‘Of course.’
‘You think so?’
‘And no God.’
‘No God?’
‘No church. Church good place for people. Meet friends. One roof. All same. Before I come here, everyone say, ahhh, that good country for Christians. Where then? When then? I don’t see. Old man and never one neighbour visit. To take for walk. To talk. Clever man and no one ask advice? In my country? In my country, a man like your father? He is honoured. Not like this way. A old forgotten no one, is all.’
She begins to put on her gloves, her cheeks reddened by her little outburst.
‘Do you know, Lynette,’ I say, ‘he used to go to church on Sunday. Sometimes he even went to a Latin mass in town.’
‘What Latin mass? Where? We could take him.’
‘I think the church has closed down. There were gates on it anyway, last time I passed, big iron gates, a padlock.’
She shakes a sad head and begins to button up her coat.
‘You think what I say before?’
‘Before?’
‘Community centre, senior socials? Whole day sometimes, all meals, breakfast time to tea. Games, singing. A tour in bus to interesting places.’
‘Ah yes, the senior social days.’
I try to imagine my father sitting in the centre of a game of bingo or lifting his hands over his head for wheelchair Pilates or maybe playing ‘Jingle Bells’ on the piano for the Christmas sing-along. Then I try not to laugh.
‘I’m sorry, Lynette, I’m afraid he’s not really that kind of man.’
‘I know,’ she says, ‘I know you say that.’
I think of the stony face on him whenever I enter his room, the strickening silence. And for a second I’ve a good mind to let her bring him. To allow him a day amongst people who are trying to make the most of the last scraps of their lives. It might give him a taste of what it would actually be like to live in a nursing home. To be spoken to by condescending voices, in overheated rooms. To be talked down to by people of lesser intelligence. To eat dinner at noon and supper at six, be put to bed at nine o’clock like a child. To have to watch afternoon soap operas on television instead of the racing from Chepstow. To be denied his piano and his evening whiskey. To be patronised and ignored and made to feel worthless.
‘Lynette, my father is an unusual man.’
‘Yes, yes, and I know that too.’
She lifts her large handbag. It looks far too grown-up for her. I half expect to see her clopping off in her mother’s high-heels.
‘What about cleaning lady,’ she asks, ‘she talk to him?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Nice woman, though? Friendly?’
‘I don’t know her. She doesn’t start back till next week – she’s been away, you see. In Australia.’
‘But your father say she work here ten years before.’
‘I wasn’t here then.’
‘A whole ten year?’
‘I left here when I was sixteen years old.’
‘Oh, that right. That right. But I thought in between…’
‘I only came back when my mother died.’
‘When or because?’
She bows her head. ‘So sorry, I don’t mean…’
‘That’s all right, Lynette.’
‘How many time she come here a week – Missus, Missus…?’
‘Larkin? Four, I think.’
‘He didn’t say?’
‘No, he didn’t say anything.’
‘Few times a week, though – you think?’
‘I imagine so, yes.’
‘Not so much for you to do then?’
‘Not so much. No.’
When Lynette leaves, I find myself examining the sandwich. I have to wonder what possessed me to make such a thing in the first place: plastic ham, plastic cheese, styrofoam bread, a gob of mango chutney in the middle. Would I eat this sandwich myself? Only if I was about to die of starvation and it was the last sandwich left on earth. I hate this sandwich and everything about it. I hate all the replicas of this sandwich that I have been making, over and over, since my return – so why make it at all?
The answer is simple: I make it because it’s the sandwich my mother would have made. It’s the sort of sandwich I ate in my own childhood and the sort I saw my father eat countless times when I was young. I made it for the same reason I’ve been making most of his meals: because I believe it’s what he’s used to – and I have it in my head that he’s the sort of man who can only approve of whatever he’s used to. So that’s: beef, spuds, peas and cabbage – plop, plop, splat on the plate; a puddle of powder-made gravy. Fried fish on Friday and Wednesday, mash, peas; a puddle of powder-made white sauce. Chicken and roast potatoes on Sunday. An occasional cutlet of salmon and boiled potatoes without a speck of skin on their souls. Steak and chips on Saturday night. Porridge and toast for breakfast; egg and bacon on Sunday. Sandwich and yoghurt for lunch. Tea and cake in the afternoon. Brown bread and hot milk before bed. On Christmas day – and I can’t begin to imagine the fun that’s going to be! – I’m planning on going crazy and boiling the arse off a few brussels sprouts to complement his overcooked, cloth-dry turkey.
Quantity before quality has always been the motto of this kitchen and no one can say I’ve failed to respect that.
I am thin – even by New York standards. Too thin. In the past few months my palate has gradually died. I eat when it occurs to me to eat. Or I eat bits of whatever my father eats with a few concessions thrown in: olive oil, garlic, real cheese – when and if I can be bothered to go to the supermarket.
Three months ago, I came back to this house, walked into this kitchen, put on my mother’s apron and picked up exactly where she left off. And now, without saying a word, he’s telling me to stuff it. He’s saying he’d rather die than eat another mouthful of her cooking. And I know exactly how he feels.
From the sitting room comes the sound of men’s voices. I had forgotten about our visitor and for a moment am unsettled. It’s not that I’m unused to the sound of voices: radio voices, voices on the television, Lynette’s metallic stacatto when she’s tending to my father. Even the voices of domestic appliances as they go about their daily business. But this is different, the voices of real men talking, and it snags on the routine soundtrack of this house.
I pick up the dog’s bowl, drop the sandwich into it then open a tin of dog food and fold thick brown lumps into the mixture. The dog is behind me, panting with joy. I bring the dish to his corner and watch him snap it all up.
I don’t want my father starving to death – not on my watch anyhow.
I want him to live. I want him to live till he runs out of money and can no longer afford to pay Lynette or the cleaner. I want him to live until he is beholden to me and my willingness to stay in this house.
I want him to live long and hard, and above all lonely.
I go around the kitchen and begin rooting through cupboards. Then I go out to the garage and venture into the misty depths of the freezer: a few small sliced pans, a single baguette, a stack of radio -active dinners in foil cartons. And a few odd-shaped blocks that look like human body parts crammed into freezer bags on which I can see, without actually looking, my mother’s handwriting in black felt marker: use by this date. I dig out the baguette. On the way back into the kitchen, I reach up to a nail in the corner, unhook a net of onions and a rope of garlic that I put there, in a rare moment of optimism, last week. Or maybe that was the week before last.
Back in the kitchen, I stand at the sink and wonder what now.
In the sitting room, the muffled conversation continues: the roofer’s rumble is low and steady; my father’s contribution is lighter and more seldom. I can’t make out the words but I can listen, as Agatha once taught me to listen, to the undercurrent of a conversation. Their voices move well together; there is an occasional collision but one always makes way for the other and it’s clear they are getting along. After a moment, a new sound begins to edg
e into the frame and now it takes over. A weaving, velvety sound. Swift. Now swifter. Urgent. I listen until I’ve it figured out. It’s the voice of the racing commentator, flowing along with the horses across the track, increasing in speed as they increase, finally bringing the race to its thundering, climactic shudder. A second or so of respectful silence before the men resume their conversation.
So that’s what they’re at. My father and this stranger – this male stranger. They are in there, in my mother’s sitting room, watching racing on her television.
Of course it’s his room now; the room where he sleeps and plays his piano; where he eats and watches television: the room where he now lives. But I still think of it as my mother’s sitting room and I still think of my invalid father as something of a trespasser.
It was there she used to watch her television. It was there she closed her door after she’d placed my father’s lone dinner plate on the kitchen table with his ‘sweet’, as she called it, a short stretch to the right. She wrote her lists and her letters in there, read her magazines and her raunchy novels. Smoked her cigarettes. Once when a diet instructor advised her to keep her hands busy and out of the cupboards she even knit me a bright green scarf and matching hat in there. And there was that brief heady period of afternoon sociability when she took to inviting ‘the girls’ around for afternoon tea – or I should say, afternoon biscuits and gin.
My father stuck to his own territory back then – the dining room where his small black-and-white television was perched high in a corner like the television in a country pub, and where his law books were sardined into the bookcase at one side. Down the centre of the room the fully extended dining-room table, that had never felt the touch of a dining plate in its life, was where he dropped his ribboned bundles when he came home in the evening and where he plotted the strategy of his cases. There was his own private telephone on the table and a jokey mug with a picture of a lawyer on it kept filled with pencils and pens. Under the window, overlooking the back garden, was the sideboard that held his small pleasures: Scotch whisky, binoculars, racing form-books, music score books. And against the east wall stood his old upright piano, long since replaced by the baby grand that now darkly gleams at the garden end of the sitting room.
In the evenings my mother would send me in to him with the horse-shoe ice bucket for his pre-dinner drink and later again to collect it and wish him goodnight. There was a wooden coat-stand behind the door that I used to think was called a ‘goat’s stand’ on account of the four large curled hooks like rams’ horns jutting from the top of it, which were almost always left exposed. Except for those nights when he was delayed in court or had been in a hurry to get to an evening race meeting and hadn’t gone back to his office, in which case, when I turned to leave the room, I would see his wig and gown lurking behind the door like a friend he’d brought home who was too shy to show his face.
The borders have all shifted now. The law books boxed away.
The coat-stand and the sideboard are both gone – I don’t know where. I do know that the dining table is in the garage, folded back into itself and jammed against an oil-stained wall.
The house remains marked territory. The dining room is my country now. The sitting room, his island. The frontier of silence lies anywhere in between.
I fill the sink with hot water, press my stiff hands down into it and wait for the cold ache to soften. I try to picture the stranger in my mother’s sitting room, the where and how of him. Is he perched on the arm of the sofa, long legs straight out and ramped to the floor. Or is he standing straight, a respectful distance from my father’s wheelchair, like a schoolboy in the headmaster’s office. Is he listening at all, I wonder. Or only pretending to listen to my father’s racing patter. Is he thinking – Jesus, all I said was I like a bet myself now and then, and I have to hear about every bleeding horse that has hit the turf since eighteen-hundred-and-ninety-two. Maybe he is biding his time till it’s his turn to show off his racing knowledge.
I wonder how he dresses when he’s not wearing those overalls. And if, when he goes out in the evenings, he chases women or simply stands still and waits for the stampede. I wonder what sort of an accent he has to go with that crumbly voice and if he takes sugar in his tea. When he lies in bed, hands behind head, is there a small blossom of wiry hair in each armpit? While I’m at it, I wonder about the shape of his buttocks – if they bulge out at the side, or if they have two slight indents just big enough for a woman to rest her knuckles in? I shake that particular thought right out of my head – I have got to, got to stop all this thinking about sex.
I went out with a black guy in New York once – about six months or so after I broke up with Michael. It was a one-off thing that hardly qualified as a date at all, seeing as how it lasted less than half an hour. Not that I minded – he was shorter than me and fattish, although he did have a beautiful voice. The date had been arranged by mutual friends. He was a doctor. A specialist, actually, in some remote part of the body that I can’t remember now.
I probably looked like shit – although I had promised Serena that I would make an effort: hair, make-up, one of my pretty French dresses. Of course, in the end I didn’t bother with any of that so, yes, I did look like shit.
He was something of a flourisher, as I recall – beckoning to the chair where I should sit, helping me into it, drawing his hand through the air as he made his way to his side of the table. There was a touch of the matador about the way he cracked open his napkin.
‘So,’ he began, stroking and patting it carefully into place on his lap, ‘I hear you’re a chef? That must require a certain degree of passion. Now why don’t you tell me all about that.’
I meant to be nice; it would have been so much easier just to have been nice – to have said, yes, I trained as a chef but am now a part owner of a catering business actually. I could have talked about the ups and downs of the job – how to get paid after an event or the difficulties of getting a canapé to be interesting and at the same time to hold its nerve until it has made its way safely into a mouth. I could have told him a little about my time in Paris – I’m sure he would have approved of that. Instead, I heard myself telling him that I found people who claimed to be passionate about food – food for Christ’s sake – to be full of crap. I went on to say that, as far as I was concerned, nobody had a right to be passionate about food, apart from those who were feeling the lack of it – people sleeping on the street two blocks away, for example, or townships, cities and, indeed, entire countries on the great continent of Africa.
Quickly, very quickly, he decided I wasn’t his type. He had been educated in Oxford, for God’s sake! His father was a government minister of who-gives-a-fuck where. And here was a girl with dirty hair, who was drinking her cocktail far too quickly (and showing all signs of it not being her first one that day), lecturing him on the ethics of food and having the nerve to throw Africa, of all places, out on the table.
He was frightfully sorry but just remembered he needed to be in surgery in a couple of hours and had most regrettably left his notes at home. And so he left me sitting alone in a long, narrow uptown restaurant, the name of which I can no longer recall, nothing to do but watch his short, fat legs gurning off each other in their tight beige pants as he made his way back down the aisle.
It’s a thing I’ve never understood about New Yorkers, this need they have to ‘bring people together’. And not just for romantic reasons either. In fact, the romantic hook-ups are not the worst idea – it’s one way of having sex with a stranger with no fear of ending up strangled in an alleyway because you will have friends in common just itching to see how you got on with each other. And so what if it doesn’t work out? You can always blame the chemistry – whatever that’s supposed to mean.
It’s the other link-ups that have always annoyed me – the friendships of convenience (always of convenience): ‘Now you ought to meet Marjorie – you guys are in the same boat. I’m telling you, you’ll be the be
st of friends.’ And then some nut calls and says – ‘Well hi there, this is Marje… so… there’s this new singles bar I’m thinking of trying this Saturday on Madison – wanna come with?’
And you end up sitting at a bar in a blue lit cave talking crap to a man-mad, husband-seeking Marjorie who says, ‘Oh how interesting’ to every sentence that comes out of your mouth, while she looks over your shoulder and hungrily eyes the possibilities.
I’m standing at the kitchen sink, thinking about phoney New York friendships and one night fix-ups and how glad I am to be out of all that – I am probably even grinning at the memory – when a shadow falls like a blind over the kitchen window and I almost pass out with the fright.
The jangling sound turns out to be the ladder. And there’s the black angel on the far side of the window, head lifted, eyes piously raised towards the gutter. Nothing between us but the kitchen sink and the glass of the window. I can see his fingernails and his watch; now the outline of his upper arms and elbows. And there’s his Adam’s apple: a dark, ripe fruit caught in the centre of his throat. Two long legs begin pegging up the rungs, now his knees, now the round toes of his boots are peeping in at me, finally the ridged soles of those boots, as he ascends out of the frame into heaven.
He has left a view of the garden behind, along with a few echoing strums from the ladder. The snow has been improving its efforts, big raggedy flakes now. The shed door is open, held back in place by the old push lawnmower and a large square terracotta pot.
In order for him to get out into the back garden without passing through the kitchen, he would have had to leave the house by the French doors in the sitting room, which are always, always kept locked. And, in order to get at the ladder, he would have had to unlock the shed door, which is also always, always kept locked.
He would need to have had keys – my father’s keys.
The same keys that are kept in a drawer by his bed. The same keys that I have to ask for, every night, putting my hand out like a child, just so I can lock up the house. The keys I have to give straight back to him as soon as I’m done.
The Lives of Women Page 10