Father of the Man

by Stephen Benatar

  However, she seemed slightly different now—he realized that—as regards her makeup and her dress, her lack of scent and lack of laughter (or at least the lack of welcome in her smile). But the change that really shocked him was her heavy built-up shoe and calipers.

  “Oh, crumbs!” he exclaimed. “Oh, crikey! Whatever’s happened to your leg?”

  There was a moment of stunned silence.

  “I think you are a very rude and nasty little boy!” Joan’s sister eventually remarked.

  And she continued on up, pushing brusquely past him and leaving him to stare, cringing heartsick in the corner by a window.

  For a long time—maybe several months—he couldn’t really quite believe this was her sister: that the faces of two women who weren’t twins could look so very much alike that it was possible to do what he had done. For those several months he even half-believed in a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde scenario: a Joan who wore high heels and perfume and was friendly and vivacious; a Joan whose club foot and set, unsmiling features expressed the darker side of her personality—with this one, if he met her in the street or on the stairs, he merely touched his cap and hurried on. Awkward. Baffled. Ashamed.

  Humiliated.

  Angry.

  This incident ranked in embarrassment next to one which had taken place in Wales a couple of years earlier, involving the headmaster, who at the time had seemed so old to Ephraim, old and thin and unapproachable, but who in fact could have been only in his mid-thirties (and if you heard him spelling out his name over the telephone to some poor silly operator—silly, because even Ephraim at six knew how to spell it—it would make you want to giggle: “S for Stuart, T for Tuart, U for Uart…”). Mr Stuart had taken some children on what had seemed a long nature-walk, through damp sweet-smelling woods filled with rhododendron, down to the rocks and sandy winding tracks and creek and estuary, and during their return Ephraim, who’d been too diffident to mention his extremely urgent need, had shat in his short trousers; and the headmaster, noticing his slow distressful progress and no doubt ascribing it to tiredness, had suddenly scooped him up and sat him on his shoulders, uttering a merry whoop as he did so. Mr Stuart, though, must soon have realized what had happened. Yet he didn’t say anything about it to Ephraim and, when they had reached the school, merely set him down to scurry off to Matron…

  And that excruciating little episode (yet it was mainly the tact which he remembered now) matched another, when he had been travelling up in the train, accompanied by Nathan, to that farm holiday near Lincoln, and there’d been an airman sitting just across from him, not yet demobbed, who’d been entertaining them with noughts and crosses and I Spy and by sketching aeroplanes and helicopters and parachutists; and Ephraim, who had been leaning forward so as to see better, and who had invariably suffered from travel sickness—yet supposedly on this occasion had had no warning of what was imminent—suddenly spewed up into the airman’s lap…

  How one thing led on to another…all while Ephraim unhurriedly washed his hands at Columbia. One Christmas Day at the flat—surely it must have been in ’45?—there’d been another airman, only this time an American, and Ephraim could remember the two of them lying on their stomachs on the floor in the lounge playing a game of…“Checkers? It’s not called checkers! It’s called draughts!” and during the course of the afternoon his falling in love with the man. He never saw him again but he thought about him for weeks: cast him as father, brother, friend. It was like a little later when he fell in love first with Laurence Olivier, after seeing a revival of Lady Hamilton, and then with Gregory Peck (Gentlemen’s Agreement), and dreamt about having each of them, too, as a father and about performing heroic exploits that would save their lives or their reputations or their careers or something…but generally their lives…Laurence Olivier had died some three or four months ago but Gregory Peck was still flourishing, had just made a film called Old Gringo which Jean was keen to see…Ephraim would have loved to know the story of that Christmas airman, whose name he had forgotten. He hoped he’d led a happy life. He wondered if, once in a blue moon, he ever thought of that little English boy who had lain next to him on the carpet and gazed at him with growing veneration, despite his earlier note of pained incredulity. “Checkers?”

  Joan had always been good to him. For even the simplest shopping errand she would give him a shilling—when his pocket money had been just threepence a week—and, once, when he brought a duckling home from Regent’s Park because it had strayed from its mother, it was she who looked after it overnight, found a box and padding and tried to feed it, she and not Nan, who was a little frightened of birds, who accompanied him back to the park the following morning to look for a duck who might adopt this wandering homeless chick amongst its own progeny. (They discovered one who, whilst waddling across the grass, looked back at the line of her offspring as though she might be counting, but then entered the water with all the ducklings fanning out behind her and to Ephraim’s huge relief seemed finally unflummoxed by the increase to her retinue.) Neville, years later—long after Joan was dead, of cancer, and when he himself had reached his late seventies—used to say that she’d been hard and mercenary and selfish and that the breakdown of their marriage had been absolutely her fault; but Neville by then, with a failed acting career behind him, followed by a failed writing career, followed by thirty years of merely selling handmade chocolates, had been a cynical and disappointed man; and Ephraim heard that even in his youth he’d had a budding persecution complex. But by then also he’d had eight years of singlehandedly nursing Liz, whom he’d married when they were both approaching fifty: Liz, who could more justifiably, it seemed to Ephraim, have been described as hard, although he thought that she’d become much nicer, gentler, after she’d contracted Alzheimer’s. (Once, looking up at a jumbo jet flying out of the clouds, she had argued sweetly, “No, Nev, you must be wrong! How could anyone ever fit inside something so tiny?”) Neville had refused to put her in a nursing home, had cleaned her, cleaned up after her, with such exemplary patience and humour and undiminished fondness—still, even when she was completely gaga, dreaming up new ways to try to stimulate her, “my poor old hopelessly bewildered darling”—while remaining lively company for other people, well-informed, amusing, challenging, generally tipsy, full of exciting plans, an excellent cook and generous host (although he took offence easily, suspected everybody’s motives, bemoaned their shallowness—and did this to their faces—felt that the family had never given him its full support)…so that in a way, despite such paranoia, you could almost think that this had been his one unqualified success, looking after Liz, for surely few husbands could have coped with it so admirably. (And, atrociously, there were moments when Ephraim nearly envied him the chance.) A ministering angel, he…Even in his seventies he had still looked a little like an angel, a paunchy angel, with his round good-natured face, although the plummy voice and the throaty laughter, and the dear boy that larded his conversation, tied him forever to the theatre; but when Ephraim had first known him his golden curls and his good looks and typically jocular expression had given him very much the air of a raffish cherub. Perhaps it was an attribute of angels, however: he had by and large been excessively happy-go-lucky: my dear child, heaven will provide. To Joan it had seemed that she was the one doing the providing—she was assistant to an art director in the film business—added to which, Neville was far more often away on tour than he was ever at home (Ephraim had seen him, though, at the Metropolitan in Edgware Road…Worm’s Eye View…dancing on a table spread for tea and sticking his bare foot into a plateful of jelly). With only a little more luck the providing aspect might so easily have been taken care of: he sold a script to Hollywood, about a vampire named Lilith, but it was never filmed and he received only two hundred pounds for it. He had a play put on in Shaftesbury Avenue; yet All the Year Round, drawing on his experiences of the family, ran for just two nights and although it was subsequently produced on television this didn’t help a great deal a
t the bank. He had a comedy tried out at Kew—Ephraim could remember finding it extremely funny—but it was a week that coincided with the sort of pea-souper in which conductors had to walk in front of their buses carrying a lantern, and none of the hoped-for impresarios turned up. (One person who saw it, however, To Christabel, was Robertson Hare, that stalwart of the Aldwych farces, and he liked it so much he asked Neville to write a play especially for him. This could have been the making of Neville, theatrically, and along with that the salvation of his marriage, but frustratingly for all concerned he just couldn’t come up with anything)…In the middle Fifties, when he had started living apart from Joan, he had had to be rushed into hospital to have his stomach pumped out; but ever afterwards denied, apparently, that his overdose had been anything but accidental.

  Something else that might have saved the marriage was the survival of their son, stillborn. They would undoubtedly have made devoted parents…although Neville, with his persecution complex, might finally have grown a bit demanding, a bit possessive, who could say…? As an old man he’d certainly have adored—spoilt—been adored by—the grandchildren he’d have wanted to have staying with him, constantly. Between them, they’d have given smashing birthday parties; Neville would have been the conjuror, the magician, always with one further item to produce out of his wondrous sleeve…

  So, childless, Joan had rescued Ephraim’s waifs-and-strays and taken him on treats and, borrowing his bicycle for The White Unicorn, had made sure he not only got paid for it but paid for it extremely well (and that was the film, too, for which his beloved Norwegian aunt had prepared table-loads of smorgasbord; but then the sequence containing them had been cut); and carried his autograph book to and from the studios and on at least three evenings a week regaled him and Nan with fascinating firsthand anecdotes—he particularly remembered one about a display of temperament by Marlene Dietrich, during the making of No Highway—and generally made him feel…what?…grown-up, important, a somebody. He could recall the impression he’d had of standing out from the crowd; he could recall carrying himself extra straight and being self-consciously charming and debonair—and no doubt a very great pain in the arse. Especially when seen not in the company of just a pretty woman (after all, his mother was a very pretty woman) but in the company of a strikingly glamorous one…then had he walked tall.

  It was good to have people turn to notice you.

  In fact, it had been one of the major disappointments of his life when he had finally realized he’d stopped growing at five foot nine inches. In his late teens and again in his middle twenties he had experimented, uncomfortably, with platform shoes. It was a source of occasional reassurance, however—even now—that Alan Ladd had been a heartthrob; and Ephraim sometimes reminded himself he would practically have towered over Alan Ladd—by a full four inches.

  His beloved Norwegian aunt…She came from Trondheim, from a handsome and well-to-do family of skiers and skaters. He could recall being surprised, on the rare occasions she’d gone back to Norway, that she could ever have brought herself to return to England—away from the fjords and the islands and the mountains and the pine forests; Amersham-on-the-Hill, even forty years ago, must have seemed a very poor substitute. And at this moment Ephraim recollected how he’d been there once, in Amersham, sunning himself in a deckchair in the garden at Wildflowers—yes, he must have been about twelve—when she’d returned from her shopping in a state of perturbation because she’d somehow lost a pound note and because, not being able to do without it, she would later have to tell his uncle. (Ephraim had gone to walk along Sycamore Road, on both sides, with his eyes scarcely leaving the ground…but to no avail…and if he himself had had a pound he would have lied to her; but she wouldn’t even accept his three-and-ninepence-ha’penny—“You can pay me back,” he’d cried, “you can pay me back!”, though that wasn’t at all what he had wanted—yet anything less than fifteen shillings simply wouldn’t do.) And part of the sadness here was that Uncle Jack, who had always flared up over the silliest and most trivial of occurrences—although, equally, he’d usually calmed down again very fast—had been essentially a decent and kindhearted man; just not the right kind of husband for any woman who wasn’t a lot more placid than Mona. Ephraim had gone to stay with them a lot. Mona had once said to him, in her charmingly accented English, “Perhaps one of the reasons you and I have such a soft spot for one another: we both came into the family at the same time.” He remembered how he had tasted real coffee for the first time in her kitchen—coffee black and rich and aromatic, out of a chunky Scandinavian mug—and Geitost, goat’s-milk cheese, slightly sweet, eaten in slices even thinner than a wafer and scraped off the main khaki-coloured lump with a special implement—and pistachio ice-cream—and homemade raspberry jam…these things had seldom tasted quite so good again. And she had taught him to say, “Tusen takk for maten,” and had many times taken him to the Regent, although only once allowed him to take her (“It doesn’t in the least matter who actually pays, we’re still out, you and I, on a really enjoyable date!”) to see such films as Born Yesterday and Copper Canyon and Run for the Sun…The Happiest Days of Your Life.

  Mona had died of a brain tumour, in her middle fifties.

  In those days everyone had taken him on treats. These treats mainly involved visits to the cinema. Sometimes to the theatre. His mother—well, with Nan it didn’t really come into the category of treat, mothers were expected to do that kind of thing—nearly every Sunday when they weren’t due to have tea, or lunch and tea, with Gran, at Marlborough Mansions, his mother took him to the first performance at the Classic (and now he had only to hear ‘The Skater’s Waltz’ by Waldteufel to be instantly back in that four-to-four-thirty rosy dusk which was snug and slightly scented—boring, too—but full of pleasurable anticipation, the promise of new worlds to come, new dreams, new revelations: the nourishment you needed to get you through the drudgery of school, the ropes you couldn’t climb, vaulting horse you couldn’t clear, neuroses you found difficult to cope with, even before you knew of such a word). Gran, too, had often taken him to the cinema—as had another first cousin to Nan, Maggie, a dozen years his senior, in her case to the cinema and then always to a meal; and Great-Aunt Madge had also made ‘assignations’, bringing large packets of sandwiches to many cheery lunchtime performances. Aunt Madge, effervescent, disrespectful, had often been at Sunday tea as well; Gran and her sisters were very close and several of them had congregated in West Hampstead—Madge, for instance, the mother of Neville, lived right across the road, would drop in nearly every day; whether she did or not, would spend at least an hour on the phone with Gran (all the sisters shared everything: gossip, hats, dressmakers, even prescribed medicines: would beguile many a happy minute rooting through each other’s bathroom cabinets to see if there was anything they might enjoy a speedy sample of). Sunday teatimes were a focal point for the entire family, being noisy and chaotic, full of laughter and good food and unity, although they also had their longueurs: their sometimes forced, almost frenetic, high spirits: their irritations, emptiness. One of Nan’s younger brothers was usually there, with his wife and small children (he had married late); sometimes both her younger brothers; and sometimes Jack and Mona came from Amersham, for lunch as well as tea. Often there was good conversation in place of simple noise: Gran was interested in metaphysics, attended Rudolf Steiner lectures and—as she said of herself—could have been the cleverest woman she knew, taken her seat in parliament, reformed the whole world…if only she’d had an education. In her youth she’d been a tearing beauty (“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,” she’d sigh, “and waste its sweetness near the Finchley Road!”) and at seventy—eighty—eighty-five—this was still readily apparent; but she claimed now she would have chosen university over almost anything: “I could have been another Nancy Astor…or Vera Brittain…or Isobel Barnet…instead of just a supremely stylish charming Jewish matriarch.” Stylish—charming—and benignly domineering; she liked to
be consulted, to be kept informed, to influence her children’s lives. But right, okay, Ephraim knew only that she’d been wonderfully kind and well-intentioned and full of energy; had really put herself out to love her neighbour in a way that he, Ephraim, hadn’t done now for years, not since his idealistic twenties; and that he’d been immensely fond of her, basking in her generosity and wit and warm approval. (Normally, that was, her warm approval: it was true, you had to toe the line.) Some of his most fondly cherished moments were of Sunday evenings, when the rest of the family had departed, just the three of them still sitting at that solid refectory table, Gran at its head, he and his mother often holding hands—even when he was eighteen, twenty, twenty-two—contentedly watching Perry Mason, or Rowan and Martin, or Doctors Finlay and Cameron. (Mary, the German au pair, after she’d seen to all the clearing up, would have gone to her bedroom to write letters or listen to her records or read the magazines her parents sent her.) An evening of good viewing—particularly he remembered a series called The Defenders, a father-and-son courtroom duo—would always leave him with a bubbly glow of wellbeing, God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.

  But all wasn’t right with the world any longer. The last time he had seen his grandmother, in the nursing home, her jaw had been slack and there’d been dribble running down her chin…of course she hadn’t known him. The last time he had seen his mother had been a week before her heart attack on her way to the lavatory, when his sister-in-law had found her, this once-so-pretty woman, lying face-down on the lino, in a spreading pool of urine, in a seeping pool of shit. The last time he had seen Joan was when she’d had a breast removed and laughing a little too gaily had cried, “Well, life or beauty? I think I’ve been sentenced to life!” And the last time he’d seen Mona she had said privately to Nan, “No, they may not have let on yet, but just the same I’ll bet you she is pregnant.” (Jean.) “Oh, and what wouldn’t I give to be in her shoes, young and pregnant and having such a husband!…You know, I’m not too sure I’ll be able to go through another twenty-five years with Jack…”