‘Of course we’ll have to sell the car.’
We are riding home on the bus from one of our daily visits to the hospital. Faced with the enormity of my father’s diagnosis and its implications, my mother is struggling to gain purchase on priorities and practicalities. Her whole landscape has been reconfigured and she can’t find a place to start navigating it.
The top deck of a London bus is a good vantage point for perspective. Looking down on the gridlocked traffic ahead, my mother wonders aloud: was that an early warning a few years ago when we found ourselves facing the wrong way on a motorway at night, headlights approaching at high speed, flashing their rapidly blinking alarm, my father seemingly oblivious to the disorientation, his split-second reflexes dulled, his famous sense of direction lost? Just in time, he snapped to and reversed away from the oncoming cars without apology or explanation. The incident was never discussed. Was it what is known as a silent stroke?
The car is the least of my mother’s worries. But perhaps it symbolises everything that is over. Mastery and control, gone. My father’s wheels have come off. He will never pull too forcefully on the handbrake again. He has crashed.
The Jag, as my father called it, was virtually a member of our family. Always upgraded with the release of each new model, and yet always replaced in the classic colour scheme of a navy-blue exterior with a walnut and maroon leather interior, conferring continuity. The Jag (which my father always referred to as a ‘she’) was incontestable proof of his self-made success, and he was as proud of it as he would have been of a champion racehorse. While he complained of its excessive gas guzzling, absurdly temperamental engine and expensive maintenance, he loved the fact that he could afford such an indulgence even if it made him look like a Tory when he was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, albeit of the champagne variety.
When I was five or six years old he sat me on his lap in the driver’s seat, put my hands on the ridged steering wheel, and led me in wide zigzags along the cypress-lined roads of Provence in dappled sunlight. It was as if the car were dancing, as we followed the shimmering, looping cadences of Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet recorded on an eight-track stereo cassette (the latest innovation in sound technology). I laughed at his silliness from my raised vantage point while my mother cautioned my father to stay on his side of the road with a mildly reproachful ‘Harry!’
These were carefree, gilded days. My parents radiated a quiet glow of contentment and success. Papa was at his most relaxed, never more light-hearted, never more playful and at ease with me. When my hands were strong enough, he let me change gear for him, cueing me when to push the stick shift into position as he applied the pedal. Forty years later I learned from a passing remark in Mary Hughes’s diary that her husband John had allowed my father to do the very same thing for him. Always eager for signs that I was worthy, I basked in the responsibility and trust this role suggested, fancying myself a co-pilot. In the car, as nowhere else, we were a team.
On Sunday mornings, my father would come to the door of the playroom and ask: ‘Baby, would you like to come to the car wash?’ It was rare for him to issue an invitation rather than an instruction, and I always welcomed the interruption to my homework, thinking we might stop on the way home at a local sweetshop where my father liked to bulk-buy Crunchies and Kit-Kats.
In the London of my childhood, an automated car wash was still a novelty. Papa was an enthusiast for any labour-saving device, buying the newest from American mail-order catalogue Hammacher Schlemmer, a company specialising in quirky products that solved problems you did not know you had. My favourites: a spoon with a kink in its handle so you could rest it on the lip of a jam jar; a miniature silver golf-club-shaped utensil that cooled your tea, perfect for an impatient man always in a hurry.
Other families might go to church, but we communed at the car wash: cleansed physically if not spiritually, soothed into a more serene state by the gentle rhythmic vibrations of the machines as we progressed along tracks through various stages—rinsing, sudsing, polishing. I laughed without fail when the car was pummelled, rocked slightly from side to side by the initial bursts from the water jets. I liked to watch the long fringes of fabric licking at the windscreen and feel the hum through the car door as the hard bristles whirred, buffing the duco. It was like a fairground ride without the fear.
I don’t remember us talking during the four or five minutes it took to get through the wash, so perhaps my father was savouring the same sensations. I pretended the noises the machines made were a terrible storm from which we were safely protected. We emerged back into daylight, buffed by chamois cloths to a shellac shine, as if we had undergone a ritual of purification, all the tensions that encrusted the chassis of our family washed away. When the car was clean, it was possible to believe we could start again.
For twelve years, every weekday morning, Papa drove me to school on his way to work. The Jag fogged up with the haze of his chain smoking (Benson & Hedges Gold filter, my job to push the lighter in for him then—oh horror—deliberately inhaling that delicious first hit of burning tobacco, which blended perfectly with the slight manure smell of the car’s leather upholstery). There he’d treat me more like an adult, discussing world affairs, explaining territorial disputes in the Middle East or old enmities between European nations, his grasp of history dazzling in his ability to quote from speeches, string together dates into chains of events across centuries, to draw maps of changing and disputed borders in the air, while displaying his natural aggression as a driver, a split-second reflex overtaker, tailgater and lane changer, intimidating and antagonising other drivers with showy manoeuvres.
His driving made me feel ashamed. On the passenger side I often met the irritated or more openly angry gaze of drivers he had cut in on. Sometimes I could see their lips move as they swore at him. At times I would adopt a sorrowful pleading expression as if I were his captive begging to be rescued, but no one volunteered.
Once my father had driven colleagues, they refused to get in his car ever again. Friends emerged from the back seat pale and shaken. But my mother was his most anxious passenger, sucking in her breath loudly when he almost grazed other vehicles, making small sounds like a wounded kitten. I refused to react, feigning indifference, though my sang-froid was merely for show.
When he needed to park in the centre of London, we would pull in to the forecourt of a hotel where he knew the concierge and I would see him hand over a fiver and say, ‘Look after that for me, will you?’ before we walked through Knightsbridge, Soho or Piccadilly on some retail errand. My mother found this method embarrassingly arrogant, but I liked the efficient and lordly way he could dispose of the car without having to endure the endless circling back to a meter that would run out before we had achieved our objective.
One way to humour Papa was by feigning interest in other cars, pointing out unfamiliar models and asking him to identify them, which he did with the accuracy of a birdwatcher or trainspotter. One day when I was about ten I pointed to a low-slung coupé. The unique concave curve of the roof had caught my eye.
‘Papa,’ I asked, ‘what’s that car with the bashed-in roof?’
My father laughed heartily at the description. Later, he loved to remind me of my expensive tastes by quoting that innocent question back at me. ‘That, Baby, is a Mercedes 280 SL. Also available as a convertible,’ he said in the caressing tone he reserved for the highest approbation.
‘When I grow up I’m going to buy one of those,’ I announced, demonstrating the kind of aspirational confidence my father favoured.
‘Over my dead body,’ my father retorted.
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s German.’
‘So?’
I knew the answer already but liked to bait my father, enjoying the ensuing argument like sport.
It always boiled down to the war. That was why my mother did not have any German equipment in the kitchen. And yet: my father was a committed Wagnerian, attending numerous performances of that most Germanic and Hitler-approved cultural Olympiad, the Ring Cycle.
This double-standard provided me with easy ammunition to taunt my father throughout my adolescence. But he always shrugged off the inconsistencies: he earned the money, he made the rules.
‘But when I am older I can do what I like,’ I needled.
‘You can,’ acknowledged my father, nodding with equable reason before delivering his ultimatum, ‘but if you do that, I will disinherit you.’
He uttered the punchline threat with a satisfied smile, implying that he had amassed enough wealth for that to be a significant countermove.
By the time I was seventeen, my parents’ marriage had hit an all-time low. Doors slammed regularly; weekends were punctuated by my father’s shouting and my mother’s tears. To escape the fighting, I enrolled in a journalism summer school in the US. Too preoccupied with their battles to exert their normal control and pleased at my ambitious initiative, they let me leave their war zone.
When term was over, my father came to meet me at the end of a business trip. He drove us from Pennsylvania to New York, finding a comfortable ease in the rhythms of Route 209 until we were stopped by a police motorcyclist and my father was fined on the spot for speeding.
‘Don’t tell your mother,’ he said, the first time he had recruited me to such complicity. Many more instances were to follow. I never betrayed him, even going so far once as to sign a statutory declaration that I was in the driver’s seat when the car was caught by a speed camera. Soon, I would be losing points on my own licence, having inherited his lead foot.
When I told my parents I was moving to Australia, my father’s despair was showy and bottomless: he mourned as if his only child had been struck by a terminal illness. He begged, he cried, he pleaded, wallowing in bathos. He had escaped the Holocaust. Survived a fraudulent theft that left his business on the verge of ruin and rebuilt it. But this decision broke him.
‘Baby, if you stay, I’ll buy you a Mercedes 280 SL.’
I blush with shame to think how desperate he was. Enough to sacrifice a lifelong principle.
The bus nears our stop as my mother weighs up her options. She does not want to keep my father’s car, though it is barely six weeks old: a sedate Prius, bought at my suggestion when Papa could no longer afford or justify the extravagance of a Jaguar and that, surprisingly, he had grudgingly come to like. She thinks it will be too hard for her to learn its silent, electric ways, and prefers to stick to her tried and true smaller, more compact Toyota Yaris.
Paralysed by the shock of my father’s diagnosis, I drift around the apartment, unable to settle to any task. For distraction, I thumb through the latest edition of my father’s mail-order Innovation catalogue, noticing that he has circled an invention preventing speed cameras from photographing your numberplate. Incorrigible still, at eighty.
There are other people my mother could call first, to share the news of my father’s diagnosis. Only a handful, but still. Instead she calls Nomi, the unusually tall Japanese dealer who has sold my father all his cars. He has a French wife, she says, they have exchanged Christmas cards, as if this makes them close. I hear her tell him the situation in a voice shock has robbed of its normal slightly singsong intonation, as if she were on automatic pilot. He agrees to take the Prius back. Having achieved that much, she goes to bed before it is even lunchtime.
For the next few days, she remains there, her face turned to the wall, barely rising to wash or eat, never getting dressed. Like a car with a flat battery, she refuses to start. My mother has stalled. My father was her power steering.
A few days later, two psychiatrists interview my father to assess the severity of his condition and determine where he should be placed. We are invited to attend. Asked where he lives and about his interests, my father delivers an uninterrupted monologue about the build-up of traffic in the neighbourhood, detailing his frustrations with lights that have no right turn and cause crossroads to clog up.
Beyond work, history, music, theatre and food, critiquing and avoiding road congestion was one of my father’s few abiding interests. It was not so much a hobby as an obsession. Nifty shortcuts without consulting maps were a source of pride in the days before sat navs. Too impatient to wait in a jam, he watched with mounting horror as London became progressively choked. He reserved special scorn for the so-called orbital ring road M25 motorway and the proliferation of cones that marked out extensive, seemingly endless roadworks along verges. He detested bus lanes, ignored them and refused to pay the congestion tax. He made U-turns where they were forbidden and once or twice drove on pavements when he thought it necessary, adopting the methods of Parisian drivers, parking bumper to bumper into the tightest spaces, while pedestrians looked on in disbelief.
These flamboyant manoeuvres were accompanied by a near-constant correspondence with transport authorities about bottlenecks and other impediments. In one memorable letter dripping with sarcasm, he complained to the local council about their fixation with putting roundabouts in the long street where we lived, suggesting that if it were to become a truly Olympic equestrian course, it might benefit from the additional hurdle of a water-jump.
Cars, too many cars, filled his consciousness, together with battles over parking restrictions, one-way streets, speed bumps and the absence of zebra crossings. Now he responded to all questions as someone literally driven round the bend.
I delayed taking the car back to Nomi, dreading the burial-like finality of it. I told myself it was just another chore on a ‘To do’ checklist that never seemed to get any shorter, no matter how many items I ticked off. When it could be put off no longer, I emptied the car of the last evidence of my father’s ownership and disconnected the sat nav he argued with so vehemently, shouting at the synthetic syllables of its implacably calm female voice when he disregarded her instructions. Unplugging that cable felt like switching off life support.
I drove to the showroom taking back roads, lingering behind the wheel, switching on the heated seat for that cosy electric-blanket feeling of comfort. But nothing could stop me shivering as I approached my destination. I asked for Nomi at reception. Before I knew it, a slim elegantly suited man stood in front of me, all stillness and solemnity. He bowed lightly with the upper half of his long torso. There was an awkward moment while I wondered how to respond, before stretching out my hand for him to shake. He took it with his head still lowered.
‘Mercedes 280 SL, still your favourite car, yes?’ he asked, attempting to lighten the mood. Getting no response, he tried again. ‘Prius your idea, yes?’
Choked for words, I could only nod.
‘Perhaps Mr Baum will make good recovery?’
I shook my head.
‘I am very sorry,’ he said, presenting me with papers to sign.
I could not see them clearly. My eyes swam with tears, spilling down on to forms about vehicle registration.
I rested my forehead on the cool clean glass surface of the desk.
‘Perhaps some tea?’ suggested Nomi.
Brushing the tears away, I wrote my name, left the car keys and exited wordlessly, stumbling between new models on display to the bus stop. I got on the first bus that came, knowing it was the wrong one, not caring, just wanting to be taken away from that place as quickly as possible.
Such a mundane chore. It was one of the saddest days of my life.