Back in London, the therapist asks: ‘How long did you say it had been now?’
‘How long has what been?’
‘Since the death. When did you last see your father?’
I remember the answer then. I tell her.
He isn’t drinking, isn’t eating. He wears his trousers open at the waist, held up not by a belt but by pain and swelling. He looks like death, but he is not dead, and won’t be for another four weeks. He has driven down from Yorkshire to London. He has made it against the odds. He is still my father. He is still here.
‘I’ve brought some plants for you.’
‘Come and sit down first, Dad, you’ve been driving for hours.’
‘No, best get them unloaded.’
It’s like Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, black plastic bags and wooden boxes blooming in the back seat, the rear window, the boot: herbs, hypericum, escallonia, cotoneaster, ivies, potentillas. He directs me where to leave the different plants—which will need shade, which sun, which shelter. Like all my father’s presents, they come with a pay-off—he will not leave until he has seen every one of them planted: ‘I know you. And I don’t want them drying up.’
We walk round the house, the expanse of rooms, so different from the old flat. ‘It’s wonderful to see you settled at last,’ he says, and I resist telling him that I’m not settled, have never felt less settled in my life. I see his eyes taking in the little things to be done, the leaky taps, the cracked paint, the rotting window-frames.
‘You’ll need a new switch unit for the mirror light—the contact has gone, see.’
‘Yes.’
‘And a couple of two-inch Phillips screws will solve this.’
‘I’ve got some. Let’s have a drink now, eh.’
‘What’s the schedule for tomorrow?’ he asks, as always, and I’m irritated, as always, at his need to parcel out the weekend into a series of tasks, as if without a plan of action it wouldn’t be worth his coming, not even to see his son or grandchildren. ‘I don’t think I’ll be much help to you,’ he says, ‘but I’ll try.’ By nine-thirty he is in bed and asleep.
I wake him next day at nine, unthinkably late, with a pintmug of tea, unthinkably refused. After his breakfast of strawberry Complan he comes round the house with me, stooped and crouching over his swollen stomach. For once it’s me who is going to have to do the hammering and screwing. We go down to the hardware shop in Greenwich, where he charms the socks off the black assistant, who gives me a shrug and pat at the end, as if to say, ‘Where d’you get a Dad like this from?’ Back home again, he decides that the job for him is to get the curtains moving freely on their rails. ‘You know the best thing for it?’ he says. ‘Furniture polish. Get me a can of it and I’ll sort it for you.’ He teeters on a wooden kitchen stool at each of the windows in the house, his trousers gaping open, and sprays polish on the rail, and wipes it over with a dirty rag. His balance looks precarious. I try to talk him down, but he is stubborn.
‘No, it needs doing. And every time you pull the curtains from now on, you can think of me.’
I ask him about the operation: is he apprehensive?
‘No point in being. They have to have a look. I expect it’s an infarct, and they’ll be able to cure that, but if not … well, I’ve had a good life and I’ve left everything in order for you.’
‘I’d rather you than order.’
‘Too true.’
I make sure there are only two light but time-consuming jobs for us. The first is to fix a curtain pole across the garden end of the kitchen, over the glazed door, and we spend the best part of two hours bickering about the best way to do this: there’s a problem on the left-hand side because the kitchen cupboards finish close to the end wall, six inches or so, and you can’t get an electric drill in easily to make the holes for the fixing bracket. The drill keeps sheering off, partly because I’m unnerved by him below, drawing something on the back of an envelope. I get down and he shows me his plan: a specially mounted shelf in the side wall to support the pole rather than a fixing bracket for it on the end. Sighing and cursing, I climb back up and follow his instructions in every detail—not just the size of screws and Rawlplugs needed, but how to clasp the hammer:
‘Hold it at the end, you daft sod, not up near the top.’
‘Christ, Dad, I’m forty-one years old.’
‘And you still don’t know how to hold a hammer properly—or a screwdriver.’
Infuriatingly, his plan works—the shelf mounting, the pole, the curtain, all fine. I try not to give him the satisfaction of admitting it.
We bicker our way into the next room and the other job: to hang the chandelier inherited from Uncle Bert. At some point in the move, many of the glass pieces have become separated, and now, in the dim November light behind the tall sash-window, we spend the afternoon working out where they belong, reattaching them to the wire that joins them, and then strengthening the candelabra from which they dangle. ‘This really needs soldering,’ he says, meaning that he will find an alternative to soldering them, since to solder would mean going out and spending money on a soldering iron when he has a perfectly good one at home. I watch him bowed over the glass diamonds, with pliers and fractured screw-threads and nuts and bits of wire—the improviser, the amateur inventor—and I think of all the jobs he’s done for down me down the years, and how sooner or later I’ll have to learn to do them for myself. The metal clasps joining glass ball to glass ball are like the clasps on his King Edward cigar boxes, and the clasps on his student skeleton, Janet.
‘I think that’s it,’ he says, attaching a last bauble. ‘Three pieces missing, but no one will notice.’ He stands at the foot of the stepladder holding the heavy chandelier while I connect the two electrical wires to the ceiling rose, tighten the rose-cover and slip the ring-attachment over the dangling hook. He lets go tentatively—‘Gently does it’—unable to believe, since he has not done the fixing himself, that the chandelier will hold. It holds. We turn the light on, and the six candle-bulbs shimmer through the cage of glass, the prison of prisms. ‘Let there be light,’ my father says, the only time I can ever remember him quoting anything, though I can recall some joke he used to tell, about failed floodlights at Turf Moor, a visiting Chinese football team, and the punch-line ‘Many hands make light work’. We stand there gawping upwards for a moment, as if we had witnessed a miracle, or as if this were a grand ballroom, not a suburban dining-room, and the next dance, if we had the courage to take part in it, might be the beginning of a new life. Then he turns the switch off and it’s dark again and he says: ‘Excellent. What’s the next job, then?’
Afterword
SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS is a typical life-span. So when my father (b. 1916) became ill with cancer in 1991, I ought to have seen what was coming. But the disease was more advanced than anyone knew. And nothing can ever prepare you. I was, to misquote C. S. Lewis, surprised by grief.
In the few weeks between diagnosis and death – as I shuttled by train from London to Yorkshire, or lay unsleeping in the spare bedroom of my parents’ home – I kept myself going by keeping a journal. But after the funeral, and the cold hearth of Christmas, I sank into depression. The only solace came from childhood memories of my father in rude health. I began typing these into my Amstrad, as though to resurrect him. It was done blind, from a black hole, as catharsis, without an eye for publication. But at some point I must have said something to Bill Buford, then editor of Granta , who bullied me to show him what I’d written, liked what he read, and convinced me there was a book here.
The draft typescript began with my dying father in hospital, then flashed back thirty years to him jumping a queue of cars. Bill liked the alternating time-frame but suggested I switch things round – first the past (so readers got to know my father at his most domineeringly energetic), then the present (so they could share my sense of loss). Most of his suggestions were good ones, and even without them the writing, by my standards, came quickly Fifty-one weeks aft
er my father’s death, the book was finished. My working title was A Completely Different Story , a phrase my father had used when informing his GP of his cancer. Among the alternatives was And When Did You Last See Your Father ?, from the Victorian painting by W. F. Yeames, which shows a son on the verge of – in Roy Strong’s words – ‘inadvertently betray [ing] his father through his own truthfulness’. Much more apt, Bill decided, and said he would be printing 3,000 hardbacks. It seemed a forbiddingly large amount.
A worldly friend told me to relax, that reviewers were bound to go easy on the book because of the subject matter, a son grieving for his father. He was right. They did. Even more surprising, the book found readers. Translations appeared as far away as Japan and Syria, and there was talk of a film for BBC2. For a poet, this was big stuff – though as ever the credit was due to my dad. In life I’d been in his debt, and here he was again, helping me out from beyond the grave with royalties, options, serializations, foreign rights.
Looking back again, recently, at the notebook in which I wrote my journal (stitched, unlined, with hard blue covers – I bought a dozen of them at a stationery shop in Skipton in the 1980s), I was shocked to find that the story of my father queue-jumping came before the descriptions of his illness. Rather than writing that passage in mourning, after his death, I must have set it down while he was still alive. Perhaps, with a splinter of ice in the heart, I saw my father as ‘material’ all along. Certainly, towards the end of the journal, I set myself an agenda: ‘To write about dying and not be deadly To write about sickness and not be sick. To write about my sick and dying father and not be merely “sensitive”.’
The mantra of every Creative Writing programme is: revise, revise and revise. It’s a good principle. But the alarming thing about the notebook is that the words I set down when insomniac, griefstruck and half-mad are much the same words as those in the final draft. One entry was originally laid out as a poem:
On a day trip to see me down in London,
you left your orange drophead Fiat in the place
where they unload the postbags on Leeds station,
illegally, you knew, but you were rushing,
just how illegally you saw on your return
by a posse of mail vans enclosing it
in a tight, red, get-out-of-this-one circle.
Improvising quickly, you asked at Enquiries
‘Has anyone seen my orange Fiat?
My son was supposed to leave it in the car park.
But I’ve looked and I can’t find it anywhere.’
Oh Christ, you agreed, when the angry guards
escorted you to it, what a daft sod.
What a prize fathead I have for a son,
until they laughed, and slapped you on the back,
and cursed at Bloody students, and let you go.
You rang that evening, with this story,
who’ll now never pick up the phone again.
This wasn’t poetry, I later realized, but chopped-up prose. It is as prose – fleshed out – that it appears on page fifty-two of the book, without that portentous last line. Prose seemed to suit my father: his life was too cluttered, and he too larger-than-life, to be contained within verse-forms. It also seemed to suit me: my poetic persona had been covert, but the role of family amanuensis, transcribing stories already burnished from repeated telling (‘Do you remember the time when …?’), seemed to release something.
I knew the book couldn’t be fiction. Whatever small virtues it might have would come from readers believing it to be true – the story of an ordinary-ish family, told by a reliable narrator. The risk was how the real-life characters in it would react to being (the word favoured by accusers) ‘exposed’. My father wasn’t around to care. But others were, including the three women who’d been most important to him: my mother, my sister Gillian, and ‘Auntie Beaty’, the woman with whom he had an intense, decade-long relationship, the true (sexual) nature of which was never admitted – not by him, nor by her, nor by my mother. Around the time of publication, terrible things happened to all three women. First my sister’s eyesight, already poor, suffered a catastrophic deterioration, literally overnight (she woke with a black land-mass the shape of Australia obscuring all but the edges of her vision). Then Beaty’s infant grandson was found to have cancer and seemed likely to die – she used to phone me late at night, asking me to join her in saying prayers. And one night my mother fell asleep in front of the television, awoke confused, stood up too quickly and toppled into the hearth, breaking her arm – the shattered humerus had to be pinned in several places and left her in a lot of pain.
‘It’s as if once my father died,’ I told a friend, at lunch, ‘all the women he loved were struck down.’
‘That’s not what you’re saying, is it?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You’re afraid it’s your book that’s done it, aren’t you?’
He was right. I felt guilty I’d written a book about my father falling apart, and now those closest to him were falling apart, myself (suddenly paranoid) included. The book was praised for its honesty. But did honesty exact too steep a price? I’d a memory of a book in The Name of the Rose that poisons whoever touches it. And of Leonard Bast being killed by books in Howards End .
By the time of the paperback, the sense of crisis had passed. Beaty’s grandson was cured. Gill’s eyesight stabilized enough for her to borrow large-print books from the library. And the pins were removed from my mother’s arm. ‘So stupid of me,’ she said, ‘If I’d stayed in bed reading your book rather than watching television, I’d never have broken it in the first place.’ I reproached myself for superstition and narcissism. But I never quite got over the guilt.
What did my mother really think of the book? There are two stories I tell myself about this. The upbeat version is that she was fine with it and that I’d not have gone ahead if she hadn’t been. Most widows would hate having to relive their husband’s last weeks. But she was a doctor, and knew about death, and understood my motive for describing it in intimate detail. When I sent her the typescript, she suggested only minor amendments. There were sections she couldn’t see the point of, especially those relating to Beaty, but she recognized the portrait of my father: ‘I can’t add to it.’ she wrote to me, ‘It was him.’ I have her letter beside me now. ‘I hope you will not be too upset by my nit-picking,’ it begins. Most of the nit-picking reflects a worry about what neighbours will think: a passage about me masturbating will ‘shock the village’, she says, and she dislikes the ‘modern writing – piss & shit & fuck and screw’. But all she asked was that I change a name or detail or two, nothing more drastic.
On the other hand – this is the bleaker, self-accusing version – in the weeks before the book came out she felt depressed enough to talk (not to me but to my sister) of ‘topping herself.’ She also fretted that ‘Sandra’, her long-time housekeeper, would be so upset by my revelations that she’d quit – the book includes an account of the sex we began having when I was fourteen and Sandra, no less of an innocent, four years older. These fears weren’t realized. Sandra’s only complaint when she read the book was that I’d bothered to give her a pseudonym: ‘I’d rather have been myself’, she said. Nor did my mother, who outlived my father by six years, come close to suicide. Even so, I tell myself, she obviously disliked the book. Why else would she have buried it in her wardrobe, instead of displaying it in the living room along with my other books?
There’s no great mystery about these conflicting versions. My mother, always a chameleon, felt ambivalent. She told some people one thing, and other people another; felt one thing one day, something else the next. She’d probably have preferred the book not to exist; in allowing it to, she may well have been indulging her only son. But she was pleased when friends told her they liked it, advised those who found it fruity to treat it as fiction, and never so far as I know used the word ‘betrayal’. Her chief feeling towards me wasn’t anger but pity – pity that
I lacked her own equanimity in relation to Beaty. ‘It’s over twenty years ago now and I have forgotten it,’ she said. ‘I wish you could too.’ My relationship with her continued much as before. But her health was blighted by osteoporosis, back pain, dizzy spells, migraines. Weighed against these, and the huge grief of missing my father, the publication of And When … was a trivial matter. My ‘saga’, she called it. It was only a book.
And Beaty? By 1991 her affair with my father was long over and she had moved to another part of the country. Convincing myself she’d never get to hear about the book, I chickened out of telling her of its existence. She found out soon enough, because of a salacious article in the local paper, sent to her by a friend. She called me in a panic, assuming I must have used her real name. I posted her a copy by return, to show that I hadn’t and that other giveaway details (including her hair colour) had also been changed. She called me again, after she’d read the book, angry with me for quoting one of her letters and saying she was sending the book back. It never arrived. In time she resumed phoning, and wrote friendly letters. I still have them. I have photographs of her, too, dating back to the 1960s. It was easy to see why my father fell for her. She died a couple of years ago. We were closer at the end than ever before.
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 20