by Tim Parks
He said: ‘Not till I’m sure just how the settlement’s going to go with Mary, I’m afraid.’
It was lunchtime and when I’d got the phone down I looked at the world map on the wall where tiny flags showed all the countries where my software was being used. From Panama to Portugal, it said on the brochure, Austria to Australia. Why is it, I wondered, that I am always to be excluded from the intimate affairs of the lives of people close to me? Why? Why do they keep me out? I was hurt, angry.
‘But why should you need to be told?’ Shirley retorted.
‘Because we’re married for Christ’s sake! Because we’re supposed to be sharing our lives. You complain I don’t understand you and then you don’t tell me what I need to know to have a chance. Obviously it’s been upsetting you. It explains everything. And I’ve been faffing about in the dark for months.’
She said perhaps I was right. Yes, probably I was right. But she just hadn’t felt like telling me. She hadn’t the heart to talk about it. It was so awful. Her parents had been such a fixed point in her life, she’d never even realised really.
She was on the brink of tears, and for once I was allowed to console her.
But over the next months, though it seemed impossible, and above all unnecessary, the tension heightened. Shirley would be sullen and moody on my arrival home and almost anything I said would cause a flare up. I might innocently ask what was for dinner and abruptly be told I could bloody well get my dinner myself. I might, despite office weariness, traffic weariness, a briefcase full of work, offer to go to the Indian shop, pick up some goodies, and immediately have to hear that since I was no good at doing the shopping and always brought home the wrong things there was no point in my going, was there?
Of course, from what one gathers from magazine articles, TV documentaries, radio plays while washing the car, etc., it did occur to me that Shirl might be suffering from some sort of physical/mental illness, or even stress, and that perhaps I should be feeling sorry for her, rather than the opposite. This I honestly tried to do. But then I also thought that if she was prone to suffering from, say, clinical depression (though she never had so suffered in the seven previous years I’d known her), then I personally didn’t want to be the one who carried the gloomy can for the rest of my life, did I? It was a serious problem.
I stroked the wispy hair at the fine nape of her neck as she sat on the floor, back to the sofa, watching TV. She shook my hand off.
Or at least scenes like this occurred. Why couldn’t we be cheerful?
I said: ‘Fancy a pint down the Torrington? Bound to meet somebody.’
She didn’t reply.
‘Bit of a tipple, pinch your nipple.’
Nothing. No response.
I phoned her brother Charles, met him in a pub in Kentish Town and over a couple of jars asked him what he thought. Had Shirley ever suffered from depression as a child? He smoked heavily from my pack of Rothmans, playing a fifty-p piece across pale knuckles. He said Shirley had always been the parents’ favourite, they had always given her everything – ponies, dance classes, skiing holidays – while he had largely been ignored and then generally made fun of when he tried to point out the social injustice their lifestyle implied. He had given the Filipino maid a wad of notes from Father’s wallet once, though, intimidated and conditioned as the girl was, she had handed them straight back to Mother, after which his father had given him a thorough beating. That was the kind of family it had been. The difference being that while he rebelled, Shirley had lapped it up, and what she was reaping now was precisely the fruit of her mindless and selfish upbringing, the ennui of the directionless bourgeoisie. She needed a cause, a sense of purpose. He himself was on a local committee which tried to ensure that eligible people got rehoused. He had been instrumental in saving a number of squats which had been under threat from eviction. He was never depressed at all. With all the suffering there was in the world, he said, it was so damn obvious what one should do with one’s life that he couldn’t understand people lounging around moping.
It didn’t seem worthwhile arguing with someone whose views were so far beyond the pale, so I drank up, paid and got out. Though that evening, just for the record, as it were, I did suggest to Shirley that she might get involved in one of those groups that provides free crêches for working-class mothers.
‘Please,’ she said, chopping lemon, ‘are you out of your mind? Or do you want to turn me into your mother or something?’
So finally I put it to her. Could it really all be simply because she wanted a child?
Could all what be?
Her being so depressed and unfriendly (not to mention obtuse).
‘Oh that. Just a phase,’ she said, breezing about with saucepans. She kissed me on the side of the neck as I tucked into chops.
‘So it’s not that you want a baby?’ I often do wish, with Shirley, that I had my dictaphone in my pocket.
She shook her head rather exaggeratedly, refusing to take me seriously. I was patient.
‘No, because I mean if it is that, I mean, if you really want children,’ I took a deep breath, ‘then seeing as I don’t, I don’t know why, but I really don’t, I feel complete and happy without them, then I think the best thing to do would be for us to split up so that you’ll be in plenty of time to find another man and we can stop making life a misery for each other. Which seems a crime frankly. I mean,’ I hurried on, talking at her back now as she sloshed water in the pans – Shirley always seems to be doing something with pans – ‘I personally don’t want us to split up, at all, I really don’t, I just want us to be happy together. I’ve said it a thousand times. However, if you . . .’
The saucepans are the new, slow cooking, heavy metal kind, and cost a good month’s salary. Though I’ll give her they’re stylish. I never objected to such purchases. On the contrary, I encouraged anything that would make her happy. I was always so relieved when there was something she actually wanted.
But now at last she turned. She stood with her backside hitched up against the draining board, her fingers gripped to its edge. She was wearing glossy blue running shorts. She looked at me and looked at me and at last after all these months she burst into tears. She wept and suddenly crouched down over pitted red-and-black chequered lino. She said of course she didn’t want us to split up. How could I even imagine such a thing? And she was sorry if she was being unpleasant and bloody-minded. She didn’t even know why she was like this herself. But she felt so upset about so many things. Honestly. And she burst into tears again.
Tears, I must say, have a quite overwhelming, even disabling effect on me. I have never been able to resist them. I had been unable to resist my mother’s as a child and I was unable to resist Shirley’s now. Hence at this point I gave up any attempt to follow the argument through to some sensible conclusion and hurried from the table to go and comfort her. We cuddled, she cried, I whispered softly, we kissed, looked into each other’s red eyes, confessed, forgave, kissed again and eventually, arriving somehow in the bedroom, made love, with me foolishly, if not unnaturally, hoping the tide had turned.
There followed a very happy two weeks of perfect reconciliation, relaxation, fun. So, yes, it was still possible. Everything was hunky-dory. Turkey was on. We bought our ferry tickets, got the car serviced. We were going to have a great time. Life was great. And then it began all over again: arguments, sulking, general bitchiness. Turkey off. Not only Turkey, but any other holidays I might be planning too. Okay? When I reminded her of all she’d said that evening, all she’d conceded, she either refused to acknowledge that such a scene had ever taken place, or she’d try some bright sardonic line like: ‘All under duress, Your Honour, under duress. My lawyer wasn’t present. I retract everything.’ Or she’d throw back her head, laughing, and say, ‘Oh George, I do love the way you always, always believe you’re right. You’re a phenomenon.’
I spoke to no one about this. Every morning I went into work, joked with Tony, my assistant programmer
, flirted mildly with the secretaries, Joyce and Sandra, reported to Johnson and Will Peacock, wined and dined clients, made rude jokey propositions down the phone to switchboard. No doubt you can picture it, the average stale-tobacco, fluorescent-lit office life, with all the little formalities and pleasantries and gallantries, the way you live and brush up against people and talk behind each others’ backs and generally get on famously.
I spoke to no one. Probably it was the same for Shirley. Jolly and lively at work, glum and offhand at home. As if we were only our real selves of old when we arrived in the safe environment of the office, the school. If other people came, Mark and Sylvia, determined to be neighbourly (had we noticed the lock didn’t engage on the front door, and what about the state of the lawn?), forcing their way in with a few cans of Whitbread’s or a tin of chewy flapjacks, we put on a great front. Shirley was almost too dazzling, I drank heavily, but as soon as they were gone, we slumped. The television. A newspaper. Separate bedtimes.
And it was on one of these evenings, as I remember it, that my heart hardened. I use that Biblical expression because at last after a childhood of Bible studies I understood what it meant: a deliberate, quite conscious shutting oneself off from the tenderer emotions. My heart hardened. I’d had enough.
This is What I Should Have Gone For
Grandfather had become entirely incontinent. I had my suspicions frankly that the old NHS had rather cocked up the prostectomy, maybe whipped out something they shouldn’t have, bit of sphincter or something, but as Shirley said, you’d never get to the bottom of it. Nor was Grandfather likely to generate much sympathy in tabloid newspapers or even a court of law were one to try for some compensation. Instinctively people would see he deserved it. So I spent a little time every morning checking out the geriatric home situation. I gave exactly fifteen minutes, ten thirty to ten forty-five, to phoning up all the various bodies concerned. I felt in this way I’d be informed and prepared when the crunch came and wouldn’t have to lose a whole week finding out the score right at some critical moment when I had a new project on my hands or something.
The problem, my enquiries revealed, was that the old man wasn’t suffering from senile dementia. Had he been suffering from senile dementia and hence truly in danger of doing damage to himself, accidentally putting the electric kettle on the gas, or setting his jacket on fire when lighting his pipe, then they would have taken him in (though with something like that on the cards one couldn’t help feeling it might have been worth hanging on to him for a while). Otherwise, they encouraged home care, and given that the social worker had reported my mother as being ‘valiant and willing, if a little overprotective’, they were of the opinion he should remain in Gorst Road.
Well, with property prices rising sharply again, I felt on reflection that this solution suited me for the moment too. Hang on a few years, then get a whole bundle of money for the house, enough not just to pay for Grandfather’s home but to leave something to spare for setting up Mother in a small place of her own as well. That way we wouldn’t be forced to take her in ourselves.
Until two things happened in the same week. Grandfather fell down the stairs and bust his hip, and Mother, who now had to wash him and change him like a baby at all hours of the day and night, came down with some sort of virus that completely floored her. She phoned me feebly at 7 a.m., having waited of course until the third day of this illness before ‘bothering me’.
I drove over in excruciating traffic to the banana republic of Hackney, aiming to winkle out the ever phoneless Peggy and take her over to Park Royal to help out. In the event, however, the gipsy painted third-floor door of her bedsit was answered, not by my sister, but by a rather stout Indian woman, the kind with a beachball of brown belly showing through gaudy drapes and a neat red bullet-hole in her forehead. She was holding the lardy and wriggling young Frederick, while her own (presumably) two small girls peeped duskily from behind her sari – beyond which, a backdrop of carelessness and charity-shop makeshift. I noticed a saucepan on the carpet, for example, a newspaper torn to shreds.
Peggy had a job, the woman said. Where, doing what, how could I get there? She didn’t know. Which again is typical of Peggy. She gets a babysitter and then doesn’t bother to explain how she can be contacted. What was the woman supposed to do if the child fell ill, if there was an emergency? But Peggy always imagines all will go well. This was what she had taken over from our childhood religion I suppose: faith. Well may it serve her. Still it was good to think there was another income in the family.
I drove over to Gorst Road, another hour simply tossed into the maw of the capital’s time-gobbling traffic system, and had to wait a further five minutes for Mother to drag herself down to the front door, since I’d forgotten my own keys. She was quite ashen and complaining, very unusually for her, of crippling stomach pains. Had she seen a doctor? No she hadn’t and didn’t want to. It was just a bug. But she must go and see her doctor. For heaven’s sake! She wouldn’t. But . . . She wouldn’t. She hated doctors. God would take her in his own good time. My mother actually said that. I hugged her all the same and half carried her in her nightie to the sofa; then went up to see Grandfather; the stink on the landing, however, told me more than I needed to know and I went back downstairs.
Mother had now stretched out on the couch. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘And the social services, for Grandfather, have you been in touch?’ Apparently a social worker would come in the next couple of days. ‘So we should take him to hospital. Immediately. Where they can look after him.’ But he didn’t want to go to hospital, she said. He refused. He’d shout and scream if you tried. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. She closed her eyes and sighed, holding her stomach. I thought: ‘Incredibly, these two people are my responsibility. This is my family. And I’m supposed to be meeting my contact from Tektronics for an early lunch.’ I asked: ‘Isn’t there anybody from the church could help?’ She shook her head. There was, but they were on holiday.
For a moment I stood helpless in the dark cave of my childhood sitting room, trapped again: the photographs, the Wedgewood, the dusty naïveté of the Hummels, the sullen rhododendrons outside the window, and, blending it all together, an all-pervading sense, which was also a smell, of brown. Somehow the place stank of brown. There I stood. Until the obvious occurred. There is nothing you can’t pay your way out of. And even though it was going to be expensive, I moved to the phone.
That evening I finished work as early as I could and drove to Gorst Road for about seven to check that all was well and we were getting our money’s worth. The nurse was tall and pleasantly bulky, her hair done up in a bun on a long thick neck, one of those women who carry weight well, moving about with a crisp rustle of uniform and tights faintly chafing together between strong legs. In her early thirties, I guessed, efficient, assured, getting through. ‘Will do, Mr Crawley,’ she said in response to some request or other, and I told her to call me George.
Upstairs I found Mother asleep in her green nylon sheets (Shirley would wince just at the thought) and the passageway beyond now smelling almost sweetly. I looked in on Grandfather to find him sitting up with the Express. Every piece of clothing, towel, dressing-gown, string vest, was neatly, femininely folded. Even the old man’s still black, rather fierce hair was combed flat, his cheeks shaved. He looked surprisingly virile, as if he might spring up into action at any moment. I smiled. ‘Had to get a nurse in,’ I said. ‘Bit expensivo, but there you go.’ He looked at me quizzically. ‘Good day at the office?’
I thought of the nurse talcing his loose old balls and bum. I thought, if only one could afford the service on a regular basis, family life could be made quite pleasant. In our own case, as long as it wasn’t for more than two or three nights, it would be worth every penny. And on the way downstairs, noting how the threadbare patches were bigger now, the bannister rail looser, it occurred to me that I might have sex with this nurse. Why not? I could tell Shirley I had to stay the night with Mother and
I could perhaps get a leg over in mine and Peggy’s old room. That should exorcise a few ghosts.
Her name was Rosemary. I went out and bought stuff for her to prepare herself some dinner (thanks to Shirley I am actually quite an astute shopper) and we ate together over fantasy Formica in the kitchen and talked. It was really most pleasant, Rosemary’s company, a quite unexpected treat. I felt so easy, so relaxed, I amazed myself. Especially since I had been wondering recently whether I didn’t need tranquillisers. She explained, when I marvelled at all the little extras she’d done, that nursing wasn’t her vocation at all, she had wanted to be a pianist. She had trained and trained and very nearly made it, but not quite. Then not having quite got married either, she had decided she must have a safe source of income. She had taken up nursing, but signed on with an agency, rather than staying with the NHS, ‘to be flexible’, she said. Now she quite liked the job in a curious sort of way. My grandfather, for example, had been terribly sweet, had told her all kinds of interesting stories.
I didn’t object. I listened, and listening, supping whatever cans I’d found in the local subcontinent emporium, I remember being delighted by the straightforwardness of all this, another life unfolding so sensibly, so poignantly; and as so often when I meet a new woman, regardless of looks, I realised that this was the woman I should have married: cheerful, practical, generous, talented, not overly bitter about her disappointments, getting on. She had large white sensible teeth, long pale fleshy hands that seemed to have a quick active almost animal life of their own. There was something nervously vibrant about them as they lay still on the tablecloth, like starfish almost, damp, soft, alive. No nail varnish. No frills. This is what I should have gone for.