The Lemon Table (21 page)

I SAID
to my mother, “Mum, have you ever hit Dad?”

She traced my source instantly. “Is that what the bitch says? You can tell her from me I’ll see her in court. She should be … covered in tar and feathers, whatever they do.”

I said to my father, “Dad, it may be a stupid question, but has Mum ever hit you?”

His eyes remained clear and direct. “I had a fall, son.”

I went to the medical centre and saw a brisk woman in a dirndl skirt who gave off a quiet reek of high principle. She had joined after Dr. Royce had retired. Medical records were of course confidential, if abuse was suspected she would be obliged to inform the social services, my father had reported a fall six years ago, nothing before or since to arouse suspicion, what was my evidence?

“Something someone said.”

“You know what villages are like. Or perhaps you don’t. What sort of someone?”

“Oh, someone.”

“Do you think your mother is the sort of woman who would abuse your father?”

Abuse, abuse. Why not say beat up, wallop, smack round the head with a heavy frying pan? “I don’t know. How can you tell?” Do you have to see the maker’s name embossed back to front on my father’s skin?

“Obviously it depends what the patient presents with. Unless a family member reports suspicions. Is that what you are doing?”

No. I am not denouncing my eighty-year-old mother for suspected assault on my eighty-one-year-old father on the say-so of a woman in her mid-sixties who may or may not be sleeping with my father. “No,” I said.

“I haven’t seen a great deal of your parents,” the doctor went on. “But they are …” She paused before finding the correct euphemism. “… they are educated people?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Yes, my father was educated sixty years ago—more—and so was my mother. I’m sure it’s standing them in very good stead.” Still angry, I added, “By the way, do you ever prescribe Viagra?”

She looked at me as if now sure that I was merely a troublemaker. “You’ll have to go to your own doctor for that.”

WHEN I GOT BACK
to the village, I felt a sudden depression, as if it were I who lived there and had already grown weary of this jumped-up crossroads with its dead church, brutal bus-shelter, chalet-style bungalows and overpriced shop that is good for essentials. I manoeuvred my car on to the strip of asphalt exaggeratedly known as the drive, and could see, at the end of the garden, my father at work in the fruit cage, bending and tying. My mother was waiting for me.

“Joyce Bloody Royce, well they deserve one another. Pair of dimwits. Of course, this poisons the whole of my life.”

“Oh, come off it, Mum.”

“Don’t you ‘Come off it’ to me, young man. Not until you’re my age. Then you’ll have earned the right. It poisons the whole of my life.” She would allow no contradiction; she too was reasserting herself as a parent.

I poured myself a cup of tea from the pot by the sink.

“It’s stewed.”

“I don’t care.”

Ponderous silence ensued. Once again, I felt a child seeking approval, or at any rate trying to avoid censure.

“Do you remember the Thor, Mum?” I suddenly found myself saying.

“The what?”

“The Thor. When we were kids. The way it used to travel all over the kitchen floor. Had a mind of its own. And it was always flooding, wasn’t it?”

“I thought that was the Hotpoint.”

“No.” I felt oddly desperate about this. “You had the Hotpoint afterwards. The Thor was the one I remember. Made a lot of rattling and had those thick beige hoses for the water.”

“That tea must be undrinkable,” said my mother. “And by the way, send me back that map I gave you. No, just chuck it away. Isle of Wight, clothead. Mumbo-jumbo. Understand?”

“Yes, Ma.”

“What I want, if I go before your father, as I expect I shall, is just scatter me. Anywhere. Or get the crem to do it. You’re not obliged to collect the ashes, you know.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like this.”

“He’ll see me out. It’s a creaking gate that lasts the longest. Then the Receptionist can have his ashes, can’t she?”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Put them on her mantelpiece.”

“
Look
, Ma,
if
that happened, I mean if you died before Dad, she wouldn’t have the right anyway. It’d be up to me, me and Karen. It wouldn’t have anything to do with Elsie.”

My mother stiffened at the name. “Karen’s a dead loss, and I couldn’t trust you, son, could I?”

“Ma …”

“Sneaking round to her house without telling me. Chip off the old block, you are. Always were your father’s son.”

ACCORDING TO ELSIE
, my mother blighted their life with her constant phone calls. “Morning, noon and night, especially night. In the end, we just took the plug out.” According to Elsie, my mother was always making my father pop back and do jobs about the house. She used a succession of arguments. 1)The house was half his anyway, so he had a duty to maintain it. 2)He’d left her without enough money to employ a handyman. 3)He presumably didn’t expect her to start going up a ladder at her age. 4)If he didn’t come at once she’d walk all the way to Elsie’s house and fetch him.

According to my mother, my father was back at her door almost as soon as he’d left, offering to fix things, dig the garden, clean the gutters, check the level in the oil tank, anything. According to my mother, my father complained that Elsie treated him like a dog, wouldn’t let him go to the British Legion club, had bought him a pair of slippers he particularly disliked, and wanted him to break off all contact with his children. According to my mother, my father begged her constantly to take him back, to which she would reply, “You’ve made your bed and you can learn to lie in it,” though in fact she only intended to make him stick it out a little longer. According to my mother, my father didn’t like the slapdash way Elsie ironed his shirts, or the fact that all his clothes now smelt of cigarette smoke.

According to Elsie, my mother made so much fuss about the back door swelling, so that now the bolt only went half way in and a burglar could be through that in a jiffy and rape and murder her as she lay in her bed, that my father reluctantly agreed to go over. According to Elsie, my father swore that this was the last time ever, and that as far as he was concerned the whole bloody house could burn to the ground, preferably with my mother inside it, before he would be persuaded to drive over again. According to Elsie, it was while my father was working on the back door that my mother hit him over the head with an unknown instrument, then left him lying there, hoping he would die, and only called the ambulance several hours later.

According to my mother, my father kept pestering her to get the back door fixed and said he didn’t like to think of her there alone at nights and the whole matter would be resolved if only she’d let him come back. According to my mother, my father turned up unexpectedly one afternoon with his toolbox. They sat and talked for a couple of hours, about old times, about the children, and even got out some photos which made them both damp-eyed. She told him she’d think about having him back but not until he’d fixed the door if that was what he’d come to do. He went off with his toolbox, she cleared away the tea things, then sat looking at some more photographs. After a while, she realized she hadn’t heard any banging from the utility room. My father was on his side, making a gurgling noise; he must have had another fall and struck his head on the floor which of course is concrete out there. She called the ambulance—God, they were slow coming—and put a cushion under his head, look, this cushion, you can still see the blood on it.

According to the police, Mrs. Elsie Royce made a complaint to them that Mrs. Dorothy Mary Bishop had assaulted Mr. Stanley George Bishop with intent to murder. They had investigated the matter fully, and decided not to proceed. According to the police, Mrs. Bishop made a complaint to them that Mrs. Royce was going about the local villages denouncing her as a murderer. They had to have a quiet word with Mrs. Royce. Domestics are always a problem, especially what you might call extended domestics like this one.

MY FATHER
has now been in hospital for two months. He recovered consciousness after three days, but since then has made little progress. When he was first admitted, the doctor said to me, “I’m afraid it doesn’t take a lot at their age.” Now, a different doctor has tactfully explained that “it would be a mistake to expect too much.” My father is paralysed down his left side, has severe memory loss and speech impairment, is unable to feed himself and remains largely incontinent. The left side of his face is twisted like the bark of a tree, but his eyes come out at you as clear and grey-blue as they ever did, and his white hair is always clean and well brushed. I cannot tell how much he understands of what I say. There is one phrase he enunciates well, but otherwise he speaks little. His vowels are contorted, wrung from his slanted mouth, and his eyes express shame at his maimed articulacy. Mostly, he prefers silence.

On Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, asserting her marital right to the fourth day out of seven, my mother visits him. She brings him grapes and the newspaper from the day before, and when he dribbles from the left corner of his mouth, she pulls a tissue from the box at his bedside and dabs away the spittle. If there is a note from Elsie on the table she tears it up while he pretends not to notice. She talks to him of their past time together, of their children and their shared memories. When she leaves, he follows her with his eyes and says, very clearly, to anyone who will listen, “My wife, you know. Many happy years.”

On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, Elsie visits my father. She brings him flowers and home-made fudge, and when he dribbles she takes from her pocket a white lace-trimmed handkerchief with the initial E in red stitching. She wipes his face with obvious tenderness. She has taken to wearing, on the third finger of her right hand, a ring similar to the one she still wears for Jim Royce on her left hand. She talks to my father about the future, about how he is going to get better, and the life they will then have together. When she leaves, he follows her with his eyes and says, very clearly, to anyone who will listen, “My wife, you know. Many happy years.”

The Silence

O
ne feeling at least grows stronger in me with each year that passes—a longing to see the cranes. At this time of the year I stand on the hill and watch the sky. Today they did not come. There were only wild geese. Geese would be beautiful if cranes did not exist.

A YOUNG MAN
from a newspaper helped me pass the time. We talked of Homer, we talked of jazz. He was unaware that my music had been used in
The Jazz Singer
. At times, the ignorance of the young excites me. Such ignorance is a kind of silence.

Slyly, after two hours, he asked about new compositions. I smiled. He asked about the Eighth symphony. I compared music to the wings of a butterfly. He said that critics had complained that I was “written out.” I smiled. He said that some—not himself, of course—had accused me of shirking my duties while in receipt of a government pension. He asked when exactly would my new symphony be finished? I smiled no more. “It is you who are keeping me from finishing it,” I replied, and rang the bell to have him shown out.

I wanted to tell him that when I was a young composer I had once scored a piece for two clarinets and two bassoons. This represented an act of considerable optimism on my part, since at the time there were only two bassoonists in the country, and one of them was consumptive.

THE YOUNG
are on the way up. My natural enemies! You want to be a father figure to them and they don’t give a damn. Perhaps with reason.

Naturally the artist is misunderstood. That is normal, and after a while becomes familiar. I merely repeat, and insist: misunderstand me correctly.

A LETTER
from K. in Paris. He is worried about tempo markings. He must have my confirmation. He must have a metronome marking for the Allegro. He wants to know if
doppo piu lento
at letter K in the second movement applies only for three bars. I reply, Maestro K., I do not wish to oppose your intentions. In the end—forgive me if I sound confident—one may express the truth in more than one way.

I REMEMBER
my talk with N. about Beethoven. N. was of the opinion that when the wheels of time have made a further turn, the best symphonies of Mozart will still be there, whereas those of Beethoven will have fallen by the wayside. This is typical of the differences between us. I do not have the same feelings for N. as I have for Busoni and Stenhammar.

IT IS REPORTED
that Mr. Stravinsky considers my craftsmanship to be poor. I take this to be the greatest compliment I have received in the whole of my long life! Mr. Stravinsky is one of those composers who swings back and forth between Bach and the latest modern fashions. But technique in music is not learned at school with blackboards and easels. In that respect Mr. I. S. is at the top of the class. But when one compares my symphonies with his stillborn affectations …

A FRENCH CRITIC
, seeking to loathe my Third symphony, quoted Gounod: “Only God composes in C major.” Precisely.

MAHLER AND I
once discussed composition. For him, the symphony must be like the world and contain everything. I replied that the essence of a symphony is form; it is the severity of style and the profound logic that creates the inner connection between motifs.

WHEN MUSIC IS
literature, it is bad literature. Music begins where words cease. What happens when music ceases? Silence. All the other arts aspire to the condition of music. What does music aspire to? Silence. In that case, I have succeeded. I am now as famous for my long silence as I have been for my music.

Of course, I could still compose trifles. A birthday intermezzo for the new wife of cousin S., whose pedalling is not as secure as she imagines. I could answer the call of the state, the petitions of a dozen villages with a flag to hang out. But that would be pretence. My journey is nearly complete. Even my enemies, who loathe my music, admit that it has logic to it. The logic of music leads eventually to silence.