by David Lodge
Alex explained that her flight had been delayed several times and eventually cancelled, and as she couldn’t get on another one that would have enabled her to get home in time for Christmas, she gave up, caught an airport-link bus, just about the only public transport running, and got back to her flat late on Christmas Day. ‘So I thought you wouldn’t mind if I took up your party invitation after all,’ she said.
‘Of course not - we’re delighted to see you, aren’t we, darling?’ I responded to Fred’s question with a forced grin and nod. ‘But why so late?’ she asked Alex.
‘I wanted to get some flowers, but it proved harder than I’d figured,’ Alex said, handing the bunch to Fred. ‘I’m not used to the English Boxing Day, with everything shut. I got a taxi to drive me around and we finally found a flower stall outside a cemetery.’
‘Well, you really shouldn’t have taken the trouble, but thank you so much, they’re lovely,’ said Fred.
‘What cemetery was that?’ I asked.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Alex said with a smile.
‘Stop asking Alex silly questions, darling, and take her coat.’ Fred thrust the slippery black nylon coat into my arms and led Alex off to the dining room, saying, ‘Now come and have some lunch, there’s still plenty left.’
I was pretty hungry myself, having eaten nothing but a few nuts and nibbles snatched between my conversation pieces, and after hanging up Alex’s coat I followed them into the dining room. Alex, a glass of white wine in her hand, was already entertaining a little group of guests with tales of the horrors of Heathrow - queues snaking out of the terminals into the open air, people sleeping slumped over their luggage or prostrate on the floors, distraught parents with crying babies and children . . . We had seen it all on the TV news of course, but there is nothing like a personal report from the front line to bring home its horrors and fill one with profound gratitude at not having been there. Fred brought Alex a plate of steaming Thai chicken curry from the hostess trolley and stayed to listen. I foraged for myself.
I’m not sure I believe Alex’s story about driving round the city looking for flowers. If she got them from a cemetery she is more likely to have pinched them from a grave in the church-yard at the end of Rectory Road than paid for them. I think she intended to be late. By being the last guest to arrive she could very naturally be the last one to leave. In fact she lingered long after everybody else except the family had gone, and made herself useful clearing up the dirty glasses and dishes and stacking them in the dishwasher. Fred invited her to stay on for a cup of tea and she accepted readily. By the end of the afternoon, to my dismay, she had made herself thoroughly at home, and was effortlessly addressing everybody by their first names. I had to admire her conversational resourcefulness. She could talk money to Giles and babies to Nicola, and property to Jim and Ben, and make-up to Maxine. She even managed to charm Ben without making Maxine jealous, and Marcia, who might have been more resistant, had gone home soon after lunch with Peter and the children. Of the family party only Anne, I thought, regarded Alex with faint suspicion.
Eventually she said she guessed it was time she was on her way, and asked if we could call a taxi. ‘You don’t want to spend any more money on taxis,’ Fred said, ‘and besides you could wait for ever on Boxing Day. Desmond will run you home, won’t you, darling?’ Before I could reply she added unsmilingly: ‘Or are you too drunk?’
‘I’m not at all drunk,’ I said stiffly. It was in fact nearly three hours since I had had my last glass of Savigny-les-Beaune, and I felt quite sober, even if in breathalyser terms I probably wasn’t. Ben said he certainly was over the limit, otherwise he would have been glad to oblige, and Giles had gone upstairs with Nicola to bath their baby, so to prevent Fred from offering herself I insisted on acting as Alex’s chauffeur. With a stern, ‘Well, if you’re quite sure . . .’ Fred acquiesced.
So I found myself alone with Alex. For someone who had just spent two days in an airport trying unsuccessfully to join her family for Christmas she seemed in remarkably good spirits. She chattered away in the car about how great the party had been and what a lovely family I had, remarks to which I made minimal responses. When I drew up in the car park behind Wharfside Court, she said: ‘You haven’t asked me how my research is going.’
‘How is it going?’
‘Very well. I’ve just made a very interesting discovery. In all the specimen suicide notes I’ve collected, the word “suicide” itself very rarely occurs. Less than two per cent. A few more talk about killing themselves. About half the writers refer to dying, or wanting to die, and the rest pussyfoot around the subject, imply what they’re going to do by “saying goodbye”, or “I won’t be a burden to you any more”, and so on. Or they use euphemisms like “catch the bus” - “CTB” for short. But almost none of them says they’re committing suicide. What do you make of that?’
‘It reminds me of a saying of Borges,’ I said. ‘“In a riddle to which the answer is ‘chess’, the only forbidden word is chess.”’
‘That’s great!’ she said. ‘I could use that. But what do you make of it?’
I thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps “suicide” seems too impersonal, too detached, too forensic a word to convey the intensity of their emotions at the time, especially as you have to combine it with the very legalistic word “commit” to make it into a verb. You can’t say, “I’m going to suicide,” or “I’m going to suicide myself ”. “Suicide” is just a noun, and a learned, Latinate one. “Die” is a simple, basic verb which goes back to the Anglo-Saxon roots of English, and must have its equivalent in every known natural language. It almost defines the human condition, whereas “suicide” categorises the act as something marginal, deviant, aberrant. That may be part of the reason.’
‘Hey - that’s awesome! You’re really good, Desmond. Can I use that?’ As I hesitated, wondering whether to say, ‘I’m sure you will anyway,’ she added: ‘With an acknowledgement, of course.’
‘Actually, I’d rather you didn’t acknowledge any help from me,’ I said.
‘OK, if that’s the way you want it,’ she said cheerfully.
Once again I felt that in trying to suppress any suggestion of an agreement between us I had somehow affirmed its continuation.
‘Will you come up for a coffee?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Well then - thanks for the ride. And the party.’ She leaned over from the passenger seat and kissed me on the cheek. I felt her hand on my thigh. ‘Sure you won’t come up?’ she breathed into my ear.
‘No thanks,’ I said. She slipped quickly out of the car, and I watched her cross the car park in her long shiny black coat, wondering what might have happened if I had accepted her invitation. As she reached the corner of the building she turned, waved, and disappeared from my view.
15
27th December. Dad was not on the best of form this morning. He had slept badly, claiming that he had to get up five times last night ‘for the Usual’, while ‘the Other’ was troubling him in a different way. ‘I think it had a binding effect on me, that curry,’ he confided to Cecilia over morning coffee. We were sitting round the kitchen table, because Fred had been cleaning spots of wine and curry from the carpets in the other rooms and nobody was to walk on them until the damp patches were dry. They were marked with squares of kitchen roll like a minefield. ‘You’d think it would be the opposite, wouldn’t you?’ Dad said.
‘I’m sure I don’t know, Mr Bates,’ said Cecilia, ostentatiously wiping her lips with a napkin, as a vain hint Dad should do the same: he had acquired a moustache of white foam from the cappuccino Fred had made him.
‘Dad, your mouth,’ I said, miming the required operation.
‘What? Oh, right. Nice cup of coffee, Winifred, but the bubbles get up my nose.’ He drew out of his trouser pocket a large, wrinkled, none-too-clean cotton handkerchief, wiped his mouth and blew his nose noisily. ‘I need a drop of liquid paraffin,’ he said. ‘Have you got any?’
/>
‘Isn’t paraffin always liquid?’ Fred asked. ‘I think we’ve got some in the greenhouse.’
‘What? You mean pink paraffin for stoves? Gawd, that would be the finish of me. No dear, I mean the liquid paraffin you get from the chemist’s. Best remedy for constipation there is.’
‘Oh,’ said Fred.
‘We’ll get some when we go out this afternoon, Dad,’ I said in an effort to steer him away from the topic.
‘Why, where are we going?’
‘To look at Blydale House. You remember - I showed you the brochure in London, the last time we had lunch.’
A look of sulky displeasure came over his face. ‘I’m not moving into one of those places,’ he said.
‘You promised to look at it,’ I said. ‘I’ve made an appointment at three o’clock.’
We argued for a while. To give Fred and her mother their due, they supported me in pressing on him the advantages of moving into Blydale House or something like it, though I’m sure that neither of them viewed the prospect of his being a near neighbour and frequent visitor to our home with any enthusiasm. ‘All right, I’ll look,’ he said, in the end. ‘But it’s a waste of time.’
He accompanied me and the Warden of Blydale House on a tour of the building with an air of silent, sardonic detachment, walking a pace or two behind us, leaving me to ask all the questions and hardly attending to Mrs Wilson’s answers. She is a pleasant, middle-aged woman, obviously well used to handling recalcitrant old people.There isn’t a vacant room in the place at present, but she had obtained permission from one of the residents for us to peep into his bed-sitting room while he was having his tea in the lounge. She unlocked the door for us. I stood at the threshold and called Dad, who was feigning interest in a watercolour on the corridor wall, to come and have a look. It was smaller than the photograph in the brochure had suggested, but clean and neat. There was a sofa bed with cushions, an armchair, a fitted wardrobe and chest of drawers, an occasional table with one upright chair, and a television in one corner.
‘Cosy, isn’t it?’ I said.
Dad sniffed and said nothing.
Mrs Wilson pointed out the door to the en suite bathroom. ‘Actually it has a walk-in shower, not a bath. And a toilet of course.’
‘You mean there’s no bath?’ Dad said. It was the first detail that had stung him into speech.
‘We think showers are safer,’ Mrs Wilson said. ‘There’s a rail for you to hold on to, and a folding seat if you prefer to sit down.’
Dad shook his head. ‘A shower’s not the same as a bath,’ he said. In old age he has reverted to the once-a-week bath night of his early life, an epic event which takes hours rather than minutes, generating huge amounts of steam and condensation in the bathroom.
‘We do have one bathroom with a chair-lift,’ Mrs Wilson said, ‘though it’s mainly for the use of people in wheelchairs.’
‘I’m not a wheelchair case yet,’ Dad said. Mrs Wilson smiled and said she could see that.
We viewed the communal dining room, where two women in blue overalls were laying the tables for the evening meal, and the lounge, where afternoon tea and biscuits were being dispensed from a trolley to the residents, sitting upright in high-backed armchairs. A few were chatting to each other. Most sat alone and silent, lost in - what? Thought? Memories? Worries? Or just lost? A flicker of interest lit up their eyes as we came into the room, then faded. We looked at a noticeboard on which the times of whist drives, bingo sessions and keep-fit classes were displayed.
‘So what do you think of Blydale, Mr Bates?’ Mrs Wilson asked him, when we returned to her office.
‘I think it’s a very nice place,’ he said, and paused to let a pleased smile form on my lips before adding: ‘for old people who haven’t got a home of their own.’
‘Oh, a lot of our residents had very nice homes before they came here,’ she said. ‘But we all get to a point where running a house is too much for us.’
‘Yes, well I haven’t got to that stage, yet,’ he said, and turned to me. ‘Can we go now, son?’
On our way out I apologised to Mrs Wilson for Dad’s churlishness. ‘Don’t worry about it, old folk don’t like to leave their own homes, it’s natural,’ she said. I asked her if I could put Dad’s name on a waiting list. ‘We don’t have a waiting list as such,’ she said. ‘Get in touch again if he changes his mind.Vacancies occur fairly frequently.’
In a way I understood his resistance. Blydale House is a decent place, clean, bright and well run, but I couldn’t look round that lounge without feeling a strong desire to be out of it, and the little bed-sitting room we peered into, though comfortably furnished, seemed more like a cell than a home. However, as I pointed out on the way back to Rectory Road (we stopped at a chemist’s on the way to get liquid paraffin for him and batteries for me), living near us he wouldn’t be trapped in the place all day, he could always hop on a bus and call in and see us.
‘You’d soon get sick of that,’ he said, with disconcerting candour.
He’s right, of course. I feel a guilty relief that he doesn’t want to move into Blydale House immediately. I could sense that Fred and Cecilia shared this feeling when I reported the upshot of our visit, but I’m afraid that all of us, having altruistically done our duty in urging him to move, now accused him of stubborn ingratitude for refusing to do so.
‘You’re only postponing the inevitable, Harry,’ Fred told him. ‘If you don’t move into a home up here, you’ll have to move into one in London.’
‘I don’t see why I’ve got to move at all,’ Dad said sullenly.
‘Because you can’t cope, Dad,’ I said. ‘You’re a danger to yourself in that house. You won’t even wear a panic alarm.’
‘What’s a panic alarm?’
‘You know what it is, I told you. A thing you wear round your neck.’
‘Oh, that. I don’t need that. I might press it by accident and have the police or the fire brigade breaking down my door in the middle of the night.’
‘If you were in supervised accommodation, you wouldn’t need to wear one, Mr Bates,’ said Cecilia, who occupies a superior type of apartment for the elderly in Cheltenham. ‘In the flat where I live there’s a button in every room which I can use to summon the Warden.’
Dad now shifted his defence to his favourite ground. ‘Anyway, how much does that place cost?’ he asked me.
‘I don’t remember off-hand,’ I prevaricated. ‘Quite a bit, but you could afford it, and if not we -’
‘It’s two hundred and seventy-five pounds a week, Harry,’ Fred interpolated.
‘What?’ Dad exclaimed. ‘How am I supposed to find that sort of money?’
‘It’s very simple. You sell your house,’ Fred said. ‘Given London property prices, it would fetch enough to keep you at Blydale for as long as . . .’ Fred hesitated, and Dad completed the sentence for her.
‘As long as I need it, you mean? Which wouldn’t be very long, living up here, I can tell you.Then you would all inherit my money.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Harry!’ Fred said. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I can assure you I have no designs on your money, Mr Bates,’ said Cecilia. ‘My late husband left me well provided for.’
‘Yes, I bet he did,’ Dad muttered darkly.
Afterwards, when we were on our own, I told Fred I thought she had been hard on Dad, frightening him with the cost of Blydale House.
‘There’s no point in beating about the bush,’ she said. ‘He’s got to face the facts. If he’s taken into a state care home they’ll confiscate his house to pay for it.’
‘You’ve really put him off the idea of moving up here now,’ I said. ‘But perhaps that’s what you intended to do.’
It was a mean thing to say. Why did I say it? I don’t know. Put it down to the curdled spirit of Christmas.
‘I can’t believe you could think that, let alone say it,’ Fred said. ‘I’ve always made your father welcome here, eve
n if I do find the constant bulletins on the state of his bladder and his bowels rather trying. I know Mother does.’
‘I think I’d better take him back to London tomorrow,’ I said.
‘All right, if you wish,’ Fred said. ‘But please don’t pretend that I’m driving him away.’
When I suggested to Dad that it might be a good idea to take him back to London tomorrow, when the traffic on the M1 was likely to be fairly light, halfway between Christmas and New Year, he agreed without argument. ‘Whatever you say, son. Whatever suits you.’ There was an air of martyrdom about him for the rest of the day, as if he felt he was being victimised but was not going to complain. Perhaps he had picked up vibrations of the ill-feeling between me and Fred, and intuited that he was part of it. Altogether it was an edgy and uncomfortable evening. After dinner, which he ate in silence, he declined my offer to fix him up with my headphones so he could watch the TV without disturbing us (we all wanted to read), and instead chose to listen to his little transistor radio through an earpiece, reclining in an armchair with his eyes closed.
‘Can’t you stop him doing that?’ Fred said to me irritably, looking up from her book.
‘Doing what?’ I said.
She sighed and raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Oh of course, you can’t hear it. Can you hear it, Mother?’
Cecilia, who was reading our Guardian, and comparing it pre-judicially to the Telegraph from time to time, said, ‘Hear what, dear?’
‘God give me patience! Am I the only person in this house with normal hearing?’ Fred exclaimed.‘There’s a faint tinny sound leaking from that radio. It’s driving me mad.’
‘It’s leaking from his ear, he’s probably got the volume too high,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask him to turn it down.’
‘No, don’t bother, I’m sure to go on hearing it,’ she said. ‘I’ll read in bed. You can look after him and Mother until they’re ready to go too.’