Father of the Man

by Stephen Benatar

  Besides, in another way it had been a mistake to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Harrison Ford was one of the few contemporary stars she found attractive and this, she had learned, could be unsettling. Strolling home afterwards (since, although the walk itself was tedious, it was a pleasant late-afternoon and she was in no hurry to get back…if Roger had been with her they’d have gone to a café but this wasn’t the kind of extravagance she felt she could indulge in on her own), strolling home afterwards she glanced discreetly at the men she passed, to see if any amongst them looked at all interesting, sexually. None of them did, not a single one…which, indeed, could suddenly feel a little worrying. She had used to enjoy making love, it had once been important to her, you often heard that women of her age still enjoyed it. Yet here she was, for God’s sake, being physically stirred only by film stars…So was it any surprise it had grown to be one of Ephraim’s major complaints that it was always him who needed to initiate things in bed?

  But all the same there were several good reasons for this.

  A, when she was worried sick about money she couldn’t feel romantic. His word.

  B, unless he romanced her first, with dinner out and candlelight and wine—or even dinner at home if she hadn’t had to be the one to plan it, shop for it, cook it—she couldn’t feel romantic.

  C, unless she thought that this time he might vary his repertoire a little, come up with something slightly more inventive…

  And, D, how when these days there was no guarantee he could maintain his erection for more than a few minutes or get it back once it had gone, how could he really expect her…etc, etc, etc? She didn’t feel that Harrison Ford, who was only about five years younger, or Paul Newman for that matter, the one other star she could think of who had the power to quicken her pulse and was perhaps a dozen years older, she didn’t feel that he (or they) would be having any trouble with his (or their) erections.

  Oh…At least she could give a wry half-smile, in full acknowledgment of the absurdity of this. How could she possibly know about the sex lives of either Harrison Ford or Paul Newman? Confusing reality with illusion! Just watch it, kid. It was bad enough to have one person in the family who already did too much of that. Far too much of that.

  But it wasn’t Ephraim who concerned her right now; she had neither the time nor the mental energy any longer to worry about Ephraim. She looked at her watch.

  It was nearly half-past-five. In only a few minutes Roger would be setting out for St Pancras.

  Jean had thought of him as soon as she awoke that morning and again while she was breakfasting and having her bath; had thought of him and prayed for him. She did the same thing now as she walked up Woodborough Road.

  “Please, Lord, be with him, as I ask you to be with my entire family, but especially at this moment with Roger…”

  Yet when he came home she wouldn’t want to hear about any of his problems with regard to travel; she had definitely made that clear. She simply couldn’t face having to take all of that on board as well as everything else—which wasn’t precisely because she disapproved; fundamentally she didn’t; how could she?—it was only because she felt so tired, so very, very tired, and because at present she found it hard enough to keep herself from drowning, let alone anybody else. The idea of Roger actually going out of his way to invite in trouble seemed so…seemed so…well, unnecessary.

  Yes, that was it. These days she felt so tired. Bone tired. She remembered how her mother, dead at the age of forty-five, seven years younger than she now was (which was the sort of thing that frequently gave you a start, “Dear God, I’m at least as old as Mum was, when…!”)—she remembered how her mother had told her once about the exhaustion experienced by everyone who’d undergone the Blitz. “Except for those times when your adrenalin was racing you mostly couldn’t think how you were ever going to carry on, how you were ever going to keep performing all those dreary little everyday tasks which drained all your energies and seemed not just boring but so wholly unimportant!”

  Jean didn’t know how people had survived. She herself, of course, had none of the excuse of the concentrated bombing, the V1s and V2s, the wailing sirens, the constant removals to the air-raid shelters, the night after night of broken sleep, the night after night of no sleep—but she sometimes felt, too, that she had little of the mutual support, the sustaining sympathy, which must have done so very much to help. At least people hadn’t been alone. She felt guilty about thinking this, as if she were downplaying the ordeals which city-dwellers in particular must have gone through, whilst upgrading her own very trivial experiences, which anyone who’d been bombed out would happily have exchanged with her, without hesitation. And yet, however her problems might have seemed fifty years earlier, in 1989 they weren’t perhaps so utterly trivial.

  For instance…moving house. Where, after all, did moving house figure on the stress ratings? Wasn’t it only a short way down from bereavement? And recently, lying awake worrying about what interesting variations on lentils and the like she could possibly come up with—and other such inspirational nighttime topics—she had for some reason started counting how many times she and Ephraim had moved house during the course of their marriage. A dozen! Twelve times in twenty-six years. Admittedly, the first few, before the children had been born, had been merely from one furnished room to another, but even so, nevertheless…And on every single occasion, the lion’s share of packing and unpacking and arranging things and finding things had inevitably fallen to her. And because they had nearly always moved in an attempt to get out of debt, this had naturally meant choosing somewhere cheaper, where, nearly every time as well, they’d experienced all the upsets of having central heating installed, and/or a damp course put in, with plaster dust then lying like a skin upon everything, and maybe dry rot needing to be treated too—with the smell that so invariably got on her chest, brought on her asthma—and probably the wiring having to be renewed as well and God knew what else. Not to mention the hideous carpets and wallpapers by which they’d been confronted on virtually every occasion…One terraced house, in Gillingham, in Kent, had had a bar in the front parlour and almost a jungle in the bathroom: plastic birds and animals perched on trellis over Chinese-style wallpaper, in basically black and pink and gold surroundings. They had kept the jungle, as a curiosity so staggering it practically cried out—screeched, squawked, roared—to plead the cause of conservation.

  And nearly every time also, although they’d always made a profit on the house they’d left—if nothing to the profit which they could have made on at least a couple of occasions had they been provided with a crystal ball and sufficient staying power—the new removal had solved nothing: Ephraim’s eagerly embraced appointments to jobs as unrelated as the advertising business, hotel porterage, the management of a seaside rep, a place in Baker Street that taught ballroom dancing, a place in Colchester that taught the martial arts, all these had eventually fizzled out, from their initial heady promise of amazing prospects, to their ultimate very grudging provision of an income that just couldn’t meet the bills. The other kind of teaching was the only job he’d ever had which managed to keep their account in the black; but his being a schoolteacher—he had been trained in secondary education—had culminated in a minor nervous breakdown (which was hardly to be wondered at: some of the classroom incidents he’d described were clearly the work of incipient criminals) and she much preferred, even to financial doldrums, a bubbly, singing, optimistic husband to one who was morose, hopeless and sometimes close to tears.

  No. The only time when a sustained high income and sustained high spirits had actually coincided had been during the three years they’d spent in Bordeaux, where Ephraim had been teaching English to adults at the university. This had been a happy period, with a fine standard of living and a number of exceptionally good friends who had constantly entertained them, given them conducted tours of the whole south-west and had them to stay, repeatedly, at their second homes in the country or in the mount
ains or by the sea. They too had entertained, of course—“d’une façon tout-à-fait anglaise et même dans la tradition de sa Majesté la Reine, ça c’est sûr” (Xavier)—and had felt they’d at last discovered a real niche for themselves, as well as a newly decorated flat, right in the centre of the city, which they’d been able to get at a miraculously low rent.

  And she’d even had friends with whom she could go shopping, go out to lunch, go to the hairdressers, to a fashion show—anything; a sudden phone call, “Jean, let’s play truant, there’s a new film!”—and apart from not being able to express her thoughts in French as quickly as she would have liked, especially when any discussion had turned to politics or philosophy or religion, about all of which she unfailingly had plenty to say, apart from this fairly slight language problem it had all been as good as, realistically, one could ever wish life to be.

  So why, oh why on earth, should she and Ephraim ever have decided to return to England?

  Mainly because Abigail was ready to start her secondary education and they’d worried that, remaining in Bordeaux, the children would never feel wholly French nor yet wholly English.

  Partly because they’d begun to miss certain members of their family and a few British friends and, more foolishly perhaps, things like secondhand bookshops and pubs and London theatre; to miss the very ambience of home.

  But even the question of the children’s education, although it had seemed of key importance at the time, now appeared practically irrelevant. They’d most likely have done just as well under the French system.

  However, upon their praying about it one night, Ephraim and she, an answer had turned up the very next morning: a letter which Oscar’s godfather had carried around for weeks before he’d remembered to post it, a letter in which he said he’d been sent to a new parish with a large rectory, where, should they ever want to move back to England, there’d be room for them to stay for as long as they liked, whilst reviewing their options. Patently, literally, an answer to prayer.

  She remembered the farewell party they had given two nights before they left Bordeaux. There’d been nearly forty guests, all of them good friends whom they were really going to miss. A cousin of Ephraim’s, a naturalized Frenchwoman, who’d journeyed down from Paris expressly, said it was extraordinary how many pleasant and interesting people they had come to know, and be befriended by, in such a comparatively short period—had said it must have had a lot to do with their own easy charm and attractiveness.

  And although they absolutely could not, in effect, have ignored Bruce’s letter, from then on life had contracted and deteriorated—not for the children maybe, two of whom had made excellent progress in England, but certainly for Ephraim and herself. And now again, about a decade further on, when they had been in Nottingham for only two years and hadn’t yet got round even to putting white paint over all the walls (what decorating had been done was chiefly due to Roger—although Abby, with enviable flair, had turned her bedroom into something highly attractive and would no doubt have helped with the rest of the house if she hadn’t reluctantly gone to a party where she’d happened to meet Paul-Michel)…now again, a mere two years later—yet after all, Jean supposed, two years was really pretty average—Ephraim was already thinking they might have made a mistake in coming here and was pondering the possibility of a return to London. Could she stand it? Could she stand it, especially now that he had gone into one of his depressions, probably the signal for a whole new series of ups and downs covering many weeks during which she’d have to fight so hard just to prevent herself from being submerged? When they’d first come to Nottingham—and, yes, as usual they’d sold their previous home, this time on the outskirts of Cambridge, at something of a profit—Ephraim had wondered about going back into permanent teaching; but had found out that he couldn’t face it. So at the start he’d taken on supply work, and managed to effect a switch to primary education, which was unquestionably more bearable, but there hadn’t been enough teachers going sick, particularly at the beginning of each term, and he didn’t get paid at all during the holidays, so again the few funds which they’d built up as a result of moving to a cheaper part of the country had all but evaporated when he’d seen the advertisement in the local evening paper which turned out to have been placed there by Columbia.

  Although exceeding the stipulated age, he’d been granted an interview, had liked the young man interviewing him and been greatly enthused by Barney’s picture of the fortunes to be made out of life assurance. Even Jean had thought, for once, that this could be the answer to their troubles: in fact Ephraim was a good husband, she felt there was little wrong with him that financial security, in tandem with a job which he enjoyed, wouldn’t put right. And everyone needed to provide for his future—didn’t she and Ephraim know this better than most?—and certainly he could always speak persuasively about something he believed in. Indeed, it was during this period, before his training finally began, that they’d been tempted into signing for the time-share, which even now, although they’d dishonestly given teaching as still being his profession and a steady salary as still providing their monthly income, she couldn’t genuinely regret, so long as Ephraim was somehow managing to keep stalling the repayments. It had seemed a symbol of their belief that at long last they would be getting their affairs into order; attaining the kind of comfort which people of their age and abilities, in this society, had almost a right to expect. She didn’t ask for wealth. Her wants appeared simple: a chance to see something of the world before she grew too old (apart from their three years in France she had done pitifully little travelling: one all-too-brief holiday in Sweden when she was barely twenty); an attractive home that didn’t need to be luxurious, just pleasant, civilized; a garden, which again didn’t have to be enormous, all she demanded was that it shouldn’t be covered in thick concrete, as this one was—yes, a garden in which she could put a birdbath and a wooden bench, grow a few flowers and vegetables and maybe a little fruit for bottling or for turning into jams and chutneys which might, ultimately, fill a whole shelf in the pantry. Polished floors and polished furniture smelling of beeswax; books lining the walls; records; sunlight and lots of flowers—preferably those which she had picked from her own garden. All fairly modest things…plus an occasional outing to the theatre and to a good but unpretentious restaurant, sometimes to a country pub for Sunday lunch…surely none of this was really too much to ask? Such aims were hardly sinful.

  But whether it was too much to ask or not, it still appeared so, and she was now in danger, she often thought, of becoming that very type of person she had sworn she’d never be: shrewish and embittered. (And outsiders always saw her as so bouncy, such an unfailing source of joie de vivre. Ha—if only they knew!) And if she had so little control over her development of personality, how much less would she have over that other dark fear which for no good reason—after all, everybody forgot things, everybody was subject to the occasional mental block—had lately come to haunt her: the recurring dread of Alzheimer’s and the attendant worry that the children wouldn’t then, as she would wish, just find a sympathetic home to place her in but instead feel duty-bound to let her turn into a burden; the memory of what she had once been—and what she had once been might then be all there was—gradually becoming layered and tainted and insidiously distorted.

  The home would have to be a National Health one, of course; and she thought in terms of the children rather than of Ephraim because to be truthful she didn’t think that Ephraim, for all his good intentions and intermittent buoyancy, would ever be able to cope. Almost certainly he would sink into a permanent depression—and one, moreover, that could possibly end in suicide.

  Or was she perhaps misjudging him?

  But obviously she hoped she’d never have to put him to the test. For, apart from all of that, at such terrifying times as these she became almost panic-stricken, desperate. She was only fifty-two. There was so much in life she still needed to experience and explore. She wanted a long and
productive voyage in front of her. She felt that, as yet, she had hardly even begun.

  7

  Roger arrived at St Pancras at six. As usual he bought a Standard—in the evenings he normally felt too tired to study—and glanced at the headlines while waiting to be allowed onto the platform. Tonight the train was actually in and being serviced and people were queuing sedately at the barrier; but sometimes, when the train arrived only a few minutes before departure, there was a rush, a seizing of seats, which owed more to the law of the jungle than to the love of fair play allegedly dear to an English heart. Even now, with twenty-five minutes to go, there were already those who’d decided not to queue and with elaborately innocent air were taking up strategic positions all ready for the off. Roger as always glared with resentment, and as always wished he had the nerve to address them. But these feelings never did anything but agitate him and to what purpose? So, again as always, he did his best to focus on his paper.

  It was odd. There’d been a Summit debate in Kuala Lumpur and one of the first things he saw was that an ‘astonished and appalled’ Mrs Thatcher had been accused by Canada of flouting the British tradition for fair play. After signing a unanimous Commonwealth declaration which called for the tightening of sanctions on South Africa, Mrs Thatcher had apparently pushed out a separate British statement with a completely different line. “I am astounded that anyone should object.”