The hospital kept my dad in for two nights. I ran my mum home on the first evening after she realised sitting behind a curtain for several hours in A&E with him ‘Nil By Mouth’, and her the same, was hardly her idea of a night out. She’d tried to buy a snack from the vending machine but hadn’t been able to follow the instructions or work out how to retrieve the coins. I left her at the flat and told her to eat something, drink some water and get some sleep.
It was grey and overcast the morning I collected him, the clouds massed together like lint gathered in the filter of a tumble-drier. ‘He’s had some painkillers for the bump and we’ve rehydrated him – should perk him up for a bit,’ said the nurse as he was discharged.
The wheelchair was certainly coming into its own, I thought, as we trundled out. He had his few belongings in a blue plastic Patient Property carrier bag on his lap. ‘They tried to put my teeth in there, stupid fools,’ he said, gesturing at the bag. ‘Can’t greet my public without them – they’ll think I’m finished.’
It was a tough push up the steep incline of Pond Street, but we crossed on the zebra, and turned into Hampstead Hill Gardens where I’d parked. ‘Lucky you don’t weigh a ton,’ I said.
‘Unlike your mother.’
Same old jokes – it was like nothing had happened. I stopped the wheelchair, and walked round to face him. ‘No regrets?’ I said, meeting his eye.
‘What do you mean?’
‘All this. The fall. The hospital. Just going to carry on as before?’
He took one hand off the plastic bag and wiped his fingers back and forth across his brow. ‘You’re right, Ben. Please accept my apologies. Unacceptable behaviour,’ he said. He seemed contrite, but there was something glib in the delivery, an undertow of saying the right thing to please me.
‘Have you any idea what the hospital said to me?’
‘No, what?’
‘Only the extremely obvious: that they thought about admitting you to the “falls clinic” but the reasons were fairly clear to them – chronic breathing difficulties, low oxygen intake, plus alcohol; it’s not a great combination for steadiness on the feet, wouldn’t you agree?’ I waited for a response. He blinked. ‘No wonder you fell, and will keep on falling, and I am the one who is going to have to keep picking you up if this carries on.’
He said nothing. He looked down the road, then at the back of his hands. Then he looked up at me. ‘Understood, Ben.’ He had on his penitent face.
I remembered the day in Oxford a few years earlier when he’d completely surprised me by ending a heated exchange with, ‘In this, as in all things going forward from now on, I defer to you. And I’ve told your mother.’ I thought he was joking but then I realised he was deadly serious. And with it, a fire had seemed to go out, and over the ensuing months he became more pliant and obliging. But now, I couldn’t tell if it was still smouldering, like a dormant volcano.
‘Come on then,’ I said, moving on. ‘Let’s get you back. Mum’ll be wondering where we are.’
A couple of days later my mum asked me to come over. We sat in the sitting room. They were doing their best impression of being alert. My mum was sitting forward, perched on the front of her chair. ‘You’ll be glad to hear your father’s off the booze,’ she said, by way of an introduction. ‘Aren’t you, darling?’
My dad nodded solemnly from his armchair. He had made the effort to get dressed. An unironed gingham shirt was tucked into a pair of dark blue track pants. His narrow white bare feet looked like fragile seashells resting in his burgundy leather slippers.
‘It was all a shock: the ambulance and everything; and we accept we haven’t adapted well to the move. I think we have felt, well . . . a little isolated and disorientated, haven’t we, darling?’ she said, looking at my dad again.
He nodded solemnly again.
‘And I didn’t tell you, but that was not the first fall,’ she said, trying not to look too sheepish.
‘I am not totally surprised,’ I said. ‘How many?’
‘A few . . . maybe six. Or seven.’
‘Seven!?’ I tried to hide too much surprise.
‘Yes, the porters have been very helpful.’
‘What do you mean the porters? They’ve been up here? Into the flat?’
‘Yes. They say it is no bother. But let’s not dwell, dear. We are chastened, aren’t we, darling?’ she said, turning to my dad again.
‘Chastened is the word, Romany,’ he said, nodding once as if to cement it into the conversation.
‘And remorseful,’ she added.
‘Another good choice of word, Romany,’ he said.
They seemed like a double-act. It was hard to tell whether they had selected the words before I arrived, chosen for the effect they hoped they would have on me. I looked at both their faces. They were looking at me expectantly like pets awaiting a treat. I had been here before; the history of my adult relationship with them was benchmarked with promises of abstinence. ‘ON WAGON’, she wrote to me memorably as I started my second year at university in 1982. ‘Dad fell over the saucepans when he came in last night, but apart from this one lapse we have been SCARSDALING without booze in the house since last Monday.’
I looked at both their hopeful faces. Pre-planned or not, I tried to get into the spirit of thinking that a small Rubicon might have been crossed, however temporarily. I smiled. ‘Good for you,’ I said, trying to muster as much neutral sincerity as possible, but after I’d said it I thought about the oily shadow on my dad’s bed, and the hours he was spending there under the landslide of thoughts inside his head, and I knew it was only a matter of time before we were back where we started.
In the kitchen a few minutes later I said to my mum on her own, ‘Would he try Prozac, or something similar, do you think?’
‘The happy pills? He is resistant, darling. His doctor got him on something like that for a while in Oxford, as you know, but as soon as his mood lifted he stopped. Didn’t trust it. Said he felt odd. We are the wrong generation, dear.’
‘And you?’
‘Oh, you know me, I’ll try anything for a quiet life. Maybe now is a good time. I think they work for me. Hard to tell. Have I tried them? I can’t remember. I might be already taking them. Pills for this. Pills for that.’ She tidied some lists and reminders to herself by the telephone.
I swept some crumbs off the worktop into a dustpan.
‘Anyway, it’s probably Alzheimer’s,’ she added with a dramatic flourish. ‘Doubt you can do much about that. Funny farm only, probably.’
‘The hospital made no mention of it, Mum,’ I said, refusing to rise. ‘They just thought he was drinking too much for a man in his condition.’
‘Well, you won’t change him now.’
‘What’s the point in stopping the booze then?’
‘Oh, leave it now, please, darling. I can’t keep up with you. We’re doing our best.’
I put the brush and dustpan back in the cupboard and moved a magnet around on the door of the fridge.
‘Sorry for all the fuss,’ she said. ‘It’s all very strange, you know.’
By that summer my Sunday visits to their flat were interleaved with occasional weekday lunches at our house. I found I could wheel my dad from the car along the alley that led to the garden and almost directly into our kitchen. Things seemed to be going quite straightforwardly, although I sensed an underlying note of worry from my mum.
‘He was up at three o’clock last night,’ she said to me on the phone one morning. ‘I heard a noise. He was getting dressed. He said he had an appointment. I told him he must have been dreaming. Get back into bed, you silly old fool, I told him. And he keeps thinking we’re on holiday. He keeps asking about when we’ll be back in Oxford. But he seems all right this morning.’
I said I’d pop round.
I drove to the flat. I took the ticket for the NCP car park under the block, and as the barrier went up, I moved from brilliant August light into darkness. I turned the car tightly past the attendant’s booth with its cluster of ghostly TV screens, and past the empty bays of the upper level, each reserved with a single traffic cone. My tyres squealed on the corners as I spiralled down. It was only on the lowest level – four storeys below, and as silent as a mausoleum – that I’d ever found a space, where the ramp stopped up against a dead-end and a chained gate to a darkened generator room, where the only other cars were long since driven, parked in the shadows, shrouded under sheets like long low tombs, thickly caked in dust, spectral and strange.
I parked and got out. The sound of the car door closing bounced off the concrete walls. I thought of my mum moving around in the flat, floors and floors above. It felt miles away. Unnerved, I found the green exit door and climbed the stairs back up to the light. The steps emerged near the front door to the flats. I could see Jim the porter reading his paper. Palms and conifers framed the path as I breathed in the warm fresh air. A chaffinch was singing in the maple above my head.
Upstairs I rang the bell to the flat. Nothing. I rang again. Finally I heard the chain.
‘Who is it?’ It was my mum’s voice behind the door.
‘It’s me, Mum. Ben.’
She opened the door. In her hand was a frozen Macaroni Cheese – one of the ones I’d bought her from Marks & Spencer.
‘Sorry, dear, I was on the sofa with my leg up. I’ve rather bashed my knee. Nothing serious. Bruise probably.’ She held up the ready-meal. ‘No peas, so I was using this.’
‘Oh, Mum, how?’
‘I was trying to plug the TV in and lost my balance.’
‘But the TV is always plugged in.’
‘Is it? I couldn’t get it to work.’
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘In bed.’
‘But you said he was OK.’
‘He was. But now he isn’t, I suppose.’
‘Is he taking his paroxetine?’
‘No idea.’
‘But you said you were pleased he was trying some new tablets.’
‘Did I? I can’t police everything.’
I made a cup of tea and sat with her for a while.
‘He’s just switched off,’ she said, after a long silence. ‘As long as I am here, he is OK, but I daren’t go out, not even to the shops, and of course he is not interested in my interests.’
‘Was he ever?’
‘Oh, don’t be cruel, darling.’ She looked across the room, lost in thought. ‘We have our moments.’ She ran her finger across her knee. ‘But it’s getting worse.’
‘What is?’
‘Him. His absence.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s like sometimes a piece of him has . . . He’s just a little old man. Don’t expect too much, dear.’
‘I don’t, Mum. It’s OK.’
‘It must be Alzheimer’s. What else could it be?’
‘Well, his chest must be hard to cope with, and he needs his oxygen and everything, but I’ll speak to the doctor if it would put your mind at ease.’
‘Would you, dear? I would so appreciate it.’
With the two of us sitting there I remembered the afternoons when I was young, when she worked from home as a journalist. She’d let me lie on the floor and draw in the doorway, to be near her, as long as I was quiet. She’d made a new career for herself in the mid-fifties since abandoning hopes of acting amid the havoc of full-time motherhood. (‘I was offered an audition for a part in Marlowe’s Edward II, but was too tired to even read it.’) Instead – making use of her first husband Ken’s contacts as an author and theatre critic – she’d grabbed an opportunity to write about life with the triplets for the Daily Express. The piece went down well. It was sharply observed and drily humorous, and with Ken’s help, more select doors opened to the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail and soon she was writing regular columns. ‘No one had written about motherhood as light comedy before,’ she once said to me. ‘It wasn’t just your father who could be funny, you know.’ By the early sixties, she was editing the ‘Femail’ page for the Daily Mail, and then She magazine came knocking and she was offered the chance to try her hand at some bigger celebrity interviews.
I pictured her tiny study just off the sitting room on the first floor in the house where I grew up. It used to be my room when I was baby. It was barely big enough for the desk and chair that sat in the middle of the room. It had a couple of filing cabinets either side, and piles of papers and cuttings and thick glossy Spotlight directories full of thousands of black-and-white publicity photos of endless actors and actresses. The pin-board was covered in clippings and reminders and phone numbers. (Clear guttering. RING IAN HOLM!!) She wrote at a small portable Adler typewriter with the phone to hand all the time – a big red GPO 746, with a rotary dial and a deafening ring. She smoked back then – Piccadilly, filter-tipped, the short ones in the wide hard box – and I’d listen to the rat-a-tat of the keys, the ding as she got to the end of the line, and the swoosh of the carriage-return. Suddenly she’d rifle through her address book, then pick up and dial – ‘Hello, Peter, darling, it’s Romany . . . Listen, I’m sorry to be a frightful bore but I’m writing this dreadful piece. Need a quick quote . . . you know how it is. Won’t keep you. Anyway, do you think femininity is going out of style?’ I’d lie quietly in the doorway to the sitting room with empty paper pulled out of one of her scrapbooks and spend an hour with a ruler and some coloured pens designing my own hand-drawn newspaper, complete with animal stories, TV listings and football results. I enjoyed the eavesdropping. It seemed like the outside world was the place to be.
An hour later, as I was leaving, she said casually, ‘I think I’m going to have to find a doctor, you know. Something odd is going on downstairs.’
For a moment I thought she meant something to do with the porters until I saw her face. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t like to bother you with these things, darling, but I have no one else to tell.’ She lowered her voice. ‘It’s like I’m trying to give birth to an egg.’
That night I spoke to Tracey.
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Sounds like a prolapse.’
‘Really?’
‘She’s had five kids. Three at one time. Women didn’t exactly do the exercises back then. Wouldn’t be surprised. The womb can no longer be supported. It can drop. Poor thing. You’d better call someone.’
Within a couple of days it was clear my mum would need a hysterectomy. Which meant time in hospital. Which meant I had to do something about my dad.