THERE IS A low point that comes when you’ve been sitting by a sickbed—around six, say, after the light has gone, about the time you pour yourself the first anaesthetizing short. My father has been asleep since Dr May left this morning, his head back on the pillow, his mouth wide open so that you can see (I’ve never noticed before) the uneven run of his bottom teeth. Sitting on the dressing-table stool next to my mother, both of us with Glenfiddichs, I feel suddenly, clearly, that he will not wake again. The dog skitters into the room and fusses round our feet, his coat—through my glass—the colour of whisky. ‘Poor little Nikki, you don’t understand,’ says my mother. ‘You don’t know what day it is. You don’t know what’s happening up here.’
For the last few days, my father, whenever he sits on the edge of the bed and Nikki comes running, has had to spread his hands out in front of him (as if warming them on the fire) to stop the dog jumping into his naked lap, and the dog has slunk away, not used to such rejection. But his animal bewilderment isn’t so different from our own informed incomprehension. A tear falls on my shoe, another on to the carpet between my feet. I keep my head down, not wanting my mother to see, but she passes me some paper tissues and says, not unkindly: ‘Better do your crying alone.’
Is it this that wakes my father? Suddenly he is there again, alert, wanting a pee, and walks unaided to the bathroom. ‘Walk’ is maybe not the word. It is like swimming in some new element, performing some previously unperformed task. There’s been a National Electricity advertisement on television lately, in which a gang of pylons shuffle into life and stride stiff-jointedly across the countryside; his walk is like this. Yet his penis is gratifyingly large, not the shrivelled miniature rose, and he pees, a triumph. Back in bed, he leans towards the glass of iced water I’m holding for him and cups his hands shakily round the glass, trying to get his lip over the top of the straw. As he drinks, the fingers of my right hand, cooled by the glass, touch his left nipple, which hardens a little—a bright pink pearl, not the slack, down-tilting brown teat of earlier. The folds of skin under his breasts are like some fancy rucked curtain, parted at the middle. Across his chest, stomach, back, shoulders is the familiar fallout of birthmarks and moles.
For the next hour he slips in and out of sleep. My sister arrives, briefed now that we won’t have him much longer, and whenever he closes his eyes and seems to fade away we bring him back him with some question, like parents coming in late from a party and—drunk, elated, sentimental—waking their baby for a play. I tell him what’s been on the news: a train crash in the Severn Tunnel, not any dead; the latest about Robert Maxwell’s missing millions, the financial mess his sons have inherited; fighting in Dubrovnik. He shakes his head in a what’s-the-world-coming-to way. I tell him some of the football results, and he makes me fetch his pools coupon from his desk. He has done the pools without success for forty years, the same complicated perm every week. I can find no record of it among the mass of paper, so he dictates it from memory: ‘One, the cross is in column E, three D, four F, six A, seven B, seven C, nine F,’ and so on up into the fifties. It’s a slow process, in and out of consciousness, but when I later turn up his master copy and check his memory against it I find it’s almost faultless. This is the poignant thing: his body is clanking into a grassed-over siding, but his mind is humming along perfectly. When I tell him that Match of the Day is on, Bolton v. Blackpool in the FA Cup second round, two great old teams now in lower divisions, he says:
‘Grandpa bought one of his cars in Blackpool, an Austin, FX 709, a Blackpool number-plate. And he was once going to a football match at Bolton, his team, a big all-ticket job against Blackpool, and the queue of cars was terrible, so he said “Bugger this” and drove past them up the outside. When he got to the front, the steward flagged him down, angry-looking, thinking he was queue-jumping, then saw his Blackpool number-plate and waved him straight into the visitors’ car park, the Blackpool supporters’ end.’
‘So that’s where you got the habit of jumping queues,’ says Gill.
‘What about your own cars?’ I ask, stilted as a fifties BBC interviewer. ‘There was some story, wasn’t there?’
‘Which one do you mean? There was my little Austin, my first car, and I was so proud of it, but I had this problem with the handbrake cable. I put some oil on, but the oil didn’t seem to be going down the cable tube, so I thought if the engine turned over and I had a short run out on the main road that might help, but I was so busy looking down at the cable I drove into a lamppost.’
‘And didn’t you crash into some railings in Manchester once?’
‘I was trying to reverse into a tight space and I couldn’t see, so I leant across to open the passenger door to get a better view, and I knocked the car into third gear and it shot forward across the road up on to the pavement and against some coping stones supporting railings. There were girls working in an office basement there, and masonry came pouring down through their window, and they all came out to see what had happened. I was about twenty. They were sniggering at me in my blazer and tie. I had to ring Grandpa to help get me out and tow me home. I felt a prize fathead.’
‘At least it wasn’t like blowing up the tram in Bolton,’ says my sister, coaxingly, prompting him to embark on another old story, about how he and two schoolfriends raided the chemistry lab and laid some explosive they’d mixed on the tramlines in Bolton. We know the tale by heart—the loud bang, the tram-driver scratching his head, the traffic brought to a standstill, the pranksters sneaking away unnoticed. To hear him tell it is comforting—for a moment, death seems to have receded. But then again, not: for us to cajole him into telling stories which we’ve spent most of our lives being bored or exasperated by is a sign of how desperate we’ve become, how little we believe we’ll ever hear them—or him—again. It’s like the ornaments or pictures on the wall I’ve always hated, the lolling dogs, cutesy goose-girls and naff souvenirs, suddenly precious now. We don’t want different stories; we want the same stories. And it doesn’t matter what he says, only that he says something: now that everything is a last thing, even the most banal utterance is depth-charged.
In the kitchen, my cousin Kela has arrived from Ormskirk. She has been told not to, but she has come: ‘This is family. He thinks he can get away without seeing me, but he’s bloody well not going to, the pet.’
We’ve always called her Kela, but her real name is Mikela, after her father, Michael, who went missing over France two weeks before she was bom. Along with Ronnie Astle, Mike Thwaites had been my father’s best friend: the three of them were schoolmates, played the same games, mucked about in the same cars, went into the RAF together. My father’s sister Mary had married Mike in 1940; after his death, after Kela’s birth, after the war, she married Ronnie, and they had three more children of their own, Richard, Edward and Jane. We used to spend every Christmas with them, Yorkshire one year, their house near Manchester the next. Kela, the odd one out, a Thwaites rather than an Astle, has always cherished my father as a lost link with her father, who is a man she never knew, a ghost, a god, an RAF hero. She sits half an hour with my father, then is back in the kitchen with her poor, dry, eczema-flaky skin, her fags, her glass of wine, her laughter, her unfailing cosiness. Since Auntie Mary died of cancer ten years ago, Kela, herself nearly fifty now, has appointed herself chief Holder Together of the Family. Despite the official protests, we’re glad she is here. She makes it easier for us to indulge ourselves, to harp on the past, though the past we harp on is a score of death not of life.
‘Dear old Uncle Arthur,’ Kela says. ‘Hanging on, just like Mummy did.’
‘Does cancer run in families?’ I ask.
‘You mean, is it genetic?’ my mother says. ‘Or does a certain sort of person … I don’t know, love. Your father is hardly the repressed sort. Nor was Mary. And they had very different personalities.’
‘Mummy had a year after they found the primary,’ says Kela. ‘She was walking round with a colostomy bag.’
‘And she didn’t deny it like Dad?’
‘At first she did. But once the secondaries were found she was talking openly about dying. She wasn’t afraid of death itself—only of choking or the horrible pain there might be. And then, the love, she left these notes about the house for us, in drawers and cupboards, which we kept finding afterwards: “Families need each other,” “Keep seeing one another after I’m not here,” “No worries about me where I’ve gone.”’
‘And it wasn’t a horrible death?’
‘No, we were all there, and chatting not long before. Then a few minutes before she died she said, “I can’t find Michael.”’
‘My brother Patrick was a bit like that,’ says my mother. ‘The last thing he said was: “There’s my mother at the end of the bed.”’
Kela drains her wine glass and lights another cigarette.
‘At least Mummy died peacefully,’ she says.
‘Granny, too,’ says my mother, rehearsing the old details of her mother-in-law’s death. ‘Fine until she was eighty-six. Then she began to have trouble with her hands, they became twisted and useless, and she couldn’t play the piano any more. One morning she said: I’m fed up, I want to die. Later that afternoon she was screaming out with pain—I gave her some pethidine, only a small dose, but she never recovered consciousness.’
‘You mean you eased her on her way,’ I say.
‘No, she was eighty-seven, with an abdominal infarct—I was saving her from pain. I did the same for my brother Patrick. He was in a hospital run by nuns, last stages of cancer, and I was sitting there, and he was in such agony because they were mingy with the morphine, the dose they gave was about as strong as a Smartie. So I went to the sister and said: could he have an extra dose? He died later that night. It’s a mercy, when you’re never going to recover anyway.’
I open another bottle of wine. We make up a bed for Kela. There are fronds and crab-claws of frost on the window.
*
I dream I’m at the office. Reception call up: ‘A gentleman to see you—says he has an appointment.’
‘Tell him I’ll be down.’
I’m expecting no one, I realize, and up to my eyes: I have widows to turn, kill fees to negotiate, a paper to put to bed. I decide to make him wait. Soon I relent and go down.
‘He was sitting over there. Must have gone.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Didn’t say.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Your size. Thinning hair.’
‘What age?’
‘Old enough to be your father.’
I rush out into City Road. No sign. I search the Underground. No one. I walk in circles round the graveyard in Bunhill Fields. Nothing.
Sunday morning, and I can hear my father’s voice as I wake. He has just had my mother make him a second breakfast: the spoonful of Complan wasn’t enough, he wanted a quarter cup of cornflakes too. Now he feels in need of a shower, and I fit a new light-bulb in the cubicle for him as he soft-shouts the instructions from the bed: ‘Twist the old light-bulb in and leftwards to release it. Got it? Right, now push the new one in and rightwards to insert it.’ Is it that he assumes I still don’t know how to change a light-bulb? Or that his is the one infallible method, the beautiful simplicity of which he thinks the rest of the world hasn’t yet cottoned on to? I take heart from my irritation: he must be feeling better.
Not that he can be, much. I watch him stagger to the shower, loose skin flapping like an elephant’s. His chest looks as if someone has ploughed across it, deep furrows between the three huge top ribs. His pacemaker, once buried in the fat of his chest, now stands proud, like a parcel on a doormat; I can even see the contact points, top right, where the two wires come into it. After the shower, which he takes leaning with one hand against the wall, he lies on the bed and asks my mother to powder his bottom—Johnson’s Baby Powder, the sweet whiff of it—‘and maybe the balls, too, they get trapped.’ She puffets out the white powder from the big phallic container, then smears its strange silkiness across him, under him. Johnson’s Baby Powder: the Johnson’s factory is nearby, in Gargrave; he was powdered as a child with it, he saw his children powdered, now he is being powdered for death. My mother’s hand is under his sac, then she kisses his forehead and leaves the room quickly, tears behind her glasses.
By the time Richard and Edward arrive an hour later, he’s sitting in his chair by the fire, head bowed, shirt open, modesty hankie in position. They had expected, from our phone call yesterday, a man close to death, but the one in the chair who lifts his head is comparatively sparky. Richard has come from Manchester, Edward all the way from London, though both pretend they just happened to be passing: they don’t want him to think there’s anything unusual about their being here, don’t want to alarm him. I feel guilty, as if we’ve got them here under false pretences: there’s no knowing, he might still be alive in three months. This is the rollercoaster of terminal illness, and already I can hear a little voice in me starting up that resents his tenacity, his ability to pull himself back up off the floor, that whispers, beneath the spoken pieties: Just die, will you . Even his cheeriness is needling, ‘it’s no fun having a major operation,’ he says, adding: ‘But there’s a long way to go yet.’ He drifts off—until we start talking about getting Kela’s car started in the heavy frost, and he wakes to issue instructions about a battery charger and jump leads.
Later, I wheedle my cousins to the pub. The fields crunch under our feet like cereal flakes, whiteness all the way to heaven. The double canal bridge at East Marton looks at itself several times in the water. Just above it is the Cross Keys, one of my father’s two locals, the pub he began going to when it was taken over by Hilly and Brian Thackeray, who became close friends. From the bar where we drink our bitter, I see a face I half-recognize, and which seems to half-recognize me. It’s a rather sulky, broken, impatient face, which—as I sneak looks at it through my glass—pieces itself together as an old schoolfriend, Charles Torrance. One summer I’d gone on holiday with his family to Seahouses, in Northumberland, and played cricket all day every day on the long, white, windy beach. Another summer he worked with me behind the bar of a club on a caravan site in North Wales, before he ran into trouble for refusing to serve (an eighteen-year-old’s mad moral fervour) a fat blonde woman known to be having an affair with the site plumber. I hadn’t seen him for twenty years but here he was now, unmistakable in his red golf club sweater, the same odd mixture of priggishness and nerves.
‘Charles,’ I say, walking over.
‘Blake—I thought it was you.’
We talk for a minute as his son bleep-bleeps away on his Game Boy. Charles too has moved away, lives in Sussex now, a solicitor, here for the weekend. He asks after my father, and I remember his, Tim, also a doctor, but grander, a consultant, dapper, with a striped blazer and tie, in his youth a county schoolboy cricketer. At my parents’ New Year parties, Tim had usually been the one who opened the piano lid and began to play. And when my father pressed me to continue with piano lessons it was always Tim’s example he cited (’Marvellous to have a musical gift’), success in this field meaning not a faultless performance in a concert-hall (my father had never in his life been to one of those: ‘A lot of people paying a lot of money to see something that’s meant to be heard: no thanks’) but a drunken singsong round the Joanna. To my father’s chagrin, I soon gave up on the piano—and playing the drums later for a group called The Crofters was no compensation, since we performed just the once (coming second out of two in a Gargrave talent contest) and our one song was a plaintive tune which he mockingly christened ‘The Camel Driver’s Lament’. Often, though, watching Top of the Pops , he’d enthuse over the power of music to ‘send people’, and I knew he must have envied Tim his musical talent. He himself could only whistle, and then just a few bars of the one tune he knew: ‘Put Another Nickel In’.
Sitting here listening to the jingles of the Game Boy, I remember other things about Tim: how he had taken to calling on my mother for a late-afternoon or early-evening drink, and how they’d talk in hushed voices in front of the wide living-room windows. In some ways they seemed more suited than my mother and father were: Tim was clever, and I suspected my mother of being cleverer, academically at least, than my father. Tim was chivalrous too, like something out of a Noel Coward play, and my mother, as a young woman, had evidently been used to chivalry (one summer I’d found on her shelves a privately printed book of poems by one Michael McKenna, with the poet’s inscription: ‘To my love Agnes, with all my heart’). Tim belonged to her lost world of love and music. He even had a romantic’s self-destructive streak—a drink problem. Sometimes he’d stay on all evening and have to be driven home in his Rover, my father plonking him in the passenger seat and taking the wheel, my mother following behind in our car to get my father home again—the alcoholic’s convoy. Tim had died of a liver complaint, much too young. My mother had been one of the few people to visit him in hospital.
Now I’m sitting here with his son, sour-faced and tense as ever, and his son, more of a charmer like Tim. We talk with my cousins, over another pint, of the pressures of work and mortgages. We agree it’s time we abandoned our complex, urban, high-pressure lives, and moved here to live simply in the Dales. And all of us know that none of us is going to do it.
Back home, Richard, Edward and Kela gone, my father asleep, my mother and I sit at the foot of the bed, drink and death strengthening the feeling that there need be no secrets now, that anything can be spoken.
‘There must have been things you’ve missed, living with Dad,’ I say.
‘Like what?’
‘Oh, I don’t know—books, music, company.’
‘Company! You must be joking—you know how sociable he is, always at the pub, always asking people back.’
‘But your sort of company—dinner parties and so on.’
‘Oh, he hates dinner parties—going to someone’s, and then feeling you have to have them in return. We’ve never once held a dinner party. He’s very unsure of himself, though he never lets on, and I think that’s part of it: at a dinner table, if the talk turns to things he doesn’t know about, he feels trapped—whereas in the pub he can always go and buy a drink and talk to someone else. He won’t even play Trivial Pursuit in case he shows his ignorance. And he can be a real sod. I remember when we first moved to Earby, the Melwards, a nice couple, asked us to a concert. He wouldn’t go, of course, but I did and enjoyed it, and we must have stopped off for a drink on the way home, but it wasn’t late, only ten-thirty, so I asked them in for a coffee—and there he was opening the front door in his pyjamas and asking where we’d been: I could have died of shame. Naturally, they never asked me again after that.’
‘He doesn’t read either.’
‘And doesn’t go to plays or exhibitions, and uses the television to fall asleep to: I know. I sometimes feel sorry for him not reading. I feel guilty in bed, looking forward to the moment he says, “Well, goodnight, love,” and is snoring, so I can turn the light back on. After all, Granny used to read, and Mary, and my mother, too—all day long.’
‘Was that why you liked Tim?’
‘Oh, Tim was so sad,’ she says, ‘so many talents, so wasted. It was an unhappy marriage—Cheryl was always nice and disapproving.’
‘He was keen on you, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, I suppose, but I wasn’t the type for affairs and I wouldn’t have wanted to hurt Cheryl. It was better left as it was, just drinks and chat.’
‘But no one would have blamed you. It would have made you feel better, getting your own back on Dad.’
‘For Beaty, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘But I don’t think that was an affair, not physical. I think Dad just felt sorry for her. That was such an unhappy marriage, too.’
‘So you knew all about Beaty and Dad?’
‘Yes. He was very open. I suppose I behaved like a doormat, but I thought: if I just sit this out it will peter away. Which it did.’
‘But it went on a long time.’
‘Ten years. And it hurt, of course. But I couldn’t ask him to leave. And I knew if I ever tried to leave with you and Gillian he’d come after me, wherever I was—he idolized you both. And I couldn’t have left you either. So I had to put up with it.’
‘It surprises me he wasn’t secretive about it; he was in other ways.’
‘He told me once in the billiard room that it was possible to love two women. And he did—I was his first love, he said, and she was his second, but in a different way.’
‘Not everyone would have stuck it.’
‘I could never argue with your father—no one could. There was one holiday when he suddenly announced we must take Beaty and Josephine, too. I thought it was outrageous—we were staying at a friend’s, it wasn’t our place to be inviting others along to. But in the end, of course, he got his way.’
‘I can remember her coming.’
‘But I still think it wasn’t sexual. Oh, I suppose after Gillian I got post natal depression and wasn’t much fun to be with. And she had the golf club and loved to drink. He started taking her out once a week. It became a ritual—Monday nights, giving her a good time, because things at her home were so miserable and Sam such a wet. Dad went to fetch her straight from surgery those evenings, never came home. I had to cover for him. I often wondered if you guessed when I said he’d gone to see J.J. Duckworth or to the Rotary Club. There was once he took her to a club in Blackburn, and met someone we knew—eventually that got back to me. And then his father died, and he hadn’t seen much of him just before and he was devastated . And I suppose maybe Beaty offered him more sympathy than I did. Granny came to live with us, because Grandpa had said in a note that, if he died before her, the one thing he asked of Arthur and Mary was that Granny never spend a single night alone. So Dad moved her in and also insisted that I sleep in the same room—the back bedroom. Sometimes he’d come in at three, and I’d go through and ask, “Where have you been?” and he’d say, “Out.” I discovered later he used to drive up on to the moors on his own and just sit there.’
‘He told you that?’
‘Yes.’
‘I remember you packing your bags once.’
‘Maybe. I went to stay with friends a couple of times. But I could never have left you.’
‘And in the end it paid off.’
‘Yes, it faded out.’
‘And Josie isn’t my half-sister?’
‘No. How could you even think it?’
‘I convinced myself there was a physical resemblance. And I remember him taking us to the maternity hospital to see her. Years later I thought I could see it all suddenly making sense.’
‘He never takes any interest in Josie now, never even mentions her: if she’d been his surely he would have.’
‘No, I see I was wrong.’
‘Well, then …’
‘And Uncle Sam put up with it all too, just like you.’
‘Yes, I suppose he hated Dad’s guts, but there wasn’t much he could do.’
‘And you’ve been happy since?’
‘For the past twenty years your Dad and I have got on better than ever. He said to me, that long day we had before his operation: “We’ve been happy, pet, haven’t we? I was a bastard to you sometimes, I know, but we were happy.” All marriages have their difficulties. We got through ours in the end.’
Her eyes are red-rimmed as she tells me all this, though she doesn’t cry and even if she did I wouldn’t know the reason—for my father’s approaching death, or for the freshened memories of what he’d done to her in his life.