He rubbed them now, and said that he didn’t find any injustice in it. I believed him, because I knew what he was waiting for – to be with Mum in Whitby. Consciousness would go, and the fence posts would fall into the sea, whether you wanted it or not.
He said, ‘I’ve so seldom been unwell. I don’t know how to be a patient.’
‘You’ve never feared death.’
‘No,’ he replied, ‘or not so much my own.’
It was perhaps an unnecessary thing to say to a son, and I doubt he would have wanted anyone else to hear it. But it was also merely one more test in a suite of exams that I’d long been sitting on the subject of what he might really be saying. His private self was there, a faint variation that played alongside the main theme, a cadence for which I’d long since trained my ear. It was always there, even within the broad Yorkshire musicality that had left me with an in-between accent and given him such a steady, filling presence in his own theatre, the local courtroom.
He showed me the x-rays as dispassionately as a piece of evidence. ‘You do realise this is you?’ I said. ‘This isn’t someone else.’
‘This is an x-ray,’ he said. ‘That’s what I realise.’
‘Examining your body.’
He tried to make light of it. ‘I’ve never been my best in photographs.’ He waited for a reaction, but when I didn’t bite he added, ‘Did you ever notice that photographs aren’t the least bit realistic? They exaggerate certain features over others. Look at me. Right now, I tell you, I am fine.’
He did seem well, perhaps even better than usual. Something shone in him. ‘How old are you, Dad?’
‘Now you ask me!’
‘Are you fifty?’
‘Thereabouts,’ he answered. He put his hand gently on the back of my neck and drew me close. ‘Come out to the garden.’
He’d come to treat the vegetable patch as though it were a council allotment, a place of refuge for the inner Yorkshireman. Gardening kept him brown and fit, but more than that it kept at bay a passive outlook that you saw in his friends, except perhaps Eric. Dad spoke to his plants now, seemingly treating them as the ultimate witnesses and conspirators of his resilience. I supposed Nikolas had taught him that while I was away – how to use his vegetable garden properly, as a sort of companion. But however fit he seemed, I could also tell that he’d started waiting.
‘What do you want to do?’ I asked.
‘I want to go back,’ he said. ‘And I want you to come with me. I want you to come with me to Whitby. It’s time we went.’ I think I must have sighed. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing.’ And then I struggled to catch something of what was finally granted. In a way, it was too perfect to catch. ‘I want to go to Whitby, Dad. I’ve wanted it for a long time.’
‘I know. We’ll go and find something for both of us.’
When I got back to Sydney, I decided to follow Claire’s instructions, however angrily they’d been given. I phoned her. I wanted to tell her that I was about to put in my notice at the law firm. That I’d stay in Sydney until June or July, and then Dad and I would go back to Whitby for a holiday together.
‘Is that why you’re calling, Ted?’
‘Dad’s unwell,’ I said.
‘Is he going to be alright?’
‘I don’t know. He doesn’t want to take it seriously. He doesn’t really believe the doctors, even though he says he does.’
‘You should come back, then.’
‘He doesn’t want the fuss. He wants me to stay in Sydney.’
‘I’d like to see you.’
‘I thought you might want to come to Sydney,’ I suggested. ‘Have a week here. There’s a spare room at my place.’
‘Who do you share with?’
‘Other lawyers.’
‘No, you come here.’
So the next time I visited Dad, I went one day to see Claire at the farm, and found her again as her ancestral self. She was collecting up bits and pieces from around the farm – a stool that her grandmother had given her once in Corfu; pots and pans that her mother wanted to replace and would’ve thrown out.
‘Why are you getting all those things?’ I asked.
‘They’re for your place. For you and the lawyers to share.’
‘Will you come for a visit?’
‘I don’t know. You’ve cut your hair?’ she said.
‘Oh, my hairdresser told me I needed a change.’
‘Do you always do what your hairdresser tells you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe I should start cutting your hair then.’
‘What would you do?’ I asked.
‘I’d shave it all off and start again.’ Claire put her hand in my hair, and then shook it. ‘Or maybe just mess it up a bit. It’s too tidy for you.’
‘Well, I’m a lawyer now.’
‘You should quit.’
‘Be a ship builder or writer,’ I agreed. ‘Eric might need me. Otherwise, I’m going to write books.’
‘I wish you would.’
‘Don’t tell Eric. He’d be heartbroken.’
After lunch, I asked her again if she’d thought about the trip to visit me.
‘No, I’m not coming to Sydney. But take these things from the farm,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’
I wasn’t sure that Claire’s mother quite understood what Claire was doing with her old things. I asked Claire if she’d told her about the disappearing household.
‘No.’ She checked, and saw me smile. ‘Well, she’d be horrified if I said that all of her old things were being used at your place. She thinks you’re such a fancy-pants.’
‘Fancy-pants?’
‘See. I can’t even use words like that around you.’
Perhaps Christina was right. But surely I should have been wary of decorating my new place with a very brown set of serving bowls, straight out of the seventies, that were now being placed in the backseat of Dad’s car. Claire was sure I could adapt them for the city. She filled the bowls with oranges and tomatoes.
‘Don’t drive too fast later,’ she said. ‘The tomatoes will fall out.’
‘Okay.’
‘Is there anything else you need?’
‘I’d love one or two of your drawings.’
We went to a spare room at the back of the house. It looked like her pictures hadn’t been moved since she’d come back from art college. A roll of them leant against a column of shoeboxes in a back cupboard. That afternoon we leafed through her folios together.
Claire showed me a series of nude studies, of the art college models. And then a lover’s necessary next step, to turn the question back on himself: ‘Have you ever drawn me?’
‘Not yet.’
Behind the nudes were the drawings I liked most of all, her early studies of Lion’s Head. In one was the Head, drawn from the other side, the rougher bay. Caught at that time of day when the lower rocks of the Head were orange and the low trees cast long shadows across the cliffs at the end.
‘You got it on a calm day,’ I said.
‘That side is prettier,’ she replied.
‘Did Anthony ever draw the rocks?’
‘Normally he just watched me. You know, he didn’t think he could paint landscapes.’
‘Not like you,’ I said. ‘He meant he couldn’t paint landscapes like you can.’
‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Let’s stop.’
I drove from the farm back to Lion’s Head, and rather than take her gifts to Sydney I left them in the house – the brown bowls, the stool and two drawings of Lion’s Head.
27
More regularly now, Dad was needed at the hospital for treatment and further tests. I organised a break from work, and once again took the train home. Ostensibly, I was there to see that Dad had all he needed, but I seemed to
be also there to witness a change in him. Bitterness had finally replaced the bleak humour over the x-rays that had come home from the clinic in town.
But he was right. They weren’t exactly photographs. They were charts and directions, and now he had no choice but to follow their course with his hands – from inside the x-rays to the surface of his chest. He touched it involuntarily. Gradually, inside the latest images the white moved further across. It was smoke. The cigars had crept into the walls.
That night, I dreamt that the white shadow had worked its way into his throat. In the dream, we were checking the x-rays together. I held one, but he snatched it from me and threw it to the ground, and said, ‘Yes, alright, now it looks like me.’
One morning, a letter arrived from England. I brought it to him in his study.
‘It’s from Lillie,’ my father said when I handed him the envelope. ‘Your aunt.’
‘I thought so. She’s still got your handwriting.’
He read the letter and folded it back into the envelope. ‘She’s unwell. She wants to know if we’ll visit.’
‘Can I read it?’
He held it in the fisherman’s net of his hands, and then stood up to put it next to his cigar box, hidden in a small cupboard in the corner of the room.
‘Later.’ He looked up. ‘Smoke?’ When I declined, he said, ‘We owe her a visit.’
It was time to return the visit she’d made in that last summer before Anthony and Claire left for Sydney, when Anthony was staying with us at Lion’s Head, and Claire came over most days, too, together planning the ultimate escape to Sydney.
I stood beside Dad and looked at the letter and the cigar box. ‘Do you want to smoke?’ I asked.
‘Yes, let’s go outside.’
As we walked, I said we’d visit Lillie together.
‘Have you got my cigar?’ he asked as we crossed the road. ‘Light it for me. My hands shake.’
There was every chance we’d still make it back. ‘I’d like it if we both went to Whitby.’
‘Yes, I want to visit Lillie with you. But I wouldn’t stay in Whitby,’ he answered. ‘I’d want to be based in Durham.’ Where he went to university, where he and my mother had met.
‘It’ll make for long days,’ I said. ‘The drive to Whitby is too long, I think.’
‘You drive, I’ll sleep.’
I took this as a yes. The next day, I began to make enquiries for our trip. We’d do as he wished and stay in Durham, but we would also return to Whitby.
But the following morning, Dad called off any arrangements I was making. ‘I’ll write to Lillie,’ he said, ‘tell her what the doctors have told me. I’m not well enough.’
‘Let’s go to Whitby now. Before it gets worse. ’
‘There’s no time.’
‘It takes a day to fly to England.’
‘There’s no time,’ he insisted.
‘Dad, I’m never going to make a good lawyer.’
‘I know. Don’t worry about that. Do something you want.’
‘I mean, I have time. I don’t need to be in Sydney. I’ll finish up at the firm early.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m not going back, not like this. It’s too late.’
He tried to give up cigars. But the withdrawals were too severe. He told me that they left him breathless. Without cigars as a conciliatory addiction he retreated into silence even before the illness forced it, muted not so much by closeness to death but by how quiet the world seemed at those times when he would usually smoke and listen to music.
I bought him an iPod, and his doctor said the breathless feeling would pass. It might have, had he kept trying. But to the nurses’ dismay, a miserable week after he tried to stop he began to smoke again, and perhaps even more heavily than before. He made an effort to conceal it, but I could tell by the way he returned to his old self.
I stayed on in Lion’s Head, and began to phone Claire every day. To my surprise, I found that she wanted a part in reprimanding me, a task that the nurses seemed also to take pleasure in. First, it was about the cigars. In our phone conversations she told me that I shouldn’t help him smoke.
‘Since when have you been so strict?’ I said.
‘Since I got to know him,’ Claire replied, ‘while you were in Denmark. I want him to get better.’
And then she disapproved of persuading my father to go to Whitby. In this, she was entirely on Dad’s side. Why press him to travel to England if he was happy here? ‘Maybe the illness has shown him what matters. He wants to be with the people he loves.’
‘But I’m the only person he loves,’ I said.
‘I think he loves me more than you these days,’ she joked.
She might have been right, but still I tried to convince him. If there was a break in the treatment, we’d make a short visit – it need only take a week or two.
‘I’ll even let you pay,’ I told him.
We drove to Nambucca Heads for a break from the house and Lion’s Head. For a while, we sat by the estuary wall. It was cold. I wrapped him in a blanket and we turned our backs to the sea. He smoked, but at long last he wasn’t enjoying it. Because I was so often lighting his cigars, I’d found a taste for them. Halfway through, he gave me his cigar and I finished it for him.
‘You got my note?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I got it.’
On my desk, he’d left a strangely formal letter telling me that he wanted to be interred in town, at the local cemetery. He began by assuring me that he wasn’t meaning to be officious, that he wouldn’t normally think to put this kind of thing in writing. But he was worried. It said, I know you hoped for us to go back. But I’m quite at peace with ending my days here.
I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. All the same, I asked whether he wasn’t making a mistake. If it came to that, wouldn’t he like his ashes taken to Whitby?
‘Please follow my wishes,’ he said, summoning all that was left of the judge’s voice. ‘You have them now, in advance. I’ve expressed it very clearly. And I’m sure it’s the right thing. If you don’t follow a wish of that kind, you’re telling me that my final moments are yours to decide.’
‘It’s okay, I’ll do what you tell me,’ I replied. But it struck me as such a bitter thing to want, this punishing of his soul by confining it to a country to which he’d never really belonged. ‘You don’t feel at home here,’ I said. ‘I always thought you’d want to be buried with Mum.’ Why else had he saved himself?
‘It’s not up to you.’ He rushed the words out, as though he’d been waiting to say them for some time. I still had my arm over his shoulder, holding the blanket in place. I held him closer. I wanted to lighten the conversation, but I couldn’t find another topic.
‘Ted, I want to stay here. If I were meant to go back, we would’ve made it by now. Lillie understands.’
‘Has she written again?’
He put his hand up to mine, gripped it on the edge of the blanket. It was a loving gesture, I thought. But it was also the gesture of a father who didn’t think he was getting through to his son. ‘Tell me again that you really want to be buried here,’ I said.
‘Let’s walk. You’re getting morbid.’ He stood up and said hello to a friend, who wanted our bench.
‘Are we all out today?’ the man asked.
‘You’ll need a blanket,’ said my father, and gave him ours.
We took a footpath that followed the Nambucca River as the estuary widened out to the heads. On a retaining wall of large boulders was painted an informal exhibition of pictures by families who’d visited for holidays, seemingly always to this same spot on the mid-coast of New South Wales. The paintings comprised lists of family members and the years they’d come. Some also contained pretty, naive portraits, often drawn by the children.
In one, the parents stood on
either side of the family dog, with brothers and sisters grouped together and the family framed by the red and yellow flags of the lifesavers. In another, the dream of perfect symmetry was replaced by a floating affinity: the family was represented as a seahorse surrounded by circles, perhaps eggs, each named after a family member.
There were memorials, too. There was one that upset my father. It was for a boy who’d died in 1999, aged one. The memorial read: In our thoughts you are happy in His kingdom, in our hearts you are with us every day, in our arms you are sadly missed. Underneath the inscription were stick people drawn by his siblings.
‘They must be young adults now,’ I said.
My father said, ‘You find out that you’ll accept whatever time there is.’
‘I love you, Dad,’ I said.
‘I’m frightened. I’m surprised to find I’m frightened.’
The afternoon fishermen were out. The light over the estuary was sandy, but the ocean was pale grey. Seagulls gathered on a sand island that lay between us and the next headland; they seemed painted into stillness there – broken lines of musical notation. On the other side of the island, the beach began again and ran without pause to Lion’s Head.
I wasn’t giving up quite yet. I asked whether walking along the wall, especially in the cool evenings, ever reminded him of home.
‘The fish smell’s the same,’ he replied, ‘but no coal. No smoke.’
‘Will you write to Lillie?’
‘I have. I’ve told her we won’t come. She knows why. She knows I want to stay.’ He was breathless as we walked. He put his hand on my shoulder.
The pressure of that hand seemed to stay on my shoulder that evening, when I sat on my own in the house, in the repetition of a phrase, a command from my childhood. Listen to it. Carefully. Sometimes said almost desperately, speaking in the instant of Puccini or Ravel or Verdi or whichever of the great composers we’d reached, but only ever instructing me in the matter of the voice, and what it meant to recognise the truth in the voice of another.
The Ash Burner Page 16