by Ben Watt
‘I don’t, Mum. It’s OK.’
‘It must be Alzheimer’s. What else could it be?’
‘Well, his chest must be hard to cope with, and he needs his oxygen and everything, but I’ll speak to the doctor if it would put your mind at ease.’
‘Would you, dear? I would so appreciate it.’
With the two of us sitting there I remembered the afternoons when I was young, when she worked from home as a journalist. She’d let me lie on the floor and draw in the doorway, to be near her, as long as I was quiet. She’d made a new career for herself in the mid-fifties since abandoning hopes of acting amid the havoc of full-time motherhood. (‘I was offered an audition for a part in Marlowe’s Edward II, but was too tired to even read it.’) Instead – making use of her first husband Ken’s contacts as an author and theatre critic – she’d grabbed an opportunity to write about life with the triplets for the Daily Express. The piece went down well. It was sharply observed and drily humorous, and with Ken’s help, more select doors opened to the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail and soon she was writing regular columns. ‘No one had written about motherhood as light comedy before,’ she once said to me. ‘It wasn’t just your father who could be funny, you know.’ By the early sixties, she was editing the ‘Femail’ page for the Daily Mail, and then She magazine came knocking and she was offered the chance to try her hand at some bigger celebrity interviews.
I pictured her tiny study just off the sitting room on the first floor in the house where I grew up. It used to be my room when I was baby. It was barely big enough for the desk and chair that sat in the middle of the room. It had a couple of filing cabinets either side, and piles of papers and cuttings and thick glossy Spotlight directories full of thousands of black-and-white publicity photos of endless actors and actresses. The pin-board was covered in clippings and reminders and phone numbers. (Clear guttering. RING IAN HOLM!!) She wrote at a small portable Adler typewriter with the phone to hand all the time – a big red GPO 746, with a rotary dial and a deafening ring. She smoked back then – Piccadilly, filter-tipped, the short ones in the wide hard box – and I’d listen to the rat-a-tat of the keys, the ding as she got to the end of the line, and the swoosh of the carriage-return. Suddenly she’d rifle through her address book, then pick up and dial – ‘Hello, Peter, darling, it’s Romany . . . Listen, I’m sorry to be a frightful bore but I’m writing this dreadful piece. Need a quick quote . . . you know how it is. Won’t keep you. Anyway, do you think femininity is going out of style?’ I’d lie quietly in the doorway to the sitting room with empty paper pulled out of one of her scrapbooks and spend an hour with a ruler and some coloured pens designing my own hand-drawn newspaper, complete with animal stories, TV listings and football results. I enjoyed the eavesdropping. It seemed like the outside world was the place to be.
An hour later, as I was leaving, she said casually, ‘I think I’m going to have to find a doctor, you know. Something odd is going on downstairs.’
For a moment I thought she meant something to do with the porters until I saw her face. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t like to bother you with these things, darling, but I have no one else to tell.’ She lowered her voice. ‘It’s like I’m trying to give birth to an egg.’
That night I spoke to Tracey.
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Sounds like a prolapse.’
‘Really?’
‘She’s had five kids. Three at one time. Women didn’t exactly do the exercises back then. Wouldn’t be surprised. The womb can no longer be supported. It can drop. Poor thing. You’d better call someone.’
Within a couple of days it was clear my mum would need a hysterectomy. Which meant time in hospital. Which meant I had to do something about my dad.
Chapter 8
‘How was the traffic, Tommy?’
My dad looked up across the table at the sound of his name.
We were sitting in a cramped office in a north London care home not far from their new flat. The overhead lights were bright. A geriatric psychiatrist – tall, thin, Irish, in a tweed jacket – was standing on the other side of the table, leafing though some paperwork. My dad looked as if he wasn’t sure if the question had been for him. He glanced at the stranger, blinked and said nothing, then looked at the backs of his hands.
‘The traffic, Tommy. All right, was it?’ said the psychiatrist again, casually. I could tell he was trying to defuse the impression that he was commencing some kind of assessment.
With my mum in hospital for her hysterectomy, my dad had agreed to let me check him into the care home for a few nights. He was OK about it. He knew he couldn’t have coped at the flat on his own, and our house was impractical with steep stairs and the clamour of three small kids. I hadn’t told him anything about a psychiatric assessment. I’d just told him there’d be a bit of form-filling and registration on arrival.
My dad, now aware he was being addressed, cleared his throat and said, ‘Yes, normal traffic.’
‘Good. That was lucky. Now then . . .’ The psychiatrist sat down and looked at him across the table. ‘Mind if I ask a few questions just to get you settled in?’
‘Fire away,’ said my dad.
‘Excellent. Right. Do you know where we are, Tommy?’
‘A fine establishment, no doubt. My son has good taste.’
‘Indeed. And the name of this “fine establishment”?’
‘Search me.’
The bluff charm. I suppressed a smile.
‘What day is it, Tommy?’
‘Always the weekend for me these days. Has been for years.’
It was hard to tell if my dad knew exactly what was going on and was just being funny to annoy the man in front of him, or was being smart to cover up his own mental deficiencies of which he was only too aware. I remembered how our local vet had once told me a small animal will fight right to the end to hide signs of ill health or weakness, moments after our family gerbil – at death’s door – had roused itself from a near coma and fiendishly bitten his hand. I looked at my dad. He didn’t look fiendish. He looked isolated and slightly peeved. I flashed a look at the care home manager who was standing silently at the back of the room, but resisted the urge to say anything.
The psychiatrist remained blank. He scribbled something down, then carried on. ‘What city are we in, Tommy?’
‘London, the last time I checked,’ my dad said, a little tightly.
I could sense him getting irate.
‘What floor are we on?’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, I don’t know . . . Haberdashery.’ He slapped the palm of his hand on the armrest of his wheelchair. ‘I’ve had enough of this! You’ll be asking me the Prime Minister’s name next. Isn’t that what you do?’ He cast his eyes around the room. He could sense someone else behind him. ‘It’s like an inquisition! Ben, take me away from here, please!’
There was a commotion. Faces appeared at the door. A sheaf of paper was pushed on to the floor, fanning out across the carpet.
Within five minutes we were back out in the lobby and he had calmed down. He was still in his wheelchair. There were apologies and a cup of tea was offered. I felt bad. As though we’d tried to trick a child.
I went up with him to his room in the little lift with the extra handrails. It was a small single with half a view of the garden at the back – better than the front rooms that overlooked the noisy main road, I thought. A care assistant led the way and made himself busy, pulling on the bathroom light, opening and closing the wardrobe door, flicking the light switches on and off, showing us the call button, talking us through it, then left and said he’d be back shortly.
I opened my dad’s suitcase and hung up his clothes. ‘Got your best stuff, here, Dad,’ I said.
‘Your mother packed it,’ he said, looking straight ahead.
In among his shirts was a photograph of my mum in a frame. I wondered if she’d packed that too. I put it on his bedside table and arranged his travel clock
and comb and pocket handkerchief around it. I moved them into three or four different positions to try to make them seem more homely, but whatever I did they just sat there like the lone possessions of a sentenced man. I tucked his shoes away against the wall.
He was sitting on the bed. He still had his blazer on and his hair was neatly parted. I glanced around the austere room. It looked like a Travelodge. Or the first day at a modern boarding school.
‘You’ll be all right?’ I said.
He looked up with a dull smile. ‘This is all part of it.’
He seemed to be giving me licence to leave. I reached for a platitude as my exit line. ‘I’ll pop back once you’re settled,’ I said. It sounded terrible. Shallow and insincere.
Downstairs, I went to sign out.
‘Is that your dad’s wheelchair?’ said the woman on reception, gesturing to the one we’d brought with us.
‘Yes.’
‘I’d put his name on it if I were you. It’s a nice one. They tend to go walkabout. Especially the nice ones.’ She handed me some Tipp-Ex.
I painted my dad’s name on the frame of the wheelchair with the little white brush. I finished and pushed it into the corner next to the others, where they all looked huddled together like numbered sheep in a pen.
As I put the top back on the Tipp-Ex, it was as though a door was closing.
I walked back to the desk, signed out and left.
My footsteps were muted by soft cushiony oatmeal carpet tiles. The air felt fresh and conditioned. There were star-gazer lilies in a vase on the ledge: the smell of Beverly Hills hotels. Wide windows spread the lush exhaling treetops of Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill out before me. There’s the zoo; I love the aviary. The city was beyond. If I’m ever ill again, let me be ill in a room like this. It’s like a soft shot of proper painkiller. An opiate. No harm can surely come to people in rooms like this. We are in a hidden space at the top of a secluded world: the film set of the ultimate BUPA pamphlet. I turned from the window and ran my fingers over the edges of the crisp freshly laundered bedlinen and cast my eye across the sleek white purring pristine equipment.
In the bed my mum was propped up. Muzzy. Relaxed. I wondered what she made of it. Maybe she thought this was what London was like these days. Maybe she thought this was just the way I did things. I was conscious of the imaginary weight of her and my dad in my arms for a moment. I just hoped the small health insurance policy she had taken out a few years ago using some of her savings (‘It was Toby’s idea’) was going to cover a hysterectomy at the luxurious private Wellington Hospital in the way her doctor had confidently predicted.
My dad was looking at her. He had been given a cup of coffee in some fine white china by a polite and amiable nurse in white hole-punched clogs, at whom he had winked. I’d brought him to see her in his newly Tipp-Exed wheelchair, although I’d hung my jacket over his name as we’d taken the gleaming lift to the top floor.
‘You look very at home, Romany,’ he said.
My mum smiled graciously.
I pictured her somewhere exotic – Acapulco perhaps. She’d been flown out there in 1968 to interview James Mason and Trevor Howard. Or perhaps on a balcony in Tangier in 1964, or in a cable car riding up to Mons Calpe in 1965, on both occasions with my dad, when Mediterranean cruises were still for dazzling couples who could leave their children behind with nannies and relatives. Maybe she’d be schmoozing with Goldie Hawn in Hollywood as she was in that photograph that used to be on her pin-board. I thought she had always effortlessly taken a glamorous opportunity as if it were some kind of noble right. The spotlight, to her, was warm not harsh. And this room was oddly glamorous . . . I suddenly caught myself daydreaming and reprimanded myself. What am I thinking? She’s had a serious operation. This is a hospital, not a hotel. ‘You’re going to need some looking after, Mum,’ I said, approaching the bed, ‘after all this silly trouble.’ I heard the sound of my own voice; I was overcompensating; it was as if I was speaking to one of my own children.
She turned the corners of her mouth up. It was barely a smile. More a meek ‘thank you’. Her face was lightly bleached of colour, like an old framed photograph left out in a sunny spot.
‘How about a few days with us? Get you back on your feet. Tracey can make up the spare room. Dad’ll be all right on his own for a bit. They’re taking good care of him down the road, aren’t they, Dad?’
‘We’re in your hands, my dear lad,’ he said.
And there it was. Not exactly a yes. More a set of light regulations to which they were now dutifully adhering. Like kids on a school trip. Their life now felt as much about coercion as anything else, however sweetly and efficiently I was managing it.
Chapter 9
The sun sparkled on the rooftops and windows of north-west London as I dropped down the steep hill to the main road below. The care home had asked me not to come back for a couple of days. They wanted my dad to settle in and get used to his carers. It was his first weekend in the new place. I’d heard he had been moved to a slightly larger room and I was in good spirits as I went up in the lift, but as I knocked and went in, he was sitting on the edge of the bed in almost exactly the same position as when I had left him in the previous room a few days earlier. For a moment it felt as though he hadn’t moved, had had no sleep, had sat upright for three days. On his bedside table was a heap of his things – clock, comb, biro, socks, a tube of toothpaste, all jumbled up and unsorted. It looked as though someone must have dumped them there in a hurry. I glanced in the wardrobe; two shirts had come off their hangers and were crumpled on top of his shoes at the bottom. The room appeared sparsely furnished. Four small indentations in the carpet showed where an armchair should have been.
‘No comfy chair, Dad?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a bit of a mess in here. What happened?’
‘Was like this when they put me in here.’
‘Where have you been sitting?’
‘Here.’ He gestured to the bed.
‘I’ll speak to someone on the way down. That’s not right. You need a chair.’
‘I’ve seen no one.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘No one has been here. I slept on the floor last night.’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you fall?’
He looked up and met my eye. ‘I dressed myself,’ he said. ‘Very tiring.’
I had to wait until the morning to speak to the senior manager. She apologised for the missing chair and said it had been replaced, and that my dad had been very confused for a couple of days. She asked me not to read too much into what he said and that appropriate care had been provided on every day since his arrival. I told her there was no sign of his suitcase or his oxygen tank in his new room and that he had no memory of being given any of the medication I had left. She told me it was all in hand. I had no option but to take her at her word. That night I lay awake in my bed and couldn’t sleep and stared at the cracks of light at the window and wondered if he was safe and asleep, or awake too, in an unfamiliar room, with unfamiliar cracks of light at an unfamiliar window. I also wondered if he was just lying on the floor.
I rang first thing in the morning. A carer – I didn’t recognise his voice – said he had had ‘a good night’ and had ‘eaten a good breakfast’. They were phrases I used to hear the nurses use in hospital to relatives, however unsettled a patient had been. I said I was pleased, and I wanted to believe him.
At home, Tracey made up the spare room: extra cushions and pillows; an armchair with a foot-stool; a tartan travel blanket; a portable television; some family photos; flowers cut from the garden. She was picturing little trips up the stairs during the day: a tray of food; some soup; a pot of tea; a slice of cake; a rerun of Poirot on TV.
But my mum was restless the first night. I could hear her turn over in the room upstairs, the soft footfall and faint creak from the floorboards as she went to the win
dow and back. I’d taken her a tray of food in the evening but she had pulled a face. Among her cuttings I once found a light-hearted unpublished magazine feature she’d written about taking days off work, in which she said: ‘I was never brought up to be ill . . . I insist on soldiering on, spluttering all over everyone, sighing deeply, and making the family feel thoroughly guilty.’
The next evening, after we’d settled the kids down, she joined us for a meal downstairs but was unable to relax and went up to her room early. A couple of hours later – after I’d left to go out for a gig – Tracey was sitting alone in the kitchen when my mum appeared in the doorway in bare feet wearing only a white nightie with her grey hair down, as if she’d gone to bed but got herself up again. After the briefest of exchanges, she had suddenly made an unexpected grab for the kitchen cupboard, and pulling out a bottle of brandy, snatched out the cork, put the bottle to her lips and swigged with ostentatious insolence, before gruffly returning to her room.
‘I was stupefied,’ Tracey said. ‘It was just weird and embarrassing. I hardly had time to say anything. And you were out. And it was your mother.’
The next night she did the same in front of me.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, refusing to rise.
‘Well, you won’t offer me a drink,’ she responded crabbily.
‘You have just had a general anaesthetic and a major operation,’ I protested. ‘The doctor said take it easy for a couple of weeks.’
With her back in her room, I wondered why it all had to be so brilliantly operatic. I wanted to help and sympathise but I resented this engineering of feelings, this melodrama, this intense sense of grievance. I felt estranged. It was a kind of wildness. Disproportionate. Unmanageable. In retrospect I wonder why I didn’t put my arms around her, seek more help, but it felt like a storm that could upturn trees, as though I could do no good and I’d be brushed away, and she was the one who needed to change.