He wouldn’t take the coat off, and sat on the patio rubbing his left leg. I gave him a mug of sweet tea, and started on some notes about the Wakefield influence on New Zealand settlement. I hoped the heat of the late afternoon sun, redoubled by the greatcoat, would lull him to sleep for a few hours, but he showed increasing bad humour and fearfulness. He complained about his sore leg, though unable to remember the cause. He complained about being left with a stranger in a house he didn’t much like. ‘I won’t have to spend the night here, will I?’ or ‘I’m not going to be here when it gets dark am I?’ he asked a hundred times, but paid no attention to any of the placating replies I made. I ignored him in the end. Angeline said he’d been a top administrator, but in the bad times all that was left of that serene and calculating efficiency was a querulous anxiety. ‘It’s a very cold house at night, this,’ he said morosely. ‘Who are you again?’
‘An academic failure in Gotham City,’ I said.
‘You talk nonsense,’ said Dad. His low-slung face turned away from me and he continued the conversation with himself. ‘I’m certain we said there was to be underfloor heating right through the living area and the bedrooms. It’ll be the rats, the buggers, that have chewed all the wiring. It happens all over the world at night. After the war there was nothing to stop rats spreading at all. In the desert I could always hear them breeding in the night.’ Dad peered into the bright sun as if it were blackness over the shifting sand, and cracked his knuckles. The hollow whisper of his voice seemed to be coming from a barren place deep inside.
It was going to be a bad evening. With the exams looming I was desperate to get a decent night’s work done. When Dad came out with the predictable request for wine and cheese, I took it as a sign and decided to let him drink enough to enter some Valhalla to which war and rats could not accompany him. For the first time I made a serious inventory of the grog cupboard and found, behind a carton, a bottle of Napoleon brandy which I’m sure Angeline and her husband had forgotten. I brought out also a bottle of shiraz to soften Dad up and provide a glass or two for me. We started on the patio and when the sun had gone down moved into the lounge. We had a mince pie each before I introduced Dad to the brandy. ‘Are the others going to have a glass?’ he said, all good humour by that time.
‘The world has our invitation,’ I said.
‘Include the orchestra in that.’
‘Even the celestial choirs,’ I said.
‘We’ll all be at the start line by 0500 hours,’ said Dad.
‘Amen to that,’ I said.
‘Amen.’
For a couple of hours the wine and brandy loosened Dad’s tongue and he hummed tunes and talked of his family as if his son and daughter were still children, as if his wife were still alive. Perhaps those years had been the uplands of his life. But then he sagged in his chair, steadily sipped brandy and made small noises with his loose lips. Twice I stopped studying to take him for a leak, and he went meekly, allowing me the first time to get possession of the gunslinger’s coat, and lifting his arms without expressing indignity when I worked his zip. I think he would have kept drinking brandy as long as I continued to pour it, but when the bottle was almost empty and the time was after eleven, I put his arm over my shoulder and helped him into his bedroom. It’s not easy undressing a very old, drunk man. Dad was all inconvenient elbows, and limp yet recalcitrant feet and hands like dying flatfish. When he was sitting on the bed and I was tugging his pyjama jacket on, he came out with a whispered echo of a conversation long gone. ‘There weren’t many women in the war.’
‘Not many here either,’ I said.
‘There was one nurse.’ Dad’s voice had almost disappeared.
‘Good on you,’ I said.
‘Very few women in the war in fact,’ and as if this was her cue, Angeline rang from Nelson.
‘So how’s Dad?’ she asked. I told her that he was fine and that he’d just gone off to bed. ‘Everything okay then?’ Everything was fine I said, and mentioned that he seemed brighter and more active in the mornings. ‘Yes, that’s the way of it,’ she said. ‘You’re not leaving him alone at all, are you?’ I could reply quite truthfully on that, but not to the next rapid interrogation. ‘You’re making sure he’s taking both sets of tablets, green and pink?’ I told her there were no problems there, and made a mental note to find the pill bottles and chuck out the number Dad should have taken. I riposted with a question of my own about the undoubted pleasure of her holiday. ‘Yes, it’s been quite nice, thank you, but I’m sure we haven’t had a chance to unwind properly yet.’ There was something in her tone which made me think she thought my inquiry overfamiliar. ‘Well anyway,’ she said, ‘do your best until the day after tomorrow and I’ll see you then. Don’t take too much notice of stuff Dad says at nights. He gets a bit wandery when he’s tired.’ I told her I thought he’d sleep pretty soundly.
He certainly did that. I checked on him a couple of times before going to bed myself. He could have been dead except for the snoring, and hadn’t moved an inch since I put the blankets over him. The snoring was reassuring because at the back of my mind was a fear that he might die in the night, and the post mortem show an exceedingly high blood alcohol level. I took the brandy bottle across the road and flung it into the soft darkness of the golf course, and then, in the exaggerated anxiety that comes late at night, worried about the fingerprints that would be clear upon it. The guilt I felt in drugging the old guy in that way more than undid the scholastic peace that had been my motivation, and eventually I went to sleep with my mind wiped of any revision, and a decision that for the rest of my wardenship I would allow Dad the natural expression of his age, his condition and his metamorphosis of character. At least alcohol had dealt to the rats of dementia, and a deep barking dog was the one animal to inhabit the night.
The only obvious consequence of the binge in the morning was a monumentally soiled bed — a soon forgotten indignity for Dad, and a rightful punishment for me. ‘Why is there always a terrible pong in this house?’ Dad asked when I had finished getting the worst off the sheets in the tub and then put them in the machine. He showed no signs of a hangover and waited with some impatience for his breakfast.
‘I’m going to give the place an airing today,’ I said humbly. He was alive and I was so thankful: my vision of the night which saw him stretched out dead drunk in the most literal way was still fresh. ‘Tomorrow Angeline comes home and everything needs to be in order. Where are these pills you should be taking anyway?’
‘You don’t get rid of a stink like this with pills,’ said Dad scathingly.
For the first time since I’d been looking after Dad, there wasn’t a clear sky. It was still warm, but a high sheet of pale cloud hid the sun. The patio wasn’t as attractive without the direct strike of the sun, and after breakfast we stayed in the lounge. Dad was quiet as I shaved him, tilting his head on command and enjoying the busy feel of the electric razor on his skin, but when that was done he wanted to talk about going back to his own home and family. ‘I could rent this place out,’ he said. ‘Investment properties like this can be good little earners if you’re not facing on-going maintenance.’
‘Angeline’s living here though.’
There was a pause. In the mornings Dad had the ability to process some of the things he heard and to notice inconsistencies with his own sense of earlier life. ‘How old’s Angeline now?’ he said cautiously.
‘In her forties,’ I said, with greater conviction than I felt.
‘So she lives here all the time?’
‘With you.’ I avoided the complication of her husband. Dad nodded, as if he’d known these things all along, his head swaying like that of a Chinese processional dragon. He made a steeple of his big, wrinkled hands, a typical gesture, and his eyes slid behind their sagging lower lids. He was doing his best with some question to himself, but couldn’t make anything of it. ‘And you are again?’ he enquired, almost apologetically.
While I read through my not
es on a revisionist history of the New Zealand wars of the nineteenth century, Dad was content to hum and sing to himself while playing with a thread from the band of his thick, blue jersey, but after I went out to collect the mail I found that he had a box of documents on his knee, and he became intent on a scrutiny of them. I tried to concentrate on my work, but after an hour or so I found the obvious repetition of his actions distracting. He would take each envelope, or paper, from the box, manoeuvre it before his face for a time then place it on the coffee table beside him. When all were accounted for, he would replace them in the box and begin all over again, giving just as much concentration to a document on its third or fourth appearance as on its first.
‘What have you got there, Mr Ladd?’ I said finally, from comradeship rather than curiosity.
‘I need everything in order before I go back to my wife and family,’ he said.
‘Well, that makes sense.’
‘I don’t seem to be quite on top of things the way I used to be.’ His voice was quiet, more self-aware than usual. The limited admission had greater poignancy than his more flamboyant claims. I left the Maori and the colonial militia, and gave Dad the attention he deserved when at his best.
‘You’re eighty-eight,’ I said, ‘and I suppose everybody’s memory is slipping a bit by then. You’re still pretty good on all the early stuff.’
‘Things seem different somehow. Why is it that I have to spend so much time by myself these days?’
I had no easy answer to that. In Dad’s whirling times I could play a sort of Mad Hatter counterpoint of non sequiturs without belittling him, but when he was in the same world deference to that realisation was due. ‘Your wife passed on some years ago and now you live here with your daughter. She’s on holiday this week and I’m keeping you company. My name’s Brian.’
So much contemporary truth was a shock for Dad. He relaxed back in the chair and his face assumed an added mournfulness. He rubbed the back of each hand in turn and eventually gave a small, wry smile. And there was in his eyes for a moment an ineffable realisation of his own condition. ‘That’s right. Of course, of course,’ he affirmed to himself, ‘Viv had a heart attack and she’s buried at Padleigh. Yes, of course. And this is Angeline’s house.’
But he didn’t show any interest in his daughter’s home. His voice faded, and he looked out to the uniform, pale cloud high in the summer sky. The revelations of comprehension were of no more joy to him than the perils of senility. Maybe as a natural means of escaping both, he fell asleep soon afterwards, and I worked on through the skirmishes of the 1860s. Dad’s mouth hung open and his theatrical, fly-away eyebrows were ludicrously luxuriant. Maybe the wine and brandy from the night before still had some claim on him; might lead him gentle into some good night.
At midday I slipped out of the lounge and assessed Angeline’s pantry with lunch in mind. On the one hand was my wish for ease of preparation, on the other the mercenary consideration that food was a part of my conditions of service. Maybe simplicity at noon and indulgence at the end of the day I decided. Baked beans on toast topped with two poached eggs apiece was the outcome. I was pleased all of the yolks were intact, but when I woke Dad he had no flattering comments. ‘I suppose there’s worse things than beans,’ was all he said. ‘People don’t eat them the same now though, do they. Something to do with roughage, or saturated fats.’
‘You don’t have to force it down,’ I said. I was surprised by the resentment I felt at his criticism. My response gave me an understanding of the greater scale of fury a committed chef would feel if Provençal Braised Pork with Saffron and Truffle Stuffing were disparaged.
‘No, no, it’s okay.’ Dad trailed his knife through the egg yolks. ‘I can get through it.’
Dad was not a malicious person. He said he’d help with the washing up, and managed to find a second tea towel and dry one flat plate before I finished everything else. A long afternoon stretched before us and I wanted to move out of the lounge to give some sense of progression to the day, and also get Dad away from his box of documents. The patio was warm and pleasant though the high cloud still reduced the sun to a general and suffusing glow. A small girl on a small trike did endless, intent circles on the neighbour’s drive, and on the smooth expanse of the golf course people towed their trundlers and had time for unhurried talk. Dad seemed restless until I remembered his long coat and helped him put it on. Incongruity is of no concern in old age: the weight and texture of the coat must have been pleasing to him and he loved the heat.
‘I played a bit of golf myself,’ said Dad. ‘It wasn’t my sport of choice, but in business it’s useful to be able to play golf without making a goat of yourself. Especially in Asian countries, you develop a sense of business opportunity and personal trust by playing together.’
‘So deals are made on the course.’
‘Not so much that, but Japanese and Singaporean businessmen like to get a sense of your personality that way.’
‘Were you any good?’
‘Not really,’ said Dad, ‘but it got me to the table without too much embarrassment and I had good products to sell. Do you know anything about mechanical engineering?’
‘No.’ I thought that was the end of the conversation, because Dad said nothing for a long while and hummed quietly.
‘What is it you do know about?’ he asked finally, and I almost congratulated him on holding onto one line of thought for so long.
‘I’m still at varsity, studying English and History.’
‘You do the roof spraying as a part-time thing then?’
‘That’s it,’ I said. Life was too short to tease out absolutely fact and fiction. The end justifies the means when you’re talking to someone like Dad, and the thing was to keep him as happy as possible it seemed to me. ‘What would you do if you could have your time over again?’ I asked him.
‘Over again?’
‘Would you live your life differently if you had a choice — a different job, different country, stuff like that.’
‘I was always a good organiser.’ Dad seemed quite interested in the self-analysis. ‘My mother and father were muddlers and I reacted against that, I suppose. Logic, systems, the application of reason — that’s what I brought to business. People sneer at administrators because they don’t understand the skills involved.’
‘You did okay, though.’
‘People think it’s paper shuffling, not real work,’ said Dad. He seemed about to say more, but then closed his eyes briefly so I prompted him while he still had a chain of thought.
‘So what is important for a manager?’
‘People not policy. The best systems in the world are useless if you don’t carry your staff. People skills make the difference from the factory floor to the boardroom, that’s what I say.’ And Dad said it with surprising coherence. It was surely the best I saw him in all the time I was there, and gave me a glimpse of the person he had once been. It was perhaps achieved with some effort, however, for afterwards he concentrated on rubbing his hands, and making sly sheep’s eyes at me. ‘So are you in some sort of business?’ he said finally.
‘I’m keeping you company.’
‘Ah, yes, that’s right.’ Dad’s voice had the pretence of assurance, but his soft expression was one of increasing bewilderment as his mind moved from the steady recollection of the far past to the morass of the present. ‘Yes, of course, that’s right, yes,’ he said to comfort himself, looking over to the abandoned trike in the neighbouring section. The child had vanished without us noticing.
Dad leant back and closed his eyes; I returned to my swot notes. No way was I going to risk another squash trip with him on the pillion seat, although I felt stale from lack of physical activity. I was envious of the happy gaggles of golfers who straggled over the well-kept course, and whose laughter carried quite clearly to me. I wondered if any player there ever glanced across at Dad on his patio and had some premonition of their future.
Dad snored for an hour
and a half beneath the luminous warm cloud of the summer, and then woke with a good deal of lip-smacking and fidgeting. For another half an hour he hummed and half sang snatches of songs from the forties and fifties, some of which had become popular again. He wasn’t conscious of me during this time and I carried on working while the opportunity was there. Finally his awareness circled out and he became quieter, coughed softly in a slightly self-conscious way and regarded me from beneath the thatch of his eyebrows. I said nothing. I wanted the mood and relationship to be of his making, rather than always imposing reality as I saw it on Dad’s variable world. I made coffee for us both, and settled in my patio chair again, still without a word. It wasn’t a ploy for my entertainment: let Dad kick off, and I’d just run with the ball. Dad began in his own good time.
‘Tell me about your time in Ecuador, Warren,’ said Dad in his reed-bed whisper. So the sun was over the yard arm, or some such thing.
‘It’s mostly forest in Ecuador and very hot. They have a lot of insects and bats, but a very shaky economy.’
‘Any rats?’ asked Dad.
‘No rats. It’s an odd thing, there’s an indigenous tropical lily there and its pollen inhibits the breeding of rats. Ecuador is the only country in the world completely free of rats. They have monkeys with coloured bums, though, and those fish that reduce horses to skeletons in no time at all.’
‘But no rats, eh,’ said Dad.
‘Absolutely not, Mr Ladd. You say that you don’t give a rat’s arse there, and the locals have no idea what you’re talking about. On the other hand there’s scorpions as big as saucers and beetles bigger than tortoises to do the scavenging.’
‘And are the tortoises any threat?’
‘Only to the babies,’ I reassured him. ‘In Ecuador babies are always left in hammocks, never on the ground where the tortoises can get at them. Even so you notice that a lot of children there have a toe or two missing.’
Owen Marshall Selected Stories Page 57