They agreed to postpone the honeymoon. ‘I owe her that,’ Lily said. She was not overwhelmed by grief. Her mother had lived a long life. But she fell into a state of melancholy, almost surly, reserve. Was it her fault her mother had closed her heart against men who traipsed filth into the house? Was it Lily she’d been protecting? She sobbed quietly for a week believing she was the cause of her mother’s loneliness. She had OK’d Quaid and seemed to like him. ‘You’ll have your work cut out with him,’ she said, ‘but he has a faithful look.’ Lily hadn’t told her mother he was married. But she’d already guessed. ‘Of course he is,’ she said. ‘He has a married look too. But that needn’t matter if he loves you. You can be faithful to one woman while you’re married to another. And you can be faithful to your wife while carrying on with someone else. I think I judged your father too harshly. But it’s too late to be doing anything about that now.’
Lily’s mouth fell open. A lifetime of example extinguished just like that. But if it was too late for her mother to change the way she lived, it was too late for Lily to change the way she felt. Let Quaid traipse filth into their Kew cottage and he’d be out of it.
‘I think,’ Quaid said, about two months into Lily’s mourning, ‘that I’ll visit my father.’
‘I thought he’d fallen into a fire.’
‘He had. It turns out that you were right. He wouldn’t burn.’
‘Why do you want to see him suddenly after going fifty years without wanting to hear his name?’
He couldn’t tell her that it was obscurely connected with his having seen her father in the gardens of Chelsea Arts Club. And now with her mother’s death. It seemed wrong that he should be so implicated in her family history and so without any of his own.
‘Time to clear the decks,’ he said.
‘Why? Won’t they clear themselves?’
‘Not in the spirit I want to clear them.’
‘What do you intend to do?’
‘It’s more what I intend to say.’
‘I love you Dad?’
‘How did you know?’
His father had a slightly different expectation. ‘If you’ve come to tell me to fuck off, don’t waste your breath. You’re the last in a long line of visitors. They’ve all told me to fuck off. I hope you’ll be more original.’
He was propped up on half a dozen pillows, his pointed beard full of breakfast, his matted eyebrows falling like spiders into his eyes, black spiky hairs growing in clusters on the bridge of his nose. Quaid wondered if he ought to complain to the matron or whoever was in charge of the care home. Shouldn’t someone be looking after the old man? But that would have been hypocritical. He didn’t want anyone looking after his father. He wanted him to perish, uncared for and alone. (As I will be, he added as an afterhought, if anything happens to Lily.)
A torn piece of paper, sellotaped to his father’s door, read
OSSIAN FREUD
PROFESSOR OF MISOGAMY
Who could want anything good for such a man?
‘Ah yes, now I have you, you’re the one who refused my name,’ he said. His voice was fainter than Quaid remembered but he still sounded as though he were forcing words through a steel trap.
‘You know very well who I am. You wrote to congratulate me on my wedding only a few weeks ago.’
‘Did I? That was uncharacteristically charitable of me. I hope it went well. Are you still fucking her?’
‘I won’t answer that question.’
‘That must mean you aren’t.’
‘Not your business.’
‘That you are or you aren’t? Do you know, eighty-seven per cent of men who have been married more than five years no longer fuck their wives. And the other thirteen per cent do it thinking of someone else. But that’s after five years. If you’ve stopped fucking yours after only five weeks something’s seriously wrong. Have you tried looking at porn while you’re doing it? I’ve got some stashed under my mattress you can borrow. Nurse!’
Quaid waved away the offer. ‘Can I get you a tea or anything?’
‘I never got round to asking you when you were a kid – that was very remiss of me – I’m sorry – how old were you when you started fucking?’
Don’t answer, Quaid told himself. Don’t give the old swine the satisfaction. But he feels there’s so much unfinished business between them, he has to make a start on it at least.
‘I wasn’t a fucker. Fucking wasn’t what I called it. You must have taught me badly.’
‘So what did you call it? Coitus non startus?’
‘You can fuck without fucking,’ Quaid said.
The old man all but choked on the mirth of it. ‘You can fuck without fucking! Which bitch sold you that story? Ah, yes. Now I remember – you were the mollycoddled one. I suppose your mother told you fucking with fucking was a sin. She sinned quite a bit, in that case. I’m surprised you didn’t turn out to be a nancy boy, unless you did. Are you?’
‘I suspect nancy boys do their share of fucking.’
Why did he say that, he wondered. What was the magnetic quality of his father’s odious vocabulary that he had to answer it in kind? Was it some infection in language or his genes?
‘Well, you’d know I suppose. Yes, I’ll have tea. See if you can get Nurse Iglesias. She’s an occupational therapist. Her occupation’s looking after me.’
‘Then why doesn’t she wash your fucking beard?’ Quaid wanted to ask. ‘And while she’s at it why doesn’t she pluck those fucking hairs off your fucking nose? And disinfect your brain?’
‘Do they ever take you for a walk?’ he asked. ‘You look a bit yellow.’
‘A walk? I’ve never walked in my life. Why should I start now? So that I’ll live longer? Who wants me to live longer? Do you want me to live longer? Be honest. You want me dead.’
‘I don’t want you dead.’
‘Then I’ve failed as a father.’
For one mad moment Quaid thought he ought to try exonerating him. You? Fail? Perish the thought, Pa.
‘So how would you have succeeded as a parent?’ he asked instead.
‘Not parent, father. There’s a difference. Your mother felt she succeeded as a parent by apparently teaching her boys how to fuck without fucking. Had I succeeded as a father with you, you’d have come in here brandishing your cock like a battering ram, shouting my turn, my turn, and smiting me with it. I’d be cowering from you, not laughing at you.’
To his surprise, Quaid rather liked the picture that evoked. ‘I could come back and try again,’ he said.
‘You? Not a chance. A man who can’t fuck his wife five minutes after he’s married her is no threat to his father.’
‘You should have more sympathy for me. I’m told your fucking days are over.’
‘Who told you that? Call Nurse Iglesias. Nurse, Nurse! This little shit who is no son of mine thinks my fucking days are over. Tell him.’
Quaid rose. ‘I won’t kiss you,’ he said.
As he closed the door he heard his father shouting after him. ‘If I’d fucked your mother without fucking her you’d never have been fucking born. How would that have been, eh? Eh?’
‘Fucking wonderful,’ Quaid shouted back.
‘So how was that?’ Lily asked when he returned.
‘Fucking awful.’