My Father's Fortune

by Michael Frayn

  He always smiles as I approach his bed, however bad he’s feeling. Which I think really is pretty bad. ‘Not too clever today,’ he often has to admit – long one of his phrases – or, a new one to me: ‘All my wickets are down.’ Gladys is there already, with clean pyjamas and news from his old office. On the better days he and I look at the Times crossword together. The hospital chaplain has come to give him comfort, he reports one evening – and succeeded handsomely, because my father derives considerable satisfaction from the smartness with which he chased the poor fellow off. We don’t say that much to each other, though. It’s difficult for him to hear even Gladys amid the hushed murmurings of visiting time, and anyway there isn’t much to say. We smile at him. He smiles at us. Worth coming just for his smile. I fetch him when he’s discharged. The car’s still a bond between us; but there’s another change in the politics here, because of course it’s my car now, not his, and I’m the one who’s doing the driving. I take him not to the flat in Wimbledon but to Gladys’s house. He’s still so weak, and so in need of care, that his concern for the proprieties has had to be laid aside. Gladys has set up a single bed in a downstairs room, where I sit for as much of each day as I can while she’s at work. He’s in worse pain than ever, and it’s frightening to be on my own with him, because I don’t know what to do, except give him painkillers and get the doctor round yet again. Bits of the lining of his bladder, explains the doctor, are still coming away, and passing agonisingly through his urethra. This is where it hurts so much, he says, unable to sit or lie still – in what he calls his pipe or his John Thomas. I’ve never heard him use either expression before. But then I’ve never before heard him refer to the genitals, his own, mine or anyone else’s, or anything else connected with the human sexual function. Nor have I ever seen him in such pain, not even with his ulcer or his slipped disc.

  There’s another inhibition that he overcomes, too. The day after his discharge from hospital he writes to thank me for visiting him – and he does it simply and truly, from the heart. I will consider the letter unnecessary, he says, but he would feel slightly uncomfortable if he failed to write it. I’m so moved by what he says next that I find it difficult even to copy it here: ‘There were many times in hospital when your visits seemed the mainstay of my existence.’

  And here’s what I find even more difficult to say: I didn’t reply.

  I not only didn’t reply in writing – I don’t think I even mentioned the letter as I sat by his bedside in Mitcham. He had opened his heart, and spoken as we should all like to speak, and to be spoken to; and I failed to respond. Why? I can’t understand it. The contrast with the way in which my children have behaved with me is humiliating. Rebecca has tried to console me for my failure. ‘If there was reticence between you,’ she wrote when I told her about this, ‘you were both simply products of your time. As all children do, you took your cue from him and from the prevailing sensibility. I imagine he would have been very disconcerted if you’d broken the powerful conventions of emotional restraint.’

  True. Except that for once he had broken them! And I hadn’t taken his hand through the breach he’d made. I have done a number of things in life, before then and since, that I’m not proud of, but I usually know why I did them, or think I do. This one, though, continues to baffle and shame me.

  *

  It’s true that the relations between me and my father were shaped by the conventions of the time, and that those conventions have changed. I wish I could believe, though, that I’d been able to give him even a little of the joy that my children have given me. And then I think … perhaps I did, just a bit. In spite of my failure to be a cricketer, and my intellectual snobbery, and my not writing home. The same strange thought recurs, and it’s one that it’s taken me all these years to think: the realisation that he loved my sister and me, and that we brought him happiness. Perhaps that’s why he would detour halfway across South London to drop in. And when he put the hat and the smile round my door and saw me sitting there, it could be that he felt something of what I feel when I catch sight of my children. So this may be what it was like being him, on the other side of his smile. Perhaps, in spite of all our differences in character, he was driven in his inmost heart by some of the same helpless passions as I am.

  *

  Gladys nurses him slowly back to health. She speaks to him as softly and smilingly as ever, and he smilingly understands what she says. If ever she regrets finding herself tied to an ageing invalid she gives no sign of it. He moves back to the flat in Wimbledon and returns to work. That winter he rings me in a state of some excitement about a series of articles I’ve written on Cuba. ‘You ought to do more of this kind of thing,’ he says encouragingly. He has already been enthusiastic, just before he went into hospital, about my first television play. I think he has at last begun to see that the genial flapdoodle I inflict on a gullible public might be a halfway acceptable alternative to cover drives and leg breaks, to orders for roofing and rainwater goods. Our visits back and forth resume, our tours of the outlying relations. We all go to Billericay together, where Sid and Phyllis have been living for many years now. Sid’s as cheerful as ever, long retired from the cigarette industry but still loyally doing his best to consume its products. He has heart problems, and arthritis so bad that his legs scarcely function any more, even with two sticks to lean on. He has become what he always warned me against being – a home man; but he heroically drives himself over to see us in his specially adapted car, and heroically shifts his considerable bulk upstairs to our first-floor living room. He’s still as joshing as ever. At the head of the staircase he pauses to recover from the climb, and is greatly assisted by the sight of our Matisse lithograph, a girl’s head established in half a dozen skimpily sketched lines. ‘Well, Michael,’ he laughs happily, ‘whoever sold you this certainly saw you coming. Why didn’t you just get one of the girls to knock something up for you?’

  By this time getting even downstairs to his own living room at home each day has become an act of heroism. Nanny can’t get downstairs at all now. My glamorous aunt with the Evening in Paris has devoted her life to caring for two long-term invalids. ‘It won’t be long now,’ says Nanny, when I visit her in her little bedroom, ‘I shan’t be here next time you come.’ And finally, after being wrong about her life expectancy for so long, for at least since my father first met her in Gatcombe Road in 1919, she turns out to be right, though it’s taken her ninety-seven years to manage it.

  I go to see her in hospital for one last time a day or two before she dies. She doesn’t see me; her ancient pale watery eyes can no longer see anything. I take her hand and tell her who I am. ‘Oh, it’s Michael!’ she cries feebly, with a delight that pierces me to the heart for all my teasing of her when I was a child, all my neglect of her since. She doesn’t make any predictions this time; she doesn’t need to. She just weeps and says over and over again: ‘I held you in my arms! I held you in my arms!’ She means when I was born, her first grandchild, thirty-six years earlier, in the flat over the off-licence in Mill Hill.

  My father, though, is in another good phase. There’s a photograph of him taken by Gladys when they’re on holiday that summer, I think in the Canaries, and hatless. Almost all his hair has gone by now, but he’s suntanned and he has a particularly wide and relaxed smile on his face. He looks in some indefinable way young, and as happy as I’ve ever seen him. Back in London the hat resumes its appearances round the door, with the smile not far behind it. Sometimes the children are at home, and he makes far more impression on them than I realise at the time. Jenny, who’s born in 1967, is too young to remember him, though she sometimes brings him to mind for me because she has a lot of his cheek and quickness, not to mention his double-jointedness. But Rebecca, who was only just eight when he died, recalls him as ‘an immensely benevolent man with a dazzling smile … I still remember the desolation when he died, that this great warmth of spirit could possibly be finite. I also vividly remember telling my teac
her at school and walking home afterwards, astonished and then sick at heart that it must be true, since she hadn’t – as I had somehow hoped – denied it … It’s his smile that remains still in my mind’s eye.’

  Even Susanna, who was only six when he died, has a vivid recollection of sitting in his lap on one of those days when he just happened to be passing. ‘He was wearing his hat and I remember asking him where he got it. And he spun a wonderful story about the Hat Tree, accompanied by many smiles and hugs. I remember the intoxicating delight of sitting on his knee, the focus of his full attention, knowing that he was teasing me, but being entranced and amused by his tall tale. He was a very funny man. And I remember that smile. It’s your smile, too …’

  *

  Then at Christmas the final act begins.

  We’re all at my sister’s for Boxing Day. My father has a headache. He takes some aspirin; the headache persists, and gets worse. He withdraws from the table and sits at one side of the room with his head in his hands, suddenly no longer young and no longer happy. The headache goes on all day – and all next day, then every day. He goes back into hospital for tests, and the source of the headache is diagnosed. His cancer has followed one of the established pathways from the bladder; he has a tumour on the brain. By March he’s in a pitiable state, helpless and confused, and he has only weeks left to live. Gladys by this time has moved to a larger and more agreeable house in the outer suburbs, and she installs him there, in a sunny back bedroom. Whether she guessed what was coming, and deliberately picked a house at Banstead, I don’t know, but the ambulance has only a mile or two to take him each day for his treatment in the Royal Marsden, the great cancer hospital. Soon he’s no longer fully in control of his bodily functions, or fully in touch with the world around him. ‘I can’t help thinking there are lions in the room,’ he says to me apologetically one day. ‘I don’t suppose there really are, but would you mind just checking? I think I can hear them … Over by the chest of drawers, perhaps …’

  Gladys sits with him through the long nights. While she’s out at work my sister and I take turns. I’m glad to have someone sharing the job – Jill was too busy the first time round having her second child. He doesn’t seem to be in pain now, but he sometimes needs cleaning up – and in any case I’m trying to slip away from time to time to meet famous actors and actresses who may be persuaded to star in my first play. I sometimes feel as if I’m an actor myself, moving back and forth between the brightly lit artificial world on one side of a door and the makeshift gloom behind it.

  But he’s on a hiding to nothing. Soon the task is beyond the three of us, and the Marsden take him into their wards. The smart lad who was always so quick, and so impatient of my slowness, is now no longer capable of organised thought, and, in a reversal which would once have seemed unimaginable, I have to get a power of attorney to manage his affairs for him. He’s never made a will, of course, any more than he’s ever taken out an insurance policy, so what little he possesses will go by default to his wife – to Elsie, who has all the money she can possibly need, and who has done nothing for my father in the last eight years except put him on the street. My sister and I are so appalled that we confect a will for him to sign at the same time as the power of attorney, leaving the money to Gladys, who could actually do with it, who has looked after him as devotedly in sickness as in health, and who has given him a little happiness again at the end of his life. By the time various bills have been paid there’s a balance of some £1,500 in his account. When Gladys gets the money she insists that we give a share of it to Nellie, his one surviving sibling – and that we somehow make it seem as if he, not she, had intended her to have it.

  My father, I assure the solicitor when I send him the will and the power of attorney, ‘was in a quite lucid condition when these two documents were signed. I explained the import of them both very carefully, and he understood and definitely assented to them both.’ I think this is reasonably true – he’s certainly conscious, and the consultant who’s treating him, present for the signing, believes he can understand. He can no longer write, though, and on the power of attorney he has to make his mark, just as his illiterate grandmother did when she registered his mother’s birth over a century earlier. His index finger no longer bends concave to the pen, as it did to his old silver Eversharp to produce all those columns of tiny figures on his sales reports. He can barely hold it at all, and the mark, scarcely even an X, is as faint and wandering as the random trace left by an insect. By the time we come to the will he’s too exhausted even to do this, and I have to guide his hand.

  I write to tell Elsie that he’s dying (though I don’t tell her about the will). ‘Poor old boy,’ she says when she phones back, shortly but not entirely unsympathetically, and when we get to the funeral she sends flowers. I later post on to her the necessary form to enable her to claim her widow’s benefits, and I think she must take it up, because I have a card in the file that was sent to my father by his local Ministry of Social Security office – apparently almost as confused as he was – to tell him, a month after he died, that his claim has been transferred to their Hove office ‘as it is thought that you will find this more convenient’.

  Elsie survives another three years. Even at the end – very frightened, according to her sister Doris, between a first heart attack and the second that finished her – she won’t let Doris call a doctor. Almost all the other relatives from my childhood who come into the earlier chapters of this story are now long gone. Most of the relatives on my father’s side that I know about die before their time, like my father himself and his father, from one form of cancer or another: his sister Daisy, his brother George, his nephew Maurice. Phil wheezes on into his seventies and Doris, who loyally sewed in Phil’s cigarette smoke, continues into her mid-eighties. Sid holds on somehow until he’s seventy-two. Phyllis outdoes even her mother; she died only four years ago at the age of ninety-eight. Nellie, my father’s eldest sister, is the longest-lived of my father’s family. I can’t find the date of her death, but she’s still alive in her late eighties, and able to be astonished at finding that anyone in the family was rich enough to bequeath her £300.

  My father doesn’t leave much else behind. In all his sixty-nine years he has still never mastered the arts of acquisition and possession. He has no house of his own, of course, and long before he’s actually dead his employers have with some embarrassment reclaimed the car for his successor. When the Royal Marsden can do nothing more for him he’s moved to a hospice, and after his death the matron hands me the belongings he has left. Apart from a dressing gown and a cardigan they fit comfortably into a rather small cardboard box. In the accompanying inventory he’s reduced to much the same sparse list as I suppose everyone is in such documents:

  1 pr slippers

  1 pr socks

  Toilet bag and contents

  Sweets

  Cards, battery

  1 signet ring

  Specs

  Hearing-aid

  Watch

  Years later Gladys passed the watch on to me. There must have been a few other bits and pieces left behind in her house along with his clothes, because apart from that wristwatch she also gave me a couple of pocket watches, one a steel Ingersoll which I think he was perhaps using when I was a child, and one with a battered gold case which I recall him wearing in the breast pocket of his elegant suits in the fifties. And when, five years ago, Gladys herself died (only seventy-two, also of cancer), one of her executors gave me, rather in the manner of my father’s supposed bequest to his sister, two pictures that they thought she would have wished me to have. They’re ink and wash, and I recognised them instantly: A Bit of Old London and St Gall, Switzerland – the last faint, improbably preserved traces of my childhood at 3 Hillside Road.

  *

  My father left few possessions but a very adequate posterity: my sister and me; my three daughters; my sister’s two sons; my seven grandchildren; my sister’s four. No doubt there will be more
as the years go by – the last echoes of my father, spreading wider and wider through the world from one generation to the next, as long as the world and the generations continue.

  To me personally he left a fortune – an intangible and unrecorded legacy more precious than money or anything he might ever have written down. The humour he used to deal with his customers and circumvent his deafness; his indifference to all systems of belief; the smile on his face that I sometimes find so disconcertingly on mine. My very existence, in the first place, of course – and the beginnings of a life that turned out to be so much easier than his. I didn’t have to share two rooms with six other people, or a kitchen and lavatory with four more. I didn’t have to leave school at fourteen, or go out and sell things, or support feckless parents and in-laws. He loved me, saw to it that I was fed and clothed and educated, and left me reasonably free to get on with things in my own way. What more can anyone want from a father?

  I didn’t even have to care for him or my mother in old age. They didn’t intentionally clear themselves away with such promptitude, but all the same my sister and I were spared the burdens that the long evity of parents has imposed upon so many of my contemporaries.

  Anyway, he did leave me physical possessions, in a way. He left me that house in Hillside Road, even though he didn’t own it. He left me the Bentalls suite, even though it was going to go on the tip. He left me the rusty chopper and the flooded air-raid shelter and the feasting cardinals, even though they’ve all long ago vanished off the face of the earth. Perhaps, after all, my mother’s story of the pirate ship contained a grain of truth. There was gold in the family, waiting only for me to claim it, though it was amassed by a twentieth-century salesman rather than a sixteenth-century pirate. Out of it I have made a childhood, and the person I became. Some of it has found its way into the stories I’ve written. And now into this true account of my inheritance.