Each year a minor – sometimes very minor – celebrity opened the fête. Five years earlier it had been Farida. This had been considered something of a coup and his parents’ standing in the village had shot up. Farida had been peerlessly professional – friendly, engaged, talking to the scouts and the old dears, doing the raffle, staying until the bitter end. How intensely he had loved her, then. He remembered it as one of the happiest days in his marriage. It could happen, even now. Joy unbidden, like that moment with the newts.
And now here was his dad, complaining about what he called the blithering noise. ‘Just seen a little girl walking across my flowerbeds, bold as brass, dressed as some kind of tart.’
‘It was a flamenco costume, petal,’ said Mandy.
‘High heels, anyway. At her age!’
Dad, oh Dad, where have you gone? When did you morph into Disgusted of Chipping Norbury?
Robert hadn’t seen his father for three weeks. Several small, purple nodules had appeared on his face. His eyes were rheumy and sunken. He kept looking at his watch, as if he had an important appointment and was waiting for everyone to clear off. His knee jiggled.
Robert could see that Phoebe was equally shocked by his condition. Earlier, she’d suggested they took him out for lunch but Mandy said he wasn’t up to it and now they could see why. Jaunts of any kind were out of the question; that trip to Wales, only a month ago, would be unthinkable in his present state. Was this just a bad day, Robert wondered, or was he indeed going downhill fast?
There was a queer, constrained atmosphere over lunch. The old man ate little. Mandy’s cooking was hardly inspiring but he’d always had a healthy appetite.
‘You’ve done us proud,’ he told her, as he toyed with a piece of liver sausage. Done us proud was another phrase he’d caught from her.
Mandy beamed at him. She was wearing a vast yellow T-shirt with the slogan: I’ve Been to Chessington Zoo. Her slabs of arms were pink from the sun.
‘Mandy’s become the mainstay of the village, haven’t you, love?’ James gazed at her with devotion. ‘Baking cakes for the other decrepits, organising the jumble sale. I don’t know how they managed without you.’
‘Where I come from, it’s just what we do. We look out for each other.’ Mandy wiped a blob of grease from his chin. ‘My mum said that happiness is like coke.’
‘Coke?’ Phoebe perked up.
‘It’s something you get as a by-product of something else,’ said Mandy. ‘Like coal.’
His father nodded. ‘Aldous Huxley said that.’
‘Aldous Huxley?’ asked Mandy. ‘What team does he play for?’ They both chuckled; it was obviously one of their jokes.
Robert felt a stab of irritation. Music drifted in from the field: Frank Ifield’s ‘I Remember You’. Suddenly he was back in his childhood. It was sports day and he was competing in the egg-and-spoon race. He could still feel the glazed, wooden egg wobbling in its spoon as he ran to the finishing line.
‘I might not have played for a team,’ he told his dad. ‘Unlike Aldous Huxley. But I did win the egg-and-spoon race back in 1964. The only thing I’ve ever won in my life. I remember looking around, I thought you’d be there. But there was only mum.’
‘Really, is that true?’ asked Dad.
‘Children remember these things,’ he said peevishly. ‘Especially when you’d promised to come.’
A small silence followed his outburst. It was stiflingly hot; sweat dampened his armpits. Frank was still singing but his father wasn’t listening. Robert thought: under the charm you’re a ruthless old bastard.
‘Strange, isn’t it,’ his dad mused. ‘We hardly remember anything from the first four or five years of our life; it disappears as if it never existed. So all the things one does, as a parent, with a small child – the playgrounds, the stories, all that effort one makes – it happens in a fog of forgetfulness. We might never have bothered. They’ve done studies on the subject, most fascinating.’
‘I’m not talking about studies, I’m talking about me!’ Robert’s voice rose. ‘A little boy, constantly let down. Phoebe, too. All that effort one makes – you didn’t make any effort at all! And it’s still going on, after all these years. You haven’t asked us a single thing about what we’ve been up to.’
He stopped, breathing heavily. His father looked mildly taken aback. Phoebe stared at him, astonished.
‘Anyone for apple crumble?’ asked Mandy. ‘Robert, could you help me bring out the plates?’
In the kitchen she swung round to face him, bumping against the sink. ‘You shouldn’t talk to your father like that. You’re a grown man.’
‘You have no idea about us and Dad.’
‘I know your father pretty well. Every orifice. Which is more than can be said for you.’
‘I don’t want to know his orifices.’
‘Yes, that’s what you pay me for.’ She glared at him through her glasses. Her face was sheeny with perspiration. ‘Whinge, whinge, that’s all you do, you and your sister.’ Her voice dropped to a hiss. ‘This isn’t about you, it’s about him. When you come to visit, it’s him you should be thinking of, but you just moan. Haven’t you got anything better to do? Nobody’s perfect. Why don’t you get a life?’
For a moment Robert couldn’t speak. Outside, they started playing ‘My Very Good Friend, the Milkman’. He suddenly felt exhausted. ‘You really shouldn’t talk to me like that.’
‘I speak as I find—’
‘Do stop saying that—’
‘And it’s as plain as a pikestaff. You’re ever so unhappy, you and your sister. You’ve had bugger all else to do except sit on your bottoms examining your feelings and where’s it got you? No bloody where. That’s the problem with money. In my family we had nothing, nothing, we had no choice except to roll up our sleeves and get on with it. That’s what you lot don’t understand, you with your silver spoons in your mouths. You’ve never been poor. If you’re poor you have no sodding choices at all.’ She pushed back her damp fringe. ‘Pardon my language.’ The funny thing was, she didn’t seem angry or even bitter. She just seemed despairing.
‘Wow.’
Robert turned. Phoebe had joined them. She gazed at Mandy, eyebrows raised.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mandy, ‘but I speak as—’
‘Do shut up.’
After this extraordinary outburst Mandy seemed to deflate. She leaned against the sink, breathing heavily. Outside, the music had stopped.
‘Your dad misses you,’ said Mandy. ‘He talks about you all the time. You say he neglected you, he wasn’t there for you. Well, now it’s payback time because you’re neglecting him.’
Neither of them spoke. Robert gazed at the parched surface of the apple crumble. Blackened juice had seeped through the cracks.
‘I know you don’t like me,’ Mandy said. ‘I can’t do anything about that.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Phoebe weakly.
‘But let me tell you something else.’ Mandy turned to Robert. ‘I know I’m speaking out of turn and you’ll like me even less now, but I’ve seen you with your wife and I can’t help noticing things.’
‘What things?’
‘That you’re ever so unhappy. Your dad was blessed with a good marriage but some people aren’t so lucky.’ She paused. ‘I’ve been single all my life and it’s not so bad. Honest it isn’t. You should pluck up your courage and give it a go. And now I’ll shut up.’
Robert was gobsmacked. He gazed at a list of words his father had pinned to the wall: ‘ANTELOPE. MELLIFLUOUS. GRAHAM/JANET.’ His aide memoires.
‘Goodness,’ said Phoebe at last. ‘You really do speak as you find.’
Mandy picked up the dish of crumble. ‘Anyway, at least I’ve brought you two together.’
‘What do you mean?’
She looked at them. ‘You used to needle each other all the time, but now you’ve got me to hate you’re getting on like a house on fire.’ She pushed open the door with her foot. ‘
Coming!’ she called.
Phoebe
The gloves were off. Mandy thought they were spoilt brats who had abandoned their father so they could dick around doing useless stuff nobody wanted to buy. Moaning minnies who didn’t appreciate how privileged they were. Rubbish at love, too, what with her, Phoebe’s, taste for spineless stoners and Robert’s marriage to a chilly ballbreaker. Altogether a waste of space, and snotty with it.
By implication, it was people like Mandy who were the bedrock of society. Hard-working, selfless and perennially cheerful, people who did the dirty work and mopped up the mess. The invisible people, without whom the rest of the world would fall to pieces. People who worked for a pittance, caring for their fellow human beings. People with hearts.
Weirdly enough, Phoebe wasn’t offended. In fact she found it curiously bracing. When you’re an adult it’s rare to be attacked; you choose your friends because they agree with you and you agree with them. Open warfare is saved for your nearest and dearest – in other words, your family.
So Mandy’s words had made her feel strangely intimate with her, almost familial. There was no denying, however, that the woman had been staggeringly rude. She’d crashed through the fourth wall of what should be a professional relationship – she was their employee, for God’s sake – and put them in an impossible situation.
Should they sack her? Their father would be heartbroken. And would they find another person who could cater to his increasingly complex needs? And wouldn’t it be a rather petty thing to do – to punish Mandy just because she’d overstepped the mark and told them some home truths?
Because, of course, there was truth in what she said. It pained Phoebe to admit it. Mandy was a lot beadier than they’d realised. She’d been watching them, clocking them. Disapproving of them, from her position of virtue. Phoebe had seen that look in her eyes, when she was blandly chatting about this and that.
To be perfectly honest, thought Phoebe, I don’t think she likes us at all.
Robert was angrier than she was. ‘What a bloody cheek!’ he’d said as they walked to their cars. ‘I didn’t hire her to tell me to divorce my wife.’
The trouble was, Phoebe secretly agreed with her. Farida hadn’t made her brother happy. In fact she didn’t think Farida was that happy herself. Undermining one’s spouse is an exhausting process and takes its toll on both of you. And Phoebe suspected that her constant make-overs and renovations were a sign of a deeper malaise. Robert had hinted that their sex life was practically non-existent. Perhaps it was true, and their marriage had worn itself out. Now the children had left home this might be the time to jack it in and start afresh.
Buffy, her local hotelier, had form in these matters. Phoebe found his breezy cynicism a welcome relief. His favourite saying was, I don’t think I’ll get married again. I’ll just find a woman I don’t like and give her a house. He loved discussing this sort of thing and recently mused, when they were drinking in his kitchen: ‘In my experience, relationships always last, proportionally, a third longer than they should. In a nine-year-marriage, say, it’d be the final three years. We’re too cowardly, too kind, too lazy, too terrified of being alone to do the decent thing and put it out of its misery. Trust me, I know.’ They couldn’t all be as lucky as her parents.
Phoebe was mulling over this the next day while she was out delivering ‘Stop the Supermarket’ leaflets. The weather had broken; bruised thunderclouds were building up in the west. On the TV that morning Farida had warned of heavy rain and possible flooding and they’d run their usual item on the lack of contingency plans. Just now, however, the air was heavily humid. Phoebe had checked on the newt pond but it had shrunk still smaller and there was no sign of life. Maybe some kids had fished out the newts, who knew?
There were six people delivering leaflets and she had been assigned the outlying properties because she had an electric bike. All her life she would remember that moment – the moment when fate intervened, and took any decision about Mandy out of her hands.
She was half a mile out of town, cycling down the hill towards a cluster of cottages deep in the valley. Next to them was a vast new poultry farm, itself the subject of a local campaign. Phoebe suspected that the workers there would be only too happy to have a supermarket in town, and hoped nobody would be around to shout at her.
As she freewheeled down the lane, her mobile rang. She slewed to a halt. It wasn’t a number she recognised.
A man’s voice came on the line. ‘Is that James Wentworth’s daughter?’ His voice was shaking. ‘This is Graham, your father’s neighbour. I’m afraid I have some terrible news.’
The phone went dead. Phoebe tried to ring back but the signal had gone.
Within ten minutes she was crashing through the door of her house. She rushed to the landline phone, to ring Graham back, but when she checked her mobile for his number the screen was black. She’d run out of battery.
She knew Mandy’s number, of course. With trembling fingers she rang her mobile, and then the landline. Nothing, just the answerphones. She rang her brother but there was no reply there, either. Even Farida wasn’t responding.
She’d wasted fifteen minutes trying to make contact with somebody, anybody. She left messages for them, grabbed her bag and rushed out, stumbling over her bike where it lay abandoned in the yard. And then she was in her car, driving east.
Was her father lying there, dead, and Mandy too distraught to answer the phone? Or was she in the ambulance, or at the hospital, and unable to get a signal?
Maybe Graham had discovered him. Maybe Mandy was out and Graham had dropped in, for some reason or other, and found him dead. Maybe her dad had collapsed in the garden and Graham had seen him through the window.
Her father was dead. That was her only certainty.
And it was their fault, hers and Robert’s. His attack on their father had been shocking. Neither of them had ever talked to him like that before. It had triggered a heart attack. A stroke.
There was a rumble of thunder and it started to rain. Outside Cheltenham she got stuck in a traffic jam. Her heart was pounding. Should she go straight to the hospital – it would be the one in Oxford, the John Radcliffe, wouldn’t it? Or should she go to her father’s house? The sky was so dark that drivers had switched on their lights. Traffic passing in the other direction sent up spumes of water. Her windscreen wipers slewed to and fro, he’s dead, he’s dead. She inched forward, the heavens releasing their torrents of tears.
He’s dead, she thought, and I haven’t said goodbye. This rain-lashed scene, this banal dual carriageway with an Eddie Stobart lorry thundering past in the opposite direction, the car in front with its children grimacing at her through the window, was a world without her father in it.
In an instant, everything had changed. We know it’s bound to happen but nothing prepares us for the reality, nothing at all.
When Phoebe arrived at her father’s cottage the ambulance was just pulling away. Its siren wasn’t on. This, of course, was all the confirmation she needed. Nor was she surprised that it had been there for so long; she knew it took hours for all the formalities. She’d missed him. No chance now for one last moment with him, alone. Just to stroke his hand and kiss him goodbye.
The front door was ajar. She parked, jumped out of the car and ran through the rain into the living room.
Her father sat on the sofa. Janet from next door was bringing him a cup of tea.
He looked up at Phoebe, his face ashen. ‘Oh, darling, thank goodness you’re here.’
She couldn’t speak. She stared at him, the blood draining from her face.
‘I’m afraid she’s died,’ he said.
‘Who’s died?’
‘My daughter.’ His voice broke. ‘She was in the kitchen and I heard this noise. Then I went in and she’d collapsed on the floor.’
Phoebe sat down beside him and took his hand. ‘It’s all right, Dad. I’m here. I’m your daughter, remember?’
‘She’s my daughter.
’
He sat there, heaving with sobs. The poor man was utterly disorientated.
‘He means Mandy,’ said Janet. ‘They’ve just taken her away.’
In the midst of this confusion Phoebe felt a stab of jealousy. He actually thought of Mandy as his daughter. Was that because she’d been a better daughter to him than she herself had been?
‘I’m so terribly sorry,’ she said. ‘It must have been the most awful shock. But I’m here now – your daughter, Phoebe, remember?’
‘Of course I know who you are! I’m not senile.’ He removed his hand. ‘You don’t understand. She’s my daughter, sweetheart. We were both going to tell you when the time was right. And now it’s too late.’
Robert
Robert and his father sat in silence. A chirrup came from the kitchen, where Phoebe was making sandwiches. The neighbours had long since gone.
He sat there, dizzy with nausea. His brain was going through a massive gear-shift; he could feel its cogs grinding. It was all he could do to lift his glass of whisky. He’d arrived soon after Phoebe and she’d told him the news. Outside, the rain lashed down.
Now Phoebe was coming in, her face blank, carrying the tray as if she were sleepwalking. She put it on the table. The armchair creaked as she sat down. They looked at the sandwiches.
‘I’m afraid there was only tongue,’ she said.
No way was he going to look at his father. He heard the sound of him swallowing and then the clunk as he put down his glass.
‘I had no idea,’ his father said. ‘Not for a long time. Months, in fact. She knew who I was but I didn’t know about her. It was quite a shock, as you could imagine.’
The Carer Page 12
