by Toby Litt
CHAPTER 22
AROUND nine the next morning Paddy phoned to say his father was definitely dying and then, after a few hours more, an unexpectedly long time, phoned again to say he had died. Even between these two calls, Paddy – Paddy’s voice – sounded changed, as if he had been carrying a monstrous burden which had now blessedly been removed, and replaced by another even more monstrous one. It was only when she put the phone down after the first call that Agatha remembered her after-midnight messages to Paddy and realised that he hadn’t mentioned or given any hinted acknowledgement of them. This, she thought, was partly because what was happening to him was so much more important, so overwhelming, and partly because what she had said fitted, in every way, with that happening: she had given her reaction in advance, so Paddy no longer had any need to thank her for it. During the second call, Agatha heard the beginnings of his suppression of the resentment that she hadn’t been present when his father could have shown his vulnerability and his final love. It wasn’t clear – it wasn’t yet possible for her to tell what longer term effect this might have on relations between them. In a strange way, Agatha wasn’t exactly sure how seriously Paddy was going to take the death of his father. On the phone, she tried her best – told Paddy he’d done all he could, that his father knew he loved him.
There was, Agatha felt, a moment during grief when an illusion of choice appeared; she had felt this very much with her own father. And how she had grieved subsequently was directly related to how she had reacted to the illusory possibility of choosing either to be stoic or succumb. The choice, definitely, was an illusion: Father-grief, for her, had been a bad, long beating-up – she could try to cover her head, so her skull wasn’t smashed and her spine wasn’t snapped but any idea of being in control departed from her with the first blows. From all that she had known of him and from what she could tell about him now, down the phone, Paddy saw two options: one was to abandon himself, to fail to deal with the situation and to do this partly in the belief that it would force her back from her own internal exile; the other was to stay Paddy, be heroically solid, accept his own conditions and cope.
As she put the phone down, again with the words I love you, Agatha wasn’t sure whether her tone had nudged Paddy one way or the other: she had tried to be neutral, but how can one be neutral comforting, or trying to comfort, a husband for his father’s death? Agatha became aware, as she took herself through to the front room, that she was trying very hard not to judge Paddy. How would he react to this new death? It was terrible to feel that their future together might depend on this. But what worried her more was that she couldn’t tell which of his reactions would be most likely to bring them back together: she couldn’t guide him towards one or the other, and she knew herself to be perverse enough that if she caught him meekly following her guidance, that might be the signal of the end. Flagged up, it certainly wasn’t. What she had always wanted, one of the things, was a resistance – an equal and opposite force so that she might know she had some kind of surface against which to build the lean-to of her life; no buildings – they were vanity; some wall or cliff against which to press, rest, beat and break her fists. Paddy was solid; solidity was the function of the father she had made him into and had made of him. He had called her (both times) from just outside the main entrance, standing in rain – she had been able to hear other hospital visitors, dropping one another off, picking up what was left of one another. ‘You can leave me a message,’ Paddy had said, ‘if you want me to get in touch. I have to stay here a little while – there are – there’s stuff to be done. I want to stay here a little while. I better get back, or they’ll move him: I got the man in the next bed to promise…’ He rambled, a little; full of love. After that all she could hear from him were sobs, I love and you soon. Stranded now on the sofa, she knew she was a long way away from where she was meant to be – from where the pride of her life should have been centred. She turned on the television, hoping for something completely irrelevant – and slammed into a talkshow discussion of euthanasia: a woman in a wheelchair pleading for the right to die. Off. She thought of Paddy, walking along corridors in the hospital, and irrationally she feared for him: another pulse of the old morbidity – he might die there, never come back. Probably, he was dead already – heart-attack, brain tumour. She closed her eyes and looked at the institutional art upon the walls of Paddy’s corridor; she did not know this hospital, but she knew hospitals. He turned into a ward, and she imagined she saw the curtains drawn around the bed of his father – another coughing man who had coughed more then less then stopped. The coughing man in the next bed along gave a nod – he had defended the body from the nurses: perhaps someone would do the same for his son or daughter, if he was lucky enough to have one. Now should be the time to collect Max, to recollect her life; whatever happened in the future with Paddy, she wasn’t going to leave him now, not for the next six months, at least. They were becoming more married, with every minute that had passed since his father’s death.
Agatha almost decided to call a taxi and take it to her mother’s, fetch Max, then take another taxi – or ask her mother to drive her – to the hospital. This was, she felt, what Paddy probably wanted her to do: although the most sensible thing would be to let Max for the moment stay where he was. If they had been going to hospital, just for a visit, they might quite easily have left Max, for ease of everything, with his grandmother. What decided Agatha against leaving the house was the feeling of not wanting to make Paddy’s experience of his father’s death a divided one: What if she arrived just as they were wheeling his father’s body to the morgue? It would botch the whole day – Paddy would, as things were, remember it purely, as purely awful – father dead, Agatha not there, Max not home. She could help him most by showing him she had changed, or was trying to change, when he got back. There were other reasons Agatha had for not going, ones which she didn’t want to have to confront. Still, she was afraid of leaving the house; she felt she could, though, and that was a change, an improvement. There would be a funeral – she would be expected to go. She would, in herself, work towards the knowledge that, on that day, she would cross the threshold: it would be an occasion. Right now, as another reason, she didn’t want to see Paddy at his worst and find herself unable to cope. Better for him slightly to recover, at least enough to drive home.
And then, later, Paddy returned – carried Max through the front door, still sleepy from the drive; in Paddy’s hand, a bag full of food: bread and butter and more basics. Agatha could tell even from the front room there was something different about this entrance, the atmosphere as well as the sound of it; she came out into the hall and gave a little yelp when she saw her living son. She took him from Paddy’s arms and immediately began to wake him up with soft talk and little shakes: she didn’t want him coming to consciousness in a half-strange house – she must show him around it and let it have a good look at him, too. The terror implicit in this second thought she put definitely to one side. Paddy, who had been expecting an argument in the hall, went placidly back to the car to get the rest of Max’s accoutrements; it took him four trips to bring it all inside: pushchair, foldaway cot. He felt almost contented, merely being Dad, toiling out of sight to make things function. Because it had been a while since he’d dealt with Max’s stuff, he resented it. He thought of African tribes-women, infants tied to their backs with a single piece of cloth. Why this array of apparatus? What was the necessity of it all – mortal fear of faeces? It was a good, distracting thought; he had too many other things he could be thinking about. He could hear Agatha upstairs bouncing Max on her hip and sing-talking to him; they were in Max’s room, now for the first time really Max’s room with Max in it, still unredecorated, still pink. Paddy waited to hear his son react to this, scared by the newness and strangeness of it all – but he didn’t; he was probably too sleepy. Paddy carried the cot folded-flattish upstairs. Agatha, when he brought it in, was showing Max the insides of all the cupboards and reassuring him the
y were empty so he wouldn’t worry about what might be lurking in them. Max was quite capable of falling asleep again, if only he’d been allowed. Paddy, phoning ahead of himself, had made Agatha’s mother promise not to hype him up on sugar. Under any other circumstances, she would probably have made her resentment known. He remembered her look of relief as she handed Max over. ‘Everything alright?’ he now asked, forking the question between the two of them – wife and child.
‘He loves it,’ Agatha said, in a tone that conveyed her own acceptance. Paddy felt wise, as if he really had learnt something in the years which were meant to bring maturity. Listen very closely to what people say they want and give them the exact opposite. Agatha saw this mood in Paddy, felt it might become a dangerous smugness, but decided not to crush it; Max needed as much confidence around him as could be manufactured. Paddy brought up more of Max’s stuff from the hall (the whole reason for their moving here – car to hall to bedroom, easy); Agatha made some noises about where it should go, pointing with her free hand – Max drooling and now, yes, asleep on her shoulder. Paddy obeyed; they were sensible choices, and he saw no reason to challenge them. The cot went where they’d seen it when they viewed the house; he unfolded the zigzag shape, admiring once again its succinct design. The world of babyhood had been completely revolutionized, or at least made-over, since he and Agatha had passed through. Agatha thought about putting Max straight down as he seemed so groggy from the journey – and she wasn’t sure if he was properly taking anything in. (Max did feel a very basic delight in being in a small room again with both Mummy and Daddy, and it wasn’t so hot there.) But she decided it was better he become familiar with some of the rest of the house, upstairs at least, even if it was only in a dreamlike state. She carried him past Paddy, along the hall and into the big bedroom. It was very important Max knew how close they slept to him (if not, in some ways, to one another). Part of Agatha stepped away from her explanation and looked back upon herself: she had been consumed, again, by motherhood – not wholly, there was an aftertaste of self-consciousness. But being this absorbed in something, something human, not a book, felt exquisite, extraordinary: Max might be saving her, saving them, them together, and by doing that saving the world. He was never meant to be glue, but they were never meant to be shattered and scattered. Max, she thought, seemed to like their bedroom – he clearly wasn’t picking up any bad vibes from it. Not wanting to push things, she decided to complete his tour of the house tomorrow, the attic (he was still nodding off whenever she stopped jiggling him up and down) – the attic could wait. She carried Max into his bedroom and began carefully to undress him: he needed changing; he needed a wash.
Paddy, sitting in the front room, had decided to leave Agatha to put him down alone. It had been frustrating, dealing with the practicality of bringing Max away from his grandmother, then getting settled in the car; there had been no chance for intimacy, though Paddy took some small soul-nourishment from Max’s mere presence. He was comforted, too, by the way things had gone with Agatha. He had come away from the hospital with several conversations worked out in his mind; he knew what he must begin by stating, and what he must say if Agatha refused to reply, or replied this way, or that, or even that: screaming. Max must come home; Agatha must prove that she did, as he’d been overwhelmed to hear her say on the phone, both in her messages and when they spoke, love him – she must make their marriage a real marriage again, from both sides. He had had a wide selection of ultimatums ready, and then he’d junked all of them. Instead, he would forget about being sensible, diplomatic; he would drive over to Agatha’s mother’s and fetch his son home. It would be, he had felt, worth whatever argument might ensue – their argument would be different, from Max’s being there with them. His thoughts were interrupted by a familiar screaming: Max didn’t like the bathroom; he had started wailing almost as soon as they were through the door. ‘What is it?’ Agatha asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
All Max would say was, ‘No!’
Paddy decided not to go and ask what was happening. It would leave something for Agatha to tell him, or for him to ask her if she didn’t.
Max fell asleep as soon as he was in his cot. Agatha turned the knob on the radiator, to make the room a little cooler – defying the memory of her mother. She drew the curtains and tucked him unnecessarily in again. Now for Paddy, who was waiting in the front room, calm-seeming.
‘Yes,’ she said, and he could see how changed she was – his father’s death, he thought, it must be that. ‘I agree: we have to have Max with us again. We have to try to be a family. And I have to deal with my problems, I know. But we can’t move.’ Paddy saw she was holding him off, until she had completed. He realised, too, what had happened: they had both been going through multiple variants of the conversation they might have if he came back with Max, and this was the outcome of all of them: Agatha was stating the conclusions, their conclusions, for the both of them – and it was both of them, he also realised, himself as much as her, who had decided she would be the one to state them; Paddy required some capitulation; Agatha needed to begin controlling things again. What she had said, and the fact of it being her who said it, was an elegant solution. ‘I’m so sorry about your father.’ Aggie stepped forwards into Paddy’s open arms and for a long while they disappeared into each other – even if you’d been there, you wouldn’t have been able to see them.
CHAPTER 23
THEY went to bed – spontaneously, and with less trepidation perhaps than they should have felt. But even as they were beginning gently to kiss and tenderly to touch, both were convinced it was going to be worse for the other. There had not been, since, a complete lack of physical intimacy between them; they had hugged, fairly often but usually in the kitchen, and almost never within sight of the bed. This hugging had sometimes begun as a more necessary and urgent holding, calming. Occasionally, in their urgency, they had kissed, but to all this there had been a definite limit. Sex was impossible, and both of them were wordlessly agreed upon that. Their motives were slightly different: Agatha’s came out of aversion, Paddy’s out of respect and, if he had been able to admit it, aversion. There had been, as with any birth, six weeks afterwards of a medically imposed No; this was the zone of stitches – but it had already been clear that their own shared private No was louder, harder and would resonate longer, if not for ever. Sex towards a second child had been purposeful as well as fun, a recreation; sex now, they both in their different ways thought, would be sex in the void – sex thrown off a cliff and falling. Paddy knew he was not prepared in his heart – what he thought of as his heart – for a return to such agony; Agatha tried to convince herself of her indifference, the importance of other, practical concerns. She wanted to reassemble herself, to put the pieces back in order if not have stuck them together, before.
In the weeks since they’d moved into the house, and since she’d taken to the nights, Paddy had been at his most reassuring when asleep. She had wished, in a way, that he had been properly comatose, then she could have rolled him from side to side, biffed him up a little, chuffed his cheeks and ruffled his hair; she could have dandled his hand in her lap, run her tongue along the inside of his lower lip – and all without his ever knowing of it. She had wanted to romp around him on their bed, frollicking like a lamb – yes, she wanted to frolic, a frolic out of grief. These impulses had been incomprehensible to her; she realised they had something to do with being childlike, with a tragic seriousness of play – she definitely had not wanted to have sex. Instead, she wished she could toy with his penis as if it had had nothing, in any conceivable way, to do with the death and birth of Rose. If she could do this, she felt, she might be able to resurrect something of what she believed she should feel about Paddy’s body and therefore, hopefully, perhaps, Paddy, too. She had also been aware of something necrophiliac in her feelings: why should she want an unresponsive body? She certainly didn’t want him to be hard, be useable. It was distressing to her – extremely distressing, to feel that P
addy being Paddy, Paddy being intellectually, consciously Paddy as well as physical, smell-and-texture-giving Paddy, was somehow a failed thing for her.