Serenity House

by Christopher Hope

  Praise for Serenity House

  ‘In this blood-freezing novel, a Florida theme-park is mistaken for a concentration camp by an ageing German who has known the real thing… If you agree with Adorno that, after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric, you might find the idea of a novel like Serenity House shudderingly lacking in taste. And you would be wrong. Hope has set out guidelines for our consciences to follow, reminded us with black humour of the horror and the pity that must never be allowed to fade’

  SUNDAY TIMES

  ‘Reality and fantasy blur in a welter of nightmarish black comedy … Hope’s observations of greed, duplicity and the uneasy status of both alien and geriatric are merciless’

  DAILY TELEGRAPH

  ‘A clever, black moral farce … This fine novel would have failed if it did not leave you feeling distinctly uncomfortable’

  INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

  ‘Hope has a precious gift for perceiving and exposing in so-called normality a crazily patterned patchwork of violent obsession and zany ritual … Serenity House is a surreal farce, rigorously logical according to its own terms of reference, scabrously enjoyable, and motivated by a sense of the “real world” that is always profoundly and exhilaratingly sane’

  FINANCIAL TIMES

  IN MEMORY OF ‘MAX’ KLEIN

  fascist pl.-s, -ism: whether full anglicization of the words is worth while cannot he decided till we know whether the things are to be temporary or permanent in England.

  A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,

  H.W. Fowler Oxford 1937 (with corrections)

  ‘Our rooms are ready, the register signed,

  There is time to take a turn before dark.’

  The Exiles,

  W. H. Auden

  CONTENTS

  1. Think of a Number

  2. Max Strikes a Bargain

  3. A Spider in the Bath

  4. The New Boy

  5. An Inspector Calls

  6. From Tranquillity to Serenity

  7. Tales his Mother Told Him

  8. Jack Goes to Market

  9. Jack Goes to London

  10. How Albert Got the News

  11. Jack Gets a Job

  12. Max and The Broad Pelvis

  13. Innocenta to the Rescue

  14. Albert Puts his Foot in It

  15. Fee fi foh fum …

  16. Problems

  17. The Joy of Passing

  18. The Great Escape

  19. Pat Dog Day

  20. Kingdom Come

  CHAPTER ONE

  Think of a Number

  Max Montfalcon lay in bed and tried to remember how many people he had killed. If one understood the question correctly, it seemed very much a question of number.

  Beside him, exuding heat and steam, a moistness almost palpable, a damp gust from some peculiar English tropic, he could feel the perspiring presence of Albert, his interrogator. That long ago a fat young man should have stolen one’s daughter and become one’s son-in-law was bad enough. It was pretty bloody rum when one’s son-in-law turned interrogator. Max’s eyes were closed and he liked them that way. He heard the distant church clock strike seven, the chimes carrying a mile or more in the evening air. By such sonic rituals Max had marked out his days and nights at Serenity House since that day in early November 1990, when he had gone ‘inside’. The church clock clear at seven of an evening. The call for ‘lights out’ at nine. The electric milk van at dawn. In summer the boys at the prep school across the road were in the cricket nets. In winter their voices grew shriller. Leaping and darting like midges they batted the hard ball back and forth across the fives courts. Roofless concrete sheds lit by fierce electric lamps. Leather glove meaty as it struck the ball; the scramble for the pepper. Eton Fives on a winter evening. Thank God for England!

  One had been exposed to bores before. But Albert took the giddy biscuit.

  Even the paucity of possessions in Max’s room irritated Albert. One blue chair and a table in similar hue, almost sky blue. French blue. Continental. Serenity House seemed to have been furnished from second-hand shops and bankrupt hotels. This was Cledwyn Fox’s doing, Albert decided, Welsh tat and French look-alikes, so dismayingly foreign. A broad-shouldered cupboard, oak, five foot tall, bronze facings and a silver lock. Fitted by the locksmith in Highgate Village, Max told him proudly, and ‘guaranteed against all but the most professional burglar’. Where Max kept his bits and pieces. ‘A few mementoes. Pre-war,’ Max had said. ‘My treasures.’

  Until recently Albert had taken no notice. Now, he was not sure he wanted to know what Max locked in his cupboard. Upon the bed a cover decorated with a map of Corsica embroidered in gold. Why Corsica, for Christ’s sake? Well, simply because that was the only map available in old Maudie Geratie’s embroidery kit, supplied by her art therapist, a pale girl named Jaci who had been ‘carried away by the Campari’ old Maudie told all and sundry, as if some evil foreign wind, like the föhn or the mistral, or some modest but fatal European malady, had robbed her of her art therapist. Before Jaci had been carried away she had also taught Maudie French-knitting and the red woollen pixie cap hanging behind Max’s bedroom door was another gift. Mixed, mismatched entangled shoes, and shabby slippers, badly bruised, heels trodden flat, lay beside the bed. Sometimes Max would look at the shoes and weep. Not because he had ruined them, walked them into the ground, but because, he told Albert and Lizzie, ‘shoes are hell to get rid of! Always two of them to one of you.’ Upon the bedside table towered Max’s beloved magazines: Monarchy, Majesty, Blue Blood, Homage and, of course, on top of the pile, Max’s favourite, Fealty.

  In a reedy, rusty voice, without opening his eyes, Max murmured: ‘Think of a number, any number …’

  Whereupon Albert had heaved himself to his feet. ‘I’m not interested in playing silly games with you, Max. You don’t want to talk to me? Fine! Suit yourself. But I’d have thought your family deserves a bit better. Lizzie loves you. And she’s beside herself. She sits around waiting for the heavens to fall. And then there’s Innocenta.’

  Albert’s voice was tight. But something else too? – got it – terrified!

  Lizzie loved him? Well, perhaps, once. But that was before they made their bargain and Lizzie broke it. The midnight knock on the door. The iron gates closing behind him. Time to pack a single suitcase.

  And Innocenta? His darling granddaughter. Yes, she was going to help him. He had an idea that Innocenta was going to help him catch a mouse.

  Albert was crashing around the room, preparing to walk out. But Max preferred to listen to young Dr Tonks, the visiting geriatrician, talking to Night Matron down the corridor about a recent leaver.

  ‘Before we got a rhythm going, she suffered badly, dear old Elsie. I had to time my shots to catch the pain at onset. Mostly I think I got there before it took a real hold. When did you say she left?’

  ‘Night before last, Dr Tonks. Around three in the morning.’

  ‘Anyone see her off?’

  ‘I’d looked in a little earlier. With Imelda. We like to look in if we know guests are leaving. First to know she’d gone was Jack. He’s so quick is young Jack. I have no fears for the small-hour leavers.’

  ‘Admirable. Last-minute problems?’

  ‘She was as good as gold.’

  ‘It gives one hope, Matron. Pain control. From onset. Then swift peaceful departure. That’s my prayer. And lots of good soldiers like Elsie Gooche, with the good sense not to hang about.’

  That’s when Albert had walked out of Max’s room. He had walked out the way people walked out of the United Nations. And meetings about Northern Ireland. Got to his feet and stomped out, muttering, ‘I don’t give a bugger. Suit yourself, you stupid old bastard. If you think th
is is bad, wait till the real questions start!’ And then bang, bang, bang, slam. That was Albert walking out like Arabs and Israelis walked out of peace conferences.

  Max had discussed Arab-Israeli walk-outs with Major Bobbno, who said: ‘Didn’t expect you to like Israelis somehow, Monty.’ Major Bobbno would call him Monty. Or sometimes Brigadier. ‘The Israelis know that you get nowhere being nice. Peace talks are about power. Look at Versailles.’

  ‘Look at Munich.’

  ‘I do. Munich. I say. Precisely! Nineteen thirty-three. So don’t be weak – nail the bastards’ balls to the wall. Then talk. That’s what the Israelis do. D’you admire the Israelis, Monty?’

  ‘I admire the Israelis, Major.’

  ‘Same here.’ Major Bobbno lifted iron-grey eyebrows, two hairy mudguards over rubbery eyes. ‘Between you, me and the gatepost, Monty, it’s Jews who get on my wick.’

  ‘We might have done better to nail their balls to the wall.’

  ‘Whose balls? The Jews’?’

  ‘The Israelis’.’

  ‘Pardon my ignorance, Monty – but why should we want to nail the Israelis’ balls to the wall?’

  ‘Not now. In forty-seven,’ said Max. ‘When we had the mandate in Palestine and the Stern Gang bombed our hotels and killed our chaps. That way maybe we would have stopped the long decline. We ran out on the Middle East, Major. After Palestine, came Aden … ’

  ‘And India. Don’t forget India, Monty. Then Rhodesia.’

  Both men suddenly stopped talking as Jack came by. Jack the American helper. The boy with the thick blond hair and the large smile. ‘What you guys saying then? Anybody join?’

  ‘We’re discussing the usefulness of nailing balls to the wall,’ said Major Bobbno. He waved his plastic hand-reacher at Jack. ‘Now clear off, before I have you shot!’

  ‘Eigh! But I love you guys!’ said the boy Jack and waltzed off down the corridor shaking his head and muttering delightedly, ‘What are you talking about? Whose balls you’re going to nail to the wall!’

  He went on his way, stopping every so often to wave his hands in some kind of American dance, and shake his hips to some internal music and pray out loud in his savage, incomprehensible way, groans and whistles, to whatever American gods he worshipped. A prayer of thanks for bringing him, a poor boy from a trailer home in Florida, to the great good place of Serenity House.

  ‘Are you sure he grew up in a caravan?’ Major Bobbno asked Max as they watched him go. ‘Mr Fox swears he comes from a decent home. University lad.’

  ‘How many times has Mr Fox been to America?’ Max demanded.

  ‘Once a year. To New York.’

  ‘And you know why?’

  ‘He takes friend Bruce to that nancy parade. Chaps in frocks.’

  ‘Exactly. So what does he know about Jack? One day I’ll tell you Jack’s story. You’d be amazed … ’

  ‘He told you his story, the boy Jack?’ asked the Major.

  Max grinned. Shapely yellow teeth above a full lip. ‘The boy’s an illiterate. He couldn’t tell me if he tried. I wouldn’t listen if he did. But I know Jack’s story better than he ever will.’

  Time passed. Max’s room was dark. Behind his closed eyelids it was darker still. The signal for lights out sang in Serenity House. A plangent electronic bleeper, not too harsh, no, programmed to mimic the call of the turtle-dove. When Cledwyn Fox, director and sole proprietor of Serenity House, first fitted the device its call was that of a distant ambulance. In the early days of its installation, before Mr Fox muted it, its urgent summons had carried off two occupants of Serenity House. The elderly are susceptible to such alarms and have learnt never to ask for whom the ambulance calls for they know it calls for them.

  Though lights out rang at nine, guests were free to choose their own bedtimes. ‘Remember this isn’t my home, it’s yours,’ Cledwyn Fox told each new arrival. But most of the elders heard and obeyed the command. Most of the bedrooms were dark soon after nine o’clock. But not silent. Cries and monologues. Abrupt, tearing coughing attacks – so alarming to those who heard them for the first time, but to the veteran strangely reassuring in their recognisable timbre and regularity, rather like the familiar striking of great, chesty clocks – spilled from the darkened bedrooms. The night staff, the ever-alert carers, would pause on their rounds, and identify the calls, just as hunters in the African dark learn to know the cries of animals that hunt and die by night. Bedtime by consensus, a sense of an ending, said Cledwyn Fox. His dove-grey brochure spoke plainly of its merits: ‘North London’s Premier Eventide Refuge. Four hundred and thirty pounds a week, plus VAT. Trained and kindly staff. Colour televisions in certain rooms.’ A congenial regime.

  Regime was a lovely word. Max rolled it around his tongue. In the warm darkness of his room, it tasted of salad oil and iron; assertive yet not unpleasant. Serenity House offered all that might be asked: private medical treatment and physiotherapy. Little Lois Chadwick with the limp dropped in once a week for hairdressing with her portable driers and her little box of ‘curlers and crimpers’. And the chiropodist, Edgar, wearing the tiniest gold ring through his left nostril, with his inflammatory views on the future of Europe. He dropped in on Tuesday with his little box of ‘clicks and sticks’. ‘Eurobugger – and Proud of it!’ said his pink lapel badge.

  ‘When we go into a united Europe envisaged by the Brussels bureaucrats, we will be taking a fast train straight into the buffers,’ Edgar intoned, stripping the wrapping from a corn plaster and examining the yellow, flaking soles of old Maudie Geratie who suffered terribly with her feet. On Maudie’s bedside table stood a photograph of a lovely girl in a large ivory frame. This, Edgar knew, had been old Maudie, once – old Maudie young. A coquette, a lissome, large-eyed, flighty dancer whose lovers had gasped, strained, and even died for her. Chiefly, a Brazilian baritone named Arnaldo, famed for his interpretation of Mozart, who had perished in the war. Which war? Edgar could not say – probably the Great War for old Maudie was well into her nineties – but after a certain age which war it had been really didn’t matter.

  It was one of the few boons of old age – you forgot about your wars. And your dead friends and lovers who seemed so dead then, were now alive and kicking all around you, while the living seemed ghosts from another world.

  Edgar sighed as he centred the corn plaster. Old Maudie giggled and glanced around her room. ‘This is a lovely apartment. You don’t often get them this size, in Paris.’

  Paris! It gave Edgar a sharp pain. Only Brussels caused him more pain. Bunions, whitlows, in-grown toe-nails, warts, corns – excrescences upon the fair face of humanity – these were the secret names Edgar gave to France, Germany, Italy, Holland. Only Mr Montfalcon understood and sympathised with Edgar’s fierce sense of Englishness. Only Mr Montfalcon deplored the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘Germans, all over again,’ he said, as Edgar treated him for a particularly painful infected toe-nail. ‘Overbearing. Over the top. Only a matter of time and they’ll be over here.’

  ‘The Channel Tunnel’, said Edgar, manipulating a disinfectant swab with gentle concern, ‘will be a death trap.’

  ‘Fire?’

  ‘Rabies! Mark my words. The first rabid dog or cat or bat to make the crossing will have “Made in Germany” stamped on its tongue.’

  And Edgar’s left nostril twitched and the little gold ring caught the light like a star. When this happened old Maudie would smile brilliantly, for her eyesight was still amazingly keen although her other functions had failed one by one. ‘Look! The evening star!’ old Maudie chirruped when Edgar’s nose ring flashed light, and she clapped her hands and would have gone on clapping them until the palms were raw had not Matron One arrived to calm her. Matron One, Mrs Trump, also known as Day Matron, was a kindly lady.

  Night Matron, an ex-Rhodesian nurse, Mrs S, known to the Manchester Twins as Rudolpha Hess, but to everyone else simply as Matron Two, regulated the evening and nighttime hours – ‘or at least as many hours as are left t
o us, one and all, for we know not the day nor the hour,’ Matron Two liked to say being religious, and so saying sometimes made Agnes cry copiously. Poor young Agnes (‘I’m just the right side of sixty-seven’), one of those belonging to a group known, not unkindly, with that soft, understanding smile, which is often the only compliment the young and healthy pay the elderly, as the Five Incontinents, leaking as she sometimes did from both ends.

  Max thanked his lucky stars that, with rare exceptions, he leaked from one end only. In bed now, he pressed his thighs together, strengthening the pelvic muscles, feeling his incontinence pad fitted snugly into his underpants. It took you back, to things done as a boy, as a baby and surely best forgotten. To have your own body wake you with its liquid, to have the old man that you knew you were not, go and leave his little wet calling card on you, that was awful. Better the pad, even though it was sometimes uncomfortable to sleep on and, if it ever got any worse, then it would have to be the catheter. Yes, he would have the catheter. What did the Arabs say? Bukra il mish, mish: ‘Tomorrow the apricots!’ No apricots for Max Montfalcon – but tomorrow, perhaps, the catheter.

  Toileting was one of the major achievements of Serenity House. Guests were toileted regularly. Pads and catheters and commodes on request in the bedrooms and strengthening exercises and attention to diet. As indeed there had to be. For if Agnes leaked from two ends, there were guests who leaked from three. Couldn’t keep a thing down, nor in, nor up. On a bad day the Five Incontinents could ruin an entire carpet. Cledwyn Fox would have carpet on the floor. And Serenity House would do its best to cope.

  ‘… Drycleaning, personal telephone in some bedrooms – not all rooms. Not bloody likely’ – since, as Mr Fox explained, the apparently pacific Lady Divina had proved herself to have immensely strong wrists and homicidal ambitions for she had one day tried to strangle Edgar the chiropodist as he knelt to deal with a particularly nasty bunion and it had required the combined efforts of both Matron One, Dr Tonks, Mr Fox and the little Filipino nurse-aide, Imelda, to rescue the dainty Euro-hater from Lady Divina’s telephonic garrotte. Afterwards Mr Fox had said: ‘From now on, she uses the pay phone.’ And who could blame him? Edgar wore the welts of his near strangulation clearly visible on his neck for some weeks afterwards as he arrived at Serenity House in his little van with the sticker in the back window which read angrily ‘Fl-EEC-ed!’