WE ENTER THE house through the garage, and the first thing I see is the chestnut flash of Nikki, the dachshund, squirming at us, his tail a frantic fox-brush sweeping the carpet. He hurls himself towards my crotch, not making it, scrabbling at my knee. As I bend to stroke him, he rolls over on his back, his front paws flopping campily, double-jointedly, back on themselves, his tail no longer a wide swishing metronome but a stumpy, irregular thump on the floor. Warmth, fur, the beating heart of a held creature: I’m resisting the soppiness of this, or trying to. I push him away and think sternly of dog-shit, of muzzles, of knotting, of a girlfriend scarred for life (a neat crucifix on her left cheek) by the family terrier. But then my hand goes searching along his jawline, and I’m a child again, back in the doggy comforts of his father’s house.
I look up and there are more dogs—a line of them in a naff, pseudo-French drawing, legs crossed, faces agonized under berets, waiting for their place at the lamppost; and a photograph of Gunner and Terry, the golden labradors my parents bought the year before I was born, their twelve pups feeding out of a trough which my father must have cadged from one of his farmers. Perhaps this was the same farmer high up above Earby who, one snowbound winter, fell sick and could be visited only by helicopter—a helicopter which my father got to ride in by making friends, ‘Over a pint’, with the pilot, who was inspecting pylons for the Yorkshire Electricity Board and who was persuaded to park his machine overnight on our back lawn (‘safe as houses’) rather than in the car park of his hotel over the way (‘it’d get vandalized, you know’). After his doctor’s flying visit, my father hit it off with farmers: word got round that, however isolated they were, he’d reach them; he had special privileges, perhaps even special powers; if your tractor toppled over on a farm-hand, he was the man to call. Only his labradors, with their tendency to chase sheep, jeopardized these relations.
Gunner and Terry lasted all my childhood, and after they died my father did without dogs for a while, in homage. Then he bought a long-haired dachshund, and that’s what he’s had ever since, sausage dog after sausage dog, most of them with the same name, Nikki. He felt awkward at first—a dachshund was such a small and effeminate dog to take out on a lead, especially for him with his big chest; a man’s man with a woman’s dog, he looked like something out of Laurel and Hardy. But as the years passed, despite my gentle mockery, he lost his self-consciousness and grew to depend on dachshunds. He even shared his beer with them, his nightly party trick: the nearly-empty pale ale bottle placed upright on the floor; the dog knocking the bottle over with its snout, and using a paw to tip the liquid into its mouth; the bottle dragged over to the edge of the rug and tipped again, a deeper tilt, for the dregs; a pint or two later, the sound of gnawing at the glass.
Of course, I prided myself on a fastidious distaste for all this cutesiness, this dogginess, and made a point of lecturing my father on the perils of dog-shit. In our regular disputes over the value of having a dog, I reckoned to win on the security question, pointing out as ungleefully as possible that Nikki had been in the house when it was burgled. But he always triumphed when it came to social usefulness: dogs help you meet people, he said, and proved it one summer when he made friends with a woman on the beach who, as well as owning a poodle, had a speedboat and water-skis to which we were given unlimited access. Dogs brought out the sentimentalist in him. He was still not properly over the death of his last Nikki; one Bonfire Night some years ago he had let the dog out by mistake, and the noise of fireworks drove it distractedly into the road. Or so he alleged: neighbours’ reports that Nikki had crossed the road several times earlier that week to visit a bitch on heat down at the farm did nothing to allay his guilt and remorse. He found the corpse on the grass verge, and came home crying with it in his arms.
He has always cried easily: he cried when dogs and cats died; he cried when he left my sister at her boarding-school; he cried waving goodbye from under our chestnut tree the day I went off to university. So why had he taught me to be brave and hold it in? Why have I never been able to cry? Why can’t I cry for him? Even now, shaking myself loose of the dog and at once coming across a photo of my father from a year ago—tanned, happy, arms round his grandchildren on the beach—even now the tears won’t come.
I pour myself a large gin and tonic, then another. There are too many cracking-up photographs around, too many mementoes: even his shoes in the workshop, the neat shelves of them, left-right, left-right, the cold leather turning up at the toes. My mother and I sit by the fire with plates on our knees. We drink wine with the roast chicken, and she begins a litany of if onlys : if only my father had had himself checked out regularly; if only he’d not refused the barium meal they’d offered him a month ago; if only she’d not had her accident.
‘But the doctor thinks the secondaries have been there two years,’ I say.
‘Yes, I know, but if only they’d caught it a bit earlier, he’d have been spared that month of terrible pain.’
‘But he’d have known for that much longer,’ I say, ‘he’d have been devastated.’
‘Yes … But if only he hadn’t got so weak before the operation, maybe he’d have more fight.’
‘But we don’t want the agony drawn out.’
So we yes, but and if only , until, several drinks later, we both begin to drowse, brief lid-droops then deeper sleep. I wake to find myself staring into my sister’s face on the sofa, a younger, browner, wrinklier face than mine (Gillian has inherited my father’s fondness for sunbathing). Quiet, anxious, she sits with her hands tight in her lap as we talk. We don’t see each other much now—only when I’m up or she’s down. Our lives have been separate from the day she went off to boarding-school thirty years ago, after she failed her eleven-plus. She hated it there, in banishment, and after three years of unhappy letters finally wrote one of such misery that my father, opening it at surgery, walked out on his patients, drove straight up to the school in the Lake District and brought her home. But by then I was fifteen, and more than our sixteen-month difference in age seemed to separate us. It’s only recently we’ve things in common again, the things we talk about now: houses, spouses, children.
At midnight I walk Gillian back to her house next door, past the outbuildings—barn, stables, pigsty, garage—of our old house, each of them now converted to a house or flat, a hamlet blazing where we had once played among hay or cobwebs. She clutches my arm. With her night-blindness—a rare eye condition—she sees poorly in bright sunlight, badly at dusk and not at all at night. At forty, she’s already on to large-print books from the library.
‘Are you all right?’ I ask.
‘Yes, if someone’s holding me.’
‘I meant about Dad. Are you coping?’
‘I think so.’
We talk about the operation: she understands his condition only dimly as yet, knows it is cancer but not that it’s terminal, is being let in on it gently, protected from its full glare. It’s my father’s usual way of doing things: Mum’s a doctor, I’m a man, but Gill’s the youngest, a woman and the sensitive one, and he wants her led there slowly. I’m not sure: her serenity alarms me; it’s based on kindly lies, and I want to shock her with the truth; or if she knows more than she’s letting on, I want us both to admit it. We reach her laundry room, back in the safe light, by the boiler, out of the cold, and I pause there, steeling myself to tell her more, to say at least, ‘We’re talking months, Gill, you know, not years.’ But what comes out of me is ‘Goodnight,’ and a peck on the cheek, and then I walk back under the blank lit immensity to bed.
In our old house—The Rectory it had been, The Grange as my father renamed it—there’d been a billiard room, long and with tall windows, which my father filled with a full-size snooker table, bought at an auction in Otley. A lorry fetched it over, and we watched it being laboriously lifted out and reconstructed—the slates, the rubber cushions, the string pockets, the lawn of green felt, the Scoreboard with the sliding arrow-marker. He played on the table every night for six months, taught me to play, too, even invited Freddie Trueman round for a game—a friend of our solicitor. A racy new life beckoned, smoke-filled and alcoholic (the room also contained an outsize drinks cupboard): I dreamt of a misspent adolescence, Yorkshire champion at thirteen, a precocious toff wizard of the felt. I discovered backspin, sidespin, how to stop the cue-ball dead; I potted colours from improbable angles—a wafer kiss of white on black, the erotic plock in the pocket. But one morning my father put a cloth over the table and kept it there forever after, disrobing it only for a week each Christmas.
The snooker table became his desk, its entire length covered with paper: invoices, receipts, newspaper clippings, share certificates, bank statements, you name it. Every night he would come back from the pub around eleven-thirty, pour himself a whisky, and sit—or rather stand—doing his ‘paperwork’ till one or one-thirty in the morning. I made a point of not getting involved. The paperwork was something to do with the investments left to him by his father, a mining engineer. It was hard work keeping on top of them, I knew that much: he never finished, and never left the table any tidier. When he retired and moved to the new house he built at the back of the old one, there was no room for a billiard table. His paperwork was now supposedly confined to a mere desk, though he quickly spread it across the study floor as well—splays of arithmetic and tax returns, a very large number of brown envelopes with mysterious headings.
Those envelopes, in a stack on the parental bed, are the first thing I see this morning. I have slept indecently well. My mother has not. When I go in with two mugs of tea, and take his place next to her (we are going to have to get used to that empty pillow), she’s straight into her worries.
‘I thought I’d better look at these. It’s not the stocks and shares I fret about. I know about those. I used to call out the share prices to him from the newspaper, I’ve seen the portfolio. It’s all the other stuff—these insurance policies and bonds and pensions and saving schemes. He’s so many bits of paper, you wouldn’t believe it. I just don’t know what’s in them.’
My mother’s fear of the chaos she’ll inherit is understandable, though I know she is really saying something else. She dreads the paperwork because paper will soon be all that remains of him. She can’t cope with figures, because she can’t cope with the figure we saw yesterday, the figure receding on that bed.
‘This is his special file,’ she says, reaching into her bedside table. ‘Have a good look while I use the shower.’
It’s the family tree he was drawing up, a task he took over from his Uncle Billy (whose oil-lush garage we used to stop at on days out to Southport), one which had him writing to relations wherever they could be traced. There doesn’t seem to be much in the file—a few letters and postcards—but I’m not expecting revelations. Though my mother’s Irish side is bogged in Celtic mist, on my father’s the impression has always been clear: a family settling in Lancashire and living off the fat of the Industrial Revolution; stolid captains of industry and their little wives; red-brick detached houses within shouting distance (but there would never be any shouting in these homes) of Bolton or Manchester; unshowy northern affluence; an enthusiasm for cars, railways, practical and mechanical things. No poets, no artists; no divorces; a fair bit of drinking, but not so much as to give the family a bad name.
The frail elderly handwriting, the photos and memory fragments come as a shock: their version of family history is very different. Here’s an impecunious start, Daniel Morrison writing to his son in 1868 to say he’s ‘middling well’ and asking, ‘being I’m out of work and tramping the last six weeks and on the road for England,’ for money to be sent to ‘your poor old father’ c/o Dumfries Post Office. Later there’s talk of steady jobs in mining or with ships’ instruments or on the Manchester Ship Canal. But in between, the record is of alcoholism and Wanderlust and early deaths through several generations: my father’s cousin, four-year-old Neil, gored to death by a cow when he got too near its calf; Crawford, who fell from a pigeoncote at three, was confined thereafter to a spinal carriage, died at fourteen; Jessie, who at the same age got pregnant by a rich Jewish boy in Manchester, took to the streets to hide her shame from the family, was spotted begging with her sickly child bundle and brought home; Daniel’s father, Alexander, who remarried after his first wife’s early death, moved away and left his children to fend for themselves; another errant Daniel, who married the sister of his wife (who had died in childbirth) either in France or illegally, since British law did not then permit you to marry your wife’s sister; Bunty, who lost her mother at six, her father the following year; and Robert, who was run over and killed by a horse-drawn beer dray, having that lunchtime more or less consumed the contents of one.
Telescoped, edited, misremembered, any family’s past seems a catalogue of grief and dispersal. But so many early deaths, and between the lines the other stories of alcoholism and madness and miscarriage and venereal disease and haemorrhages and mining disasters … For my father to be facing death at seventy-five begins to seem, in such a family, not a tragedy of cut-shortness but a miracle of longevity. For him to have stuck it out with his children seems miraculous, too, when the heritage is of neglect—children put on trains with address labels round their necks or pleading with their fathers, ‘at least come home for Christmas.’ And where are all the doctors and businessmen I’d been led to think lay behind us? The talk here is of deck-chair attendants in Blackpool, idlers of the dance-hall or ice-rink, chancers joining the US Gold Rush. I’d have been cheered, once, to discover these departures from stolidity. But not today. It isn’t just (just!) that my father is dying. Where he came from is dying too.
I pick up a photograph, a wonderful sepia set piece, the Blakemores circa 1895, my great-grandmother and her four children posed on a bench, two girls in lace dresses and frills, a besuited boy with a book open in his hand, and a baby in a bonnet. I look at them in their allotted roles—the Eternal Mother (she died within a year), the Proud Beauty (married a womanizer), the Scholar (gassed in the trenches), the Daddy’s Girl (but Daddy remarried), the Baby of the Family (already with his bottle)—and I follow their stares back to the man taking the picture, the Absent Father, who had his story too, grief and nervous breakdown. I think how cruelly far the reality of their lives was from what the camera had chosen or predicted for them that day, and how the photo lost nothing in feeling for my knowing this, and how that must mean art can lie as much as it likes, or needs to, and we forgive it anything so long as it is art. The people captured here are real, and there’s a frisson in knowing that, which you couldn’t get from painting or fiction; but truth does not come into it at all.
I dress and wander into the kitchen, where Pat is, the ‘maid’ as we called her when she arrived in the mid-sixties as an eighteen-year-old, the ‘housekeeper’ as she has become since my parents retired, though ‘live-in’ might be closer to the mark (these days she studies at a local college and has her room in return for occasional cleaning), and ‘companion’ or ‘nurse’ are suddenly looming ahead. She sits on a stool eating toast and peanut butter, young-looking still under her dark hair, the temporary fill-in who has stayed a quarter of a century, whose home this now is. ‘She’s a great girl is Pat, she’s like a daughter to us,’ my father likes to say, who has, however, another daughter, real not surrogate, a son, too. It’s some tribute to Pat, or some reflection of our odd upstairs-downstairs arrangements, that my sister and I have never felt usurped: she’s no one’s servant, but she’s not quite family either, prefers to eat alone, knows when to withdraw, has decided which bits of the house are hers to feel free in—the kitchen, her bedroom—and which are not. Now the portable television she’s watching beside the kitchen sink reports a stabbing in London, and she turns to give me a look—wry, stoic, bereft—that tells me she knows how ill my father is, and that his death when it comes will be as hard for her, who shares his house and loves him, as for me, his faraway son.
I make us tea, she makes us more tea, then I walk down the garden. Over the wall, to the right, is the old house. My father had bought it from the Church of England for 2,500 pounds in 1954, and then spent another 5,000 pounds doing it up, an expense he always resented (if the practice hadn’t been so busy, he’d have done all the work himself, not just mucked in at weekends), but which he made up for thirty years later when he retired and almost single-handedly built a new house in its grounds. The site was the paddock where I used to play solitary games of football—once my field of dreams, now his. Here, outside his dining-room, is where one of my goals used to be; there, down by his rockery, was the other. The trees that ran along one side of the pitch are still here, though lopped to let light in, and the wind is blowing through them as it used to when I was Ray Pointer and Jimmy McIlroy and the rest of the Burnley team. I was all the opposition players, too, and tried to stick one past myself between the metal posts hung with my father’s strawberry nets. It was here I’d come after the final whistle of the 1962 Cup Final, to put right the scoreline: Tottenham Hotspur 3, Burnley 1, the television had said, but that wasn’t how it ended on my pitch. The trees were ecstatic supporters then. Later I lay on my back beneath the trees, and heard the wind in them like a stream, and pretended I was listening to the sadness of passing time, and I knew one day I’d come back and the sadness would be real. Now I am here.
Many retirees die before their great deferred adventures are completed, or even begun. My father’s magnum opus is this house, and he’s lived in it for more than a decade. He drew up the plans himself, handing them over to an architect friend to translate into professional designs. He borrowed a JCB from a local farmer to dig out the foundations. He got hold of the stone and roof slates from a church that was being demolished near his surgery in Earby (when he was seen high up in the roof helping lower slates to the lorry below, rumours began that the doctor was having money troubles now he’d retired and had taken a job as a labourer). He acquired some Canadian pine from a neighbour, transported it to an old mill in Colne where he treated and sawed and planed it to make beams and shelves and doors and pot rails and dados, then brought it home and polyurythaned each item three times. He appointed a builder to begin the work, but also appointed himself foreman and chief helper. He chose the windows—metal, double-glazed, openable both side and top. He himself bought—‘so there’s no mark-up’—the copper pipes, the electrical fittings, the insulation wool, the roof felt, the wash-basins, the carpets, the lino, the pale-blue bath with the scraped side, at a knock-down price.
All those years of helping others with their golf club or pub dining-room extensions—projects quietly resented by my mother because time given to others was time denied to the family; all his long history of odd-jobbing—changing tap washers, fixing the electrics, lying with his ear to a blocked drain and coming up with his arm sleeved in sewer-black mud: all that had been mere practice for his greatest project, this house. Impatient and cheapskate, he was no craftsman. If a way could be found to get by with bits and pieces he already had, then he would find it, and fudge it, and bugger the appearance. Why buy a triangular corner cupboard when you could saw up a rectangular kitchen cabinet and have two ? He was the sort of man who would raid his own skip, in case something useful had been chucked. Most of his tools are old, handed down from his father and grandfather and uncles; here they are, handle upward, in tubs of oil and sand to stop them rusting. I stand in the garage and workshop gazing at these testimonies to a practical man, the pliers and chisels and all the other things he’d picked up over the years (‘How much for cash?’) and could not bear to throw away: crumpled cans of Simoniz, paint tins with a crust-hard quarter-inch in the bottom, hanging saws with their teeth torn out, garden shears open like lobster claws, the drum circle of an extension lead, a knapsack weed-killer spray, a paraffin-wick road lamp, an oil can with its plunger jammed half out. Two tyres stand upright against the wall, a buffer to the front bumper of his car. There’s a vice bolted to the workbench with nothing in its grip. His spanners and screwdrivers dangle in rows, getting bigger as they go. Above them are neat shelves of Senior Service or Golden Virginia tins with ‘three-quarter inch brass screws’ or ‘One-inch galvanized nails’ labelled on the side. Some day all these will be mine.
It took two winters in gloves and blue overalls, two summers in a pair of shorts, before he finished the house. He held a party to celebrate and gave the house a name—Windyridge, the name of the house he’d grown up in, an even apter name here, for a site where the wind never stops. That evening he sat back in his chair while the sun went down and the sky pinkened on the screen of hills from the Trough of Bowland to Upper Wharfedale. Next morning he began work on the garden: the lawn, the orchard, the vegetable plot, the summer house (built from leftovers, and resembling a bus shelter), the rockery, the orchard, the polyhouse. He was especially proud of the ‘geriatric’ flower-beds I’m wandering among now, the earth at waist height, so that he—or more likely my mother—need never bend while weeding.
He’d have liked me to help with his house, to be the apprentice, the plumber’s mate, the Lad at his side. But I was lazy, and living two hundred miles away, and he roped in others instead—my brother-in-law Wynn (an employee of Yorkshire Water, good on the heavy work), my Uncle Ron (who brought to carpentry all his dentistry skills), neighbours, former patients, friends. I feel guilty now for not having been there; I feel guilty for ever having grown up and away. Often enough, at various addresses, he’d helped me. In one flat we’d constructed a door and wooden bridge from the bathroom out to the back garden, which was otherwise reached only by traipsing round through the curmudgeonly downstairs neighbour’s yard: the bridge was made from two old railway sleepers snapped up on the cheap and transported down from Yorkshire, and the neighbour so hated their bulk and ugliness that he pleaded with us to take the bridge down and feel free to use his yard. Help of this sort meant my father storming ahead, and me standing at his side holding tools. So when it came to building his house, I couldn’t reciprocate: I’d looked on but never learned his practical skills.
Besides, I missed the old rectory and selfishly resented him moving from a place I’d assumed would always be there to return to, a childhood I could pick up again if ever I fancied. And I recoiled from the new house precisely because it was new, which meant vulgar. Whenever I came up he would drag me away from whatever I was reading and escort me round his work in progress. I’d try to make approving noises, but below them was a lofty silence: I knew there were better ways for me to employ my time, and—sticking my head back in the nearest book—I probably conveyed the thought that there were better ways for him to employ his. Now, chastened and frightened, I want to tell him I was wrong—that it didn’t matter any more to me that the only book I’d ever seen him reading (abandoned halfway through) was Jaws . I can see him with his head bowed over some faulty electrical appliance or blocked carburettor (‘We’ll soon fettle that’), lost and absorbed and self-transcending. Why had I thought my interests more important, less ephemeral than his? What could I compare with this monument he’d built to himself? What consolation can art be, what comfort are reading and writing, now that grief streams through the trees and this home he made for living in is about to become the house where he will die?
The wind gets up, flapping the plastic sides of the polyhouse. I inhale the sweet air of tomato-and-compost, and see the brown plants shrivelled on the canes, and think of him tying them with green string and the first yellow bell-buds showing. It would have been June then. He would have been well, or would have thought he was well.
In Room 2, Ward 19, I want to shake him. I want to put a bomb under him. I want him to be dead rather than die like this.
‘I know you don’t feel right, Dad, but operations take it out of people, they feel flat afterwards, and you are much stronger than you were three days ago.’
‘I am that.’
‘And the doctors are happy. And once you’re eating properly and in your own home …’
I don’t know whether this blather is for his sake or mine—because it’s the sort of cheeriness he goes in for himself and feels comfortable with; or because I can’t bear to admit he’s dying. I know they have opened him up and closed him again without doing anything other than pass a tube across his stomach. I know this can’t help him regain his appetite or health. I know that if he doesn’t start peeing soon, his kidneys will become infected, then pack up altogether. And I know that he knows all this, knows too much about the body to be deluded. Physician, diagnose thyself: well, he has, and that’s why he’s depressed.
‘And you might not feel like visitors now, but there are lots of friends who want to see you, and in a week you’ll be different.’
He looks at his watch and says: ‘Number One, your five minutes are up. Come in Number Two. Your five minutes are up too, Two. Come in Number Three … No thanks.’
It is the only flash of something like anger, or life. No, of course he wouldn’t want anyone to see him like this. He hates feeling fallible: ‘I may not be right but I’m never wrong’ is the motto on a horrible brass wall-plate he has. He isn’t a vain man, but he is a proud, even bumptious one, a man with a puffed chest who learnt to water-ski in his fifties and thought he could go on forever. To be stalled and stranded like this is bad enough; for others to see him in this condition …
Lunch arrives at eleven-thirty, an omelette and mashed potatoes. He asks for some butter to moisten the food (‘It’s like swallowing holly, or iron spikes’). The television’s on in the background, and there’s a shot of Arthur Scargill from the archives. My father has never liked sharing a name with the miners’ leader; he prefers if anything to be called ‘King Arthur’, the nickname some of his friends use in recognition of a certain tendency to lord it, or more-than-lord-it, over the locals. Now I want to delude him into recovering some of that bullying energy. I’ve seen him angry, in tears, petulant, sorry for himself, but never like this, never down .
My mother leaves us for a moment: ‘Have a last word before the train.’ I offer to lift him from the chair on to the bed, but he doesn’t want to be lifted—‘Soon as I’m up there, I’m bound to have to get down for a piss or shit.’ He asks me only to pull the sheet back, too weak even for this. I hold him close a minute and feel the unfamiliar juttiness of his bones. I hold him a bit longer, not wanting him to see my face. I turn a last time at the door, but he is staring into space in front of him, or at the Thing inside him, not at me. I walk with my mother through the swing doors of Ward 19 and out into the drizzle, the gauze of dampness, which doesn’t move at all, just hangs there helplessly, as if the sky cannot relieve itself or cry.
On Keighley station I recognize the older brother of one of my schoolfriends, or think I do. A young girl is on his arm, while her sister and mother stand just behind. I take a seat on the train opposite them. A low industrial estate goes by, the pens of a sheep auction, bleached grass by a river. Yes, it’s him all right, though behind his thick lenses he shows no sign of recognizing me. The girl is besotted: she leans her head on the shoulder of his brown leather jacket. How old is she? Eighteen? Twenty-two? I can see his wedding ring, and I imagine what he may have gone through over the last weeks or months or years: an angry, rejecting wife, children too maybe. Then I imagine it differently: his cruel northern obduracy and heavy drinking and culture-licensed irresponsibility. I struggle between these two images.
What is his name? At Ermysteds, his brother Brian had been the most powerful figure in our year, clever, subversive, a fighter. Most of us suffered humiliations from him at one time or another: when I was twelve and overweight, I’d been sitting in the art room failing to paint and looked out of the window to find him holding up a piece of paper that said ‘Fat PB’—P. B. being the initials (Philip Blake) the teachers used to distinguish me from R. A. Morrison, the red-haired boy I’d seen crying on my first morning in the playground (crying not because it was a scarily big new school but because he was a poor boy without a uniform). Fat PB became a nickname and taunt for a while. My parents, at whose insistence my sister and I would eat up all the helpings they served us, had let us both get ‘chubby’, their word for fat . They thought I’d grow out of it naturally. Maybe I would have. But I expect I have Brian to thank that I put myself on a diet and lost a stone in six weeks.
Brian was attractive to girls, and the first of us to get on to them. He got me on to them, too, but not literally and rather later than him. At fourteen, he and I double-dated—his of course was the prettier. I remember sitting awkwardly with mine (Janice? Helen? Linda?) under the girder of light in the local Plaza, the six-fifteen performance because she had to be home by nine. In a heat engendered more by classroom talk than by desire I tried to put my hand on her breasts, what there was of them, before realizing that convention required me to kiss her first, not easy, I discovered, when a girl keeps her face fixed firmly on the big screen straight ahead. After a few more evenings of this, both of us pretending that the struggles in the dark were happening to someone else, which for all the intimacy we achieved they might as well have been, we took to talking through the films instead. We were useless touchers but good talkers, and might have gone out together longer. But one summer weekend when I was away Brian seduced her in an empty barn—or so he claimed, and even she spoke about rough hands and straw in her knickers. It was never the same between her and me after that. But I remained obsessed with Brian—who got all the best girls, or stole the best ones I had, or made me feel mine weren’t worth stealing (‘scrawny’, ‘no tits’, ‘tight as a nun’s bum’) for the rest of my adolescence.
And now here’s his brother, also with a young girl, and I hear him saying: ‘When we get there, you sit next to your mam.’ The girl has the same olive skin and deep-set eyes as he does. Suddenly I realize the time-warp I’m in: this is not the predatory twenty-year-old, Brian’s cocky brother; this is a man in his mid-forties out with his wife (the grey-haired woman opposite) and two teenage daughters. Why is one of those girls, fifteen or so when I look at her more closely, behaving like his lover? Simply because—doting, innocent, old-fashioned—she seems to like her dad? Is the sternness of his wife the jealousy and disapproval of a woman pushed to the side of her own life? Is it still OK for daughters to make up to their dads like this? I follow them as we get off at Leeds, the girl still on his arm, and strain to hear another snatch of conversation, grab another clue. But then they’re gone in the crowd.
I wait for the King’s Cross train. Was this how my sister had once been with her father? Do I want my own daughter to be like this with me when she’s fifteen? I think of the coach I see every morning when I walk my son to his school bus: F SCOTT & DAUGHTERS it says on the side, and there is still a little shock in seeing that, in the provocative departure from & sons and the idea of a liberal-minded coach-firm proprietor—a further shock in realizing that F SCOTT might not be a man at all. The days of fathers and sons are over: they’ve run the heredity business for themselves, have invested all their names and money in it, and now the fathers are dying and the sons not taking over and the whole shebang’s in ruins. The women have been effaced for too long—like my mother, who encouraged my father and me to discuss money alone in the study, who let him go to the bar or bank for her, who at mealtimes gave us men the bigger helpings. It is time for the women to come forward, time …
The London train is running late. I wander over to where the mail vans used to gather, scene of one of my father’s great escape stories. He had come down to see me in London, a one-pound winter special return, and had arrived at the station with only five minutes to spare. The visitors’ car park was full and so he had left his car—a sporty drop-head orange Fiat—parked among several Post Office vans. It was illegal, he knew, but he was rushing. Just how illegal he saw on his return: a posse of mail-vans enclosed it, a tight, red, get-out-of-this-one circle. Improvising quickly, he asked at Station Enquiries, ‘Has anyone seen an orange sports car? It’s mine, I have a set of keys for it, but my son was supposed to leave it in the car park and it’s not there.’ He was directed to a guard, and then to an angry trio of Post Office workers.
‘Oh, Christ,’ he said, when they escorted him to where, as he knew, the car was parked, ‘the daft sod.’
‘Student, is he?’ one of the guards asked, calming down.
‘Yep, bloody student,’ my Dad said. ‘Supposed to be clever. Prize fathead, if you ask me.’
He rang me that evening, exultant at this rare case of him using me rather than I him: ‘You should have seen their faces: absolutely livid. There must have been ten mail-vans boxing me in. But by the time I left we were great pals. Best thing of all: they’d have charged three-fifty in the car park. And I didn’t pay a penny.’
Back in London, on the Northern Line, going southward, I find the destination boards are getting ahead of themselves, as usual, over-optimistic, promising what they aren’t going to deliver: MORDEN 3 MINS , it says, but after ten there’s still no sign of the train. Instead of frustration, I feel a rare affection for this suspended time. But then I hear the inevitable growling and swelling in the tunnel, the sleek rat springing hyperactive and lethal from its trap. The carriage is full of men, every one a killer, brow-lines of rage and torment sculpted as if with hammer and chisel. Next to me is a close-cropped twenty-year-old in a leather jacket, with an AIDS INTERNATIONAL DAY sticker. He crouches by the pneumatic doors next to his dog, a beautiful grey velvety Weimaraner. The dog is nervous to be travelling in this thing, the rattling steel, the shaky floor. Every so often it gives a little howl, and when it does its leathered owner yanks on its collar and pulls its face hard up against his, staring it out, boss, disciplinarian, torturer. Silence, then another little howl, and this time he cracks its head hard against the door. More and longer silence, but then, just before he stands up to get out at Bank, the dog howls again and the boy leans into its face and bites it below the eye. It yelps in pain as they disappear through the door.
I am close to yelping myself now. A storm breaks across the city. At Lewisham station the tracks are under water, and as the train sits there I see a grey mouse in the wall below the opposite platform, flooded out of its home, trying to find a way down, balancing on a stone above the flood, panicking this way and that. At Blackheath I get off and move with the pedestrian bleepers, then cross the wide expanse of road in front of two cul-de-sacs. A black car is winking to turn in and starts to move. Head-down, I pretend not to see him but I can sense over my shoulder that he’s keeping on coming. Suddenly the car is there at my shoulder, a Stanza: the driver taps his finger against his head, the you’re-a-nutter gesture, then accelerates into the car-width between me and the pavement. He’s trying to prove a point, not kill me, but already I’m running after him shouting, ‘No, it’s you who’s mad, you fucking arsehole bastard.’ I run a hundred yards up the road, still shouting. His Stanza’s disappearing round the corner into the cul-de-sac, and I imagine catching him at its far end, his face whiting-out as he sees me through the glass, his hands whizzing to get the window up, but my arm is through and locked around his neck, dragging him out, or I’m up on the bonnet with an iron bar I’ve found, shattering the windscreen and in for the kill, like those IRA executioners with the off-duty soldiers who drove into a funeral march at Milltown cemetery, justice, a bullet through the head, the body dumped over a wall somewhere.
I stop running—a madman with a bag and briefcase ready to kill. I turn round, walk breathlessly up the hill and reach the road I live on, where, finally, a quarter of a mile from home, I start to cry.