This Party's Got to Stop

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘Was she angry?’ I ask.

  ‘I explained about your father,’ Hanne says. ‘She wanted me to send – how do you say it?’

  ‘Condolences.’ I bring my eyes down from the window. My father, this house – the months that lie ahead. ‘I miss you, Hanne,’ I say. ‘I miss Berlin.’

  On the morning of the funeral, I wake up to see Robin bent over the sink in the corner of the bedroom, vomiting. I ask if I can get him anything. He shakes his head, then retches. Watching as he grips the edge of the sink with both hands, I remember Dad telling me how Robin kept being sick on the day our mother died. The funeral is less than four hours away. I wonder whether he’ll be well enough to go.

  By midday, the vomiting has stopped, and he says he feels better. His eyes are bloodshot, though, and the colour has drained from his face. When he changes into his black clothes he looks more ghoulish still.

  At half past one, the hearse arrives outside our house. Two other cars park close behind, their coachwork gleaming like patent leather. They have a sort of ceremonial bulk that seems out of all proportion to the road; should any of our neighbours still be unaware that Dad has died, they can hardly fail to notice now.

  I walk out to the front gate. The air is chilly; I can smell wet leaves. On the pavement a tall, raw-boned undertaker in a black coat wraps his arms around himself against the cold. His black gloves make his hands look enormous, like a cartoon strangler, or Mickey Mouse. I tell him the rest of the family is on its way. He nods, then gazes off into the distance. His cheeks have a grazed look, as if it hurts him to shave. I face in a different direction. Sky the colour of exhaust fumes. I consider starting a conversation, but there’s nothing to say, and I end up staring at the reflection of our legs in the car door.

  Our speed doesn’t rise above fifteen miles an hour, and the coffin remains in front of us, the blunt, blond end framed by the rear window of the hearse. I love you all in different ways, Dad wrote in the letter his lawyer gave us. Your five lives have been my life, your joys and sorrows mine. He carried me a little, without me feeling it, and that is what I have lost. Something as powerful and light as prayer. We turn down Church Street. Everybody on the pavement stops and stares.

  In St Mary’s the air is veiled, slightly opaque, as though made up of dust or sediment. Both sides of the church are filled with people we know. Frank and Miriam. Uncle Roland. Neighbours like the Goodchilds, the Martins. My ex-girlfriend, Tina. And Bernard too, of course. I look at Robin and Ralph, and they look back at me. Whatever binds us seems to tighten. We take our seats in the front row.

  Organ music swells, and the coffin floats up the aisle on the pall-bearers’ shoulders. As they draw level with our pew, one of them stumbles. The coffin lurches, dips, then rights itself, but not before I have imagined the toe end hitting the stone floor, the lid coming loose, and Dad’s body sliding out, stiff as a canoe. I dare not glance at either of my brothers. I gaze at the ceiling instead, and bite my lip, and when I lower my eyes again, the pall-bearers have withdrawn, and the coffin is resting on a sort of trestle near the altar.

  During the hymns we sing as loudly as we can. As in the chapel of rest, this is partly bravado, and we grin at each other between verses, but we are also venting some of our frustration and self-pity – it’s like a kind of weeping – and by the time I leave the church and climb back into the big black limousine my voice is hoarse.

  With the cemetery in sight, I suddenly realize that Sonya has no idea what is about to happen. In his will, Dad insisted that he be buried with Wendy, his first wife, and Sonya ought to have been forewarned, but somehow, with so much else to think about, none of us remembered. As our car glides between the high wrought-iron gates, I clear my throat and turn to her.

  ‘Sonya,’ I say, ‘there’s something you should know …’

  When I have finished explaining, her face hardens, and she looks out of the window. I wonder whether it was Dad’s intention to punish her from beyond the grave. Certainly, he never disguised his bitterness at her betrayal, which was how he thought of it, and he lost all faith in women as a result. You can’t trust them, he would tell me. They say one thing, then do another. In his notebooks, he was still more virulent. Once, I stumbled on a page where he had written, It’s all take, take, take. Then, further down, in a slanting, almost drunken scrawl, All women are prostitutes.

  But no, I don’t see it as revenge. It seems unlikely he would have involved Wendy in an act of recrimination that had nothing to do with her. Besides, he would never have imagined that Sonya would be standing at his grave side; he thought of her as gone, for ever. Divorce has such a muddying effect. The end of his marriage to my mother may have been abrupt, but at least death is clean. There was no falling out of love with Wendy, no tarnishing of her memory – nothing to prevent the good times from rising to the top. I’m sure his desire to be buried with her was a pure one. He was looking for kindness. Returning to the place where he had felt most comfortable.

  Not that this will be much consolation to Sonya. If I were her, I would feel snubbed. It’s as though Dad is telling her that she never measured up. As though he is removing her from the story of his life. But after all, as Dad himself often said, she was the one who decided to leave, and she must have known him well enough to realize that he would never forgive her. He would often allude sarcastically to Gotthelfstrasse, where Sonya lived after the separation. God help her, he would say. On her first night back, Sonya told us she still loved him, and I believed her, but a love like that wouldn’t have made much sense to Dad. In his eyes, she had abandoned him, but worse than that, far worse, she had deprived him of his children. Though it’s difficult to work out what else she could have done – apart, perhaps, from settling locally, in Eastbourne – the decision to return to Switzerland was cruel because it put them beyond his reach. Given the state of his lungs, flying was out of the question; in fact, Dad’s doctors advised against long-distance travel of any kind. Every summer, Rosie and Hal would spend three weeks with him, and though he adored their time together, it would leave him physically and emotionally exhausted. Also, he saw how the children were growing away from him. He was becoming a kind of interlude in their lives, a habit that happened too seldom to be worthy of the name. They were losing their English; sometimes he would have problems making himself understood. He never felt his disability more than in those final years, and once or twice, when we were alone, he cursed it in language I had never known him use before.

  At the graveside, I hear the clamour of young voices from the playground at the bottom of the hill. The two children are standing in front of me, and I look down at the tops of their heads. Is it appropriate for them to be here? Will it damage them? At the time of our mother’s funeral, I was eight, and Robin and Ralph were five and three, and people felt it would upset us to attend. Later, when I asked Auntie Miriam about that day, she said she thought that she took the three of us up on to the Downs, and that we had a lovely time, just running about, ‘being boys’. Though I have no memory of that, I can imagine it – blue skies, a warm wind blowing, the town spread out below. Look! There’s our house! We would have raced through the long grass, shouting, laughing, falling over. We might have pretended to be aeroplanes, with lots of engine noise and arms for wings … But then some upright lines appeared between Miriam’s eyebrows, and she put three fingers to the corner of her mouth, and looking at me sidelong, almost slyly, said, ‘But I remember being at the funeral …’ She smiled at the foolishness – the treachery – of memory. One thing is certain, though: we didn’t go. From one day to the next, our mother disappeared, and I don’t think any of us understood what had happened to her.

  I place a hand on Rosie’s head. In a whisper, I ask her if she’s all right.

  She looks up at me, her lips pale, and she nods.

  ‘Yes,’ she whispers back. ‘I’m fine.’

  We heard somewhere that sherry is supposed to be served after a funeral, and we have bought a bottle
of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, which stands untouched on the kitchen table in front of the white wine and the cider. We’re like foreigners, trying to observe the customs of a country that is unfamiliar to us. Someone asks if there is any tea. Vivian puts the kettle on, while I hunt around for cups and saucers.

  Later, stepping out on to the lawn, I feel the damp ground through the soles of my shoes. Mist blurs the Downs; my hands are bloodless, cold. I walk up the garden, then stop in the archway and glance back towards the house. It has such a cheerless, run-down air. Did it always? Not in the sixties, surely. Not when we were young. Shabby, perhaps, and a bit chaotic, but never cheerless. In the last seven years, though, it has gradually fallen into a state of disrepair. The window frames cracked and rotted. Tiles slipped off the roof. The pebble-dash began to look grim, utilitarian. It became a house inhabited by a man who had lost almost everything, a man living a strange, abbreviated life, embittered and alone. My glass is empty. I move back down the garden.

  Before I can reach the sitting-room, Uncle Roland intercepts me. As a child, I idolized Uncle Roland. He ran the Goodwood estate, which belonged to the Duke of Norfolk. Before that, he lived in Portugal. He was worldly, wealthy – everything my father wasn’t. If anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would always say the same thing: a land agent, like my uncle. But then, during early adolescence, I became disillusioned with him; it was as if all the gloss and glamour dropped away, revealing somebody I neither recognized nor understood. At that age, I was intensely loyal to my father, and I suspect I began to side with him. The two brothers didn’t seem to have ever been particularly close. Younger by four years, Roland missed the war entirely, and it is conceivable that my father resented his brother’s good fortune. My father also claimed that Roland made light of, or even mocked, his disability. Whenever I saw the two of them together, which was only rarely, they would spend most of the time in superficial banter. Under this veneer of good humour, I thought I detected irritation, if not hostility.

  Roland offers his condolences. He seems smooth, self-possessed, almost jovial. I have no sense of what he might be feeling, and find myself wishing he hadn’t come.

  The conversation shifts. He wants to know why I left the advertising industry. Loathe to answer, I stare at my feet, but he pursues the subject.

  ‘It was such a good career,’ he says. ‘You had real prospects. I just don’t understand why you gave it up.’

  I look into his eyes at last. ‘I was making too much money,’ I say.

  He gazes at me in utter disbelief.

  Back in the kitchen, I fill my glass with wine and gulp it down.

  ‘What is it?’ Ralph asks.

  I shake my head. ‘Nothing.’

  Out in the garden again, I notice Tina standing by the fir tree. She is wearing a black sweater, and her thick blonde hair falls to her shoulders. We split up in 1981, not because we stopped loving each other, but because Tina thought she was too young, at twenty, to spend the rest of her life with me. She cried on the night she moved out. You’ll never see me again, she said. You won’t forgive me. I know you won’t. I didn’t say anything. I wanted to punish her, and the only power I had left was to withhold the truth. Of course I’ll see you. I won’t be able not to. I love you. We drove north, over the grim skeleton of Vauxhall Bridge. She was going to live with a friend from art college. I helped her carry boxes up the stairs and into her new bedroom. I didn’t cry until I was back in my car. It was raining by then. As I entered the roundabout at Paddington Green, I nearly crashed into a van. Later, when I was home, I opened my notebook, but all I could come up with was a single, unsatisfactory line: rain on the windscreen, tears on my face.

  She’s as lovely now as she was when I first met her. I remember a holiday we had in Cozumel, and seem to glimpse her on our hotel balcony wearing nothing but the bottom half of a bikini she designed herself, the street below scattered with bits of palm tree from the hurricane that hit the island the day before we landed. I feel she was right to have broken up with me, and agree that there might have been restlessness or recrimination at some point in the future if we’d stayed together, but at the same time I suddenly regret having been so reasonable. I should have argued. Shouted. Thrown things. I should have told her I couldn’t live without her. There are years we haven’t had, countries we haven’t seen. Perhaps that will never happen now … But as I watch her standing on the lawn, I sense there is something that can be revived, something that has still to run its course.

  I walk towards her. She has driven down from London because she knew my father. He would tease her about all the make-up she used to wear. You don’t need any of that, Tina. She would chuckle. Yes, I do. He would smile and shake his head. She didn’t mind him being critical, perhaps because she realized that it was his way of telling her she was beautiful. In any case, he couldn’t help himself; he liked women to look ‘natural’. Oddly enough, that’s how Tina looks today: scrubbed clean, as though she’s just been for a swim. No hair dye or eye pencil. Not even any lipstick. When I reach her, she takes my arm and squeezes it.

  ‘You’ve got no make-up on,’ I say.

  She gives me a guarded look, half hurt, as if she thinks I might be finding fault.

  I smile at her. ‘Dad would have approved.’

  Eyes filling with tears all of a sudden, she tells me that she loved him.

  ‘He loved you too,’ I say. ‘He really did.’

  *

  Robin and I are talking over by the hedge when Erica appears. Dad discovered Erica at the beginning of the seventies, when he developed an interest in genealogy. They have a grandfather in common. Erica comes from a branch of the family that emigrated to South Africa, but she moved to England when she was in her early forties.

  ‘What are you two being so secretive about?’ she says. ‘Are you plotting something?’

  ‘There’s no need,’ Robin says, ‘not any more.’

  He steers a look at me, and I feel sure he is thinking of the time we planned to do away with Dad. That night has stayed with me, mainly because it revealed an anger that I didn’t, until that moment, realize was there, an anger rooted in his weakness, an anger which, like a flame in bright sunlight, only became visible if viewed from a certain angle.

  Once, before I was born, my father had been strong, but a team of surgeons cut out most of the ribs on the right side of his body and then drained the fluid from his lungs with needles so thick that the diameter of the sharp ends could be measured with a ruler. When he was finally discharged from hospital, part of each lung had been closed down. He breathed faster and more shallowly than other people, and one half of his back sagged in such a way that his spine was thrown into unnatural relief. His scars had the muted gleam of silk or wax. One evening, while I was giving him his usual massage, he described what it was like to come round from a major operation. I felt as if I’d been flattened, he said. Run over by a steamroller. They gave him morphine to dull the pain. He became addicted. To break his habit, they simply halved the dose. The next day, they halved it again. He screamed for more. When I read Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit and found the following sentence – You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex – it was Dad I thought of first.

  His years in hospital turned him into a different person. More fragile, less confident – a man who lived so prudently that his sons were almost guaranteed to throw caution to the winds. Sometimes he would stand in front of the basin in his bedroom, stripped to the waist, and he would talk about his sporting accomplishments, how he had rowed for his school, played rugby for the county. He would flex his right bicep. Look at that, he would say. Not bad, considering. He would invite me to feel the hard goose egg of muscle. Most parents want their children to be able to imagine them as they once were, in all the careless glory of their youth, but for my father there was so much more at stake. In his twenties, he had been brutally altered, savagely diminished, and he was desperate for me to see him as he used to be,
as he was supposed to be – as he truly was. But I never could. I never could.

  Given his injuries, he did well to last until he was sixty-one. At the hospital, the sister told us that he had been living on borrowed time, and I wondered to what extent his survival had to do with us, his children. Your five lives have been my life. Since his death, we have been joking about our new status as orphans, but if I go back twenty years, that was a very real possibility. It was also my greatest fear. My mother, who was young and healthy, had been taken. My father was still with us – but for how much longer? From the age of eight, I would lie awake at night and pray for my father not to die. My bedroom shared a wall with his, and if he murmured in his sleep, or even if his mattress creaked as he turned over, I would freeze, heart thudding, afraid his lungs had filled with fluid. Once, when I was nine, Dad woke to hear water running in the upstairs bathroom. He looked at the clock. It was late – after two. He stepped out on to the landing. My eyes wide open, I brushed past him as if he wasn’t there. I sleepwalked through the house that night, turning on every tap I could find, and Dad followed me from room to room, turning them all off again.

  My prayers were answered – Dad didn’t die – but the effort I had to make night after night produced a smouldering resentment. I wished he could be like other fathers. I hated having to worry. I longed for a life that was selfish, nonchalant, carefree. Why should I have to bear the brunt of all this terrible uncertainty? Why me?