Father of the Man

by Stephen Benatar

  No, no, I’m sorry, I don’t mean that. You know I don’t mean that. But if only you could…

  What?

  Get me out of this mess. Here at work and there at home. Get me out of the mess I appear to have made out of practically everything. And not only in my own life but—over the past two dozen years; or at least a good proportion of them—in Jean’s as well. Please. By one o’clock, O Lord…since, as you know (who better, other than Barney Watson?), a workable goal has to have a time limit. So while we’re on the subject, Lord, let’s make it half-past-twelve, how about that?

  But anyway. Failing all this, on Sunday—if not Saturday night—he could retrospectively garner support from Roger. Possibly even from Jean? That was, if he apologized…And he actually reached out for the phone right now; but couldn’t quite bring himself to use it.

  Yet by Sunday, of course, Oscar would be home and Ephraim wasn’t sure how much he was looking forward to his son’s return. Oscar would assuredly be partisan, encouraging, full of congratulation; but things didn’t seem to cut very deep—although how on earth could you tell whether they cut deep or not?—his mind would soon be on to something else. And hardly any wonder: he’d have so much to talk about, so many photographs to show, so many people to catch up with. (So many telephone calls to make.) Besides, in comparison with all his own great doings a couple of silly squabbles in a Nottingham insurance office could scarcely be expected to carry any vast amount of impact. Perhaps it would be better not even to speak of them to Oscar.

  Perhaps it would be better not even to speak of them to Roger. Roger—enthralled and fascinated by his younger brother’s exploits—might very well make those same comparisons.

  Ditto, Jean.

  Ephraim felt his eyes grow wet.

  Thank you, God.

  At the moment he didn’t even know how he was going to face having to listen to the unfolding saga of the traveller’s sundrenched odyssey.

  He didn’t know how he was going to put up with Oscar’s exuberant clumping round the house; with tales of his romantic conquests; with heady all-important plans for his future.

  That evening, while Roger was having a relatively uneventful journey home (“But what have you done all the other evenings this week?” asked an unfamiliar official; and Roger had answered, “Caught the earlier train—the one to Sheffield which you have to change on”); and while Jean was mixing a cheesecake and thinking up various small ways in which to celebrate Oscar’s return—as well as seeing to the supper and making Roger’s sandwiches and intermittently trying to raise Abby on the telephone…while all this was going on, Ephraim was hunting round West Bridgford for No 5 Stanley Villas, Holloway Road. Not having wanted to draw attention to it at the office, he hadn’t consulted his street guide until he was on the bus; and then the light was so poor and the print so small he hadn’t been able to read even the index—for a long time he had realized that if he wanted to see things clearly he should really do something about it, but, aware that his eyes were probably his best feature, he had always felt fiercely resistant. Now, in the centre of West Bridgford, he went into a video shop to take advantage of its bright strip lighting. Nodding to the frowsy woman slouching on a stool behind the counter he looked along the shelves of movies and grew distracted by finding several he would like to see again: Someone To Watch Over Me, No Way Out and—a really old one, this—The Best Years Of Our Lives; Gran had taken him to see that in 1946 at the Empire Leicester Square. By the end he’d looked along virtually every shelf in the shop: it was warm in here—outside, it wasn’t merely cold, it had begun to spit. Therefore it needed much willpower to turn away from such things as “an unforgettable time in which four adolescents on the brink of manhood learn about friendship, and a lot about growing up” (Stand By Me) to the lifeless-sounding street names in his A-Z.

  Holloway Road wasn’t amongst them.

  He asked the woman if she knew it. “Sorry, dear. I’ve lived round here for thirty years; you’d think I ought to.” He noticed that her bleached hair betrayed in abundance its gingery and grey-streaked roots. “Haven’t you been able to find what you were after?”

  “No—just browsing. You’ve got a good selection.” In fact he’d thought of saying: No…the story of my life!

  “I like musicals myself. My Fair Lady now…must have seen it more than half a dozen times. My son pulls my leg, though, over that one. Something rotten.”

  “Sons do. I like musicals as well.”

  “People say I’ve got a look of Ginger Rogers about me.”

  “Mmm. Yes.” He stood back; pretended to take seriously this claim. “I think I do see the resemblance.”

  She laughed, and in a raucous voice suddenly began to sing—he caught the whiff of alcohol. “‘I’m in heaven; this is heaven; and the cares that hang about me all the week…’”

  Still sitting on her stool, she waved her arms and swayed her torso—it was a large one—in undulating accompaniment to a rhythm that was less apparent to him than to her; then much to his relief she stopped.

  “I don’t suppose I sound like her!”

  “It was nice, though.”

  “Another world,” she said. “Another world.”

  He didn’t answer; observed a respectful pause while she lingered in it, in that other world, a moment longer; he felt sorry for her—tried to picture what she’d been like thirty years before. She took a cigarette from a packet on the counter. There was an ashtray containing maybe a dozen stubs of varying lengths, heavily lipsticked.

  “So…no Holloway Road,” he said at last. “Stanley Villas doesn’t ring a bell?”

  “No.” She thought about it; shook her head. “Sorry, dear. You’ll have to go on searching.” He left her freshly undulating, the smoke rising brokenly across her half-closed eyes.

  “‘I’m in heaven; this is heaven…’”

  He did go on searching—until at last he’d had enough. Fruitless. There was no Holloway Road. There was no Stanley Villas. Why should anyone bothering to enter a free prize draw lie about their address? Did it provide them with an alternative to saying no; a chance to retaliate for having been hassled; a comfortable feeling of being in control? Whatever the reason, it had wasted his evening. Worse than that, it had given Barney an excuse to gloat—whether he’d do so openly or not—and to go on feeling superior.

  Jerzy and Lucy and Sean wouldn’t be all that sorry, either.

  And then he stopped—suddenly he stopped—whilst walking along a stretch of broad shiny pavement on which the lights of a Chinese takeaway were garishly reflected.

  It needn’t have been a waste of time. No. This could turn out to be a golden opportunity. Why hadn’t it occurred to him? What R. Harrison had so loftily scorned would beyond doubt, somewhere else, prove most warmly and sincerely welcome.

  16

  Back to Beeston the following morning: the same train as yesterday. All right, he would be late again—so what? This was Friday, they were nearly at the end of the week, and Monday would mark the beginning of a two-month period, unexpected bonus, when he’d be able to make a whole new start. Lovely feeling. And today—despite the constant pattering against his window every time he’d woken in the night—the forecast was one of sun and mainly settled conditions.

  Not so good for business, maybe, but in every other respect—great.

  Even the situation with Jenny wasn’t so bad as he’d supposed. The mere fact of her having a boyfriend didn’t preclude him from seeing her occasionally, popping in for a chat, suggesting lunch…or at the very least a coffee after work. Sleep had banished that hurtful statement he’d imagined; he remembered how easy he had felt with her, again believed that she must like him. A boyfriend—even a fiancé, and he wasn’t quite that, anyway—wasn’t at all the same as a husband. Many a slip twixt the cup and the lip; he could see his grandmother again, wagging her finger at him. All’s fair in love and war, my pet. A shade more questionable, that one, but still.

  This morn
ing, as he slowly ate his breakfast, he granted the Cecils a brief leave of absence and settled down to something different. Yesterday it had occurred to him he should record as much as possible of this week’s eventfulness, while the detail remained fresh. For one thing, over roughly a dozen years he’d been thinking about keeping a journal and this seemed a propitious moment to begin (again). In the past his tidy and conventional mind had always insisted upon January 1st but in the past his tidy and conventional mind had always come unstuck, somewhere around the 6th. And for another thing, rather more practically, he told himself that in case he should ever end up in court such an account could prove of value to his solicitor.

  But he ought to have bought his exercise book in Woolworth’s, not the British Museum. Its stiff-covered smartness was intimidating; he felt his jottings needed to be worthy of it. (Yet why? He wasn’t his mum. He wasn’t hoping to write something with any pretensions to literature. He chewed one of his buttered scones and stared reflectively from the window. Or was he?) At all events, to destroy the pristine quality of the opening page he wrote, “This lunchtime, take cat-and-mackerel to man who frames cartoons for Mr Cavendish.” Which would also give him a valid excuse to call on Jenny—as soon as Monday, maybe?—because he thought it a good bet she’d be interested in seeing the finished product.

  He hadn’t, of course, required any aide-memoire but the strategy worked. He felt liberated to start writing.

  “Sunday afternoon. 22.10.89. Nottingham railway station. ‘My season ticket expired yesterday. I want it extended please by the six days lost through strike action.’”

  Flat. He suddenly remembered the clerk’s ponytail and one earring; then the dwarf in the lumberjacket and black sneakers; the mother with her baby; the soldier having problems with his rail warrant. Patently, some of the points he now began to salvage wouldn’t be of much use to a solicitor but he himself, unforeseeably, was finding interest in far more than merely plain facts.

  So he had written—flowingly—about a dozen lines when the man who had simply smiled at him yesterday, in a mistaken nod of recognition, came along the train this morning.

  Usual explanation. Usual provision of name and address. (Less than two days to go and it would all be at an end.) The man moved on.

  A bare five minutes later he returned. This time he had company. A tall and suntanned official in his mid-forties, with glasses and a moustache, produced his ID.

  “Revenue Protection, sir. I’m afraid you’ll have to get off this train at Leicester.”

  After a moment Roger shook his head. “No. Sorry.”

  The official stared at him and bit his lip. “So you want all these passengers to be delayed, do you, while we have to fetch the police?”

  There was nobody sitting next to Roger but the two men in the seat opposite immediately lowered their papers and made no pretence of not being interested.

  They did not look sympathetic.

  Nor did those who sat across the aisle.

  Time is money, their expressions seemed to say. We all have vitally important meetings to attend. Appointments to keep. Interviews. Lectures. All set up for the stroke of nine. Already they were glancing at their watches.

  “Can’t you have the police waiting for me at St Pancras? That’s what I was promised earlier in the week. No one has to be delayed.”

  Roger had lowered his voice, partly in the hope it might encourage this stern-looking newcomer to do the same. It didn’t, though—not at all. “No, sir. I’m afraid you’ve got to leave this train at Leicester.” Little wonder there were heads craning round curiously, along the whole length of the compartment.

  The train, in fact, was already slowing down for Leicester.

  “Right. Are you getting off here of your own free will, or do we have to make the police come on board to fetch you?”

  “Yes.” Roger’s throat felt painfully constricted.

  “Yes—what?”

  “The police.”

  The Revenue Protection official put out a hand as if to pull him bodily from his seat; but then thought better of it. Instead, he reached up to the rack above Roger’s head, took down his raincoat and umbrella, snatched up his briefcase from the table, and walked to the nearest door with them. Roger saw him hurl them on the platform. The train had scarcely stopped; no passengers as yet had boarded through that door. Afterwards he imagined the looks of bewilderment there must have been—almost of alarmed disbelief—as they had to clear a quick pathway for the passage of his belongings. He picked up his biro, returned it to his pocket, placed the exercise book on his lap, along with the greaseproof bag which contained the rest of his breakfast, and remained seated.

  He hoped that his briefcase or umbrella might actually have hit someone…the type of person who would be bound to lodge a complaint.

  The other official, who had stayed at his side, a bit uncertainly, didn’t meet his eye. He was bending slightly at the knees, gazing out of the window, apparently looking at something which had caught his interest on the line.

  There was a long wait. In truth it was nothing like as long as it might have been—Roger would have expected a full half-hour and it wasn’t even a third of that—and yet, because he didn’t know when it would end and because he felt acutely uncomfortable throughout, hearing or sensing or imagining the murmur of agitation all about him, it certainly felt like half an hour. The Revenue Protection officer was now out of sight—perhaps standing on the platform—but the other man had had to turn away from the window and wander up and down the compartment answering questions about the reason for the holdup. “We’re extremely sorry, sir,” he was saying, “extremely sorry, madam. It won’t take very long. Nothing to worry about. We’ll soon be on our way, doing everything we can to make up for lost time.” Roger heard him add—when this had failed to satisfy—“The young man has a grievance; it’s going to take a bit of sorting out.” Roger wished he could have had the bottle, himself, to stand up and apologize. But all he felt able to do was shamefacedly glance from time to time at the people sitting nearest him—and they seemed merely frustrated and impatient; not curious, nor ready to adjudicate. He believed it would have helped if someone had spoken to him, asked non-aggressively for reasons. But he couldn’t be the one to start a conversation.

  A Mr Smith, the one who’d gone to Washington, might have said, in the drawling tones of James Stewart: “You guys…I feel sorry about this. But we can’t let City Hall always call the tune, can we?” Immediately he would have smoothed away dissension; won friends and popularity. “At times like these we Ordinary Joes must band together. Because whenever City Hall gives us a raw deal and we don’t let out one goshdarned almighty holler what happens? We allow the system to become that little bit more repressive, that little bit more uncaring, that little bit more convinced that it can get away with it. Fellas, it’s then we need to reach out for our catapults!”

  Unrestrained cheering. A standing ovation. Vows of solidarity. Jefferson Smith would no doubt have been carried aloft in triumph.

  The Revenue man returned.

  His promptness was something to be thankful for. So was the sight of the policeman he had with him.

  Roger, of course, got up as soon as the policeman requested it.

  On the platform this tow-haired, plump-cheeked representative of the Law picked up Roger’s possessions. He held the umbrella and briefcase—and also exercise book and breakfast—while Roger put on his raincoat and for a second or two brushed unconsciously at a small dark smudge on one sleeve. The train began to pull away. It seemed that everyone was peering out at them…and not simply those who were sitting; there was a lengthy line of hands momentarily on seat tops, on tabletops, a lengthy line of hunched-over trunks. Roger turned his head. “You know, we’re not unsympathetic to this complaint of yours,” remarked the young policeman. Or to your feelings when you find that you’re the object of a peepshow, he seemed also to be saying. “But there’s just no way, unfortunately, that you can travel
without a ticket.”

  Roger relieved him of the rest of his belongings.

  “Yet I have to get to London and I haven’t enough money.” He was putting the food and the book back into his briefcase.

  The Revenue Protection officer had apparently disembarked higher up the platform. He joined them in time to overhear what Roger had said.

  “Then get somebody to take money into their local station,” he advised. “And Leicester will be notified.”

  Roger shook his head. “No. There isn’t anyone.”

  “Nonsense! There’s always someone. In an emergency. If you swallow your pride and forget to be obstinate.”

  The policeman rubbed the tip of his broad and freckled nose. He said, “Mr Mild, sir. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “You could arrest me.”

  “Oh, nobody wants that.” He said it with a grin, as if Roger had just made a joke.

  “I do. It’s the only way I shall ever get a fair hearing—be able to state my case before those who are impartial. If you don’t arrest me I shall simply catch another train later in the day.”

  “No, sir, I wouldn’t do that.” The policeman’s look remained agreeable but it lost all signs of joviality. “At the moment you’re a civil offender. Do as you’ve threatened and you at once become a criminal offender.” He wiped a bit of dirt off Roger’s shoulder. “I think we’d better escort you safely off the station, sir.”