Out Of The Winter Gardens

by David Rees

  “Going abroad for the first time.”

  “Yes . . . well . .

  “How’s Aunt Bridie?”

  “Got stung by a bee. Otherwise O.K.”

  “And Nic?”

  “Camping out in that disgusting old fulling mill! Can’t imagine why she allows it; that bee-sting must have turned her brains. Mike . . . look after yourself. I worry about you.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about! I’ll see you on Friday.”

  6. A family reunion

  Adrian had returned to collect some of his property— twenty-two things in all; everything else that was his, or which he owned jointly with my father, he did not want. The letter was a kind of formal acknowledgment that the entire contents of the house—with the exception of the harp, which was still in the room upstairs—now belonged to Dad. Dad didn’t let me read the letter, but he told me the gist of it. “It makes life a bit simpler, I suppose,” he said. “One of the problems when a relationship ends is who owns what. People can get very unpleasant—arguing about who paid for the paint on the toilet walls, or the fablon on the larder shelves. This, for instance—” he tapped the kitchen table “—belongs to both of us. Did. It would be rather a nuisance having to go out and buy a new table and chairs.”

  “What happened,” I asked, “when you and Mum broke up?”

  “She had more or less everything. Even if I’d taken half the stuff, I wouldn’t have been able to put it anywhere—I moved into a bedsit. Where I wrote my first novel, as it so happens. Luckily the publisher took it. I dread to think what would have occurred if I’d never had a book accepted—still living in that room, I imagine, or another one rather like it, teaching the less able idiots in a comprehensive school how to punctuate, and suffering from alcoholic depression.” He filled the kettle and put it on the stove. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

  “Please. Mum once said she wished she hadn’t taken all the furniture.”

  “Why?”

  “It kept too many memories churning around, she said. She sold a lot of it four years ago. . .when Uncle John died and we moved in with Aunt Bridie and Nic.”

  “Did she?” Dad looked annoyed. “She could have asked me if I wanted some of it. There was a nice cane chair—peacock chairs they’re called; you know the sort? With the huge back. I owned that. . . oh, years before I even met your mother.”

  I laughed. “It’s in good hands. It lives in my bedroom at Tralee, and I’m very fond of it.”

  “Well, in that case . . . you know, Nora’s probably right about the memories. I’m going to experience that here.” He stared, unseeing, for a moment at the kettle, then said “Maybe I should sell up. Move to . . . no, this is stupid . . . Why should I let that man drive me out of my house?”

  “What else did he say in his letter?”

  “Nothing. It’s just cold and business-like. How can he. . .?”

  We drank our tea in silence.

  Later, I went round to Miranda’s, but there was no answer when I knocked. The woman next door, who was trimming the hedge between the two gardens, peered over and said “They’re away on holiday, in Cornwall. They won’t be back for another two weeks.” They never mentioned it to me, I said to myself, as I walked off. Very strange. Even if it was some sudden decision, like our trip to Amsterdam, she could have left me a note—slipped it through Dad’s letter-box before she left. Maybe she gave it to Adrian, who forgot, or deliberately threw it in the dustbin. No . . . there was probably some reasonable explanation. But I couldn’t help feeling more than a little sad, as I turned into the Overcliff Drive and stood on the grass to look at the sea. We had stood here, looking at it, the two of us.

  The weather was changing. There was a strong wind, and the water was dark and hungry. Clouds were building up in the south-west, spires and towers and turrets, above Durlston Head. Waves were breaking much further out than usual, curling over and collapsing in white frothy anger. No one was swimming. People were collecting up their possessions, wrapping bathing costumes in towels, putting the remnants of picnics into bags and baskets; but a few tough beach-goers were refusing to let the weather disturb them, and they sat contentedly, watching the waves and the sky. I went down the cliff and squatted on the sand, resting my chin on my knees. It’s the only place I can sit and do nothing, a beach—the sea, more than anything I can think of, satisfies the senses: the salt tangy smell, the constantly shifting pattern of noises, the slip and slither and flux that please the eye so much that there is no urge to stare elsewhere. And knowing that you’re on the edge of civilization, the last point of land, is always exciting, though why that is I can’t fathom. The sea was rushing in, pushing, receding, pushing: lacy surfaces of water obliterating sandcastles, almost convincing the watchers that soon it would engulf everything. The clouds, too, were hurtling towards us. I stayed where I was until the first light drops of rain were needles on my skin; then walked up the cliff path and reached home just before the deluge began.

  “A summer storm,” Dad said. “Was that lightning?” A distant rumble of thunder answered his question. He was preparing our evening meal—belly of pork with stewed apricots, a bit adventurous for him. As if he could read my thoughts, he said “Yes, I’ve decided to learn how to be a chef. I can’t accept dinner invitations and not give proper meals in return; I’d lose all my friends. Adrian has left a whole shelf of cookery books—he must be crazy! So I’m experimenting on you. Pass me that jar of basil, please.”

  “Father accused of poisoning son,” I said. “Something nasty in the apricots.”

  “A woman in Shakespeare died of poisoned apricots. Or was it in Webster? The Duchess of Malfi, perhaps . . . My memory is not what it was. Mmmm.” He tasted the contents of the stew-pan. “Needs a little white wine.”

  A very mercurial person, my father. Introspective and listless one moment, then the next happily absorbed in some activity—tennis, Dutch royal tombs, apricots. Perhaps that was the secret I was looking for: always to have a glut of occupations to satisfy the mind. “It smells good,” I said.

  “How was your girlfriend?” he asked.

  “Gone away on holiday.”

  “Oh. Well . . . you’ll soon meet another girl. Though that can be more easily said than done, I suppose. You know, I wouldn’t want to be sixteen again, but I envy you having the good things of life ahead to discover. Shame one can’t do it all a second time, knowing what one knows now.”

  “Do you really mean that?”

  “Of course not! There’s a certain age—the forties— when you know and you still can. A very good age to be.”

  “Well, work on it.” He looked puzzled, so I said “When you feel depressed.”

  He sighed. “I should. I can still do everything just as well as I did twenty years ago. Disco dance the whole night. Run about in shorts, as I am now, and not be ashamed of my legs.” It sounded to me as if he wasn’t absolutely convinced of all this; was he trying to reassure himself that he wasn’t old, yet feeling that he was? Maybe there’s an age when you know you can’t start again: Dad’s age. He could, as he grew older, get very lonely; if he didn’t have someone to live with at forty-five, then perhaps he never would. He’s lucky 1 exist. Was that the reason he was making such an effort to impress me, to be sure I liked him? A sort of insurance policy for his retirement? I dismissed the idea. He was just being himself: I could take it or leave it.

  More lightning, and the thunder rolled fiercely overhead. The rain was torrential. “The flowers are going to be smashed to pieces,” I said, looking out at the garden.

  “Something pleasant and comfortable about a summer storm when you’re inside the house. Listening to rain battering on the roof and knowing the roof doesn’t leak. This pork is cooked . . . Let’s see if it’s edible.”

  More chess later. His game was slower and careful, but I still managed to win. By the end of the week it would be a different story; he was learning how to read my chess mind. As I ought to learn how to read his tennis
mind, but couldn’t, as the basic techniques I had were far inferior to his.

  In Amsterdam he’d complained about people being competitive, that it ruined friendships. Yet he and I were competitive—very much so. I wanted to match him, be his equal, and he wanted to stay ahead. I wondered if at some future date it might spoil what was between us, or would he gradually relinquish things to me? Wasn’t that the idea of having children—they should ultimately be your replacements? Perhaps he just hoped I’d be equipped, be as skilful as he was, and have enough talents to face the world. He’d given up teaching when he found he could earn a living as a writer—but he’d never really stopped being a teacher. Something, I guessed, Adrian didn’t like. I did.

  Next day the sun was shining, and though the sea still looked unusually wild and restless, the routines of summer were restored—the swimmers, the families on the beach, the old ladies in the shelters. Dad spent the morning in the garden, tying broken plants to sticks, sweeping up leaves and twigs that the storm had dropped all over the grass and the flower-beds, and grappling with a huge rambling rose that had rambled too much and got itself ripped from a trellis by the wind. “I could give you roots and cuttings to take back to Alresford,” he said. “If you’d like them, that is. You told me the garden was a mess—you could do something about that if you wanted to.’’

  “Yes, I do want to. Thanks. I’ll. . . have whatever you can spare.’’

  “Well . . . some of that helenium to start with. Lovely colour—yellow as butter. Phlox. Heliopsis. Aubretia, alyssum. Lilies. Not a good time of year to move plants, but if you dig them up carefully, then put them in at once and water them thoroughly, they’ll survive. The anemone japonica, the rudbeckia, montbretia . . . those white daisies there, I got them from the churchyard in Wales where my grandfather is buried, and those . . . I don’t know what they are, but I call them Edie’s Mother’s Flowers, because my great-aunt Ethel in Glamorgan was given a bit of it by the mother of her friend Edie, and they’re the millionth descendants of that very same root. You ought to have some of it, and the daisies—they’re like family heirlooms. But . . . well, I won’t dig anything up now; we’ll wait till the end of the week.’’

  I hadn’t thought of flowers being like family heirlooms, but I suppose you can get fond of a clump of this or a patch of that, just as you feel about any relic or souvenir. “I hope I can carry them all on the train,’’ I said.

  “Maybe we could put them in plastic bags and cardboard boxes, and I could drive you home.’’

  “Drive me home? Whatever would Mum say if you turned up in Alresford?’’

  He grinned. “She’d get rather a shock, I imagine. Pleasant or unpleasant as the case may be.”

  “ Will you?”

  He considered that for a while, then muttered “Hmmm . . .ha. . . humph,” and turned back to the problem of the rambling rose. “I’ll think about it,” he said, eventually.

  “I’m going indoors to have a glass of water. I’m not sure that . . . I’m feeling too well.”

  He stopped what he was doing and stared at me. “I thought you were looking pale,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  “Queasy stomach.”

  “Last night’s apricots?”

  “No. They were delicious.”

  “There’s aspirin and paracetemol in the bathroom. You’ll find them in the cabinet over the basin.”

  I lay down on my bed, and stayed there for a couple of hours. It was nothing serious, I was sure; a mild bug I’d picked up in Holland, perhaps—but I didn’t feel at all like going for a walk or rushing down to the beach. Dad was now in his study. I could hear the typewriter tapping, somewhat more purposefully than usual. Maybe I was just exhausted—so many new experiences and sensations in such a brief time that my body needed a rest in order to catch up. I dozed. And thought.

  All kinds of things I should have thought of before, but which had been crowded out by events. What if the other kids at school knew Dad was gay? I’d become a social leper. As if he was a criminal, a jail-bird; that’s what their attitude would be. Or—like father, like son. He is, so I must be. That sort of stupidity. They knew as well as I did that I wasn’t, but that would make no difference. I remembered some boy we used to torment because his father owned a fish and chip shop. He smelled, we told him, of stale cooking fat. He didn’t, of course, but we spent weeks walking past him holding our noses. Kids can be very cruel. I wouldn’t say a word about Dad’s sexual orientation, but it was annoying to have to be secretive if I was asked why my parents had split up. His books were all in the school library; people knew I was the author’s son and they sometimes questioned me about him. I’d invariably said I knew little and cared less, which was true then—but it would be different now. I felt resentful that Dad’s being what he was could force me into telling lies.

  The jokes we repeated about homosexuals: not turning your back on them, and don’t bend down to pick up something you’d dropped; and they wore women’s clothes, minced, lisped, waved their wrists, carried handbags—as if they were female by nature but had been born into the wrong bodies; pouf, poufter, pansy, queer, homo, bender, bent, fairy, faggot, fruitcake; or they were old men in dirty raincoats who exposed themselves to children in public lavatories and parks. A composite portrait that was grotesque, silly and obviously untrue, but which had its sinister side— evil and predatory. Were there really such people? I hadn’t met any, nor come across someone who had. My father wasn’t a bit like this. Neither were the three or four boys at school I knew who’d masturbated with each other. Dad may have been different from most fathers—in the way he talked and let me talk about anything under the sun, in preferring men to women for reasons I couldn’t understand and probably never would understand—but in every other respect he was an ordinary human being.

  He came into my room later with a bowl of soup, and asked how I was. Improving, I said; aspirin seemed to have been all that was necessary. “Do you object to the rude names people like you get called?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course. Why?”

  “I just wondered. You aren’t a bit like . . .”

  “The sort of idiot you see on second-rate TV comedy shows? Larry Grayson and John Inman? Of course I’m not. Nor is anybody in real life. Do you think all blacks are violent rapists with neanderthal I.Q.s, that Pakistanis sleep fourteen to a bed, that Jews are evil moneylenders with long Fagin beards? Those are all malicious stereotypes because people are frightened of minority groups.”

  “Why?” I drank the soup: tomato.

  “They see them as threats to the status quo,” Dad said, “to a ‘normal’ way of existence. People don’t like what they can’t understand. It shouldn’t be there, they say. But what is normal?”

  “Being attracted to the opposite sex, I would have thought.”

  “And why are you attracted to the opposite sex?” he asked.

  “I just am. It’s . . . normal! There isn’t a . . .a why to it.”

  “Roughly ten per cent of the world’s population, including me, prefer their own sex. How do you account for that?”

  “I . . . I can’t. Something . . . must have gone wrong somewhere.”

  “Nothing went wrong anywhere. There isn’t a ‘why’ to it, as you’ve just said about yourself fancying girls.”

  “There must be!”

  “Nobody ever asks why men and women are attracted to each other. It’s natural, we think, like waking up or smiling or having a pee, and anything different is unnatural. But it isn’t so simple. A sizable proportion of the human race is naturally drawn to their own sex. It isn’t learned like a foreign language, or unwillingly acquired like a . . . a broken limb. And these men and women aren’t freaks—they don’t go around wishing they could change their sex. They’re not child molesters either, or anything ugly or abnormal you may have heard about from other kids at school. Many of them are perfectly happy to be what they are, and those who aren’t would be just as happy if society didn’t continu
ally frown and sneer and tell them they’re second-class citizens.”

  “Here endeth the lesson,” I said, and handed him the empty soup bowl. “I just wish . . . you weren’t.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s obvious. I’d have had you all the time, not just for this . . . this little oasis.”

  “Oasis! That’s a good image. Perhaps you’ll be a writer, too, one day.”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “You can’t undo the past,” he said, and sat down on the end of the bed. “It is, as a fact like the present. Let’s suppose the past were different, and that I wasn’t homosexual. My life would not have been the same, oh, from the teenage years onwards. I’d have met lots of girls, probably got married earlier than I did, to—and this is quite likely—someone other than Nora. I thought I was heterosexual, but deep down I knew I was different in some . . . some vague, indefinable way. I remember—no, I shouldn’t be saying things like this.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well . . . I remember the first time a girl allowed me to undo her bra. I thought, so what? What’s so interesting about it? When all the other boys were going half-crazy doing that. Or wanting to.” It reminded me so much of school now, the boys going half-crazy, etcetera, that I laughed. “You may well laugh!” he went on. “But let’s suppose another scenario, a very improbable one. A world where it’s possible to be entirely happy growing up gay. Where it isn’t regarded as wicked, or unfortunate, or unhealthy. Then I wouldn’t have got married at all. Now, what do these two imaginary pasts have in common?”

  “Neither would have led to me coming into existence.”

  “Absolutely right! Would you rather you hadn’t been born?”

  “No.”

  “In that case, you have to accept all the complicated circumstances that led up to it.”

  I sighed.“You tie me up in verbal knots, as usual. You never leave me in a position where I can score a point!”

  “Oh, sorry about that!” he said, cheerfully, and drummed a tune on the side of the soup bowl. “Listen . . . I came in here not just to give you soup, but to tell you a couple of things, and I don’t remember what they were. . . yes, I do. I’ve stopped work on that book I’m meant to be finishing; I seem to be quite unable to think of anything worthwhile to put in it. I’ve started a new story.”