Fathers and Sons (15 page)

Before she could speak there was banging on the door behind me. ‘Hang on a sec.’

It was the girl again. ‘I left my comb in there. Give it me.’

‘For fuck’s sake…’ I pushed it through a broken pane and turned back to the phone. ‘Go on.’

I heard my mother take a couple of shallow breaths. Then she spoke in a calm, quiet voice.

‘Your father died at one o’clock this afternoon, he was in my arms, it was a massive heart attack.’

Her sentence, delivered with the economy of a newsroom ticker tape, was a knockout punch.

I came to a few minutes later. I was standing a few feet from the phone box, fumbling for a cigarette and dropping matches over the pavement. My fingers were numb, my ears were ringing and my legs were giving way. I managed to stumble to a low wall and half-sit, half-collapse on it.

I don’t know how long I was there but I began to get odd looks from passers-by. One man stopped. ‘You all right, then?’

I wanted to say I was fine, it was only that my father had just died, I’d be OK in a minute. But I could only stare at him. He wandered off uncertainly.

After a few minutes I got some feeling back in my legs and the electric hum in my head faded. I stood up and walked slowly back to our holiday home.

When I came through the door, Lynda stared at me. ‘Good God, you look terrible. What on earth’s happened?’

‘Dad’s dead.’

It sounded to my ears as if I had just told the worst, wickedest lie of my life.

My father’s sudden death was a detonation of shocking force, instantly punching a wide hole through the fabric of his
family. Like the survivors of a surprise air raid, we wandered around in shock, peering into the smoking crater and trying to make sense of our abruptly ruined landscape.

We believed that a great cosmic mistake had been made. I walked the woods alone the day afterwards, looking up at an iron-grey sky through the green canopy and saying through grinding teeth: ‘You take it back, God. You just fucking take it back, all right? You’ve fucked up and now you have to fix it. You can do anything, can’t you? So fix this, you bastard. Fix it now.’

My sister, who had taken delivery of her bound wedding photographs a couple of days earlier, was seized by the irrational belief that the whole thing was some kind of elaborate joke organised by our father. He hadn’t died at all; at any moment there would be a knock at the front door. We’d open it to see him standing there, grinning sheepishly as we dragged him inside, weeping and laughing in our relief.

My mother was mostly silent, except at night when she sobbed quietly for hours in her bed. She was very far away from us. One night I went in and held her hand. After a while she sat up and said a strange thing.

‘I feel so sorry for him…he has such a long way to go and he’s so tired and frightened. Poor Chris…’ Later, she would have no memory of saying this or what it might have meant.

My mother must have felt horribly alone. Both her parents had been dead for years. Her Canadian family was scattered across North America. Both her children were married, and one of them lived at the other end of the country. Now her husband had been torn from her side without so much as an hour or even a minute to prepare herself.

In an instant she had become a housewife without a husband. It was a catastrophe.

There was no word from Geoffrey or Kitty.

Up at Kiln Farm, a great silence had fallen.

The chief mourners were in fits of laughter. The widow was dabbing at her eyes with a tissue; the deceased’s children were doubled up. Ahead of their black limousine, the hearse, with its flower-decked coffin, reversed awkwardly again from the cemetery entrance. The driver had almost hit the stone gateposts twice as he tried to drive between them; now he was lining up for his third attempt. He couldn’t understand it. He had made this simple right-hand turn dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times. Why couldn’t he manage it today?

We knew. Woodman Road Cemetery lay along the route of Chris and Mary Claire’s nightly post-dinner walk; a mile or two of gentle exercise before bed.

My father had a superstitious dread of cemeteries. He hated going into them and was uncomfortable even walking past them. He always insisted on crossing the street to the pavement on the far side of Woodman Road Cemetery, much to his wife’s amusement.

We used to tease him about his phobia. ‘Go on, Dad, be a man. Walk there after sunset.’

‘Laugh all you want,’ he said, ‘but I’m never going in there.’

We were laughing now as Thos. Bennett & Sons, Funeral
Directors and Undertakers, struggled to get their reluctant passenger through the gates. The driver finally made it at the fourth go, scraping a wing on the way.

When I explained things to him afterwards, he sighed with relief. ‘Thank God for that,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t understand it. It felt like a giant hand was pushing my hearse back. Mind you, sir, that’s not the first time the dear departed have played their tricks on us, and it won’t be the last I’m sure. I’ve seen and felt stranger things in cemeteries, I can tell you.’

I doubt he exaggerated. Many years later I brought Judy to see my father’s grave. It was a long time since I’d been back and to my embarrassment I couldn’t remember where he lay. There was no attendant to ask and after a while I thought we’d just have to go home again. Then Judy pointed. ‘There he is. He’s just over there.’

She was looking across to the far side of the cemetery. It was impossible to read what was on the gravestones from this distance, but I trudged over with her anyway. And there it was, the pale marble headstone engraved in gold letters: ‘Christopher Holt Madeley, b. May 2 1928, d. August 8 1977’.

‘How the bloody hell did you know it was here?’

My wife slowly shook her head. ‘I have absolutely no idea. I just felt a sudden, complete certainty that this was the spot. How weird…’

As the man who drove my father’s hearse said, strange things happen in graveyards.

Geoffrey didn’t come to Chris’s funeral. The silence that had fallen like a thick shroud over Kiln Farm persisted. Kitty, too, stayed away. There were no phone calls, no letters or cards, still less flowers. My Uncle Jim telephoned to explain. His parents, he said, were immobile with sorrow. The loss of a second son had almost paralysed them, coming as it did towards the closing years of their own lives, a cruel, cruel blow.

My grandparents were speechless and almost motionless with grief. They could barely make it downstairs in the morning, let alone down south to another funeral for a son, dead before his time.

I visited them at Shawbury, often, in the months and years that followed. They never spoke his name to me, unless by mistake, when they seemed to confuse me with him. This happened mostly with my grandmother, usually about an hour or so after I had arrived. They would listen politely to my news and answer my questions about them coherently, if briefly, and then Kitty would drift back down the years, usually settling in the 1940s and 50s.

‘You love Denstone, don’t you, darling? You were so glad Father and I sent you there…’

‘Grandma, it’s me, Richard, Chris’s son.’

‘Yes, of course…I’m sorry. That was a long time ago…Are you still with that paper in Tillsonburg? Why have you come home? Are you tired of Canada?’

And so on. Geoffrey rarely joined in these dreamlike conversations, but he never corrected his wife. I don’t think he ever really thought I was his dead son but he seemed to take some comfort from the exchanges, especially when I went
along with the delusion and answered as my father. I tried to remember his diplomatic evasions on the subject of Denstone and did my best to replicate them.

These peculiar discussions usually ended in the same way; Kitty would give a little sigh and suddenly say, ‘But of course, you’re not Chris at all…you’re Richard. I’m so sorry, darling…are you staying here tonight or have you taken rooms at the Elephant?’ The Elephant and Castle was an old inn with rooms in the middle of Shawbury. And we were all back in the present.

Meanwhile, Geoffrey’s present was one of rude good health, generally speaking. He seemed indestructible. The bowel cancer that his gloomy doctors had predicted would carry him off a couple of years earlier had gone into full remission, never to return. One of his retinas had detached, giving him mono-vision to accompany his mono-hearing, but he still efficiently–and legally–drove a car. He listened to music on the stereo my father had bought him, and he played his baby grand. He continued to go on his walks across the fields.

Outwardly, my grandfather went on exactly as before Christopher’s death. But I will never know what his inner responses to my father’s sudden passing were, because he never talked about them. Did he berate himself for withholding his affections from the young, bespectacled schoolboy growing up in pre-war Shawbury? Did he question that iron-willed, immutable decision to banish his son to a grim boarding school in Staffordshire’s sticks? Did he wish, with all his heart, that he’d at least once told his third-born that he loved him?

I don’t know, partly because I didn’t ask. I couldn’t ask. I
was still in my twenties and had barely begun to reflect on the paths the fathers and sons before me had been forced, or had chosen, to walk. Questions or comments about my father were always met with the same, urbane, closed-down response from my grandfather.

‘Ah yes, Chris…let’s talk about that another time, shall we?’

Meanwhile my grandmother gradually stopped confusing me with her dead son and merely looked puzzled when his name was mentioned.

My father, in death, hadn’t exactly become Kiln Farm’s equivalent of a Stalinist non-person. But like his baby brother John, death excommunicated him almost entirely from his parents’ conversation. Banishment was the only way they could cope with two hammer blows that had struck at the beginning and the end of their marriage.

Geoffrey and Kitty would outlive my father by seven years. Kitty slowly sank into confusion. Towards the end she would telephone her son Jim in the middle of the night telling him breathlessly that there was a ‘strange man’ in the house. This was my grandfather, sleeping peacefully in his own bed next to hers.

Shortly before she had to be taken into care, I went to see her. We sat together in front of the tiled hearth above which Elizabeth and I had hung our Christmas stockings so many years before, and watched pictures in the fire.

I thought she had fallen asleep and was about to remove her glasses gently when suddenly her head jerked up and she stared at me intently.

‘What is it, Grandma?’

Her eyes were full of tears but bright and fierce too.

‘They’re together, you know. John and Chris, I mean. They’re playing right now in a meadow on the other side of the Wrekin.’

Perhaps they are.

Kitty died of heart failure. Geoffrey succumbed to a stroke. His deepest feelings about Henry’s and William’s betrayals went with him to the grave, as did his reflections on what sort of a father he had made. He died as he had lived, in near-inscrutable, dignified emotional privacy. I came to love him very much. I still miss him.

I have sometimes wondered what kind of a eulogy my father would have delivered had he been at his father’s funeral. But that inner question is always subsumed by another. What would Chris have made of his own son; a man of twenty-eight with a new woman by his side; a woman who had just agreed to marry him?

And to trust him to be a step-parent to her children: seven-year-old twins. Twin boys.

What kind of a stepfather, my father might have wondered, would his son make?

On the day of Geoffrey’s funeral, this was a question that had been occupying me for many months.

‘I
come in a three-pack.’

Judy’s reply when I asked her to marry me could not have been clearer. She was letting me know what I was in for.

The twins, Tom and Dan, were six, children of her first marriage to David. That marriage, like my own, had come to grief. But there was never a moment’s argument or doubt who the boys would be living with. So if I wanted Judy, it would be a package deal–and I had to be absolutely certain I could handle that. So did she. I was still in my mid-twenties, after all; was I really up to the job of stepfather? We both had our doubts.

We’d realised we were falling for each other sometime in the spring of 1983. I had joined Granada Television in Manchester the previous year, as the third person in a line-up fronting the popular nightly regional news show
Granada Reports
. The other two presenters were Tony Wilson and Judy Finnigan.

Tony Wilson was a local legend–his lifestyle at that time was
later the plotline for Steve Coogan’s film
24 Hour Party People
. He was known as Mr Manchester. He was known as a lot of things–graffiti around town proclaimed that ‘Tony Wilson is a wanker’. It delighted him and when I asked why he didn’t mind, he said, ‘Because it’s true, I am a wanker. I’m a television presenter, aren’t I? We’re all wankers. Including you.’

Tony described presenting
Granada Reports
as ‘my day job’ and it was true. His other life was at the heart of the emerging ‘Madchester’ music scene. Tony launched bands like Happy Mondays and Joy Division, later renamed New Order, and ran the hippest club in the north, The Hacienda.

He was the most nerveless television presenter I ever knew, and stood completely outside the petty, potty world of television politics. Once, while he was reading the news, electricians doused the studio lights, part of some wildcat industrial action or other. Tony, forewarned, whipped out a penlight and carried on in the gloom without missing a beat. But timid management decided to pull the programme anyway and the cameras shut down. Tony went berserk, running into the director’s gallery to confront startled producers.

‘What the
fuck
are you doing? That was
great
television, you tossers!’ When they told him the order to take him off-air had come from the great man himself, legendary Granada TV boss David Plowright, Tony marched straight to the lifts and punched the button for the executive floor.

He marched straight into Plowright’s office without knocking.

The row that followed could be heard two floors down.

But Tony was probably the only television presenter not to be sacked for calling the managing director a c***.

Tony made his own chemistry. But the producers quickly decided that Judy and I were generating a subtler brand and Tony cheerfully went off to other shows while Granada built their news programme around the two of us.

They had no idea what kind of ‘chemistry’ they were promoting. Before long we both realised we had found in each other the person we wanted to spend the rest of our lives with. This was no office fling. Within a week of our first secret date I asked Judy to marry me. Her response was conditional. She told me she loved me but was dreading the impact of her pending divorce on her children, and had no intention of making matters worse by foisting an inept stepfather on them. She asked me to think it over very seriously and then tell her honestly if I thought I could hack it. If I had any doubts, the marriage was off. Pretending I was up for the role of stepfather would be pointless; it would quickly become evident that I wasn’t fully committed and this second marriage for both of us would end disastrously.

I booked a fortnight’s holiday and flew to Greece to sit on a beach and think it through. I only took hand luggage and my bag was heavy with books on step-parenting.

I should have saved myself the bother. As I sat on the sand under the fierce summer sun, I realised my books were useless, a horrible blend of 1980s psychobabble and nascent political correctness. Step-parents, I read, should not under any circumstances attempt to love their new partner’s children. They should aspire to be no more than a friend; an extra listening ear in the family. Children would be confused by a deeper emotional commitment.

I thought this was utter guff then and I do now. Children have an infinite capacity to be loved–the more the merrier. My sad books made step-parenting sound like an exercise in timidity and frigid emotional withholding. Christ, this was exactly what Geoffrey and Chris had experienced during their childhoods and much good it had done them. I had no intention of inflicting such claptrap on Tom and Dan, if I was indeed to become their stepdad.

I walked back from the beach and tipped the books into the communal rubbish bin at the end of the dusty lane leading to my little taverna. Clearly, this was something I was going to have to work out for myself.

I have never forgotten that fortnight in Greece. I made a few friends but kept mostly to myself. I went on long walks to remote beaches whose sands bore the telltale marks showing that turtles had dragged themselves ashore in the night to lay their eggs. As I walked, I built endless models of the future in my head and demolished them with questions. Was I mature enough to be a stepfather? Was it something I actually wanted? Did I have the patience to handle the situation if the boys resented my arrival in their lives? Had I fully grasped what I was taking on?

I knew Tom and Dan slightly because Judy sometimes brought them to work with her. They were sweet-natured boys, blond and amenable. Being twins, they had a certain cachet. They called me Richard from the first day we met–they were used to seeing me on television with their mother–and sometimes they sat on my desk and told me dreadful jokes about superheroes. They were dedicated fans of the TV series
The A-Team
and would earnestly enquire if I thought Mr T would prevail in a fight with Batman, should the two ever meet and happen to fall out.

‘Mr T would win, I should think,’ I extemporised.

‘Why?’

‘Well, er, he looks stronger than Batman to me. And he was a soldier in Vietnam so he knows how to fight.’

‘What’s Veetnim?’

‘A place where there was a big war once.’

‘Who won?’

‘The army that Mr T’s army was fighting.’

‘That’s silly, Mr T never loses fights. And he loves children.’

During these early encounters I found it impossible to tell the boys apart. Tom had a tiny freckle on the side of his nose but other than that they looked identical. It would be years before they would deliberately choose different hairstyles to mark themselves apart. But they never seemed to mind when I mixed them up. They were used to it, and anyway, as I say, both had easy-going natures.

Now, hundreds of miles away, I wondered if I could come to love these children. I certainly loved their mother.

I took a break from all the agonising and learned to windsurf. My tutor, a German, only had two words of English. ‘Get vind! Get vind!’ he bellowed from the surf as my sail flapped uselessly at the wrong angle. And then when I did manage to catch the breeze, I’d promptly fall off. At least the sea was warm.

After two or three days of public ignominy, I suddenly found I was able to tack back and forth across the little bay and even manage to steer around swimmers in my way. I thanked my
teacher and paid him his final drachmas. He nodded and smiled something in German. I asked his girlfriend, who spoke English, what he’d said.

‘He says his work here is done,’ she laughed. ‘He doesn’t mean the windsurfing. He means that he’s made you happy. We’ve been watching you, you know. You always looked so sad.’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I’ve just got a rather important decision to make, that’s all. I’m not sad, honestly. Just a bit thoughtful.’

That night I took my blankets down on to the deserted beach. There was no moon and the sky glowed with stars and planets and distant, fuzzy galaxies. As I stared into infinity my mind, unbidden, made a soft, unmistakable click. Like a computer fed a stream of complex information ending with a question mark, my subconscious had, in its own time, delivered its answer.

Of course I could be a stepfather to the twins. Of course. I already liked them and suddenly felt a surging confidence that I could love them, too. The practicalities would work themselves out; the most important thing was to put the happiness of the boys first. Judy already did that; if I followed suit, everything would fall into place.

Like the answer to most problems, the solution was devastatingly simple once you grasped it.

I walked back to my room. The power was off, so I had to write my letter to Judy by candlelight.

Then I went to bed and slept until noon.

‘How much longer are you going to be?’

Judy’s voice came out of the dusk of an early August evening. I dropped the spanner I was holding on to the drive and wearily adjusted the angle of the big square torch on the roof of my two-door, two-litre Ford, currently undergoing its metamorphosis from single man’s car-about-town into family saloon.

‘Fuck knows. Nothing seems to fit, and I think there are some screws missing. I’ll probably have to use wire or something…maybe half an hour if I can get these runners to stay put.’

I was transforming too, from fastback driver into roof-rack dad. Holidays for one–or two at most–were over. Tomorrow would see the start of a holiday for me and the three-pack. The famous four–Richard, Judy, Tom and Dan–were about to go wild in Cornwall.

My sports saloon only had room for a couple of toothbrushes and a bottle of Calpol in its ridiculous boot. Hence the roof rack, hastily bought an hour earlier and now stubbornly resisting all attempts to assemble it in the gathering gloom of a Manchester evening.

‘You should have done it earlier. Would you like a gin and tonic out here, or shall I leave it in the kitchen? I’m going to bed. We’ve got an early start…’

We’d made our plans a few weeks earlier. My final divorce papers had come through and Lynda and I were free to go our separate ways. It had been a rocky marriage with too many rows, and we’d finally split a year and a half earlier, soon after Christmas 1982. There had never been any real
question of having children: we didn’t get on well enough. The whole thing was a damn shame. But Lynda married again–a farmer in North Yorkshire–and bore him a baby girl.

Meanwhile Judy and David were now separated. In return for the deeds to their home, a pretty detached house opposite Manchester Grammar School in Old Hall Lane, David was freed of any future financial responsibilities for the boys. I had promised to share these, and the mortgage, with Judy. A lot of trust was involved on all sides and later I had to repeat my pledges to a judge in the family courts.

Meanwhile there was the pressing question of how to introduce myself to Tom and Dan, now seven, as a permanent fixture in their lives. Judy and I decided that after a series of days out together–at the end of which I modestly returned to my nearby flat–we should advance matters by renting a holiday cottage in Cornwall, where the boys could get used to me being around at bedtime and for breakfast. If all went well, I would move in to Old Hall Lane when we got back.

I finally got the roof rack bolted on at about one in the morning and crept into the spare room with my flat G&T. This was it, then. Moment of truth, and all that. Tomorrow–no, today–I would assume a hands-on paternal role for the first time. David, of course, was the boys’ father–and a constant and crucial force in their lives to this day–but I was on the final descent to touchdown on what a friend in similar circumstances called ‘Planet Steppy’.

I knew from those dumped reference books that there were
no reliable guides or maps; I would have to find my own way, and I fought back a sudden frisson of panic.

This was no time to go flaky on a mother and her two boys.

We broke the journey from Manchester to Cornwall at a small family hotel in Somerset, close to the village where I’d received the news of my father’s death. I wondered what he would have made of his son’s great big adventure; a holiday to the West Country and the start of a whole new chapter in my life. I think he would have been intrigued. He certainly would have been relieved to see that I was at last driving a Ford.

‘We mustn’t sleep in the same room tonight,’ Judy told me firmly as we checked in. ‘I think it’d be a really good idea if you share with the boys. They’ll think it’s fun, all guys together. I’ll take a single.’

Most of the conversation at dinner that evening was taken up with comparing the relative merits of superheroes. Judy and David must have heard it all a hundred times before but at least I was fresh to the debate and engaged with mostly unfeigned enthusiasm. Judy stifled a yawn.

‘OK, boys, that’s it. Cornwall tomorrow, bed now. You know where your room is–I’ll be up to tuck you in in a minute. So will Richard.’

I looked at her as they disappeared up the stairs. ‘So…how d’you think it’s going so far?’

‘If I’d realised you knew so much about Batman, Spiderman and the Green Goblin I’d never have agreed to marry you.
Seriously, darling, it’s going better than I could have hoped. Don’t feel you have to try too hard with them, though. When you’re fed up talking about bloody superheroes, just tell them.’

‘Er…right, I will.’

I didn’t tell her I’d kept my best stuff about Spiderman back for the next round.

I look back now on those ten days in Cornwall with a kind of reverence. They were among the most perfect days of my life. The August sunshine was absurdly extravagant; we lived under a bowl of brilliant blue from dawn to dusk. At night we and the boys would lie out on the little lawn in front of our cottage and watch satellites coursing silently between the stars. Meteorites flared brightly as they rushed to their doom, and once, a tumbling green shooting star eerily lit our upturned faces.

During the days, cornfields that crowded to the sea cliffs shone bright yellow in the sun, and great clouds of dust rose like smoke as the giant combines brought in the harvest. Despite the warm nights we lit log fires and candles and read the boys Cornish ghost stories and legends.