Serenity House

by Christopher Hope

  The brochure for Serenity House, written in the early eighties, and never revised in the light of more sensitive recommendations by the District Health Authority, was direct and factual. ‘Serenity House. North London’s Premier Eventide Refuge offers complete care for long and short terms in respect of convalescence. Post-operative. Geriatric. Terminal. Holiday …’ Plain, perhaps, but free of ‘superfluous imbroglio,’ declared Cledwyn Fox in tones of some satisfaction, ‘and coming from a Welshman,’ he liked to add to prospective guests, ‘you can’t say fairer’. The small print, mind you, had to be watched pretty carefully. It laid down conditions for the governance of drink and tobacco and placed their dispensation firmly in the hands of the Director and staff. ‘Interest’, the brochure warned, ‘will be charged on late payment of board. Incontinence damage will be charged directly to the incontinent in question.’ Because this ran to replacing top quality carpet – Mr Fox always insisted on good carpet, ‘none of your bloody industrial weave around here,’ – it could be pricey. Then there was the ‘behaviour clause’ modelled, according to Mr Fox again, on ‘similar exclusion clauses found in public schools’; to wit, the right of the Head to boot out any trouble makers, but, naturally, excluding unconscious mental afflictions, whatever they were, or relatively harmless acts of insanity where the person in question really couldn’t help herself. ‘In the evening’ – Mr Fox usually spoke only about ‘the evening’ expecting one to fill in for oneself the obvious conclusion ‘of life’ – ‘in the evening,’ said Mr Fox, ‘acts of insanity are bound to occur, especially when dealing with dementia and’ – here his dark, lively little Welsh face took on a gnomic, almost a pixie-like expression – ‘even due perhaps to the inconsolable anguish of great age. Yes indeed!’

  Speaking these words as if delivering them at an eisteddfod, thus did Mr Fox indicate both his sympathy and his spirit of discipline. There had to be rules, hence the catch-all killer clause in the contract: ‘At all times the patient shall not cause a nuisance or annoyance to the staff of the nursing home or other patients therein.’ And finally, there was help with funeral planning. Serenity House had its own scheme to which guests might contribute or they could, if they wished, make use of the scheme run by Age Concern. ‘It is something that families in particular appreciate,’ Mr Fox explained to the relatives of incoming guests. ‘People are able to leave clear instructions as to what they want done. Not to put too fine a point on it, that way there is always the cash to cover the casket.’

  *

  Who was it who heard Max counting aloud that night, after Albert’s ferocious interrogation? It was Matron Two, moving slowly down the corridor, hearing something outside her range of nocturnal reference, a man counting slowly and firmly in a low voice: ‘… one hundred and eight, one hundred and nine … ’ interrupted now and then by what sounded like choking but turned out to be, she discovered as she listened carefully, not the sounds of asphyxiation – thank heaven! – but only dry, barking sobs.

  ‘Now then, Mr Montfalcon,’ said Matron Two, as she slipped into his room and sat down beside his bed, ‘it’s just a dream you’re having.’

  So silently she moved, did Matron Two, down the corridors, the crêpe soles of her brogues making no sound, the blue night-lights soft on the dark down of her upper lip, that some of the guests supposed that it was Matron Two whom Lady Divina meant when she kept announcing the closeness of the ‘Angel of Death’.

  ‘Numbers were never taken,’ Max murmured. ‘Never. So many who came into the place, simply left again without being noted.’

  ‘And where did they leave for, these visitors of yours?’

  ‘Not mine!’ Max raised himself in bed, turning on a bony elbow, sharp as a school compass. ‘I had nothing whatever to do with the missing numbers. This is hard to understand. I know that. People who weren’t there cannot understand. Ever.’

  ‘You’re dead right, Mr Montfalcon. That’s what I say about Rhodesia. Not all whites were monsters who ate little black babies. So don’t you fuss. You can tell me, if it makes you feel better – I’ll understand.’

  But Max had sunk back on his pillows and said nothing. Matron Two gave him two sleeping pills – her little ‘bombs’ – and a sip of water. A few minutes later he was snoring.

  Dear Mr Montfalcon. He was a nice man and not half so demented as he liked to pretend. Probably did it just to get that dreadful family off his back. She did not know who was worse. The obstreperous son-in-law with the round, pink face and the loud voice, or his stuck-up daughter with all the blonde hair, or that ghastly granddaughter who came at night sometimes, dressed up in her robes and painted eyes. Was she a witch, a druid, or the follower of one of those silly gurus who collected Rolls Royces and cheated on their taxes? Poor Mr Montfalcon. The visit from the son-in-law earlier that day had clearly upset him. They could hear the shouting from E-wing.

  Max Montfalcon was a fine, sensitive man. Matron Two thought him head and shoulders above most of the intake of 1990, though, as Mr Fox said, times were tight and beggars can’t be choosers and what the hell, so long as their cheques don’t bounce. But really! He didn’t have to nurse them, did he?

  All the elders in Serenity House were supposed to retain at least the vestiges of health and reason. Or they should be in geriatric wards somewhere else. Yet there were some who, when the doctors arrived on visits, quite visibly pulled themselves together, stood up straight and nodded, and tried not to dribble. Much as she admired Cledwyn Fox, he connived at the deception. Some guests in the House really weren’t up to it any longer. Some weren’t ‘there’ at all. And amongst some of the very frail and elderly, even when they were ‘there’, like old Maudie, or Beryl the Beard, she knew, somehow, that they wished they weren’t.

  And now a man with a loud voice and pink, shining face, hiding under the pseudonym of ‘son-in-law’, came into the House and terrorised one of the better guests. It really was too much. Matron Two did not like Members of Parliament. They were always so damned sure of themselves. Perhaps it came of always having to pretend they knew what they were talking about and having to say it in five minutes flat before the chap in the wig shut them up. Visits from MPs usually spelt trouble: just look what had happened when parties of British MPs began visiting Rhodesia – it had been the beginning of the end.

  It had to be said that Max Montfalcon was quite a fellow. ‘Uncontainable!’ Cledwyn Fox said proudly. ‘A free spirit’ – when he had turned up that afternoon on the arm of Sergeant Pearce, after going missing for a full five hours. Whether sitting in his electric wheelchair or moving in his extraordinarily slow but determined way down the corridor, or out of the front door, his height, his kind of tall, stiff stillness made him memorable. The dark blue barathea blazer with its single ivory button was thirty years old if it was a day, but style is style, even in a foreign kind of a way, even if it possessed the stylishness of crinolines and bustles and frockcoats, the sorts of things that hung in faded opulence, in pleats and ruffs and elaborate cross-stitches in museums and theatrical outfitters’ windows. Max often liked to wear a grey silk shirt washed so thin it seemed transparent, and he would knot a dark blood-red tie around the loose creased flesh of his thin neck, a great Windsor knot of tie that was slung like some woollen anchor beneath his bobbing Adam’s apple. Yes, Max Montfalcon was what Cledwyn Fox would once have called ‘a gentleman’, with his fine good grey hair carefully swept back over the ears, and his light blue eyes, even now with a tendency to water, still imposing and rather beautiful. His height and bearing, at eighty-one, made Max Montfalcon a handsome man, with his rather sad little habits – the elderly red tin of rolling tobacco in his inside pocket, shreds of the stuff lodging in the folds of his clothes and often in the folds of his facial skin, the distressing habit of walking with his heels flat, refusing to lace his shoes properly and turning left and right foot sideways as he shuffled along, walking on his feet but not in his shoes. How he kept them on was a mystery. Yet he never lost a shoe, did Max
Montfalcon, even when he went on one of his little ‘wanderings’ and had to be brought back from the park or the woods, or the heath where he’d been found like some stray dog or picked up like a lost ball.

  Once he was returned to Serenity House by Mrs Marcos, the Cypriot tailor, into whose shop he had strolled one afternoon and discussed, to her intense surprise, the vagaries of the English hyphen, while rolling a cigarette. He declared that, in the matter of the hyphen he, Max Montfalcon, preferred to follow the great Fowler and ‘wallow in uncertainty’. He said ‘vallow’ with a little sharp bark. It was one of those words he never ever pronounced correctly, just as he always insisted on tea and ‘bisquits’ and studied the television programmes in something only he called the ‘bulletim’, choosing to express the first syllable as if it rhymed with ‘dull’. Little Soti Marcos, just eighteen months and safe in her grandmother’s arms, looked into Max’s pale blue eyes, saw his upper dentures fix upon his lower lip as he proceeded to give velocity to his ‘vallow’, and howled her head off.

  What Max had actually gone on to say to little Soti, if anybody could remember it, if anybody could understand it, and of course he did not now remember it, was: ‘I hate the use of the hyphen in the term “German-born Jews”. As Fowler pointed out with a similar example of the cumbersome hyphen in the term – “South African-born Indians” – what we should simply say is “Jews born in Germany”.’

  Why should this example have sprung to mind? If asked at the time, he would not have been able to say. It really didn’t matter, certainly not as far as Mrs Marcos and her little granddaughter were concerned. On that afternoon, when the sight of Max’s strong yellow false teeth descending on his lower lip had made little Soti Marcos weep like the monsoon, Mrs Marcos had taken him back to Serenity House, wheeling him along like some elderly bicycle on very flat tyres.

  But most often it was Sergeant Pearce of the Highgate Police who led him home. The handsome village bobby who stood on the corner of Archway Road watching for the ‘amber gamblers’, the motorists who jumped the yellow on the Archway traffic lights.

  There were some ways in which Sergeant Pearce reminded Max of young von F. Something in the height, the blue eyes, the uniform? No, not the uniform. He supposed young von F had worn a uniform, but that would have been after he returned to Germany. Serve him bloody well right. At that time, anyone who returned to Germany ended up in a uniform. What could young von F expect? Seen from the side, Sergeant Pearce’s dark hair curled in his nape in much the way that Cynthia Pargeter had found irresistible! What on earth had happened to Cynthia? He’d not seen her since the day young von F (damned fool!) sailed for home.

  ‘Got someone here who I think belongs to you,’ Sergeant Pearce would say, on arriving at Serenity House, unfurling his dental flag – his slow crooked smile that had passing housewives blushing like schoolgirls – for the benefit of the goggling nurse. It was the opinion of everyone who knew him that Sergeant Pearce was far too good-looking to be a policeman. And indeed he wasn’t much of a cop. He never caught an amber gambler, or ticketed a car, but he nabbed Max Montfalcon on more than one of his little walks.

  Perhaps there was something about Max which positively invited arrest. Who would not have been struck by the slow rocking shuffle of the old man in his blazer and red tie and his ruined shoes, proceeding at an achingly slow pace down the uneven pavements of Highgate? Children clutched their mothers’ hands, wide-eyed at his agonised progress. Busloads of inquisitive Chinese negotiating the hilly heights, in search of the tomb of Karl Marx, stared at the immensely tall thin old man who teetered on the kerb and waved a fist whenever he caught sight of them. ‘Slitty-eyes, slitty-eyes!’ Max would yell, borrowing the insult from Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, one of his great heroes (after Earl Mountbatten – now there was an Englishman for you!). Or he would glare at the pale-faced and rather furtive Russians hiding out in their trade mission on the edge of Highgate West Hill, their closed, alien and somehow abstracted expressions reminding him of beings from a planet well beyond our solar system.

  They all saw the old man from time to time, buffeting the air like a bather entering a high, cold sea and making barely any progress. For he moved like a tightrope walker fighting a gale-force wind that hit him face on. It could take him five minutes to cross the road; the length of a single block took anything up to half an hour. Anyone watching him closely would have seen that although he always appeared to be moving, he often only went through the motions of walking, lifting his left leg and then seeming to forget the purpose of the movement, freezing it there while his hands, long white hands, with veins so thin yet clear they might have been drawn in blue ballpoint pen, described frantic little circles by his sides, cyclones of effort.

  ‘Do you have daughters?’ Max demanded of Sergeant Pearce.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Good. Don’t. Daughters are ingrates. Take your money – throw you to the wolves. I made a bargain with my daughter, Lizzie. And my granddaughter, Innocenta. She talked of “granny flats” and “free spirits”. But she’s young and believes in Buddha or Odin or someone. I am not a granny. My suite of rooms in my daughter’s house was not a “flat”. We had a bargain. My money in exchange for a safe haven. Hadn’t been there for two minutes and they shipped me off to the scrap heap.’

  ‘I think we’re getting nowhere fast, sir,’ Sergeant Pearce said, steering Max in a gentle circle to face the way he had been walking.

  ‘Story of my life. I wonder what you feel about the hyphen, Sergeant? If we follow Fowler, we can dispense with the hyphen altogether. Fowler illustrates this very clearly using the term “South African-born Indians”. Fowler suggests in its place that we use “Indians born in South Africa”.’

  ‘Really, sir?’

  ‘We transpose this. And instead of the ugly hyphenated German-born Jews, we get: “Jews born in Germany”. See what I mean?’

  ‘Yes, sir. No hyphens.’

  ‘No Jews either,’ said Max.

  ‘See what you mean,’ Sergeant Pearce nodded heavily as the justice of this observation was borne home to him, ‘when you put it like that.’

  ‘Like what?’ demanded the walking windmill at his side, as the policeman and his charge walked slowly home to Serenity House.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Max Strikes a Bargain

  One February morning in 1990 Max had noticed that his mansion in Hampstead Garden Suburb echoed more than usual. He had been humming snatches of an old song he couldn’t remember why he remembered: ‘That’s How We Live Everyday…’ sang Max in his rusty baritone. How very strange! Where had that come from? Was it perhaps something he had danced to years ago in dear old Harwich? Pale winter sunlight shone on the crystal candelabra in the big house, empty but for him and the gardener, Kevin, a pleasant youth burnt mud-brown and wearing a pony-tail.

  Two Portuguese maids, Elisabetta and Katerina, came every day and even if they cleaned the place twice, found there was never enough work to fill the time. So they’d polish the very tusks on the blue elephants painted on the cream tiles in the third bathroom and admire their reflections in the taps and talk of Lisbon. Max enjoyed talking to Kevin about the reckless ambitions of some politicians for European Monetary Union. ‘The snake lay down in the basket of currencies and brought forth the EMU. It’s a German racket!’ Kevin preferred to talk of flowers and frost, though he showed himself well aware of the issues Max raised. ‘You either go to the country with a referendum – Ask ’em: do you, or do you not, want to be hitched up to Madame Europe? Or what you’ve got is your elective dictatorship,’ said Kevin. And Max could only reply ‘Bravo! m’boy!’ and marvel that a gardener could see what Her Majesty’s Government and Opposition remained blind to.

  On the morning his house echoed more emptily than ever Max began to think of disposing of his assets. Max discovered that he had been, in his younger days, something called an ‘asset-stripper’. The thought began occurring to him: if asset-stripping takes its toll, per
haps asset-disposal puts some time back into the system? Maybe it was the moment to move.

  ‘Assets’, as the great Fowler truly observed, is ‘a false form’. Use of the word is merely a journalistic short-cut, and takes the place of other, longer, words reporters can’t remember or have forgotten how to spell: words like possession, advantage, resource. An asset is an asset is an asset. Always singular, never plural. He planned to cash in his ‘asset’ just as he had once abandoned teaching.

  Somewhere in the middle fifties, his wife, Angela, would look at him in those brief years they were together and see him as a very tall, temporary teacher of English, loathed by his colleagues in Occam College, a very minor public school not far from Oxford.

  ‘But I adhere to the King’s English,’ Max would protest to her, in their tiny bedroom in the small rented house across the road from the huge oval cricket field upon which the mist came down like some terribly patient, softly hostile, divine reproach. Elizabeth the baby moved in her mother’s arms and looked at Max with his own blue eyes.

  ‘I wouldn’t say “adhere”, darling.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Wallpaper adheres. Or believers adhere to a religion. But not you to the King’s English. It sounds—’

  ‘Funny?’

  ‘Well, odd.’

  In the single year they spent at Occam College Angela learnt how a man’s wife will take on his characteristics in the eyes of others. She heard herself described by the common-room wives as ‘the foreign woman’, and this despite her blonde hair and her light-green eyes and her very English air. She took on her colour by way of Max’s manner, bearing curiously formal, somehow always rather stilted. He could not for the life of him imagine why his fellow-teachers had regarded Angela as foreign. Born in Hove, educated in Cheltenham, the daughter of a prebendary dean and a mother who came from one of the oldest families in Brighton. Strange.