There are two other British couples staying at the chateau. They already hate us because we’re so late. I want to say, ‘Relax, people – I already hate us, too.’ But instead Dad and I struggle up past the old tractor and the crooked bench to the door of the cave – actually a barn – and receive their hellos with better grace than they are offered.
Inside, it is dark and cool and smells of sawdust and spilt wine. The French woman is our tasting hostess; she seems to be doing everything around the place. There are four champagne bottles on the big barrel by which she stands. There are these huge wooden wine racks down two of the walls. There’s some strange gigantic spider-claw agricultural equipment that seems like it might easily double for torture duty were the Inquisition to pass by. We all stand around – except for Dad, who takes the only chair. As he settles himself, shifting his legs with his hands, he looks up and says something about L’Assommoir, which I don’t quite understand except that it’s funny. Our hostess smiles – not by way of reciprocity but as if at the persistence of a favourite pupil – and my father’s easy French gives him the instant seniority of the room. Even the effortful way in which he moves does not make him an invalid to be pitied or patronized but somehow confers charisma and authority; centrality. I feel a new pulse of certainty. My father doesn’t want to be in a wheelchair. My father doesn’t want saliva to leak from his slack lips as he slurs and slips on the surface of words that he once so commanded.
Our hostess starts in on her spiel in what I sense is a deliberately thickened French accent. We all stand and listen to her for about ten minutes – none of which we understand, except Dad, who asks questions like he’s genuinely interested, which of course he is. Soon enough, Dad and the French woman are just talking to each other and the rest of us are left out.
Meanwhile, it takes me a while to figure out what the low volume squeaks and squeals are that we all keep hearing. Finally, I realize that they’re coming from a little white chunky speaker that one of the other men is holding: a baby monitor. Every so often, he ducks away from not listening to the French woman to hold it up to his ear in a move that is designed to be discreet-but-noticed.
One of the other women is making some kind of oblique play in my direction about how she is glad that she’s not with the baby-monitor guy. She starts a conversation: I’m Leah, she says, and I have no choice but to join in. Soon we’re all swapping stories about who we are and what we think and where we’re heading. I say stories because there’s no way I am telling anybody the truth. But then, I don’t think the others are telling the truth either; only the stuff they like to hear themselves say in public. Dad would argue that life is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves; that it’s all stories for Homo sapiens; narrative. Ralph says that he is ‘with Sartre’ and that our lives are really only the collection of stories by which we misunderstand ourselves. Jack says, ‘It feels pretty fucking real to me.’
I want to tell the other couples that it isn’t their fault; that I can’t respond or interact at the moment; that it’s just that I’m on the way to killing my father; and that its making me dislike people who are inattentively alive. That they could have been anyone because I’m only dealing in the tectonics these days and everything else feels like bad acting. But I don’t say any of this. Oh no. I join in like the weasel little pleaser that I am.
Which is how I find out that Leah and her husband are ad-agency millionaires and that the other couple, Neil and Beth-Marie, have had two children and are the first people on planet Earth to do so. The ad-agency millionaire doesn’t say much and he looks a bit like I imagine Richard the Third must have looked; tall but a little hunchbacked and twisted with prominent wrist bones and eyes that speak of an intelligence that he knows he has deployed in the wrong direction. He can’t smile but his mouth sort of twitches every so often. I figure he’s my only chance at dinner.
I stage a phone call. And I go and stand outside.
The sky is bruised from dealing with a mighty sunset – maroons and purples and a low streak of bloodiest red.
I stand there for a while saying ‘yes’ ‘no’ ‘yes’ ‘no’ ‘yes’ ‘no’ – to nobody on my phone. Yes, the world is ancient. No I don’t want to ever go home. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. I don’t know.
The landscape eases me. I share this with my father. Something to do with its lack of concern for human paltriness. And I start thinking about all those prehistoric people, fathers and sons, way back before there were any homes, squatting on their escarpments and watching out for danger in the dusk. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Eros. Thanatos. Creation. Destruction. All the way back to the dawn of time. And before that? And why? My mother got into Buddhist teachings and read a lot of mystical stuff – maybe to get back at Dad in some way; maybe to chase the fleeing ghosts of her poetry. And once she told me that she’d read in the Kabbalah that Life was the means by which the Universe was trying to understand itself – and that maybe humanity was its best effort so far. I like that idea.
‘Lou?’ Dad is standing behind me holding on to the barn door with his stick. ‘Who was it?’
‘Eva,’ I lie.
‘All OK?’ he asks. His eyes are bright.
‘She says it was good to talk to you.’
‘Well . . . it was good to talk to her.’
Luckily, Richard the Third appears with two glasses.
‘Here you go, guys,’ he says.
‘Hang on – we’re going to sit on that bench,’ Dad says. ‘What’s the verdict?’
I help Dad across while Richard the Third hovers. I think he suspects me of faking the call. Which elevates him further in my estimation.
‘Not dry enough for me,’ he says. ‘I like my champagne dry. How about you?’
‘Wet,’ I say.
Richard the Third’s mouth twitches into the suggestion of a smile, many smiles. He passes the glasses. ‘I’ll bring out the next one as soon as we’re live.’
Dad and I hold the wine up to the mighty sky and peer at it as if we might divine the future in the random rising of the bubbles. There are few things that make my father happier than tasting wine. I have this feeling that I have done the right thing again. I’ve seen him taste so many times – the whole ritual, a joke, a game, but neither. And suddenly I’m happy because he is happy. Just the two of us out here somewhere in the gloaming of an unknown planet with the whole universe wrapped around our lives.
We swallow the first mouthful. And Dad has his nose straight back inside the flute.
‘Straw, straw to begin, Lou. But then . . .’
‘Biscuits,’ I say.
‘Biscuits, yes, but also tart. Oh, it’s very good.’
‘Cooking apples?’ I suggest.
‘Apple crumble.’
‘Almond.’
‘More complex.’ Dad hesitates. ‘Apple pips?’
‘Cyanide,’ I say.
He takes another sip. ‘Oh wait, I’m getting minerals, Lou. On the nose.’
‘I told you. Cyanide and tin.’
‘Smokier,’ he says.
We’re both drinking freely now.
‘Oh, this is a serious wine,’ Dad says, vehemently.
‘Smoked mussels,’ I offer. ‘No – hang on – a tin of smoked mussels.’
‘Left open,’ says Dad.
I nod. ‘Smoked mussels left open in the tin.’
‘Oh, but hang on; hang on, Lou. Big fruit again on the finish.’
‘Big something.’
‘Floral notes.’
‘Whispers of spice.’
‘Basil,’ he says, as if he’s got it.
‘No – bergamot,’ I counter.
‘Dandelion.’
‘Deeper, Dad: molasses.’
‘Prune?’
‘Damson.’
‘Lighter, Lou: elderflower.’
‘Grapes,’ I say. ‘Grapes.’
I talk to Twigge in my own mind. I don’t know why. (Like other people pray, I guess.) This kind of behaviour is exactly the sort of thing you should tell a psychologist. But of course it’s exactly the sort of thing you can’t tell a psychologist. Or not one that you’ve only met a few times. He was a friend of a friend of my father’s. They had ‘shared a platform’ at the Cheltenham arts festival years ago – for no reason as far as anyone could tell. We went to consult with him because Dad thought it might be ‘good for us’ (by which he meant me) and because he wanted us to ‘talk to someone intelligent and respected in the field’.
I only ever got to see him once on my own. But I wanted to ask Twigge: is it normal to love the idea of people more than their actuality? Because I’ve noticed that – when they’re talking about their children, when they’re talking about their parents – people seem to fill up with feelings much more if the children and parents in question are not there. Get them in the same room, though, and they can’t stand the sight of each other. What does that mean, Doctor?
But the closest Twigge ever came to speaking directly to the issues of ‘your circumstances’ was when he pointed out (actually to the bookcase) that – no matter who or what you become – you remain the child of the same mother and father. If you’re lucky enough to know them, this will be the most fundamental relationship of your life, the most formative and the most unique. The likelihood (he went on expansively to say to the window) is that one will be affected by, and involved in, their deaths. (‘One’ – his word.) Indeed, this ‘involvement’ turns out to be one of the duties of being a child – often the main duty. (So he has come to think.) There are exceptions, of course. Millions choose to have nothing to do with their parents. What’s the Auden, he asked? Your father says you’re a budding poet.
I hate the word ‘budding’.
‘Larkin,’ I said. ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’
And probably because he got the wrong poet, Twigge then had to talk even more despite the obvious discomfort that saying anything caused him. So that’s when he finally said something interesting. He started to talk about the ‘ponds’ that people come from. (His word again.) He said that in some ponds the innocent are fed lies. And thus they learn to croak.
I wanted to ask him more about this but then he started off about ‘choice’ and ‘choice architecture’. He said he shared Jung’s view that there is always a choice. Sure, I said. But there’s no good choice. And can you tell me this: what is the right thing to do in a world where there is no right thing to do?
That shut everything down again. Impasse.
But I took three things from our solo session. All of which I did not say. One. Death is what intensifies love. The subconscious (which knows that it has got to end) feeds the conscious (which knows that it has not done so yet). Two. Life is about coming to terms with an ever-lengthening list of our losses. Three. Knowing things intellectually makes very little difference to how you feel.