The Good Father

by Marion Husband

  Dunn looked grave. He gazed down at my father’s last will and testament as if he knew it off by heart but wanted to make doubly certain he had it straight before reading it to me. I presumed he would read it, formally, leadenly, like those actors playing his role in films as a motley crew of would-be murderers wait on the edge of their seats. But he looked up at me and, gently he said, ‘Mr Wright, I should let you know now that your father has left everything to a man named John Philip Jackson. Everything. He has made no provision for you, none at all. I’m sorry.’

  John Philip Jackson . For a moment I had absolutely no idea who he was talking about; it crossed my mind that my father had picked out someone randomly from the telephone directory. Then I realised that he meant Jack. I laughed shortly. I should have guessed – of course, how obvious it was!

  ‘Mr Wright?’

  Dunn looked even more worried; perhaps he thought he had an imbecile on his hands because his voice became soft and rather slow, his pronunciation even clearer. ‘Mr Wright, your late father has left everything to this man, John Jackson. I think you should know that you can contest the will, if you wish.’

  ‘Would there be any point? He was of sound mind, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Arguably.’

  I laughed again. ‘He was, Mr Dunn. More than sound, I would say. Pain made his wits even sharper. You haven’t drunk your coffee. Please, don’t let it grow cold.’ Suddenly puzzled, I said, ‘Shouldn’t Jack have been present, to hear this?’

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘John Jackson.’

  Dunn looked down at the will again. ‘It was a stipulation of the will that you should know first.’

  I nodded. ‘Is it also a stipulation that I should be the one to tell Jack?’

  The man frowned at me as though rather shocked at such an idea; he obviously didn’t know my father very well. ‘No, Mr Wright. I shall write to Mr Jackson.’

  Because he looked so concerned, so anxious for me, I said again, ‘Drink your coffee, Mr Dunn, please. And do try the cake – it’s really very good.’

  He ignored me. ‘Do you know Mr Jackson?’

  ‘Yes.’ I edged the plate of cake towards him. ‘If you enjoy the cake I’ll give you some to take home. I’ll never get through it, although I haven’t the heart to tell Mrs Hall. I know I’ll end up surreptitiously throwing it to the birds. Actually I should give it to Jack, for him and the children, although I suppose it’s his anyway, now. How does this work, Mr Dunn? Am I to just pack a suitcase and go? But then really the suitcases belong to Jack now, too. My clothes are my own, I suppose? Not that he’d want them.’

  ‘I’m sure Mr Jackson will give you time to organise your affairs, Mr Wright.’ In that preposterously gentle voice of his he said, ‘How well do you know him?’

  ‘I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t think that’s any of your business.’ Tired of his demeaning concern I said, ‘This isn’t a shock to me, Mr Dunn, as I believe you imagine it to be. I neither want nor expect your sympathy.’

  ‘I understand.’ He sighed. To my surprise he began to eat the cake, taking sips of coffee between bites. He ate with great concentration and delicacy, his eyes fixed blankly on the middle distance; I don’t believe I have ever seen anyone look so sad whilst eating cake, so absent from the pleasure of it. He had obviously never known starvation. At once I realised how unfair this bitter thought was; after all, often enough I took no joy from food. Besides, I wouldn’t wish starvation on anyone.

  He caught me looking at him and smiled rather bleakly. ‘You’re right, it’s good cake.’ As if he felt the need to make conversation he said, ‘Your father told me that you’re a draughtsman, Mr Wright. Where do you work?’

  ‘A draughtsman?’ This was a new one on me. Usually he would say only that I was an invalid; sometimes he would say that I was feeble-minded to boot. I daresay he thought he would appear too cruel in disinheriting a feeble-minded invalid, so he had to think up some other description of me. I don’t know why he should have had such contempt for draughtsmen as to describe me as one of their number.

  Dunn said, ‘I presume that’s not what you do?’

  ‘No. I illustrate children’s books.’

  ‘Really?’ His face became more animated as though this was terribly fascinating. ‘That must be very rewarding.’ He went on smiling at me. ‘What kind of books do you illustrate?’

  ‘Collections of fairy tales, mainly.’

  He nodded enthusiastically. ‘Wonderful! I know the Grimm Brothers’ stories very well. My wife . . .’ His smile slipped a little. Quickly he said, ‘My wife came from the place where they were born. Jakob Grimm was a great German linguist.’ He breathed out sharply. ‘Anyway, Mr Wright, if there’s anything I can do to help in any way . . .’

  I laughed. ‘Do you have a spare room, at all?’

  He gazed at me and for a brief moment I truly believed he was about to cry. ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Wright.’

  I wanted to comfort him. I said, ‘It’s all right, Jack is a friend. Perhaps he’ll keep me as his lodger, eh?’ He didn’t look much comforted so I went on, ‘Don’t worry, Mr Dunn. Things have a habit of working out, in my experience.’

  ‘Do they?’

  I nodded and he frowned at me. All at once he said, ‘Your father also told me you were a prisoner of war. Was that a lie, too?’

  ‘No.’ I glanced away from him, imagining the contempt in my father’s voice as he told him this. Knowing that this kind man would have been embarrassed by such contempt made me feel ashamed. After all, what type of man has a father who despises him so much? I made myself look at him. I said, ‘I’d like to tell Jack about this business myself. Is that all right? I know you’ll need to write to him officially, but all the same, I don’t want him to think that I don’t know about it. I don’t want this to be any more awkward than it need be.’

  ‘Of course you must do what you think best, Mr Wright.’ He hesitated then. ‘Were you a prisoner in Germany?’

  ‘No. In Burma.’

  His eyes widened, a mixture of shock and pity on his face – the same expression I’ve seen before when I’ve told people how I’d spent the war. ‘I’m sorry.’

  So, I’d earned myself yet more sympathy. Standing up, wanting more than anything to get him out of the house, I said blithely, ‘Yes, well – I did hear the Germans were a little kinder to their POWs. Now, there wasn’t anything else, was there?’

  He got up, this big, commanding man who pitied me to the point of being insufferable. If my father had not tried to poison his mind against me he might have treated me normally, without his bloody kid gloves. He might have noticed that I was a man just as he was and not some terribly wronged child. I saw him to the door; I held out my hand to him and thanked him for coming. I have my dignity. At least I have always had that.

  After Dunn left, I went upstairs to my father’s bedroom and sat down on his stripped-bare bed. I stared at his wardrobe where his shirts and suits still hung, where his shoes were neatly lined up together in their pairs, where his ties were coiled into a drawer like snakes. Above the hanging rail are box files, made of heavy, marbled cardboard in dark reds and greys, pristine because I bought them from the stationer’s only last week. The files are stacked one on top of the other; they contain my father’s diaries.

  My father kept a diary every day of his life from when he was a boy. Not all his diaries are in the files, of course, there were many that I burned. Amongst those I kept were the ones he wrote during the 1914-18 war, and during the time when he met and married my mother, because on the pages of those diaries he seems like a different person; he is brave and optimistic, a good soldier and a thoughtful lover. He writes of my mother tenderly, with words that remind me of the old music-hall songs popular when he was a young man: she is his love, his turtle dove, his sweetheart. He cannot quite believe she could care enough even to look twice at him. She is the sweetest, loveliest thing and he is crazy for her, half-mad with love. Time and again he wish
es that she would be nice to him and not tease him so cruelly.

  He promises himself he will ask her to marry him and his nerve fails. Then, when he finally asks her and she says yes – well, that is a day in May that is full of exclamation marks, of flowers and cupids and hearts pierced with arrows so that his joy and excitement leap from the page. I found myself smiling, as pleased for him as if I hadn’t already known her answer or knew what was to come. I found myself liking him, and it was an unsettling feeling that too quickly became grief for this father that I never knew. I cried for him, the tears that have been expected of me these last few days.

  My father under-estimated his illness; he didn’t expect it to rob him of his mobility quite as quickly or as suddenly as it did. I know he intended to burn all the diaries himself before he gave himself up to the cancer. Instead, much to his horror, he had left it too late.

  One afternoon, I heard him fall and ran upstairs to find him on his hands and knees by the fireplace in his bedroom, his face as white as the paper he was trying to destroy. I hadn’t seen his diaries before, I had no idea he kept them. As I carried him back to bed he raged at me, gasping through his agony that I was not to read a word – not a word! I laid him on the bed, reassuring him, saying anything at all that I thought might quieten him. He grasped my arm and pulled himself up so that his face was near mine.

  ‘You will burn them, every page.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Of course.’

  ‘And you must promise me – promise me most faithfully that you won’t read a word.’

  ‘Hush. Hush now.’ As I tried to ease him down onto his pillows, I had an idea he was delirious. He was certainly not himself, not the man who would ever dream of extracting a promise from me, being certain that I would never keep it.

  He gazed up at me and for a moment his face cleared of pain. Then he said, ‘What does it matter now?’ He snorted. ‘Nothing matters now. Read them all – burn them all, do what you like.’

  I sat with him until he slept, until it was almost dark, so that when I got up I stumbled over the diary he had been about to burn when he fell. I picked it up and saw that it was for the year 1954. I put it down on the mantelpiece; I had no interest in what he wanted to write about that terrible year. I went into my own room and got ready for bed. Then I went downstairs and made cocoa and listened to the news on the wireless before locking the doors and climbing the stairs. I did all these habitual things automatically and thought only of 1954, that November when Carol was killed.

  1954 had been, until its end, a rather good year for me. My recovery had been a slow process, so slow, so many tiny, shuffling steps towards believing I could have something of an ordinary life – the first time I went to the cinema on my own, for instance, and managed to convince myself that I wasn’t being stared at or whispered about because I looked so strange, a skeleton whose clothes had miraculously failed to rot along with his flesh. Dressing one morning, I’d caught a glimpse of my naked body in my wardrobe mirror and was startled. I made myself confront my reflection full on, something I hadn’t done for years, since my discharge from hospital where there always seemed to be mirrors and weighing scales and tape measures to alienate me from myself. That morning in the spring of 1954 I saw in the mirror an almost ordinary man. Because it was Sunday, as usual I walked to Carol’s house to sit with the twins while she, Jack and Hope went to Mass. Carol smiled at me, puzzled.

  ‘What’s happened?’ She took a step back as if to see me better. Looking me up and down she said, ‘Something’s changed.’

  I grinned, scooping up the boys, one in each arm. ‘Nothing’s changed – nothing of any consequence.’

  She put her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide. ‘You’ve met someone – I can see it in your eyes. Jack!’ She turned to him as he came out from the kitchen, rushed as usual, frowning. ‘Jack – Pete’s met someone!’

  He turned his frown on me. ‘Really?’

  ‘No. Carol’s jumping to conclusions.’ I smiled at her, hoping to see something in her eyes that betrayed even a little jealousy of this suddenly invented woman. ‘There’s no one else. I just feel happy this morning, that’s all.’ I kissed the boys and put them down; immediately they clamoured at my legs to be lifted up again. Carol went on gazing at me, unconvinced. Perhaps there was some jealousy in her eyes, in the way her smile faltered. She became brusque, scolding the boys for being too noisy for poor Uncle Peter; she wouldn’t look at me as she kissed my cheek before she left. Behind her back, Jack rolled his eyes. He patted my arm. ‘My wife wants everyone married off,’ he said. He laughed shortly. ‘God alone knows why!’ There were times like that when I thought that he hardly knew his wife – that he barely even looked at her; at those times I could have punched him.

  So, in 1954 I had stepped a little from the shade into the light, and I had my work – lots of it. I had found a publisher of children’s books who liked my drawings and there seemed so many children about in those days, so many new parents to buy storybooks to read at bedtime. I saw pregnant women everywhere, many already pushing a pram and tugging a toddler along by his hand. I drew these mothers and children for a series of schoolbooks designed to help infants learn to read – my bread-and-butter work – and so I was able to save a little money, beginning to hope that the woman Carol had invented for me might come along. If she did, I would have enough for us to set up our own home, away from my father. I began to imagine I was ready to leave him in the autumn of 1954.

  My father was still working at the bank at that time, the manager of the Leeds & Pennine on the High Street, leaving the house at eight-thirty prompt every morning, returning just as promptly at five. Mrs Hall cooked our meals, cleaned the house and did our laundry. I discovered how little my father paid her and increased her wages with my own money. I discovered too, quite soon after I returned home in 1946, just how much my father was drinking.

  He drank each morning, a swift, stiff short to see him to the bank. He filled a silver hip flask with Scotch and slipped it discreetly into the inside pocket of his jacket to be reached for just as discreetly whenever he felt the need; it was reverently added to his morning coffee, served at eleven in his office by one of the bank girls, and just as reverently to his afternoon tea. He called these sneaked drinks his tipples, his little snifters, and it was a kind of boasting because he knew I hadn’t the stomach for alcohol – another of my many failings at manliness in his eyes. He drank steadily all day, seemingly immune. At night he drank himself into oblivion and this suited me. I’m ashamed of how much his drinking suited me.

  After Carol was killed I had reason to be ashamed, more reason than enough to be sick with shame and guilt – so sick that I lost the little weight I’d managed to gain. Not that I cared, not that I ever looked in a mirror again after Carol was killed.

  He killed her. There. I shall be honest now and not look at her death obliquely as I always have in an effort to excuse him – to excuse myself – and to somehow make her death less cruel. After all, it’s kinder to believe that a loved one was killed by accident than to know that she was murdered. But even at the time I knew my father murdered Carol as surely as if he had squeezed his hands around her throat.

  He had been drinking all day, as usual, only that November evening he had a dinner to go to, a rare enough occurrence – he disliked socialising with colleagues, with anyone. I remember that he threw himself about his room, looking for cufflinks, turning out drawers in a search for clean handkerchiefs that were properly folded and pressed for his breast pocket. He asked me to help him fasten his bow tie, scolding me for not being quick enough, but never the less subjecting himself to my ministrations – a foretaste of what lay in store for us both in the years to come. He cursed the bloody fool who had organised this dinner for branch managers, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as he swallowed a mouthful of Scotch from the tumbler on his dressing-table. I suggested that he shouldn’t go – only wishing that he would. He gazed at me scornfully. Of course he
had to go! Of course he had to, if one believes in unchangeable fates.

  The house was so peaceful when he’d gone; I haven’t known such peace since. I worked on an illustration of Snow White finding the dwarves’ cottage in the woods; it was never finished. Weeks later, I crumpled it into the hearth and burned it, unable even to look at it because it seemed so invested with hope, my foolish, optimistic hopes for a future that ended that night.

  I was in bed by the time he came home. I heard the front door slam, heard him blunder about in the hall, and thought that I would turn out my lamp in case it should encourage him to come into my room and berate me for something I had neglected to do. Instead, I placed my book down, listening. He was weeping, crying and moaning an anguished stream of words. I heard him stumble on the stairs, his crying becoming louder. Such a sense of dread filled me, and a panic that had me tossing my bedcovers aside and running to him. He was in the lavatory, on his knees, vomiting and vomiting; at last he fell against the wall, dishevelled, there was mud on his shoes and trousers, a dark stain on his white evening shirt. I crouched beside him.

  He grasped my hands. He looked at me with the kind of desperate relief I had seen only on the faces of men who believed I could save them from dying. ‘Help me,’ he said. He jerked me towards him and I could smell the vomit and alcohol on his breath. His tears splashed onto the backs of my hands. ‘Help me, Peter.’

  I don’t think he had ever used my name before that night; I know he never used it since. At that moment, for the first and only time in my life, I felt that I was his son and he was my father and that there was a bond of love between us. I remember that I brushed away the strand of his hair that had fallen across his eyes and that I tried not to betray my panic. I spoke to him then as I was soon to speak to Hope and the twins, saying that everything would be all right, soothing them with a conviction that shamed me and that later I was to marvel at: I had no idea I could lie so well.