In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  IX

  Why did I agree to talk to Deborah and her son Charles in the middle of my mother’s agony? It’s a question I keep asking myself now, through these difficult nights in the back bedroom of my mother’s tiny house. Why did I do that? Who would not feel at once how inappropriate it was? ‘I’ll go out for a breath of fresh air,’ I told the nurse. An expression my father used constantly. ‘We could all do with a good breath of fresh air,’ my father used to say. As if his clergyman’s life were all mustiness. ‘Good idea,’ the nurse smiled. ‘Just ring when you want to come back in.’

  Why did I do this? It’s not such a tough a question as: Shall I view my mother’s corpse? Because there is no dilemma. What has happened has happened. There’s nothing that needs deciding before a coffin is sealed, a body burned. But maybe the two issues are not unrelated. And not unrelated either to that other question I had been asking myself a few days before: Why did I agree to go to the conference in Amersfoort, which had nothing to do with my own line of work, an invitation I could easily have turned down or cancelled, when I was falling in love with a fine young woman and was eager to show her my devotion in every way. I could even have used cancelling the conference to further my cause. ‘Elsa,’ I could have said, ‘I am cancelling this interesting and absurdly remunerative conference to spend more time with you.’ Why didn’t I do that? It would have spared me the anal massage. And why, having arrived in Amersfoort and heard that my mother was sinking fast, didn’t I simply stuff my few clothes into my disintegrating Samsonite and head right off at once? Why had I given my talk all the same; not only given it, but actually taken questions afterwards, difficult, finger-in-the-wound questions, lingering so long in my careful responses as to risk missing my plane? And the answer to all these questions can only be my need to be good or, rather, my need to think of myself as good. A man always ready to make his contribution. Only being good, generous, helpful brings me relief. Relief from what? God knows. I have to be good. The problem with Mother’s corpse then is that I don’t know whether it would be goodness to see it or goodness not to see it. I just don’t know. I don’t even know why the decision holds any importance for me. And when I say ‘it’, I refer of course to the person who taught me this obsession and schooled me in this need for goodness or, rather, I refer to her embalmed earthly remains. But how could remains be anything but earthly?

  I pushed open the door of the hospice and stepped out into a blowy English night. Deborah and her son were not there. A man was walking his Labrador dog and speaking on his mobile. I consulted my mobile, where the most recent message said. ‘Arrived. Whenever you can.’ I walked to the gate and looked up and down the road. The air was raw. They were nowhere to be seen.

  I had first met Deborah and David at university thirty and more years before. Deborah before David, a posh, coltish PhD student whom I had tried and failed to make a move on. Perhaps it was my second year. She was older. She didn’t notice my trying. Her father was some top civil servant, her mother one of those women my parents would have said might as well just go over to Rome now and have done with it. Does anyone use such expressions today? I invited Deborah out and attempted to kiss her on a couple of occasions. I was attracted, I suppose, to a certain brittle flamboyancy she had; she was bossy and vulnerable together. She seemed to like younger men. But women have always seemed both vulnerable and bossy to me. Perhaps I mean women’s bodies. Their shape, skin, smell, voices, eyes; everything about them seems precious and commanding. I’m in thrall. The feeling was especially strong in those days with classy women. This awareness of fragility and authority. I mean those women who constantly perform their being female, who are constantly conscious of the drama of being female in the presence of males, but not necessarily for males. They don’t interest me now. Elsa is not like that.

  Deborah didn’t notice my attempts to kiss her. Or she noticed but didn’t take me seriously. She collected me. Not unkindly. She had me run errands for her, search out books, take down notes. I was a good note-taker. One of the errands I ran was to David. We became friends as he fell under Deborah’s classy spell and eventually moved in with her. I was envious. David’s grip on language, on literature, on aesthetics, even politics – and most of all on classy women – was a marvel to me. What did they see in him? He was not handsome. He was a year younger than I was.

  A baker’s son from Nottingham, David had entirely thrown off his humble origins, first with a scholarship to Rugby, then another to Cambridge. His accent had all but gone. He kept just enough of it to remind people of the distance he had travelled, to remind the class he would spend his life among that he was not quite one of them, though actually rather better than them at representing all they aspired to be: cultured, authoritative, charismatic. And over the years, as I watched Deborah and David have children together, grow older together, but without marrying, without ever being somehow 100 per cent together, I sometimes wondered if Deborah hadn’t fallen for David precisely in order to seduce this small part of him that he held back, to possess this residual Midlands accent, this pride in not quite finally and utterly capitulating to the class he had for the most part readily capitulated to, or appropriated, so long ago. While, for David, being with a posh lady like Deborah, a real thoroughbred, only intensified his determination to hold that one thing back, as if the nearer he got to his goal of complete absorption into the British moneyed classes, the more powerfully some original and essential part of himself resisted. Or perhaps he chose Deborah precisely because only a really posh lady like her, a lady who constantly performed her feminine poshness, could give him, day by day, the opportunity of showing off his residual baker’s boy masculine roughness, his otherwise barely visible distinction from them. David wouldn’t marry. He wouldn’t bow to imperatives of propriety and dynasty. He wouldn’t quite speak in the same accent as theirs. Not quite.

  Deborah insisted that she admired him for this. It proved he didn’t want her money. She gritted her teeth and tried in every way to make her money work for him. Imperious and anxious, she commanded in every area but the tiny territory he held back. When you saw them together, in whatever wonderful house they had recently bought, for they seemed unable to decide whether it was better to live in town or out, north London or west, or even Paris for a few years, or Provence where they had a second home, you never felt that David was in possession of his domestic space or that he was really at ease there; he was always slightly on the defensive, wrapped in irony and distance. And at the same time you never felt she was entirely satisfied with where she had him, in one splendid property after another, for although she commanded in everything that mattered, and decided herself when to have children and where to send them to school and where to go on holiday and whom to see at the weekends, nevertheless she never made even the slightest gains in the areas David chose to defend. Always on the attack, Deborah was always held at bay.

  No doubt it was my perception of David’s unease, and his of mine in my very different marriage, that brought us so close together for the period when we both began to have affairs. For a few heady years the exhilaration of betrayal had us constantly eager to be talking to each other, swapping our stories. We were kids truant on the beach, in the pounding surf of new pleasure. Pounding flesh, David laughed. Everything seemed possible. And then, by the same token, as deceit and duplicity became chronic, as it became clear that far from our life’s opening up, we had simply exchanged one prison for another more stressful prison, or prisons rather, then the similarity of our situations, instead of bringing us together, began to push us apart. Having cheated on our wives, we couldn’t leave them. But we couldn’t leave our mistresses, either. And when they left us, we couldn’t live without yearning for another. We still loved to meet, to drink, to exchange stories. But now, rather than excitement over anything new, it was the pleasure in meeting the only person with whom you could share your frustration, even humiliation. ‘If I believed,’ David liked to preface our evenings, muttering t
he words ruefully as we clinked our glasses, ‘that my response were to one who might some day return, etc.’, and after taking a first swallow of his beer he would twist his lips in a queer grin. ‘Fuckin’ inferno, mate.’

  But how often do you need to look a shameful secret in the face? Our meetings grew rarer. More and more firmly stuck in our married lives, we were glad when work prised us apart geographically. David and Deborah had gone to Kingston. Upon Thames, of course. My wife and I had returned to her Edinburgh home. Until – and it must have been shortly before that famous Sunday lunch – my separation shifted things between us. At last I had made a real move. I had gone to Spain, left my wife behind, become Emeritus. And even if I didn’t quite feel I was in the clear yet, I remember being eager to talk it over with David. Perhaps I had wanted to persuade him to follow suit, to convince him it was possible to come out of a life of duplicity, to start again. In any event, whatever the occasion of my visit to London that time, I had stayed an extra day to see him. But what I imagined would be a meeting in a pub, where all could be told and shared over the proverbial pint, turned out to be a lunch with his children and Deborah at which she announced their imminent, after all these years, marriage. I had separated and David was marrying. On her forthcoming birthday. Her sixtieth.

  As we exchanged parting kisses that day, I whispered in her ear, ‘Happy, Deb?’ And she said, ‘Ecstatic.’ She had got her man. She had sapped his resistance at last. If I had come out of the Claygate Hospice, then, in the midst of my mother’s agony, was it really to assist old friends, to lend a hand in Deborah and David’s troubles, or was it rather out of a spirit of Schadenfreude: I wanted to know how their lives, their married lives, had gone so spectacularly wrong? Or was it both? I would be good to them and enjoy their suffering.

  ‘Tom!’ Deborah called. She was hurrying towards me along wet hedges, wearing heels.

  ‘Sorry, this is ridiculous. He’s refusing to get out of the car.’

  She began speaking yards away, open umbrella tugged about in the chill breeze. Her ankles were slim, brittle.

  ‘Please, go and talk to him. I can’t bear it.’

  Now she was beside me, in smart cashmere coat and pink scarf. Once again I had eyes pleading with mine, this time in a carefully made-up face.

  ‘Please. It’s the white Audi, on this side. Get him to tell you what on earth’s going on in his head. I can’t bear it.’

  I embraced her. ‘I’m afraid I only have a few minutes,’ I said.

  ‘How’s your mother?’

  ‘Bad.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Deborah sighed. ‘Just when David and I are finally happy, the boy goes and does this.’

  ‘What did he do, exactly?’

  ‘I told you. He smashed a chair over his father’s head. And he won’t say why.’

  I walked some fifty yards down Grange Road and found the white Audi with the young man sitting, arms folded, in the passenger seat. Opening the driver’s door, I had a strong feeling this was a mistake. I should be concentrating on my mother. On the other hand, these people were old friends. And the nurses had invited me to take time out.

  ‘I’ve only got a few minutes,’ I told Charles, as I sat behind the wheel. ‘It’s a bit weird, to be honest, your mum wanting me to talk to you so urgently.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  I couldn’t judge his mood. He seemed polite but removed. He was a young man from a different generation.

  ‘It’s been a while,’ I said.

  Gazing out of the windscreen, he kept his arms folded.

  ‘When was it? Two summers ago? Eighteen months?’

  ‘You don’t have to waste time with small talk, if your mother is so ill.’

  He was mocking. I looked around. The car was very clean inside, by my standards.

  ‘So just tell me why you hit your dad. What’s it all about? Your mum is frantic.’

  ‘I wish I’d killed him.’

  ‘Come on, Charlie, I’m sure you don’t.’

  ‘I fucking well do!’

  He turned to me and started shouting. ‘I do, and I’m going to.’ He brought down a fist on the dashboard. ‘I’m going to fucking well kill him.’

  I tried not to be impressed. I left a pause. He turned back to the windscreen and folded his arms again.

  ‘What’s he done, then?’

  ‘You can guess.’

  I thought. ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘Yes, you can.’

  I thought some more. ‘You know, I’m really not sure I can, Charlie.’

  ‘You can.’

  Near the hospice I could see that, under her umbrella, Deborah had lit a cigarette. She seemed to be studying the flowerbeds.

  ‘Does it have anything to do with those stories you once sent me?’

  Again he turned to me. His face was leaner and older than I remembered.

  ‘Stories? Christ, no.’

  ‘Charlie,’ I said. ‘Your mum asked me to help, but if you don’t tell me what’s up, there’s not much I can do.’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do if I tell you.’

  I thought about it, or tried to give him the impression I was thinking about it. I said, ‘I suppose I can imagine reasons for being angry with David, but then in the end I can imagine reasons for almost any son being angry with any father. I know my own kids are often angry with me. But why hit him? And why now? Why not years before, or why not some time in the future?’

  ‘Why now?’

  ‘Yes. Why hit him now?’

  Charlie had begun to drum his fingers on the dashboard. I watched him. He could easily have refused to get into the car with his mother, I thought, if he really didn’t want to talk to me. So at least partly he must want to.

  ‘Why now?’ he repeated. His right knee began to bounce up and down. ‘Good question.’

  ‘So?’

  He rocked his shoulders back and forth, as if to music I wasn’t hearing, then asked: ‘Why didn’t you come to their wedding, Tom?’

  The way he used my name shifted something. We were on equal terms.

  ‘I was in South Africa.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I could show you the stamps on my passport.’

  ‘Don’t pretend you don’t understand. I believe you were in South Africa, but I don’t believe that’s why you didn’t come. You decided not to come to his wedding. Then it so happened there was a trip to South Africa.’

  In truth, this was a pretty accurate description of how things had worked out.

  ‘You were Dad’s best friend and you didn’t come to the wedding.’

  I didn’t know how to reply. David hadn’t insisted I go. The official invitation had come from Deborah. I felt David saw the marriage as a defeat. He didn’t want me to be a witness.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘whatever you think about your father, surely the thing to do now is to get on with your own life. You only damage yourself getting involved in theirs.’

  It was advice I’d given my own children any number of times.

  Charles folded his arms again.

  ‘I won’t talk to anyone who’s not straight with me.’

  ‘But why do you suppose …’

  ‘I won’t, and that’s that.’

  It was perplexing. For a moment or two I watched him as he gazed through the windscreen to where his mother was smoking under her umbrella. In profile, his face was strong and handsome, a jutting jaw, Roman nose, deep-set eyes. All his mother’s.

  ‘Write something about it,’ I told him, opening the car door. ‘You wrote those stories to tell the world you were gay, right? I thought they were pretty good. So now write about your father. Tell the world what you think of him. Why not? But don’t get yourself stuck in gaol for assault. That’s just dumb.’

  As I shut the door he was shaking his head from side to side, slowly and theatrically.

  ‘So?’ Deborah demanded.

  ‘I have to get back.’

  ‘Didn�
��t he tell you anything?’

  She was lighting another cigarette and, on impulse, I asked her for one. I’d stopped smoking years ago. It was foolish. She cupped her lighter for me.

  ‘He wouldn’t say. Maybe it has to do with your wedding, though.’

  ‘Our wedding?’

  ‘I told him if he had anything to get out of his system to write about it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rather than clobbering people.’

  Clobbering was a word I hadn’t used in ages.

  ‘But write what?’

  ‘Whatever it is that’s eating him.’

  Deborah didn’t seem convinced. In the fresh air, the tobacco was having a powerful effect.

  ‘I need to be going.’

  I leaned forward to brush her cheek.

  ‘Tom,’ she said, returning the embrace with unexpected warmth. She held on a little and her body shivered against me. It seemed very deliberate. I was being careful to keep my cigarette from her hair.

  ‘I should really be back with Mum now.’

  ‘Remember?’ she said. ‘In Wales that time?’

  ‘Deborah Pool,’ I protested, ‘you’re a married woman!’

  As I pulled away, a voice behind me yelled, ‘Prick!’ I turned and Charlie’s open hand slapped into my face.

  X

  The tenth post-massage pee was the worst. I stood, holding the rail handicapped people use to drag themselves out of their wheelchairs onto the pot. Presumably. One is never actually witness to such scenes. Thank heaven. My sister had told me what a nightmare it had been getting Mother onto the toilet when they released her from hospital a week or so after the fall and sent her in an ambulance down to Swanage. She couldn’t get herself to the bathroom; she was in too much pain even to stand. Back pain, spine pain. Something was seriously wrong. At the same time she hated to use the bedpan. She felt demeaned by the bedpan, humiliated, I suppose, by the proximity of her own excrement. The water closet whisks your shit away, dilutes your piss in an instant, the bedpan does not. Even if only for a few minutes, before your carer comes to sort you out, you are obliged to lie in close contact with your piss and shit. With your smell. Your corruption.