by Tony Parsons
‘I saw the pair of them,’ I said. ‘Peter and his missus. With their kids.’ A beat. ‘You’re much more beautiful than she is, Gina. I saw the woman. She’s nothing special.’
I expected Gina to deny her beauty. That’s what she always did in her twenties. Like all the beautiful ones, she got sick of people talking about it, as if the way she looked was the most interesting thing about her. But now she just laughed.
‘Yeah, well. The Japanese have a saying – a man gets bored with a beautiful woman after three days but he gets used to a plain woman after three days.’
‘They’re a cruel race.’
‘It probably loses something in the translation. And they are actually the kindest people in the world.’
She looked away. The barrier between us had briefly lifted. But now it had come down again. And I saw that Gina had not wrecked our lives. She had wrecked her own life. And I knew that I could never find it in my heart to hate her.
The redhead – Sian – brought the tea. She had even made a cup for me. Green, Japanese, healthy-looking tea. Luckily I wasn’t expecting Brook Bond PG Tips and a custard cream. I perched on the edge of the sofa, giving Gina some space.
‘I could stay, if you want me to,’ Sian said.
Gina smiled and shook her head. ‘It’s okay.’
The redhead glanced at me quickly and looked away. She began backing towards the door, like a courtier leaving some regal presence. ‘Call me later?’
Gina closed her eyes, nodded, and smiled. There was a click as Sian shut the door quietly behind her.
Gina sipped her tea. ‘She’s been great.’ She looked at me meaningfully over the rim of her green tea. ‘Really supportive.’
I smiled. ‘She’s gay, right? Sian is gay.’
Gina put down her tea. ‘Not much gets past you, does it, Harry?’
I smiled. ‘What are you saying to me, Gina? What are we talking about here?’
She looked at me. Mocking, defiant. Enjoying it.
‘What do you think I’m saying, Harry? What do you think we’re talking about? Have a wild guess.’
I laughed. ‘You’re not a lesbian, Gina,’ I said. ‘If that’s what you’re planning for the next experiment, the next adventure, the next quest for fulfilment, then I wouldn’t bother.’
She mimed confusion. ‘What’s it got to do with you?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, standing up. ‘But I’m more of a lesbian than you are, Gina. Trust me, you’re not a lesbian.’ I took a few steps to the door. It wasn’t a very big flat after all. ‘You’re just tired of men,’ I said.
Then I went to find my son.
A mile from the house where I grew up, there is a church on a hill.
And when I saw Pat sitting cross-legged by the grave, an almost-empty bottle of cider in one hand and a cigarette in the other, with Elizabeth Montgomery sitting opposite him, her legs stretched out, watching his face, I knew that I had been wrong all along to believe that my parents were not here.
I saw both my parents after they died, and it was a definite anti-climax. I wanted a big moment – some emotional final farewell – Katherine Jenkins singing ‘Time to Say Goodbye’ in the soundtrack of my mind – and it wasn’t like that at all. I had the same reaction to both of the bodies. My father in the back room of the undertaker’s on the suburban high street. My mum still at home in the bed she had shared with my father, and then slept in alone as his widow. And the feeling was one of anti-climax.
That is not he.
That is not she.
Whatever light had made my father the man that he was, and whatever light had made my mother the woman she was, it had gone out, or gone away. And while I could not say if it had gone to heaven or oblivion, I knew that it was gone. That was not my dad in the undertaker’s back room. That was not my mum in the bedroom where she slept for forty years. My parents were elsewhere, or they were nowhere at all.
And that is why I always resisted the hour’s drive out to the grave they shared. Apart from the fact that I was always busy with my life, and apart from the fact that it was a drag battling through the commuters heading east on the M25. Apart from all that, I did not believe that my mother and father were actually resting in this bleakly picturesque graveyard, with the five-hundred-year-old church behind it and the yellow fields rolling away beyond.
And I was wrong.
They were here.
And their grandson, his long blond hair roughly shorn close to his head, was with them.
Elizabeth Montgomery looked up as I approached the grave.
I saw Pat take a drag on his cigarette, his eyes squinting as he exhaled and muttered, ‘It’s only my dad.’
Elizabeth Montgomery stood up, smoothing her skirt, and smiled. She had a great smile. And I thought, What a wonderful choice. If you are a boy and you are choosing a girl to go crazy about, then you couldn’t do better than Elizabeth Montgomery. A girl who will come and smoke and drink cider with you at your grandparents’ grave. How could you do better than a girl like that?
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘The need to pee.’
I looked at Pat and then I looked at the grave. They had brought flowers, I realised with a pang of guilt.
‘You certainly know how to show a girl a good time,’ I said. ‘Cider. A graveyard. And a packet of low-tar. Last of the big spenders.’
‘Don’t tell me you never hung out in graveyards,’ he said, not looking at me.
I laughed, remembering lurking in this very graveyard with my best mate, looking down the sights of a .22 air rifle and running for home every time the sky got dark and we heard the rustle of leaves behind a gravestone.
Pat held out the bottle of cider.
‘Go on then,’ I said, and I took a swig.
‘The thing about grandparents,’ said my son, ‘is that they love you in a different way. Parents – sorry – but they drive you up the wall. Because they are always on at you to be better. Smarter. Tougher. Nicer.’ He looked at the gravestone. ‘Grandparents just accept you the way you are. Grandparents are happy with you in a way that parents never are. Parents are always trying to make improvements – as if you are some derelict property that needs doing up. With grandparents it’s unconditional love. That’s how I remember it, anyway.’ Pat glanced at the gravestone.
‘That’s how it was,’ I said, and took another swig of the cider.
‘They’ve been gone for quite a while,’ Pat said.
For most of his life. ‘I wish they’d known Joni,’ I said. ‘I regret that – them not knowing her.’
Pat laughed. ‘They’d have eaten her up.’
I gave him back his bottle of cider. ‘Yeah, she’s an edible little thing.’ I felt like hugging him, but I didn’t. ‘Your hair…’
He self-consciously ran his fingers through it. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said.
‘I’ll complain to the headmaster.’
‘Good luck with that.’ He shook his head. ‘They’ve done worse. They do worse every day. You just don’t see it.’
Elizabeth Montgomery came back. She crouched down by Pat’s side and kissed his face. He didn’t move, just pinched out the remains of his cigarette and put it in his school blazer. The grave was very clean.
‘Give you a ride back?’ I asked them.
Elizabeth Montgomery looked at Pat, and he shook his head.
‘We’ll stay for a bit longer,’ he said.
Elizabeth Montgomery held up a paper bag that said Gourmet Fare on the side. ‘We’ve brought sandwiches,’ she said. ‘We were going to make a day of it.’
I looked at them uncertainly. ‘You promise me you’ll go back tonight? She’s worried. Your mother’s worried.’
Pat looked up at me. I was expecting some coruscating teenage sarcasm, but he nodded seriously. ‘We’re going back tonight, okay?’
Elizabeth Montgomery stood up and smiled at me. ‘We’re fine,’ she said. ‘We can get the train.’
‘Okay.’
&
nbsp; I looked down at the yellow fields. With that perfect harmony that made them seem more like a private world than a married couple, my parents had died on almost the same day. More than a decade had separated their deaths, but on the calendar it was only twenty-four hours apart. So when I saw the yellow fields of spring, they both came back at once. I should come to this place more often, I realised. If only to see the yellow fields.
I shook Elizabeth Montgomery’s hand and gave my son a hard, fierce kiss on the top of his head. That was definitely the right way round to do it. I stuffed a few notes in the pocket of his school blazer. All done without asking his permission, and without giving him a chance to protest.
Then I walked back to my car, where I phoned his mother and told her that Pat was with his girlfriend, and with his grandparents, and that our boy was safe and sound.
Nineteen
Oh yes, I thought, as I crawled out of bed, got dressed in the dark and drove to the hospital. I remember now.
With my parents gone for so many years, I had forgotten that in the end there is always the call that comes in the middle of the night.
But the scene at the hospital was so unchanged – the men standing outside in their pyjamas and dressing gowns, sucking down a shot of nicotine, the laughing nurses looking forward to the end of their night shift, the homeless man sleeping on a bench outside a shuttered shop in the deserted reception area – that it could have been the same stage set, populated by the same characters.
It all came back to me now.
Walking along the corridors with their same old night noises of equipment being moved and the sick moaning in their sleep, for one mad moment I felt that I was looking for the bed where my father lay dying. I found the nurses’ station I was looking for and they directed me to a dark, crowded ward where the end bed had the curtains pulled around it. I stepped inside.
Singe Rana was sleeping, propped up in bed with his head falling forward. Ken sat by his bedside, rifling in a large box of Quality Street. Even at this hour, he was wearing his Sunday best. But then he always wore his Sunday best.
‘Stroke,’ Ken said. ‘Know what one of them is, do you?’
I shook my head. ‘Not really.’
I only really knew about cancer. My parents were from the generation that courted to Casablanca. Cigarette smoke and true love were inseparable in their minds. So it was always cancer that was big in our house.
‘Not really or not at all?’ he snapped, furiously unwrapping a Caramel Swirl.
I looked at Singe Rana’s face. It was still smooth and youthful, but the beautiful golden colour seemed more burnished now, suddenly older, as though many years had passed in just one night.
‘Not at all,’ I admitted.
‘The quack called it a pulmonary embolism,’ Ken said, his mouth full of chocolate. ‘Blood clot. Finds its way from the heart to the brain.’
He considered his box of Quality Street. Picked up a Coconut Éclair and threw it back. ‘Sorry to call you in the middle of the night,’ he said. ‘Just thought you might want to know. Bit pointless, really.’
I shook my head. ‘I want to know. I’m glad you called. And I am not big on the whole sleep thing right now.’ We both looked at Singe Rana. ‘What’s going to happen to him?’ I said.
‘Too soon to tell.’ Ken shrugged. ‘Impaired functions, they told me. That’s quack-speak for anything from a tingling sensation to coma, paralysis, death.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Yeah – they don’t narrow it down much, do they?’ He looked at his sleeping friend. ‘If he gets through the first week or two, he’ll be right as rain.’
He held out the Quality Street and I shook my head. But then he rattled the box at me and I took a Green Triangle. I remembered this one. Delicious hazelnut wrapped in milk chocolate, if I wasn’t mistaken.
‘We were at the dogs,’ he said, his eyes not leaving Singe Rana’s face. ‘He was talking about Italy. He likes to talk about Italy more and more. He rattles on about Italy as if it was the best holiday of his life.’ He chuckled. ‘Oranges and lemons, he talks about. The fields and the girls and the wine. The mountains and the vineyards. I don’t remember much of all that. But then he’s a glass-half-full kind of bloke, old Singe Rana.’
Ken scratched his leg, the one he had lost, and I wondered if the story was true, I wondered if he could still feel it after all these years of living without it.
‘What I remember is the cold,’ he said. ‘And the noise. And the mud. And the stink. It stunk, that mud in Italy. Bloody stunk, it did. Somebody said it stunk in exactly the same way that the Somme stunk in the first turnout. Something to do with the mud and shells and the rotting bodies.’ He nodded. ‘I remember that smell. And I remember the wounded lying in rows with the kind of wounds that they never show you in the films or on the news. Boys with their guts hanging out, calling for God or their mother to come and help. Men holding their intestines. Head wounds from 88-millimetre shells so bad that you could see bits of brain. This is on the living, mind. Limbs gone. Minds gone. Faces blown off. Bollocks shot off. Smashed bodies everywhere.’ He looked up at me. ‘Still wish you were there, do you?’
I felt a stab of anger.
‘I never said that, did I?’ I said.
‘You don’t have to. It’s clear as day. I saw it in my Mick – the one that’s in Australia.’ A thin smile. ‘Wishing he was there. This feeling that he – your lot – the sons – had missed something. Something big. Something important. A test. A challenge. The experience. I don’t know what you call it, but you know what I mean. And I know you feel it too, even if you can’t admit it. That wanting to be part of something bigger than yourself. This need to do something bigger and better and more important than buying a car that you’ve seen Jeremy Clarkson drive on Top Gear.’
‘I thought Mick was your favourite,’ I said.
‘He is,’ Ken said.
Then suddenly a family was there, bustling around the bed, unloading presents. A tiny old lady, thin as a child, Singe Rana’s wife, and two strapping middle-aged men and their wives, and assorted nippers from their teens to a babe in arms. And they all had that open-faced calm that I now thought of as Nepalese.
As if awakened from his dreams by the smell of Aloo Chop, Singe Rana stirred. He sleepily smiled at the sight of his family as they unloaded parcels of food. But they ignored Singe Rana and began offering it to Ken and me. Flat bread, curried vegetables, fried rice, milky tea and of course the spicy potato cakes. Ken brandished his box of Quality Street, trying to return the hospitality. They impatiently waved him away.
Over extensive protests, Ken gave up his chair to Singe Rana’s wife, and then gently placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder.
The two old men looked at each other but said nothing. He took his hand away. We left.
In the corridor, Ken removed a stiff cream-coloured envelope from his blazer. I assumed it was a Get Well card and that he would want to go back to give it to Singe Rana. Despite his unsentimental front, I suspected that Ken was the kind of man who would bring someone a Get Well card. He looked at the card for a moment as if he had forgotten it was there and then he slowly removed it from the envelope, as if he was going to announce the winner of some great prize.
It was a white card with discreet silver bells and roses and swirly gold writing.
‘This is my invitation,’ Ken said, as though he had never received one before, or as if it was so long ago that it was lost to memory.
He held the white card with swirly writing very gently and in both hands, like a thing of great delicacy and value.
‘My invitation,’ repeated Ken Grimwood. ‘I was meant to go out there today. Or do I mean yesterday? My Tracey was going to take me. But I stayed here. Missed my lift.’ He gestured towards his friend. ‘Because of him in there.’ A short laugh as he slipped his invitation back inside his jacket. ‘My Tracey went mental.’
And loneliness too, I thought.
That’s what
old age is about, even more than the calls that come in the middle of the night. The kind of loneliness that comes when most of what you have loved has gone.
A crop-haired boy in a suit stopped us as we were going into the church.
‘Bride or groom?’ he said.
‘Neither,’ Ken said, and the boy rolled his eyes, as if he had heard that one already today.
‘Bride’s side,’ I said, and the boy gave us both a white rose buttonhole, the little stem sheathed in silver paper.
We stepped inside. Light streamed through the stainedglass windows and lit up the women in their hats. It smelled of even more roses. There were children everywhere, running up and down the aisle, and their laughter echoed with the protests of their parents.
Ken was still holding his rose in both hands as if it was a tiny bouquet. I took it from him and put it into his blazer’s buttonhole. Then we found a seat on the bride’s side, towards the back and on the aisle, as if we were planning on making a quick escape. There were two young men waiting at the altar with a female vicar. Tracey was standing up in the front row, adjusting her hat.
‘I don’t know these people,’ Ken muttered.
Then I saw his daughter spot him. She came down the aisle, holding her hat, her high heels clicking on the flagstones.
‘Glad you made it, Dad,’ she said, giving me a quick nod as she took her father’s arm and gently lifted him to his feet.
Ken looked bewildered. ‘You’re the bride’s granddad,’ Tracey explained, her eyes scanning the entrance. ‘You have to sit with us.’
He let her lead him to the front row as the organ began the wedding march. Then the bride was suddenly there in an explosion of white, with Ian clinging tearfully to her arm. The bride was pretty and pregnant, hovering between smiles and tears, and she looked more like her grandmother than anyone else in the front row. There was the same sweet, dark-eyed mischief about her that I remembered from the wedding pictures of Ken and his Dot. Or perhaps it was just because she was around the same age as her grandmother had been in those wedding pictures, and everything was still before her.
