My Father and Myself (11 page)

Sometimes as though ashamed of the fleshly weakness that had forced him to acknowledge pain by so much as a curse, he would pass it all off as a jest, wagging his carving knife perhaps at the offending finger in an admonitory way, as though it were a refractory child, apostrophizing it with: “Why can't you lie down, you blighter?”

It was a long time before he could be persuaded to take medical advice; it was the worsening of his condition that drove him to it. Professing a low view of doctors, whom he hurried in fast enough if anything went wrong with
us
, and the best specialists obtainable, he would have had to be practically
in extremis
before he would have summoned one to himself. However, since our own doctor, Harry Wadd, who was a personal friend, often in for a meal or a game of bridge, lived next door, he was readily available, and when my mother was worried, as the sweet, anxious lady constantly was, she would surreptitiously phone her fears to him, and soon he would come, humming and bounding up the steps in his light-footed way, ostensibly to impart to father the latest racing tip or dirty story, really to take a professional squint at him. My mother would then leave them together over the decanters and cigars. My father was sometimes vexed and grumpy with her over these subterfuges which, if he did not twig them at once, he received evidence of later when the bills came in, for Dr. Wadd (despite the cigars and fine old brandy) was far too astute a businessman not to lay them on and with considerable generosity to himself. But I am sure my father was grateful to her on the whole, and her prompt action once saved his life, as I shall describe later. Eventually his jumps got so bad that he was obliged to take the alleviating drugs he had hitherto resisted (“Beastly things drugs! Can't do without them when you've once started”); these were large pink or white capsules which he floated like boats in his whisky-and-soda before or after dinner, prodding them with his forefinger until they became softened, when he gulped them down before their contents could spoil the taste of his drink. He took these in his last years whenever his jumps started, or if he felt them to be on the way, and obtained considerable relief. The capsules, I suppose, contained potassium iodide or some similar preparation, and I expect he knew that and what was really wrong with him. His jumps were “neuritis” only by courtesy; he was suffering from a syphilis contracted in Egypt in his guardsman's days,
²
incompletely eradicated then and now in its tertiary stage. I myself learnt this from the doctors only after he died of it. But whatever he understood about his condition, the gravity of it must have been kept from him, for at the time when the doctors knew that he would shortly be dead he had tickets for another sort of journey in his pocket.

1
. This is conjecture. If it was not caused, it seemed often to be intensified, by pain.

2
. I am uncertain of this. It is in my head, but I don't recall how it got there. Perhaps Dr. Wadd inserted it, but I can't substantiate it. The disease may have been contracted later.

BESIDES HIS STATE of health, there was another strong reason for supposing my father's life to be as complete as it was seen: the steady regularity of its domestic rhythm—at any rate as observed by me when I was at home in the 'twenties. At the beginning of the decade he left Blenheim House, our third Richmond residence, at eight o'clock every morning for breakfast at his office. Any nosy Parker keeping a watch upon our house would have seen the front door opened punctually at that hour by the butler, and my father descend the steps in his grey Edward VII hat, his light fawn or heavy overcoat, his umbrella on his arm, a cigar in his mouth, drawing on his wash-leather gloves. He would halt for a moment in the front rose garden to exchange a word with Scott the gardener (if that bibulous old man had arrived) about the roses, the racing, or the weather, he would make some little joke (perhaps about the Epsom Salts he had just taken and would he reach his office or even the station in time?), old Scott would dissolve into wheezy laughter, the butler would stand with the gate ready open, my father would pass through and walk down Richmond Hill to the station. Punctually at six-thirty p.m. he would return for dinner, often bringing with him a present for my mother, flowers or some delicacy for the table. After dinner he liked a game of bridge and neighbors would be summoned in for it if necessary. These regular habits were, of course, interrupted from time to time; trips might have to be made to his business branches in the Midlands— Liverpool (including a visit to his old sisters), Manchester, Sheffield; if we were going to a dance or theatre he might dine us at Romano's; occasionally he would be kept late at his office and dine out alone at his club. But he seemed to prefer his home and home comforts. He was generally there for weekends and, in the early part of the decade when he was more active, might stroll on Richmond Terrace in the afternoon or take the dogs for a walk. Unless our nosy Parker had assiduously trailed him upon these walks he would soon have started to yawn.

My notebooks remind me of a special situation when, at any rate for a few years, he always dined in town; this was when my mother invited her sister, Aunt Bunny, with her second husband, Dr. Hodgson Chappell Fowler, the “Doc” as he was called, down from Pimlico to spend the evening, as she often felt obliged to do. This man, the “Doc,” was so detested by my father, who seldom displayed strong personal feelings, that he could not bear to be in the same room with him. There was nothing surprising in this; it was indeed inconceivable that anyone who met the “Doc” could possibly desire to meet him again, the repulsiveness of his appearance and the sour, prickly aggressiveness of a personality which, since no one could praise it, was forever praising itself, were too daunting; yet share though we all did my father's distaste we managed, for my aunt's sake, to endure what we could not always avoid, and I wondered afterwards whether part of my father's quite frantic dislike of this eminently dislikable man was due to the fact that as witness to his secret marriage the “Doc” had added to his other enormities the impudence of having a confederate claim to confidence. At any rate, the very sight of him acted upon my father like an emetic and, despite his affection for Aunt Bunny, he exacted from my mother a solemn promise that he should be forewarned whenever the “Doc” was to appear so that he could make arrangements to dine elsewhere. This naturally created great difficulties for my poor mother, for the constant excuse “I'm afraid Punch has been kept at his office” soon wore thin; the “Doc,” who easily bristled with suspicions of slight since it was his lifelong experience to be dodged wherever he went, smelt the customary rat, and the feelings of my aunt, who adored her disagreeable, bombastic soak of a husband and wished others to adore him too, became wounded and militant. At her wits' end (I take it from my notebook) and hoping to bring about a reconciliation, my mother “forgot” one evening to keep her promise to my father and assured my aunt instead that he would be at home. He was peacefully smoking in his armchair in the sitting-room when he heard the “Doc's” loud alcoholic voice hectoring my aunt as they ascended the frontdoor steps. With a single bound he sprang from his chair as though he had been stung, seized his hat in the hall, told Avery to inform my mother at once that he was dining out, left the house by the back door and returned to London.

With the passage of time, the deterioration in his physical condition and the gradual onset of locomotor ataxia, which affected his gait, my father's habits altered though they remained regular. He began to breakfast at home and, abandoning his walk to the station, took taxis instead. Those were the days of his taxi-driver, Mickey. Later still he gave up the train too and was driven to and from Bow Street every day in a private hire car owned by a Mr. Morland, a local man we had known for years. Before turning over to cars he had been an ostler with a stable of horses on which, as children, we used to ride in Richmond Park. His monthly bill must have been terrific, and we wondered why my father did not buy a car instead, for we regarded him as a wealthy man, but when we suggested this he would say mildly that he couldn't afford it—a remark we never took seriously. On his return in Mr. Morland's car, he would still bring with him the frequent little presents for my mother, exotic fruits such as mangoes or avocado pears, marrons glacés of which she was fond, whatever he knew would please her; her birthdays and their anniversaries were never forgotten but marked by something more expensive, a piece of jewelry or a bottle of “Jicky,” her favorite perfume. Journeys to the Midlands were all given up; the only large break in his routine now was an annual month's holiday to Bad Gastein in Austria, a famous spa where he took the cure. For his jumps, now largely controlled by drugs, were not his only physical trouble, his blood pressure was high, he had developed a paunch and a liver, and the good living in which he indulged was not the prescribed regime for reducing any of them. He was a connoisseur of wines with a well-stocked cellar; of claret, burgundy, and port he was specially fond, and often when I dined with him my opinion on some new vintage he had just laid down was requested. “Do you think I'm getting too fond of my stomach?” he once asked me; a touching question from father to son.

From my notebooks. Dr. Wadd to my mother:

Poor Mother! She tried, in her anxious, ineffectual way to restrain my father; port at last had to be renounced, but all attempts to wean him from his clarets failed. Once, after a fright, she begged Wadd to speak seriously to him:

which sent Wadd into one of his squealing, leg-slapping bouts of laughter. However, the Bad Gastein treatment was certainly effective, my father would return appreciably slimmer and better in health—then start to grow a paunch and liver again. My mother never accompanied him on these journeys; she had already begun, in the mid-'twenties, that nervous withdrawal from the hazardous outside world which was in the end to confine her to her house like a squirrel in a cage. On one of his last visits to Bad Gastein, when his gait was getting very groggy, I remember feeling sorry for my old father going off on holiday all by himself and asked him if he would like me to go with him. He seemed surprised and rather disconcerted; it was very kind of me, he said gruffly, but he could get on perfectly well alone.

In view of all this it may be thought excusable never to have considered whether this man in his late fifties might still possess virility; the fact that women and sex were often in his thought in the form of the smoking-room story, one of which I have recounted, and in other jocularities, was easily written off as a compensation, the reminiscent after-glow of a lost libido, that substitute amusement in the old for actions they are no longer able to perform. It was when I returned home after the war, at the age of twenty-two, that I was judged old and worldly enough to share in this kind of entertainment which my father and his associates enjoyed—the telling of “yarns,” as he called them. He loved these yarns and would chuckle and chortle over them like the “naughty boy” my mother sometimes called him, spinning them out, as time went on, to interminable lengths to delay, for as long as possible, the familiar or foreseen conclusion, savoring the smutty joke with relish as he savored his old brandy. To my young mind these yarns were seldom good and never single; one of them always reminded him or his cronies of another; they seemed to adhere together in their sexual fluid like flies in treacle, and whenever I lunched with him, Stockley and his other colleagues in his office dining-room in Bow Street, the yarn-spinning, once it had started, which it generally did the moment we sat down to table, would go on almost non-stop, each dirty story being instantly capped by an even dirtier one from someone else. At first I thought these stories perfectly disgusting, as also the terms my father habitually employed for the sexual act: to “poke,” to “screw,” to “roger”; and his word for the male organ, “tool”; but I got used to them at last, laughed heartily with the rest—though I felt a transparent impostor in that I never had any to contribute myself—and even egged my father on to tell the “latest” when we were alone, I saw he enjoyed them so much. They formed the atmosphere of good-fellowship—atmosphere, I fear was all it had—in which he and his friends lived, seemed, indeed, the only kind of non-professional social intercourse in which most of them were able to engage. “Rog, old lad,” Dr. Wadd would chirrup, dashing into the house in his smart patent-leather, suede-panelled boots, a carnation in the button-hole of his loud check suit, “I've just heard a good ‘un, had to drop in and tell you,” and drawing my father aside (if there were ladies present) he would impart in a whisper, punctuated with squirts and squeaks of mirth, the latest yarn before rushing off in his car to perform some urgent operation. I used often to wonder what could be the source of this extraordinary folklore, this large oral pornographic “literature,” these businessmen's ballads. Who invented the things? Are they still going the rounds? Some of them were quite elaborate, almost short stories: surely the strangest example of anonymous art.