Ten Years On (23 page)

My head hits the pillow. When he slides off my shoes I feel the weight of the world slipping away, like sand running through my fingers. He sits at the edge of the bed, strokes my hair. I like it. Being touched. He turns off the bedside light and I hear him walking away, gently shutting the door.

33

There’s a knocking sound. I think it’s in my dream but then the sound is tugging at me and soon I’m awake and can hear things sliding about on what sounds like a tray. ‘Come in.’ Disorientated, I feel for the light switch on the bedside table.

Joe enters the room armed with breakfast. ‘Room service,’ he announces in a French accent. ‘
Le café et les croissants
.’ He reverts to English as he says, ‘And I thought you might like this rather delicious-looking –’ he picks up the jar, studies the label – ‘Bonne Maman apricot jam that my father is rather partial to.’ I shift myself into a sitting position. ‘Here,’ he says, grabbing a cushion and placing it behind my back. His care makes me think he’d be an amazing doctor. ‘Did you sleep well?’ He puts the tray on the empty side of the bed and laughs, saying it could almost balance on my tummy now.

To my surprise I did sleep well.

‘Anything else you need?’

‘For you, monsieur, to sit down.’ I pat the bed and pick up a warm croissant. ‘Eat one with me.’

He picks up a couple. ‘Didn’t you say you
have
to eat two?’

‘What are you doing today?’ Joe asks me over breakfast, lying down on the other side of the bed.

‘I might see if Mum can come shopping.’ Pippa’s old bedroom now looks like a baby department, but the one thing I’ve yet to buy is a buggy. ‘Oh my God,’ I say mid-mouthful. ‘She’ll be frantic! She’ll think I’ve driven into a ditch or …’

‘Calm down, I’ve spoken to her. Last night, when you were asleep, she called on your mobile. I told her you were here.’

Relieved, I thank him.

‘Becca?’

‘What?’

‘You’ve got …’ He gestures to the side of my mouth, looks as if he is about to touch my face, but before he can, I wipe away the small blob of apricot jam. ‘Aren’t you working today?’ I ask.

He shakes his head. ‘I’m looking after Dad. While you were in London he had a nasty fall.’

‘Oh no. What happened?’

‘He fell out of bed. Mavis found him. He’s home from hospital now, but she’s got something she needs to do today.’

‘Why didn’t you say anything before? You could have called me.’

‘You were away, Becca. Anyway, he was fine. Just bruised.’

‘I wish you’d called me.’

‘I wanted to, I did, but …’ He runs a hand through his hair. ‘Edoardo said you’d sounded anxious. The last thing you wanted was me telling you about the dramas going on down here.’

‘We’re friends,’ I tell him. ‘Ring me next time, promise?’

He nods.

I put my cup of coffee on the bedside table. ‘Right. I’d better get going. Thanks so much for last night, for …’

‘Hang on …’

‘What?’

‘Why don’t you spend the day with me? Meet my father?’

‘Meet him?’ I repeat inanely.

‘Why not? He’s a tricky old thing, but if you’re up for a challenge …’

34

When Joe introduces me to his father, sitting in his straight-backed chair, I try to disguise my shock. It’s not the sight of the deep bruise on his forehead or his pale face that startles me. It’s his weight. His jumper hangs off him; his trousers gape at the knee.

‘All morning he’s been wanting to go to the Lobster Pot, wherever that is,’ Mavis is saying. ‘Now, Joe, there’s a lasagne in the fridge and I’ve put clean sheets on the bed, so everything’s dandy.’ Adam’s mother is a busty, generously built woman in her sixties, and I can tell she has a can-do attitude. Immediately I like her, and I can see why Joe worships the ground she walks on. ‘Mavis, this is Rebecca.’

‘
The
Rebecca?’ she asks, beaming. She touches my arm with a podgy freckled hand. ‘Adam has told me all about
you. He thinks you’re as pretty as a princess, which you are.’

‘He thinks she has hair like Julia Roberts,’ comments Joe.

I feel myself blush. ‘I’ll get a big head if you carry on. Carry on,’ I add, laughing.

‘The wine course meant the world to him, Joe,’ Mavis says.

‘Adam was top of the class,’ I say.

‘He’s talented, picks things up quickly,’ Joe continues.

‘He’s a very good cook too.’ There’s pride in her voice. ‘Always has been, that boy.’

‘Excuse me, I am here,’ Joe’s father reminds us.

She and Joe stand on either side of his father, encouraging him to shuffle forward in his chair, before placing an arm under each shoulder to help him up and into the wheelchair, a professional team now. Though he looks slight and frail, I can see how heavy he is to move. ‘Well done, Mr Lawson!’ Mavis applauds. On the way over here Joe told me that Mavis refuses to call him by his first name, Francis. ‘She’s old-fashioned like that,’ he’d said.

‘Now it’s not too warm, but at least it’s not raining,’ Mavis comments merrily, as she and Joe help Francis put on a coat. She also places a rug over his knees. ‘Mr Lawson, keep still, please.’

She looks at me, asks when the baby is due.

‘Just after Christmas. About ten weeks to go.’ I tell her my antenatal classes start soon, in the next ten days or so.

‘Are we going to the Lobster Pot?’ Francis says, eyeing me.

‘Dad, the Lobster Pot’s in London. He used to take Mum and me there,’ Joe explains. ‘Lovely French bistro place.’

‘Why can’t we go there now?’ he demands, struggling to get out of his wheelchair. ‘Who’s taken my scarf!’

Mavis rests a strong hand on his arm, sits him back in his chair and tells him to relax, his scarf is right here. No one’s taken it.

‘Oh.’ He stares at me. ‘Who’s this, Joe? Is she your wife?’

‘No, Dad.’

‘I’m a friend,’ I say awkwardly.

‘Dad, this is Rebecca, a friend from university,’ he says.

The old man’s watery grey eyes rest on mine for a moment.

‘Right. Are we ready to rock ’n’ roll?’ Mavis unlocks the brakes. ‘Now, Joe, don’t you forget about the quiz this weekend, will you?’ She explains to Mr Lawson that the Black Dog is holding a charity evening to raise money
for Parkinson’s, ‘and your son has kindly taken a table. Isn’t that grand!’

‘Rebecca’s coming too,’ Joe reminds me.

‘Wonderful. Adam will be chuffed.’

Francis hits both arms of the wheelchair again, impatient. ‘Are we off to the Lobster Pot?’

Joe wonders if he should explain once more. ‘You’ll see,’ he replies, as if he’s just had a better idea.

Joe pushes his father in the wheelchair, along College Street, past Wells bookshop. We stop for a moment, watch a couple being photographed outside the front door of a small Georgian town house. It looks like a ghost house now, only darkness behind the windows. I read the plaque: ‘In this house Jane Austen lived her last days and died 18 July 1817.’

‘Forty-one years old,’ Francis says, taking me by surprise, ‘and buried in Winchester Cathedral, but not a single mention on her tombstone of her being a writer,’ he chuckles. We walk on, until Francis orders us to stop. ‘Beautiful,’ he says, gazing up at a delicately carved statue of the Virgin Mary. She’s graceful, serene. I feel ashamed and daren’t tell Francis that I have walked past this building so many times and not once have I noticed her.

‘Somehow she didn’t get smashed up,’ Joe reflects. ‘Isn’t that right, Dad, that a lot of Winchester’s medieval works were smashed up by Cromwell’s bastards? The cathedral’s west window was trashed, all the statues in the great screen were destroyed.’

‘I hope Cromwell’s down there,’ I say, gesturing, ‘and not up there.’ I point to the clear blue sky.

‘Are we going to the Lobster Pot?’

Joe parks the wheelchair outside the porter’s lodge, asking the porter in charge if his father can revisit Chamber Court and show us round the grounds of Winchester College. ‘He lives in the past,’ Joe whispers to the grey-haired man. ‘I think he’ll enjoy revisiting old haunts.’

‘Tell Rebecca about your time here,’ Joe suggests, as we walk down a cobbled pathway, past the warden’s lodgings on the left.

‘Who’s Rebecca?’

Joe looks over to me helplessly. ‘Me!’ I say with a jolly smile. ‘I’m Joe’s friend!’ When I realize I am talking in the same tone that I use with Oscar and Theo, I tell myself to snap out of it at once.

*

We stand inside Chamber Court, a large square that houses the scholars. ‘I lived here, in the sixth chamber,’ Francis says, as Joe and I peer through a narrow cobwebbed window into a dark musty space. ‘In my day there were four hundred and seventy boys. Ten houses with forty, and seventy scholars. My parents paid a hundred and five pounds a year for me to be here.’

Finally I understand the pressure Joe must have been under, to become a scholar and excel here too.

‘And he can’t remember what he ate for breakfast this morning,’ Joe says to me, but I can tell he’s pleased by how well this is going.

‘Chamber Court was where any important VIP guests came,’ Joe continues. ‘Dad had to line up on ceremony.’

‘George VI came once,’ Francis remembers.

The college chapel is ahead of us. ‘The outside’s been repainted, hasn’t it, Dad?’

‘Don’t like it.’

‘The colour doesn’t work,’ I agree. ‘It looks like Wensleydale cheese.’

‘Becca’s an artist,’ Joe tells his father.

Francis swivels round in his wheelchair, stares at me with his beady grey eyes. ‘Who
are
you?’

Joe and I laugh. We can’t help it.

*

After lunch in the Wykeham Arms, we stroll through the water meadows. This is what’s special about Winchester, I decide, what I didn’t appreciate when I was growing up. You have the water meadows, a national treasure, the fishing on the River Itchen, rowing, bird-watching (if you’re into that), and then on the other side is the cathedral, the coffee shops, wine bars, art galleries, boutiques and the general bustle of the city centre.

We reach a sticky point when we come to the small white wooden gate close to the entrance of St Cross Church. Oscar and Theo’s kissing gate. How do we get through? It’s too narrow for Francis’s wheelchair.

Joe takes charge, lifting his frail father into his arms, and thankfully a couple of passers-by take pity on us, picking up the wheelchair and handing it over the gate for us.

When we return to the house, I watch Joe settle his father back in the sitting room. It is possibly the worst house Francis could live in, since it’s on many different levels. There are steps going down into the kitchen, more steps up into the sitting room. Luckily he has a stairlift that takes him up to his bedroom.

Francis’s cheeks look a warmer colour, his eyes brighter, and he’s still on a roll about his old school.
‘Winchester College has produced scientists, lawyers, doctors, politicians – mostly Labour ones,’ he contemplates. ‘Probably the most famous soldier was Wavell.’

Joe kneels down in front of his father. ‘Now, Dad, would you like a cup of tea? Or maybe something stronger? A brandy? Sherry?’ I watch Joe smiling at his father and I feel a wave of affection towards him.

‘Who was the most famous? Anthony Trollope, the writer, now he went to Winchester. There aren’t many businessmen though.’

‘Hang on,’ I step in, ‘don’t forget, Mr Lawson, it produced a great wine connoisseur.’

Joe gets up, says he’s going to put the kettle on.

‘Joe!’ Francis calls out to his son.

‘And I think Mavis has made you a fruitcake.’

‘You’re a fine man. I’m proud of you.’

‘Oh, Dad,’ Joe says, standing at the door looking like a bashful schoolboy.

‘I’m proud of him, Rebecca.’

When Francis falls asleep in front of the television, Joe and I leave the room and head into the kitchen.

I tell him what a good idea it was to take him round his old school. I enjoyed his father’s stories of eating snoek and powdered egg in the dining hall, along with
his football disaster. Francis had hooted with laughter as he’d recalled letting in eight goals in twenty minutes during a match against Southampton.

Joe smiles sadly. ‘He’ll have forgotten about it tomorrow.’

‘Yes, but it made him happy today.’

‘I’m going to have to think about a nursing home soon,’ Joe confides. ‘I hate it, but I don’t know how much longer we can cope alone, in this house.’ He clears up the plates and mugs.

‘I think it’s amazing the way you look after him.’

‘He’s my father,’ he says simply. ‘What else can I do? Let him rot in a home?’

I think of what Peta said. ‘No, of course not. I didn’t mean it that way.’

‘I wouldn’t have Maison Joe without Dad.’

‘I still think it’s—’

He cuts me off. ‘I have help. Lots of help.’

I put my mug down. ‘Why can’t you accept a compliment?’

‘It’ll be great to see Jamie again at this quiz. Peta’s coming down too. Did I tell you that the series she’s been working on has been put on hold, the male lead has tonsillitis …’

‘Shut up, Joe! Sometimes I wish you’d …’

‘What?’

‘Let me finish a sentence.’

Finally he looks me in the eye, smiles. ‘The great wine connoisseur.’

‘Well, you are.’

‘Thanks for saying that.’

‘He is proud of you. You know that, don’t you?’

‘It’s the first time he’s said it to me.’ He breathes deeply. ‘Dad and I, we’re quite similar like that, find it hard to show our feelings.’ He looks at me, and for a brief moment I picture Joe and me all those years ago at Bristol. I can see him placing a hand over my mouth and saying, ‘You know I have feelings, you know I care, Rebecca.’ I see us in my bedroom and remember his touch against my skin.

35

The Black Dog is holding a quiz tonight in aid of Parkinson’s. Mavis’s brother lives with this condition. It’s a cosy pub, with a log fire and colourful kilim rugs. Kitty, Annie, Peta and I grab one of the corner tables, while Joe and Jamie are at the bar, ordering drinks. Peta asks me how I am, her tone sympathetic. I haven’t seen her since the party at Joe’s flat. ‘I know you were upset about Olly’s birthday,’ she continues.