When Harriet Greenwald was cross she would often deal with it by gardening: vigorous digging, raking, mowing and – best of all – pruning usually put paid to any serious anger. Not that Harriet was essentially an angry person. She was, she liked to think, mostly easygoing. But, as everyone does, she had her moments. And these ‘moments’ tended to arise where her father was concerned.
Harriet’s mother had departed life when her only child was sixteen. She had died under an anaesthetic during a quite ordinary procedure and Harriet had sometimes wondered if her mother had done it as a last resort, having tried, and failed, to leave her husband by less drastic means. Her mother had twice before attempted to escape the marital home: once in a solitary dash for liberty and once on the arm of the owner of a Turkish restaurant, who had promised the earth, or at least to provide for her in Tooting. But despite the restaurateur’s forceful demeanour and material advantages – the restaurant had been doing well – the liaison had not been proof against the remedial effects of Harriet’s father’s disconcerting charm.
The charm, as charm generally is, was ephemeral. It emerged as a winning card on those occasions which Harriet’s mother had used to call ‘the last straw’ (but which, due to the charm, never quite were). At other times, Harriet thought to herself as she savagely pruned swathes of the Virginia creeper which adorned their back wall, he was intransigent, selfish and crafty. He had been so today.
Harriet and her husband Mike were due to leave for the US at the end of the week to visit their daughter. Joanna had had an internship with a design studio in Boston specialising in sportswear. Despite the economic downturn, sportswear, it seemed, was booming and Jo had been taken on as an assistant designer.
Mike and Harriet were both teachers. It was over a year since they had seen their daughter and with the Easter holiday pending they had a splendid opportunity to pay her a visit. ‘But,’ Harriet had said grimly, ‘before we make any serious commitment I’ll have to be sure things are OK with Dad.’
Being sure things were ‘OK’ meant seeing to it that her father did not alienate his latest carer, though how she was supposed to ensure such a thing, Harriet would dearly love to know. Mike said nothing to this. In the thirty-two years since his wife had died, his father-in-law had been a source of perpetual anxiety for his daughter, who was now the same age as her own mother when she finally escaped her husband’s toils.
Over the last two years, Sam Davis had run through eight carers, all, as the agency assured in tones of reproach, coming with the highest recommendations. Four of the carers had been men, four women, so it was not gender discrimination operating as Harriet had hoped at first. Replacing the troupe of departed men with women had made not a blind bit of difference. Men and women alike, in the end Sam got them to go.
Nor was it any kind of racial prejudice. Her father had had British, Afro-Caribbean, Irish, Spanish, Polish and even Venezuelan carers. The fact was, whatever corner of the globe they hailed from, Sam Davis was always too much for them.
‘What is it he does exactly?’ Mike asked when the last-but-one carer had given notice.
Harriet reflected. Mike knew her father, so the question was rhetorical but it was worth trying to put a finger on it.
‘He’s changeable,’ she said after a while. ‘But not in the way that we all are. Deliberately. He muddles them: asks them to do things and then when they do just what he has asked he says, quite charmingly, that that wasn’t what he wanted them to do, or that he never asked them to do it in the first place. It drives them mad. And it’s not as though he has dementia or anything. He’s perfectly sound in mind. He just likes to mess people about. It amuses him.’
‘Yes, well it doesn’t amuse me,’ Mike had said. ‘If he wasn’t your dad and half paralysed, I’d thump him.’
‘Someone will one day,’ Harriet said. ‘I don’t know whether to dread it or pray for it.’
But today, cutting back the Virginia creeper, she was more inclined to the latter course.
All had been going so well. They had booked their tickets, suitcases were filling, Mike had Googled what to do in Boston and Harriet had found Jo’s black silk camisole, without which, she emailed, she could no longer survive. And Mira, Sam’s latest carer, seemed really to like him. When Harriet, her heart in her mouth, had visited last, she had found Mira sitting on the kitchen table eating chocolate digestives and screaming with laughter. It was true that what she was laughing at was a fiction with which Sam was regaling her about his alleged career in the navy. There were things about her father’s life of which Harriet guessed she was ignorant, but that he was ever in the British navy she was pretty sure was not one of them.
But that very morning, just as everything looked set fair, Harriet received a call.
‘Madam, I am sorry but I leave Mr Davis.’ The sound of gentle crying filtered down the phone.
‘Oh dear, Mira. Why? What has happened?’
‘He ask me to buy him pyjamas and I buy and he send me back four times. Now he send me back to get the pyjamas I buy first. I say, “But these are what I bring in the first place.” He say, “I know, I want to see again to see why I no like them.” And then he hit my bottom. It is not right he do this, Mrs Greenwald. My behind it is not right he hit.’
‘Mira, wait there. I’m coming right round.’
Mira let her in red-eyed. Harriet went straight through to the untidy garden room where she found her father sitting, apparently studying the sky. ‘Dad, what’s this I hear from Mira?’
Her father smiled in the way that to another person might have been winning. He waved his stick in the air. ‘Have you ever studied clouds?’
‘Dad, Mira says you hit her.’
‘Good Lord.’ Sam Davis turned a mild and mischievous stare on his daughter. ‘As if I would.’
‘She claims you smacked her bottom.’
Her father shrugged. ‘The girl’s an idiot. It was a mere affectionate pat.’
‘Dad! For God’s sake, this is the twenty-first century. You simply cannot pat girls’ bottoms.’
‘Anyway, I’ve told her she must leave.’
‘Why? We’re about to go away.’
This, she saw, was a mistake. Her father’s face took on a musing look. He was cooking up, Harriet suspected, an answer to rile her further. ‘Have you considered the miracle of cloud formation?’ he eventually asked.
‘No,’ Harriet said, furious. ‘With a father like you I have more onerous things on my mind.’
Apologies and cajoling, and a couple of twenty-pound notes, failed to bring round Mira. She left, promising only, for Harriet’s sake, or perhaps it was the twenty-pound notes, not to make any mention of the assault on her behind.
And now Harriet, clipping like mad at the already radically barbered Virginia creeper, was at a loss. Today was Saturday. On Maundy Thursday, she and Mike were due to fly to Boston, and what was to be done about her father? Social Services could of course be alerted but he had successfully alienated them long ago. And then, he had ‘means’. Quite how much these ‘means’ amounted to, Harriet had never quite fathomed. But money it seemed was in too much supply for Social Services to consider a trying old man a real emergency.
The bell rang and, dismounting the ladder, Harriet went through the house to answer it.
Florid and smiling, Brenda Bottrell, the chairperson of the local gardening society, stood monumentally on the doorstep. ‘The promised Hostas,’ she announced, brandishing a bag overflowing with earthy foliage.
‘Oh, thank you,’ said Harriet, who had forgotten the chair had offered her these plants. ‘Do come in,’ she suggested, trying to make up for her forgetfulness, ‘and have a cup of tea.’
‘Well, maybe just the one.’
Mrs Bottrell, moving like a tank, manoeuvred herself on to the ricketiest kitchen chair. It was impossible not to suppose she had picked it deliberately as the least fit to bear her weight. Widowed for who knew how many years, Mrs Bottrell, Harriet had always to remind herself, must be lonely. Lonely but undeniably awful.
Over tea, Harriet explained that, regrettably, their impending Easter trip would mean her missing the next meeting of the garden society. Mrs Bottrell was condescending and understanding.
‘I have never crossed the pond myself,’ she averred, as if only the foolhardy failed to follow her example.
‘Though we mightn’t be going after all.’ Harriet explained to Mrs Bottrell’s questioning brow that her father’s carer had given notice and she was pessimistic, at such short notice, about finding a replacement for the Easter weekend.
‘Where does your poor father live?’
Electing not to query the ‘poor’, Harriet said, ‘Just round the corner. We moved here to be near him when he had his stroke. He’s half paralysed,’ and sighed.
Mrs Bottrell’s fierce little eyes took on a sudden lustre. ‘If I can be of any help …? I was, you know, a trained nurse.’
It was as if some empress had loftily offered her services. ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly impose,’ said Harriet, flustered.
But later that evening, when the agency had ‘regretted’ they had ‘no one at present suitable for Mr Davis’, Mike said, ‘Why not accept the old trout’s offer? She might even enjoy it if time’s heavy on her hands.’
‘I doubt if anything is “heavy” on Mrs Bottrell’s hands.’
None the less, the following morning Harriet rang the chair of the gardening society.
‘If you really mean it,’ Mike heard her say, ‘then we will be for ever in your debt.’
Returning from Boston, Harriet delayed going round to her father’s house longer than good conscience quite allowed. The trip had been heavenly. Jo was thriving and had a pleasant-seeming boyfriend, Mike had ‘done’ Boston and she had had time to catch up on her reading. On the few calls they had made to her father he had been uncharacteristically polite. Nevertheless, after bracing herself to ring to arrange the dutiful visit, it was with some trepidation that she walked up the path to his front door. The door, she observed, had been newly painted a startling red.
‘Do come in.’ Mrs Bottrell was gracious. ‘Samuel is in the conservatory.’
Walking through to the garden room, Harriet saw that it was not merely the front door that had been radically altered but the familiar interior landscape of her father’s house. The piles of old shoes, the shabby books and dusty prints were clean gone. The denuded walls were brilliant with paint and on a shelf, which had for ever held the Encyclopaedia Britannica, she observed a dimpling china shepherdess and her swain.
Her father’s appearance had undergone a corresponding change. His formerly unkempt hair had been cut short, as, she detected, had his nails, which were unwontedly clean. Instead of the moth-eaten maroon pullover in which, for the past ten years, he had received her, he was sporting a crisp blue-and-white striped shirt beneath a navy blazer. His ancient slippers, she saw, looking down at his feet, had been replaced by a pair of smart brown brogues.
‘He’s looking better, isn’t he.’ It was an affirmation rather than a question. ‘We’ve had a bit of a tidy since you’ve been gone.’
Harriet glanced at her father, expecting outrage. But with a shock, she saw his being was wholly focused on Mrs Bottrell, at whom he was gazing with adoring eyes. ‘She’s a marvel,’ he exclaimed, turning finally to his daughter. ‘Brenda is a marvel.’
‘Get away, you old silly.’ With a terrible mirthful jauntiness, Mrs Bottrell whacked Harriet’s father in the region of what Harriet instinctively knew the Chair of the Garden Society would refer to as his ‘backside’.
Harriet stared and Mrs Bottrell afforded her a majestic smile. ‘He just needed a bit of pruning, didn’t you, dear?’ at which Harriet’s father (as Harriet later told Mike) positively simpered. ‘And there’s no need to worry about “carers” any longer.’ Mrs Bottrell waved a large manicured hand. ‘Samuel and I got engaged. On Easter Sunday, actually,’ she announced and, quite dreadfully, giggled. ‘We are getting spliced as soon as we can. We were only waiting for you to come home, weren’t we, Samuel?’