Dinner is to be served at this long table just inside the big open French windows looking out down a long path, which is lit with ankle-high solar lamps so it looks like a runway for errant nocturnal poultry. The room is beautiful in the way you’d hope a dining room to be beautiful in an old French chateau – tall ceilings, a pale-blue stripe in the walls, elegant dark-wood furniture that dimly shines with the lustre of exotic suns entombed. There are tall candles and the tablecloth is ivory white like it was made long before the Revolution and hasn’t blushed since.
A girl brings things in and out with way more effort than interest – she’s fifteen, I’d say – tall, with freckles and this quick transactional smile that makes me want to go outside and have a cigarette with her in order to get to the bottom of whatever her problems might be.
We are sitting down and nobody dares to touch the bottle in the ice bucket because it feels somehow wrong to go on drinking champagne regardless.
Baby-monitor Neil is talking like he has established this great reputation with himself for wit: ‘I’ve heard rumours that it’s monkfish,’ he says. ‘Which is a result. I love monkfish cheeks.’
Straight away, though, it’s war. Because Leah isn’t buying it, or him, or anything: ‘I hope they’re not farmed,’ she says.
Which brings Beth-Marie: ‘Can you even farm monkfish? Aren’t they more like sharks?’
Which causes Neil’s phone to appear.
Dad and I are facing one another. I’m thinking that I may be the only person in the world who doesn’t actually like the taste of champagne.
‘What has the Twitterverse got to say on the subject?’ asks Richard the Third. His real name is Christopher Turnkey, which he half whispers in the manner of a sports commentator during a tense moment in play.
‘Hang on,’ Neil says. ‘I’m on Wikipedia.’
‘And?’ Christopher prompts. He hoists the champagne from the bucket and offers it round.
Neil reads: ‘Monkfish is the English name of a number of types of fish in the north-west Atlantic, most notably the anglerfish genus Lophius and – ah, yes! – the angelshark genus Squatina.’
‘I thought so,’ says Beth-Marie, ‘some kind of shark. Well, distantly related!’
‘Does it say anything about farming?’ Leah asks.
‘Nothing here.’
‘Maybe they only farm the cheeks,’ I say.
The girl comes in with a basket of different loaves. Beth-Marie tries to reinstate herself as the most wholesome of our party by making out that she doesn’t mind which bread she has; for some reason it’s getting more and more important to her that she comes across as happy-go-lucky in direct proportion to the actuality of her unhappy-go-planned. Leah doesn’t eat bread of any sort. Neil has a bread-maker. Christopher is on the UK Food Council, which has recently recommended to parliament that we institute a stronger regime for more detailed bread labelling.
‘So where are you guys heading tomorrow?’ Leah asks.
And that’s it.
‘We’re going to kill ourselves,’ I say.
‘Lou,’ Dad says.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Just Dad. I’m going to give it a few more months.’
Once we started going steady – in that impossible phrase – Eva became the still point of my turning world. We lived mainly at her flat because it was so much nicer and she had no flatmates and we sat together on her cushions and drank terrible ad-hoc cocktails made from cunning old liqueurs – Frangelico, Bénédictine. We told each other about our lives before we met, which seemed now to have been carefully choreographed to lead up to this point. And that poster above the candle in her fireplace became like some kind of totem or a portal into another, wider, more exciting world that knew nothing of uneasy Britain. We talked about our work and what we wanted to do in the future. I encouraged her in her plan of going to Asmara in Eritrea where her grandmother was from and setting up an office. She encouraged me in my writing. I said that if she moved there, I’d go with her. Turn my back on database management. I said that we should travel together. Buy flights. Afterwards.
And that led us back to Dad.
She put down her iPad and said that she’d been reading about how ‘the impact’ on the ‘family-carer’ was massive. The carer is the one doing all the worrying, Lou, she explained. And nobody can care better than the family-carer because nobody knows the patient so well. That’s the problem. And it gets so that only a family-carer will do because – as the disease worsens – the patient needs the intimacy of lifelong rapport. They need someone who knows what the blinks really mean. The carer watches the patient decline and – day by day – the carer also becomes the decision-maker. Meanwhile, they go mad because they are not able to do anything about the disease. And eventually, the carer starts to feel nothing but guilt . . . because really they are waiting for death.
So that’s when I told her that Dad had just received his date from Dignitas.
And she turned to face me cross-legged.
‘So it’s decided?’ she asked.
‘If he wants to go through with it: yes. Although . . . he’s being weird.’
‘What’s he saying?’
‘Well, when he told me, he said “for this relief much thanks” – which I guess is something from Shakespeare. I don’t know. I mean . . . he says it is great. He says it is “the winning ticket”.’
She widened her eyes.
‘He says that it’s the security of knowing that there’s another option – that Dignitas feels like hope. Like he’s back in control. But then . . . then he’s also acting odd. I don’t know . . . Maybe it’s something to do with my brothers.’
‘What do you mean?’
I winced. ‘They’re going to want to kill him when they find out.’
‘They’re going to be angry?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wait. What? I don’t get it.’
‘Well – you know – what I call the bad side of Dad?’ I put my phone down and turned to face her. ‘I think when he was younger, he did a lot of shitty selfish stuff that got to my brothers when they were kids. And he definitely did some bad things which drove their mum crazy . . . properly bat-shit crazy.’
‘Did they tell you about it?’
‘Some of it. But . . . it was kind of . . . taboo. Because of my mum.’
‘Right.’
‘And he was different with me. New marriage. More money. And he was just – you know – older. It’s almost like I had a different mother and a different father – and like my brothers were trying not to ruin that for me. Which is one of the reasons I’ve got so much time for them.’
‘I see that.’
‘They’re over it now . . . But not really. Who ever gets over anything?’
She half smiled.
‘I don’t know how they’re going to take him actually having a date for Dignitas. It will hit them hard in the obvious way. But also . . . they’re not . . . I don’t know . . . nothing has really been sorted out – on some deep level. And now there’s suddenly a timetable.’
‘Which they will see as forcing them back into dealing with their shit – right?’
‘Exactly. Like everything is on Dad’s terms again.’ I saw her for a moment as if I were a stranger looking down: her presence, her engagement. ‘But the thing is – whatever they say and do – the disease is real. And they’re going to have to face up to that.’
‘And you?’ She reached her hand to the side of my face. ‘How are you about him having the date?’
‘I’m OK . . . because I’m here with you.’
She leant over and kissed me lightly.
‘I always hoped my frog would turn into a database manager,’ she said.
‘I promise you we can do ten years on your issues after this.’
‘Won’t be long enough.’
The evening becomes the night and the light from the candles swims and glimmers in the room. My father leads our ill-gathered party away from the shallow choppy little inlets of conversation, in which we’ve all been bobbing about and crashing into one other, and out to deeper waters where the world is more interesting and we can see for miles and set our course by the heavens. This is for my benefit – because he thinks I’m losing it, or that I’m tired from the driving; but it is also because he flourishes in company. When I was little, it was always Mum for the first half of the evening and then Dad for the second. When he’s just the right drunk, all the irritation and frustration and dissatisfaction leave him and it’s like his intelligence can stand up straight and breathe and stretch. And now I’m thinking about how we learn a lot by seeing the people we love through strangers’ eyes – as if you might fall in love with someone all over again when they are talking to somebody else. So nobody wants to go to bed. We want more wine. Because now is the moment, and now we are here, and now we are all alive without distraction. We want more and more. Longer. Longer. We don’t want it to end.
I am standing in the darkness outside. I am exhausted. I smoke. The silent moon is staring open-mouthed at the Earth. There’s no wind, no sigh, no whisper; fields deep in shadow and the dark shape of the treetops; nothing stirring.
And suddenly, I know I can’t do it. It’s an intuition. Something spiritual. I just know I can’t do it: I cannot drive my father to his death.
You don’t simply give up.
So that’s OK, I’m thinking. I know. I know. At last I know.
I’m going to tell Dad: we’re going home.
He will ask if I am sure. But I will say that I am. I really am. And so he will say – OK. That’s decided, then. And we’ll turn around and go home. And he’ll make the best of it. I know he will. Because it’s the one unshakeable thing between us. That he will do what I ask. That he’ll carry on living.
I smoke afresh with thirsty lungs. We’ll make it to Christmas. Together. However bad he gets.
I have to go back in there and tell him we’re going home.
No . . . I’ll tell him tomorrow. In the morning. Let him have the night. Let him hold the table. That’s the kinder thing. Yes, I’ll tell him in the morning. But I am decided. We’re not doing this. We’re not doing this. And it’s a great all-encompassing relief that lets me breathe again and balm my soul in the merciful light of the ancient stars.
Dad asks each of us to tell a story from our own lives. And when we do, he makes us all feel like we’re talking about something more than what we’re merely saying; that our flimsy tales, badly told, resonate beyond themselves; that in talking about ourselves, we are really talking about desire and love and human nature, the most interesting things in the world. And the candles are three-quarters burned when we say that he must tell us a story, too. And his midnight voice reminds me of when I was a boy and he read to me by the side of my bed; a voice that poured magic and dreams into my pillow.