by David Lodge
“Come on, Sidney, we’ll be late for your appointment,” said Lilian.
“Yes, please don’t let me detain you,” said Bernard. “I hope all is well.”
“What I dread is, if they say he’s not fit to fly on Thursday,” said Lilian. “I can’t wait to get back to Croydon.”
After about three-quarters of an hour, Bernard went back inside the hospital. His father and Tess were deep in conversation, their heads close together and their voices low to avoid being overheard by the other occupant of the room, an elderly man called Winterspoon who was recovering from a hip-joint replacement.
“It’s time to go, Tess,” Bernard said. “We’re meeting someone for lunch, Daddy.”
“Daddy says he doesn’t know anything about this friend of yours,” said Tess with a mischievous smirk.
“No, I didn’t get round to telling him,” said Bernard, wishing he still had a beard with which to conceal his blushes. “Her name’s Yolande Miller, Daddy. She was the driver of the car. D’you remember a lady in a red dress standing over you in the street?”
“I do not,” said the old man sulkily. “I don’t remember anything after that car hit me. No wonder you didn’t want to sue the woman.”
“I made that decision long before we became friends, Daddy. It wasn’t her fault. The police are not taking any further action, so that proves it.”
Mr Walsh sniffed.
“Naturally Yolande was very upset about it. She’d love to come and see you, if you would like her to.”
“I have enough women visiting me, thank you very much,” said Mr Walsh. “That Sophie never misses a day. By the way, d’you think you could pick up a Penny Catechism for me somewhere? She’s always pumping me about the Catholic faith, and I’d like to be sure I was giving her the certified stuff. I don’t want to be passing on a lot of heresy by mistake.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Bernard.
“Who is Sophie?” Tess enquired.
“I call her that because I can’t pronounce her last name,” said Mr Walsh defensively.
Bernard explained who Sophie Knoepflmacher was.
“Well, you fellows certainly haven’t let the grass grow under your feet,” Tess said. “You both seem to have fixed yourselves up with girlfriends.”
Bernard laughed over-heartily, and avoided meeting his father’s eye.
“So tomorrow’s the great day, Daddy,” he said.
“What’s great about it?”
“Ursula’s coming to see you.”
“Oh, yes.” He did not look thrilled at the prospect. “I hope she’s not planning to stay too long. I get tired easily.”
“She’s a very sick woman. Daddy, you should be prepared for that. And she has an enormous amount of emotion invested in this meeting. It won’t be easy for either of you. Just be kind to her.”
“Kind to her? Why shouldn’t I be kind to her?” said the old man, bridling.
“I mean, be patient, be understanding. Be gentle.”
“I don’t need you to tell me how to behave towards my own sister,” said Mr Walsh. But he asked some questions about the arrangements for the visit, and Bernard felt that he had at least focused the old’s man’s mind upon its importance for Ursula. They left him looking thoughtful.
Yolande had booked a table at a Thai restaurant a few blocks north of the Ala Wai canal. The district, like most of Honolulu outside Waikiki and the downtown area, had a scruffy, improvised character, and the restaurant looked unpromising from the outside: an L-shaped arrangement of clapboard sheds, with corrugated roofing and ugly air-conditioners protruding from the walls. But inside it was a cool oasis, with a tinkling fountain, oriental wall-hangings, ceiling fans and bamboo screens. The clientele did not look like tourists.
Yolande was waiting for them at a corner table. The two women regarded each other warily as Bernard introduced them. Yolande expressed her regrets over the accident, and Tess stiffly declared that she understood it had not been Yolande’s fault. Tess had never had Thai food before, and seemed irritated or intimidated by Yolande’s knowledgeability. “You two order for me,” she said, closing her menu. “I don’t really go in for exotic food.”
Yolande’s face fell. “Oh, I’m sorry. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have suggested this restaurant.”
This skirmish did nothing to relieve Bernard’s misgivings about the wisdom of bringing the two women together. But after they had ordered, Tess asked the way to the Ladies, and Yolande went with her. They were gone long enough for Bernard to drink most of a Thai beer, and he presumed that some confidences had been exchanged, some mutual appraisal satisfactorily accomplished, in the interval, for when they returned to the table they seemed more relaxed and at ease with each other. The lunch was a surprising success. Tess pronounced the food delicious. The conversation, in which Bernard took a minor role, was mainly about bringing up children. Yolande deftly drew Tess out on the subject of Patrick’s problems, a topic of which she never tired.
They separated in the restaurant car-park, for Bernard was to drive Tess to see Ursula. He kissed Yolande on the cheek with studied casualness, painfully aware of Tess’s sardonic observation, and she murmured into his ear, “Your sister’s OK, I like her.” She got into her rusting white Toyota and rattled away.
“Well, I must say you’ve got better taste than Frank,” said Tess, as they walked to his car. “Though what she sees in you, Bernard, I can’t imagine.”
“It must be my beautiful body,” he said. Tess laughed, but gave him a shrewd glance, as if trying to assess exactly how facetious he intended to be.
They drove to Makai Manor along the coast road, and he stopped at the lookout point near Diamond Head to let her watch the windsurfers. There weren’t so many of them as there had been at the weekend, and Tess regarded them with only mild, unfocused interest. She seemed to have something else on her mind.
“Has Ursula said anything to you about her will?” she asked, when they were back in the car.
“No,” said Bernard. “Well, not since she came into all this money. Before that, she did say something about wanting to leave something, to somebody, perhaps me, so that she would be remembered. I persuaded her to spend whatever she had on making the rest of her life as comfortable as possible.”
“That was unselfish of you, Bernard,” said Tess. “And now she’s rich, she’ll probably reward you by leaving you her fortune. Well, you deserve it, I suppose. And God knows, you could use the money. But I have to say that I don’t think it would be right. The money should go to Daddy, and then in due course to all four of us, you, me, Brendan, Dympna, and not necessarily in equal proportions. After all, what have Brendan and Dympna done for Daddy or Ursula? And they’re both comfortable enough as it is.”
Bernard mumbled something non-committal.
“But after what you told me last night, I can’t see Ursula leaving her money to Daddy, not all of it, anyway. I’ll be quite open with you, Bernard – I’ve been thinking over what you said last night, and I think you’re right, so here’s my contribution to glasnost in the Walsh family circle: I want a fair share of that money for Patrick, or better still, an unfair share. At the moment we can cope, more or less. He goes to a special school every day, during term, by taxi. But he can’t live at home indefinitely. He needs physically looking after, and I won’t be able to do it much longer, with or without Frank. He’ll have to go into some kind of residential care eventually, and the best ones are private. If we could set up some kind of Trust Fund, it would make all the difference …”
“I understand your feelings,” Bernard said. “But really, Tess, it’s Ursula’s business. I have no idea what she intends to do with her money.”
“But you could influence her. You’re managing her affairs for her now, aren’t you?”
“Not to that extent, no.” He paused for thought. “If we’d had this conversation two weeks ago I would have said: You can have all Ursula’s money, as far as I’m concerned, and we
lcome. But since then, I’ve become involved with Yolande. I’ve got nothing to offer her at the moment. No house, no savings. I haven’t even got a proper job. I can’t deny it’s crossed my mind that a substantial legacy would be very useful.”
“D’you mean you want to marry her?”
“If she’d have me, yes. But I don’t know what her feelings are about me, really. I haven’t dared to discuss the future of our relationship, in case she says it hasn’t got one.”
“I gather that she’s getting divorced.”
“Yes.”
Tess slowly shook her head. “You’ve come a long way from chief thurible bearer at Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Bernard.”
“Yes,” he said. “I have.”
Enid da Silva was waiting for them in the entrance hall of Makai Manor as they came in, her normally serene brow creased by a frown. “Oh, Mr Walsh, I’ve been trying to call you all morning. Mrs Riddell is not very well, I’m afraid. She vomited a little blood this morning and it upset her. Dr Gerson has been out to see her. He said you were to call him. Mrs Riddell is afraid he’s going to say she can’t visit her brother tomorrow. She’s very agitated. Here’s the number.”
Bernard phoned Gerson at once. “She had a small haemorrhage,” he said. “I didn’t think it was necessary to bring her back into hospital. She didn’t lose a lot of blood. But it’s not a good sign.”
“Can she travel to Honolulu by ambulance tomorrow?” Bernard explained the arrangement that had been made, and its importance to Ursula.
“Can’t your father come to her?”
“I could ask Dr Figuera, but I doubt it. He’s only just been allowed out of bed, for a few minutes a day.”
“You’re probably right.” Gerson deliberated for a moment. “Strictly speaking, I should say no. She ought to rest tomorrow. But from what you tell me, she’s only going to fret if she doesn’t see her brother, right?”
“Correct,” said Bernard.
“Then we might as well let her go, and accept the risk.”
It was the first topic Ursula raised, as soon as she had greeted Tess. Bernard saw in his sister’s eyes the shock of encountering Ursula’s wasted appearance; he supposed that he himself had got used to it, though she did look particularly frail and sallow today, scarcely able to lift her head from the pillow to meet Tess’s kiss. “Not too good,” she whispered, when he asked her how she was. “I brought up a little blood this morning. They called Dr Gerson out to see me. I’m afraid they won’t let me go to see Jack tomorrow.”
“It’s all right, Ursula,” Bernard said. “I just checked with Dr Gerson, and he says you can go.”
“Thank God for that,” Ursula sighed. “I don’t think I could have stood another delay.” She stretched out her good arm to clasp Tess’s hand. “Now I can relax and enjoy your being here, Tess. It’s wonderful. The last time I saw you, you were in pigtails and a gymslip.”
“You shouldn’t have stayed away so long, Aunt Ursula,” said Tess, leaving her hand in Ursula’s. “You should have come home before …”
“Before it was too late? Yeah, of course I should. But I wasn’t sure I would be welcome. My last visit wasn’t exactly a success. In fact it ended with a tremendous row between myself and your mother, and Jack. I forget how it started now, something very trivial, about bathwater or something. That was it, I used all the hot water in the cistern, unintentionally – I was already Americanized by then, you see, I took constant hot water for granted, but in your house in Brickley it was heated by some complicated system …”
“A solid-fuel boiler in the kitchen,” said Tess. “It never worked properly. We had an immersion heater put in eventually.”
“Well, anyhow, I used to take a bath every morning, because it was what I was used to, a tub or a shower every day, and there wasn’t a shower in your bathroom … Monica used to give out little hints that she considered this routine excessive – the rest of you only had one bath a week. I pretended that I didn’t understand what she was talking about, and I guess she brooded about it and got more and more resentful, until one morning I accidentally overfilled the tub and all this precious hot water was spilling out the overflow pipe into the back garden, and when I was through there was none left for the washing. It was washday. Well, that was the last straw for Monica. She exploded. I don’t blame her, looking back. She had a hard time making ends meet in those days, and I must have seemed a spoiled, inconsiderate houseguest. But it was an ugly scene, and unforgivable things were said, on both sides. Jack did nothing to calm things down when he came home from work. He made them worse, if anything. I left the house the next morning, a week earlier than I’d planned, and never went back. Too proud to say sorry, I guess. Sad, isn’t it, to think that a few gallons of hot water could keep a family divided for a lifetime.”
Exhausted by this long narrative, Ursula closed her eyes.
“Of course, it wasn’t just the hot water, was it Ursula?” Bernard gently prompted. “There were other things dividing you. Other resentments. Like what you told me yesterday, about yourself and Daddy and Uncle Sean, when you were children.”
Ursula nodded.
“We were wondering – I’ve told Tess about it, by the way, I hope you don’t mind –”
Ursula shook her head.
“We were wondering whether you intend to bring it up with Daddy tomorrow.”
Ursula opened her eyes again. “You think I shouldn’t?”
“I think you have every right. But don’t be too hard on him.”
“He’s an old man, Aunt Ursula,” said Tess, “and it all happened a long time ago.”
“To me, it’s as if it happened yesterday,” said Ursula. “I can still smell the smells in that old shed back of our house: turpentine and creosote and cat pee. It comes back to me like the memory of a bad dream. And Sean smiling at me, with his teeth but not with his eyes. I can’t forgive Sean, you see, because I can’t talk to him about it, any more than I can ask Monica to forgive me for wasting the bathwater. I left it too late. They’re both dead. But I feel that if I could talk to Jack, if I could tell him how much unhappiness it caused me, in later life, that summer in Cork, and feel he understood, and accepted some responsibility for it, then I would be free from the memory, once and for all. I could die in peace.”
In silent acquiescence Tess patted Ursula’s fragile hand.
“Of course, there’s always the possibility that he’s entirely forgotten it, erased it from his memory,” said Bernard.
“I don’t think so,” said Ursula. And, recalling how reluctant his father had been, all along, to be reunited with Ursula, neither did Bernard.
“One more thing,” Ursula said, as they were preparing to leave. “I think maybe I should receive the Last Sacrament.”
“That’s a good idea,” said Tess. “Only we don’t call it that any more. Or Extreme Unction. It’s called the Sacrament of the Sick.”
“Well, whatever it’s called, I think I could use it,” said Ursula drily.
“I’ll speak to Father Luke at St Joseph’s,” said Bernard. “I’m sure he’d be glad to come out here.”
“Perhaps he could do it tomorrow afternoon, at the hospital,” Tess said. “When we’re all together, as a family.”
“I’d like that,” said Ursula. So Bernard made a telephone call there and then to the Chaplain’s office at St Joseph’s, and arranged it.
“My God, Bernard,” Tess said, when they were outside Makai Manor, “she looks terrible. She’s just skin and bone.”
“Yes. I suppose I’ve got used to it. But it is a cruel disease.”
“Oh, life, life!” Tess shook her head. “What with mental suffering and physical suffering …” The sentence trailed away, unfinished. “I need a swim,” she said abruptly, straightening her shoulders, and lifting her face to the sun. “I need a swim in the sea.”
They returned to the apartment to change into their swimming-costumes, and then Bernard drove them down to Kapiolani Beac
h Park. He told Tess the story of the lost and found keys as they slipped off their outer clothes. She looked heavy-hipped and ungainly in her plain black swimming-costume, but she was a strong, graceful swimmer, and he had some difficulty keeping up with her as she struck out towards the open sea. When they were about a hundred yards from the shore, she rolled over onto her back and kicked her feet luxuriously. “It’s ridiculously warm,” she cried as he came puffing and blowing up to her. “You could stay in all day, and never get cold.”
“Not like Hastings, eh?” he said. “Remember how your fingers used to turn blue?”
“And your teeth used to chatter,” she said, laughing. “Literally. I’d never heard it before, or since.”
“And the agony of stepping on those pebbles in your bare feet.”
“And trying to take off your wet cossie, and put on your knickers, under a towel that was far too small, while balancing on one foot on a hill of sliding shingle …”
It was a long time since he had felt so at ease with Tess. The word “knickers”, at once homely and faintly naughty, seemed to evoke a state of playful and unreflective happiness that he associated with childhood, though he couldn’t actually remember Tess ever pronouncing it in his hearing. As they lay on the sand, drying off after their swim, he remarked on this.
“No, well, I would have got my ears boxed if I had, wouldn’t I? Mummy and Daddy were very strict with Dympna and me, as far as you were concerned. We had to be very modest, for fear you’d be distracted from your vocation.”
“Really?”
“Of course, ‘Bra’ and ‘knickers’ were considered dirty words. If we were washing or ironing our underwear, and you happened to come into the kitchen, it was whisked out of sight for fear it would inflame your senses. And as for sanitary towels … well, I don’t suppose you even knew when we started our periods, did you?”
“No,” said Bernard. “I never gave it a thought, till this moment.”
“You were marked out for the priesthood from an early age, Bernard. I could almost see the halo growing round your head, like the rings of Saturn. You had a very privileged life at home.”