It was dark in England. As soon as I boarded the train at Gatwick I removed the SIM card in my phone and replaced it with an English SIM. I was aware that this SIM-switching was out of date and that the logical thing to do nowadays is to get a smartphone with a contract that will allow it to roam everywhere. But I knew I was not going to do this. I suppose I resent the constant pressure to update and be every minute connected in every way. It seems an important part of my identity to resist such things, at least for a while. On the other hand, nothing would have been more useful to me at the present moment, moving as I was between countries and with a whole series of conversations on the go, private and work-related alike, than a single gadget that gathered phone calls and emails from wherever they came to wherever I was. Had I had an iPhone, for example, I would have seen emails from my brother, my wife, my daughter and Deborah Pool, not to mention numerous work emails and a lovely message from Elsa, before I got on the plane at Schiphol, something that would no doubt have changed and certainly complicated my mood on the flight and allowed me to be better prepared for what awaited me in England, though it might also have altered, if not entirely obliterated, my taxi conversation with Dr Sharp, which for some reason I was now thinking of as an important conversation, one I must return to when I had some time, though quite why I wasn’t sure. Certainly not for any precise content. Perhaps for the train of reflection it had set in motion with regard to my father. Dr Sharp’s similarity to my father, that is. With my mother’s imminent death, I had started thinking of my father, whom I hadn’t thought about for many years. The fact is there were things I would have liked to ask my mother about my father, a vague theory I had that I would have liked to verify. But if these were questions I hadn’t had the courage to ask in the past, when she was crying ‘cooee’ up the stairs and cooking plum crumbles to be served with thick yellow custard, was it likely I would be able to ask them now? I must see, I supposed, what state my mother was actually in.
‘I am sure,’ was the burden of my brother’s email, opened on my laptop while standing in the passport queue at Gatwick, ‘that the dear old bird will bury us all. I called her the day before yesterday and I assure you she was extremely chirpy.’ In short, it was a typical email from my brother. I had read it shuffling along in the queue, pushing my small bag across the floor with my toe, so as to have my arms free to cradle my laptop on my left arm and protect it from other shuffling passengers with my right. Mother was made of tougher stuff than people like us, my brother wrote. His daughter, he said – my niece, that is – had been passing through London on business just three weeks ago and had found her grandmother ‘in fine shape’. They had gone to Marble Hill Park together. They had walked by the river and had tea and cakes. In any event, he was a bit surprised – my brother, that is – to learn that I had jumped on a plane at the first cry of alarm from my alarmist sister. He himself, he wrote, couldn’t easily envisage crossing half the globe in the next few weeks, which were packed with institutional obligations. He had had a nice visit with Mother in the summer. He had good memories of that and wasn’t sure they needed adding to. The rest of what was really a generously long and chatty email encouraged me to read a new book on evolution, seen from a chemist’s point of view, a book he had found particularly impressive both for the clarity of the style and the illuminating nature of the information provided. ‘More and more,’ my brother concluded, ‘it does seem we are just a predetermined fizz of chemical reactions set in motion millennia ago. Including our most intimate thoughts. Hardly worth struggling against the tide. Heigh-ho, Tommy! Have a good trip and let me know how you find the old dear.’
A trolley now arrived selling sandwiches and, having paid for tea and ham-and-cheddar with a card, because I had no British currency, it occurred to me that perhaps it was what Dr Sharp had said about masturbation that had really impressed me. People impose pleasure on their bodies even when they don’t really need it or want it, Dr Sharp had said. An act of will. People had convinced themselves they must have pleasure. All the time. Pleasure coming more from the mind, really, than the flesh. That was an interesting idea. Was my aversion to the iPhone and the iPad partly to do with the fear of having Internet porn constantly and alluringly available, so that one would always be tempted to impose pleasure on one’s body? Mental sex. Though it did seem that Elsa had ended that phase of my life. Since I had decided to stake everything on Elsa I had noticed, to my surprise, that I was suddenly and entirely free from that kind of compulsion. The truth is, one day you will have to get an iPhone, I thought now, because the world will become so integrated with this new gadget, there will be so many apps one can’t do without – to book a theatre ticket, to find a restaurant, to check street directions – that you will have to get one merely to function in society like other human beings, the way everyone has to wear clothes, like it or not, live under a roof, get an income, pass a driving test, take care of their teeth and open a bank account. All like it or not. Civilisation imposes these things. You cannot live simply as the animal you are, even if you might like to, or might like at least to try, or to have tried. All the same, I didn’t want to buy a smartphone right now. I would wait until the last possible moment, as my mother had waited until the last possible moment before calling for help after her fall down the stairs three weeks ago, perhaps the day after the visit from her granddaughter, my brother’s child, or perhaps that very same evening, for nobody knew exactly when Mother had fallen down the stairs, even though this accident was something we had been expecting for twenty years and more. She hadn’t been able to say. And presumably she waited till the last possible moment before calling for assistance because she knew in her heart that when they took her away from her home she would not be coming back.
Sitting on the train from Gatwick – not the Gatwick Express but Southern, for my immediate destination was Clapham Junction – I was about to call my old friend Deborah, in response to her emailed SOS, when a message arrived from my sister. ‘Please call as soon as you arrive.’ Then the phone rang and it was my son in Bristol. ‘You’re in the UK already?’ My son was evidently surprised that my UK number had responded. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As of half an hour ago. How are things?’ He would gladly come to see his grandmother, my son said, my eldest child, but he would need to beg a day off work. Was I absolutely sure she was dying? I had no idea, I told him. I had merely responded to an email from my sister. ‘You’re the doctor,’ I said. He laughed. He was indeed a doctor, my son agreed, but he hadn’t seen his grandmother for some time. A doctor wasn’t a diviner. I was surprised the boy knew the word. ‘Call me after you’ve seen her this evening,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll find a doctor at this hour, but speak to the nurses. These things can be deceptive.’
I now started to call my sister, but as I did so Clapham Junction was announced and I cancelled the call to gather my bits and pieces and be ready to get off. It would be absolutely typical of me to leave some crucial piece of luggage or clothing or technology on the train. Then, having found the platform for Hounslow at Clapham, and Clapham is never easy, the person I actually called was Deborah, though all the while aware that I ought to be focusing on my mother, my sister. There were only five minutes to wait, the illuminated indicator told me, for the Hounslow train, which was a stroke of luck. I had taken it for granted, initially, that Mother really was about to die, but what if she wasn’t? These things can be deceptive, my son said. He was a doctor. What if my sister was being melodramatic, exaggerating? Alarmist, my brother had said. One effect of my brother’s unwavering conviction that my mother will live for ever is a desire, on my part, to demonstrate to him once and for all that she is now in serious trouble; she is mortal; people do die. Drum that into his head. Above all, parents die. They really do. To wilful denial one reacts with wilful exaggeration. Mum’s sick. She’s dying. Exasperated, perhaps, by some comment my brother had made – the dear old bird will bury us all – my sister had upped the stakes, to get through his thick skull – officially, it should be said, my brother is the genius of the family – that something really was happening. ‘She’s going downhill fast,’ my sister – officially the family dunce – had emailed. This to have my brother face facts, even if the facts weren’t perhaps quite as extreme as she was intimating. Or at least my son had put this idea into my head. And I realised now that I really ought to have thought of the implications of my sister’s including my brother in that email. It wasn’t an email exclusively for me. And I should be phoning her now to find out more. I should be trying to figure out how long I would stay in the UK, if my mother was not dying. Should I cancel the conference in Berlin? The 27th annual gathering of European linguists. My diary was teeming with appointments. Uses of Archaism in Contemporary Communication Strategies was the title. I had a flight to Berlin from Madrid tomorrow evening. But I wouldn’t be in Madrid. What should I tell Elsa? Vaguely I was aware that ‘teeming’ was a word my mother always used and that I never did. For rain particularly. It’s teeming down, she would say. As I approached London and London weather, I was using Mother’s words. On the other hand, Deborah’s SOS had been so interestingly alarming, and had to do with people who had been so much closer to me over recent years than my family had been, how could I not phone her with some urgency? To be honest, I had hardly seen anyone from the family in an age now. With the exception of my mother, that is, whenever I passed through London, and then only because she was ill, because it was a duty to visit a mother who is ill when it’s not too difficult to do so. Though never, since that long summer together, for more than a lunch or a dinner. Then surely, I thought, there would be time enough to focus on Mother and what needed to be said to Mother, and whether and when I should book a flight to Berlin or to Madrid and so on, while I was sitting at her bedside. She would hardly want to be sitting up talking all night. There would be plenty of time.
‘Tom!’ Deborah cried. ‘At last!’
It was the same posh and squeaky voice of old. It never changed. Though she did sound flustered.
‘Hi, Deborah.’
‘At last,’ she repeated.
I explained I hadn’t seen her email for some hours because I was travelling. I didn’t have a smartphone. Then in the silence that she should have been speaking into, nothing. I heard some sighing. She had begun to cry.
‘Deborah?’ I said, gluing the phone to my ears as the train for Hounslow via Richmond rattled along the platform. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Are you in England? This is an English number, isn’t it? How wonderful. Are you in London?’
‘It is,’ I said, boarding the train behind a man with a stick, ‘and I am, but I’m tied up right now. I have to see my mother.’
I had to go to the bathroom again too, but the fact that I wouldn’t have to disturb anyone to do so, just walk along the South West Trains carriage to where my eye had already located the illuminated sign, made this infinitely less painful than it had seemed on the plane. Hence it could wait. My bladder would soon be back to normal, I decided. Today was a glitch. A little flare-up after the massage. And I didn’t tell Deborah my mother was at death’s door because it seemed to me she had enough on her plate. Who had used that expression already today? Charlie had attacked David with a chair, Deborah’s email had said. David had been taken to hospital. She wondered if I would talk to Charlie, her youngest son. ‘You’re the only person I can imagine knowing what to say to him,’ she had written. ‘Like you did before, remember?’
I didn’t.
‘Perhaps you could come over later,’ she said. ‘Could you?’ No doubt my mother went to bed fairly early, she thought. It was only half an hour from Hounslow to Kingston. And such a stroke of luck I was in London.
This was difficult. Deborah’s voice had an edge of hysteria. Apparently she was just back from hospital, where David was under observation. I had no idea what shape I would find my mother in or what exactly was expected of me. Until just a few moments ago I had been convinced I was in a race against time to make it to her deathbed. But perhaps not.
‘What on earth happened, Deborah?’ I asked. I started walking along the carriage to the bathroom. ‘Why would Charlie do that?’
But she said, No, Tom, she really couldn’t even begin to talk about it on the phone. ‘Rosie is listening,’ she whispered sharply. Every word she spoke reminded me how posh Deborah was. In the train there were bags to be stepped over. She just couldn’t, she said. And she burst into tears again. Rosie was the daughter. ‘All I’ll say is it’s a fucking disaster. I’m going fucking crazy.’ Now her voice was suddenly loud and harsh. Rosie must surely have heard, I thought, if she really was there. And I was taken aback because Deborah never swore. Deborah was a churchgoer, a high-churchgoer, one of those people who always warn you not to swear when you have a meal together with their kids. She got quite indignant when people swore. My mother was low-church, of course. Proudly low. And I swear far too much.
I had buzzed myself into the South West Trains bathroom now and was pressing the phone against my shoulder to free my right hand to unzip. I can’t unzip with my left alone. Still, the last thing I needed was for the phone to fall into the loo. More calmly, Deborah said, ‘The fact is poor Charlie is likely to be charged with assault and battery. The police have told him to come to the station tomorrow morning. And he’s saying he doesn’t care and if his dad doesn’t shape up, he’ll do it again. He’ll kill him. Please come and talk to him, Tom. He’ll listen to you. I know he will. I’m going mad.’
As we spoke, the phone beeped to warn me someone else was trying to call. The pee was slow in coming, the hi-tech South West Trains bathroom most impressive.
‘David’s going to be okay, though?’ I asked cautiously. ‘Isn’t he? Is he badly hurt?’
The truth is, I would far rather have seen David than his son, Charlie. Or Deborah, for that matter. I had already been planning to call David at some point to meet for beers and to crow to him about Elsa. It was something I had been looking forward to. Now it seemed that wouldn’t happen.
‘Can I call him in hospital?’ I asked.
‘He’ll be fine,’ Deborah said rather drily; but no, he couldn’t answer calls. He was under sedation.
‘God! I’ll see what I can do and call later,’ I said, wondering why designers preferred expensive, push-button electric sliding doors to simple handles and latch locks. Surely it only increased the possibility of something going wrong.
Deborah told me she was counting on me. It sounded unpleasantly demanding, but there was no time to think about this because now the phone rang again and it was my sister. I was still staring into the bowl.
‘Hi, Bro!’ she cried, ‘how you doing?’
She was so breezy! As if I’d come home for Christmas. I was taken aback. The fact is my sister and I hadn’t spoken to each other for at least six months, perhaps a year. In our family my brother and I spoke to, or at least emailed, each other pretty regularly, but not my sister. Or rather, my sister always spoke to the parents, but not to us. Only my mother’s illness had forced this recent exchange of emails.
‘Hi, Sis.’
‘Sorry, listen,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid things are a bit complicated, Bro.’ Her voice seemed jokily conspiratorial. She was the only person I knew who called a brother ‘Bro’. ‘Where are you, by the way?’
‘On the train to Hounslow.’
‘Ah. You see, she’s not in Hounslow. As of two days ago. That’s why I was trying to get in touch. I’d forgotten you wouldn’t know.’
My sister now began a long explanation of my mother’s recent movements, while I zipped up and pushed the button to move out of the bathroom, well aware that I hadn’t peed all there was to pee and hence would very soon have to go again. ‘After her fall on the stairs, you see, they couldn’t work out whether the deterioration was due to the impact on her back or an acceleration of the cancer. I mean, these awful pains she’s getting. Obviously, if they are due specifically to the fall, then the situation might not be terminal. More orthopaedic.’
‘But where is she now? If I’m going to get to her this evening …’
‘Claygate.’
‘Come again?’
‘It’s to the south,’ she said. ‘Check on your phone.’
When I explained once again that I didn’t have a smartphone, she called out, ‘How does Tommy get here from a train between Putney and Richmond? He’ll check,’ she said. Meaning her husband presumably. ‘He’s a whizz at these things.’
‘You’re there, then?’ I said. ‘Now.’
‘With Mum? Yes. Or rather, not exactly. We’ve just come outside for a few minutes’ break. It’s heavy going. But we have to leave soon.’
‘And how is she?’
‘All over the place, to be honest.’
Again I was surprised by my sister’s tone of voice, which didn’t seem melodramatic or anguished at all. Almost offhand. What did she mean: all over the place? Again it occurred to me I might have completely misjudged her email. After all, it had popped up exactly as I was feeling the first effects of the fatal massage. I had only read it once. One thing colours another.
‘Yesterday she managed a few steps with the Zimmer frame. They are eager to get her up on her feet again. You know how they are. But today she looks like it’s all over, bar the counting.’ She paused and began more seriously, ‘What you have to do, though, Tom, when you see the doctors tomorrow morning—’
Now her husband interrupted. I should get off at Richmond, he was saying, assuming I hadn’t already passed Richmond, and take a taxi or a bus, depending on my finances. If a bus, it was the 65 to Esher. ‘Get off at St Leonard’s Road,’ my sister said. ‘You see, she was in the hospice in Hounslow, where she’d always meant to go, after being with us, I mean, but then they sent her to the hospital for a scan, to see if there was spinal damage. That meant a trip to the West Middlesex. Wednesday. The scan took hours and, when it was over, the bed in Hounslow had gone because of some emergency that had come up. I thought it was pretty disgraceful, to be honest. They’d just bundled her stuff into her bag. Anyway, at that point, thank God, they found her the place in Claygate, otherwise she’d have been in a regular hospital ward with a dozen others. They even threatened to send her back to us, if you please.’
‘If you please’ was another expression my mother always used, but which I don’t think I or my brother ever did. Like ‘whizz’, for that matter. In fact, as this conversation with my sister unfolded – the first conversation, as I said, that we had had for at least six months, perhaps a year – I was acutely aware that not only had our family long been split into the religious side and the non-religious side, but we even spoke different languages. Or we spoke the same language in different ways, if you please.
‘Anyway, what you’ve got to do,’ she was saying, ‘when you see the doctor tomorrow morning …’
‘What time?’
‘They come round around eight. I think it’s a woman. Is demand that they …’
The train was arriving in Richmond. I had to move, I said.
‘Okay. Text me when you get on the bus and we’ll meet you at the stop and say hello, before we drive home. St Leonard’s Road. See you soon, Bro.’
My sister, I should have said, lives in Swanage and has a handicapped daughter to return to. Severely handicapped. In her thirties now.
Getting off the train, I wondered if I should phone Deborah again and tell her it was definitely off, I couldn’t possibly come. Then I thought I would wait at least until I had seen what the situation at the hospice was. David, far more than Deborah, had been an important part of my life and though I had rather lost contact in the last couple of years with moving abroad, I was curious to know what was going on between them. Extremely curious. In particular, why on earth would their charming son Charlie have attacked his father with a chair? What had David done? Charlie, unlike his brother Robin, had always been a good boy. As I too, unlike my brother, had always been a good boy.
At the same time, looking around in the foyer of Richmond Station for some information as to where I might catch the 65 to Esher via Claygate, I was struck by the thought of the ordeal my poor mother was going through and the relaxed, sometimes flippant tone of my sister’s voice. Not that I meant any criticism of my sister. Who, after all, had been on hand to look after my mother when she had finally sent out her plea for help, days after the famous fall, if not my sister? And looking after my mother in those days meant carrying her to the bathroom, or the toilet as my sister still said, or simply letting her do it in bed. And who could have carried a big-boned woman like my mother to the bathroom, the toilet, the loo, if not my sister’s huge-boned husband? Who would have done the unpleasant cleaning, if not, again, my generous sister, herself in her sixties and seriously worn out by thirty years of looking after a disastrously handicapped child.
So I wasn’t criticising my sister’s tone of voice at all. I was just surprised by the thought that this is what life is actually like. Your mother is going through every kind of hell, in excruciating pain, not knowing what bed she will die in, your sister sounds relaxed and jokey, and you are thinking of your old friend Dave and the precariously double life he always led. David would have done anything not to hurt Deborah. He had told me that a million times. He admired Deborah. In a way he adored Deborah, he truly did; certainly he prized the whole family thing that he and Deborah had put together: their lovely children, their fantastic home – homes, rather – their circle of friends, and so on. But he had never really felt, Dave had told me on one memorable occasion, that Deborah was his woman.
Once again I wasn’t thinking of my mother. But I had found the 65 bus stop. So I should be with her soon enough. There would be time enough for Mother, I thought. I didn’t want to take a taxi, because I couldn’t see the point of spending ten times as much to save: what? Just five or ten or fifteen minutes. This was a thriftiness, a habit, I had learned in childhood, no doubt from my mother who, as we have seen, was determined now to die in the thriftiest possible way. That was one of the reasons why she was going through this miserable ordeal, shifted back and forth from hospital to hospice.
Thrift or not, though, the truth is I hate that feeling of being trapped in a taxi having to watch the meter creep up at every traffic light. No, let’s be more specific. Whenever I’m in a taxi I feel guilty: guilty of throwing money away, guilty of treating myself like a king when I should be with ordinary people on the bus. And who had instilled this guilt in me, if not the woman determined to die cheaply in order to pass on the money to me, so that I could feel guilty whenever I spent it on a cab? This is the money your mother is earning for you now, I thought, if you want to see it that way, dying so cheaply as she is, and you spend it on a cab. But because I’m no sooner feeling this taxi guilt than I realise that it is stupid, it is nothing more than a hangover from childhood conditioning of an emphatically low-church variety, an instinctive resistance kicks in and I start to mock myself for feeling guilty and to wish I was taking taxis all day long, with classy women and fat cigars and bottles of champagne on the back seat. I wish I was spending lavishly, scandalously, above all carelessly, unwisely, living it up in every possible way, and at the same time I loathe the sight of the meter creeping up to form the scandalous figure I am actually going to have to shell out when the journey ends. I feel like a sheep gripped tight for the fleecing. And since riding in a taxi inevitably provokes this conflicted state of mind in me, I have started to hate taxis most of all because of what they tell me about myself. Even when travelling on expenses I hate taxis. The emotions click in even when I’m not paying. Perhaps that partly explains my anxiety in the long taxi ride to Schiphol.
Still, at least this taxi decision had started me thinking of my mother again. My mother’s absolutely central role in everything I am. No doubt my father’s too, truth be told. Or the combination, Mum and Dad. They made me who I am. Suddenly, unhappily, I was now electrically aware there would be an awful lot of thinking coming my way in the next few days. Assuming Mother died. But even if she didn’t. Perhaps especially if she didn’t. An awful lot of very difficult thinking and very difficult emotion, to the point that I felt exhausted just thinking of the thinking I would soon have to be doing. Not to mention the emotions I would be feeling. Presumably. How would they impact on my bladder? Impact actually seemed an appropriate verb in this particular circumstance. If only Elsa were here, I thought. Elsa calms me down. On the other hand, if anyone’s life had run parallel to mine over these last two decades, or at least until my separation, it was David’s, and David came from a completely different background from my own and had been conditioned in completely different ways. So where was the determinism of one’s parents’ genes and cultural conditioning? And if any phrase has ever sunk into my skull over the years, with the purpose and urgency of a gunshot announcing a long-delayed revolution, it was when David said that evening, over beers no doubt, since David never said anything personal without a beer in his fist, ‘Despite the family, Tom,’ he said, ‘despite admiring Debbie so much, despite not wanting to hurt her, and so on, ever, I just feel really she is not my woman. Not the woman for me. Never has been, never was.’ And then he added with a sigh, as if admitting a major defeat, ‘I suppose it must be a thing of the flesh.’
A thing of the flesh. As if David, or indeed any of us, would have given anything to have been spared things of the flesh, to be spared imperatives we could not control. This from a serial adulterer of the most resolute ilk. Which reminded me again of something my mother had said that summer in her house while playing Scrabble together. She said, ‘I’m not afraid of the actual dying, Tom, since I’ll be going home to glory of course, but cancer just smells so bad.’ And we were both thinking obviously of Father. Because he had smelled. There was no denying it. ‘Pounding flesh,’ David used to say when he was ‘out on a mission’. As I climbed onto the 65 I was acutely aware of a sharp, stabbing pain in my belly.
‘This is the sixty-five to Esher Central Station,’ a disembodied but definitely female voice was announcing. It’s interesting how frequently disembodied voices are female. I climbed on the bus with my bag and pulled out my wallet, only to realise I had no English cash to pay the fare; they would hardly take foreign credit cards on a red bus. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the driver said. Sir! I got off the bus, crossed the road to go back to the railway station and walked straight to the taxi rank.
‘You take cards?’ I asked the driver. A woman.
‘Reluctantly,’ she said.
‘Not as reluctantly as I take cabs.’
Coming out with this sharp response immediately made me feel better. Combative. The pain eased. It was odd. You feel better when you get into some kind of rapport, I realised. As when you talked to the knitter with the dyed hair on the plane. When you engage with people. I need Elsa here. That is the truth. Elsa is my woman, I thought. ‘I’m going to Claygate,’ I told the driver. And to my sister I texted, ‘Send hospice address. In a cab. Don’t want to arrive late.’ Then I made a pact with myself not to look at the meter for the whole duration of the ride, not even to register the sum, mentally, when the driver finally pressed the button that stopped the figures creeping up; I would just hand her the credit card and tell her to add three quid for a tip. It would be fun discussing this detail with my shrink. The tip, I mean. No, five quid, I decided. Let’s give a stupidly large tip, against the grain, against the boy who is his mother’s thrifty son.
I sat in the back of the cab suddenly drained of energy, staring emptily out of the window, and after some minutes realised that we were driving through Kingston. I knew because I saw the John Lewis I had been to with Mother one day that summer of four years ago, when she had wanted to buy me a teapot to take home as a gift for my wife. In the end, Mother was always more of a Kingston person than a Hounslow person. She should never have been living in Hounslow. And she always hoped that these small social rituals of gift-giving and birthday-card-sending would keep our marriage on the rails, despite the glaring evidence that the conjugal carriages had come uncoupled years ago. ‘What do I want with another teapot,’ my wife said, ‘when the only person drinking tea around here is you?’
And why hadn’t it occurred to me that going south instead of north from Richmond, I was going closer to Dave and Deborah’s, not further from them? So if I didn’t spend all night with my mother, which seemed unlikely, I might as well make the effort and go and see Deborah and young Charlie, if it would help. Perhaps I could even sleep there. I had eaten with them in their Kingston home just once, as I recalled, something over a year ago, when the conversation over lunch in the garden – they had only recently moved into a truly magnificent house – had gravitated towards the delicate question of Charlie’s sexual orientation. The garden backed onto the river. Was this what Deborah was referring to when she spoke of my having once talked to him? Though I hadn’t actually spoken to Charlie at all. Deborah and David had waited until the children drifted away from the table to ask me was it true that Charlie had sent me some stories he had written, for me to read? One says children, but they were all in their twenties now. I had immediately been on my guard. I said it was true, yes – two stories, to be precise, in an email. He had mistakenly imagined, I said, meaning Charlie, that since I sometimes work for publishers I might be able to help him publish them.
‘But I actually am a publisher,’ David observed. ‘And one that publishes stories, not academic monographs.’
‘So you know how naïve he was being,’ I laughed.
‘And are they any good?’ Deborah enquired.
I remember shrugging and saying that although I really wasn’t an expert on short stories, it was hardly my field, I tend to get hung up with syntax and lexical choices, they had seemed to me to be rather good, actually, yes. Certainly I had read them with interest. To the end. Which was rare. ‘But a bit sad,’ I added, hoping that this small extra scrap might be enough to round off and conclude a conversation that had caught me by surprise. Why Charlie had sent these stories to me, out of the blue, I really wasn’t sure. I didn’t even know how he had got my email address. And why, having sent them to me, he had then wanted to tell his parents he had sent them was even stranger. I certainly wouldn’t have mentioned it to them if they hadn’t brought the matter up. Or perhaps he had told his sister, and his sister had told his parents, which would make things even more delicate for me. But I couldn’t know that and certainly couldn’t ask.
‘Well, I’m rather intrigued,’ David said. ‘It’s great you think the boy can write. What are they about?’
I took a deep breath and sighed. We had had a glass or two. It was a Sunday lunch, as I recall. There were bottles on the table. David and Deborah do drink. The house was wonderful. Their houses are always wonderful. Looking up, I guessed from something in her eyes that Deborah knew the truth. She was the boy’s mother, after all. Or at least she was afraid it might be that. While David was oblivious. David thought we were simply talking literary performance. He was a book man. And for a moment I was able to savour the irony of Deborah’s being largely unaware of her husband’s endless sexual adventures, but cottoning on fairly rapidly about her son, or so it seemed, and David’s living a life of extraordinary deviousness while remaining absolutely oblivious to Charlie’s identity crisis, a crisis intensified perhaps precisely by this lack of awareness on his father’s part. Perhaps deviousness obliges a man to be so focused on his own performance that he really doesn’t have the mental space for anyone else’s. In the end you can hardly expect a tightrope walker to help you with your bags.
‘He seems a bit shy of telling us what he writes,’ David prodded, smiling at me.
David and I hadn’t spoken in a while, not since my separation anyway, and although in the past there had been times of exhilarating intimacy, these days we barely communicated at all.
‘Kids and their fathers,’ I said offhand. It must have been obvious I was hiding something.
‘Oh, come on.’ David poured himself more wine.
‘Love,’ I told him. ‘They’re stories about love.’ This was true. ‘Who would want their parents to read their love stories?’
‘Oh, romance!’ he exclaimed. ‘Wonderful! Sells books.’
‘Quite.’
‘Excellent,’ David filled his glass. ‘Funny,’ he chuckled, ‘he keeps his women well hidden.’
There was a moment’s silence. What was I supposed to say? Charlie hadn’t suggested that sending the stories to me – and they were as passionate and explicit as ever stories could be – was a way of coming out to his parents. He had simply asked me for a literary opinion. We had spoken about literature a few times in the past when I had stopped by at their house. We were all bookish people. And once, when my family visited theirs, we had played tennis together. Presumably Charlie had imagined I would be a sympathetic ear within his parents’ circle. I was the kind of low-church guy who swore at a high-church table. In particular, I was the close friend of a father who was jovially, insatiably heterosexual and never swore at table. And Charlie was right. I was a sympathetic ear. I really could not care if the boy was homosexual or not. I feel a deep sympathy for anyone pushed by fleshly imperatives to take decisions his nearest and dearest are not easy with. But then I wasn’t his father. He wasn’t my son. And he hadn’t actually told me whether or not to say anything to his parents. He hadn’t asked me to tell and he hadn’t asked for discretion. I was simply sent two highly erotic, touchingly lyrical stories about adolescent homosexual love. However, there was the complication that while one of the stories finished happily, the other, which was by far the longer and more ambitious of the two, ended with an accident that might well have been construed as a suicide, a double suicide, perhaps even a death pact. At the end of the family holidays on which the two adolescents discover their sexuality, the evening before their parents are due to return to their strait-laced city lives, the two young men dive from a cliff into a tormented and rocky sea. What coast this was wasn’t clear, but their deaths were, as it were, taken for granted. That was the catastrophic tone of the final lines of an otherwise blissful story. It didn’t bode well for a coming out.
‘I guess if you want the details,’ I said, ‘you should ask him for a copy. I mean, I wouldn’t like to give away the end and spoil it for you.’
‘Damn, you’ve got me curious!’ David said. ‘Don’t tease, Tommy. Tell!’
He filled my glass again. I sat smiling.
Then Deborah said, ‘By the way, Tom, speaking of romance, Dave and I have a story of our own.’
David pressed his hands on the table and rolled his eyes.
‘Do we have to?’
Deborah was suddenly beaming. ‘Can you believe this old bear has agreed to marry me on my sixtieth birthday? Think of that!’ She actually clapped her hands. At once I realised she had been dying to tell me this all lunchtime.
The truth was David had always refused to marry Deborah. They had lived together and had children together unmarried, in sin, despite her high-churchness. It had been hard for her. Officially, Dave’s refusal was ideological. Child of ’68, he was against all conservative institutions, he said. But unofficially I felt it was because, beyond the evident social and economic advantages of marrying a smart woman from a wealthy, well-connected family, who incidentally was five years older than he was and had always looked after him in every way, David’s flesh nevertheless warned him that Deborah was not, as he put it, his woman. However long they lived together, at the deepest level they would never truly be married, ceremony or not. He knew that. Except that now, rather surprisingly, he had agreed to marry her on her sixtieth birthday.
‘Better late than never! Congratulations.’
‘More attrition than romance,’ David commented. He was laughing, but it was cruel all the same. ‘Do we have to?’ he repeated when Deborah began to talk of the wedding-reception arrangements. Again it seemed cruel, but a cruelty born of unease. And now it was Deborah who, by ignoring his unease and cruelty, seemed determined to be cruel herself. The party would be on a boat on the Thames, she explained; which had the advantage of restricting the number of people who could come. Otherwise, marrying at sixty, there was simply no end to the people they might have to invite. ‘Even grandchildren,’ she giggled. Their eldest daughter was producing a second.
‘I won’t be sixty,’ David said, filling his glass yet again.
‘I suppose,’ Deborah laughed, ‘given what you said about the stories, Tom, we should ask Charlie if he has a partner to bring.’
Why did she say that, I wondered, when it had seemed to me she had guessed why I hadn’t wanted to talk about them? Or was I wrong? Perhaps she just liked to throw out knowing glances from time to time.
‘Even two,’ David joked. ‘A few charming chicks would give us the excuse to exclude an old hen or two.’
Deborah laughed with him. But I was unsettled. All at once I felt a powerful rush of impatience; no doubt it came in the wake of that tidal wave of emotions that had so recently swept away my own family life. I was fed up with charades.
‘I’m afraid they’ll be cocks,’ I said. ‘Not chicks.’
‘Where exactly in Claygate, sir?’ the driver asked.
Thirty minutes in heavy traffic and I hadn’t thought of my mother at all. But nor had I thought of anal massage or bladder pains. I checked the phone, to find that my sister hadn’t answered my message.
‘It’s a hospice,’ I said. ‘In the Claygate area.’
‘Sorry?’
‘A hospice. Those homes for people who are dying.’
The taxi driver shook her head. She had a straight-backed, rather military look to her.
‘Near St Leonard’s Road.’
‘Do you want me to take you there?’ She began keying the name into her navigator.
‘I’ll see if I can get the address.’
I phoned my sister now and, as I waited for the call to connect, wondered if my impetuous, perhaps unwise disclosure at Sunday lunch more than a year before – my telling my friend, albeit not in so many words, that his beloved younger son was gay – had perhaps set off whatever chain of events led to Charlie’s smashing a chair over his father’s head sometime in the early hours of this morning. The phone rang but wouldn’t answer. On the second attempt the call was rejected.
‘Okay, St Leonard’s Road,’ I said.
The taxi stopped. When we’d finished sorting the money, the driver turned and flashed me a smile, a five-pound smile, I suppose.
‘Thank you, sir. Glad I overcame my reluctance.’
‘My pleasure,’ I told her. In other days I might have asked for her phone number. There was something about the woman. Perhaps a sense that she was doing a job she didn’t really want to do. Conflictedness can be attractive. As it was, I climbed out of the car to find myself in a long and leafy suburban street, the kind of place someone like myself should be living in – would be living in, I thought – had I played all my cards in the conventional fashion.
Where was Mother?