She was tracing a finger around the rim of her cup.
I tried again. Startled, she lifted her gaze.
‘Is my father … Gil, is he up yet? Is he awake?’
Her finger stopped its circling.
‘In the garden,’ she said, turning her head to the French doors that opened onto the lawn. It was raining outside and, even if it weren’t, it seemed unlikely Gil would be gardening. The eponymous character of In Daniel’s Den spoke for his creator when he said, ‘When it comes to gardening, my thumb’s not so much green as gangrene.’
‘He’s had his father’s potting shed turned into a study,’ Nanna explained, suddenly seeming saner. ‘Tap-tapping away, he is. Lord knows where he finds all those words. Word after word, tap-taptapping. You’d think he’d run dry of them.’ She drank the last of her cold tea.
Standing, walking towards the doors, I announced I was going to see him.
‘He doesn’t like that … being disturbed in his den. He’ll be up to check on me soon enough. Why not have some breakfast while you wait?’
Ignoring the congealed egg and shrivelled sausage left for me in a frying pan on the stove, I made myself some toast. Seen in the daylight, the house was surprisingly small. Enormous compared to our house in Brunswick, but not the mansion of my imagination. Knowing my grandparents had reversed their migration to Australia to live in the Madigan family home, I had assumed it was a manor house, something grand and worthy of the upheaval. As it was, the place in Exmouth was no bigger than their house in Hawthorn. If anything, it seemed smaller because more cluttered; overstuffed with inherited furniture, the rooms darkened and made heavy by patterned, textured wallpaper. The air, too, felt stale, weighed down.
I needed to go outside, to breathe. The rain, though, had the house surrounded. I felt trapped.
Returning to my room, I lay on the bed. I couldn’t concentrate on reading, and sleep didn’t offer itself as an option. This wasn’t what I had been expecting, what I’d hoped for. Dressing, I determined to disobey my grandmother’s advice and visit Gil in his hide-out at the end of the garden. Was this really what he had in mind? Me making small talk with his demented mother, a woman I’d never really known and who by then certainly did not know me. Mum had told me to be direct with Gil, to let him know what I was feeling. ‘You’d think someone with all that imagination would be able to sense what others are feeling,’ she had said.
Doing up my shoes, I heard a door slap shut, Gil’s muffled voice. As I walked down the staircase he greeted me from the landing. ‘The giant awakes! Welcome to the land of the living. Well … the sodden and the living.’ Ruffling a hand through his wet hair, he added, ‘I’ve cooked you some breakfast, English style’. Something about him— his warmth, his boyishness – melted my anger. I didn’t tell him I had already eaten, and, at his insistence, ate the reheated egg, the greasy sausage. Even thanked him for them.
Explaining he had hundreds of congratulatory letters to respond to and that he’d begun work on a new novel, Gil pleaded for a few more hours at the desk on the promise that afterwards he would take me for a drive to show me the sights.
‘Why don’t you give your grandmother a game of Scrabble? She likes that. Don’t you, Mother?’ Returning his attention to me, he said, ‘You’ll find her an imaginative player. A real modernist – she makes it new. The whole English language!’
I didn’t know what a modernist was, but after he returned to his den I found the Scrabble box on top of the sideboard in the dining room and asked Nanna if she wanted to play. She was washing dishes, taking ages to clean each item, wiping it over and over with a sponge. At the mention of Scrabble, she dropped the spoon she was washing into the sink and dried her hands on her dress.
It didn’t take long for me to understand Gil’s joke. Never a confident speller, I didn’t question her first offering of U-K-A-L-E-L-E (worth seven, plus the fifty-point bonus for using all of her letters). But when she followed my humble B-I-K-E with another seven-letter turn, Q-U-I-B-L-E-D, I became suspicious.
Surreptitiously, I wrote the word out on the score pad, confirming the missing B. Nanna was humming loudly. I wondered if it was a ukulele tune; if she wasn’t playing two games at once, daring me to quibble over her spelling. Using all her tiles nearly every turn, the game was over in record time. The victory genuinely thrilled her and she asked to play again. I said I needed to read. ‘Good idea,’ she said. ‘A good way to improve your game, reading – expanding your vocabulary.’
Gil honoured his promise of a drive, albeit two hours late. Also, he hadn’t mentioned that Nanna would be tagging along. The three of us – her in the back, me in the front – drove to the Devon Cliffs. The rain had eased to mizzle and everything – land, sea and sky – was a blur of shifting greyness.
‘Not quite Sydney Habour, is it?’ Gil said, gesturing to the horizon.
The road and the cliff tops were deserted except for a large, long-haired dog which, wet and bedraggled, trotted up to where we stood under an umbrella. Fortunately, Nanna had remained in the car. Dolefully looking up at us, inviting a pat, the stray shook itself and ambled off. Gil flared with anger, then, looking at me brushing at the splatter marks on my jeans, erupted into laughter. I joined in.
‘It’s like something out of Beckett.’
I didn’t know what he meant, but suddenly the absurdities of the past twenty-four hours were something I could laugh at.
The next few days followed a similar pattern: Gil worked in his garden retreat undisturbed until lunchtime, while Nanna repeatedly beat me at Scrabble. In one game, having let her get away with T-U-R-M-I-T-E (worth sixty with the bonus), she then pulled me up for spelling ‘debacle’ with a K, my only attempt at using all the tiles. For me, the real game was trying to figure out if she was consciously cheating or not – something I failed to establish, which means I lost that contest too.
In the afternoons we made trips to Exeter and nearby seaside towns with strange names like Dawlish, Budleigh Salterton and Maidencombe, fogging up the car eating hot, soggy chips in car parks. It became obvious that Gil didn’t want to leave his mother at home on her own, so our adventures were limited by her presence and her regular need for a toilet. On the trip to Maidencombe, she fell asleep in the back, her head lolling about, her mouth gaping like a sideshow clown.
‘My Aunt Meredith is coming at the end of next week,’ Gil said. ‘Once she’s here we’ll take off, just the two of us. Hit old London Town. We’re waiting to get your nanna into a home.’
I didn’t know what to say. I felt terrible for Nanna, her being passed between reluctant carers, not knowing her fate. But then I also wanted my holiday, some time alone with my father.
‘Do you want to do me a favour?’ he asked.
Usually when people laid that trap for me I would say that it depends on what the favour is. This time, still eager to please him, I said, ‘Sure.’
‘I’ve got to go to Oxford next Monday to give a couple of talks. Unfortunately, it’s over two days. I’d take you with me, but I’ll be tied up the whole time. There’d be nothing for you to do. They’re putting me up in one of the colleges, making a fuss. Ghastly, really, the whole thing. Been organised for months, long before the Booker.’ We were travelling down a narrow lane with hedgerows on either side. We both stared straight ahead, looking out for oncoming traffic. ‘Do you think you could look after your nanna while I’m gone?’ He’d entered a bend too quickly and had to brake to adjust his line. ‘I’ll be back by dinner on the Tuesday, so really it’d only be one day and a night. Of course, I’d leave you with a list of names and numbers in case anything went wrong. But you know what she’s like – she sleeps most of the time. Sleeps and stares, wanders round a bit.’
Remembering what Mum had said, I contemplated telling him it was unfair, me caring for his mother. Wasn’t it meant to be the other way round – him doing me a favour? Him looking after me? He flicked on the indicator and slowed to make a right-hand turn. I stole
a glance at him. He had a brown age spot on his cheek, near his left ear. I turned and looked back at Nanna, her head now slumped forward. ‘Will she mind?’ I asked.
‘Won’t even notice,’ Gil said, smiling. ‘You two could have a Scrabble marathon. You never know, keep her at it long enough, you might get a win!’
In the backwash of the Booker, Madigan risked drowning in the spate of demands placed on both his public and private lives. In her house in Exmouth, his mother, Lauren, was sliding steadily into dementia. Having parted from Annie Edwards, Madigan moved temporarily into the family home and did what he could to care for her. This task was made no easier by a full roster of post-prize readings and interviews, the logistics of which were further complicated by his residence in Devon. A less obliging author would have refused all but the most prestigious of these requests and brandished the Booker as a licence for aloofness. But while Gilbert Madigan’s romantic relationships may have been marred by infidelity, his relationship with his readers was characterised by a fierce, unwavering loyalty. If the people who had accorded him such a privileged life wished to hear him read or speak, Madigan felt an almost medieval obligation to honour their demands. His minders at Penguin knew this and, for the sake of increased sales, happily overexposed him in this, his moment in the sun.
Despite such pressures, or perhaps as a valve to release them, Madigan nonetheless found time to engage in a brief affair with Oxford academic Sheila Maplestone.Fifteen years later,responding to a question from the floor at a comparative literature conference in Vancouver, Maplestone let slip that she and Madigan had had a dalliance soon after the Booker announcement. This, she hastened to add, accorded no special veracity to her critical reading of In Darkest Light.*
* Maplestone’s conference paper argued that In Darkest Light was a complex response to Eurocentrism and the privileging of the ocular.
Sinclair Hughes, Inside the Lion’s Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan, p. 226.
CHAPTER TEN
All my attempts at rebellion have failed. From lack of courage, mainly, but also, I like to think, from some deeper appreciation of the complexity of life. We didn’t know it at the time, but punk, like all of rock’s rebellious poses, turned out to be little more than another means of moving merchandise: The Ramones a bunch of Republican voters, Malcolm McLaren a PR huckster. I understood the impulse to lash out and tear down, to spit and spew and piss on things – I was angry too – but my heart was never really in it. In the five forgettable gigs that described the stunted life of Learning Disorder, I could never look at our guitarist Ronnie Dagger – real name Greg Reynolds; nickname behind his back, Ron Dag – for fear of laughing at his pantomime of disaffection: guitar slung below his knees, head flailing, strings of saliva glistening in the makeshift lights. My own permanent snarl was a mask for the smile beneath.
I bumped into Greg in Collins Street ten years after we had disbanded; we were in our late twenties. He was wearing a suit, and he told me he was working in IT. I didn’t say anything. ‘I’ve bought in,’ he volunteered. ‘I prefer that to sold out.’
In 1979, as Learning Disorder was pretending not to rehearse – rehearsals betraying that we cared – I told the others I had been in London in ’76, at the screeching birth of British punk. I didn’t say I’d gone to any of the famous gigs, but when Greg assumed I had, I didn’t bother to correct him.
The day Gil left for Oxford, my resentment steadily grew. I didn’t mind keeping an eye on Nanna, making sure she turned off taps, the gas, even calling out from the hallway to remind her to get out of the shower. The truth was I liked her more demented than how she was when I was younger: prim and properly intimidating. It was the disappointment that gnawed at me; my unmet expectations. I had been expecting another Sydney, not Dawlish.
As Gil suggested, Nanna and I played a few games of Scrabble that day, all of which I lost. Her most audacious move was P-L-Y-A-B-L-E, forty-two on a Triple Word Score, plus the bonus fifty. In the afternoon we watched television in the sitting room, something Gilbert never did or encouraged. ‘I like this one’, Nanna announced, when we stumbled across Bette Davis in Now, Voyager. We’d missed the start, and at the time I didn’t much like the story – the troubled psyche and shipboard romance of a rich woman hardly fired my imagination – though in retrospect I wondered if Charlotte Vale’s flight from her mother didn’t, at some unconscious level, influence my actions the following day.
Charlotte. Holden. And me. It wasn’t something I’d planned or even really thought through, but as I dressed the next morning I had it in my mind to take myself on an outing. I wouldn’t be abandoning Nanna, because, as a sop to me, Gil had organised for Mrs Wainwright, the retired local librarian who worshipped his every word, to provide us with lunch and keep Nanna company in the afternoon. She, I later learned, was Nanna’s regular Scrabble victim.
I hurried Nanna through her morning rituals and stuffed her full of bacon and eggs, sausages, toast and cups of tea in the hope that she wouldn’t attempt to cook anything in the short time between my departure and Mrs Wainwright’s arrival. I thought about hiding the matches but worried that without them she might leave the gas on unlit. Fire, I decided, was the lesser risk. I wrote a note for Mrs Wainwright explaining I had gone to Exeter and would be back for dinner. Before leaving, I set Nanna up in front of the tellie, watching a kids’ show about a family of furry, hat-wearing puppets. When I told her I was going out for a few hours, that Mrs Wainwright would be coming soon, she shushed me, waved me away. ‘I can’t hear the music. I like the music.’
I stuck the note to the door, which I left unlocked. Mrs Wainwright would be there soon enough. Everything would be fine. The further I travelled from the house, the less I needed to reassure myself.
The bus to Exeter arrived at the stop soon after I did. Bouncing along in the back of the coach, I felt happy for the first time since meeting Gil at Heathrow. Finally I could breathe. I wanted to keep travelling. I didn’t think of it as running away. For perhaps the first time in my life, I wasn’t really thinking at all. I wasn’t taking responsibility. Not even for myself.
In Exeter, the bus’s final destination was the railway station. What, I wondered, was there to do in Exeter? Gil had already shown me the sights: the cathedral, the university. I wanted to keep moving. On impulse, I bought a ticket to London. The train was at the platform, readying for departure. I scampered on board and found a seat opposite an elderly couple who looked like farmers dressed in their Sunday best for a trip to the city.
Staring at the old man’s knobbly fists, the way they poked out from the sleeves of his jacket like a pair of tortoise heads, I felt my adrenaline seep away.
As I watched the fields of Devon flicker by, my exhilaration soured with worry. I couldn’t look at the old woman, her powdered cheeks, her freshly set hair, without fretting about Nanna. What if she had a fall? Everything that had moments earlier felt like freedom now seemed like selfishness.
My chest was tight again, my throat constricted. I checked my watch. It was still early, 10.30 – Mrs Wainwright would be arriving soon. Realising I had no idea how long the journey from Exeter to London would take, I cleared my throat and asked the couple. The woman looked to her husband, who glanced first at her and then at his watch. ‘You’re not from these parts, then. By the sound of you.’
‘No. From Australia.’
‘Long way from home,’ he said, sounding like a detective on the tellie, making small talk before pinning something on me.
‘Yes,’ I said, trying to sound confident. ‘I’m visiting my father. My nanna lives in Exmouth.’ Blushing, I was sure his next question would be about why I had abandoned her.
‘Well, this is the express train,’ he said, his tone suddenly warmer. ‘Shouldn’t take much more than three hours. You’ll be back with your father no later than two. Depends if they’re doing track work down the way.’
I felt sick. Even if I caught a return train as soon as I arrived at Paddi
ngton, I wouldn’t be back in Exmouth before seven. Gil was due home at six.
Shit.
While part of me was panicking, another part was glad. Formulating a defence, I thought that Gil should never have asked me to look after his mother. I knew that, and I knew he knew. I imagined him returning home, expecting everything to be as he had left it, then discovering I was missing, Nanna unable to account for my whereabouts. Maybe it was his turn to feel worried; abandoned, even. He had passed his responsibility on to me, now I was passing it back. Why should I be the only one to carry a stone around in his gut? The more I thought about it, the better I felt. Gil deserved a scare. I wanted to submerge him with me in my tank of panic.
When the train shuddered to a stop at Paddington station, I looked out the window at the weak, wintry light glowing through the glass of the high, steel-vaulted ceiling. The elderly couple gathered their belongings and the man wished me luck. I followed them onto the platform. Looking round, I remembered having been there as a little boy. An image of Mum flashed through me and I suddenly imagined Gil ringing her to say I had gone missing. I didn’t mind scaring Gil, but it wasn’t fair on Mum. I had to return straight away.
People streamed towards the exit and I allowed myself to be swept along. No one actually touched me but the air between us rushed and bubbled as we shuffled forward in unison. On the concourse, I stared up at the enormous departures board. Others were doing the same. We were like rocks in a river, the crowd flowing round us, tumbling on. Scanning up and down the long list of unfamiliar place names, I couldn’t see Exeter. A fresh wave of panic sloshed through me. I glanced around for help, for the station master. Not seeing anyone in uniform, I forced myself to try again. This time I searched for Plymouth, and distracting my eye from the object it sought seemed to make it materialise – Exeter St Davids Plat 4 2.45.
With only forty minutes to kill, I decided not to leave the station in case I lost track of time and missed the train. I did, though, step out onto Praed Street, so I could at least say, if only to myself, that I had reached my destination. It was drizzling outside and the road and the footpath were slick and shiny and the passers-by had their umbrellas tilted against the wind. I smiled at the absurdity of it all. What had I been thinking?
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