This Party's Got to Stop

by Rupert Thomson

  I picked up a chunk of dry mud from the flower bed and flung it at his window. It fell back, landing on the glasshouse roof and almost shattering a pane. Dad’s curtains didn’t move. He must already have taken his Seconal. I swore under my breath, then walked round to the front door again. This time I held the letter box open and put my mouth to the gap.

  ‘Dad? Dad!’

  I must have called his name thirty times.

  At last I heard the click of his bedroom door. I watched one-eyed through the upright letter box as he felt his way down the stairs in his tartan dressing-gown, then I let the flap close quietly and stood back.

  When he opened the door, he had a curious, almost absent-minded smile on his face, and his hair was adrift on the top of his head, wispy and unkempt.

  ‘Sorry if I look strange,’ he said.

  I stepped forwards and wrapped my arms around him. It was like hugging a basket of eggs, you had to be so careful.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ I said. ‘I missed my train.’

  ‘I was fast asleep. Dead out.’

  ‘You go back to bed, Dad. I’m in now.’

  At breakfast I apologized again.

  ‘All the years go by,’ he said, ‘but you never forget the sound of your child calling you in the middle of the night …’

  Later, he talked for half an hour without a break – about the new poems he had written, about a plan to end his days in a retired sailors’ home near Portsmouth and, lowering his voice, about Forbes.

  At last he sat back in his red chair, saying his throat hurt. He took a sip of water, then stared out into the room. ‘Now you tell me something.’

  But I could hardly talk about my time in London – any mention of nightclubs or parties left him baffled, even vexed – and though I had told him, in my letters, about my move to West Berlin, I doubted he would want to hear about that either. He blamed the war for robbing him of both his youth and his health, and was unlikely to approve of my involvement with a German girl; he might even think I’d done it on purpose, to upset him. Dad had his own ambitions for me. His grandmother had been Scottish – a Johnston – and several years of genealogical research had revealed a branch of the family that had once owned vast tracts of land in Dumfriesshire. He believed it was my duty, as his eldest son, to make money and buy them back. He also wanted me to claim a title – Marquis of Annandale – and a clan leadership, both of which, he argued, were rightfully ours. When I took a job as a copywriter in London in 1978, Dad thought this was a move in the right direction, but my resignation four years later mystified and disappointed him, and he was always trying to persuade me to reconsider. Since he was a poet himself, albeit an unpublished one, surely he ought to have understood when I told him that my intention was to write, but in a recent letter, posted on 23 October, he suggested that I look for advertising work in West Berlin – ‘to keep my hand in’, as he put it. To my father, a career in advertising signified security, wealth, even glamour; above all, though, it was a stepping-stone to the life he had mapped out for me.

  Later that day, I handed him a Polaroid of Hanne, which I had taken on the steps of a Tuscan church the previous summer. He held the photo at arm’s length, a habit he’d acquired since his eyesight started going, and one he tended to exaggerate. Eventually, he asked why I was wearing such peculiar clothes. At first I didn’t follow. Then I had to laugh.

  ‘That’s not me, Dad. That’s her.’

  He shook his head and leaned back in his chair, staring up into the corner of the room.

  I took the picture from him and studied it closely. Hanne was nearly as tall as I was, and we both had dark brown hair, but could she honestly be mistaken for me? Surely not. In the end, I thought his misreading of the Polaroid was a refusal to acknowledge her existence. He didn’t see her because he didn’t want to see her.

  At the beginning of my visit, I had told him I would be leaving on Monday morning, but on Sunday night, while we were standing next to each other in the scullery, doing the washing-up, he turned to me. ‘Can’t you stay a bit longer?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘My flight’s on Tuesday.’

  It wasn’t true. I wasn’t flying back until the end of the week, but I wanted to be in London, with my friends.

  Dad looked down at the draining-board, lips pressed together. ‘We didn’t have much time, did we?’

  After my visit to the travel agent, I stay indoors. Only two colours register: the white of the snow spread thinly on the rooftops, and the red of the living-room carpet. Sitting on the floor, arms wrapped round my knees, I play the same record over and over until it becomes the soundtrack for my father’s death. I can’t seem to break out of the state into which I descended the moment my phone call with Robin finished. That instant, blanket desolation.

  At last, a key turns in the lock, and Hanne appears in the living-room doorway.

  ‘I’m sorry about your birthday,’ I say.

  Kneeling, she puts her arms around me. Her leather jacket is so icy that I shiver; she has brought the cold air in with her. Though she holds me tight, I can’t find it in myself to respond, or even to alter the position of my body.

  Later, she sits on a chair by the wall. One leg drawn up against her chest, she watches me. ‘It’s like there’s something over you,’ she says. ‘I can’t get near you.’

  But I don’t feel enclosed, or sealed off. I feel as if I’ve shrunk. I feel small. There seems to be less of me than there was before, and I wonder what it is I’ve lost.

  Apart from a father, that is.

  The following day, Hanne drives me to the airport. I can’t stop yawning. We didn’t go out to celebrate, as planned. Instead, we lit candles and opened a bottle of red wine. We sat in the living-room, our voices hushed, the plate-glass window creaking with the cold. I told Hanne how brisk Robin had sounded on the phone, almost officious; I’d barely recognized him. She imagined it would have been a shock for him to find out his father was in hospital. He’d be running on pure adrenaline. As for Ralph, I said, the last time I had spoken to him was three years ago, at his wedding. What would it be like when he arrived? How would we all get on?

  ‘Maybe it’s a chance to be closer,’ Hanne said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

  We stayed up till four.

  I stare at the beautiful, dilapidated streets. Buildings the colour of smoke. Graffiti, bullet holes. Canals. I will miss Berlin, but it feels superseded, beside the point. I’m like an actor who has been standing in the footlights, only to dis cover that the real play is happening off-stage.

  Hanne asks how long I will be gone.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  Though I sense her eyes on me, there’s nothing I can tell her that will be of any comfort. She’s in the car with me, only inches away, but like the city she has begun to seem superfluous, irrelevant.

  At check-in, the stewardess says I’m only allowed one item of hand baggage. Every word I have written since I walked out of advertising has been written on my portable, a maroon Olympia with art deco curves and chrome trim, but since I have packed a camera in my holdall, I let her take the typewriter.

  As Hanne and I drink a last coffee together, she glances at her watch. ‘You must hurry, or you’ll miss your fly.’

  I can’t help smiling.

  ‘What?’ she says.

  Hanne’s English is like nobody else’s. Once, while describing a camping trip, she said that her tent had flooded and her dreaming packet had nearly floated away.

  ‘What?’ she says again, though she’s grinning now.

  ‘A fly is an insect,’ I tell her.

  She kisses me goodbye, first on the mouth, then on both sides of my nostrils.

  ‘Your nose wings,’ she says.

  I have brought a book with me, but can’t take in any of the words. My father’s dead, I keep saying to myself. My father’s dead. I glance at my fellow passengers. They’re behaving as if
it’s a day like any other. I put the book back in my bag and take out Dad’s last letter, dated 30 January.I’m still feeling short of breath, which isn’t very pleasant, however I must just put up with it. That sentence now seems like a cry for help, and once again I’m surprised at myself for not having reacted. As a rule, Dad would send me a letter every fortnight, and I remember wondering, halfway through February, why he hadn’t written. But I let another week go by. Still I didn’t ring. I suppose I must have been trying to save money. As I slide the letter back into its envelope, I notice that half my address is missing. Dad wrote the name of the street, but forgot to include the house number, and he omitted the postcode entirely. With hindsight, it’s a miracle the letter arrived at all. The inaccuracy of the address and his reference to being short of breath suggest he was in distress. How is it that I didn’t realize?

  I turn to my window and its expanse of pure blue sky. Far below, the North Sea wrinkles, a ship pinned to the surface like a brooch. My father’s dead. All of a sudden I feel unbelievably light and free. My body floods with a secret exhilaration. I could be a spy. I could be famous. I could be on my way to meet someone I’m in love with.

  Once I have collected my suitcase and my typewriter, I hurry through customs and take an escalator down to the station. My train isn’t due for fifteen minutes. I set my luggage down and stroll along the platform. Though clammy, the air smells burnt, metallic, as if some electrical device has shorted out. I gaze across the fields. Recent heavy rain has flattened the stands of bracken in the nearby railway cut, and there’s the constant distant sound of water trickling.

  England.

  Walking back, I notice a tall, burly man staring at me. His mackintosh is beige, like a detective’s, its belt fastened tightly, almost chastely, round his midriff, but his hat, a dark brown Homburg with a creamy satin band, looks as if it might belong to a jazz musician. As I approach, he gestures at my suitcase, then says, in an American accent, ‘I was beginning to think there was a bomb in there.’

  ‘You can’t be too careful these days,’ I say.

  We look at each other, and even though we’re referring to recent terrorist attacks – only two months have passed since Harrods was targeted by the IRA – we both laugh quietly.

  The train arrives. Still standing twenty feet apart, we smile and shrug, then enter different carriages. Once I have found a seat, I gaze out of the window at stations whose names I know by heart. Haywards Heath, Three Bridges. Wivelsfield. After my mother died, Dad sent me away to boarding-school, and this was the railway line I would use. I was never in any doubt about what waited for me at the other end – twelve weeks of noise, cold and hunger – and then there were the horrors that couldn’t be predicted, or even imagined … When I was fourteen, Robin started at the same school, and we would travel together. By then, I no longer dreaded term-time, but Robin would sit across from me, his face so pale that all his freckles showed, his left eye twitching. I would do my best to reassure him. It’ll be all right, I’d say. I’ll be there, remember? But I wouldn’t. Not after lights out, or when the masters weren’t around – not when it mattered most. In his first year we would meet on Sundays, after chapel. Our walks would take us beyond the school’s ring fence and into the surrounding woods and fields. I was no longer impatient with him, as I had been when we were young. I didn’t mind if he dawdled; there was nowhere we were trying to get to. Sometimes he would tell me what was troubling him, but mostly he kept quiet. It was enough to have the company, a familiar face, an hour or two when he could feel safe. At least, that was how it seemed to me.

  From Eastbourne station I take a taxi, and in no time at all we’re turning into Summerdown Road. We pull up outside the house. Half hidden by the yew trees in the front garden, it has a withdrawn or injured look, like a person wearing an eye-patch. The wooden fence is badly warped, its grey boards on the point of collapsing outwards on to the pavement, and there are cracks and kinks in the tarmac surface of the drive. The windows are blank; it has been dark for hours, but Robin hasn’t thought to draw the curtains. Though my father has just died, what the house reminds me of, as always, is the absence of my mother, and as I step out of the taxi it occurs to me that I might never be able to feel that desolation in its entirety. It’s as if my grief is a jigsaw, and I can only deal with one piece at a time.

  After paying the driver, I watch as his tail-lights vanish down the hill. I think about my last visit, in November, and how my father locked me out. I remember watching through the letter box as he fumbled his way downstairs. All the years go by, but you never forget the sound of your child calling you … I could call him now, and there would be no answer. I could keep on calling. He would not appear. He will never hear my voice again. Fingers pick my heart up like a pack of cards and shuffle it. I walk to the front door and put my luggage down, then I reach out for the knocker.

  He Didn’t Say Goodbye

  In 2007 I went to see Bernard, a Frenchman who had been one of Dad’s few friends. What could he tell me about my father? He had known him as well as anyone. On a chilly, misty afternoon, I joined the rush-hour traffic streaming out of Eastbourne. Bernard lived outside the town, in Polegate, and I had to negotiate a series of dual carriage-ways and roundabouts, none of which had existed when I was growing up. As I drew closer, I noticed increasing signs of deprivation and neglect. One front garden was buried under a tangle of discarded furniture: a mustard-coloured sofa, a torn mattress, an ironing-board. Nearby, on the pavement, was a naked plastic baby that had lost an arm. A police car passed me in low gear.

  I hadn’t seen Bernard since the summer of 1984, but when he came to the door, his blurred figure looming behind a panel of frosted glass, he seemed surprisingly familiar. He was immaculate, as always – ‘I have just been teaching, you see?’ – in a dark suit and tie and a pair of highly polished shoes. He sounded the same too, his voice plummy but slightly nasal, as if he had a history of sinus problems. Only his hair had altered: once black and shiny, it had turned a creamy white, especially on top of his head, where it folded sideways, reminding me of a seagull’s wing.

  I followed Bernard into the kitchen. While waiting for the kettle to boil, he laid out blueberry muffins and iced slices on a plate. When I remarked, tongue in cheek, on the beauty of the arrangement, he giggled. There had always been a demure, self-effacing quality about Bernard that invited gentle teasing. We carried the tea and cakes into the living-room and sat down at his dining-table.

  I started by asking how he met my father.

  Determined to avoid military service, he fled to England when he was seventeen, Bernard said, and took a job with Major Tolley, an elderly bachelor and one-time British amateur golf champion. In return for various domestic duties, he was given board and lodging, pocket money, and a free weekly English lesson with my father, who happened to live round the corner. Though Dad was already in his mid-forties by then, the two men immediately got on. ‘The sense of humour,’ Bernard said, by way of explanation. ‘He always liked a good joke.’

  I wondered how much Bernard had known about the fragile state of my father’s health.

  ‘I vaguely remembered that he’d been wounded. In the navy. Something to do with torpedoes …’ Bernard began to titter, and this time I found myself joining in.

  By the early seventies, Bernard was studying English at a college in town, but he stayed in contact with my father, and when Dad and his new wife, Sonya, had their second child, they asked Bernard if he would be the godfather. Later, when the Home Office lost Bernard’s papers, Dad wrote several letters on his behalf, which helped to keep him in the country.

  On Tolley’s death in 1978, Bernard ran into financial difficulties. Though the major had left him money in a trust, he had no income and nowhere to live. He stayed with the major’s gardener for a while, in Polegate. In time, he became a gardener himself. He worked for local families like the Martins and the Goodchilds, and for my father too. In fine weather, he would turn up every
week. ‘We were always in touch. Yes, indeed.’

  I told Bernard how unusual he was, which triggered another fit of the giggles. Unusual, I went on, in that he was one of the only people Dad had thought of as a friend. This revelation seemed to take Bernard aback, and as I began to describe how solitary Dad’s life had been, especially towards the end, he interrupted me. ‘One thing I do remember,’ he said. ‘Before your father died, or before he went to the hospital, he rang me up.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘He more or less made it clear that this was the end.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I just said, No, no, it’s not true …’ At the time, Bernard hadn’t suspected this would be the last conversation they would ever have, though he had known my father wasn’t well.

  Had my father told him what was wrong?

  ‘Not really, no.’

  A clock chimed somewhere, playing a descending scale.

  ‘He must have known something really final was happening,’ Bernard said.

  I explained why I was so startled by what he had told me. Dad hadn’t phoned any of us, I said, neither before being admitted to hospital, nor while he was there. He had taken his diary with him, which had all our numbers in it, but he hadn’t called to let us know where he was. It was only by sheer chance that we had found out. Bernard suggested that perhaps our father hadn’t wanted to upset us. That was what I used to think, I said – until just now. Dad was always saying things like that. I didn’t want to upset you. And it would make sense as a theory if he expected to be discharged in a day or two, but not if he was convinced that he was going to die. ‘That’s right.’ Bernard was staring at the table. ‘Yes. Yes, indeed.’