We follow Malte. His stock is high in Oberotweil. Now that the concert has been deemed such a success (and there’s every chance of a rebooking next year), he is all bad jokes and bonhomie again. He waddles up to the desk to greet the maître d’ – a thin and wiry man with an inclined head and eyes that glance sideways every few seconds as if to intimate that, yes, he is peripherally aware that the world is a conspiracy. They seem to be friends – or, at least, familiar collaborators of recent days; and so this, we quickly understand, is the fluid colloquy of equals. Nods and checks-of-the-system ensue. Mute re-agreements are remade. And then the maître d’ looks past Malte at us four with the brief concern of a man with many wider worries; he sees my father’s over-worn black corduroy blazer, Jack’s over-smart dad-casual jacket, Ralph’s over-battered boots, my too-skinny drainpipe jeans. And there is a moment when he might object – rightly, rightly – but Malte’s presence and the need to get on with it prevail.
‘This way,’ he says, the menus in his arms like scrolls of law or worship.
The restaurant is not on the battlements but rather on a terrace in front of the castle overlooking the Rhine. We pass through high doors and outside into the warmish evening air. I am at the back, pushing Dad, glad of the thoughtful German access ramps and the flatness of the tiles and the generous space between the lamps and tables.
‘Is good, ja?’ Malte asks over his shoulder.
‘Sensational.’ Ralph is additionally delighted that he will be able to smoke because our table is outside.
The castle must have been medieval originally – rebuilt when Germany felt romantic – and it rears up in the glow of soft architectural lighting beside us. There are square battlements. High round and narrow towers with tight conical roofs. A yellow banner, suspended between two windows far above, announces to the river-valley below (and the world beyond) in black Gothic writing: ‘Das Gourmet-Festival Denzlingen: die Feinschmeckermesse am Rhein.’
Dad twists in the wheelchair. I lean in to hear him as all such carers do.
‘Find a world,’ he says, inclining his head after Malte, ‘and rise therein to greatness.’
‘That’s what I’m doing, Dad,’ I say. ‘But in database management.’
The place is full. The other diners are a mixture: fellow concert-goers still carrying their programmes; one or two families with teenagers; two bigger tables of more elderly couples, stiffly dressed and falsely good-humoured (as if meshed together on some atrocious ‘Romantic Rhine’ cruise); and several undeniably heavy-weight tables where an atmosphere of great gastronomic seriousness is evinced in the care with which forks are raised to mouths and eyes are closed and grimaces of delight or disappointment disport themselves across the kind of faces that start revolutions. We’ve been told that the castle is very popular and used throughout the year by everyone from bat-watchers to medieval re-enactment specialists. We are lucky. Some terrifying and irresistible psychological pincer-movement perpetrated by Ralph and Malte has ensured that we have a special table at the far corner of the terrace. This turns out to be situated on its own – on a round area that juts out a little as if the base of an un-built hexagonal tower planned to give the best possible view up and down the river. And, here, the maître d’ stops, turns, smiles, inclines his head.
‘Your table, Herr Lasker,’ he says in English. His eyes travel briefly sideways and back again. ‘If there is anything we can do for you, then let it be done. And may I say, Happy Birthday, Herr Lasker. We are honoured to have the family and friends of Herr Swallow for this occasion.’ He indicates the expensive linen with a magician’s flourish. There are candles in teardrop glass to thwart the non-existent wind and I can smell the scent of the roses that climb the old walls around.
He lays out the menus. ‘I will send someone over to begin . . . the process,’ he says and backs away as if from the Holy Roman Emperor.
Malte comes forward – his head trampolining in the mattress of his neck.
Ralph pauses in the lighting of his cigarette and makes a gesture of appreciation with his hand. ‘Thank you, Malte.’
‘You must have a drink with us,’ Jack says, ‘and Dean.’
‘Amaretto and lime,’ I say.
‘Where is Dean?’ Dad asks. ‘His Chopin was . . . I don’t know. Transportative.’
‘He is with Rheinmetall. He must eat with them,’ says Malte.
‘Who are they? A rock band?’ This from Jack.
Malte demurs: ‘No – the sponsors.’
‘Rheinmetall sponsor the Debussy festival?’ Ralph’s brows rise.
Malte nods. ‘Yes, we are all grateful to Rheinmetall.’
None of us knows what to do with this information; it seems to mean something about the universe that can’t be tackled in a single night.
‘Well, thank you, Malte,’ Dad says. ‘I, for one, am having a wonderful evening.’
Malte bows. ‘No, thank you, Herr Lasker. We would not be here without you guys. They say one good efforts deserves another and so this is my pleasure to help. I know nothing about the vans. But music and eating – I am the man.’ He clasps his white hands together so that they rest over the gelatinous dome of his white stomach. ‘Well, we see us in a while, crocodiles.’
‘Come and have a drink with us,’ Dad says again. ‘And bring Dean. We thought his Chopin was . . . sublime. Truly. Tell him. Tell him.’
‘For sure. Yes. I will try to come back with Dean . . . But if you have finished before I find you – then there is a jazz bar in the castle – on the other side. Sometimes Dean plays. I will be there, myself, later on. They serve the excellent – how do you say? – snacks.’
‘We’ll be there, Malte,’ Ralph says.
Malte smiles his curling-bacon-on-the-grill smile and backs away with a waddle and a wave looking like that rarest thing – a happy man in a world more or less to his liking.
I park Dad up next to the stone wall and put on the brakes so that we can look out across the valley. The Rhine is wide and oily-black tonight. Long shimmering poles of reflected light from the villages opposite reach out across the surface – crimson, yellow, pale green. The vine-terraced hills beyond are massed shadows save for another old fortress opposite that is likewise under-lit in amber and set forward on an outcrop-vantage overlooking a distant bend. The darker shape of a night barge is passing by with its forward light – like a long diamond-studded tongue lapping through the water without a mouth.
We eat and drink as if Valhalla will indeed be destroyed in the morning. Course after course; little portions but lots of them; stuff on strings, see-through soups, stuff made of seeds, stuff made of skins, some little lobster tails with some kind of lime-frost, bits of pigs with figs, and then some kind of pasta with truffles, which has my father more or less singing, but smells to me like socks and tastes like sodden mushrooms.
I have never seen Dad so happy, though. He’s having the time of his life. The liquid light of the candles a-swim in his eyes. The castle, the river. The mighty night behind him. Talking about the Valkyries. Talking about Volkswagens. Ralph on one side, Jack on the other.
But maybe the three bottles of wine are the problem because, sometime around about dessert, this dark vapour starts to permeate our talk – something clammy, cold and noxious that has slipped from the water, slouched up the banks, climbed the walls below and now comes creeping and curling into our conversation. Maybe it started with what my father was saying about my mother and a camping trip from fifteen years ago because that’s when Jack suddenly jolts forward.
‘. . . But I don’t think that’s right,’ he says. ‘How can Lou really understand? He wasn’t there.’ He pauses a moment. ‘And then you lied to him.’
My father’s face flinches but sluggishly like everything is running slow because he desperately needs to clear out the cache on his hard drive but hasn’t got the time to shut down properly and reboot. ‘That wasn’t important, Jack. It was the past. It didn’t matter. Not as far as Lou and—’
‘Not true.’ Jack stops him, sharply. ‘I’d say concealing things from your children hinders them in their effort to understand who and what and how they are. I’d say it really sets them back, Dad. I’d say it’s damaging.’
I put down my glass. ‘What are we talking about?’
Jack continues: ‘I’d say it is something you—’
‘Dramatized,’ Ralph cut in. ‘Yet again.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Dad retorts. ‘People conceal things from their children all the time. For their own good.’
The night vapour is a spirit that is more than noxious, I’m thinking, something toxic – insinuating its way within.
‘That’s how families work,’ Dad says. ‘Have to work.’
‘What are we talking about?’ I ask.
‘I wanted to protect you and Ralph from th—’
‘Not true.’ Jack interrupts. ‘In fact, now I have my own children, I can’t believe y—’
‘I wanted to make a clean start, Jack.’ My father makes a swatting motion with his hand. ‘I wanted to make a clean start.’
I bang the table, half-meaning it. ‘What are we talking about?’
Everyone goes cold-silent. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it has been me all along. Maybe I was just waiting for the right moment to grab the wheel and lurch us across the road into the oncoming traffic. Because now we’re going to crash. At last.
Ralph reaches forward for the wine. ‘I would say now is a pretty good time to tell him, Dad.’
‘Tell me what?’
My father’s eyes are tired but there’s something else I‘ve not seen before – something wan and weak that has hidden itself from sight; shame.
‘I didn’t meet your mother in New York, Lou,’ he says, slowly. ‘I met her in Russia – about eighteen months before you think.’
Ralph’s voice is equanimous: ‘Taking the total amount of time you behaved like a fuck-pig to around three years.’
‘Your mother lived in London, Lou, before she went back to New York.’
Jack interjects: ‘Dad liked to pop round and see your mother once or twice a week and then come home and scream and shout with ours.’
‘We tried to stop, Lou. She went back to America. To stop.’
‘Ralph and I used to lie awake listening to Mum and Dad fighting while all this was going on,’ Jack says.
Ralph smiles, cold as cracked china. ‘It was very soothing.’
‘We were upset for the first six months,’ Jack says, ‘but then we got into this game where we’d count the swear words.’
‘Dad used to swear a lot back then, Lou.’ Ralph sucks his teeth. ‘Lots of cunt and fuck.’
‘I was . . . I was trying to talk to Carol. I never stopped trying to—’
‘Not really,’ Jack interrupts again. ‘Dad thought the best approach was to lie, Lou, and then – when Mum found out – as she was bound to do – he thought the next best plan was to move from coward to bully.’
Ralph does this swimming fish gesture with his hand. ‘From lies to torture and back again. Isn’t that right, Dad?’
‘It went on for a long time, Lou,’ Jack says. ‘A long, long time.’
My father looks at me as if for mercy. ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he says.
There’s a black hole burning inside of me; I’m dark, invisible and I have no centre but I’m dragging everything in.
‘So you went for the option which created maximum suffering for everybody.’ Jack shakes his head.
‘You don’t “go” for “options”, Jack.’ My father’s derision is weak and shabby and ugly. ‘It’s not that simple.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘There was dignity in leaving. There was dignity in staying—’
‘For fuck’s sake.’ Ralph laughs dismissively.
‘There was zero dignity.’ Jack speaks almost as though he is the father and Dad the disappointing son.
‘There was cowardice in leaving,’ Ralph says. ‘There was cowardice in staying. I think that’s what you mean, Dad.’
‘I was going mad.’ Now my father is wheedling. ‘You have no idea. I was afraid of my own mind.’
‘Wrong people to ask for sympathy, Dad,’ Jack says.
‘I’m not asking for sympathy.’
‘You’re asking for something, though,’ Ralph says. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘I could not talk straight to Carol. I could not talk straight to Julia. They . . .’ Anger enters my father’s voice – a vehemence part alcohol and part rebarbative. ‘There was so much drama in it . . . I was being fucked over by both of them.’
‘Don’t speak like that about my mother,’ I say, quietly. But my own voice is strange to me. I want to go. But I can’t. I have no other family.
‘How would you like me to speak? I thought you three were all big on reality.’ Dad expels that last word like it’s the bone that has been stuck in his throat all these long years.
‘But the thing is, Lou . . .’ Ralph is composed by way of counter. ‘My mum still let him in. She still let him come in and sleep in the spare room. Can you imagine what that was doing to her? Night after night. Week after week. Even after she found out.’
‘Every morning,’ Jack says, ‘every morning we used to have these horrible little breakfasts . . . Mum all tense and red-eyed with controlled hysteria trying to make our toast and ask us about our school work and then kiss us on the way out.’
‘The best bit,’ Ralph says, ‘was when Dad promised to stop – swore blind that he had. And then—’
‘Carried on.’ Jack shakes his head disgusted.
‘I didn’t carry on.’
‘Sorry. Started again,’ Jack scoffs. ‘In secret.’
‘I had to go to New York—’
‘Ah, this bit is true, Lou,’ Ralph says. ‘Important conference on Emily Brontë’s misuse of layered narrative.’
‘I thought I was having a bloody breakdown, boys.’
‘No; a breakdown was what you caused Mum to have,’ Jack says. ‘She was a steady woman before. Naive maybe – but with her own life and plans. You – you created her suffering.’
‘I . . . I was falling apart. My mind was a hall of broken mirrors. You don’t know.’ Dad is leaning forward, his eyes burning – muscles twitching unbidden in his furrowed brow. ‘You try . . . you try to sort out the love from the desire, the desire from the madness, the madness from the meaning, the meaning from what the hell you are supposed to do. But you are on your own – on your bloody own – with no experience and no counsel. On your own. With your children in revolt and your wife hating you and a job which eats your waking existence and the shit-spray of everyday life in your eyes all the time. So, yes, I go to New York and suddenly . . . suddenly it stopped. On the plane. Over the Atlantic. Everything cleared and eased. I felt better.’
‘Fine,’ Jack says, derisively. ‘Fine, Dad. Glad you felt better. But instead of never coming back. You went for the other option. You came back for . . . what? For more cheating, more lies. Another eighteen months of torture.’
‘Of staggering self-indulgence.’ Ralph pours himself more wine. ‘You have to admire the commitment. The narcissism. However malignant.’
‘I don’t presume to judge you, Ralph.’
Ralph’s eyes are mica. ‘No children, Dad.’
‘I—’
‘Big difference, Laurence.’ Ralph places the wine down with slow deliberation. ‘What I do is between consenting adults. We all agree to the agony. We don’t enlist child soldiers.’
‘I didn’t—’
‘Of course you did.’ Jack’s drunkenness is like some sort of super-sobriety. ‘How could we not be involved? Dragged into the psycho-drama. All children are half their mother and half their father. You divided us against ourselves in the worst possible way at the worst possible moment.’
Ralph exhales. ‘But even forget that. Forget us. It’s just that you behaved like such a cunt for so long. Didn’t you? Such a total cunt.’
Dad’s face is tight and he’s not moving. They’re going to tear him apart in front of me, I’m thinking, and hang him from the battlements. And I don’t know whether to save him or join in.
‘The second discovery is what sent my mother properly crazy, Lou,’ Ralph says. ‘Dad lied. Dad was found out. Dad swore he would stop. Dad lied again – deeper and with more duplicity. And Dad was found out a second time. Good old Dad.’
‘There are as many kinds of love as there are people in the world, Ralph.’ My father gestures wildly. ‘We love one way here. We love another way there. Of course we do. You know that. I . . . I was the one trying to get reality into both pictures. I was—’
‘After being found out again.’ Jack’s disgust is written in the lines of his face. ‘These were not pictures, Dad, these were lives. Listen to yourself.’
‘First rule of any affair,’ Ralph says, ‘is that you protect the people you know you love over and above whoever it is you think you might love.’
‘The only explanation is that you wanted to be caught,’ Jack says. ‘You wanted us all to know.’
‘You wanted the drama,’ Ralph adds.
‘You wanted all four of us to see . . . to see how much we needed you. You know what I think?’ Jack pauses. ‘I think you were preening yourself in the reflection of the suffering you were creating.’
Ralph takes over: ‘You seek conflict, damage – you drag everyone else in – down to your level – and it’s all the classic stuff a cunt needs to make himself feel better about his miserable soul. But what’s really depressing,’ Ralph says, ‘what is really fucking depressing, Dad, is the idea that you haven’t grown up at all. Because here we are again. It’s all about you. It’s all about you.’
‘I tried . . .’ My father’s face is pale and his hands are tight to the arms of the wheelchair. I can tell he’s being annihilated not just by what they’re saying, but by the cool fervour with which they are saying it. ‘I tried . . . I tried to drain the thing of all the drama. I sat with your mother . . . And then I sat with your mother . . .’ He points at me with a stabbing finger. ‘And I said . . . I said . . . But there was no reasoning with anyone.’ Anger notches his brow again. ‘There’s no bloody reason to it – to any of it. She became a monster. You don’t know.’
The four eyes of my brothers are as one creature.
‘You don’t know,’ Dad says, his voice rising. ‘Some nights I sat in the van on my own hating myself. Knowing how much you hated me. Knowing that. Can you imagine? And that you were right to hate me. And—’
‘We didn’t hate you, we just thought you were a total cunt.’ Jack saying it – Jack saying the word rips into my father the deeper. ‘We couldn’t understand why you didn’t just fuck off.’
‘A coward and a cunt,’ Ralph says. ‘You were the monster. Whatever she became, you turned her into.’
My father recoils. All the light goes out of his eyes. He cannot take much more. But I am not the referee and I’m holding the sponge in both corners.
‘There was no escaping . . . the situation . . . because you can’t stop loving your family and the mother of your children. I loved—’
‘Don’t pretend—’
‘No, Jack, no. No.’ My father is shaking as he leans forward in his wheelchair – and now I can see the ghost of his former violence stirring in him – as though he would rise and beat his sons if only his body were still able to do so. Beat them into tears and submission. ‘I did not get married lightly. I loved your mother. I loved Carol. Do not . . . do not . . . do not tell me who I loved and who I didn’t. Never tell me that. Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. She was my north star, my guide, my safety. I loved your mother dearly before it was all so . . . so incinerated. You two . . . you two . . . you don’t know—’
‘You could have made a decision and stopped – stopped – involving the rest of us,’ Jack says. ‘One way or the other.’
‘Everything was self-created,’ Ralph says, ‘self-inflicted, self-designed, self-centred, self—’
‘You two know nothing of what I did—’
‘We know enough.’
‘—or what was done for you. For you!’ My father rises from the chair and stands, shaking, swaying, one hand on the table, one hand on the armrest of his wheelchair, fury coursing through him. He reaches for a knife and tries to bang it down. But he has no control and it flails wildly into his wine glass which spills, expensively, rolls in a half-circle and smashes onto the floor. He cannot stand but sways a moment, the stars stealthy in the sky behind him, his face cracked by feeling and smeared with its flood, before he falls back heavily into the wheelchair that jolts and bucks – held only by the brake that I set.
‘What was done for us, Dad?’ Ralph asks in a voice of deadly calm as he lights a cigarette from the candle. ‘Are you talking about that weekend when we drove across Wales in the van with Mum chasing us in her car? Or what about Keswick when you smashed up Jack’s face and then locked us in that room. Can you imagine what that felt like for us? I thought he was going to die. He was fucking bleeding everywhere. And it wouldn’t stop. I thought Jack was going to die from having no blood. I was nine, Dad. Meanwhile you were down the corridor busy in bed with Julia. Christ, the deceit of it. The lies. I mean what the fuck were you doing? What the fuck were you thinking? Beating us up. Taking all your shit out on us.’
‘Or what about Devon when you left us in that shitty hostel?’ Jack asks. ‘No food. No call. No money. No idea if you’d had an accident or something. Was that done for us, too?’
‘I’m sorry, boys.’ My father’s voice is hollowed out. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why didn’t you just go?’ Jack asks.
‘Carol was drinking. She was hitting me. And it became – it was violent. Terrible.’
‘You made her that way.’
‘Maybe I did. But I saw that she was . . . she was becoming unstable. And I was worried what would happen to you.’ His voice has no tone of combat left. ‘And in those days the court always decided in favour of leaving the children with the woman. I was told that she’d get custody of you. Unless I had overwhelming evidence. And I thought . . . I thought she would take it to court. I wanted to be with you, boys. I wanted to be with you two.’
Ralph is looking directly at Dad – his eyes the world’s most powerful and precise tunnelling apparatus. ‘You’re saying you stayed to collect evidence?’
‘I felt I had a duty to look after you . . . both. I didn’t want to lose you.’ Now the emotional lability takes him. Tears leak from the side of his face. ‘You two – my boys. Christ.’
But Ralph is relentless. ‘You stayed to collect evidence? This is your defence?’
‘Sorry, this is the disease—’
‘Forget the fucking disease,’ Ralph says.
‘I stayed so I could take you with me. I didn’t want to be without you. I thought she’d stop me seeing you ever again. Not everything I did was bad. I loved you.’
Jack’s voice is identical to Ralph’s: ‘So what? So that’s why you deliberately tape-recorded her screaming and crying?’
This is the creature that crawled out of the river. Two heads, one voice.
‘That’s why you did it?’ Jack presses. ‘That was your solution?’
‘Yes.’ My father’s is quiet now – as if it is a relief to give it all up and lie down and die. He closes his eyes. ‘Yes. That’s why I recorded her.’
But the creature isn’t done.
‘And did you let it all happen naturally, Dad?’ Jack mocks.
‘Or did you goad her to get the good stuff on tape?’ Ralph asks. ‘Did you set the whole thing up?’
My father is silent.
The creature’s voice is two vicious whispers.
‘You deliberately staged it, didn’t you, Dad?’
‘You deliberately provoked her pain and suffering to get it on tape.’
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he breathes.
‘Can you imagine – can you imagine – after all that had happened – can you imagine how Mum felt when she found out – from her solicitor – about those tapes? About what you’d done?’
‘Did you know that she asked to listen to them? So she could prepare a defence. But they wouldn’t give them to her. They said no because they were too harrowing and there was no point.’
‘But even then . . . Even after she knew she would lose, she still wanted to hear them.’
‘You know why?’
My father is silent.
‘Because she wanted to make herself confront what you were capable of so that she could hate you instead of loving you.’
‘She wanted to listen to the sound of love being pissed on.’
‘That’s what she said. To us.’
‘Those exact words.’
‘She told us she remembered the nights you did it. How you did it.’
‘What you contrived. To make her attack you.’
‘She told us about the faces you made that the tape would not pick up.’
‘Your mother was—’
‘Those tapes. Her whole life.’
‘You – you were the sick one.’
‘I had to make a judgement . . .’ My father’s eyes seek mine but I can’t look at him. ‘I’ve been happy for the last twenty-seven years. Really. And I think you’ve been . . . I think you’ve been better off, too. I think—’
‘Fuck it.’ Ralph suddenly scrapes back on his chair to stand. The creature is gone. They are two – my brothers again. ‘It doesn’t matter. We got over all this a long time ago. You did what you wanted to do. We’re through it, past it; you’re the one with all the shit to carry, not us.’
Jack rises slowly and speaks as if to himself. ‘As a child you trust the relationship of your parents. As an adult you realize that this is an unreasonable expectation.’
‘Yes. Who gives a fuck? Not us.’ Ralph throws down his napkin. ‘Much worse going on right now in some Cambodian lithium mine. Besides, there’d be no Louis otherwise. Let’s go and see Malte and listen to some more music. I’m fucking starving.’
Jack is swaying. ‘Come and find us, Lou, if you want to.’
‘Thanks for dinner, Dad,’ Ralph says. ‘Lou, be sure to use his fucking credit card. Least the cunt can do.’
Eva’s beautiful face fills my phone. She is telling me that she has a flight for the day after tomorrow. She is going to fly to Zurich whether we are there or not. She has booked a tiny Airbnb apartment – in the centre near the lake. I can come and get her or she can come and get me. Whatever is happening. I say I will see her the day after tomorrow. I’m not driving back with these bastards. And I kiss the screen goodbye. Then I look at myself in the bathroom mirror. I don’t really know who I am; but I know that with this woman’s love, I can do whatever it takes. I can outlast. And I can endure.