July 1989
When I was twenty-four, Mum told me she and Dad were getting married. ‘So that’s why there aren’t any wedding photos,’ was all I could think of to say. And she explained how Dad had never been able to divorce Nancy, his first wife, whom he hadn’t seen for thirty years. Now poor Nancy had died, shrivelled into senile dementia by her bitter angry life. She had resented him too much to free him. I was shocked, and surprised at my shock. When the boys and Poppy were told, Mummy laughed till tears ran down her face, apologizing as she choked, because each one of them said, ‘So that’s why there aren’t any wedding photos.’ Mum wrote a list of friends and family to invite to the wedding and I looked on in silence. Dad came in and kissed the top of my head. ‘Scandalous, isn’t it?’ he mocked, and I suddenly felt moved and thrilled. To be at one’s parents’ wedding was a rare privilege, I decided.
The weeks before the wedding were fraught. While banns were read each week at the Catholic church in Sallingham, we made late-night phone calls to California, trying to track down Nancy’s death certificate. It arrived at last, and we celebrated with a bottle of red Martini. For once, Dad shared.
The garden was blooming; tangles of roses struggled across walls, petals like drops of blood where tendrils had paused on the grey flint. Dad wore a white suit, his bootlace tie secured with a silver eagle stolen from Brodie. His feet were large and pneumatic in a pair of pumped-up Reeboks which belonged to Dan. Dad was very pleased with them and spun a football on the lawn. The boys watched gravely, terrified that he might hurt himself but unable to dent his pride by stopping him. Mum wore black, her dress sprigged with white flowers and comfortingly familiar. It was the one she wore for all godly events, from carol services to funerals, and she would consider no alternative.
At the church, Action Priest waited, preening in his ceremonial robes. Flook named him Action Priest when he saw the boyish figure, head close-cropped, features lean and muscular, getting out of a sports car one day at Mildney. He had come to hear Dad’s confession. While Mum and I skulked nervously in the house, Action Priest went out to the lawn where Dad was sitting. ‘He hasn’t been to confession once since I’ve known him,’ Mum whispered. ‘I hope he’s not going to say something disgraceful.’
One and a half minutes later Dad appeared, leaning heavily on Action Priest’s arm; they walked towards the arbour for an absolving drink. Smiling and joking, they passed us peering out of the back door. Dad pretended not to see us, but he looked back and winked, curling his lips back to utter a triumphant ‘Hah’ at his lurking, incredulous family. We allowed a decorous interlude to pass, then crept round to the arbour. They were talking about football, Dad’s arm around Action Priest as they moved goal by goal through the League table.
Squat and new, the church hung over Sallingham’s white cliffs, high above wheeling gulls and a glittering black sea. Dad refused to sit on the chair placed for him in front of the altar. We heard his breath coming heavy and slow as he performed his role. Mum shook as she made her vows, her voice trembling, almost swallowed by the rustle and creak of the congregation. Afterwards we threw confetti over them and Dan pulled up in his rusting white Vauxhall car. It was wet with sequins and hearts hastily daubed that morning over Dan’s Bob Marley emblem. He drove Mum and Dad away, leaving the scent of smouldering rubber on the road behind him.
Back home in the garden, guests queued up to salute Mum and Dad while Brodie, Flook, Dan, Poppy and I stood behind, smiling proudly, as if we were the parents.
The next day, Dad and Poppy flew to Italy for the honeymoon. Mum went on the train. ‘I want to enjoy our honeymoon,’ she insisted, ‘and I won’t if aeroplanes are involved.’
It was August. Italy sweated and scorched under a blistering sun. Dad became ill, his throat parched and closed against the hot air. Late one night he was rushed to hospital in Siena. He stayed there for a month.
Poppy returned to England, white and thin. I met her at the airport and she fell crying into my arms. ‘It was terrible. I found Dad collapsed in the bathroom,’ she gulped. ‘I thought he was dead, his skin was cold. He had to go to hospital on the third day we were there, and since then all we’ve done is drive to Siena to sit in his little hot room with him. Mum won’t come back until he’s let out, and the doctors don’t know how to make him better.’
I was terrified that Dad would die. On his honeymoon, in Italy, the place he loved, with Mum, the person he loved. Hysteria rising, I knew that this was how the gods had destined it to be. A day later, Mum rang from a hospital phone. ‘You might have to come,’ was all she said when I asked how he was. ‘Let’s give it another day.’
Poppy and I lashed ourselves into fevered misery, then Flook phoned and told us not to be so bloody stupid. ‘He’s only ill because it’s hot.’ He spoke slowly, enunciating very clearly, as if talking to an imbecile. ‘He’ll be fine when he gets home.’
Thoughts of his never getting home faded with Flook’s words. Two days later, a long white car drew up at Mildney. Out came Mum, pale and blotched, with dark-ringed eyes. Out came Dad, wrapped in a white cashmere blanket, suntanned and wearing dark glasses. He was thin. Bones I had never noticed before were crossed by veins fragile as birds’ feet, and his nose reared patrician in his sunken face. We prepared to carry him, reverential and praising the Lord, into the house, but he would have none of it. Seizing his stick, he walked round to the front of the car and asked the driver to raise the bonnet. Poppy and I gawped. Dad and the driver began to examine the engine.
‘He’s thrilled by this car,’ whispered Mum. ‘As soon as he saw it, he cheered up. He’s been talking about engines all the way from the airport.’ We made Mum some tea. Dad did not appear for half an hour.