Vanished Years (38 page)

‘Oh, really?’ he asks with deep interest.

‘Yes, really. You’re going to bore me soon if you just watch the news non-stop. It’ll make you gaga.’

‘Thank you,’ he sings, reaching slowly with shaking fingers for a crumpet.

*

Summer wanes, observed by my father in his chair under a rug from his favourite spot in the garden. The first falling leaves are reflected in the one dark glass of his spectacles. It’s the only movement on a face lost in contemplation.

Soon it is too cold to sit outside and he comes into the house for the last time. As the big autumn winds howl across the plain, stripping the trees bare, shaking the windows and doors, my father turns with the whole globe towards the frozen slumber of winter. His breath shortens with the days. He calmly observes the world like an old dog in his electric armchair by day or his electric bed by night – all operated by Mummy with a dial – watching the news from various different positions. The news is one of the rocks to which he clings, reminding him briefly of himself. Life reduces to a pinpoint, like the follow-spot on a face at the end of a play fading to black. In the last glimmer of light some things remain. Daddy still loves women and drink although his methods of flirtation have become confused.

‘How’s your drinking problem?’ he asks his favourite girlfriend who comes to lunch one day.

‘Fine, thank you very much. How’s yours?’ that lady snaps back, quick as a whip.

‘Not very good. I’m being bullied if you must know.’

Drinking – another of the rocks – has become a preoccupation, the last rebellion.

‘Can I have some more beer, please?’ he asks in a sing-song schoolboy voice.

‘No, darling. You’re only having one nowadays, remember?’

Pause.

‘Oh dear. Am I?’

My brother comes up with the idea of mixing his Speckled Hen light ale with alcohol-free beer. It works. For a while. At first he can’t believe his luck. Four beers at lunch!

‘I should really be more drunk by now, you know,’ he confides to me secretly one day.

‘Well, how marvellous that you’re not, don’t you think?’

‘I’m not sure. I rather like it, you know.’

Sometimes he stares like a cat at a parallel universe, standing on its edge.

‘Yes, vu-rry,’ he says, answering some complicated philosophical question.

‘Very what, Daddy?’

‘I forget. What
was
it?’

Sometimes he watches something closely and in detail. Sometimes he searches your face for a clue. Often he nods off. Occasionally he is on form. Sex is a subject that is always sure to get both my parents laughing, coming as they do from a generation unequipped for discussion about such personal issues – ‘not happyclappy like you’. I can have them both in hysterics with a couple of well-aimed questions. On homosexuality, for example, of which, despite her best intentions, my mother is thoroughly distrustful. She confronts my father with gales of laughter when I say, ‘Daddy had tons of affairs at Stonyhurst. Didn’t you, Daddy?’

‘Darling, you didn’t, did you?’

My father, who can’t swallow properly any more and is always choking, is heaving slowly with mirth. He rolls his eyes, and starts to choke.

‘Oh Mummy, really,’ he snorts, getting out his large red and white hanky and blowing his nose loudly and sneezing at the same time. ‘Of course we did.’

‘
No
!’

He sneezes again.

‘
Yes
.’

One night I ask my mother if she can remember her best sexual experience. This question, needless to say, brings the house down.

‘Making you,’ says my father, after the laughter subsides.

‘Darling, what
do
you mean?’ asks Mummy, aghast.

‘Making you,’ he repeats, to arpeggios of glee from his wife.

‘Oh, Tony, you do make me laugh.’

She is on the move again, cantering off to the kitchen to finish dinner. The grim reaper slips back into the room.

‘That’s why you’re so special,’ Daddy says. ‘Could I have some more beer?’

The cold weather arrives and the house crackles and groans with heat – for once. My mother keeps her husband moving by the sheer force of her personality. He is longing to retire to his bed, but she knows that as soon as that happens, it will be the end, and although he drives her mad, she can’t let him go. They have been married, after all, for fifty years.

And so he is moved around like a valuable vase. His handlers are Steve, Marianne, Rachel and Lauren. They are saints. They arrive in the kitchen at eight in the morning where my mother is a whirling dervish in her dressing gown.

‘Goodness, is that the time? I’m still undressed.’

She storms around her house like a character in a computer game, ducking through low doorways, swinging around corners and screeching up the stairs. She tiptoes only when she opens the door to my father’s shrouded room each morning with her heart in her mouth. Will he still be alive?

‘Just a few more minutes,’ is all he needs to say for her to speed off – clomp clomp clomp – down the stairs to get his breakfast tray ready with which she miraculously appears through the floor of his room in the lift a few minutes later.

Marianne, his lovely German nurse, is a much slower character than my mother, and loves to chew the cud downstairs in the kitchen.

‘Come on, everyone,’ says Mummy. ‘Let’s not sit around, shall we?’

Marianne is full of surprises. For example, she is a nudist and has a tattoo on her bottom, which she has shown my father. Daddy has forgotten what a tattoo is.

‘Marianne has drawn a map on her bottom,’ he says one day at lunch.

‘What on earth do you mean, Tony?’ asks my mother.

‘She showed it to me.’

‘What?’ shrieks Mummy.

‘At least, I’m pretty sure she did.’ Daddy can still back-pedal.

Mummy harbours a competitive streak, born years ago on the lacrosse field, encouraged now by Steve, and while she needs to have help looking after my father – she is exhausted – she hates to relinquish one hairbrushing.

I sit in the middle of this rush-hour traffic, trying to keep calm, but it is impossible. My mother is happy only when everyone is on the run, and she’s right in a way. The grim reaper can’t operate amid all this movement, and so the major plods on across the high pass, slowly but surely, with much elegance, considering how reduced are his circumstances. All in all, his old age has been a great success, and I can’t find in myself a heavy heart. He has finally become the person he has always wanted to be.

‘After all,’ I reason to my mother, ‘I will die alone in the actors’ rest home. If I’m lucky some dresser fairy from the theatre where I have my final seizure will come to prise the amethyst ring from my bloated finger, but otherwise …’

‘That’s why I wished you’d got married,’ says my mother sympathetically.

Marianne baths my father with the greatest care. She shaves him, brushes his teeth and gets him dressed. He comes down on his chair-lift at about eleven o’clock for Nescafé in the kitchen.

‘Oh thank you, darling,’ he says to Steve who gives him his cup – the same large white cup with worn-out hunting scenes round the sides that he has had his coffee and tea in since the sixties.

‘It’s Steve, Major.’

‘Oh really? Oh God!’

Steve and I meet regularly in the pub at the end of our village. Walls have ears at home, and here we can discuss ‘the situation’ at our leisure. The situation being the handling of the two old people in our care. The Swan is another thatched throwback, poised like my
father on the edge of extinction. An extortionate rent and the increasing risks involved in drunk driving are squeezing the life out of it. But for the time being it is a cosy black-beamed backwater, a low snug with a smoking fire and a German helmet hanging above it filled with flowers.

In his regular corner stands Dave Smith, the last local man, studying his nightly pint, speaking to no one, while the rest of the villagers are now professional commuters with eighteen cars each, or army officers on their way back from Tidworth or Porton Down. No one from the housing estate on the hill comes in. The Swan is too sedentary for them. They prefer the rowdier atmosphere of Amesbury where thrilling squaddies crash loo seats over one another’s heads.

Steve can be found here most evenings at six-thirty and that’s where we meet. My parents, brought up not to frequent bars, are nevertheless fascinated by the pub and all its travails but never dare to go there for a drink. My mother particularly thinks she knows everything that is going on within its walls, including how many pints Steve has before coming home. What she doesn’t know is that Steve has fallen in love with the girl who works behind the bar and pretty soon they are having a baby. This news has been imparted to me and I am instructed to break it to them how and when I want. It doesn’t go down very well, partly because Steve already has two other families further up the vale, and partly because my parents feel themselves to be the moral compass of the county, and, like the Queen, have a divine right to lofty views.

But Steve is a kind of saint, very attractive to women, and made to be a father. He is a character from Hardy, large with a cheerful, handsome face. He is extremely resourceful, loyal, funny and still knows all the country secrets that everyone else has forgotten. His latest child Lewis is born two weeks before my father’s death, and the last picture I have of my dad is of him holding little Lewis in his arms. It is a strange snapshot – two creatures at either end of the spectrum, neither of them really aware that the other is there. It is uplifting and depressing at the same time. The thought of the long
hard slog, getting from one end to the other, is shattering when you’re in the middle. Steve’s elder son Rob works behind the bar in the Swan, and listens disinterestedly as we discuss the situation. A teenager is not remotely interested in death.

On the last Tuesday of my father’s life we have dinner in his room. My mother and I sit at a card table at the end of his bed. I am perched on the corner, she sits in his wheelchair. Daddy lies against the cushions with his glasses off and his hair brushed back. His eyes glitter. He’s having a vision. It’s us, flickering like an electric light. Perhaps he knows that it will soon snap off so he watches with all his strength. My mother and I chat at him and he beams back but something is suddenly revealed. He gasps and lifts his hands in defence, eyes wide and glassy. It passes.

‘I think you had another TIA, darling,’ says my mother, scrutinising him closely.

He is used to the process now. Rooms expand and contract, colours flare and fade as his faltering heart pumps blood into the far reaches of the optic nerve, slowly and weakly, but he is no longer concerned. He has given himself to the flow. It is carrying him now through eddies of consciousness, from the shallows to the depths and back again.

‘Do you mind awfully if I say goodnight?’ he says.

‘But darling! Ru has come all the way down from London.’

He looks at me for a long moment, lips strangely pursed. ‘Has he?’ he finally asks in a dreamy voice.

I wiggle his big toe through the blanket.

I never see him again.

On Wednesday morning they both fall over in the downstairs loo and can’t get up. The wheelchair has got stuck against the door. My father is too heavy for my mother to lift on her own and so they wait for Stevie Wonder to appear.

They are a funny sight. A woman of seventy-two sitting on the loo
with a ninety-year-old man with his trousers down, lying at her feet. The walls of the small room are covered with mementoes – Spy and Giles cartoons; a Playboy calendar from the seventies; photographs of the family – me in films, my brother in helicopters, school groups, army groups. Their whole life is looking down on them.

‘You’ve been a great support to me,’ Daddy says deliberately. ‘Thank you.’

The hall clock strikes the hour.

On Thursday morning with the usual clatter my mother appears over the horizon with a smoked haddock.

‘I don’t want it,’ he says flatly.

‘You’ve got to eat.’

My mother puts it down in front of him, whipping round the room like a force ten wind, opening curtains, fixing a napkin to his pyjamas, preparing medication, before stopping for a moment to watch him. He is sitting up with his eyes shut.

‘Darling, come on. You’re going to die if you don’t eat.’

With that she storms back downstairs and my father dies alone with a haddock on a plate, simply and without fuss, in his cream-panelled bedroom, looking through the window at the wintry garden that he will wander from now on only as a ghost.

Coffee is at eleven o’clock as usual, and so they are sitting around my father’s bed, my mother, Rachel our lovely cleaning lady, Marianne, Steve, and Colin Fox the vicar. They each have a cup and saucer. My father lies dead between them.

‘He looks so peaceful,’ says my poor mother, who is holding herself together remarkably well. He doesn’t actually, but everyone says that. The dead look dead. Drained. His lips have sunk. His skin is ice cold. He lies on the pillow with his hair brushed and his hands over his chest and the room is an empty shell. My mother holds his finger.

‘Oh dear, he used to say this finger always hurt. I’m afraid I wasn’t very sympathetic.’

She cries. Grief turns her back into a young girl before my eyes, the mother who used to weep as the school train pulled out of King’s Cross, a young, tender, unsure creature. I had completely forgotten about her.

A little later I creep back into his room to sit with him alone. The silence buzzes. The face of my father has sunk further. On serious issues we have never talked and we never will.

The nearest Daddy and I ever get to ‘one of those chats’ is a conversation in a taxi in the autumn of 2001. We are driving down Pall Mall on the way from lunch. He has had his first big fall coming back from a regimental lunch, when he hits his head on the garage floor and starts speaking backwards for a while. But he rallies – he has the most impressive will – and is soon back in the office and staying in his London flat for one night a week, hauling himself up the stairs, stopping for a breather on a plastic chair on the landing. We are sitting side by side in the taxi, comfortably silent, looking at a grey London afternoon passing by outside.