‘Quite a shock,’ said Phoebe. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s when the love-seat broke,’ he said. ‘She sat down with me, in the garden, to tell me.’
‘Why didn’t she tell you straight away?’ Robert demanded. ‘Who was her mother? How did she find you?’
‘Why didn’t you tell us ?’ snapped Phoebe.
Their father raised his hands, as if to ward off a cloud of bees. ‘Wait, wait, one thing at a time.’ He took a breath. ‘She loved her parents dearly. Her father had always known she wasn’t his but brought her up as his own. But when they died, her parents, she had this urge to track me down.’
‘Who was her mother?’
He paused. ‘This . . . woman I knew.’
‘Yes, we gather that,’ said Phoebe. ‘Who was she? Where did you meet her? How long did it go on for?’
She glared at him as if he were an errant child. He shifted in his seat.
‘We met at a conference in Cardiff.’
‘How? Who was she?’
‘She worked for the caterers.’
‘The caterers?’
‘She was a waitress.’ His face softened. For a moment it belonged to somebody else, not their father at all. ‘Silver service,’ he added with pride.
‘How long did it go on for?’ demanded Phoebe.
He paused. ‘A while.’
‘How long?’
‘Does it really matter?’
‘Of course it does! How long?’
‘Four years.’
Robert and Phoebe stared at him, speechless. For the first time he looked sheepish.
‘When was this? When we were children?’
He nodded.
‘Was she married?’
He nodded.
‘So you were both married.’
He nodded again.
‘Where did you used to meet?’
He looked up. ‘Do we really have to go on with this?’
‘Yes!’ Robert barked.
He dropped his gaze. The sandwiches lay untouched, their tongues poking out.
‘A friend of her family had a caravan park in Crickhowell,’ he said.
‘What, near our cottage?’
He nodded.
‘That’s where you used to meet?’
Phoebe was thinking hard. Robert could almost feel it.
So was he.
‘Is that why you bought Haford?’ he asked, at last.
‘I wanted you to have holidays in the country,’ their father said. ‘To roam free.’
‘Bullshit,’ Robert said. ‘That’s why you bought it, wasn’t it?’
Their father drained his whisky. His hand was trembling. ‘Look, I really don’t feel up to this. Not today, of all days.’
‘Fuck how you feel,’ Robert said.
‘I’ve just lost my daughter—’
‘Fuck that,’ said Phoebe. ‘You owe it to us. I presume our mother didn’t know about your little trysts.’
‘If that’s what you want to call them.’
‘What do you suggest?’ Robert snapped. ‘Your shags?’
He flinched. ‘It wasn’t like that!’
‘What did you do, play Racing Demon?’
He took a breath. ‘I mean, I was very much in love with her. And with your mother. I was horribly torn.’
Phoebe barked with laughter. ‘Horribly torn!’ Then she burst into tears.
‘Oh, my dear . . .’
Their father tried to get up but she waved him away. ‘Don’t!’
‘What was she called, this woman?’ Robert asked.
‘Stella.’ That softened face again.
Stella.
‘That’s why you were always going away.’
‘Not always,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it was work.’
‘But sometimes – quite often – it wasn’t,’ Robert said. ‘You were seeing her. Stella.’
A burst of birdsong came from the kitchen. God knew what time it was. The rain seemed to have stopped.
Phoebe pulled out a tissue and blew her nose.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ said their father. ‘For everything.’
‘If it wasn’t for Mandy, we’d never have known,’ Robert said.
‘I expect not.’ He raised his head and gazed at them with his bloodshot eyes. ‘What I hope is that now you’re older—’
‘Actually pretty old,’ snuffled Phoebe.
‘Yes, but you’ll always be my children, whatever age you are.’ He paused. ‘But now you’re older and been through things yourself, you might understand.’
‘Understand?’
‘How terribly complicated everything is, when it comes to matters of the heart.’
‘Not really,’ Robert said. ‘Not in this case.’
‘Mum never knew?’ asked Phoebe.
He shook his head.
‘I expect you were very careful,’ she said.
‘I expect we were.’
There was a silence as the two of them reorganised their childhood. Robert could feel his sister’s effortful re-examination of probably the same events. The phone calls. The absences.
‘And when did Mandy come along?’ she asked.
‘After it was over. I didn’t know Stella was pregnant.’ He paused. ‘Nor did she.’
‘How did she know it wasn’t her husband’s?’
‘Ken couldn’t have children.’
Ken. It was all thickening up, horribly, into another parallel life.
‘And what did he have to say about it?’ asked Phoebe.
‘I don’t know. As I said, it was over between us and I never saw her again. But Mandy told me he accepted her as his own child and simply loved her. By all accounts he was a very sweet man. A saint.’
‘Who you betrayed for four years,’ said Phoebe.
Their father sat slumped in his chair. He was old and ill and had just lost his daughter, they shouldn’t be haranguing him like this. Robert was suddenly overcome with exhaustion but he could see that Phoebe had a hideous compulsion to persevere.
‘So when they died, Mandy tracked you down,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Through the internet.’ They could see he was relieved to move on to this. ‘Then she found out about the agency. She was already a registered carer, you see, she just signed on with them.’
‘Why didn’t she tell you straight away who she was?’ Phoebe couldn’t quite use the word daughter. Not yet.
‘She thought it would give me a heart attack. The shock. She said she just wanted to be with me, to get to know me and find out about me. After all, her real father was Ken.’
Robert thought of Mandy upstairs, rifling through his dad’s letters and old photographs. Asking him and Phoebe questions about the past.
‘But she did in the end,’ said Phoebe. ‘Tell you.’
Their father nodded. ‘I had a little stroke, you see—’
‘What?’
‘Several little strokes, in fact.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’
He shrugged. ‘You weren’t here. I didn’t want to worry you. They were only tiny.’
‘She should have told us.’
‘I told her not to. I didn’t want to be a bore.’
‘A bore ?’
‘A burden. Anyway, I was in good hands.’
Robert didn’t know how to respond to this. Worried? Resentful? Neither did Phoebe. She got up and fetched the whisky bottle.
‘So she thought I’d better know the truth,’ said their father. ‘Before it was too late.’
Robert remembered how he and Phoebe had noticed a change. The disorientation; the look in the old man’s eyes. They’d thought it was the beginnings of dementia when in fact he was simply trying to cope with the hugest of secrets.
‘Once I knew . . .’ Their father paused. ‘Once I knew, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.’
Phoebe flinched, as if she’d been slapped.
The tactless old fool. Robert glared at him. ‘So why di
d neither of you tell us ?’
‘It was up to her. She was going to, of course, but it was never the right moment, she kept putting it off. She said to me once, “They’ve had you all their lives. It’s my turn to have you now. Just for a little while.” ’
Phoebe unscrewed the whisky bottle. Their father held out his glass. His hands were trembling yet he was speaking with clarity, his old vagueness gone. Maybe it was a relief to tell the truth at last.
‘And she was nervous,’ he said.
Robert raised his eyebrows. ‘Mandy, nervous?’
‘She said you were both so clever and sophisticated. She was worried you’d be horrified to find out who she was. That you’d be ashamed of her.’
‘What?’
‘She felt inferior.’
Phoebe looked astonished. ‘I hope it was nothing we said.’
He shrugged. ‘You don’t need to say anything.’
Robert and Phoebe relapsed into silence. There were so many questions, yet there was no energy left. Not just now.
Their father looked grey, and so very old. The man had lost his daughter. Amidst all this, Robert kept forgetting. And they had found, and lost, a sister. Just now it was all too overwhelming to comprehend.
Phoebe
Phoebe and Robert stayed the night. One of them could have gone home, but home seemed strangely irrelevant – another country whose map, once they arrived there, would be utterly changed. Besides, they’d drunk too much whisky to drive.
And of course they couldn’t leave their father alone. Not tonight, or for the foreseeable. They were the carers now.
They had no idea what this entailed, however, no idea at all. For it was a major operation. First their father had to be showered. He could get into the downstairs bathroom, with help, but he was too rocky on his legs to stand in the shower cubicle whilst soaping himself. Robert looked squeamish about this so Phoebe volunteered.
‘I can still manage the lavatory part,’ the old man said, to her relief. ‘Peeing, I mean. Though Mandy has to help me when it comes to number twos.’
Wiping bottoms was just a job to her. Phoebe couldn’t imagine doing such a thing, but already she was being shunted into intimacy with her father’s body.
For she had never seen him naked. Sometimes in swimming trunks, decades ago, but now she was helping undress an elderly man whose face and hands were familiar but whose body was shockingly alien – grey skin peppered with moles, sagging breasts and stomach. Below its creases, beneath the sparse pubic hair, hung the adulterous penis that had brought her into the world. She caught the briefest glimpse of it as she helped him into the cubicle. If he was embarrassed, however, he was braving it out.
‘One tries to retain one’s last vestige of dignity,’ he said. ‘But, to be frank, it’s rather a relief now it’s gone.’
By now, no doubt, he was used to having his body manhandled. The very young and the very old have this in common. That Phoebe was doing it seemed to make little difference to him, or so he pretended. He held onto handles, fixed to the cubicle walls, as she soaped him with a sponge on a plastic stick. This must have been Mandy’s invention, to stop herself getting wet. There was something of the crucifixion about this that was unsettling.
Afterwards, wrapped in a dressing gown, he sat on the lavatory while Phoebe dried his legs. His ankles were swollen and blotchy due to poor circulation. First she had to massage them with moisturiser, then massage his feet with another cream, and anoint the yellowing shards of his toenails with fungicidal jelly. Then she rubbed lotion into the skin of his buttocks, fragile as tissue paper, which had become sore from all the sitting.
During this he was silent. No doubt he was remembering Mandy and her expert hands – that professional caress that morphed into a daughterly one. How odd it must have been, for him. Odd for Phoebe, too, exploring his body like this. Totally unerotic, yet not dissimilar to the first time she’d had sex.
‘I remember bathing you,’ he said, making her jump.
‘Did you?’
He nodded. ‘You and Robert together. You used to squabble like billy-o.’
‘I don’t remember that.’
‘It’s somewhere in the fog of unknowing,’ he said. ‘That time you can’t remember, when you were very small. But the love was always there. You know that, don’t you, darling?’
Suddenly, unexpectedly, Phoebe was overcome with tenderness for her frail father, for the times remembered and the times forgotten. She and Robert were in shock, of course, but then so was he. And who was she to blame him for anything? She, of all people, whose past was littered with emotional blunders?
‘Now, where are those jim-jams?’ he said.
Not only jim-jams, but incontinence pants. She left Robert to help him on with these, the ultimate humiliation. Through the door she heard their father trying to make a joke of it. ‘Well, my boy, you wet your bed until you were four.’ Robert said something; her dad laughed.
Once he was ready for bed it was time for his pills. It was fiendishly complicated. Zocor for his heart. Cardizem for his blood pressure. Doxazosin and MiraLAX for goodness knew what. Mandy had sorted them into boxes with little compartments. He swallowed them one by one, as obediently as a child.
‘Now I’m afraid it’s time for my teeth.’
This was the only time she saw him truly discomforted. More than the incontinence pants. More even than the adultery. She and Robert had forgotten he had dentures. Out they came, with a moist clunk. Suddenly he was unsexed and transformed into a crone.
‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled, through sunken lips.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Robert, passing him his glass of Steradent. Phoebe sensed that these ministrations were softening her brother, too.
Their father’s bed was in a small room off the lounge. Robert helped him while Phoebe drew the curtains. Suddenly it hit her – the banality of what they were doing, and yet the vastness of it all.
‘God, we haven’t even asked what she died from.’
‘They think it was an aneurism,’ said their father. ‘There’ll be a post-mortem.’
‘Should we be ringing anyone?’
‘I think there’s an aunt still alive, but she didn’t have much family left.’ He pulled the duvet up to his chin. ‘Only us.’
Upstairs, Robert said he’d sleep in their parents’ room. Phoebe took Mandy’s. It was even more chaotic than when she’d first glimpsed it – clothes strewn over the unmade bed, a mug of half-drunk tea. A Mary Celeste air to it, of somebody who had just stepped out for a moment. She looked at the pegboard of photos, those holiday snaps of Mandy’s female friends. Somehow they’d have to track them down and tell them, but it all seemed impossible to contemplate at the moment, along with everything else.
The room had its own washbasin. The shelf was cluttered with the usual assortment of bottles, pots and half-squeezed tubes. Even some mascara and lipstick, though she’d never seen Mandy wearing any. A pot of anti-ageing night cream, whose magical properties might account for her eerie skin. Phoebe washed her face with soap and dried it on Mandy’s grubby yellow towel. She hesitated about using her toothbrush but she had no choice, so she squeezed Mandy’s toothpaste onto it – Euthymol, something she’d never used. Flinching, she brushed her teeth, leaving an alien taste in her mouth, like wallpaper paste.
Pops. Did Mandy say it as a hint, or did it just slip out?
Phoebe felt dizzy, the past unravelling so fast. Rubbing on the night cream, she looked at the wedding photo. Mandy’s mother clung to the arm of a bashful young man with big ears, wearing an ill-fitting suit. She – Stella – was no beauty but decidedly voluptuous. Heavy breasts and hips, a body that, like her daughter’s, would probably run to fat. She looked fun. Anyone less like Phoebe’s mother would be hard to imagine – her gaunt, nervy, classy, beautiful mother, bluestocking and part-time JP.
She looked around the bedroom. It was as chaotic as a teenager’s. No wonder Mandy had made herself at home. It was
home.
There was a tap at the door and Robert came in, wearing their father’s pyjamas. He sat down on the bed.
‘Weird, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Beyond weird.’
Phoebe couldn’t wear Mandy’s nightie – how could she? She’d stripped to her T-shirt and knickers. Robert shifted over and she climbed into bed. His thick hair was greying; soon it would be as white as their father’s.
‘I’ve been thinking about Wales,’ Robert said. ‘The place we loved. How everything has turned out to be a fiction. Our holidays. My novel.’
‘My sort-of-love affair.’
‘The words were all lies. Torren’s words, our father’s words. One big betrayal.’
He rubbed the side of his nose. It was a large nose, like their father’s. The old man’s face, however, was looser and more generous. Less handsome than Robert’s, certainly, but so very charming.
Robert fingered the crochet flowers of the bedspread. ‘I wonder if she made this herself.’
‘She had funny taste, didn’t she?’
‘But she made him happy.’
‘They had a hoot.’
Robert nodded. ‘If he changed his will, which I suspect he did, she deserved every penny.’ He paused. ‘God, I’d love a cigarette.’
‘She didn’t smoke.’
‘What’s that, then?’
He pointed to an ashtray on the bedside table. They exchanged glances. Phoebe leaned sideways and pulled open the drawer. Inside was a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
They burst out laughing. So Mandy had another secret up her sleeve. Robert took one and lit up. He inhaled deeply.
For a while they didn’t speak. The window was open and the faint sound of a TV drifted in from the cottage next door. It was companionable, their being there together, Phoebe tucked up in bed. They hadn’t done it for years, not for all of their so-called adult life. Not since Hafod, where they’d shared a room. Where, at sunset, the bats streamed out of the barn and their parents loved each other.
‘What on earth are we going to do about Dad?’ he asked. ‘I suppose we’ll have to start looking for somebody else, but what are we going to do till then?’
‘If you’d written this as a novel,’ Phoebe replied, ‘Dad would die tonight. It would be so beautifully shapely. But life’s too messy for that.’
The Carer Page 13
