Robert
Robert was sitting in his shed, allegedly writing his novel. In fact he was thinking about his mother’s death, and his sister’s subtle upstaging in the grief stakes. Phoebe had always done this sort of thing, making him feel just that little bit less sensitive than she was herself. He remembered it so well, the three of them sitting around Mum, lifeless in her hospital bed. That waxen face, so familiar and yet not hers at all, an empty mother with her mouth open in a final, prehistoric yawn.
Phoebe turned to their father. ‘Would you like to be alone with her for a while?’
Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Point one to Phoebe.
And then, when he’d gone in to say goodbye to what can only be described as a corpse, it was Phoebe’s turn. She spent ages in there, much longer than he, and emerged with her face streaming with tears. She hugged their father, as if only the two of them truly understood the depth of their grief, and carried on crying all the way home, even fishing in Robert’s pocket for his unused little pack of Kleenex. Point two to her.
He hadn’t cried at all. It just seemed a tremendous relief that their mother’s suffering had finally ended. He did cry later but nobody witnessed this, not even his wife.
Point three: a bunch of wild flowers for the coffin, lovingly gathered from the local hedgerows. His lavish bouquet looked vulgar and corporate next to Phoebe’s wilting tribute, a goodbye from the heart.
He’d noticed this with terminal cancer. It creates a subtle sense of rivalry between the relatives – who saw the patient the most frequently, who brought the most thoughtful food, who had been given the most information about their medication, who became the favoured visitor who had a long, intimate and revelatory conversation with the loved one just before they passed away, who grieved the most copiously. And then there were the acquaintances who appeared from nowhere and muscled in – people who’re good at death, people who’re suddenly in their element. Like it or not, they become bustlingly indispensable and then fade back into obscurity. Mostly women, of course.
Bloody complicated, women. His mother, his sister, his wife. He was sixty-two and still hadn’t got the hang of them. It was like those circuit boxes in the street. Plain boxes, so boring you hardly notice them. That’s men. Then somebody from British Telecom opens them up and you’re astonished by the thousands of tiny wires all tangled up but with their own baffling logic. That’s them. Women.
His mother, for instance. She’d been just as brainy as his dad. They met at Oxford where she got a First in PPE. Photographs of the time showed a serious, high-minded student. Even in those yellowing snapshots she looked intimidating, her hair cropped in a bob around her striking face with its sharp cheekbones. A woman incapable of compromise.
But that’s exactly what she did. Because first he and then Phoebe were born, and bang went her hopes of a career in the civil service. She could have been a high-flyer; she could have been a Dame. In fact, she would have made a marvellous Prime Minister – principled and humourless and scrupulously fair. Instead she became a stuck-at-home mum. She wasn’t so great at that.
In those days, women did the child-rearing, whatever simmering resentments they might have felt. And while she changed their nappies, their father was becoming more and more successful, whizzing off to conferences, hobnobbing with the great and good, gathering honours and generally charming everyone he met. For he was a charmer – attractive and funny and self-deprecating. His colleagues loved him, his students loved him, everybody loved him.
His carer loved him, and she’d only been there a month. ‘He’s such a dear,’ Mandy said. ‘Such a gent, with that twinkle in his eye. We’ve been having a hoot!’
A hoot!
Robert looked at his watch. One o’clock; the morning had flown by. A dead wasp lay on his laptop. They seemed to hibernate in the shed, then conk out in the fumes from the paraffin heater. After lunch, he conked out too. There was a sagging couch for his siesta, rammed against the wall.
Farida, his wife, laughed at his shed. ‘We’re living in a five-bedroomed house in one of the most sought-after streets in Wimbledon,’ she said. ‘You’ve got your own study, central heating, Eames chair, lovely view, sensor lighting. You’ve got the whole fucking house, which took us three years of building hell to make into our dream home, and every morning you solemnly traipse down the garden to sit in a nasty little hut where you’re poisoned with fumes and showered with dead insects.’
Farida didn’t understand the creative process. How only in his hut did Robert feel free. A novelist needs that sense of separation, of liberation. As he trudged across the lawn he could feel his normal life lifting off him and his characters crowding in. They waited to welcome him as he wedged shut the warped door and settled down in his sanctum.
As for his afternoon nap – who was to blame for that? The problem was that he never got a good night’s sleep. Farida had to get up at four in the morning, to go to work at the TV studios. She had her clothes laid out, she tried to be quiet, but of course he woke. He heard the rustle as she pulled on her designer outfits, grunting with irritation when the zip stuck. Through the bathroom door came the faint hiss of the shower. Out of consideration for him she used to tiptoe out of the bedroom, carrying her high heels, but recently she seemed to have forgotten about this, and, if he had still been asleep, he was jolted awake by the tap-tapping across the floorboards and down the stairs. Was this new lack of consideration a sign of something more worrying? As their neighbour, Linda, said: ‘I realised my marriage was over when I didn’t leave him the last strawberry.’
Farida read the news on breakfast TV. Every morning Robert watched terrorism, torture and mass shootings stream through those glossy crimson lips. Sometimes, if they’d been quarrelling, he felt she was singling him out; a Damascus car bomb was all his fault. This was paranoid, of course, but that didn’t stop him. And then her face would soften as she talked about a Royal baby, and all was forgiven.
He should have got used to it by now. She’d been doing the job for years but the strangeness of it could still hit him. He knew that face so intimately, but then so did millions of others. For two hours each morning he shared her with the nation. She was still stunningly beautiful – polished bronze skin, shiny blue-black hair. Of course men fantasised about her. He fantasised about her, when she was at one remove like this and subtly altered by being on screen. There was an undeniable erotic jolt in knowing that she belonged to everybody but it was only he who would hold her naked in his arms that night.
Though, to be frank, there hadn’t been much activity in that department for some time. This was only to be expected, of course, in a long marriage. Theirs, however, went through a sea change when he lost his job in the City.
At first Farida was sympathetic. She was on BBC London News at the time and reported on the sorry exodus of the chaps who had been given the push. There she was in her Nicole Farhi suit, talking to camera, whilst behind her Robert himself could be glimpsed amongst the stream of men leaving Canary Wharf, transformed into shirt-sleeved hobos as they clutched their pitiful cardboard boxes.
Oh, she was fine at first. As time passed, however, something altered between them. Farida was hardly a natural nurse and Robert was a broken man. Broken, humiliated, lost, needy . . . all the things with which she had no patience. She liked a sparring partner; it was one of the things that had attracted him in the first place – her bright steeliness, her lack of sentimentality. On their second date, when he leaned across a candle-lit table and stroked her hand, she’d said: ‘I don’t do dote.’
She didn’t do dote, she didn’t do failure. In a way he respected this, whilst also wallowing in self-pity and resentment. Not a pretty sight, especially when slumming about in tracksuit bottoms all day and loading the dishwasher wrong.
During that period Robert thought a lot about his wheeler-dealing career, to which he was so spectacularly unsuited. He chose it to impress his wife and to be a man. But he also did it to i
mpress his father. Look, I can be successful too! Underneath it all, he simply wanted to get his attention.
The story of his life.
After his nap he brooded on Mandy’s words. It was a long time since he and his dad had had anything resembling a hoot. His visits had been based on filial duty and a desire to get the hell out of it before the rush-hour traffic built up on the A40. His father was now an enfeebled old man, mostly confined to an armchair. Robert’s need to prove himself had all but disappeared. For a sea change had taken place in their relationship.
Robert got up from the couch and bundled away the blanket. It still smelled of his dog, after all these months, and was threaded with his beloved grey hairs. Unlike his wife, dogs did do dote, that was their point. Christ, he missed him.
Leaving his hut, Robert padded across to the kitchen in search of a digestive biscuit. As he rummaged in the larder he thought about his father and how things between them had changed after his mother’s death. Until then, his parents had seemed indestructible. Their strong marriage had cemented them together in the bond that had brought him into the world and been the core of his life.
Since then his father’s universe had shrunk. That was not surprising: his health had worsened; he was suddenly alone. And now he was flailing around for some sort of contact, like a sea anemone waving its tentacles. No doubt he was searching for his wife, and the reassuring solidity of the big life they had once led and that she had so tirelessly made possible. But it had all disappeared, leaving nothing but memories, and he had rapidly become helpless. Robert’s complex feelings for him had simplified into something as crude as pity. This filled him with desolation. No wonder his jokes had dried up.
Mandy, however, had reinvigorated the old man. Thank God for Mandy! She phoned most days to tell Robert their news. Her voice cheered him; that Brummie accent hadn’t started to grate. This chatty woman in her chunky, implausible outfits had been their salvation.
Phoebe
Mandy bought the old man a special clock for his birthday. Each hour depicted a different British bird, which burst into song when it struck.
‘I bought it from the RSPB,’ she said. ‘They’ve really pushed the boat out with their merchandise, haven’t they, Pops?’
Pops? Robert and Phoebe froze in their seats. Jack, Robert’s son, stifled a giggle.
Their father, however, was delighted. ‘Two minutes to four,’ he said. ‘Sssh, everybody!’
They sat there in silence. Jack’s hand inched towards his mobile but Farida gave him a nudge. This was rich, Phoebe thought, considering Farida had spent the last half-hour on the phone herself, pacing the garden and aerating the lawn with her Louboutin ankle-boots.
Robert stared at the carpet, his lower lip stuck out. Phoebe knew that expression so well; when he was a boy he could nurse a grievance for weeks. Maybe he and Farida had had a row; all these years and he still hadn’t learned that sulking got him nowhere in the face of her breezy indifference.
Their father raised a finger – wait for it – his eyes sparkling. Was he humouring Mandy or truly excited? And how did he feel about being called Pops? For God’s sake, the man had an OBE.
The silence was broken by a chirrup from the kitchen. ‘The garden warbler!’ announced Dad, striking his knee in triumph. ‘A shy little chap, saw one in the fig tree only last summer. As light as thistledown, and now he’ll be sunning himself in Africa.’ He turned to Jack and Alice. ‘My darlings, be mindful of just one thing as you journey through this baffling and beautiful thing called life. Nothing that science can achieve will ever even begin to begin to approach the miracle of bird migration.’
Alice took his hand. How wonderfully simple was her love for her grandfather! Jack was the same. They were now young adults but their devotion to him had remained constant since they were babies. Phoebe had felt that too, with her grandparents. That jump of a generation seemed to bypass the usual family Sturm und Drang, and thank God for that.
Dusk had fallen. Mandy got up to draw the curtains. She was in charge now, and thank God for that too. Phoebe certainly didn’t resent this, not yet. She just marvelled at the vastness of Mandy’s bottom in those silver leggings, worn no doubt to celebrate the occasion. Only a month had passed and she seemed to have put on even more weight. Though voluminous, her multicoloured sweater still bulged with her girth.
Their father, by contrast, had dwindled into a frail old man – still pretty attractive, with that thick head of hair – but with pitifully skinny arms ending in those liver-spotted hands, one of which Alice was still stroking.
The conversation had moved on to cuckoos. Warblers, it seemed, were the most common victims of the cuckoos’ invasion. The female cuckoo pushed out the little warbler eggs and laid her own. The interloper hatched and grew vast, sitting there on its great bottom, dwarfing the frail warbler who had no idea what was happening to it.
‘Ugh, gross!’ said Alice.
Their father shrugged. ‘Who knows if the warbler even notices?’
Mandy beamed at them. ‘Time for cake!’
‘I did like your outfit this morning,’ Mandy said to Farida. ‘Does it stop at the waist?’
Farida nodded. ‘Of course. Below that I’m just wearing knickers.’
‘Farida!’ said Robert.
‘She’s joking,’ said Alice. ‘Don’t listen to her.’
Mandy scooped some cream off her plate. ‘I never used to listen to the news, it was always so horrible. But now I’m living here we watch it every day, don’t we, love?’ She popped her finger into her mouth and sucked it. ‘Your father’s trying to educate me.’
‘And vice versa,’ said the old man. ‘Have you watched something called Pointless ?’
‘No,’ said Robert.
‘Yes,’ said his daughter.
‘It’s a game show,’ he said. ‘Utterly hilarious. I didn’t know who the people were but Mandy explained them to me. They seem to be celebrities just because they’ve been on other game shows a lot like this one. Something almost Nietzschean about it – the Übermensch and the doctrine of eternal return.’
‘We’re also into box sets,’ said Mandy. ‘Game of Thrones is our favourite. We’re on Series Three.’
‘It’s a riot,’ said Dad. ‘Wall-to-wall sex and violence. Why didn’t I know about it before?’ He turned to Mandy. ‘Hopelessly addicted, aren’t we, love?’
Love? It was odd hearing these new words coming out of their father’s mouth. But he looked so happy, the birthday boy, eighty-five years young, as Mandy said.
Phoebe stole a glance at Farida, who was inspecting a chip in her nail varnish. She was in awe of Robert’s wife – everyone was, to some extent. In Mandy’s case it was because she was on the telly.
‘Does she meet lots of stars?’ she whispered to Phoebe later, in the kitchen.
‘Not really. She trained as a journalist and knows about things, she has briefings and whatnot, but basically her job is to read the news.’
Mandy looked deflated. ‘She’s a bit old, though, isn’t she?’
‘Well, fifty-two.’
‘They probably keep her on because they’re supposed to do that.’
‘Do what?’
‘My friend Maureen says they’re supposed to have older women on TV, and more Muslims.’
Phoebe looked at her sharply but Mandy, unperturbed, passed her a teacup to dry.
Phoebe felt another jolt – they all did – when Robert’s family was preparing to leave. Jack said he had to be up early because he had to visit his friend Haydon, who was in Exeter Prison on drug offences. Jack said he was thinking of writing a letter to the Guardian about how many black men were banged up and what a scandal that was.
‘Well, they do more crimes, don’t they?’ said Mandy.
There was a silence. Robert, one arm in his overcoat, swung round to look at her. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘They just do. Maybe you don’t have any of them in Wimbledon but if you grew up where I
did you’d know what I mean.’
A flurried leave-taking followed this.
As Phoebe drove home she wondered what her father thought about Mandy’s views. He was a man of impeccable liberal credentials. When the SDP was formed in 1981 – how quaint and innocent those days seemed now! – he and her mother nearly came to blows over the split in the left wing and how they were going to vote. Now he was stuck twenty-four hours a day with a woman whose opinions would once have horrified him. But he’d said nothing. Did he not want to rock the boat? Phoebe knew why she’d stayed quiet – what if they’d had a row with Mandy and she left them in the lurch?
Or was he slipping into senility, where everything floated past in a thickening blur?
She was always on the lookout for any signs of dementia, her deepest fear. Dad was certainly becoming forgetful – the walls were stuck with Post-it notes, written by Mandy in big black letters: ‘TEETH’. ‘FLIES’. ‘PILLS’. Most of the time Mandy was there to remind him, of course, but she’d recounted lurid stories she’d read in the Daily Mail about houses burning down because some old girl had forgotten to turn off the gas. Their dad hadn’t started putting his wallet in the fridge but he did sometimes seem confused, and of course he kept forgetting people’s names and where he’d left his specs. But then he’d always been pretty vague, the absent-minded professor; he’d relied on their mother for everything, from sorting out plumbers to remembering his children’s birthdays.
Anyway, whatever his state of mind he was safe in Mandy’s hands and they could breathe a sigh of relief. She might not have been his intellectual equal, and she certainly had some dubious views, but what the hell? She had become essential to their lives – to their father’s, of course, most of all.
And from what they could tell she had become devoted to him. And he seemed devoted to her. She made it seem so easy.
Love . . . beautiful love, unconditional love. We’re born knowing it, and receiving it. And yet what messiness awaits us.
The Carer Page 2
