by Tim Parks
The truth was, he hadn’t wanted to talk about Father with Mother. On just one occasion, after cousin Hugh’s unexpected reappearance he had said: ‘Well, Mum, that’s the first person I’ve seen from Dad’s side of the family since I was a little kid.’ And he had asked: ‘Why didn’t Dad talk about his family?’ And his mother, who would have been sipping a glass of sherry before dinner, which was the only alcoholic drink she ever touched, shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘I suppose he didn’t have anything to say.’
Thomas hadn’t pressed the matter, but it was strange now to reflect on these reluctances: his mother’s to speak about his father, his father’s to speak about his family, his own to challenge their reticence. Why hadn’t Thomas thought of these things during her lifetime? It was not that he imagined there was some secret being hidden from him. It was more as though she wanted to keep the man to herself. Perhaps she had been afraid that speaking of Father to Thomas would diminish him. Because Father was so devout and Thomas such a doubter. Speaking about him might have given her son a chance to make some disparaging remark, or simply to show once again that he didn’t believe. To rock the boat. That was a favourite expression of Father’s: Don’t rock the boat! In any event, she had kept whatever there was between them in her heart, to the end. In her bedroom there was a photo of Thomas’s father as a young man, and resting on the glass frame below his face she had placed a small square of white paper with a few lines of religious poetry:
Death hides –
But it cannot divide
Thou art but on
Christ’s other side.
Thou with Christ
And Christ with me
And so together
Still are we.
Thomas respected this carefully preserved bereavement. He didn’t investigate. He knew that when the cancer had gone to his father’s brain he had accused his mother of all kinds of unpleasant things and that this had upset her greatly. Never for one moment did Thomas imagine that there was any truth in those accusations. It was just that the cancer had gone to Dad’s head. And who does one accuse, when accusing, if not one’s wife of many years? Thomas knew plenty about that. It even occurred to him that he was thinking about his father now because, in separating from his own wife, he had undone, as it were, the last thing that his father had done as a clergyman, when he’d married them, Thomas and his wife, holding their ringed hands one above the other and declaring, ‘Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.’ Recently, in preparation for the divorce, Thomas had had to dig out the marriage certificate with his father’s signature on it. It seemed odd to think that his father’s hand had pressed on that very paper so many years ago. His handwriting was scratched and sharp, but not without a certain angular elegance. Thomas examined the certificate for a few minutes, looking at his own signature, his wife’s, his father’s, then put it in an envelope with the other papers, ready for his divorce.
Whore. That was it. Just once his mother had talked about it. They had been talking about her cancer, he remembered. She was lucky, she said, because hers hadn’t gone to her head. Like poor Dad’s. Then she burst into tears and told Thomas that, in his madness before he died, Father had said all kinds of awful things; he had called her a whore. Shocked, Thomas immediately reassured his mother that it had been the disease speaking. She knew that. In his right mind Dad would never have said such a thing. Later Thomas realised that she had told him this in order to receive his reassurance before dying herself. Once reassured, she didn’t tell him anything else.
Edward Paige was born in Liverpool, on the longest day of the year, in 1920. He had two sisters, one definitely younger. Perhaps both had been younger. Thomas could have asked his own brother or sister about this – they were older than he was, they might know – but he didn’t want his brother and sister to know that he was thinking about his father. Why not? He didn’t want to pool their collective memories. He didn’t want to have to adjust his views in the light of their knowledge. Vaguely he was aware that Mother had spoken of Father being fond of Eleanor, the youngest sister, mother of the cousin who had appeared from the blue. But so far as he could recall, Father had never spoken of her. He had never spoken of his mother, either. All Thomas remembered, from perhaps two visits when he was very small, was a tiny old woman with white wispy hair and a hooked nose.
Was his father deliberately enigmatic? Edward Paige had talked once of his father, Thomas’s grandfather. They were on holiday in South Devon, and Father had wanted to visit Plymouth Sound because his father’s ship had been mothballed there during the Great Depression. Thomas’s grandfather had been a ship’s captain and Father had spent an unemployed summer with him on that ship, waiting for world commerce to start moving again. It must have been a happy time for him, because he got quite excited as they walked along the shore, pointing out where the ship had been and the landing stage they’d rowed to when they went ashore.
Thomas knew his grandfather had been called Ernest Holden because, at some point in his teens, with no comment from Father, a sort of certificate had appeared, framed, in the hallway of the house. It was a document from His Majesty’s Government declaring that Ernest Holden Paige had given his life for his country, in action, in the Atlantic, 8th June 1941. Thomas had the impression that his father had wanted to become a seaman, too, but had been held back by his poor eyesight. His sight was so poor that neither the army nor the air force had accepted him. He couldn’t even get a driver’s licence. So while his own hero father had fought submarines, Edward worked in Cammell Laird shipyard, doing technical drawings for marine engines. One of the happiest stories Father liked to tell was about how he was admired for his ability to hit rats with a paperweight in the shipyard workshops. It was strange to think that he couldn’t join the navy or drive a car, but could see well enough to draw and to hit rats with paperweights.
Father had never spoken of his reasons for becoming a clergyman. But Thomas did know that his father and mother had initially planned to be missionaries. They had met at missionary training college. They had wanted an adventurous life. It was 1948; they had lived through a war, but only on the edge of the action. She had been bombed in London, he in Liverpool. Her father had forbidden her to join the Wrens. His father had been disappointed that his son couldn’t enlist. Now they would fight the good fight another way.
Thomas’s parents’ marriage, he realised now – and realised that, without being aware, he had always known this – was based on a religious mission. They were partners in a task: to make the world a better place, converting people to the faith. That was the logic of their being together. If either of them were to lose this faith, their marriage would be lost with it. Wouldn’t it? Their life was a life in the Church, for the Church, though, for reasons that hadn’t been explained, they hadn’t in the end become missionaries. Perhaps having produced children made them less eligible. The Church didn’t want to be responsible for little white children in Uganda or Indonesia. Maybe we children blocked Father’s career, Thomas thought. We frustrated his ambitions. First the eyesight problem, then his children. He remembered the man’s impatience. His father had no time for chatter. Sometimes he barely took time to eat. He was impatient with Mother, too, impatient to be doing. But doing what? Winning souls for Christ. How strange. And how disappointing for him, then, to have failed first and foremost with two of the three souls under his nose, Thomas and his older brother.
He took our salvation for granted, Thomas thought.
Once he had decided to make the effort, it didn’t take Thomas long to gather these thoughts and type them on his computer. If only because there were so few. Thomas was living in a small flat now, in Liverpool, away from his wife, in Pendlebury, away from his children, who were grown up. They no longer needed him for protection. Only for financial support. Yet he did not feel he had really got away. It was as if he had left home to climb a mountain and was now stuck halfway up, bivouacked above the treeline, free, but freez
ing, with no way forward and no way back. Thomas was perplexed. His wife was down in the warm pastures waiting for him. So it seemed. But he wouldn’t go back. It was in this period that his mother died and he began to think about his father.
There were memories of infancy and memories of adolescence. There were two or three incidents that seemed important. Watershed moments. During Thomas’s early childhood, his father had seemed busy and happy. He preached and led meetings. First in Manchester, then in Blackpool. He was charismatic and embattled. He liked a fight. His voice was vibrant. He made jokes. He was a leader. People came to him for advice. At breakfast and lunch and dinner, he said grace. In the evening, before bed, he said prayers. They were fervent, earnest prayers, the prayers of someone going to heaven, or to hell. He wasn’t interested in empty, formal religion. He liked his lamb and his roast beef, his plum pie and his custard. But he was always impatient to be up and doing again. Thomas distinctly remembered his father thrusting his chair back and wiping gravy from his mouth with a white napkin. People said ‘serviette’ then. His father had had a rather slack mouth, poor teeth, but he was always clean shaven. He was always ready to be meeting people. To be saving their souls. Thomas could actually see the gravy stain on the crumpled napkin as his father hurried off.
But he couldn’t see his father’s face. Thomas tried and tried, but he couldn’t quite see it. In the small flat he lived in now, he kept no photos of the past. He had no family heirlooms. What had Father looked like? A thin handsome nose, definitely; sandy hair, but receding; grey-green eyes, very thick spectacles. Father was endlessly cleaning his spectacles, usually with a huge white handkerchief. Thomas could see the vigorous action of the hands rubbing the lenses with the cloth. But he couldn’t put eyes and nose together. He couldn’t remember looking into those eyes, or them looking into his. The handkerchief was in the way.
Father’s body was easier. Thomas remembered an aura of vulnerability, at once wiry and hunched, tense. But not intimidated. When the family moved from Manchester to Blackpool, Father took the children swimming in the sea. He wasn’t afraid of cold water. From being a tense, impatient man in study or pulpit, he had explosions of physical activity. He ran across the ribbed sand, puffing and calling. He didn’t keep fit, but rode a bike to visit parishioners. At the church, they hated him because he had banned the annual crowning of the May Queen. It was paganism, he said; it had nothing to do with Our Lord Jesus Christ and his message of joy and salvation. He hadn’t become a clergyman to perpetuate pagan rituals and crown pretty girls. There had been a lot of bad feeling when the May Queen was banned, but Thomas was young then and Father had seemed very confident and pleased with himself.
Once Father took Thomas to a holiday camp with some boys from a reform school. That was frightening. They were wild. They jumped off swings in motion to see who could leap the furthest. They yelled swear words and made rude gestures. Some of them had been sent to the school for robbery or violence. Father didn’t seem to have any trouble talking to these boys or saving their souls. Perhaps he felt it was missionary work. He felt fulfilled. If Thomas had sworn or put up two fingers, Dad would have been furious.
It was also scary when Father talked about death and burials. There was a story about a coffin that floated in the muddy water after a storm and another that had to be forced down into the grave because it was too long. The corpse had been a giant. In the end, Dad and the sexton had had to stand on the coffin to get it underground and even then they buried it at a 45-degree angle. It seemed strange to Thomas that his father could laugh at death. It seemed strange when he changed from his ordinary clothes into his robes, the long black cassock and starched white surplice, when he raised his arms outwards and upwards at the end of the blessing, so that he was like an angel, to be gathered into heaven. ‘May the Lord bless you and keep you!’ His voice rang around the brown stones of the church. ‘May the Lord cause his face to shine upon you!’ Later, the same man would chase Thomas and his brother back to bed if they crept down the stairs to spy on guests. ‘Scallywags!’ he yelled. Sometimes he got seriously angry with Thomas’s brother and spanked him. ‘I will have the last word,’ he said. ‘I will thrash the stubbornness out of you.’ It was frightening. But reassuring, too, in a way. Certainly it was not that memory that made Thomas sad when he thought about his father. Thomas had never been spanked, that he could recall. I was the good boy, he realised. Or the shrewd one.
When Thomas was nine or ten, his father had had a breakdown. Nervous breakdown was the expression they used then. It was Sunday and he had been due to preach. The moment had come to go up into the pulpit, but he had been unable to. He had had to go home. Perhaps the pagan people of Blackpool had finally got the better of him. Afterwards, Thomas’s family had gone on the longest holiday they ever took together. A month in Devon. That was the time they went to see where Dad’s father had mothballed his ship in Plymouth Sound. Thomas remembered how strange the idea had seemed: mothballing a ship in a depression. They had stayed in an abandoned zoo of all things, sleeping in old animal houses that had been converted into holiday cabins. It was the only time Thomas had met his father’s other sister, Elizabeth. She came with her husband, who smoked and drank beer from cans. Thomas’s parents disapproved. He had a tent made out of an army parachute from the war and he did not go to church. Thomas remembered the fabric of that tent, a very light brown and green, very soft and thin. Why had his father and mother gone on holiday with the sister he never spoke of, on that one occasion, the time Dad had been unable to go into the pulpit to preach? Why did they never go on holiday with them again?
There had been one occasion in Thomas’s life when he had been unable to go into a meeting at work. Like his father, he had been in his late forties. He had had to say he was ill. It was after a girlfriend left him. That was the first time he betrayed his wife. He was in love with this girlfriend, but he could not imagine leaving his family, so after a while she left him. Then Thomas was so overcome with unhappiness that he had not gone into work one morning but had walked to her house, the house she had a room in, and stood in the street looking up at the window. It did not help. He saw no way forward.
Soon after Father’s breakdown and that famous holiday with the visit to Plymouth Sound, they had left Blackpool and moved to Bristol. This was one of the watersheds and, looking back, Thomas realised that his memories of Father from this time on were different, rather sadder. The expression ‘new challenge’ had been used. Thomas heard the words again now without quite knowing who had said them. Dad had been given a new challenge: a big church in a thriving well-to-do Bristol suburb. People in high places believed in him. He was a man who needed to give energy where energy would be well received. An evangelical cannot thrive in a world of May Queens. Or not for long.
At school, Thomas had to drop his northern accent to avoid being laughed at. Did Father have to change his accent in the pulpit? To suit the good folk of Clifton? Thomas had no recollection. Thinking about this now, he found it odd. Life had slipped by unnoticed. Or perhaps he, Thomas, at ten years old, had been so focused on his new life, the need to make new friends, the new vicarage with the big garden and the bus to school, that he had barely noticed his father, who went on preaching in much the same way, it seemed to Thomas, albeit from a different pulpit.
Did he have any recollection of talking to Father, one-on-one, through his adolescence, about anything that mattered? Girls, sex, religion, smoking, drinking? He did not. He really didn’t. What Thomas did remember, though, was the growing antagonism between his father and his brother, and his father’s frustration with his sister’s failure at school. He remembered these things because they had caused him pain. His sister was a good Christian, but not smart. One day, she had run away from school because she couldn’t face her teachers. Father was angry with her. She locked herself in the bathroom, and he banged on the door with his fists. ‘You shall come out!’ Mother tried to mediate, but she was shocked, too: they hadn’t ex
pected this of his sister. Meantime, his brother grew his hair long, smoked, smoked dope, drank, had inappropriate girlfriends and listened to evil music. But he did well in school and could beat Father at chess, which was not easy. Thomas could not beat Father at chess. Not once.
Thomas saw clearly now how his father had failed to see things clearly then. He had failed to accept that his daughter was not going to do well at school and that his son was not going to be a staunch Christian. He had allowed these entirely ordinary developments to frustrate him beyond measure. He had castigated himself. He saw the failings as his own, because it was unthinkable that they could be God’s. Still, Thomas did well enough at school and toed the line at church. He was sent to a school some miles away, to keep him from his brother’s evil influence. And he kept away. His behaviour was exemplary. Thomas did not smoke or listen to psychedelic music and, when he swore, it was out of the earshot of parents and sister.
Yet even Thomas was not quite what his father wanted. He preferred literature to the sciences and Father was convinced that the truth lay in the sciences; the sciences and theology. Everything else was wishy-washy humanism. At church, Thomas was more obedient than fervent. He went to church only because he would feel guilty if he didn’t. He would feel he had let his parents down. Of course, he would have preferred it himself if he had felt fervent about church. He would have liked to like his duties. It would have been such a relief. But, try as he might, he didn’t.
All this was in the air, but never talked about. Father could hardly complain, because there was objectively nothing in Thomas’s behaviour to complain about. Father could confront Thomas’s sister when she hid in the bathroom instead of going to school. He could confront Thomas’s brother when he was caught smoking at his bedroom window or when he started to paint pictures of naked women and said he wanted to go to art college. For better or for worse, there was a relationship there; there was heat. Father would bang on the bathroom door; he would shout. Sometimes he would even strike Thomas’s brother, then afterwards he’d be fearfully friendly, because he had overdone it. He would embrace him, and Thomas’s sister, too.