COPYRIGHT
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017
Copyright © Rebecca Stott 2017
Rebecca Stott asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008209162
Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008209186
Version: 2017-04-10
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Frontispiece
RECKONING
BEFORE
DURING
AFTERMATH
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
PICTURE PERMISSIONS
Also by Rebecca Stott
About the Publisher
FRONTISPIECE
RECKONING
1
My father did the six weeks of his dying – raging, reciting poetry, and finally pacified by morphine – in a remote eighteenth-century windmill on the East Anglian fens. It had been built to provide wind power to help drain the land, but by the time my father and stepmother bought it, the sails and cogwheels were long gone. A previous owner had stripped out the rusting machinery, added a low nave with extra rooms and painted it a dusky pink. From a distance and with the paint flaking off, it looked like a church washed up on the banks of a river. When the local farmer covered the black fields in every direction with plastic sheeting that miraged into floodwater in certain lights, the building always looked to me like a boat, or an ark, untethered from its moorings.
It was so far from civilisation that it did not figure on GPS systems: the undertakers took four hours to reach us.
Since they’d moved into it six years earlier, my father had turned the Mill into a pagan shrine, pasting its round, six-foot-thick walls with passages from Eliot’s Four Quartets and from Yeats’s last poems, owl feathers and Celtic symbols. He glued the lines of poetry onto the plaster, and when the damp made the paper curl off he’d hammer in huge nails that made the plaster crack.
They’d bought the house on a whim a year after their wedding. They both wanted to live on flat land, he said. They both liked big skies.
‘It’s on the banks of a fen river,’ he said, when he phoned to say they’d found the perfect house. ‘The Romans used it to ship building materials across the fens. During the war a farmer ploughed up a hoard of Roman silver plates covered in tritons and sea gods just a couple of fields away, and the local Baptists used to do their baptisms here. There’s a mooring platform, so we can buy a boat.’
But you’ve got no money, I muttered to myself. How exactly are you going to buy a boat?
They drove me up to see it. We climbed through nettles and peered in through cobwebbed windows. It was beautiful, but it was also eerie and unsettling. All that sky. All that black soil. American bombers crossed the land on their flightpath from the Mildenhall airbase. Falcons hung low over the riverbank or scrutinised the fields from their posts on electricity cables.
Four months later my stepmother had turned the small circle of long-neglected riverside land into the beginnings of a garden. My father beat down the nettles with sticks. He borrowed a plough from a neighbouring farmer and broke it within a few hours. The farmer patched up the worst parts of the road. My father planted beech hedges and supervised local lads in the laying out of a lawn. He ordered and planted a grove of white birches at the far end of the garden as a birthday present for my stepmother. Their white trunks were magnificent, luminous against the black soil of the fen fields, especially at dusk.
‘He’s always had a thing for silver birches,’ she told me. ‘I prefer willows.’
My father was built on a different scale to the rest of us. In 2007, the year of his dying, he was sixty-eight, six foot four, and twenty stone. His long snow-white hair and beard would have made him look like an Old Testament prophet if it wasn’t for the combat jacket he’d taken to wearing. He’d bought it from the Army and Navy Stores to audition for the part of Mark Antony in a production of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, and now wore it all the time. He thought of himself as an ageing Antony, but to me he was Sir Andrew Aguecheek, sometimes a Falstaff, occasionally a Lear. We called him Roger in our teens, and later Rodge or Dodge or The Big Man, never Dad. He wasn’t a dad, at least not in the way that most people meant it. I’d usually just refer to him as ‘my father’ – Roger seemed an absurd name for a man built on his scale.
His head was twice the size of mine. When he’d had money he’d bought his clothes from an outsize shop called High and Mighty, but now that he was poor, most of his clothes – and my stepmother’s – came from charity shops. When he split the seams of his trousers he’d staple them back together again. It was far quicker and more efficient than sewing, he insisted when I asked what he was doing with the stapler in one hand and the washing basket in the other. My stepmother flashed me a look that meant hold your tongue. When he broke his glasses, he taped the arms back on. She flashed me a look about that too.
He had a set of dentures that had replaced some of his back teeth, and sometimes he’d take them out when he was speaking fast or reciting poetry. He’d place them on the table between us. Sometimes he’d do this in restaurants or pubs. He’d belch, too – at home and in public. His belches were loud, elongated, and reverberated like a long rumble of thunder. He belched, I think, as an act of defiance against all forms of gentility and because it made us laugh. My brothers – and then my son – competed to imitate those sounds. It became a tribal thing.
Through that final winter, increasingly lame, bilious and irascible, his pancreas riddled with the still-undetected cancer, my father – the great limping bulk of him – walked the bank of the River Lark for hours every day, following the line of the river across the fens listening to Joyce’s Ulysses on his headphones for the seventh time. He and my stepmother had planted hundreds of bulbs – fritillaries and parrot tulips – on the path up to the Mill door and in rows on the riverbank. By February they were pushing up shoots.
On Valentine’s Day in a hospital in Bury St Edmunds, doctors had finally used the word ‘cancer’ at the end of several weeks of euphemisms that had begun with ‘inflammation’ and then progressed to ‘blockage’, then ‘lump’, and then finally ‘tumour’.
‘Seems they manage bad news by drip-feeding it here,’ my father said. ‘It’s exactly three centimetres by six centimetres,’ he added, indulging his obsession for numbers, tracing the edges of the shadow on the ultrasound scan printout. ‘They don’t know how long I have. But they’ve given me a counsellor. That’s not good, is it?’
He’d have to finish his memoir now, he said, when he’d been allowed to go home and when he’d stopped swearing, raving, and thumping walls and tables with his fist. He’d begun to think about what it might mean to put his affairs in order. When he told me he was going to need my help to finish t
hat book of his, my heart sank.
He’d started writing it eight years earlier, shortly before meeting my stepmother. He’d called it ‘The Iron Room’, after the corrugated-iron Meeting Room where he and his parents and siblings had worshipped five or six times a week when he was growing up. For the first three years he’d talked about his memoir all the time. Every spare hour he took away from his paid work as a freelance copyeditor he’d be at it: ten steps back into rewriting; one step forward into new writing. He’d sent me scores of drafts, each only slightly different from the last. I came to dread the sight of his emails in my inbox.
‘I can’t see the wood for the trees any more,’ I pleaded. ‘Let me read it when it’s finished. Then I’d be a fresh pair of eyes.’
I was relieved when the emails stopped coming, when he’d been distracted by the Mill, the garden, the broken plough, and the question of where to put the silver birches.
It was when he hit the 1960s, he said, that he’d run into trouble. He hadn’t been able to get any further. I did the calculations. That was a shortfall of forty-nine years. How long would that take him – or me – to write?
‘The Nazi decade,’ he added, as if it were an explanation, and I nodded, telling myself the morphine was addling his head. Everything after 1960 had turned into a thicket, he whispered, through tears and expletives, whilst uncorking what was probably the third bottle of wine that afternoon. But he was going to finish it, he said. He had to. He wasn’t going to let Death win that sodding chess game. He thumped his huge fist down on the arm of his chair again. Not any time soon.
He gestured at the television, a forty-two-inch flatscreen, the only piece of equipment in the cool damp interior of the curved Mill walls, on which he’d paused a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Within the black-and-white frame two men dressed in medieval clothes sat playing chess against a wild sea.
Det sjunde inseglet/The Seventh Seal © 1957 AB Svensk Filmindustri. Still photographer: Louis Huch
‘So long as the knight keeps playing the game of chess,’ my father said, ‘Death can’t take him.’
He was damn well going to watch all fifty-eight of Bergman’s films again now, he declared.
Of all the things I might have guessed my father might have wanted to do with his remaining days, watching Ingmar Bergman films wasn’t one of them. I could only remember seven films that Bergman had directed. My father had made me watch them when I was sixteen, on afternoons when he persuaded me to skip school during my O-Levels: Wild Strawberries, Autumn Sonata, Cries and Whispers, The Seventh Seal, Winter Light, The Silence and Through a Glass Darkly. He’d buy red wine, huge loaves of still-warm bread and slabs of ham, and open a jar of his favourite wholegrain English mustard. We’d watch those films in his dusty, post-divorce flat, sitting on the floor amid piles of unpaid bills and documents and scatterings of poems. I’d go back to school – or to my mother’s house – slightly drunk, my head spinning.
I started a list on the day he showed me Death playing chess on the TV screen. Ingmar Bergman: 58, I wrote at the top of the page in my notebook, thinking I’d order them online. I’d forgotten that my father had more than forty of them in a cupboard in the Mill, that he’d been collecting them since he’d stolen into the back row of a cinema to see Wild Strawberries at the age of eighteen.
Fifty-eight. How many films could you watch in a day?
My younger brother, travelling across New Zealand on sabbatical from work, flew home and moved into the Mill. I stayed as often as I could, driving up from Cambridge every other day, leaving notes for my ex-husband and babysitters, managing a job and publishers from a phone and an internet connection that rarely worked. My sister flew over from France. My two other brothers came as often as their jobs and young families allowed them. The five of us gathered around, steeled ourselves. My stepmother ordered in food and more cases of wine and turned the thermostat dial to Constant.
In the crypt light of the Mill tower, through late February and March, we watched Bergman films together, interspersed with long hours of cricket – the World Cup had just started. We played Mozart, drank wine, cooked, and ate together at a table that seated fifteen, only a few feet from my father’s reclining chair, which was now permanently horizontal. It snowed. My son and I drove across fen dirt tracks in the dark to fetch foil boxes of Gressingham duck prepared for my father by the cooks at the White Pheasant pub at Fordham, but though he wanted to eat he had no appetite. He worked away at his memoir for several hours a day for the first week, propped up on pillows, but then, once the Macmillan nurse had increased his daily doses of morphine, he was too tired to write.
Then there was the day he told me, tears in his eyes, that he didn’t think he could finish his memoir after all. He’d gone back into the thicket, but he couldn’t face it: the muddle, the cruelty, the madness of it all. And even if he could describe those years, he whispered, as if someone might be listening in, he’d never be able to close the great gap in time, get from 1960 to now, to this.
‘Shandy’s dilemma,’ I said, and he smiled darkly. For decades he’d been persuading me to read his favourite books. Many had become my household gods now too. A webwork of in-jokes and literary references had grown up between us. We’d both read Lawrence Sterne’s mad fictional eighteenth-century memoir The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. But now that he had only weeks to live, the similarities between Tristram Shandy and my father’s own unfinished fictional memoir struck me as both tragic and ridiculous.
Poor Tristram finds he’s written several hundred pages before he’s even been born. Convinced that the oddities of his personality were caused by the fact that his father was interrupted while having sex with his mother on the night of his conception by his mother asking if he had forgotten to wind the clock, Tristram then has to explain about the clock, and to do that he has to explain about Uncle Toby, his father’s brother … and while he is trying to explain all of this, and as the pages are mounting up, there’s a knock at the door and Death is there on the threshold – cloak, scythe and all. Tristram leaps from the window and gallops to Dover to take a boat to Calais. Death takes up pursuit.
I took the bus from my house into town to buy a portable tape recorder.
‘If I ask you questions,’ I said to him as he disappeared into another cricket match, ‘it might be easier. You wouldn’t get so tired. Then I could transcribe it later. We could do short bursts, when you felt like it.’
I had bought a black tape recorder. Out in the Mill dust coated everything in hours, and I had to keep wiping the machine down. The dust bothered me. I’d never noticed it before. Dust and, even in March, fruit flies. The house was full of them. My father had started to keep a tally of the number he’d find in his wine glass. The fruit fly count joined all the other reckonings in his notebooks: daily calorie counts, his gambling winnings and losings, the daily diabetes count, the cricket scores. My stepmother just put an old beermat over her glass. She didn’t much like wine.
But although the tape recorder had been easy enough to choose in the department store that day, I hadn’t anticipated that the tapes would stupefy me. How many did I need? They came in packs of four or eight or twelve. Each of them could hold eight hours of recording. How long did he have? How far would he get? I stood in front of the display case in the shop for twenty minutes trying to do multiplication sums in my head. I picked up three packets of twelve: thirty-six tapes. That was 288 hours; 17,280 minutes.
I now have two tapes in my study drawer, next to the old tape recorder. One is full, the other only partly full. I gave the unused ones away. My father got from 1960 to 1966, two years after my birth. He ran out of time. Like Tristram Shandy, like the knight in The Seventh Seal, he didn’t get to finish his story once Death had got into the house.
What he had to tell me was far worse than I could have imagined. No wonder he’d got stuck.
When we began, I pictured my father and me in that thicket together, with scyth
es, torches and protective clothing, and then, triumphant, finally scaling the castle walls. We’d do whatever was needed – cut through the thorns, slay the dragon, rescue the princess – together. But we didn’t make it.
Day by day he grew quieter. His reclining chair remained in its horizontal position and his morphine-induced sleeps lasted longer. I slipped the tape recorder and the pack of tapes into the back of the cupboard where he kept his dusty film collection and his store of Spanish reds.
In the fourth week of his six weeks of dying, my father, laid out at the centre of the Mill tower, opened his eyes and summoned my brother and me, his executors. He had already given me instructions about what to do about his memorial stone, the funeral, and his extensive debts. He was struggling hard to surface from his drug-inspired dreams, to keep his eyes open, to sit up. We moved in closer.
‘This is very important,’ he stressed, raising an arm from the bed and jabbing his finger into the air with all the strength he had, his white beard and hair wild, his jaundice-yellowed eyes bloodshot.
‘You can’t leave any of those bastards alone with me when I’m asleep. You understand? You know what they’re like. They’ll take advantage. They’re like vultures.’
He knew all too well from his fifteen years as a ministering brother in the Exclusive Brethren that the distant family members who were now visiting every day as the end grew nearer would want to pray over him, help him find his way back to the Lord. He was having none of that.
Dutifully, we warned the cousins who came carrying Bibles and hymnbooks. How do you tell a Christian not to pray? What else were they supposed to do? Leave the dying man to the tortures of hellfire?
We asked them to respect his wishes. They were offended and baffled. They’d driven a long way. Many had got lost when their GPS systems had begun to tell them to turn around and make for the nearest road. They drank tea and examined the strange pagan grotto of the Mill and its many false idols. I watched a distant cousin run her eyes down the lines from Four Quartets my father had pasted above the door, her brow furrowed.
In the Days of Rain Page 1