My Father and Myself (17 page)

There was to be a final eleventh-hour chance, but we never took it. My father's dying began with an illness quite different from the one that finished him off. At dinner one evening, when Dr. Wadd was present, he poked out his tongue at him and said, “What do I do about that?” There was a large, thick, purplish patch in the middle of it. He must have had it secretly in his mouth for some time and known what it was. “That's all right, Rog, old boy, a spot of radium will soon clear it up.” For some weeks he lay in Wadd's hydro next door with radium needles in his tongue, very patient, but getting more and more vexed with his old friend Wadd (whom he had long seen through as a humbug) who, believing him to be wealthy and knowing him to be dying, was now fleecing him in every possible way. Specialists visiting other patients would be winked in to take a squint at him, would amuse him with a “yarn” (which my father was now unable to cap, since he could not speak), and then send in a bill for ten guineas. These bills my father never disputed, grumble about them though he did, but he was glad to get out of Wadd's clutches. Very groggy on his legs he went down to a hotel in Southsea to recuperate from his cancer, which had left him with a sore tongue, and to die of other things. But he was not to escape medical vulturism, for he carried with him a letter from Wadd to the Southsea doctor appointed to attend him, which somehow I saw. The part that I remember said that he could afford good fees. Soon after he was installed I visited him and found him in his bedroom washing out his mouth with permanganate of potash. He said, “You know, it's a funny thing but my old dad had cancer of the tongue and I thought him an old man. In fact he was about the same age as I am. And now
I
have cancer of the tongue and I don't feel old at all.” I too thought my father an old man; he was the same age as I am as I write this book and, although I have not yet had cancer of the tongue, I don't feel old either.

Not long after this he had the first of a series of strokes, expected by the doctors. Syphilis had begun its attack upon the blood vessels of the brain. The stroke was slight and he was able to get about after it with the aid of sticks. He remarked to me then with a chuckle that the thing that had worried him most was that he might not be able to “get the horn” again, but thank heaven the doctor had reassured him on that point.

It was at this time (the year was 1929) that I was conducting my affair with my English sailor who, as I have said, was stationed in Portsmouth, which is contiguous with Southsea. I forget if I had already established us both in the Portsmouth flat; at any rate I was constantly driving down from London to see him. Now that my father had chosen Southsea for his convalescence (was it because he knew I went there so often?) I wanted to visit him too; but the sailor had the larger share of my interest and, not wishing to miss any opportunity of seeing him, the most convenient arrangement seemed to be to bring them together. This worked very well; my father was charming to this inarticulate, monkey-like boy who could not express himself without the help of manual gesture, of whom he could not have made much, for there was not much to make. He must surely have wondered—if he had not guessed—what his son, whose photo had lately appeared in
Vogue
under the caption “We Nominate for the Hall of Fame,” after the London production of
The Prisoners of War
, could possibly see in so dumb a companion; yet he accepted him with grace and good humor, invited him two or three times to dine with us both in his grand hotel, joked with him and teased him to make him laugh, and took an interest in his pursuits, his naval life, his boxing, and his deep-sea diving. Thinking back at it all now, I expect he must have been pretty bored with this boy, and I wonder whether, by having him with me so much, I may not have forfeited my last chance of a private conversation and understanding with my father. I doubt it. The sailor, it should be said, was helpful and attentive to him too, so far as, in such daunting surroundings, his natural diffidence allowed him to exert himself; he helped him out of his chair and supported him along the corridors; when my father was feeling equal to it we drove him about in my car. But if there were opportunities for a quiet conversation with me he did not take or make them; he asked no questions, invited no confidence—and offered none; if I had my secret life, he had his.

One evening he remarked to us jovially at table that he was particularly pleased with himself, he had lately had a wet dream, a thing that had not happened to him for months. None of these merry remarks of his had, for me, the least significance; I took them all as the rather wistful jollities of the sexually abdicated. When we were escorting him to his bedroom afterwards, the lift-man said to him, “The lady from the Pier Hotel has phoned, sir. She wants her suitcase back at once.” A momentary silence ensued; then my father said rather gruffly, “Come in and get it. You'll find it under the bed.” The sailor and I covered up this awkward indiscretion as best we could with small-talk; we speculated about it when we left. A similar indiscretion occurred a little later, this time by way of the telephone operator, and the name of the lady at the Pier Hotel, who wished to speak to him, was supplied. It was Muriel. My mother and sister happened to be having tea with him; he said briefly, by way of explanation, “You remember I've spoken about her. An old friend.” My mother, who was the vaguest of creatures, made nothing of this, but it gave my sister food for thought. In fact my father had mentioned this lady to us, but not often and not for many years; she had been actively engaged, we dimly recalled, in some ambulance or hospital service, of patriotic interest to him, during the war, and he had occasionally alluded to her in laudatory terms as a splendid woman who had done wonderful work for the sick and wounded in various countries and received for it sundry foreign decorations. But “old friend” of his though she might be, he had never brought her to our house and, so far as I could recollect, none of us had ever met her. Now, it appeared, she had graciously emerged from her ambulance to look after him in his illness, for which we felt extremely grateful to her. My mother could not have coped with sickness at such a distance, it plunged her into a state of agitation even at home, and any patient nursed by her would soon have been driven round the bend. Nervous of life, frightened of death, surrounded by sedatives and boxes of glycerine suppositories, she was already forming that eccentricity of habit which was soon to confine her, an affable chatterbox and for a time a secret drinker, with a female help and a succession of Sealyham dogs, within the sheltering walls of her own dwellings for another seventeen years. Not without reluctance did she allow herself to be driven to Southsea by my sister to visit my father; when his condition worsened she went no more until his death; she excused herself from going up to see him dead (my notebook contains the entry “Mother and Headwaiter” but alas I can't remember what it means, something characteristic and bizarre, no doubt) and did not attend his funeral in Richmond. I saw that the very thought of it upset her and advised her to stay at home.

Now that the presence and name of the lady at the Pier Hotel were out, I daresay my father relaxed whatever caution he had ever employed, at any rate so far as I was concerned, and started to let slide what he saw he could no longer prop up, for I began to collide with her and was introduced. She was a tall, rather coarse-looking woman to whom I did not take, but she was clearly fond of him and addressed him as “Dear” and “Dearest.” She described herself as a widow with three daughters, and she had known my father for twenty years. A little later, when I called with my sailor, I found her with the youngest of her daughters, a girl of seventeen, who called my father “Uncle” and “Darling” and bore so marked a resemblance to him and my sister that I was not wholly unprepared for the revelations that followed his death, which occurred soon afterwards.

The last time I saw him alive another stroke had left him partially paralyzed. He was conscious but did not know if he was on his back or his side and was under the delusion that he was too near the edge of the bed and might fall out. He wanted to pee, he said, and asked me to fetch his bed-bottle, but it was a great struggle for him to get into the right position to insert his “tool” into it. I helped him, rolling him with difficulty on to his side, and tried to guide him into the bottle. I had handled a good many “tools” in my life, but with this dread gun that had shot me into the world I may have been awkward and clumsy; at any rate he pushed my hand away and finished the job himself. Only a few drops came out. Even in this extreme moment he said no more to me, except, dismissively, that there was nothing more that I could do. To Muriel afterwards he said with a groan, “I wish I could die”; he would never have said so meek a thing to me.

News that he was sinking reached me at the BBC; by the time I got to Southsea he was dead. Muriel met me and took me up to his darkened room; she had already prepared him. I stood just within the door looking across the twilit room at the large, still figure upon the bed. He had been laid out under a sheet, his hands folded on his chest, his head with its calm, majestic, now waxen and remote face propped against pillows. Death has always filled me with awe and, perhaps inherited from my mother, repugnance. Now I wanted only to get away. I had done what was expected of me, I had seen my dead father; I wanted to go. But Muriel, whom I had forgotten, was in the shadows observing me, with understanding and contempt. “What are you standing there for?” she suddenly exclaimed. “Are you afraid of the dear old chap? What is there to be frightened of? Come along and give him a kiss, the darling old boy.” And repeating “Dear old boy,” “Darling old Rog,” she stood beside the bed patting and kissing his dead face and trying to pinch up his cheek in a playful, affectionate, proprietary way, but the flesh was stiff and would not come up in her fingers. She had placed between his folded hands a small sprig of heather and—it was good of her, I realized later—a snapshot of my brother, sister and myself taken as children.

Like so many other things that might be expected to have made upon me an indelible impression, the remainder of that day has been expunged from my memory. Did she trouble to explain herself to me then? My fancy is that she was brusque and hostile, said that she did not suppose she would see much more of me and that she had already taken from my father's personal possessions such money and objects as he had promised her, including the tickets for Bad Gastein where he had planned to take her had he recovered.

THE FULL TALE of my father's deception was made known to me in two letters, sealed in a single envelope addressed to me and marked “Only in the case of my death,” which I found in his office. The letters were separated in time by seven years; the first was dated October 21, 1920, the second December 13, 1927. I will give them in full.

My father died in October 1929, and my part in the transactions that followed has long filled me with various irritations ranging from doubt to disgust. We had never been brought up to think of money, it was always there and as much as we wanted, and if it occurred to me at all that my mother's share of these lean leavings looked somewhat thin (for how much would she get, in October 1929, out of the “£3000 a year if I die before 1930?”), the thought did not affect what I considered my bounden duty, indeed my instant consent, to the old chap's wishes. They must be honored, of course, and the office would naturally provide for my mother. In this frame of mind, as innocent as his own, I went to see his “men pals,” not one of whom, after a lifetime of friendship, had been to visit him in his last illness, but whose only manifest concern had been whether cancer of the tongue was infectious and they should buy a new set of forks and spoons for their office dining-room to avoid the ones he had used. I was interviewed by his partner, now sole head of the firm, Arthur Stockley. He at once laid down the law, in the firmest, even harshest, manner. He clearly disliked and disapproved of my father's mistress, had no intention of letting her into any spoils, or of submitting to the sentimental blackmail, as he regarded it, of my father's blithe and unbusinesslike assumptions. He was perfectly clear as to what Elders and Fyffes were prepared to do to help my mother—and what they were not prepared to do. They would provide her with a pension, perhaps £500 a year, subject to revision at the end of ten years, but only on condition that my father's wishes with regard to his mistress were entirely ignored. If I handed over to her the insurance policy of £2000, my mother, so far as they were concerned, would get nothing.