‘They’re your father’s sheets,’ she shouted up from the kitchen.
‘He’s your husband,’ I shouted back.
‘I thought you were a feminist.’
‘I am,’ I said.
‘Then you shouldn’t expect me always to be doing the sheets.’
‘He supports you,’ I shouted, ‘I support myself, and right now I have proofs to correct.’
‘Well, that’s your choice,’ she said.
‘It’s my work.’
In his bedroom beside the study, Patrick heard every word. Can I help, he offered, which of course he couldn’t, either with the proofs or the sheets, which were indeed a problem, to be washed every day. The deadly cells massing in his bowel and burrowing into the rich flesh of his liver were a powerful challenge to those masculine regiments of knowing, those compendia of knowledge, those legal certainties by which he had understood so much of his life. It was all very well for the doctors and the neighbours to jolly along on the surface – and on the surface Patrick responded as he always had, with courtesy and an element of wit – but it didn’t alter the reality that pressed on him. Death by bowel malfunction is a putrid affair. Would it have been less shocking to us before the lavatory was invented with the brilliantly conceived S-bend sealing out the smell and sight of waste matter we barely need glance at? When there were cesspits beside roads and open drains under windows would we have been so shocked by the emptying of a foul-smelling pot?
Late one afternoon towards the end, after a particularly bad day, when his bowel had leaked a shiny grey-green liquid until the doctor had come and injected him with something to dry it up, after a day of washing sheets and wiping his scrawny legs and haunches where the flesh hung in folds, he asked me to read to him. Betsy had gone to stay with one of her children for two nights, the front door had banged shut, and Amy, Jane’s eldest, who was on a break from Manchester University, and I were alone with him. Suddenly the house was very silent, as if at last there was room for us in it, but by the time it came we had lost the capacity to move. The morning nurse had left; Patrick was propped on his pillows in his bed beside the window, where on the sill was his radio, tuned always to Radio 4, and his books, including the essays of Montaigne that are now on my desk. On the table on the other side of the bed were a glass and a jug of water, tissues, the accoutrements of the sickbed, a telephone and a lamp he could angle to his book, or away towards the watercolour of his parents’ garden on the wall behind the bed. Amy and I sat still and quiet on low chairs beside him.
‘Will you read to me?’ he asked.
‘What would you like us to read?’
‘Tennyson,’ he said. So I went to the shelf in his study next door and returned with the blue leather-bound book from which he had read to us as children. I opened it to the lilting verses of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ – Willows whiten, aspens quiver, / Little breezes dusk and shiver – lines I’ve always associated, quite wrongly, with the river that runs outside the window where we sat.
‘No,’ he said, his eyes closed and his voice so quiet that we had to strain to hear him. ‘“Ulysses”,’ he said. ‘Read me “Ulysses”.’
I faltered; for to me Ulysses means Joyce, that’s the automatic association, a leap which, in that room, I couldn’t encompass. But my clever niece took the book from my hands and turned to the poem. So completely had I switched my allegiance from the poetry of the nineteenth century on which we were brought up, I hadn’t even known of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ until Amy handed me the book, and I read it to Patrick that afternoon. It is a poem in the voice of an old king dying. It little profits that an idle king, / By this still hearth, among these barren crags … A strange poem that moved me greatly, not so much when I read it as when Amy read it again and took in the awful struggle of the king who must lay aside his kingly prides. What is the secret that lies behind those robes, under that orb and sceptre, beneath that crown? Much have I seen and known; cities of men / And manners, climates, councils, governments, / Myself not least … Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ / Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades … As we read that autumn afternoon, the sky outside the window was darkening. Across the river we could see the lights come on in the pub. There were tables on the grass outside, a kind of patio built beside the river, where torn and tatty umbrellas turned in the wind. There was a silver line of tears along Amy’s lashes. Death closes all: but something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done.
At last, she said when we went down to the kitchen and stood together in a silent embrace. At last it’s been said. For upstairs in that darkening room when we sat still and quiet together, my father, her grandfather, had watched us closely. When we began to read I’d assumed it would lull him to sleep as once ‘The Lady of Shalott’ had lulled me, but when we closed the book and laid it on the table beside him, his eyes were cleared of the morphine haze.
‘I shall miss you,’ he said. I don’t think he meant my absence in Australia, or Jane’s in Yorkshire. ‘All of you,’ he said. Then, very quietly – did we hear him right? – ‘Sometimes I think I missed you all.’
That poem was the first gesture by my father that truly acknowledged what was happening – I don’t count the times he took me through his will, a practical exercise – and I didn’t respond well. Reluctant as I am to admit it, I could not remove those ancient masks, some of which it seems are born with us as we claw our way into air, an inheritance that, even as we snuffle in our cribs, conceals our original face. What was your face, a Zen koan asks, before your parents were born? My response was not to say that I would miss him and maybe always had; instead, as the tide of grief rose in me, I found an excuse – the classic, English excuse – for leaving the room. It’s time for tea, I said.
On the table in the hall downstairs were all the family wedding photos. As Betsy had six children and there are three of us, the hall table rattled with photos. At the end near the door onto the stairs, in pride of place, was mine, the eldest of the nine and the first to marry. There I was, twenty years old, dressed in white, smiling anxiously into the camera as I stepped from the church (Norman, flinted) on the arm of my sweet-faced and equally young husband. When I considered Amy launching into her life at university and the turbulence of a first love, I thought it should be forbidden, marrying that young. Not that it was a disaster for me marrying at twenty – far from it, it took me to Papua New Guinea – but as a long union it was quite inappropriate, and why at that age should it be anything else? One is not yet formed, one’s layers are thin, there is an absence; even one’s secrets are slight. Every time I passed that photo, every time I walked in or out of my father’s house, I received that image of my younger self with flowers in her hair as a rebuke. I never moved it, I never asked for it to be taken away, but every time I passed it I flinched. Upstairs in Patrick’s study was another photo of me. It was taken at the beach house on that rocky stretch of coast south of Sydney early in the year I turned forty. It was taken at a moment of change, on the cusp of a decade of great complexity. In the privacy of the room only my father inhabited was a photograph of me as I was, and though he knew little of the context or significance of that moment, in it I smiled at him from a life that, for better or worse, was mine. Yet publicly the only photo of me was taken in the fairy tale moment of the wedding day. It was a split I’d spoken of often, a split I’d wept over in the safety of a room in a stone house in an obscure suburb of Sydney some half-hour from the house on the corner, where I began the journey of an analytic psychotherapy. For several years I had driven there three times a week and spoken to the man who, from his chair across the room, would come to know me in my split and fractured reality, and in the curious process of being known, I would come to know something of myself, though, in the nature of knowing, that doesn’t always make the fractures less fractured; it rearranges them into another pattern, another shape, that’s all, and maybe that is enough.
Not long before I began this the
rapy, Patrick made his only visit to Australia. He and Betsy came for a month in the Australian autumn of 1988, while Jane and her husband Nigel were living in Sydney on a two-year work stint. Amy and Martha were at primary school, and Tom, their little brother of the blue knitted helmet, began at kindergarten. For most of Patrick and Betsy’s visit we were all together, on expeditions, which Patrick took great interest in, though I could rarely name the plants he noticed or give him the details of the constitution he enquired about, while Betsy complained that the place was without culture. It was not easy, the split in me was raw, with Poppy dead, the absence of a husband, which in the presence of my father I felt acutely, all ambivalence gone, and Garry refusing to play the role – Just for a few weeks, I’d say. Please. Later, in the room in the stone house, I’d return to that visit again and again, and to the paradox of my sense of inadequacy, the inadequacy of the life I had shown my father, although the life I didn’t have – ‘the disguise of marriage’, Virginia Woolf calls it – was not the life I wanted to live. Fortunately there were Jane’s children: at times of unspoken stress, they’d run around, they’d lean on their grandfather, ask for stories, or lead him off to look at something they’d made, or found, and the moment, whatever it was, that might have produced tears, passed.
One evening when Patrick and Betsy were with me at the house on the corner, they went up to bed early. We’d eaten alone, just the three of us – Helen must have been at Murray’s – and they were tired. I pottered around in my workroom downstairs, but with my father in the house I couldn’t contemplate my desk or anything on it. So I sat at the piano, an upright against the wall, and practised the two-page Haydn sonata I was learning. I’d rented the piano after Poppy died and had gone back to lessons, but music is not in my hands and all I could do was pick out the notes. That I could make my way through this learning piece was a personal triumph, no more; that Patrick was impressed and came downstairs is a comment more on his lack of musicality than my capabilities. But there he was in his dressing-gown. He walked round the room looking at the photos on the mantelpiece – a mix of family and friends, England and Australia, PNG. What a life you’ve had, he said. He admired my golf-ball typewriter and the pile of pages – of Poppy – about which I said very little. He took Patrick White’s Voss from the shelf, opened it and, still holding it, looked at the pictures on the wall, posters mostly and a few collages by an artist friend. He stopped in front of a large poster from the Fine Arts print workshop at Sydney University: You are on Aboriginal land.
‘I think I’d find it hard,’ he said, ‘living on land that hadn’t been the land of my ancestors.’
‘Sometimes I wonder if I should take that down,’ I said, standing beside him. ‘Some days it seems hypocritical having it up there. Other days I like it, a reminder.’
Then we sat together, just Patrick and me, and talked of Voss’s trek into the desert interior, of the poet Kath Walker, the first Aboriginal woman to be published and who had just that year taken the name Oodgeroo Noonuccal. He liked that, practised the sound of it. A strange country, he said. Not so strange when you learn how to see it, I said. I told him about reading Christina Stead when I first came here and meeting her years later when she returned to Sydney, and about the writers of her generation whom I’d met while I was researching Exiles at Home. I told him about visiting Eleanor Dark – I took The Timeless Land off the shelf and put it on the table. Her husband was a gardener, like you, I said. She told me off once, when she asked me what I was doing here, in Australia. I’d said something flippant; I was young at the time, and I guess I didn’t know. This is a place to take seriously, she’d said. Too many people come here and live only on the surface. It does them no good, she said, and it does us no good. Patrick opened The Timeless Land. Ah, he said, what we were talking about yesterday. We’d walked up onto South Head where we could look out to the ocean and turn to see all the way down the harbour. Whenever I’m up here, I’d said, I always imagine the first ships sailing through the Heads. Patrick saw at once the view from the ships, and I reminded him there’d have been people standing up here. They’d all be gone by now, Betsy said. Patrick put his hand on her shoulder. Everything about their lives was about to change, he said. Not everything, Amy, aged twelve, insisted: she’d done a school project. All the way back to the car she listed the things that would remain: the rocks, the sky, their babies, their songs, their stories, their religious beliefs, the fish they caught, the way they walked through the bush. The settlers got lost, she said, they couldn’t tell where anything was.
‘She’ll soon be old enough for this,’ Patrick said, still looking at the book.
We’d always talked well of books, Patrick and I, and we did that night, a kind of code that brought us as close as we could come to talk of feeling or emotion. There was something comforting about my father in his dressing-gown in my workroom in Sydney, and also disturbing, a collision of worlds that had for twenty years or so kept themselves apart – or rather that I had kept apart. That evening the tears welled in my eyes but they didn’t fall until the next year, when I’d tell the man in the stone house who took the chair across from mine of that visit, able to say to him as I could not to my father that somehow I needed to bridge this deep split in me, or least give it another shape.
As evening fell that day we read the poem ‘Ulysses’, Amy and I were downstairs cooking supper when the phone rang. I picked it up in the kitchen, and at the same moment Patrick picked it up beside his bed upstairs. Hello, we all said. Hello! Hello! Hello! I knew at once that it was Ben, but Ben, ashamed, was slow to identify himself. As a consequence Patrick took a while to realise that the call was for me, and round we went until at last he put the receiver down. All Ben could say was that it had shocked him to hear my father’s voice, and in that short call in the kitchen I had never felt such distance from him. What did he expect? That my life ceased to exist when I was away from him? I waited until the night nurse came, and when Amy went downstairs to watch a film on television, I ran a bath and, pleading tiredness, shut the door of the room where I was sleeping and took a Valium.
The next evening, after I’d taken Amy to the station for her train back to Manchester, after his carers had been to wash and change Patrick, after I’d made lunch for his sister, my aunt, who’d driven over to see him, and walked along the river with her while he had his nap, after I’d waved her goodbye and watched the news, I took the tray for supper upstairs: soup and a little steamed fish, invalid fare. There was a fire in the grate, and with Betsy away I poured a glass of red for him as well as for me.
‘Who was that who rang last night?’ he asked.
‘That was Ben,’ I said.
‘Who’s Ben?’
‘A friend,’ I said, and as the words left my mouth, or is it our hearts they leave, before I realised what they would be, I added, ‘a man I have loved.’ Past tense. And to my astonishment, I told him of this other fracture in my life, loving a man who matched me in so many ways, yet was married and had small children.
‘Very hard for a man with young children to leave,’ Patrick said.
‘Is that why you waited?’
‘I sometimes wonder if that was right,’ he said.
‘Leaving,’ I asked, ‘or leaving when you did?’
‘At the end of your life it’s hard to know.’
Which did he mean? I didn’t press.
‘Tell me about Ben,’ he said. ‘What does he do?’
‘He restores furniture. Antiques. He imports things, he buys for museums – you know, proper furniture.’
Patrick wanted to know how he’d come by this trade, and how, from my university life, I’d come to know him. I told him that one of the things I had liked about Australia and my university education there was the mix of people I knew, the children of immigrants who’d come from Southern Europe after the war, and the children of Jewish refugees whose parents had escaped Europe before the war, or had come on the ships that brought them after. I to
ld him the story of Ben’s father leaving Hungary in 1939, just in time before the borders closed, the rest of his family left behind, and most of them killed.
‘How old are his children?’
‘Young,’ I said. ‘The eldest is ten.’
‘So you’re his escape.’
‘Or safety valve,’ I said. ‘I sometimes think I keep that marriage going.’
‘Maybe,’ Patrick said, ‘but you must know what it means to a man in that situation.’
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