We were each shocked by the sight of the other.
“I’m fine. I’ve been on the boat. I always lose a bit of weight at sea.”
I felt my mother’s distress at finding a gaunt man in his fifties as her son. I saw that, in this novel period of life, when time itself goes weird, she had been prepared to greet me as a hulking teenager, or an assistant-lecturer at a university in his pink twenties—not someone so promising a candidate for death in his own right.
I hugged her. She was all skin and bones.
“How’s Peter?”
“Well, he was up this morning, but then he went to bed again …” The nurse still stood by with a proprietorial air, as if in charge of the both of us as well. I gave her the evil eye and she reluctantly stumped off toward the kitchen, where she began to rattle dishes, loudly, in the sink.
“He’s got a touch of jaundice,” my mother said. “The doctor says that’s quite usual.”
A gray metal wheelchair stood in the hall, a plaid rug folded on one of its arms. I couldn’t take my eyes off this alien contraption; its utility-issue ugliness, like the nurse’s dowdy uniform, seemed somehow needless and cruel.
“I think he’s awake. Peter, dear? It’s Jonathan.”
I followed her into the bedroom.
“Hello, old boy.” From beneath the bedclothes, he extended his right hand.
I shook it, thinking that the oddest thing about this scene was that I couldn’t remember ever seeing my father in bed before.
“Sorry about all this … kerfuffle.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Oh, pretty well. No pain to speak of. How are Jean and—uh—Julia?”
“Fine,” I said. “They’re fine. We’ll all be here on Saturday for the party.” Planned long before, this was to celebrate my parents’ wedding anniversary—their fifty-fifth.
“Good-oh,” my father said.
Jaundice had turned the skin of his face to the color of an ancient legal deed. Every bone protruded from behind the skin. But his beard was in fine fettle, sprouting in silver tufts and curls and tassels, as if it had every intention of enjoying life long into the future.
“Well!” said the district nurse, announcing herself. “I’m off now. See you in the morning, Peter!” she said with a professional twinkle.
“Thanks so much. Bye.”
“So you’ve got Big Nurse,” I said when she was gone.
“She’s a perfectly decent sort,” he said—always quick to correct my kneejerk negative opinions.
“Rather you than me.”
My mother wanted him to eat. She was feeding him with packets of nutritious powder dissolved in water. I retrieved the jars of candied ginger from the car.
“Fortnum & Mason’s,” I said, trying to force a note of gourmet extravagance into my father’s grim diet.
“Awfully kind of you, old boy. I hope you didn’t go out of your way.”
“And I’ve brought back Colonel William’s diary.” This was a calf-bound manuscript book from the 1830s, when Colonel William Raban, sailing to Madras, had run into a storm at sea. My father had thought it would interest me, but Colonel William had proved as dull a dog as most of my paternal ancestors.
“Oh, good of you to remember. Could you put it on my desk in the study, do you think? So it won’t get lost in the … general commotion?”
A minute or two later, my father’s eyes closed, and he drifted into sleep. I took the book into the study. The desk was largely occupied by U.S. atlases. My father, who’d been an artillery officer from 1939 to 1945, had always planned our family holidays like army campaigns, and he had gone to town on the projected drive from Minneapolis to Seattle. His old gunnery slide rule was placed on the opened Rand McNally, and there were several loose passages of notes in his small, careful handwriting. He had been sketching several alternative routes. Names of towns big enough to sport a motel had been circled. Reading the notes and looking at the maps, I saw he’d got as far as Great Falls, Montana, in the plan-of-campaign. Halfway to our house.
I put the colonel’s diary on top of the DeLorme atlas for Idaho and joined my mother in the kitchen.
“Do you take sugar, dear? I don’t remember.”
“No sugar for me.”
“I think it’s William who does. Or is it Dominic? I don’t think it’s Colin.”
“Whoever,” I said. “Tell me what you can—what you know.”
“Well,” she said, her high voice rising in forced brightness. “I talked to the doctor this morning. We both like him, Peter and I, we both like the doctor very much. And I said to him, ‘There will be a remission, won’t there? If I can get him to eat properly—if he gets his appetite back? He will get up and about again, won’t he? We might be able to go to Scotland?’ ”
Before her marriage, my mother had supported herself by writing romantic stories for women’s magazines. Dialogue had been her forte.
“And the doctor said, ‘Well, Monica, I don’t think I ought to raise your hopes too high. I’m afraid I don’t think you ought to count on that.’ And I said to him …‘How long?’ ”
Her voice was an appalled whisper.
“He said … he said, ‘One never can tell, but, perhaps, a few … weeks.’ ” She gave a choking laugh, and in my mother’s face I saw the abyss.
Market Harborough was a foxhunting town: I passed a shop selling red coats and riding crops for the tally-ho crowd. Beyond the market square, and, on massive antique oaken stilts, the old grammar school, lay a shopping mall, of sorts. The architect had obviously visited America, but he hadn’t got it quite right. In the Sainsbury’s supermarket of this mid-Atlantic no-man’s-land, I put together the ingredients for a chicken-and-coriander curry and bought a mixed case of wine. The cool of the aisles and the close-reading of wine labels, the ritual of getting cash out of the ATM machine, all felt preciously ordinary, and I spun out my trip away from the bungalow for longer than was necessary.
“Hi,” I said to the girl at the checkout. “How you doing?”
She gave me a look, and reminded me of my Martian status here.
When I reached my parents’ home, rain had begun to fall; the first in weeks. Big splashy globules were dropping from a windless gray sky.
“That’s nice,” my mother said. “It should perk up the garden for the party.”
I made an important fuss of chopping things on the kitchen table, pulling the cork on a bottle of red burgundy, ostentatiously sniffing it, then clinking glasses with my mother.
“I don’t stop hoping. It’s very wrong to stop hoping, don’t you think? I just hope now that we can have this summer together … But he must eat,” she said with sudden fierceness. “He liked your ginger. He had some when you were out shopping.”
With the curry bubbling on the stove, I went into the bedroom to talk to my father. He was awake, but dozy with morphine.
“Thanks again for the ginger, old boy.”
I sat in the chair by the bed in the darkening room, and told him about Julia—her ebullient sociability, her growing verbal dexterity, her happiness at preschool.
“Light of my life,” I said.
He nodded, smiled, and went to sleep.
My mother and I ate in the small dining room that opened onto a glassed-in porch overlooking the back garden. The bungalow was a modest brick affair, built in the 1940s, that my parents had moved into a couple of years before. A few steps from the town center, it was conveniently opposite the old people’s nursing home, to which, my father used to joke, they might eventually graduate, “when we reach our dotage.” But only weeks before, dotage had lain comfortably in the twenty-first century, and the bungalow had been bought with a long tenure in mind. The camper, in which my parents had toured Europe, east and west, was parked out front. My father’s researches into the history of Channel Island privateering, in which his Priaulx ancestors had been ac
tive in the eighteenth century, took him and my mother on regular jaunts to Guernsey, St. Malo, Cherbourg, as well as to county record offices all over England.
The bungalow’s one stab at grandeur was its lawn, which could have held a tennis court with ample room left over. In the last year, my father had been planting it with saplings, to break up the monotony of mown grass. In the half-dark, I could see their spring leaves hanging limp from the drought. To plant young trees, I thought, is tempting fate, an activity that ought to be reserved for children.
“I do hope this rain keeps on,” my mother said. “Peter heard it, and he was very pleased. He’s been worrying about the garden.”
I left to drive back to London after eleven that evening. Fearing the slippery wet lanes, I got onto the motorway at the nearest junction, a few miles west of Harborough. Traffic was thin at this time of night. I was dazzled by my own lights on the wet black surface of the carriageway. Heavy lorries sped south, big as cargo ships. To right and left, the darkness crowded in—a thick fir forest. By Newport Pagnell, where I stopped for petrol, I was seeing boils and whirlpools in the road. To rid myself of these marine hallucinations, I turned up the radio and got the news on Radio 4, followed by the shipping forecast.
“Dogger, Fisher, German Bight … Humber, Thames, Dover … Wight, Portland, Plymouth …” There were gale warnings for Fastnet and Irish Sea. Southwest 7, rising to gale 8 later.
I was back among the whirlpools, passage-making through the forest.
Death is a wilderness in which everyone is lost for words.
Two days of steady rain transformed the garden, and by the Saturday of my parents’ wedding-anniversary party, the leaves on the saplings had recovered their bounce and the banks of flowers were in profuse bloom. On the lawn, Julia and her cousin Alethea, two months apart in age, raced screaming and naked while their thirteen-year-old cousin James chased them with a water hose.
Things were less simple at the lawn’s east end, where the grown-ups were sprawled on the grass or seated in candy-striped garden chairs on the crazy-paving. The four sons, ranging in age from 34 to 53, looked like peas from one pod: dark, narrow-beamed six-footers. Only I had inherited the baldness on my mother’s side of the family, a deficiency I tried to keep hidden under a baseball cap worn indoors and out. Our brotherly similarity of build was deceiving. We all had the same deep voice but spoke in different accents, and were riven by ancient slights and grievances, never explicitly spoken of, never resolved. As Arabs and Israelis, Belfast Protestants and Catholics, might warily exchange small talk at some unfortunately arranged cocktail gathering, so my brothers and I, glasses in hand, spoke to one another on topics carefully chosen for their neutrality. Three of us had a child apiece, and the partner of the fourth was expecting a baby. Three of us owned sailing boats. Three of us sported rival brands of cellular phone. Brought together now, for the first time in many years, by my father’s cancer, each was doing his best to put on the family play; but we were drastically underrehearsed in our parts, and our lines sounded wooden, even by the forgiving standards of a first reading.
Each of us had a long-standing alliance with one of the others, and the easiest thing for all of us, when we dried up onstage, was to fall back into two camps of four people apiece, with the female partners standing by their men. Jean, as the visiting American, carried the least baggage, and was the most socially mobile of the women, though she incurred the odium of having married me.
Yet we tried, as our mother, back-and-forthing it between our father in the bedroom and the drinkers in the garden, watched for the old signs of trouble, some of them dating back nearly half a century. I could see the worry on her face as she stepped out from the sunroom. Had she heard the Syrian say “Golan Heights,” or the Protestant “Sovereignty”? No, she hadn’t. But among the sounds of ice tinkling in vodka and the giddy frolics of the dripping three-year-olds, the danger was real.
We visited Peter in relays. Jean carried Julia in her arms when it was our turn. My father gave us a game smile, exposing the tombstone-teeth that were among my inheritances from him.
Julia stared. “Is that my Grandad Peter?” she said.
“Having a good time?” my father said.
“Yes, thank you.” Her eyes were wide while she took in the strange color of my father’s skin, his sunken eyes, those teeth. “Can I go play with Alethea now?”
“See you later, Peter,” Jean said. “Say goodbye to Grandad …”
“Goodbye, Grandad Peter.”
When we were left together, my father said, “Begonia and Alethea are looking well …”
“Jean and Julia,” I said. “Can I get you anything? Ginger? A glass of wine?”
“Not right now, old boy. I’m quite comfortable as I am.”
I took his hand in mine. He looked surprised—and even, possibly, a little frightened. Things were not usually thus between us. I let the hand drop, but said: “You’re setting us all a hell of an example to follow … handling this with so much bravery. We’re all very proud of you.”
A sudden, lively argumentative gleam came into my father’s eyes.
“Oh, I don’t know about ‘bravery,’ ” he said. He was back in his come-off-it-old-boy voice—the one he’d used to debunk my latest, university-fed ideas in the days when I’d fancied myself a Marxist literary theoretician. What should have accompanied the voice was a long, considered exhalation of St. Bruno pipe smoke. But my father had quit smoking in 1992. His first day off his pipe had coincided with the morning on which he’d taken captainly charge of the narrow boat that Jean and I had rented to tour the Oxford and Grand Union canals.
“I don’t know about bravery. I’d say it was more of a question of what kind of act you put on. Wouldn’t you, old boy? Presentation of self and all that?”
This was an allusion. In the mid-1960s, when I was teaching literature at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, and my brother Colin was reading sociology at the University of Manchester, the three of us used to sit up till three and four in the morning, wrangling amiably over bottles of red plonk. Colin and I were both interested in “role theory,” and had made Peter read Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
“Well, if it’s an act,” I said, “it’s a wonderfully brave act.”
“It … doesn’t … take … bravery,” my father said, laying out the words between us, one by one. Then he made a mild, self-deprecating, harrumphing sound; a very English laugh.
At a little after three o’clock, my mother came out to say that Peter was getting up and would soon be joining us.
“Is he really strong enough for this?” I asked.
With a touch of anger in her voice, she said, “Yes! He’s feeling much better now, and he doesn’t want to miss the party.”
Ten minutes later, my youngest brother, Dominic, piloted my father out to the sunroom door in the hideous wheelchair. Though the temperature was in the eighties, he was cocooned in blankets. Below the knees, the legs of his striped pajamas fluttered round ankles that seemed little more than bare bones. The pajamas themselves, with their convict-pattern and extreme thinness, looked as if they might have survived from his boarding school days. He nodded and smiled, the cavernous black sockets of his eyes masked by glasses now. His hair had been brushed neatly back, and his silver beard glittered in the westering sun.
Glasses were raised. Someone said, “Happy anniversary!” but it wasn’t me.
My father got his right hand disentangled from the blankets and slowly raised it level with his head, first and second fingers erect, with the third and fourth held back by his thumb. The gesture was entirely familiar to me, though I couldn’t quite place from where. I thought it belonged to the resurrected Christ in an Italian painting.
He’s going to give us a benediction! This was strange. At theological college in the early 1950s, then for the next few years as a deacon and curate, my fa
ther, like his own, also a parson, had been a ritualist, an Anglo-Catholic. He had gone in for heavy vestments and incense; had said the daily orders—Prime, Matins, Compline, Vespers. Then, in the 1960s, under the influence of the Church of England modernists such as John Robinson, the bishop of Woolwich and author of Honest to God, my father had dropped all the high-church trappings, even to the point, eventually, of never wearing his dog collar. Watching the raised hand, the skyward-pointing fingers, I thought: He’s gone back to Anglo-Catholicism; and the benediction, when it comes, looks as if it may well be in Latin.
Yet he didn’t speak. The hand was moving slowly from side to side. He wasn’t blessing; he was counting.
“All my sons,” he said.
“Wine, Peter?”
“Oh, just a small glass. White. White would be nice.”
He held it, but did not drink. He grinned, in a vague, grandfatherly way, at Julia and Alethea, who were struck mute, lemur-eyed, as if God himself had appeared to them in the middle of a burning bush.
We had return tickets to fly back to Seattle on the Tuesday after the anniversary party. “Take Julia back,” I said to Jean. “I’ll wait. Until.”
“Don’t you want us to stay?”
“This isn’t a time for Julia. She needs to get back to normality, or she’ll forget what normality is.”
But that was my cover. I wanted to be alone. If I were to properly play the role of son as my father lay dying, I couldn’t manage the roles of husband and father too. I saw Jean and Julia on to the plane at Heathrow and drove direct to Jermyn Street, where I tried on a ready-made double-breasted charcoal-gray suit.
“A little bit on the heavy side, perhaps, sir, for this time of year?”
“I need it for a funeral.”
“Oh, I’m very sorry,” said the man, in a very unsorry sort of tone. Then a note of genuine anxiety showed. “What day will you be needing it, sir?” I’d told him that I wanted the cuffs on the trousers removed (I had to kick myself into remembering they were called “turn-ups” here), a slimming pleat taken in on the spine of the jacket, and a slight lengthening of the sleeves.
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