And When Did You Last See Your Father

by Blake Morrison

  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.

  Bolton Abbey

  THE THURSDAY OF Whit week, my parents’ afternoon off. On days like this, school holidays or bank holidays, we often drive up the Dales: drystone walls, no trees, and a wind whistling like winter in the telegraph wires. But today it’s sunny and we’ve stayed in the valley, and now we’re pulling into the car park, very crowded, at Bolton Abbey. A brown river churfles past the ruin. A line of stones picks its way across—silver buttons on a dead man’s chest. Trout leap out of their bull’s-eyes to snatch up flies. I ask if we can get out and play here, but my father says, ‘No, let’s find somewhere quieter,’ and off we go, past the Strid (just a step across the churning water, but if you slip you never come up again) and on towards Burnsall. My mother has gone shopping in Harrogate. Auntie Beaty is with us instead.

  She’s not my real Auntie, but my father calls her that because he says she is almost family. He met her three or four years ago, when she and her husband Sam became managers of the golf club. When my parents go to pubs, my sister and I have to stay in the car, with lemonade and crisps. But at the golf club we can wander off down the fairways looking for lost balls, or play in the yard at the back. I like the yard, the crates of empties stacked under the steamy kitchen window, the wasps you have to mind out for in the orangeades and Britvics. My parents stay a very long time inside, at the bar, where Auntie Beaty or Uncle Sam serves them. Once everyone was very merry and invited us in and we had shandy, and also onion and sugar sandwiches, which are much nicer than you think they’re going to be.

  When he has time for a round of golf as well as the bar, my father lets me caddy for him. I wheel his trolley over the frizzed grass, past larks’ nests, the ball like a tiny white ulcer in the mouth of a bunker or green. There is one hole, the sixth, where we always see a lapwing, also known as a peewit or plover says the Observer Book of Birds . It’s a lovely black and white colour, with a crest like one of Auntie Beaty’s black curls. When we trundle the clubs past, it flies up, making terrible cries, as if it had been hurt or had lost something, and then suddenly it crashes to the ground and rolls and flops about with a broken wing. My father says not to be fooled, that it’s perfectly healthy and knows what it’s doing, and all its playacting is for just one thing—to lead us away from the nest. Once it flew straight at Uncle Gordon’s head when he hit his second shot into the rough—he had got too close to the nest and it was desperate to scare him off.

  ‘Why do we spend so much time with Auntie Beaty?’ I asked once when we were driving back over the moors.

  ‘Because she’s a bit sad, and needs help,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For one thing, she and Uncle Sam can’t have children. And they also have money troubles.’

  ‘Do you give them money?’

  ‘I help with their accounts, so they’ll learn to understand money and look after it
themselves.’

  But they can’t have learnt to look after money yet, because he is still there most nights till very late, and today Auntie Beaty has come out driving with us, and is sitting in the front of the car holding Josephine while my sister Gill and I sit in the back. Josephine—Josie—is nearly two now, and noisy, and has red cheeks and curly black hair. I can remember the day she was born. My father took my sister and me along to the maternity hospital, Cawder Ghyll: we couldn’t go in, so he held us high at the window nearest Auntie Beaty’s bed on the ground floor, and we saw the cot with the black head in it. Josie had been a surprise, and my father said we didn’t have to feel sorry for Auntie Beaty and Uncle Sam any more: their troubles might not be over, but they had children now, which was a blessing. My mother wasn’t there that day, though Cawder Ghyll was the hospital she delivered babies at, and she had delivered Josie too.

  Auntie Beaty comes to our house a lot. Once I walked into the bathroom when she was feeding Josie: it felt funny, as if I shouldn’t be there, but she didn’t mind, and I saw her big white breast and the brown nipple when Josie took her mouth away. Another day she brought her Dad with her, Josie’s grandpa: he stood at the edge of the raised bottom lawn, where the aubrietia climbs up the wall on to the paved edgings, and suddenly he tipped backwards and fell on his back on the gravel three feet below. He lay there, flat and white and gasping like a fish, and Auntie Beaty screamed, but my father came running with his little bag and helped him up and said it was all right, he must have lost his balance, it wasn’t a heart attack. Auntie Beaty has been coming round even more since then. She is always laughing and my father is always laughing, though not my mother. Sometimes Auntie Beaty is kind, gives me crisps and sherbet fountains, hugs me till I taste the perfume on her neck and lets me test how springy her black curls are. But other times Gillian and I say we’re fed up playing with Josie, and my mother is sarcastic. Then my father gets cross and says we’re all family and helping Beaty, and where’s the harm?

  I’m getting bored now in the back of the car, even though the roof’s down, our hair in our faces. I’m in training for the Olympics, the hundred, the two hundred, the four hundred, the high jump, the long jump. At last year’s village fête in our paddock, I came next to last in the under-nines dash, but I know I can do better this year. It was a bad day for other reasons. My mother had her terrible migraine, and maybe that affected my performance. I think it was my worst day ever—worse than when she skidded on the cow-muck and crashed the car; worse than when she ran screaming up the stairs because the wardrobe had fallen on top of Gillian; worse than when I was made to stay in bed all day as a punishment for still at my age dirtying my pants. I came back to the house after the tug-of-war and heard a noise from upstairs. She was moaning and rolling about on the bed, holding the back of her hand to her forehead. ‘Get Daddy, quick,’ she said, and I fetched him from the raffle, fast. I waited downstairs, then another doctor from the hospital came, and they told me to go back to the fête. At least I beat Christine Rawlinson in the race, but I should have beaten Stephen Ormrod as well. When I got back Lennie, the maid, said ‘It’s all right, she’s at peace now,’ and I thought she must mean: Your mummy’s dead. She wasn’t, and has had only two migraines since, but I worry that she might roll and moan with another strong one. In the Bible, when David is a boy, before meeting Goliath, he plays his harp at the court and the King’s headaches disappear. I wish I could cure my mother’s migraines like that, but I can only play the piano, and Mrs Brown says I need more practice before I can take Grade One. I think curing migraines is probably a much higher grade, Nine or Ten at least.

  My father has turned off the lane on to a grass-seamed track between two gateposts. He parks the car, the handbrake clicking tight, the silence after the ignition key. We are at the top of a hill, above a rough meadow with thistles and buttercups and cow-parsley.

  ‘Why don’t you and Gill take Josephine down the hill,’ he says. ‘You’ll be all right—just hold her hand. We can watch you from here.’

  ‘Oh, Arthur, I’m not sure,’ says Auntie Beaty.

  ‘No, go on, they’ll be fine,’ he says. ‘Lovely day, no sheep or cows to worry them, wonderful spot for children. Blake will look after her: he’s nine now. Everything will be fine. Where’s the harm?’

  So we walk down the meadow, Josie’s small hand trustingly in mine, which makes me feel big and in charge. I want to turn round to make sure my father and Auntie Beaty are watching us, but I don’t. I’m not like Lot’s wife in the picture at Sunday school. I’ll show them I can be trusted.

  On the level ground at the bottom of the field, there’s nothing much to do, but I know we shouldn’t turn back straight away. Gill begins to pick buttercups. Josie sits down on her terry-and-plastic bottom. She’s too small to play games. I wish my father were here to sprint against. A lapwing wheels away from us, rising then plunging, and I think: ‘Enough of your tricks. I know your nest is near. I could smash every egg if I tried.’ I’ve learnt a lot about birds lately. We have a redstart’s nest in the wall below the billiard-room. There was a pied wagtail on the lawn this morning, headbobbing and lifting its skirt, putting food in the mouth of its chick, which was fluffy and even bigger than its mother and should be fending for itself by now. And that distant cry just now was a curlew’s, I think, getting faster and higher.

  I look up the field to where the car’s parked, but the windscreen is lit and flaring and I can’t see behind it. It’s as if all the power of the sun were in the glass containing Dad and Auntie Beaty, and no one else can look on it without being blinded. I put my hand—flat, as if saluting—over my eyes, and look again. I think I can see two heads there, close together, safe inside the blaze. I wait for the car doors to open, and I hear my father’s voice again: ‘Everything will be fine. Where’s the harm?’

  Foetal

  ON TUESDAY EVENING, three days after I’ve left him in Ward 19, my mother rings while he’s asleep to say that I’m not to know this, that I must feign amazement and let him be the one to tell me, but he’s home. I wait till ten for his call, but it doesn’t come, so in the end it’s me who rings and she who answers and he who picks up the extension by his bed. For years now, when you call one of my parents, you speak to both. In the early days, before extensions, he got himself an earpiece, so while my mother stood with the phone he’d be there listening alongside and shouting comments until in the end she gave up and changed places and he took over. Then came British Telecom, and a phone in every room, and dialogues for three voices.

  ‘You’re home, Dad.’

  ‘I thought that might surprise you.’

  ‘He wanted it to be a surprise.’

  ‘Well it is a surprise. How you feeling?’

  ‘A bit better now. Sharp pain under the scar, but you know that old theory—if a child has tummy pains, put a penny on its umbilicus and tie a bandage round.’

  ‘He says it’s working a treat.’

  ‘You have a penny on your umbilicus?’

  ‘Not a penny, a tight bandage. And I’ve slept fourteen hours today.’

  ‘He needs the rest.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I say, though it isn’t and he doesn’t, not on that scale. My father sleeping fourteen hours a day? The man who reckoned he needed only six hours and a couple of catnaps? Come on .

  ‘I’m glad to be back.’

  ‘He’s among his own things, that helps.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘But no one else knows I’m home yet and I’m not telling.’

  ‘He wants them to go on thinking he’s in hospital.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So they won’t visit me, that’s why.’

  I listen to his faded voice, and remember part of my conversation with Dr Taggart—‘Can he die at home?’ ‘I don’t see why not: your mother’s a doctor, and there’s nothing more we can do for him in hospital’—and wonder if this is where we’ve got already.

  ‘So you’re on the me
nd.’

  ‘Aye, home now, can’t be bad.’

  ‘And he’s got me to look after him.’

  ‘Can I can come up and see you?’

  ‘You’ve just gone back. You don’t want to bother.’

  ‘He’s still weak: he needs to take it easy.’

  ‘Soon, though.’

  ‘When I’m better.’

  ‘When he’s stronger.’

  ‘Too true.’

  Three days later, a red sun sinking over Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, I’m on the InterCity north again. The call had come this morning, while he was asleep: ‘Better make it this weekend,’ my mother says, ‘just in case: I don’t think it will be long.’ Not long; it is only ten days since the cancer was confirmed.

  Wynn, my brother-in-law, picks me up at Skipton station. ‘Bad do,’ he says. He hasn’t been allowed to see my father yet—not flesh and blood. I tell him he must come in the house with me, but when we get there it seems to be shut up, derelict or in mourning. Thick curtains are drawn in the downstairs bedroom, and two plywood boards have been stuck over the front door glass. ‘It’s always like that these days,’ says Wynn, ‘to stop people looking in.’ Never mind that the house stands in an acre of ground and is reached only by a long drive: there is still the postman, the milkman, the passing salesman. My father is taking no chances.

  He is sitting in one of a pair of green reclining chairs that he bought a quarter of a century ago, the venue of his catnaps. The chair has a lever at the side to tip yourself back and bring up the footrest. Now, though, he’s perched at the edge, leaning forward, head on his chest. He wears a pink shirt and green cardigan, nothing else. There is a white handkerchief bunched up between his thighs—his modesty rag, or figleaf. The bottom buttons of his shirt are undone, and his belly swells from it, a pregnant woman’s belly, even down to the brown bisecting line that runs from top to bottom through the navel. I look again and see this isn’t a line, but the zip of his scar (my three-year-old nephew is similarly deceived at first sight: ‘What’s that railway track on Grandpa’s tummy?’ he whispers). There is a little hernia bulge pushing through just above the navel, like some small object left beneath a carpet.