‘Good evening,’ I said, standing next to him. ‘Nice to see you.’
‘Good evening,’ he replied.
‘This place never changes,’ I said.
‘We like it this way,’ he said.
I ordered a drink; I needed one.
I noticed the date on the newspaper he’d been reading and calculated that Dad was just a little older than me, nearly fifty-one. We were as close to equals – or contemporaries – as we’d ever be.
He was talking to a man sitting on a stool next to him, and the barmaid was laughing extravagantly with them both. I knew Dad better than anyone, or thought I did, and I was tempted to embrace him or at least kiss his hands, as I used to. I refrained, but watched him looking comfortable at the bar beside the man I now realized was the father of a school friend of mine. Neither of them seemed to mind when I joined in.
Like a lot of people, I have some of my best friendships with the dead. I dream frequently about both of my parents and the house where I grew up, undistinguished though it was. Of course, I never imagined that Dad and I might meet up like this, for a conversation.
Lately I had been feeling unusually foreign to myself. My fiftieth hit me like a tragedy, with a sense of wasted purpose and many wrong moves made. I could hardly complain: I was a theatre and film producer, with houses in London, New York, and Brazil. But complain I did. I had become keenly aware of various mental problems that enervated but did not ruin me.
I ran into Dad on a Monday. Over the weekend I’d been staying with some friends in the country who had a fine house and pretty acquaintances, good paintings to look at, and an excellent cook. The Iraq war, which had just started, had been on TV continuously. About twenty of us, old and young men, lay on deep sofas drinking champagne and giggling until the prospect of thousands of bombs smashing into donkey carts, human flesh, and primitive shacks had depressed everyone in the house. We were aware that disgust was general in the country and that Tony Blair, once our hope after years in opposition, had become the most tarnished and loathed leader since Anthony Eden. We were living in a time of lies, deceit, and alienation. This was heavy, and our lives seemed uncomfortably trivial in comparison.
Just after lunch, I had left my friend’s house, and the taxi had got me as far as the railway station when I realized I’d left behind a bent paper clip I’d been fiddling with. It was in my friend’s library, where I’d been reading about mesmerism in the work of Maupassant, as well as Dickens’s experiments with hypnotism, which had got him into a lot of trouble with the wife of a friend. The taxi took me back, and I hurried into the room to retrieve the paper clip, but the cleaner had just finished. Did I want to examine the contents of the vacuum? my hosts asked. They were making faces at one another. Yet I had begun to see myself as heroic in terms of what I’d achieved in spite of my obsessions. This was a line my therapist used. Luckily, I would be seeing the good doctor the next day.
Despite my devastation over the paper clip, I returned to the station and got on the train. I had come down by car, so it was only now I realized that the route of the train meant we would stop at the suburban railway station nearest to my childhood home. As we drew into the platform I found myself straining to see things I recognized, even familiar faces, though I had left the area some thirty years before. But it was raining hard and almost impossible to make anything out. Then, just as the train was about to pull away, I grabbed my bag and got off, walking out into the street with no idea what I would do.
Near the station there had been a small record shop, a bookshop, and a place to buy jeans, along with several pubs that I’d been taken to as a young man by a local bed-sit aesthete, the first person I came out to. Of course, he knew straight away. His hero was Jean Cocteau. We’d discuss French literature and Wilde and pop, before taking our speed pills and applying our makeup in the station toilet, and getting the train into the city. Along with another white friend who dressed as Jimi Hendrix, we saw all the plays and shows. Eventually I got a job in a West End box office. This led to work as a stagehand, usher, dresser – even a director – before I found my ‘vocation’ as a producer.
Now I asked my father his name and what he did. I knew how to work Dad, of course. Soon he was more interested in me than in the other man. Yet my fear didn’t diminish: didn’t we look similar? I wasn’t sure. My clothes, as well as my sparkly new teeth, were more expensive than his, and I was heavier and taller, about a third bigger all over – I have always worked out. But my hair was going gray; I don’t dye it. Dad’s hair was still mostly black.
An accountant all his life, my father had worked in the same office for fifteen years. He was telling me that he had two sons: Dennis, who was in the Air Force, and me – Billy. A few months ago I’d gone away to university, where, apparently, I was doing well. My all – female production of ‘Waiting for Godot’ – ’a bloody depressing play,’ according to Dad – had been admired. I wanted to say, ‘But I didn’t direct it, Dad, I only produced it.’
I had introduced myself to Dad as Peter, the name I sometimes adopted, along with quite a developed alternative character, during anonymous sexual encounters. Not that I needed a persona: Father would ask me where I was from and what I did, but whenever I began to answer he’d interrupt with a stream of advice and opinions.
My father said he wanted to sit down because his sciatica was playing up, and I joined him at a table. Eying the barmaid, Dad said, ‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’
‘Lovely hair,’ I said. ‘Unfortunately, none of her clothes fit.’
‘Who’s interested in her clothes?’
This was an aspect of my father I’d never seen; perhaps it was a departure for him. I’d never known him to go to the pub after work; he came straight home. And once Dennis had left I was able to secure Father’s evenings for myself. Every day I’d wait for him at the bus stop, ready to take his briefcase. In the house I’d make him a cup of tea while he changed.
Now the barmaid came over to remove our glasses and empty the ashtrays. As she leaned across the table, Dad put his hand behind her knee and slid it all the way up her skirt to her arse, which he caressed, squeezed, and held until she reeled away and stared at him in disbelief, shouting that she hated the pub and the men in it, and would he get out before she called the landlord and he flung him out personally?
The landlord did indeed rush over. He snatched away Dad’s glass, raising his fist as Dad hurried to the door, forgetting his briefcase. I’d never known Dad to go to work without his briefcase, and I’d never known him to leave it anywhere. As my brother and I used to say, his attaché case was always attachéd to him.
Outside, where Dad was brushing himself down, I handed it back to him.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t have done that. But once, just once, I had to. Suppose it’s the last time I touch anyone!’ He asked, ‘Which way are you going?’
‘I’ll walk with you a bit,’ I said. ‘My bag isn’t heavy. I’m passing through. I need to get a train into London but there’s no hurry.’
He said, ‘Why don’t you come and have a drink at my house?’
My parents lived according to a strict regime, mathematical in its exactitude. Why, now, was he inviting a stranger to his house? I had always been his only friend; our involvement had kept us both busy.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Come.’
Noise and night and rain streaming everywhere: you couldn’t see farther than your hand. But we both knew the way, Dad moving slowly, his mouth hanging open to catch more air. He seemed happy enough, perhaps with what he’d done in the pub, or maybe my company cheered him up.
Yet when we turned the corner into the neat familiar road, a road that had, to my surprise, remained exactly where it was all the time I hadn’t been there, I felt wrapped in coldness. In my recent dreams – fading as they were like frescoes in the light – the suburban street had been darkly dismal under the yellow shadows of the streetlights, and
filled with white flowers and a suffocating, deathly odor, like being buried in roses. But how could I falter now? Once inside the house, Dad threw open the door to the living room. I blinked; there she was, Mother, knitting in her huge chair with her feet up, an open box of chocolates on the small table beside her, her fingers rustling for treasure in the crinkly paper.
Dad left me while he changed into his pajamas and dressing gown. The fact that he had a visitor, a stranger, didn’t deter him from his routine, outside of which there were no maps.
I stood in my usual position, just behind Mother’s chair. Here, where I wouldn’t impede her enjoyment with noise, complaints, or the sight of my face, I explained that Dad and I had met in the pub and he’d invited me back for a drink.
Mother said, ‘I don’t think we’ve got any drink, unless there’s something left over from last Christmas. Drink doesn’t go bad, does it?’
‘It doesn’t go bad.’
‘Now shut up,’ she said. ‘I’m watching this. D’you watch the soaps?’
‘Not much.’
Maybe the ominous whiteness of my dreams had been stimulated by the whiteness of the things Mother had been knitting and crocheting – headrests, gloves, cushion covers; there wasn’t a piece of furniture in the house without a knitted thing on it. Even as a grown man, I couldn’t buy a pair of gloves without thinking I should be wearing Mother’s.
In the kitchen, I made a cup of tea for myself and Dad. Mum had left my father’s dinner in the oven: sausages, mash, and peas, all dry as lime by now, and presented on a large cracked plate, with space between each item. Mum had asked me if I wanted anything, but how would I have been able to eat anything here?
As I waited for the kettle to boil, I washed up the dishes at the sink overlooking the garden. Then I carried Father’s tea and dinner into his study, formerly the family dining room. With one hand I made a gap for the plate at the table, which was piled high with library books.
After I’d finished my homework, Dad would always like me to go through the radio schedules, marking programs I might record for him. If I was lucky, he would read to me, or talk about the lives of the artists he was absorbed with – these were his companions. Their lives were exemplary, but only a fool would try to emulate them. Meanwhile I would slip my hand inside his pajama top and tickle his back, or I’d scratch his head or rub his arms until his eyes rolled in appreciation.
Now in his bedwear, sitting down to eat, Dad told me he was embarked on a ‘five-year reading plan.’ He was working on ‘War and Peace.’ Next it would be ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ then ‘Middlemarch,’ all of Dickens, Homer, Chaucer, and so on. He kept a separate notebook for each author he read.
‘This methodical way,’ he pointed out, ‘you get to know everything in literature. You will never run out of interest, of course, because then there is music, painting, in fact the whole of human history...’
His talk reminded me of the time I won the school essay prize for a tract on time-wasting. The piece was not about how to fritter away one’s time profitlessly, which might have made it a useful and lively work, but about how much can be achieved by filling every moment with activity! Dad was my ideal. He would read even in the bath, and as he reclined there my job was to wash his feet, back, and hair with soap and a flannel. When he was done, I’d be waiting with a warm, open towel.
I interrupted him, ‘You certainly wanted to know that woman this evening.’
‘What? How quiet it is! Shall we hear some music?’
He was right. Neither the city nor the country was quiet like the suburbs, the silence of people holding their breath.
Dad was holding up a record he had borrowed from the library. ‘You will know this, but not well enough, I guarantee you.’
Beethoven’s Fifth was an odd choice of background music, but how could I sneer? Without his enthusiasm, my life would never have been filled with music. Mother had been a church pianist, and she’d taken us to the ballet, usually ‘The Nutcracker,’ or the Bolshoi when they visited London. Mum and Dad sometimes went ballroom dancing; I loved it when they dressed up. Out of such minute inspirations I have found meaning sufficient for a life.
Dad said, ‘Do you think I’ll be able to go in that pub again?’
‘If you apologize.’
‘Better leave it a few weeks. I don’t know what overcame me. That woman’s not a Jewess, is she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Usually she’s happy to hear about my aches and pains, and who else is, at our age?’
‘Where d’you ache?’
‘It’s the walk to and from the station – sometimes I just can’t make it. I have to stop and lean against something.’
I said, ‘I’ve been learning massage.’
‘Ah.’ He put his feet in my lap. I squeezed his feet, ankles, and calves; he wasn’t looking at me now. He said, ‘Your hands are strong. You’re not a plumber, are you?’
‘I’ve told you what I do. I have the theatre, and now I’m helping to set up a teaching foundation, a studio for the young.’
He whispered, ‘Are you homosexual?’
‘I am, yes. Never seen a cock I didn’t like. You?’
‘Queer? It would have shown up by now, wouldn’t it? But I’ve never done much about my female interests.’
‘You’ve never been unfaithful?’
‘I’ve always liked women.’
I asked, ‘Do they like you?’
‘The local secretaries are friendly. Not that you can do anything. I can’t afford a “professional”.’
‘How often do you go to the pub?’
‘I’ve started popping in after work. My Billy has gone.’
‘For good?’
‘After university he’ll come running back to me, I can assure you of that. Around this time of night I’d always be talking to him. There’s a lot you can put in a kid, without his knowing it. My wife doesn’t have a word to say to me. She doesn’t like to do anything for me, either.’
‘Sexually?’
‘She might look large to you, but in the flesh she is even larger, and she crushes me like a gnat in bed. I can honestly say we haven’t had it off for eighteen years.’
‘Since Billy was born?’
He said, letting me caress him, ‘She never had much enthusiasm for it. Now she is indifferent... frozen... almost dead.’
I said, ‘People are more scared of their own passion than of anything else. But it’s a grim deprivation she’s made you endure.’
He nodded. ‘You dirty homos have a good time, I bet, looking at one another in toilets and that...’
‘People like to think so. But I’ve lived alone for five years.’
He said, ‘I am hoping she will die before me, then I might have a chance... We ordinary types carry on in these hateful situations for the single reason of the children and you’ll never have that.’
‘You’re right.’
He indicated photographs of me and my brother. ‘Without those babies, there is nothing for me. It is ridiculous to try to live for yourself alone.’
‘Don’t I know it? Unless one can find others to live for.’
‘I hope you do!’ he said. ‘But it can never be the same as your own.’
If the mortification of fidelity imperils love, there’s always the consolation of children. I had been Dad’s girl, his servant, his worshipper; my faith had kept him alive. It was a cult of personality he had set up, with my brother and me as his mirrors.
Now Mother opened the door – not so wide that she could see us, or us her – and announced that she was going to bed.
‘Good night,’ I called.
Dad was right about kids. But what could I do about it? I had bought an old factory at my own expense and had converted it into a theatre studio, a place where young people could work with established artists. I spent so much time in this building that I had moved my office there. It was where I would head when I left here, to sit in the café, seeing
who would turn up and what they wanted from me, if anything. I was gradually divesting myself, as I aged, of all I’d accumulated. One of Father’s favorite works was Tolstoy’s ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’
I said, ‘With or without children, you are still a man. There are things you want that children cannot provide.’
He said, ‘We all, in this street, are devoted to hobbies.’
‘The women, too?’
‘They sew, or whatever. There’s never an idle moment. My son has written a beautiful essay on the use of time.’
He sipped his tea; the Beethoven, which was on repeat, boomed away. He seemed content to let me work on his legs. Since he didn’t want me to stop, I asked him to lie on the floor. With characteristic eagerness, he removed his dressing gown and then his pajama top; I massaged every part of him, murmuring ‘Dad, Dad’ under my breath. When at last he stood up, I was ready with his warm dressing gown, which I had placed on the radiator.
It was late, but not too late to leave. It was never too late to leave the suburbs, but Dad invited me to stay. I agreed, though it hadn’t occurred to me that he would suggest I sleep in my old room, in my bed.
He accompanied me upstairs and in I went, stepping over record sleeves, magazines, clothes, books. My piano I was most glad to see. I can still play a little, but my passion was writing the songs that were scrawled in notebooks on top of the piano. Not that I would be able to look at them. When I began to work in the theatre, I didn’t show my songs to anyone, and eventually I came to believe they were a waste of time.
Standing there shivering, I had to tell myself the truth: my secret wasn’t that I hadn’t propagated but that I’d wanted to be an artist, not just a producer. If I chose, I could blame my parents for this: they had seen themselves as spectators, in the background of life. But I was the one who’d lacked the guts – to fail, to succeed, to engage with the whole undignified, insane attempt at originality. I had only ever been a handmaiden, first to Dad and then to others – the artists I’d supported – and how could I have imagined that that would be sufficient?
The New Uncanny Page 20
