Pacemaker
A HOT AUGUST afternoon in my sister’s garden: quiche and sandwiches, lager and wine, the milling of the extended family in and out of the kitchen, the lounge, the playroom. We are here after the christening of my sister’s second child, Liam, now six months old. We are here, too, to celebrate the reprieved life of her first child, Louise, who about this time a year ago was lying unconscious on the side of the road in Spain—a car crash, the child thrown from her mother’s arms in the back seat, a piece of skull pressing against her brain which somebody had the nouse to break off: Louise survived, she came home, she is here. The sun lies in stripes on the deck-chairs. Two dogs chase each other up the garden path. My father, beaming, takes his shirt off, as he likes to at the least excuse, but which he’s not done lately in public. To me, who knows, there’s no mistaking the give-away box shape high up on his ribcage.
His heart had become erratic; he’d begun to lie awake at nights, hearing rapid blips like the ones you got in old phone boxes when your money was running out. Now he has the dual chamber machine to control it. Before the operation he wrote to me, enclosing a leaflet from the British Heart Foundation (‘physiological pacemakers require complex electronic circuitry and often need more than one electrode lead ’—his underlining) and one of his own diagrams. The diagram showed a yellow line going from the pacemaker box into both the upper and lower chambers of the heart. Red lines denoted the main arteries, and there was a pink vertical one to show the central nervous system, with Christmas-tree branchings off it marking the (in his case faulty) nerve fibre. It looked like one of his old drawings of car engines, the sort he’d sketch when trying to make me grasp how pistons and carburettors and spark-plugs worked. It was hard to believe it was a drawing of him.
‘It’s shaken him, you know,’ my mother says. ‘It’s hurt his pride—having to have an aid to get by.’ Only the immediate family knows about the pacemaker: it mustn’t get out that Arthur has a dicky heart, ‘not till I snuff it.’ But today he sits there chatting to neighbours and nieces, his chest bared in challenge. At a quiet moment he takes me to one side, jubilant: ‘Not a bugger’s twigged. Not a bugger’s said a word. Maybe I’m not so decrepit after all.’
Early evening we go to the Cross Keys. For years it’s been a sore point between us. He likes his seven o’clock pint, then back in time for dinner on the table at eight-thirty. I like a drink too, but why can’t he stay at home and have one? I have small children to put to bed; I have a wife who’d rather be drinking with us than left behind; I belong to a generation which finds something a bit suspicious or unhealthy in these men-onlys. ‘Home’s not the same as the pub,’ he says, putting his coat on, unwilling to break routine: ‘Are you coming?’ Sometimes I give in and join him, then spoil things for both of us with moroseness. But usually I resist and stay behind on principle, watching him go and feeling guilty—feeling envy, too, envy of his freedom from domesticity, his independence and separateness, which date back to the war. The tension in such little things! So much between us! But tonight’s a truce. Tonight we’re relaxed and benign. Tonight I sit with him over his bitter, boys together in the huge, carpeted, knock-through lounge.
‘Not like it used to be here,’ he says, ‘not like when Brian and Hilly had it.’ There’d been a wall, once, where we are sitting: the lounge bar for the bourgeois on one side, the taproom for the workers on the other. He usually opted for the latter, with its darts and benches and bare-board floor: ‘That’s where you find your decent, honest sort.’ The taproom brought out the populist in him, the sentimentalist, the inverted snob: he preferred the company of farm-hands, plumbers and mechanics to the solicitors and mill-owners out front. Or so he claimed: what he liked, I suspected, was everyone in their proper place, and him able to move back and forth as he pleased, man of the people, doctor of the public house. The new democratic knock-through ruined that. He lost his special status. The pub became a classless mélange.
‘No, not like it used to be,’ he says. This is the downside of being seventy-one. The upside is a fund of memories which, when he’s relaxed like this, he enjoys cracking open (a fund like the beer-stuck pillar of pennies that’s gathering on the bar waiting for a local celebrity to knock it over). Remember that time , he leads off: when we all went to the Lakes on holiday, and bought four yellow Lakeland windcheaters, a quartet of clones, kitted out like golden orioles, the swish family Morrison. Remember that time , I respond, taking up the pace: when he tried out his new camera, the one with the delayed shutter action, and posed us on a steep hillside so that—on the 3D-less prints—we looked like an acrobat troupe standing on each other’s heads. Remember that time : when we waved our Union Jacks at the Queen and her two children in Harrogate (older brother, younger sister, just like me and Gillian), or later, snooping near Balmoral, pursued the royal hunting jeep along a moorland track. Remember that time : when we opened the village youth-club in our converted barn and people crowded in from as far away as Colne and Nelson. Remember that time : getting up at dawn to water-ski on a millpond of a sea, Abersoch at its best, the hop-start on the shoreline, then the carve and swish of the single fin in the water, the photos of us afterwards attempting turns so sharp our ears seem to brush the water. Remember that time : the three-month trip across Canada and the States in 1973, those thousands of miles, the bear that sniffed our tent in Yosemite, the salmon we wood-smoked on Vancouver Island, the man in Taos giving directions to an eating house called (we thought) The Petrified Chicken, on and on, New York, New Mexico, Houston, Toronto, the Dormobile papered over with stickers …
But I remember other times, less easy to speak of, or the same times, differently textured. That trip across North America? I’d had my girlfriend with me, too, the five of us hemmed in together, and I endured not only three months’ tension and sexual frustration but a twenty-two-year-old’s shame that I’d not yet got away from my parents. The youth club? Pep pills began to circulate more freely than in my father’s surgery. And after nine, when the lights were dimmed for the disco, couples would snog in dark corners, and my father, the sex policeman, went round breaking them up. Abersoch? As well as water-skiing, there’d been the time, at seventeen, when I got drunk with two friends and, after the pub, carried home an armful of orange traffic-cones and red reflector plates. The police nabbed us at the camp-site, pushed us about, took our names and addresses. We thought we’d got off, but two months later the letter came: wilful damage, resisting arrest, larceny, appearance will be required in court in North Wales. It was the larceny that upset my father: ‘You’ll never get a decent job with that on your record.’ He made us write abject letters to the Chief Superintendent. And when that didn’t work, he got himself ‘the best solicitor in the Lleyn Peninsula.’ We drove down in the dead of winter, slate-grey rain, a courtroom with paraffin heaters. Our chief defence seemed to be the number of ‘O’ levels we had between us. The solicitor played the class card: ‘These young men before you … grammar school boys on the brink of important careers … one moment of summer madness …’ We got fined a tenner each for the damage (my father paid), and were let off the rest. I ran across one of the policemen in the gents, who said, shamefaced, ‘If we’d known what kind of lads you were …’ But it was me who felt shamefaced. Part of me hadn’t wanted to be got off, had wanted us to be put in prison for a very long time.
I can’t tell him this now. I can’t tell him about the girls we met that same summer and how I so fell in love with mine that I said to my friend: ‘If there’d been a firing squad last night, one life to be taken, hers or my father’s, I’d have chosen his.’ Remember that time : what, when I was callow, callous, ungrateful, disloyal, parricidal?
I walk over to the bar and buy us another drink and let his reminiscences wash over me. He’s reached the near-present now, Louise’s accident, the two-inch square of bone missing from her forehead, the skull cap she had to wear, the latest tests showing that the tissue behind the hole has begun to harden—when
the light catches her brow, you can still see it throbbing. ‘You never know,’ he says, the roll and pulse of fruit machines behind him. ‘One sharp instrument, even a stick, could still do it. Same with me: even with the pacemaker I could have a coronary. Your grandfather died at sixty-eight. I’m seventy-two next month, I feel I could go on till I’m ninety, but you just don’t know.’
Not knowing, afraid that time is running out, I try to steer him on to Auntie Beaty. For years I’d wanted to arraign him, stand him, handcuffed, in front of me till his secret crimes had been exposed. I’d shout the charges so that all the court could hear them—lies, infidelity, cruelty to my mother—and ask him: How do you plead? Now it’s different. Now I’m an adult. Now I don’t pretend to judge. Now I see him in the mirror when I dress, feel myself becoming him, fear that I’m inheriting all the faults he would have wanted to save me from. I don’t want to accuse, only get him to come clean with me. And then there’ll be nothing between us. Then I will tell him I understand.
He comes back from the bar—a last bitter for him, Guinness for me.
‘Remember the time we used to spend at the golf club?’ I say.
‘Great days, great days. I had a handicap of twelve then.’
‘And the bar afterwards, with Auntie Beaty.’
‘The nineteenth hole, and those onion and sugar sandwiches. Great times.’
‘She meant a lot to you, Beaty, didn’t she?’
‘Great girl, great girl. Every weekend, Sam and little Josephine, too. I helped design their bar extension.’
‘I know that, Dad, but you were crazy about Beaty, weren’t you—in love with her, I mean.’
‘Obsessed, maybe.’
‘You used that word once before.’
‘Did I?’
‘At Abersoch, years ago—don’t you remember? You were on at me about morals. I accused you of hypocrisy. I was way over the top, and brought Beaty up, and tried to get you to talk.’
‘Maybe it’s you who’s obsessed.’
‘Maybe. But come on. It was more than obsession with you.’
‘More? I don’t know. Don’t see Beaty and Sam now. Moved away down south. Time we made a move ourselves, isn’t it?’
Outside swallows are skimming the canal. The sun is sinking, and the moon is a pale thin wafer opposite, the ghost of its dead mother. He hands me the keys to his new Ford: ‘The big thing is the power steering—see if you like how she handles.’
I head off up the A59, past the rectory where Canon Mackay used to live, the other rectory in the parish, the one the Church of England chose to keep, letting the one in Thornton go to us. ‘What do you think?’ my father asks. ‘Picks up nicely, doesn’t she.’ At West Marton I turn left by the village shop, boarded up now: ‘Nice, easy turning action, eh?’ Two miles from home there’s a little humpback bridge over the canal: when you take it fast, as my father used to, the heart lifts and empties as the wheels leave the ground. I try again. It feels like my last chance.
‘You can tell me about Beaty, you know. I’m grown-up now. There needn’t be any secrets.’
‘Yes,’ he says. Then after a pause, ‘Great thing, power steering: never miss it till you’ve had it, but once you have you’ll never go back to ordinary.’
Sandra
THE DAY BEFORE the cremation I drive my mother down to Earby, to see a man about funeral baked meats, and then on to the hairdresser. ‘I’ll be done in about an hour,’ she says, and I push on towards Kelbrook, parking by a row of terraces. It was cobbled here once; the houses have bathrooms now, and satellite dishes, and pebble-dash. Sandra’s is the last door on the right, navy blue. She appears in an apron, and with a duster in her hand. ‘I thought you might come,’ she says. ‘I’m dusting.’
Sandra was Pat’s predecessor, the maid before. She’d come from a broken home in Scotland in 1963. I was thirteen. She was nineteen. My sister had just gone away to boarding-school. We were alone a lot, sharing the same teenage stuff—Titbits, Top of the Pops . She was young for her age after the traumas back home, and my father had felt protective, treated her as a daughter as much as an employee, and was upset when she left. But she had a boyfriend by then, and found a cheap flat to rent, and had got a better-paid job on the till at a petrol station in Barnoldswick. She’d married the boyfriend but the marriage hadn’t lasted—only the son had, grown up now. Sandra stayed close to my parents, always remembered birthdays and often called in. She felt grateful to them, for one thing: my father had lent her money to buy her house—this house where she’s now pouring the tea out, and asking me how it was at the end, and saying: ‘You won’t mind if I dust round you, will you? My mam’s coming down for Christmas, and if I don’t do it now I never will.’
From a wooden stool she shakes a feather duster at the pot rail, the sideboard, the glass display case with her collection of thimbles and miniature dolls. She’s wearing blue jeans and a red sweatshirt which rides up from the waist as she stretches—she’s not lost her slimness, and her face is still attractive under the reddish hair, permed and frizzy now, not Twiggy-straight. My father’s death, the flood of grief and nostalgia, my acute physical awareness of her have removed any barriers. Without meaning to, I’ve slipped into the old flirtatious banter we used when we were teenagers:
‘Funny us being alone in a house again.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what it used to mean.’
‘Oh, I’ve given all that up: life seems less complicated without.’
‘Don’t you get lonely?’
‘Not really.’
‘But it’s such a waste. How old are you now?’
‘Forty-eight next month.’
‘A terrible waste.’
‘Nah.’
My parents had always had maids. Rosa, who was Austrian, had come in 1946 and stayed until 1958, when we moved the mile from Earby to Thornton: I could remember only a sweet-natured, hard-to-hear-properly granny figure who’d be ironing or making cakes while I lay with the labradors under the kitchen table, and who one day rushed in flour-faced from the garden with a swarm of bees in her white hair. Then came Lennie, in her late twenties, a beanpole with a long runny nose, prone to moods and silences. She must have seen me through from childhood to puberty—I can remember walking into her bedroom in my underpants, a twelve-year-old swooning in self-regard at an erection (she saw me off by not noticing). When she married a carpenter called Jeff, and they emigrated to Australia, there followed a dismal brief succession of housekeepers: the one who cooked us mixed grills, spent all evening crying in her room and left after three weeks; another who left after twenty-four hours; a third who might have lasted longer but who walked into the bathroom one morning when my father was (his phrase) ‘on the throne’ and blithely continued cleaning around him—even he found that a bit too informal. Sandra was a desperate last shot, immature but sweet-natured. She had stayed two years; and even when she’d left, and Pat had taken over, she’d never really gone away.
A pretty nineteen-year-old in a big house in a strange place far from home might have felt bored and unattended, especially since the job was so undemanding: I was at school all day, my sister at home only in the holidays, my parents unfussy about cleaning but needing someone to cook occasionally and answer the phone while they were out on their visits. But if Sandra was lonely she never showed it. Soon tradesmen and farm-hands and older schoolfriends of mine and any male with the remotest excuse to call were paying court, and she happily flirting back. The kitchen with its Aga was the centre for this and most other activities in our house. I’d perch there on my stool under the window, pretending to do homework in thrilling proximity to the world of would-be adult sex, when only a year before, at twelve, the mechanics of intercourse (as relayed to me by a friend at grammar school) had seemed so incredible and disgusting that I’d refused to believe them. My parents, being doctors, might have been expected to fill me in about sex, but by the time my father finally broached the facts of life
with me as I lay in bed one morning, both of us deeply embarrassed, I had already lost my virginity.
It was a boyfriend of Sandra’s called Steve who brought the world of sex even closer. Steve was in his last year at grammar school and so a year younger than her. But he was swanky and handsome and tough—once, at the local swimming-pool, I suspect egged on by me, he had started trying to beat up two ‘posh little boarding-school cunts’ and got us ejected and banned. Sandra, impressed, lighted on him among her other suitors, and they began going out together, though going out seemed to mean staying in and drinking coffee by the Aga. His banter grew in confidence until it reached a sort of Mellors-like bluntness (I was just discovering Mellors, too: my mother must have bought her copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover shortly after the trial: she kept it in her bedside cupboard, and I furtively took it off to bed whenever she was out). I wondered whether much of Steve’s banter wasn’t for my sake—a piece of machismo more to impress the jealous schoolboy with his homework than to seduce the maiden.
‘Tha’s got a nice pair.’
‘Shut up’ (flicking a duster at him).
‘Gi’ us a feel.’ He’d lunge, she’d push him off. ‘Go on, Blake wants one too, dunt tha?’
I did, and—emboldened by Steve’s bluntness—in his absence sometimes tried for one, my mother once walking in on us as we wrestled near the dining-room cupboard and disguised our sexual tussle as a fight to get out the carving knife for supper. Then, one night when my parents were out and Steve not there either, after a long session of innuendo, Sandra emerged from her room wearing a new bikini: ‘How do I look?’ I’m not sure what she expected, but for me, seeing her vulnerable but also pleased with herself, this was the chance at last to touch her breasts. I came at her. She fought me off. We fell to the floor. I tried to undo the bikini top, failed, got my hand inside it, slid on, down towards the elastic of her bikini pants. She fought harder now, squirming and panicking—it had got out of hand, wasn’t supposed to go this far, but now I felt the brush of pubic hair and suddenly, cornily, miraculously, like some bad old film cliché, we stopped fighting and began kissing. On the bed, she told me to be careful . There was no need. In a few seconds, the moment she touched me, I came.
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 16