by Francis King
But when they at last returned – all through their absence he had kept his frozen vigil at the window – the two of them were pushing the chair together, just as he and she had so often pushed it together in the past, their hands often touching, and she was talking, smiling, laughing, as was the tall, dark, narrow-faced man.
I’m sorry. Very sorry. But I think it best if we go back with my husband.
Oh, do you really think so? Are you sure?
I think it best.
But not now, not at once!
Better. Yes. I’m sorry. You are so kind, always so kind.
They would be taking the train. Might they leave the pushchair and some other things until they could return in a day or two? Her husband would borrow a van from a friend of his.
Well, yes, of course. If that’s what you want. Of course.
He never saw them again. He never heard from them again. Elsie said that they had vanished from the flat two or three days after their return to it. She made enquiries of the landlords, of the other tenants, and of the Pakistani owner of the store at the corner. But no one had any information. Perhaps they had moved to Brazil. Perhaps to Hungary. Those were the usual surmises.
But it’s so odd!
Yes, it is odd. I hope the poor thing and the baby are all right. Elsie eventually told him that she had spoken to the police. But
they had been ‘unhelpful’.
I was unhelpful too. I should have done something. He thought
that but did not say it.
A ferocious gale battered the seaside town all that night. By turns he slept, half-slept, and lay awake. What am I doing in this tiny boat without any oars? It’s dark and what ought to be water when a wave crashes over me is not water but blood. I feel sick. Seasick, life-sick. Will no one rescue me? That was one dream. He awoke from it to reach out for the glass of water by his bedstead and gulp from it. His throat and mouth felt parched. Then, soon after, still awake, he had to urinate. He remembered, with a terrible pang, how Lidia would leave a glass of water by the vast bed every evening and how she would each morning empty the chamber-pot and scour it out with something that made it stink no longer of urine but, even less agreeably, of carbolic. Why is that it is only in works of fiction and in accounts given by patients to psychiatrists do dreams have a coherent, consequential logic, however perverse?
Once more he drops off, as over a cliff into a boiling sea. Whose room is this that I’m about to enter? Oh, it’s the attic! And why am I so terrified of turning the doorknob? But I must, must, must. The light switch. I can’t see a thing. Yes, up, not down. I remember that. The sudden glare from the overhead bulb – or is it the sudden terror that I feel? – makes me close my eyes tight shut. Open them, must, must. Blood glistens everywhere. It makes zigzag patterns on the walls and the carpet. It drips off the chimneypiece and the vast, dangling light-bulb. The room is empty. No one, nothing there. Except, yes, in the centre of it, yes, the pushchair. Smashed, crushed. It might have been run over by a lorry or a train.
He woke, sat up in the bed, and then scrabbled out of it, frenziedly pushing away the bedclothes as though they too were soaked in blood. That man, with his dark, stern, narrow face, must have killed them both. Must have. He did. Why did I never realise? Why? Why?
Over breakfast he mused on the dream, as he sipped at an acrid cup of instant coffee made, as always, with two teaspoons, not one, from the jar. Yesterday, on his visit to Safeway, he had forgotten to buy any bread and so he had had to toast a stale crust originally intended for the birds. He now constantly dreamed, so that his sleeping life had long since become far more filled with incident than his waking one. He was convinced that through those confused, often terrible night-time visions a voice – perhaps the voice of the person that he once was, perhaps the voice of the person that he was still to become, perhaps even the voice of some guardian angel or even devil – was trying to make itself intelligible to him. Yes, that brute must have killed them both. He nodded to himself, cup to lips, with a lurching, giddying sensation of mingled horror and grief.
Later, in a crescendo of dread, he once again mounted the stairs to the attic. He half expected to find it as in his dream – splashed with blood, empty but for the pushchair, the pushchair smashed. But it was all as it always was: dimly lit by a single forty-watt bulb, dusty, crowded with the debris of times long gone.
He was breathless from the ascent and his legs were trembling. He sank down on to an old cabin trunk, so heavy that it had ceased to be used when porters had ceased to exist, and gasped for air. He put out a hand to the handle of the pushchair and let it rest there. Then, slowly, he began to push it back and forth, back and forth, as he used to do when he and the child were waiting for Lidia’s return. It squeaked and it creaked, the two sounds alternating at regular intervals. It was that regularity that eventually brought him first consolation and then an overwhelming sense of both fatigue and repose. His eyes closed. The hand ceased to push and pull. The pushchair was stationary and silent.
The Interrogations
He had been lively on the first day. He had asked me to prop him up on the pillows – ‘No, no! She can do it’ he irritably told the black nurse, who had just taken his temperature and blood pressure and was about to start on the pillows. ‘Let my daughter do it. She’s strong. She’s got plenty of time and you’ve made it clear that you’ve far too much on your hands already.’
With a sigh and a frown, the nurse left the room.
‘She’s always in a hurry, that one. All the nurses here are in a hurry. All of them seem to be either black or Australians. I prefer the Australians. I hate it when that woman touches me. I can smell her when she’s close. Why do they all have that peculiar smell?’
I was appalled. But, as others so often reminded me and as I so often reminded myself, one had to make allowances for a man of eighty-four. He belonged to a different era, almost to a different species, at once more jovial and more brutal than ours. He had also worked for most of his life as jute-merchant in Bombay, with large domestic and office staffs of Indians, whom he had treated as serfs. Once again I told myself that I mustn’t ‘lose my rag’ – as he would often put it when I lost my temper with him. So all I said, as though making a joke of it, was: ‘Oh, father, please! You must get over these prehistoric attitudes of yours.’
‘You know by now that I have no use for this political correctness. I say what I think. I’ve always done so. I’ll go on doing so. If that’s prehistoric, so be it.’
I decided to change the subject. ‘ How is it here?’
‘Well, you can see for yourself. It’s not a bad room. The kind you’d accept in a two-star hotel.’ For a while his grating cough silenced him. He swallowed hard, and swallowed again, as though
something had stuck in his throat. ‘And the staff are all right except
– as you saw for yourself – they’re always in a hurry.’
‘Is the television now working?’
‘Yes, a man – another black of course – came to fix it. Channel
One is still a fuzz. But otherwise it’s fine. Not that I get much
pleasure out of it these days. I can’t hear it properly, can’t see it
properly.’
‘And the food?’
‘Passable. They must keep the microwave busy.’
‘Roy sent his best wishes. And the children. They plan to visit
you at the weekend.’
‘Decent of them.’ He was clearly not interested. He was not
going to ask whether Roy had had any news about the job for
which he was in the running, or whether Janet’s worryingly persistent
rash was any better.
He licked his dry lips, closed his eyes, grunted, sighed. The
shrivelled leaf of his consciousness eddied, dipped, and was sucked
down into the still, dark, dangerous waters on which it had been
floating.
The silent interrogation
began.
Why am I here?
Because we could no longer cope with you.
Wasn’t the house large enough?
Yes. Yes, of course.
And who gave you the house?
You did, father. As our wedding present.
Didn’t I always love you more than your stepbrother and
stepsisters?
Yes. Yes, I believe that.
Then why did you decide to dump me here?
It wasn’t a question of dumping you. We did what we thought
was best.
Best for me or best for you all?
Best for you and for us.
You said you couldn’t cope. But you had the carers. Not that
they were much bloody good. But still – you had the carers. Didn’t you?
Yes, we had the carers. But they cost money. Four carers in all. A lot of money.
My money?
Yes, but it was running out. Fast.
And you didn’t want that, did you?
Mercifully, at that moment the shrivelled leaf slowly resurfaced. He drew a long sigh, his amazingly pale-blue eyes fluttered open, he put a gnarled hand up to his cheek and brushed it, as though to remove an invisible cobweb. The signet ring that my mother gave him on their wedding day glinted in the late sunlight from the window beside the bed. I am now wearing it myself. It has the crest of her family, an old and distinguished one, engraved on it. His family was a prosperous one of builders’ merchants, but they had never had a crest. He was proud of my mother’s crest.
‘I dropped off.’ He turned his head from side to side, eyes searching. ‘ What’s happened to my tea?’
‘Oh, it’s far too early for tea, father.’
‘Time goes so slowly here.’
‘Would you like one of the Jaffa cakes I brought.’
‘No.’
‘Or some barley water?’
‘No.’
The black nurse was called Beryl and she came from St Kitts. We had little chats, never in his room but when we met fortuitously in the corridor or at the reception desk. ‘How is he?’ I used to ask. ‘I hope he’s not being too difficult?’ I added once. She replied: ‘Well, he’s a real character, isn’t he?’ One afternoon she told me that she was going off early because her son was having a tonsillectomy at the Royal Free. ‘NHS,’ she added. Was it a dig, an oblique reproach? I decided that, if it were, it was better to ignore it. Instead I asked how many children she had. Six. When I mistakenly told him this, he pulled a face, as though he had unexpectedly tasted something bitter. ‘They breed like rabbits.’
He was getting frailer and vaguer. Roy had once remarked, partly in hatred and partly in admiration: ‘ He has such a sharp edge to him.’ Now that edge was increasingly blunt and rusty.
‘Would you like me to read to you?’
He shook his head. ‘I can’t hear you properly. It’s the frequency. The high frequency. Your voice is too high for me. I can hear that black creature. Perfectly. Her voice is like a female impersonator’s. Not that I want to hear her.’
‘What have you been watching on television?’
‘Nothing. It’s all so dreadful.’
‘Don’t you watch the sport?’ When he lived with us, he would drive Roy crazy with the sound turned up to full as he watched some football match or athletics programme.
‘Can’t be bothered.’ He had been a champion marathon runner just before the War, in which he had served with so much gallantry.
He closed his eyes. ‘Well,’ he said. Then, more softly, merely a whisper: ‘ Well.’
The shrivelled leaf was eddying, about to descend once again into the dark and cold.
Roy doesn’t like me, does he?
Of course he does.
Don’t you remember when he shouted at you in one of his rages: We’ve just got to get rid of the old bugger?
He didn’t mean it. You know what he’s like. When he loses his temper he comes out with silly things like that. He doesn’t mean them.
Are you happy with him?
Yes. Of course.
Fortunately at that moment Beryl entered the room. ‘I must just take his temperature’ she said. I wanted to say ‘ What’s the point of constantly taking his temperature? He’s dying, isn’t he?’ Instead I leaned over him and shook his arm. He stirred, opened his eye. He glared at Beryl. Then ‘ Fuck!’ The word was like a rifle shot in an empty room. ‘ What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Sorry. I have to take your temperature.’ She approached his bed with a slight waddle, her large breasts jutting out under her white apron. Roy would find her attractive, I thought. Voluptuously ample, totally unlike me, she was his sort of woman. ‘What a mess you’ve got your bed into.’ She might have been our Finnish au pair talking to one of the children. ‘ Let me deal with those pillows.’ She put out a strong, fleshy arm, placed it around his shoulders and then eased him up. With the other arm she tweaked the top pillow away from under him.
‘Oh, you bitch!’ he bawled. ‘You did that on purpose. You hurt me on purpose. You know how painful my neck has become.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said coldly. She looked across at me, shrugged, pulled a face. ‘There’s no need to talk me like that.’
‘Oh, get out of here. Get out!’ He yelled the last two words.
Again the shrug, the pulling of a face. ‘And what about your temperature?’
She once more approached the bed and extended the thermometer.
I expected him to shout more abuse at her. Had he bitten the thermometer once she had placed it in his mouth, I should not have been surprised. But now, to my astonishment, he was suddenly docile. Hands to his sides outside the bedclothes, he stared up the ceiling.
‘It’s a glorious day,’ Beryl turned her head to say to me, as she waited for the thermometer to cook.
‘How’s your son?’
‘Oh, he’s fine now. His throat’s a little sore still. But he’s back at school.’
‘That’s good.’
After she had plucked away the thermometer, examined it and left the room, I demanded: ‘How could you speak to her like that. What’s the matter with you?’
‘What’s the matter with me? Haven’t you realised? I’m dying.’
‘That’s no excuse. No excuse at all. If the living owe a duty of respect to the dying, then the dying owe a similar duty of respect to the living. I was utterly ashamed of you.’
‘Oh, she’s such a useless bitch. And I’ve told you, I hate that smell of hers.’
‘What are you talking about? Smell, smell, smell! She has no smell, except the smell of soap. It’s your whole attitude that stinks. You seem to think that you’re back in India shouting abuse at the wogs. You’re not. Whether you like it or not, you’re in another world. You’ve got to learn to behave in it.’
‘Oh, it’s too late for that. You can’t teach a dying dog new tricks.’
He closed his eyes. His usually grey face was blotched with an angry red. He had drifted away from me.
How can you bring yourself to speak to me like that? I thought you loved me.
I do love you, father. But you’re driving me crazy. Why can’t you die with decency and dignity?
Because dying is such an indecent and undignified thing. Do you now dread your visits to me?
Yes. Yes, I have to say it. Yes, I do. You frighten me. You shock me.
Would you rather not come?
Oh, no. No. I must come.
Every day. Why? I’m lucky if I see your stepbrother and stepsisters once a week.
I have a sense of duty. It’s an awful nuisance. I inherited it from mother.
Don’t you have anything more than that?
Yes.
What?
Well, love, I suppose.
His legs suddenly began to twitch under the bedclothes. Dogs’ legs twitch like that when they are dreaming. His eyes opened. He stared at me, as if at a stranger.
‘Father!’ The cry emerged
from somewhere deep inside me with a terrible, tearing sensation. I jumped up and put my hands to his emaciated shoulders, my cold cheek against his hot one. Then I felt his hands pushing me away, with extraordinary violence for someone so ill. ‘Come on! Come on! What’s got into you?’ he protested.
From that visit, his attitude to Beryl wholly changed. He had never before called her by her name. Now he constantly did so, as though just to utter it gave him pleasure. Those bleak, extraordinarily pale blue eyes would suddenly darken and soften as he watched her going about her humdrum tasks of handing him his innumerable pills and then extending a tumbler of water, of taking away a vase of dead flowers or bringing in a vase of fresh ones, of straightening his sheets, of tidying his slippers or the books and magazines on his table. ‘Ah, there’s Beryl,’ he would say when she entered the room. ‘Beryl is going to take her children to Alton Towers,’ he told me. ‘ Tomorrow she has the day off. So the children will be the gainers and I’m to be the loser.’ ‘ Beryl has brought me her Mail. There’s a long article about the ludicrous delays in getting Athens ready for the Olympics.’
She comes into the room and he at once turns his head away from me to look at her. ‘Oh, goodness, your pyjama top is soaked!’ Now he yields himself gratefully to her ministrations. There is a yearning look in his eyes as she eases off the top and wipes down with a towel the once powerful, now emaciated chest, with the livid scar puckering down it. Curiously, there is the same yearning look in her eyes too. Before, she has carried out her tasks, often unpleasant and always unwelcome, with an unheeding briskness. Now her capable hands seem to linger over each small service with rare delicacy and, yes, tenderness. Those services have become stages in a secret rite that only they share. I am excluded from it. ‘That’s better,’ she says. ‘The poor dear is getting these sudden fevers.’ She stoops over him. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’