ask me why I’m so girly. I’m not particularly, I don’t think. It’s just that I’m the same as Mummy, that’s all. I laugh at silly jokes too loudly, just like her, and if I’m gullible, so was she for sure. Once, when I was still quite small, I hid behind the sofa and dropped a huge black rubber spider into her lap. She screamed and screamed, and then saw the funny side, and we both became ill with laughing about it.

  She was a dreamer, just like I am, always closing her eyes and thinking of lovely memories and being somewhere else with her music and her books. I think she just wanted to go back to her old life, but in the end she knew it was too late for that and was trapped; the dreams were too big, and the drinking more important than any other thing in her life, including me.

  VII.

  December, 2008

  ‘Pa?’

  He’s sitting in his armchair as I open the door, the back of his head framed within the vast, distorting screen of the television he’s far too close to. I’m not sure it’s him for an instant—his hair’s been cut, and it looks as though it might have been blow-dried. The oil that he’s massaged into his scalp to tame his hair ever since I can remember has not been applied; now there’s a white halo of soft down with a just-left-of-centre parting where there’s never been one before. I struggle to check a giggle. It’s Thomas’s doing. He’s the immensely warm and personable young man from Zimbabwe who’s doing an IT course during the evenings and managing to persuade truculent old folks to do things they don’t want to during the day, and he’s been making a few alterations to ‘Mr. Adrian’s’ appearance. The hair’s the most recent and certainly the most alarming, but other revolutionary changes have been introduced, like the successful binning of an ancient pair of monogrammed slippers, which had earned me a stinging rebuke when I’d surreptitiously placed them outside the back door of the house with all the other rubbish on the day of the big move. He’s forgetful about most things these days, and I thought I’d got away with their removal. But it hadn’t passed him by, and they had to be retrieved from a black plastic bag complete with a couple of old tea bags that had found their way into an already darkly stained interior. Now, fingernails are regularly cut and cleaned, a shower-time rather than a bat
h-time has been introduced and declared ‘a real time and effort saver’ by the very same person who, in spite of a well established difficulty getting in and out of the tub, has refused to countenance just such a change for the past five or so years. I’ve just paid a bill for desperately needed new underwear from Marks and Spencer’s—my gentle blandishments to encourage an updating of his socks and pants drawer have always been dismissed with a testy ‘who’s to see my bloody pants anyway? None of their business.’ It’s quite remarkable that Pa seems to be going along with it all, only very infrequently putting his foot down—the last time about being forced into a short-sleeve shirt that he’d insisted, quite rightly, was not his own. ‘I know it’s not mine because I haven’t worn one since I came back from the Middle East!’ On a quick visit before my recent holiday, unable to find him in his room, I’d ventured along to the communal sitting room to find him not only happily ensconced in the wheelchair he swore he’d never use—with Thomas standing behind him with a proprietorial hand on his shoulder—but also clapping his hands with gusto, slightly off the beat, to a rendition of Doing the Lambeth Walk. It was being performed by a large blonde lady dressed as a pearly queen, holding a microphone attached to a portable speaker on wheels. Gone are the days, apparently, when he looked down on me for enjoying the ‘trite and vulgar’ Tchaikovsky. I guess the simple truth is that it’s not that he’s growing more amenable, just less inclined to put up a struggle. It’s probably a sign of closing down, a waning spirit of defiance, more than anything else.

  Today the room’s stiflingly hot, with the curtains at the closed French windows that lead onto a concrete patio half drawn against the sun’s rays. On the bed next to his chair, there’s a tray with an abandoned lunch—two thin sausages adrift in a sea of congealing gravy on a white plate. A segment of pallid tinned peach like a dead goldfish is lying in a saucer full of milky tea with the cup upside down beside it. Next to it, a digestive biscuit is breaking down into a brown putty in a small, not quite empty glass of orange juice balanced precariously at the very edge of the tray.

  ‘How are you doing?’ I say as I settle a hand on his shoulder and my head comes round to break his view of the omnibus version of Eastenders. He’s never shown the slightest interest in the goings on at Albert Square in the past, but the sideways jerk of his head informs me of a frisson of annoyance at the interruption.

  ‘Pa? It’s me. Ben.’

  ‘Oh! Hello there, old chap. How are you? How was your Greek trip?’ The watery blue eyes behind the glasses light up with recognition. It’s one of his better days.

  ‘It was fine, Pa. But I’ve seen you since I got back, of course.’

  ‘Of course. Of course,’ he says, nodding his head and failing in an attempt not to look puzzled.

  ‘Take a glass of port…’ A finger is wagged in the general direction of the chest of drawers.

  ‘Thanks, Pa, but I don’t drink, remember,’ I tell him, ‘Nearly two years now.’ His eyes settle on the television again. I move the tray on the bed towards the bank of pillows to make a space and hoist myself onto the bed. There’s a pristine copy of the Sunday Telegraph at the foot of the bed that I stealthily reach for, momentarily feeling guilty at my never-ending urge for information of the outside world, before I remember that the rules of engagement round here have been changing swiftly recently, and that Pa is now quite content for me to be with him without the necessity of any verbal communication at all. But still, I find myself reading with care, letting gravity gently and silently coax each turning page from perpendicular to horizontal, glancing up from the paper every now and again just in case I might be under some unspoken obligation to follow what’s unfolding on the screen. I let my hand rest on top of his on the arm of the chair. It’s his good, right, side. The fingers of his left hand are constantly moving; sometimes a small ripple travels up his arm turning into a wave that engulfs his shoulder before travelling through his torso to his left leg and down to his foot that then erupts into a series of short spasms.

  He’s wearing a pair of brown corduroys I don’t recognise. The turn-ups are adrift around his white calves and a morsel of scrambled egg from breakfast has made a home for itself in the folds round his crotch.

  ‘Thomas’s day off today, then Pa?’ I ask, as the credits begin to roll on the television.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thomas not here to help you today?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll open the door for a tiny while, shall I?’ I say, my voice rising above the theme tune that’s still holding his attention, ‘It’s quite stuffy in here, you know.’

  ‘Yes, if you want.’ When I turn the key in the door, a seal of dried condensation, dust and fraying paint around the frame succumbs to my push, and it opens with an indignant crack.

  ‘There we are. That’s better, isn’t it?’ A tingling freshness sweeps into the room like a bossy housekeeper. I go back towards the bed, sit down and take his hand in mine again. I give it a squeeze as I look round his new home. I’m glad of the few things that I’d arranged to be brought from the house to accompany him—the early Victorian mahogany chest of drawers with the bowed front, and the bracket clock inherited from his father that sits on top of it, together with his prized first edition of Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples next to the unopened bottle of port. Hanging too high above the clock on the freshly painted white wall is the passably good copy of Millais’ Ophelia that had belonged to my mother and that Pa had rather unexpectedly insisted should come with him. When I was small, I was convinced that the hapless young woman floating in the clear, deep stream, with the open eyes and supplicatory palms turned upwards to the sky was a representation of her. It frightened me, made me fearful for her, and I’d do my best to avoid setting eyes on it where it hung in her room next to the dressing table in the house in Beirut.

  There’s a suitcase that sits above the utilitarian wardrobe opposite the bed; it overhangs the top, inviting attention, as though impatient to be taken down and repacked for the resumption of some interrupted journey. It invests the room with a feeling of impermanence, as though the occupant may be staying only temporarily.

  ‘When are we going home?’

  ‘What do you mean, Pa?’

  ‘When are we going home?’ he repeats slowly, insistently, and with more than a hint of impatience, ‘I’ve had enough of the seaside. I’ve not swum once—not once. It’s too cold, and I’d like to go home. I’ve been here too long now.’

  Not such a good day after all. I walk over to the door and close it again, mapping out my words for the forthcoming struggle. ‘We’re not at the seaside, Pa. We’re in Weybridge, remember? We’ve left the house. This is where you live now.’

  ‘I’ve not been told this,’ he says, indignation rising in his voice, ‘I don’t know anything about this.’

  ‘Pa, come on, now. Of course you do.’

  ‘I’ll pop in to see you tomorrow on my way back from my trip,’ I tell him a few minutes later when the surprise at the news of his move has somewhat abated. I’ve not bothered to tell him that it’s Saxham I’m visiting. I’m not sure that he’d process that information at the moment, and anyway, a new found interest in a very loud game of snooker on the television means he’s not paying me the slightest attention.

  ‘In the suitcase…’ he says suddenly as I open the door to go. He’s twisted himself round in the chair to see me better.

  ‘What, Pa?’

  ‘You must get it from the suitcase, Ben.’

  ‘There’s nothing in your suitcase, Pa.’

  ‘No, not mine,’ he says waving the finger of his right hand, ‘Your mother’s. Your mother’s suitcase in the attic. The brooch—it’s still up there. You know the one—the Prince chappy gave it to her, remember? I’ve kept it there—always kept it there. Should be in the bank, you know. It really should be in the bank.’

 
‘Yes, Pa. I know. I found it. I’ve got it.’ It’s the first time any mention of the suitcase has passed between us. It’s as though light has streamed in through an opened window to expose our secret to harsh daylight, illuminating it for a second before it cracks and crumbles to dust.

  ‘You could give it to your daughter. When you have a daughter, you could give it to her.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I could.’ I immediately see an image of a young girl on a swing, the Teasdale heiress, demanding to be pushed harder and higher by a bemused middle-aged ‘confirmed bachelor’ who’s asking himself how on earth it came to be that he finds himself with a young daughter.

  I walk back across to the silent old man who’s studying me from his chair. ‘It’s safe and sound with me, Pa,’ I say as I put my hand on the back of his head. ‘Safe and sound with me,’ I repeat softly as slowly and deliberately I lower my head and place a firm kiss on his cheek.

  Q

  I haven’t been back here to Saxham since the day I left nearly four decades ago. Not once. Until my recent holiday in Lesbos, I truly thought I’d not the slightest interest in seeing the old place again. Less than the slightest interest, in fact. Whenever the subject of schooldays has come up in conversation, I’ve heard myself boasting that I’ve spent nearly forty years successfully erasing it from my consciousness.

  But now that I’m here, once again descending the steep lane that leads from the church down to the river bank and the old school house, it’s an extraordinary revelation to discover what my mind has decided to pack away in its box of memories and what it has totally discarded.

  I do remember the hill being this steep. Our little crocodile of boys, making its way back down the street towards the school after the Sunday morning service in the church, was always being forcefully reminded to stay on the pavement, even when that meant having to resort to a malformed, hand-in-hand single file. Step off the narrow band that hugged the houses on either side and onto the cobbled street, and you were likely to slip, especially if there was a late autumn deposit of rotting leaves or a stubborn ground frost resisting the anaemic mid-winter rays of the sun.