In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  Did my father go to his shrink about me, I wondered?

  St Peter and St Paul was a busy church. On the home page photos came and went every few seconds, beneath eight drop-down menus. On a page entitled The End of Life, I read, ‘Making plans for your death and funeral will be a source of much comfort to those whom you leave.’ That depends on the plans, I thought, and I wondered what my wife could have written to my mother, to get an unpleasant response in return. Just the thought of my mother writing in anger seemed so improbable. It wasn’t her. And if my wife had written about our separation, why hadn’t Mother spoken about it to me? What was the point of my protecting her from the news, if she already knew? Unless Mother was protecting me from the knowledge that I hadn’t been able to protect her.

  If only, she cried.

  Then, clicking on a bright-red button with the word NEWS, I was suddenly looking into my mother’s eyes. Or she was looking into mine. Lay Preacher Martha Sanders Goes Home to Heaven. We were face to face. It was a recent photo that showed all the toll her disease had taken; still, Mum’s eyes were smiling hard. ‘If Martha Sanders was not a saint, I don’t know who is or ever will be,’ the article began. Had I married my wife, I wondered, because she was one of the few people who never succumbed to the myth of my mother’s saintliness?

  XIX

  From the moment I saw the twins detach themselves from the crowd in King’s Cross Station, I was drawn into an atmosphere that was wonderfully familiar. We hugged warmly. They had missed me. We hugged again. They liked my hair shaved pretty much to zero. I liked everything about them, their meatiness and bounce. We laughed. They wanted to go immediately to Tottenham Court Road, where they hoped to buy some gadgetry that would accelerate their game console. They were excited to be in town, excited to be on the Underground. I was excited to be with them. I was a father. And I remembered my pleasure when their older brother and sister had arrived at the hospice, the pleasure of seeing strong grown-up children. ‘You are throwing all that away,’ my wife protested.

  ‘Someone’s got a girlfriend.’ Mark staged a yawn when Matt kept sending text messages. ‘What a bore!’

  ‘Someone’s jealous,’ Matt responded.

  In a pub off Goodge Street they ordered quantities of food. I asked them about their bike race and they explained it had been rained off. Across the table I was overwhelmed by their loud laughter. They had a youth and health quite different from Elsa’s, but that made me think of Elsa. It made me think that to tell them about Elsa would somehow mean the end of my fatherhood. Would it? ‘The problem,’ I remember the shrink remarking, ‘is not not-telling them. Why should you tell anyone about your private life, Señor Sanders? Your private life is yours. The problem is not telling them when you feel you should tell them.’ But the shrink’s voice was fading now. Perhaps I will not go back to Madrid at all, I thought. I will stay in the UK and be a father.

  ‘By the way, there’s someone I might have to see later,’ I said. ‘A woman who was a friend of a friend who’s seriously ill. Remember David Pool.’

  ‘It’s cool,’ the boys interrupted. ‘We’ve got plenty to do.’

  They wanted to know what time the funeral was, and whether they could make it to Twickenham for the rugby game afterwards. England–Scotland. It was less than a mile away. Talking it over, I said it would depend on whether or not they came along after the service, to the cremation. They were perfectly free not to come. The main thing was the funeral, not the committal.

  ‘You’d better see if there are still tickets, though.’

  I couldn’t remember ever having used the word ‘committal’ before. I must have learned it from Father.

  The two fell silent. The twins had always distinguished themselves from each other in all kinds of ways – dress, posture, hair – but all the same there was an intense oneness about them; they emitted the same aura.

  ‘We’ll come,’ Mark said. ‘We’ve come to see Gran off.’

  I felt heartened.

  ‘By the way, can we actually see her, Dad?’

  ‘See her body?’

  They nodded.

  ‘You can,’ I said. ‘Actually, we could go together.’ I looked from one to the other. ‘Are you sure you really want to, though?’

  ‘Mum said it was the thing to do.’

  ‘It’s up to you, really.’

  ‘The truth is we feel bad we didn’t come when she was dying.’

  I smiled. ‘There’s no need to feel bad. But if you do want to see her, we’ll have to phone for an appointment.’

  They hesitated.

  ‘We’ll do it,’ Matt said. ‘We’d like to see her again.’

  ‘Her body,’ I reminded them. ‘It’s not her.’

  ‘Is it frightening?’

  ‘She’s been embalmed,’ I told them.

  Matt wasn’t convinced. ‘Which means?’

  ‘Which means she’s been made to look like she always was.’

  ‘We’ll do it,’ Mark said.

  ‘You’re sure? Shall I phone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When? When would you like to go?’

  They seemed to consult together, without speaking.

  ‘This afternoon.’ Matt grinned. ‘Get it over with.’

  ‘Okay.’

  They listened while I pulled out my old Nokia and phoned at once, from the pub.

  ‘Good afternoon. It’s Tom Sanders here, son of Martha Sanders who’s in your care. We would like to come to’ – I hesitated – ‘to view the body. This afternoon.’

  ‘Four o’clock,’ I told the boys.

  They ate quietly for a while and I asked them how their mother was.

  ‘Fine,’ they both said. ‘Mum’s fine.’

  When we got back to Mother’s house towards three-thirty, the woman I had seen at the hospital was sitting on the doorstep, smoking. She wore the same jeans and grey coat.

  At the gate, Mark leaned across to whisper in my ear. ‘Cute.’

  Twenty minutes later we all walked together to the undertaker’s, rang the bell and I left the twins there. As we walked away, the woman remarked, ‘They seemed anxious.’

  ‘It’s their first dead body,’ I told her.

  Her name was Mary Hammond. But at first it seemed she wanted to know all about me, rather than vice versa.

  ‘David never stopped talking about you. He felt it was an omen when you left your wife. He’d thought you never would. And you live in Madrid now?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It must be fantastic.’

  ‘It’s far away,’ I said.

  On automatic pilot, I crossed the road to the bus stop; we could go to Marble Hill and the river, I thought. As we spoke, my boys were viewing Mother’s corpse.

  Mary Hammond asked me if I was happy.

  I said it was not an easy question to answer, when your mother had just died.

  ‘But are you seeing someone? In Madrid.’

  ‘David didn’t mention that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sure, I’m seeing someone. We’ve just moved in together.’

  ‘That’s great.’

  As we stepped off the bus, the day was dull and cold. We crossed the road and set off across the park towards the river.

  ‘Tell me how you met David,’ I asked.

  ‘That’s a bit of an issue. You must promise not to tell anyone.’

  I promised.

  ‘It was through his son, Charlie.’

  ‘You know Charlie?’

  ‘I went out with Charlie. Briefly.’

  ‘But you’re older.’

  ‘Three years. Just. Charlie went to school with my little brother, that’s how I met him. We went out for a month or two.’

  ‘But isn’t he gay?’

  She laughed. ‘He is and he isn’t.’

  I tried to calculate. David must have had Charlie in his early thirties. Which made the age difference between himself and Mary just a little less than that between my
self and Elsa.

  ‘You went from son to father?’

  She shook her head. ‘With Charlie, it was a sort of fun friendship. It wasn’t anything really. We didn’t do anything. With Dave, it was electric. We knew that we loved each other instantly. Only it wasn’t a great way to start, I suppose. That’s why we’ve been so secretive.’

  ‘But Charlie knows. He gave me your phone number.’

  She stopped and grabbed my wrist.

  ‘Charlie mentioned me? To you?’

  ‘Not exactly. He gave me a number and told me to call it, and it was yours.’

  She thought about this for a moment and we started to walk again.

  ‘The fact is, that’s not my regular number. He must have found some messages on David’s phone, but not my name. We had rules about that. No names on the phone.’ She frowned. ‘I nearly jumped out my skin when you called, because I never use that phone for anything except to speak to Dave. It has a special ring for him and another for anyone else, but no one else had ever called. Afterwards I phoned him at once to find out what was going on. I had no idea anything had happened. And of course he didn’t reply. He hadn’t told me anything.’

  I tried to understand. ‘When did you last speak to him? You knew he’d been in hospital?’

  ‘Of course! We spoke a dozen times a day. He called me right after the accident. I knew he was going to be out of it for a few days, after a bad fall like that. Obviously it would have been tricky to visit him in hospital. We were going to meet the evening he was discharged.’

  Her voice faltered.

  ‘He never said anything about being desperate or taking his life.’

  We had reached the river now and the water was moving sluggishly at low tide. We sat on a bench dedicated to the loving memory of someone who had enjoyed walking here, and once again I thought that what I should have done was to stand beside my sons as they viewed Mother’s corpse. We should have seen her together. Why did I allow events to capture me like this? My friend’s melodrama was his business, not mine.

  They had met in David’s house, she said now, three years ago. At the time she had just been awarded a PhD place in the States, but understood at once that she would never go. She wanted to be with him as much as possible.

  ‘Life changed completely. In a matter of days. It was crazy. We did crazy things.’

  I waited. Mother was laid out in her bonnet and blue tailleur, and my boys were standing beside her.

  ‘He was married, of course. And he was Charlie’s father. But you could see the marriage had died ages ago. I hardly even thought of it. David said we just had to believe, and it would work out for us.’

  This didn’t sound like something David would ever have said. I wondered if he had told her he was married, which of course he hadn’t been at the time, or whether she had simply assumed he must be.

  Mary talked about the holidays they had taken together. Cornwall, Scotland. They were youthful, inexpensive holidays, camping and hiking, not the four-star hotels Deborah preferred. They had surfed in the Atlantic on Sennen beach. They had walked the length of the Ridgeway. It wasn’t the David I knew at all.

  ‘He changed. He kept saying, I’m changed, I’ve finally changed! He didn’t smoke when he was with me. He didn’t drink.’

  ‘Didn’t drink!’

  He had lost weight, she said. They had rented a flat for her. In Richmond. So they could spend nights together.

  ‘I didn’t understand how he could wangle this, being married. He said his wife barely noticed where he was or what he was up to.’

  She began to describe a cycling trip in Holland. Imagining David cycling was beyond me. Mary was not his type of woman. David went for tall, sassy women in smart skirts and heels, with smart accents, women his own age, or not much younger, with a place in society and forceful opinions and other well-established relationships. Mary was a generous, earnest young woman, well built, round-faced, with a frank, wide mouth and full lips. Ready to begin life.

  ‘Did he introduce you to his friends?’

  ‘He wanted me to meet you, but you were always abroad.’

  ‘It didn’t get claustrophobic, just you two?’

  She hesitated. ‘Not claustrophobic. Just that I wanted things to move on. I wanted to tell people I was in love.’

  ‘You put pressure on him.’

  ‘He put pressure on himself! The problem was always that we’d met through Charlie. He didn’t see how we could get round that. Then I was ill for a while. Last spring. I had stomach pains. They did all sorts of tests and never found out what it was. For two or three months. I was feverish and weak. Dave was fantastic. He did everything for me.’

  ‘David’s a wonderful guy.’

  Mary twisted her neck from side to side as though trying to release a stiffness. ‘When he told me you’d left your wife, I took it as a sign. I think he saw your lives as parallel. He said, If Tom has left his wife, anything can happen. He kept saying, Let’s go to Madrid and visit Tom.’

  I sat staring at the river. I liked Mary, but what was I supposed to say to her? That there had been no fall. That David lied to her systematically? And to everyone else.

  ‘Didn’t you tell anybody at all?’

  ‘A couple of friends. But no one who mattered.’

  ‘And you’re sure Charlie doesn’t know?’

  She shrugged. ‘I see him now and then at my brother’s. I’d have noticed if there was a change.’

  ‘And your brother doesn’t know?’

  ‘No.’

  I thought about it. Why had Charlie asked me to get in touch with this woman? What was it supposed to lead to? A justification for his assault on his father? While marrying my mother, my father is still playing around with other women, promising to marry them even. Was I supposed to tell Deborah? Why didn’t he tell her himself? Or was I supposed to tell Mary that David had finally married the woman who had never been his wife, while pursuing this relationship with her? So that she would then leave him alone? Did everybody think that if nothing was ever officially declared, it could all be reversed and denied and no damage done?

  Mary leaned forward, elbows on her knees and chin on two white fists. She spoke in a flat voice: ‘Sometimes I felt I didn’t really exist. And now he’s at death’s door and no one understands why I’m grieving.’

  I couldn’t find anything to say.

  ‘I’m usually a happy person,’ she said.

  Out on the river there was a solitary rower sculling swiftly upstream, occasionally resting his oars to twist around and see where he was going. The conversation had completely emptied me. My sons had seen Mum and I hadn’t been with them.

  ‘You said it was your mother’s funeral tomorrow? Maybe I’ll come along. No one asks why you’re crying at a funeral.’

  ‘Feel free,’ I told her. ‘St Peter and St Paul, Hounslow. Two o’clock.’

  Her shoulders trembled. She put her face in her hands. ‘I can’t,’ she muttered. ‘I just can’t.’

  I waited.

  ‘I can’t let go of him. I can’t believe he did this. I keep thinking it must be my fault.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘We were so happy! And there were no obstacles, not really. Who cares how we met? His wife is rich. There was no money problem. She’d lost all interest in him.’

  I hesitated, then said quietly, ‘I don’t know about that.’

  Mary’s eyes were red. ‘Okay. But even if she did care and it mattered to her – even if it really mattered, I mean – why did we have to suffer instead of her?’

  ‘That’s a good point.’

  ‘And his children are grown-up. They aren’t babies. They aren’t even adolescents.’ She found a pack of tissues in her bag.

  ‘There are children,’ I said, ‘who decide to stay children. Or whose parents want them to. For whatever reasons.’

  ‘Charlie,’ she said.

  We looked at the brown water tugging at an anchored rowing bo
at. Three ducks were hunkering down in an eddy by the near bank.

  ‘Why did he do it? Why would anyone try to kill themselves when they are with someone they love?’

  She turned and leaned against me and I put an arm round her.

  ‘We could have been so happy. We could even now, if he got better.’

  I sensed she wanted some encouragement from me.

  ‘If I had an ounce of courage, I’d go and tell them all to fuck off and leave him to me and I’ll nurse him. They should just all fuck off, his wife and his children. Then he’d come round.’

  ‘David wasn’t well,’ I said.

  She blew her nose and pulled back a little.

  ‘When do you think he’ll wake up? What are the doctors saying?’

  ‘The doctors aren’t saying anything.’

  We walked back across the park and stood at opposite bus stops for a while, she to go to Richmond, me to Hounslow. Aware of each other across the busy road, there was that slight embarrassment of not knowing whether to make eye contact and, if so, what face to wear. I looked to the right towards the park, but as my bus appeared I turned to say goodbye and found her staring at me. She wore a bewildered expression, as if she’d only just realised something that hadn’t occurred to her before. I tried to smile and for one split second imagined Elsa in her place. Only on arriving home did I realise I hadn’t been to the bathroom for two hours and more.

  ‘Gran looked pretty cheerful,’ Matt said as soon as I was through the door.

  The twins were watching television, with bowls of ice-cream on their knees.

  ‘Like she always did.’ He was texting as he spoke.

  ‘It wasn’t scary at all,’ Mark said. ‘Just a bit weird.’

  ‘Like a film,’ Matt said.

  I said, ‘That’s great.’

  ‘Oh, Mum phoned. She said you’re coming back on the train with us. That’s fantastic, Dad.’

  XX