After the Party

by Cressida Connolly

  The corridors in the hospital were of highly polished pale green linoleum, and shiny paint in the same colour came halfway up the walls, where it ended at a dado rail. The rest was a custardy colour. A nursing sister took them to their father’s room. Beneath the thin cotton blankets the outline of his legs seemed too insubstantial, and his shoulders and chest and arms looked wrong: too narrow, too concave, too spindly. The familiarity of his face hardly registered above the shock of this sudden diminishment. For a moment Phyllis thought they must have gone into the wrong room. But when he spoke his voice was their father’s voice.

  ‘Hello, darling. How good of you to come.’

  It was Nina he was addressing, of course. Illness had compromised his ability to be democratic with his affection. She went at once and took his hand – it looked not like a living thing, but as veiny and papery as a fallen leaf – and sat herself on the bed. Patricia stood to the other side, while Phyllis hovered at the foot. After an interval of a few minutes, Patricia removed herself, tip-toeing with some theatricality from the room. This they had agreed in the car: that the younger two would stay with Daddy while she went to talk to the doctor.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Phyllis asked.

  ‘Oh well, you know, could be worse,’ said her father. ‘Rather a fright.’ He seemed to be very short of breath. The effort of even these few words made him seem to sink back into his pillows. He seemed to shrink still more. He was less than himself, like a half-plucked bird.

  ‘It must have been dreadful,’ said Nina. ‘Did you fall or did you just come over all peculiar?’

  Mrs Manville had found him on the floor in the hall. The dog had been sitting beside him, a detail which, talking things over later, had made all three daughters cry; not because it was typical of the dog, but because to have induced such loyalty towards his master was typical of their father.

  ‘I fell, I think,’ he said, his voice now barely above a whisper. He closed his eyes.

  Phyllis and Nina looked at each other. Their father’s breath made a rasping noise in the quiet of the room. Phyllis felt oddly embarrassed by the sound; it was so bodily. Their father had always been rather formal. It was rare to see him even in his shirt-sleeves, let alone a dressing gown: throughout their lives he had appeared at the breakfast table fully dressed, shaved and with his hair pomaded; his cuff-links just so, his shoes always polished. He wore a wool tie on days when he wasn’t expecting to see anyone and a silk one when there was company, or on those days when he was appearing in court as a Justice of the Peace.

  Patricia came back.

  ‘We must let you get some rest,’ she told her father. ‘Doctor’s orders.’ He didn’t seem to have heard her.

  ‘Daddy?’ said Nina. ‘We’re going to go now. We’ll be back in the morning.’

  He opened one eye. ‘Tell your mother not to …’

  ‘We will,’ said Nina. ‘Don’t worry about a thing.’

  ‘I loathe the smell of hospitals,’ said Patricia, once they were back in the car. ‘You’d think they’d invent something to mask it.’

  ‘I think they have,’ said Phyllis. ‘I mean, I think what you’re smelling is the smell that hides the other, worse smells.’

  Patricia shuddered at the thought.

  ‘What did the doctor say?’ asked Nina.

  ‘It’s his heart. He’s going to have to rest. Stay in bed. Trays. No gardening.’

  ‘Crikey,’ said Phyllis, aware that someone was going to have to prepare those trays and take them up and down the stairs.

  ‘But is he going to be all right?’ said Nina.

  ‘He said it’s too early to say.’

  ‘Oh God. How will Mrs Manville manage, with Mummy as well?’ said Phyllis.

  At this they all fell silent, while each of them wondered whether either of the others would volunteer.

  ‘Let’s just get home and see how the land lies,’ said Patricia. They each knew that by home she meant the Grange.

  It was evident that one of them would have to stay on. While they were sitting with their mother, Mrs Manville dropped several saucepan lids on to the stone floor in the kitchen, always a signal that she felt she was being overworked. As girls they had stifled laughter at the expressive sound effects which came from behind the kitchen door, but now they felt weary and exasperated.

  ‘Honestly, what is that woman paid for?’ said Patricia in a sort of hiss.

  Their mother, meanwhile, seemed elated. The excitement of their father’s fall appeared to have given her a temporary reprieve and she seemed to speak quite normally, asking what the doctor had said and whether her husband had seemed comfortable. Her eyes were bright. It was only when she repeated her questions immediately that it became apparent that no real change had taken place.

  ‘We ought to draw up a rota, work out who can be here and when,’ said Nina, after supper.

  ‘That sounds like a good idea,’ said Phyllis. ‘I won’t be able to stay next week, because it’s half-term and the children will be back. But I can manage the week after.’

  ‘I don’t see why you have to turn everything into a committee,’ said Patricia. ‘There are only three of us, after all. We can perfectly well decide what the best course of action is, without rotas and lists. Anyway we’re all very busy. I think we should be considering a nursing home. For Daddy.’ Their father had always been adamant that their mother should not be sent to rot in a nursing home. Nina took no notice.

  ‘I’ll stay on tomorrow, if one of you can drive the car back after breakfast?’

  ‘I’d like to see Daddy in the morning, first,’ said Phyllis.

  ‘Right-o,’ said Nina.

  ‘We don’t know how far their finances stretch,’ said Patricia. ‘I think I should look through Daddy’s desk, try and get an idea of things, before we look into a nursing home.’

  Her sisters regarded her with open hostility. Their father’s study was private, a sanctuary of leathery maleness. It was to this room that he repaired every morning after breakfast, to attend to his affairs and enter figures into mysterious ledgers. There was a heavy silver inkwell, inscribed to him from his regiment, and an ivory letter-opener. Its blade was too wide to fit into an envelope, but it had always lain across the desk in a ceremonious way, a small enamel box – for postage stamps, an early gift from his wife – at its side. His desk was implicitly out of bounds, like an altar. It would no more have occurred to Phyllis to look inside the drawers of this desk than to poke about in a sacristy.

  It was mid-November when Phyllis came to take her turn at the Grange. The house had a dejected air, as if the people who lived there had gone away. For the time being she and Nina had prevailed: their father was to be looked after at home, at least until the New Year. After that, Patricia had insisted that they must return to the question of what would be best for the long term. They couldn’t keep taking it in turns to stay with their parents in perpetuity: they had their own lives to be getting on with. The spectre of putting both parents into nursing homes loomed.

  Hugh drove his wife back to Buckinghamshire. It had been wet for the past few days, so that even the trunks of the trees were stained, darkened. Now a pale sun broke through the cloud, making the surface of the road and the trees gleam with the muted, warm colours of metals: branches catching the light glowed in patches like unpolished brass and the lanes shone a dull pewter. It sometimes seemed to Phyllis that she was never more content than when looking out of a window at the endless variety of England’s countryside and light. Nature was such a consolation.

  Hugh was to stay the first night. It was clear that his mother-in-law had no notion who he was. ‘Could you just put the card table over there by the window, if you don’t mind?’ she asked him.

  ‘It’s not a removal man, Mummy! It’s Hugh.’

  Her mother gave her a blank, owl-like stare. ‘I think the secretaire would be best in the drawing room,’ she replied firmly.

  For dinner Mrs Manville served consommé, f
ollowed by a chicken dish with mushrooms. The chicken seemed to consist mostly of bones, with no meat adhering to them. Without her father guiding things at the table, conversation was impossible. Their spoons made an amplified noise against their soup bowls in the silent dining room, as if they were unhappy diners in a dingy hotel.

  Now that her father was out of commission, Phyllis realized what a lot of looking after her mother required. Once she was up and dressed and installed in her chair she more or less stayed put, but she needed to be reminded to go to the loo and to be escorted there several times a day. It didn’t do to be entirely sedentary, so a little turn around the lower garden took place in the early afternoon, which meant wrapping her up against the cold. Her feet and ankles were now too swollen to fit into boots or shoes. She had two pairs of tartan slippers, one for inside, one for the garden. With her memory had disappeared any sense of the minute-by-minute continuing passage of time, and she never complained of boredom, although she barely moved from one hour to the next. She had forgotten how much she had loved riding, and never mentioned her horse – the culprit of her present condition, now long deceased – nor asked after any of her companions from the old, hunting days. It had been a miracle that she had survived the fall, the doctors had said. Her body had recovered, more or less intact. Phyllis supposed that they should be thankful for this miracle, but it was not easy to feel gratitude at the sight of this poor simulacrum of a mother. Her mother didn’t read, or even seem to think; she just sat. She didn’t seem happy, but she didn’t exactly seem unhappy either. She was like a well-mannered child, sitting politely in a waiting room.

  It was difficult, now, to recall what her mother had been like before, when they were children: her animation and low laughter, the tilt of her head when she read bedtime stories aloud to them; the reassuring flat of her hand against a forehead hot from fever. As a child there had been nothing Phyllis loved more than the smell of her mother’s skin, when she bent to kiss her goodnight: the smell of orange-flower water and distant cologne.

  Now getting her up in the mornings and down the stairs took ages. She sat limply while her swollen feet were inserted into her rolled-up stockings. When required to she lifted her arms obediently but without any spontaneity, with no apparent memory that this was something she did every morning in order to have her nightgown removed and her wool vest put on. Mrs Manville helped her mother dress, muttering short phrases of encouragement: ‘That’s it, put your hand in there’; ‘Leg in, there you are.’ A different and kinder side of Mrs Manville emerged, without impatience or irritability.

  Phyllis, having glanced into her mother’s room, next went to collect her father’s breakfast – the things arranged already on a tray on the side in the kitchen, awaiting toast and boiled egg – and take it up to him with the newspaper. She drew back the curtains and asked him to lean forward in his bed so that she could plump the pillows. Even this small effort brought a flush to his cheeks, as if after some great exertion.

  ‘Would you like the wireless on?’ she asked. Patricia had bought him a set, especially for his bedroom, to keep him entertained while he rested.

  ‘No, thanks. I’m very happy with just the paper. Later, p’raps,’ he answered. Phyllis went down to the dining room, where Hugh was waiting for her.

  ‘Doesn’t seem to be a paper,’ he said, looking rather put out.

  ‘Daddy’s got it,’ she explained.

  Hugh did not like to talk in the morning and generally retreated behind the pages of The Times. Now they were obliged to exchange mild pleasantries whenever they caught each other’s eye. Afterwards Hugh went to fetch his case down to the hall, ready to go. As he stepped out of the door, Jamie appeared.

  ‘Hugh, how are you?’ he said, extending a long arm to shake hands. ‘I’ve come to see your Pa,’ he told Phyllis. He did not say hello to her.

  ‘Oh good, he will be pleased, do go on up,’ she said.

  ‘Odd-looking sort of fellow, isn’t he?’ said Hugh, once Jamie was out of sight. Jamie’s frayed shirt, open at the neck, and his uncut hair were very much outside his own standards of dress.

  ‘Ssh,’ said Phyllis. ‘He’ll hear you.’

  Hugh said he trusted that Phyllis had put arrangements in place with their cook, before she left, so that he wouldn’t be left to starve. In any case he planned to spend the next several days in London: Party membership was growing thanks to the peace campaign, with which he was closely involved. It was essential that the government now adopt a programme of economic appeasement in order to continue to extend the hand of friendship to Germany. Hugh was among a small group entrusted by the Leader with the task of gaining influence with certain key members of the Conservative Party. Such allies would bring respectability to the cause. Once he came back to Sussex he would be alone at Bosham for only three nights before Phyllis joined him. It occurred to Phyllis that Hugh would have ample time in which to see her sister, assuming Greville would be in London.

  She waved him off. Going back into the house she was aware of a lightness, a feeling as if something burdensome had been lifted away. She lingered in the hall until Jamie sprang down the stairs, two at a time. She imagined that the stair carpet at the Dickinsons’ farmhouse must be worn in strange uneven patches, for Jamie never took each tread individually, but leapt up two and three steps at a time, and down in the same way, pell-mell.

  ‘Would you like to come for a stroll?’ he asked.

  She said she would. ‘Come back to the farm with me and I’ll give you morning coffee,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some things I’d like you to see.’

  As they made their way up through the garden and across into the wood that fringed their two parcels of land, Jamie talked excitedly. He planned to turn the long low building, once part of the dairy, into a studio for his sculpting and pictures. The old farm buildings made a perfect place to work, at least until the weather turned, when they might prove too cold.

  ‘I didn’t know you were artistic,’ said Phyllis. This new side to Jamie made him suddenly seem unfamiliar to her. She felt shy, as if she were walking beside a stranger.

  ‘Mum and Dad weren’t especially keen on my painting: they didn’t feel I’d be able to make a living at it. But I learned a lot, during my travels. Don’t look so surprised! You’re not the only one who’s been abroad, you know. I was in Italy for a couple of years, in Florence. I think it was when you were in South America. When my grandfather died – Mum’s father – he left me some money and I used some of it to go off and study art. I’ve been drawing for years,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some sketches of you, as a matter of fact. I was thinking of seeing if I could translate them into a head. In clay, I mean.’

  ‘Goodness. Can you draw from memory, then? I thought you had to have the person in front of you.’

  ‘Well, you have been in front of me. In the front of my mind, anyway,’ said Jamie.

  Phyllis looked down at her feet in their sensible lace-up shoes. ‘I can’t begin to imagine how you would go about turning a lump of mud into something that looked like someone,’ she said.

  ‘Well, that’s the challenge. That’s what makes it interesting,’ he grinned. They had reached the farmyard. ‘Come and have a look.’

  A long low shed that had been used for calving had been cleared and repainted with whitewash. Jamie had installed a wide wooden counter all down one side, on which were ranged some eight or nine sculptures, some of them concealed under cloths, which looked wet. There were three finished portrait heads and some abstract sort of shapes, carved in wood. A long table was covered with drawing books and glass jars full of pencils and charcoal.

  ‘Goodness!’ said Phyllis. ‘You’ve done so much.’

  ‘Well, it’s not a new hobby,’ said Jamie. ‘I’ve been making maquettes for years. The wood carving’s a new thing, but actually I don’t believe it’s working: it’s too difficult to get it to do what I picture in my mind. I think I may abandon those.’

  Phyllis was relieved to h
ear this, for most of the wood pieces were rather peculiar.

  ‘And drawing. Don’t you remember, I did drawings of you and your sisters, ages ago. I even did one of your pony,’ said Jamie.

  ‘Do you know, I’ve quite forgotten.’

  ‘So, what do you think?’

  ‘Well, I don’t really know anything about art, much less sculpture. Although I did see some wonderful things only a few weeks ago, in Paris. But they were all marble. Greek goddesses, nymphs, that sort of thing.’

  ‘But do you like them?’

  ‘I think I do. I’m not sure, yet. I like the way this one looks a bit like driftwood and a bit like a person lying down.’

  She walked very slowly along the length of the counter. ‘This head is very life-like, you’ve got the hair exactly. Who is she?’

  ‘Her name’s Clemmie. I got to know her in Italy.’

  Phyllis couldn’t help feeling pleased that he didn’t seem at all interested in talking about the sitter.

  ‘A man from a gallery in Bruton Street in London has been down to see my work. He likes them very much. We’re talking about an exhibition in the spring. It’s a well-known gallery.’

  ‘But that’s wonderful! When will it be? You must tell us, so we can all come and cheer you on. Oh Jamie, is that why you’ve got such long hair, now? Because you’ve turned into a professional artist?’ She couldn’t resist teasing him.

  He batted her on the arm. ‘There’s nothing professional about it, I just haven’t got round to going to the barber. Come on. Let’s go into the house and warm up. I might even have a biscuit to offer you, somewhere.’

  After this her days at the Grange took on a routine. Phyllis would get her father’s breakfast in the mornings and then take his dog out for a morning walk. The distance to Jamie’s house was just right: enough to give the spaniel a good run, but close enough to be back at the Grange in plenty of time for lunch. Each morning he made coffee for her and they drank it in the kitchen, talking. They reminisced, or told each other about their travels: something made Phyllis hold back from telling Jamie about all the meetings and things she had got involved in. Then in the early afternoons she sat with her mother while her father had what they all persisted in calling a rest, as if the whole of his day was not also made up of resting. At four o’clock Phyllis took him up a cup of tea and drew the curtains and read to him for an hour or so, something out of Kipling or from a funny little book of country reminiscences an old JP friend had brought, called Small Talk at Wreyland. At five he liked to switch on the wireless. A couple of times Jamie came over to the Grange, ostensibly to see how the patient was getting on. One evening he stayed on to dinner and afterwards got out a pencil and a pocket sketchbook in which he made several rapid little drawings. She didn’t like to ask to see them in case she sounded vain. Phyllis’s mother had always been fond of Jamie and his presence seemed to calm her. Other visitors tended to make her agitated, but in Jamie’s presence she sat quietly, smiling her empty smile.