Father of the Man

by Stephen Benatar

  “I didn’t realize,” answered Roger, “there was going to be a problem. Otherwise, you see, I wouldn’t have left it so late. I’m sorry about that.”

  In fact, it had all seemed so simple and straightforward. The neatness of the six days owing and the six days required…Roger had viewed this almost as a sign that everything was meant.

  He told the man, less succinctly than he’d hoped to, exactly what the trouble was.

  “And if you can’t extend my ticket I was wondering if I couldn’t…you know…have a…whether you couldn’t just give me some kind of a pass.” He shrugged, and again gave an apologetic smile.

  “Wish I could,” said the station master. “But even if something like that were possible—which I doubt—I’d still have to get authorization from our area office at Derby.” He pursed his lips slightly and looked at the two plants on the windowsill as if speculating on whether or not they needed water.

  “Excuse me, then, but…but couldn’t you give them a ring?”

  “What, on a Sunday? No, no, they don’t work weekends.” The very idea that anyone should think they did appeared to fill him with wonder and amusement and even a touch of pity. Now his glance travelled towards the bicycle. Roger imagined an ironical lift to the eyebrow: perhaps he was envisaging low handlebars and seeing himself bowling along country lanes on this bright October afternoon instead of sitting in a poky office poring over paperwork.

  “So what do I do tomorrow?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to pay.”

  “But I haven’t any money.”

  “Borrow some.” There could have been the hint of a question mark but certainly no more than a hint. Perhaps absentmindedly, he had picked up a pencil and was now rolling it beneath his right palm, back and forth across a small uncluttered space of desk. A poor substitute for freewheeling down an autumn hillside—maybe with your wife and children. The interview had not contained the friendliness it promised. Nor any feeling of genuine goodwill.

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  “Better stay home, then. You haven’t got much choice.”

  Rather than catch a bus back Roger decided to walk. When he opened the front door the smell of baking bread came out to him. His mother was chopping vegetables for a soup; Polly sat begging for pieces of potato peel. “Darling, you wouldn’t like to feed her, would you? Get her out from under my feet?”

  By this time Roger had grown calmer. He collected the dog’s bowl and took the tin-opener from the drawer. “Where’s Dad?”

  “I think he must have gone upstairs. I think he must be lying down.” Jean’s tone was suddenly so neutral, so audibly neutral, that in fact it wasn’t neutral at all.

  “Oh dear.”

  “Yes. Oh dear, indeed.” But she made a visibly conscious effort not to elaborate on the point. “Were things all right at the station?”

  “What makes you think they wouldn’t be?”

  “Nothing whatever. Just an unconsidered turn of phrase, you poor pedantic boy.” She threw a carrot in the bin, as having grown too rubbery even to make soup. Then, possibly alerted by something in the tone of his response, she repeated her question. “Were they?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Why? What happened?” Her vegetable knife stopped slicing and she turned to face him with automatic concern.

  As he spooned out the dog food and Polly scrabbled excitedly at his trouser leg, her tail lashing frantically, he reported as faithfully as he could the substance of what had been said. “But as I walked home I got more and more bolshie. Even if I have to pay for only one day’s ticket, that’s over forty quid. And it’s so unfair. When they took my money they engaged to give me three-hundred-and-sixty-five days of travel. Consecutive travel.” Roger had rehearsed that phrase.

  “I know, love, I know. But it’s no good getting all het up over it. I still have a spot of emergency cash left in the building society. I’ll write you out a cheque.”

  “Yet it isn’t fair, Mum. I shouldn’t just give in to it. ‘If we can keep you as a customer we’ll certainly pay you back the days we owe! If not—sorry, mate—just thirty-six pounds, not a penny more!’ That’s effectively what they said to me.”

  Jean touched his forearm sympathetically, then turned back to her preparation of the vegetables. “Darling, you never seem to learn. All your life you’ve complained that something or other isn’t fair; but what have you ever been able to do about it? The world isn’t fair—sooner or later we all have to become resigned to that. So why not follow the man’s advice: just stay at home tomorrow? We’ll go to the cinema…and afterwards have coffee and cake; we can pretend we’re on a date!” At the moment Jean worked only three days a week, in an antiques shop, although she was thinking, regretfully, that she would soon have to look for something better-paid. She laughed; there was a note of excitement in her laughter. “Have we ever been to the pictures together, without anyone else in tow?”

  But Roger refused to be drawn. He watched Polly, who was by now pushing her bowl right across the kitchen, pushing it with tongue reluctant to acknowledge there was no more left. “And then what happens on Tuesday?”

  “Indiana Jones,” persisted his mother, “you said you wanted to see it. Oh, darling, do say yes! And I’ll be the one to speak to Mr Cavendish, to tell him you’re not well.”

  “Anything—so long as you never lie! That’s what you used to say.”

  “Oh, Roger, don’t be such a…”

  “What?”

  “And apart from anything else, my pet, think how embarrassing you’d find it.” However, she didn’t expatiate on what ‘it’ was. “You—who won’t even wear a bright tie in case it draws attention to you. You—who always wear a belt and braces.”

  “What in God’s name has that to do with anything?” Yet he didn’t wait for an answer. “And, anyway, when do I complain so much about everything being unfair?”

  “Don’t say you don’t even realize you do it. I thought you knew yourself better than that.”

  “No. Tell me. When do I do it?”

  “It’s not important,” said Jean.

  “But I want to know.”

  She sighed. The excitement had gone out of her. “It’s only over small things. Like when Oscar’s had one of those little strokes of luck he always does seem to be having. Don’t you remember when you said to me, ‘How is it that Oscar keeps finding things—like that Rolex wristwatch which nobody ever claimed—or discovers money in his account which was clearly put there by mistake but just as clearly nobody ever missed? How is it that every time, whatever happens, he comes up smelling of roses?’”

  “And you said he was born under a lucky star, that’s simply the kind of person he is.”

  Jean was wiping her hands down her flowered apron. “Anyhow, will you come to see Indiana Jones with me?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry. No. I can’t.”

  “Then I’ll go to write you that cheque.” Her voice had taken on something of the expressionless tone in which she had spoken about his father.

  “No, Mum. I don’t want one.”

  “All I’ll do is sign it. You’ll fill in the rest. You’d better take my card; for heaven’s sake don’t lose it.” This last bit was intended to be humorous.

  “But I don’t want them, neither the cheque nor the card.”

  “Don’t be naïve, Roger—please. I’ll leave them both on the sideboard. You’ve got long enough to consider it. I can’t do with two difficult men in this house at the same time.”

  Roger shook his head again. His mouth was set in a stubborn line. She had sometimes told him he had all the stubbornness of his father.

  “Because if you get a police conviction and completely ruin your prospects don’t think you can just run back to us to fix it. Oh, and by the way, the money’s a gift, not a loan. We’ll manage somehow; your father needn’t know.” She indicated vaguely the vegetable rack beside her; on Saturday mornings, in the market, she always stoc
ked up on plenty of vegetables. “The only way I want you to repay me is by not making a mess of your life because of some adolescent idea about the way things ought to be. That might have been all right for Sunday school in the reign of Queen Victoria but after ten years of Margaret Thatcher I can tell you it absolutely isn’t!” There was a tremor in her voice. He was suddenly afraid that she was going to cry. She walked rapidly past him.

  There was a further question he had meant to ask but now realized he couldn’t. If it had been Oscar and not me…would your advice have been the same? Or do you think that he, born under his lucky star and able to talk his way out of practically anything, might still have come up smelling of roses?

  Though he wondered whether Oscar, caught in such a situation, would also have declined her proffered means of escape.

  One thing sure, however: his fears, when he next saw her, proved well-founded; it was clear she had been crying. Him? His father? She didn’t refer to it or to what had caused it but Roger naturally felt responsible. He knew this would have sounded corny but he really thought she must be among the best of mothers in the world.

  His father, too, remained very quiet.

  Yet somehow they all got through their supper, without anyone tempestuously leaving before it was over.

  He didn’t sleep well. Supposing I’d been an American at the time of Vietnam, he thought. Or old enough to be called up during the war? Supposing I’d been a dissident Chinese student only a few months back? Not much comparison, really: on British Rail no tanks nor bombs nor bullets. No napalm. Not even all that many sticks and stones.

  And words can never hurt me.

  He’d been awake before his alarm rang. About an hour later, on the train, he opened his briefcase and took out a packet of the sandwiches his mother had prepared the night before: every morning he found two such packets in the fridge, carefully foil-wrapped; also a banana, washed apple and some other piece of fruit. Occasionally a bar of chocolate. He’d considered waiting for his breakfast until the conductor had come—or more accurately, of course, gone—but that mightn’t be for ages. He wasn’t hungry, in fact to eat would be an effort, yet he didn’t feel that after would be any easier than before. And by then, too, people would be more a ware of him. Besides, he had to try to take his mind off things.

  For this reason also, while he was getting through the first half of a sandwich, and beginning, against all expectation, to realize it was doing him good, he opened his ring binder; studied the printed sheet that lay immediately inside. It was the Advanced Level paper in History, 1399-1714, set for the previous summer. As a painstaking method of revision Roger was slowly working his way through it; he himself would be sitting the examination next year. It was even possible some of the same questions could resurface.

  He’d already passed his ‘A’ level in Literature and his ‘A’ level in Geography. When History was added to these, his way would then be clear to go to university, like Abby and Oscar. For a long time now Roger had been half-regretting his decision to leave school at sixteen. He’d been stupid and obstinate—yes, his mother had been angry with him then as well; it had been only his dad who had backed him up—but he had never had much of an academic bent, nor been all that keen on mixing with his peers, and it had somehow seemed more important to begin to earn a living, help out at home, get an early start. Degrees no longer appeared a certain passport to an interesting career.

  But he had stayed with the bank for only three-and-a-half years. He had never expected breathtaking adventure—no. Yet nor had he been prepared for the sheer, corrosive boredom of it.

  By contrast, he had really enjoyed the umbrella shop. Despite the daily dusting and other small elements of drudgery, he had felt liberated. And because the business was still family-owned he had felt, too, an appreciated and individual part of it.

  For shop work, moreover, it was outstandingly well-paid. He had been looked after and he had done his best to be of value. He had believed he had a future there.

  And now—this! If the business had been doing well, Mr Cavendish had said, he’d somehow have found the three-and-a-half thousand pounds…with no one but the firm’s accountant being aware of it. Yet the last two summers had been unusually dry, the rates were about to be increased, if the increase were dramatic the shop might even have to close. And Roger hadn’t saved the wherewithal out of his wages; was amazed he hadn’t so much as thought about it. Also, he couldn’t work out where all his money had gone. Of course, there was what he paid his mother, plus a few pounds a week to Scottish Widows—a friend of Uncle Nathan’s had fixed him up in that—and there was a standing order to Oxfam, too, for he had followed Abby’s example; from the age of eleven or twelve she had always given to charities. But otherwise…well, it had just gone. He had spent it on bits and pieces round the house: some curtains, a carpet, a wardrobe: and on taking weekly driving lessons in the hope that he’d become the first member of his family to drive. But he’d already taken his test three times and although he was good (his instructor told him he was near-perfect, apart from his tendency to be overcautious) he kept on failing in confidence whenever the examiner got in. He had parked in front of somebody’s driveway, had mounted the kerb whilst reversing, had even, incredibly, messed up a hill-start. Crazy things like that.

  Yet when faced with only a written exam he was fine; and he was glad that he now had these ‘A’ levels to concentrate on—in some ways it was almost lucky he hadn’t taken them at school—if simply to show there were things he could actually succeed at. University still didn’t appeal to him but he’d suddenly needed to prove, even long before the driving tests, that if he didn’t go there it was simply because he’d chosen not to. Also, in a vague, unformulated way, he’d viewed it as a kind of present to his mum. Added to which, he’d never had a proper hobby. His studying had been a godsend during his year in that bedsitter. It had been yet more of a godsend, maybe, during these past twelve months of Intercity travel.

  He wasn’t going through the questions in the History paper in sequence and unfortunately he had finished over the weekend the one he’d spent the whole of last week answering. Which meant he was having to start an entirely new piece of work this morning; and at the moment he was finding it hard not merely to make a choice but even to understand the meaning of the question.

  Discuss the view that the ambitions of Henry V in France left a task for his successors that was too great for the resources of the English Crown.

  His sandwiches today were cream cheese with sultanas and stem ginger; and, more conventionally, Cheddar with cucumber and pickle. He’d told his mother more than once she ought to write a recipe book on the making of sandwiches. Even though money was tight her invention seemed practically unflagging; repetitions rarely occurred within a fortnight and, anyway, were seldom unwelcome. Each day she provided two kinds: a round of each for his breakfast and a round of each for his lunch.

  How far was English cultural development in the later Tudor and early Stuart period both Court-led and Court-inspired?

  He just sat staring through the window, not really noticing the taste of cream cheese or ginger or pickle, nor the golds and russets of the countryside, the blue sky, the brightness of the grass—yet possibly deriving benefits from each of them—and thought of all the different ways in which he might have saved money and how different his situation at this present instant would then have been. His own resources, or lack of them, temporarily took precedence over the resources of the English Crown, or lack of them, either in the later Tudor period or at any other time. Considerations of English cultural development were similarly delayed.

  Therefore, when the conductor came, it was a total anticlimax.

  “Tickets, please. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Thank you, madam.”

  His approach seemed agonizingly slow.

  Roger held out the little plastic wallet that contained his out-of-date ticket. The conductor gave it only the briefest of glances.

  “
Thank you, sir.” He moved on down the carriage.

  5

  Despite his depression, Ephraim—whilst shaving on that Monday morning; and at least he could bring himself to shave, unlike other occasions on which even getting out of bed had seemed practically beyond him—Ephraim now found himself humming a song which must have been popular at the beginning of the Fifties. He could pinpoint it like that because he could recollect singing it to his mother in the kitchen of their flat in Marylebone: his hitting home the punchline and her pretence of being aggrieved at such a display of sauciness. Indeed it was only the finish he could properly recall.

  “Dearie, life was cheery

  In the good old days gone by…”

  And—ah, yes—shock, horror!

  “If you remember, say you remember,

  Then, dearie, you’re much older than I…”

  Surely he couldn’t have been much more than thirteen when this type of humour would still have appealed to him. He might have said surely he couldn’t have been much more than thirteen when he would still have sung to her. But he knew this wasn’t so. They’d often had spot-the-tune competitions until he was maybe in his twenties and even now he could see his mother’s look of concentration when trying to identify the song being hummed to her or trying to recapture the tune of something she was hoping might then confound him. And he could see the little table at which they’d generally been sitting, the little table with the American oilcloth on it and the flimsy flap nearly always extended, and over their heads the shelf containing all the jars and breakfast cereals in daily use: the Nell Gwyn marmalade, the extract of malt, the barley kernels, grape-nuts or post-toasties.

  Suddenly he had such a vivid picture of the whole kitchen: the dresser with the willow-pattern china, the wooden draining board, soft and scuffed between the worn-down ridges, the window with its view of other war-neglected chimneys, roofs and windows. He saw the tiny shaky-legged fridge, dating back to sometime in the Thirties, the equally insubstantial cooker set into a recess, the bottle of Bev on the mantle above this, along with the Mazawattee, the matches, the candles, the cookbooks—suggestions for wartime dishes from Countess Morphy or from Betty Brand of the Sunday Graphic—and right in one corner, hidden by the books, his mother’s totally indispensible Lixen, aka Elixir of Senna. Ephraim smiled; his smile was wistful rather than amused. Because the room was easy to warm with just a one-barred electric fire, they often sat there in the evenings, he doing his homework, she also sitting at the table, typically in her black-and-white checked housecoat and reading the latest Philip Gibbs or Frances Parkinson Keyes, smoking her Senior Service, making frequent cups of tea and equally frequent inquiries into the progress of his work. These last were seldom nagging; almost invariably sympathetic and encouraging, or congratulatory. She thought he had such a brilliant future; the word ‘loser’, had she known it, would never, not even remotely, have entered her head. When Ephraim looked back on these times, his mother’s companionship seemed almost inseparable from her approval. Indeed, as he razored the lather off his chin (it was impossible to believe this could be essentially the same chin which he’d had in 1945, on that sunny July afternoon when he’d first walked into the empty echoing flat three floors above MacFisheries, the flat which to this day he could still think of instinctively, before any other place, as home), as he razored off the lather he saw a slow tear forming in the corner of one eye, and then another instantly brimming beneath the other lid. He hadn’t always found his mother fault-free—far from it—but he now, fleetingly, had an unexpected vision of the moment of his own death: saw her waiting to greet him at the end of that dark tunnel, saw her again looking young and very pretty, all the later lines of sadness and abandonment erased, as she stepped light-footedly towards him, half-dancing, to the tune of Dearie, do you remember…; she, too, in her youth had won several medals on the dance floor.