We chuck everything in the van. We drive to the office and the wash-house. This time all three of us carry him up the stairs. The pigeon has gone. We sit Dad down on the chair in the showers. He is full of purpose and chatter. He wants to tell us about the Upper Palaeolithic. All his life, he says, he’s wanted to visit this particular prehistoric cave and now he’s going with all three of us.
Ralph takes the credit card to settle the bill and ‘see what else they’ve got’. Jack goes to tidy up the van – he’s going to change the bed, wash the utensils, re-pack.
I help Dad. I dress him in clean clothes. He has purple bruises on his ankles. They look terrible. He says more ibuprofen will do it; he has hundreds of pills in his wash bag. He says he was expecting a lot of pain. He’s already taken three. He’s never taken more than one at a time in his life before. Of anything. He swallows two more. I am silent.
The others come back in and we haul him out and sit him on a bench. Jack is actually doing the whole dustpan and brush thing inside the van. He’s using his baby wipes on the ‘upholstery’. Ralph comes out of the shop. He’s bought salami, cheese and tomatoes to go with our bread and the remaining four million croissants. Jars of artichokes. Cigarettes from hell, he says, it’s all they had. He sits next to Dad and smokes and watches Jack while making cheery sarcastic comments. But there’s something about Jack that is impervious or unreachable – like he knows for certain that the secret to human happiness lies snugly curled up inside a life devoted to minor sacrifice.
I text Eva. She’s with her phone and free and we do some back and forth. I tell her we’re on the move and that’s somehow good.
Jack is ready. We all climb in. Ralph takes the wheel. I slam the door too hard. I help Dad arrange himself. He’s pleased to be clean and in fresh clothes. He’s lying down with his feet towards the back and his head at the front so he can ‘join in’. His shampoo smells of apples like we’re straight from some gently billowing summer orchard in Normandy. He wants his pillows piled so he can swivel his head and see forward. I sit up beside him, also leaning forward onto the back of Jack’s seat. The engine starts OK but the dashboard is beeping and clacking as if something is urgently wrong. Many things.
‘Low fuel?’ Jack suggests, in a mock-helpful voice. ‘Lights? Oil pressure? HIV?’
I poke my head between my brothers’ seats into the cabin. ‘Are the hazards on?’ I ask.
‘No, Louis,’ Ralph says. ‘Thank you. The hazards are not on.’
‘Bloody hell.’ Dad is shaking his head and frowning with the pleasure of puzzlement. ‘I don’t understand it. Must be something to do with the jump leads. Or fuses. But it doesn’t make any sense though. How can the jump leads affect the circuit board?’
‘The van is going insane,’ I say.
Dad and I are both leaning into the cabin now; it’s like we all want to be in the front, like suddenly we all want to drive.
The clicking noise won’t stop. Ralph raises his hands above the steering wheel as if to surrender.
‘I think it’s because you haven’t got your seat belt on, Jack,’ I say.
‘Somehow all the defunct alarms have been reactivated,’ Dad says, shaking his head. ‘The dash used to beep when you didn’t buckle up in the front. But I don’t really see how—’
‘No,’ Jack says, fastening his belt. ‘Not insane. The van is coming back to life.’
The clicking stops.
‘It is the fucking seat belts.’ Ralph exhales like the world is entirely new to him. ‘Amazing.’ He revs the engine unnecessarily. ‘OK. Stand by.’
He stalls.
Silence.
‘I just don’t think we’re going to make it, Dad,’ I say.
‘The gods are against us,’ Ralph says.
‘Or the gods are for us,’ Jack says.
‘It’s always been so hard to tell,’ Dad says, lying back down into his pillows with a sigh. ‘I told you, Louis.’
‘What? What did you tell me? Why does everyone keep telling me things?’
‘That a man meets his destiny on the path he took to avoid his destiny.’
After an hour or so, the road becomes narrow and more dramatic. This is mountain country. Dad wakes up and lies on his pillow looking backwards out of his window. I do the same. Up front, my brothers are talking about Siobhan’s Monday-night yoga. We pass along a deep gorge. Then we begin to loop precariously this way and that up the steep-shouldered valley. Now and then, there is a short tunnel cut through the tawny overhanging rock. A river runs swift below us – turbid, opaque, the colour of Oxford stone. I have a new game that I am playing with myself. I imagine that I am seeing the world with my father’s eyes. It doesn’t work at first – I’m telling myself things about the beauty of the landscape, but I’m not experiencing it; I’m too self-consciously aware of what I’m doing. But then the thoughts that notice the thoughts I think about what I’m thinking start to quieten or drop away and the trick begins to work . . . And gradually everything does seem miraculous and inexplicable to me: the fact that I am here with Dad and my brothers – on this day in all of history, on this planet in all the universe. And that’s when I get the thought that if there’s one thing – and maybe it’s the only thing – that is good about what we’re doing, about this journey, then it has to be that we’re getting to feel what it means to be alive together. Truly alive. Truly together.
I breathe the air coming in through Dad’s window. I look out at the world. I listen to my brothers. Their talk is a comfort to me. We’ve always talked in the van. Dad and Mum and Ralph and Jack. I used to lie half-sleeping in the back when I was little – listening to my family taking everything apart and putting it back together again; and then dreaming of the world.
Jack is saying: ‘. . . All I am suggesting is that maybe you should take up meditation. Give it a try. Lots of troubled people swear by it. It teaches you mindfulness.’
‘You mean mindlessness?’
‘I don’t think that’s what they say. I think—’
‘Well, doesn’t it teach you – specifically – to think about nothing? Isn’t that meditation?’
‘That’s one aspect of it.’
‘And isn’t the essence of your humanity to do with your reason and your ability to think?’
I glance across at Dad. He half turns and he shakes his head a little on his pillow. But he’s listening, too. He is greedy greedy greedy to listen to Ralph and Jack regardless of the conversation – can’t help himself – like they’re two of his pupils who have become famous but whose essays he never bothered to read at the time.
‘I love my thoughts.’ Ralph lifts one hand from the wheel. ‘They are the only thing that is the slightest bit interesting to me. Imagine if I had to rely on yours.’
‘And yet you’re a physical creature. You have a body.’
‘And it’s in much better shape than yours. Thin, for example.’
‘Troubled.’
‘Free.’
‘Not so. Your mind is tyrannical, Ralph.’
‘Not so. You hear tyranny because you’ve enslaved yourself.’
‘By enslaved, I take it that you mean that I’m married.’
‘Your word-association.’
‘And what about your heart?’
‘My heart is like a blister.’
‘And this is a good thing?’
‘I believe in love. I believe in death. I’m trying to experience as much of the former given the latter. But we’re talking about you. What do you believe in? Life insurance?’
The further up the gorge we climb, the more swiftly and turbulent flows the river. The boulders by the side of the road are a sandy colour now and look like the illustrations in children’s books about the ‘Holy Land’.
‘I believe in constancy,’ Jack says.
Ralph clicks his tongue and glances in the mirror. He shakes his head slowly but his eyes are smiling at me. ‘I refuse to accept,’ he scoffs, ‘that you are the kind of man, Jack, who says to himself: “Let there be no more love affairs.” How can you say that? This is my last experience of women. Are you that kind of a man? Should we drop you off somewhere punishing and abstemious?’ He indicates the landscape. ‘You could live in a cave. Eat rocks. Fight with the devil for forty days and nights. Although I bet he’d be bored to tears with you after an hour.’
‘Marriage isn’t the end of the love,’ Jack says. ‘Watch out for that goat.’
Ralph slows. The goat frisks nervously into the road.
‘No, but it’s the end of all the other forms of love.’
‘Again: no. Love evolves.’
‘Subsides.’
‘Wrong. For many people – marriage is a beginning.’
‘But you—’
‘In my case . . . If we’re talking about my case.’
‘We are.’
‘In my case . . . despite all my stupidity and immaturity and being a dick, guess what?’ The goat hesitates, uncertain. ‘It turns out my younger self arranged a good marriage for me. Yep – I know – it’s staggering. Given me, given us. But each year that passes, I am more and more grateful to him for his wisdom. Each year that passes, I fall further in love with my wife.’
‘Then you are almost unique in the world, Jack. And your marriage a shining beacon for the rest of humanity. No doubt it is visible from space.’
‘Thank you.’
‘There are probably foggy-visored astronauts weeping silently into their helmets as we speak.’
‘Love is not what you think it is. That is all I am saying.’
The goat scrambles away up the rocks to where we now see others are waiting. We start off again. The road straightens and Ralph changes up through the gears.
‘Tell me, how does this overwhelming love manifest? A mutual interest in TV dramas? Fashionable shades of paint? Fresh herbs?’
‘You underestimate people. You underestimate everything. Except yourself.’
‘Not so. I’m at the bottom of all my own estimations. There’s no man alive who can estimate me lower than I estimate myself. I merely disguise this in order to appear convincing and self-assured. Just like everybody else. Though, in my case, with the additional disability – and honesty – of knowing what I’m up to.’
‘Maybe lots of married people are happy. Have you ever considered that?’
‘Oh, please. Come on. Look around you, Jack: all these oafish husbands discussing the missus this, or the kids that. Alternative routes through upcoming roadworks. Business-class breakthroughs. Market capitalizations of taxi companies. For ninety per cent of women, marriage is the opposite of fulfilment.’
‘Are you a feminist now, Ralph?’ I ask.
‘No, but I am an expert on married women.’
‘Lucky them.’
‘Most of these wives, Jack, they’re sitting around reading The World of Interiors while the world of their interiors falls into shrunken ruin. Not a single appeal to their imaginative faculties in years. Unless we count imagining other men in the sack. So I say . . . I say how about at least one of us falls in love with your wife, mate, and we see how that goes? Why the sanctimoniousness? Why the—’
‘Decency.’
‘Our love affairs define us.’
Jack is exquisitely breezy: ‘You don’t really understand the family until you have got a family, Ralph. Nor the real relationship between men and women. Go and watch a woman giving birth to a few of your children sometime. I promise you: it changes everything. I’m afraid this inner-humanity stuff is inconsequential once you’ve been through the other end of sex.’
‘The other end of sex,’ Ralph repeats the phrase. ‘I like that. But answer me this: when you die, what are you going to remember? What are you going to look back on? I’ll tell you: the times you lay beside a woman in the warm afternoon and made love and talked and ate and talked and made love and drank and made love and talked about this and that and her and you and everything good and bad and lost and found until the world stopped its mattering and the evening sun fell across the bed – where you then made love again, the deeper this time for your communion and the coming of the dusk. What beats that? What the fuck beats that? What else is there?’
Jack turns in his seat: ‘Is that what you think about, Dad.’
‘Among other things,’ Dad says to the roof.
‘Such as?’
‘Your children. What a mess you made of that.’
Up ahead, above the road, something strange is going on with the weather: the sky is surreptitiously tearing itself apart so that the grey is revealed to have been hiding torn sheets of white which in turn have been concealing secret robes of blue.
‘I think that love turns out to be the opposite of what you describe.’ Jack is more engaged than he’s pretending. ‘In fact, love is the procedures, the practicality. Making sure there’s milk for your coffee. Changing the bulbs. Picking the wet towels off the floor so that they dry.’
‘For Christ’s sake – if love turns out to be picking up the towels, then haven’t you got to ask yourself who – or what – you’ve fallen in love with?’
‘I’m saying these things are totems of love.’
‘And I’m saying they’re not.’
‘I’m saying that after all the melodrama and madness has subsided, what you are left with . . . is life itself, Ralph. The reality. You really have to give reality a try one day.’
‘The superficial.’
‘Look to what a person does, not what they say.’
‘Pick up towels.’
‘Consider the million actual sacrifices and daily kindnesses. Look to the acts not the words. Who prepared the food you are eating? Who changed the interest rate on your mortgage so that you had money for your holiday? Who organized the plumber? Who found your door keys?’
‘And why would I want to make love to this person? Because of their steady determination over the towels or their quiet proficiency when it comes to mortgages?’
‘This is what life is made of.’
‘It’s not what my life is made of.’
‘And so you are lonely.’
‘Free.’
‘Sad.’
‘Truthful.’
As if to make his point, Ralph accelerates and we overtake a labouring old Renault. It’s not the best place to be making such a move, though, and he has to brake severely for a hairpin, which we then swing round a little too fast. There’s a dent in the barrier on the outer edge beyond which you fall down the mountain, maybe for ever. We need another driver. Someone with a different surname. Dad has rolled into me. I help set him back on his pillow.
‘You’re being dishonest, Jack.’
‘No: you’re the dishonest one.’
‘Don’t you walk out into your day and ache for some escape from your prison?’
‘Your word.’
‘The unspoken implication.’
‘Of course.’ Jack puffs out his cheeks, conceding a little without conceding anything. ‘I see women all the time and I want . . . I want what you say you chase: an intimate and enlightening conversation that is physical as well as everything else.’
‘There you go. That’s what I’m talking about.’
‘But I choose not to.’
‘You choose imprisonment.’
‘Because actually those choices damage me. I choose—’
My father interrupts in his lecture-hall voice: ‘I’ll no more dote and run to pursue things which had endamaged me.’
‘Who’s that?’ I ask.
‘John Donne,’ he says. ‘“Farewell to Love”.’
‘Donne thinks love is damage?’ I ask.
Dad looks at me without raising his head. ‘Long answer or short?’
‘Short. Always short. This is the twenty-first century, Dad. We all have attention deficit disorder.’
‘If we take love here to mean sexual desire—’
‘We do,’ Ralph says, vehemently addressing the landscape. ‘We must. We can. And we do. Without desire the world withers.’
‘Then, yes, in this one instance – amidst dozens of poems with different points of view – love is damage.’
Ralph glances in the mirror and I can see his eyes are bright. He’s not had a drink yet, I’m thinking. He’s not even thought about it.
‘Keep arguing with each other,’ I say. ‘It’s making me and Dad feel better about our personalities.’
‘And how do your choices – the ones you have made – how do they leave you, Jack?’
‘Happier than you, Ralph.’
‘Dreaming of a mistress who you could trust.’
‘Living with a wife who I already do.’
‘Dying inside.’
‘Living . . . and not in some fantasy.’
‘Constrained and compromised.’
‘In some ways, yes, but not everything about relationships is physical.’
Ralph laughs out loud like Jack has just lost everything with a single catastrophic move on the chessboard. ‘For fuck’s sake.’ He lifts his hand from the wheel and gestures at the world. ‘Sexual chemistry, sexual charisma, is what we’re all about here on planet Earth. Take a look around, Jack. Watch some nature documentaries. Every gene in every life form is going absolutely mental trying to attract someone, something, anything in order to make as much love as physically possible. In order not to be lonely, in order to pass itself on . . . Every gene in the world wants to fuck like there’s no tomorrow. And you want to know why? Because there isn’t any tomorrow. As soon as the fucking stops, we’re all dead for eternity. You, me, Dad, the planet. Even Louis.’
‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ Jack says. ‘I love my wife dearly and I’d hate to be without her.’
‘Maybe this is why we could use some sisters,’ I say. ‘Get a fresh perspective.’
‘It’s not too late, Dad,’ Jack says. ‘Maybe you’re going to meet some hot Neanderthal ass in this cave. The sort of prehistoric señorita that you never could say no to.’
‘I’d love a sister,’ I say. ‘I’d really love a sister.’
‘It’s not a Neanderthal site,’ Dad says. ‘It’s Upper Palaeolithic. Homo sapiens.’
‘Pleasure is not the same as happiness,’ Jack says. ‘You should remember that, Ralph.’
‘Contentment is a form of boredom,’ Ralph says. ‘You should remember that, Jack.’
‘It’s really not boring. Children are . . . children are the opposite of boring.’
‘Oh, oh, oh,’ Ralph is mocking. ‘Here we go: the fatherhood defence.’
‘It’s not a defence.’
‘A compensation.’
‘Wrong again. Fatherhood is a unique relationship. I love my children in a way that is entirely free from the tangle of Eros you describe. And that is a kind of freedom, Ralph, a kind of love that you don’t get to experience otherwise. And – yeah – an experience that trumps all others.’ Jack breathes in as if the temptations of this mountain wilderness had been dismissed long ago. ‘You need a family to understand the family. You need children to understand yourself and the women you are with. Childbirth. Motherhood. Daughters. If you don’t see any of that, you only get half the picture. I promise you, bro. Hate me. Hate what I’m telling you. But it’s true.’
‘Except not true at all. What about all the gay artists in the history of the universe? From Virgil and Plato . . . via Michelangelo and Marlowe . . . to . . . to . . . Auden.’
‘None of whom understood the first thing about women.’
‘Henry James,’ Ralph says. ‘Shakespeare. Flaubert probably. Gay, gay, gay. The list is endless. Pretty much everyone who is good at anything to do with deep human understanding is gay.’
‘Did the Neanderthals fuck Homo sapiens, Dad?’ I ask. ‘Or just the gay ones?’
‘Louis, there’s no need for that language.’
‘Did early humans make heterosexual cross-species love?’
‘We now know they did.’ Dad sighs. ‘Not in any great number but to some extent. We all carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA.’
‘There you go,’ Ralph says.
‘There you go what?’ Jack says. ‘That doesn’t prove anything. What the fuck?’