Vanished Years (15 page)

‘We are going on a pilgrimage to Lourdes,’ said my father.

‘How marvellous,’ replied Nicky, sweet and attentive, always good with family.

‘What?’ said my father.

‘The pope has issued a plenary indulgence.’

It was like playing to the upper circle, talking to my dad sometimes. One had to enunciate every syllable.

‘What’s that?’ asked Nicky.

‘It means that if you take the water, go to confession, have communion and do the candlelight procession, the whole hokey-cokey, this year, the jubilee, a hundred years since the initial apparition, then you will go straight to heaven, come what may.’

‘Even if you commit a terrible murder on the way?’

‘Even if you commit a terrible faux pas!’

‘There’s a good son for you,’ said Nicky to my dad.

‘Where?’ asked my father.

‘That’s what I am going to give you, Daddy. Eternal life! You are going straight to heaven.’

‘You’re screaming, darling,’ said Nicky.

‘I shall wait for you at the gates,’ said my father and we all fell silent.

‘Take a good book. You might be waiting an awfully long time,’ whispered Nicky.

A
t some point in 2008 the plan was hatched by my father to make a trip to Lourdes, the village in south-western France where the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant girl one hundred and fifty years ago. There is a miraculous spring and my father wanted to bathe in it one last time.

‘Not for a miracle, you understand,’ he said, brave, blind and in bed one morning. ‘But to give thanks for a marvellous life.’

Life was marvellous in retrospect and tawdry up close. Daddy was finding it difficult to adapt to old age. Unable to escape to the office, abroad or to the races, and having few interior pursuits to fall back on, he spent most of the day in front of the television, watching the news or sleeping. This pastime was punctuated by visits to the loo, pushing his empty wheelchair in front of him for balance, or to the drinks cupboard before lunch to mix a pink gin. He shuffled along, banging against the furniture like a bumper car. My darling mother, still verging on hyperactivity at seventy, screeched around the house performing her chores, swooping down upon him every fifteen minutes for a spot check.

‘Do sit up straight, Tony, for God’s sake!’

His own energy paled beside hers although he occasionally rose to her bait and snarled back as of old, at which point she cantered off, satisfied that she was keeping him going. She was, although their world was shrouded in its deep winter freeze, under a blanket of dementia and disease. One by one their vast network of acquaintances began to die, and some of the survivors behaved very oddly at lunch. The men went on ahead. They’d fought a war, after all, and had drunk seriously ever since, so they slid into the fog, mistaking a birthday for D-Day and their wife for the postman, while these poor wives, who had never signed a cheque and had been accustomed to receiving orders, now found themselves in charge. The tables had turned, after a life spent buttoning their husbands’ collars and their own lips. Occasionally this new power went to their heads and many a lazy Georgian rectory turned into a Zimbabwean dictatorship, where unspeakable atrocities were committed in the name of progress by a junta comprising of Mummy and Mrs B, the housekeeper, crushing and squeezing some poor crazed brigadier towards the Last Post and the final frontier. Once he was dead, history could quickly be rewritten, and Mummy either sailed off into the sunset memoir with her girlfriends or else she lost her marbles overnight.

But for the time being, funerals were the cocktail parties for the over-eighties. One caught up with a vast network of friends and relations, with people one had watched getting married and divorced and married again. After all the wars and the weekends, now they met in a funeral pew, or waving from a passing wheelchair on the rickety pathways of graveyards, or later over a box, bending low to look at the messages on the floral bouquets. And so, rather brilliantly, living and dying were challenged in the same breath, my parents embarking on these trips and on the big trip itself with their signature blitz sang-froid.

‘That was a marvellous funeral.’

‘Terrible hymns, though. Not one tune I knew.’

‘Boring address. General X looked goofy.’

‘He hasn’t been right for a long time.’

My father’s health had seriously deteriorated over the previous two years, although his will to live still overwhelmed his body’s desire to call it a day, and so he ploughed through several shipwrecking storms and miraculously survived. He had a stroke in a swimming pool in Dubai, where on a whim he had gone to the races. According to a racing friend, he was chasing a girl to the shallow end when it happened. That trip lost him the sight in one eye. A few months later his spleen burst one night, and he began to spew a strange black bile like a beer tap. He just opened his mouth and it bubbled from him. He was rushed to the local hospital, ominously named Odstock, where he contracted MRSA and C Difficile, while the condition of his spleen went undetected and untreated. After a week there, when it had poisoned his entire body, he was discharged. The next day he was rushed to the Cromwell Hospital in London.

The Cromwell is a reassuring landmark for the wealthy and ancient returning from Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset and Devon after a weekend in the country. Otherwise it is an ugly modern building, unremarkable except for its futuristic windows of blue glass. Inside the large reception area wait an uneasy melting pot of the sick rich and their various dependants. Bony British matriarchs in tweeds and headscarves sit gingerly next to rows of small round Arab ladies swathed in black, whose eyes swivel comically inside their masks. Everyone is waiting for a man. I have rarely seen a woman patient in the Cromwell, although they must have them. The man arrives – sheiken but not stirred, accompanied by the Harley Street specialist du jour, pristine in a pinstripe suit, under a handsome head of silver hair. It’s the last generation of everyone: of tribal leaders, of empire rulers, and not least of the elegant British private doctor with his Harley Street rooms.

My father lay in a bed surrounded by machines in the limbo of Intensive Care. No night or day – just life held by a thread in an unrecognisable body, wired and masked, in a ghostly pool of light. There was a feeling of theatre in that place, a hushed expectancy, as
if a giant curtain might rise up at any moment and we would all find ourselves on stage, confronted by an audience of saints and gods and everyone we had ever fucked or fucked over. I found it deeply exciting. A nurse sat as still as a graveyard angel at the foot of each bed, making notes. The deathless silence was broken only by whispers, clicks and bleeps. Occasionally a sob cut through it, somebody receiving bad news, a loved one seen for the first time, and sometimes one heard the strangled rattle of life evaporating off the planet. Then screens would be rushed towards a bed with a theatrical precision to shield the rest of us from the horrors of death. A silent flurry of doctors and nurses followed, white on white on white, coats, walls, screens and faces. Mummy and I looked at one another, not daring to speak, lest the grim reaper turn his attention towards our bed, although our curiosity always got the better of us, and we did everything but stand on tiptoe to see over the garden fence at the electrical resuscitations going on next door. Unfortunately the nurses were discreet and unresponsive to the energy of our interest.

‘How ghastly for them! Did I hear electrocardio massage just then?’ sleuthed Mummy, one night, after a particularly dramatic scene change.

‘I really couldn’t tell you, Mrs Everett,’ the nurse replied, smiling.

Mummy tried changing tack. ‘Poor Mrs Abu must be beside herself.’

‘We’re going to wash your husband now, Mrs Everett,’ the girl said firmly. ‘Would you mind going to the waiting room for a few minutes? We’ll call you when we’re done.’

In the waiting room lay the answers to all Mummy’s questions. It was where we all gathered in the morning, the motley crew of distraught relatives, another place that reminded me of the theatre. It was the quick-change room where you fixed on your smile and covered your drained face before you went on stage.

There was only one other patient in Intensive Care when we arrived. A shrunken grey man from Dubai lay in the bed next to my dad. When you went into the room you were confronted by the two
of them, surrounded by their consoles, a pair of undead kings on their thrones, while backstage his wife and my mother waited side by side, both in full burqua (Mother’s was from Hermès), and a little girl drew with felt tips in her colouring book. She was wide eyed. Ours were red. Sometimes there were men there. Sometimes another woman, sometimes my brother. Any mutual distrust quickly disappeared in the light of our common hopes and fears, and soon we were a kind of team.

It was touching to find my mother and ‘Madame’, as we ludicrously called her (when in doubt, use French), chatting together in their own languages, holding hands. They may not have understood the words, but they were fluent in the irregular verb of being a wife. They had both devoted entire lives to these flattened vegetables next door, and had quite possibly received rather less attention in return. The warmth between the two women, and the support she received from the nurses, got my mother through the day. ‘Monsieur’ was never coming round. They were resigned to that, and sat by his bed talking quietly to one another while he watched through unseeing eyes. Daddy was going to come round. That much was certain. And so my mother sat beside him, held his hand and waited.

Spectacles of intimacy were frowned upon in military circles. One said goodbye to one’s husband – whether he was boarding a troopship or being nailed into a coffin – with little more than a wave and a chin stuck out in defiance. Those were the rules of the game and so I had rarely witnessed any gestures of affection between my parents in forty-five years, beyond a distracted peck at the airport. I had a feeling that my father’s drugged-out, half-closed eyes registered faint surprise from somewhere in his semi-coma, and I smiled. Intensive care was coming from all directions.

What a far cry, this picture of them now, from their wedding portrait, fifty years ago, that stood by both their beds at home. Between the bleeps and flashes of hospital, and the bells and the thundering organ of St James’s, Spanish Place, a lifetime had rushed by. Was it a second ago or fifty years since that spring morning when they
stepped from God’s house to be photographed for the first time as man and wife? Frozen for ever, surrounded by bridesmaids in crinolines, Edwardian matriarchs in musty hats and veils, friends from the war still carrying swords, in a blur of confetti; the future stretched out in a beautiful haze that day, conjured up and coloured by faith and belief in Britain and Beelzebub. It was a mirage, of course. ‘In sickness and in health, for better or for worse’ were just words and not a magic receipt to deal with the series of events and experiences that led them towards the valley of death via the swing doors of Intensive Care.

The operation to remove his spleen was a success, and after several days Daddy was brought round.

‘I am feeling rather holy at the moment,’ he whispered, and began to have hallucinations. ‘They are making a marvellous chanting in the mosque next door.’

‘What mosque, Daddy?’

‘I don’t know where it is. They’re hiding it from me.’

What recovery he made was painful and slow. A brilliant Scottish sergeant major of a lady, recommended by the wife of a dead friend, stormed into our house, and completely took over. Jean was a slightly unhinged Mary Poppins. She was nearly seventy years old herself and was possibly shell-shocked from the years entrenched in various country houses of the rich and selfish. Her tactics were brilliant but dangerous. She completely identified herself with the patient, usually a man, which inevitably led to rebellion against the lady of the house. She didn’t much like women. At coffee time in the kitchen she was deliciously indiscreet about her latest case and we all hung on her every word, as she sat, legs astride, in front of the Aga.

‘When she’d come into the room he told her tae bugger off. It’s nae wonder. She’d been starving him on plastic ham all the while!’ she said about a couple we all knew.

‘Oh, Jean. That’s simply not true,’ said my mother, enthralled. ‘She absolutely loved him.’

‘Wull, if that’s love, I can dae withoot it,’ Jean replied, with a snort of derision.

That summer we were infested by field mice, which was a sign, according to country people, that it was going to be a cold winter. It was certainly a hot summer, and at night the old house groaned in the heat. From the ceiling above my bed I could hear the scratches of little feet, as those rodents who had escaped Mummy’s executions got ready for the winter. Our valley was quiet under the harvest moon, released from the endless buzz of daytime traffic as if it had been holding its breath all day. The only noise was the screech of the local owl and its mate’s distant reply somewhere up on the plain.

But our house was a creaking galleon on the changing tide. Sometimes I woke in the dead of night to hear the ghostly groans of my father’s nightmares. I tiptoed to his room across the corridor. There he was bathed in the light of the moon, smoking imaginary cigars in his sleep, puffing and talking distractedly, his hand searching blindly for an elusive ashtray.

‘Oh, Crippin! Where is the bloody thing?’ he moaned, winding himself up in the tangle of sheets.

Further along the corridor my mother’s door was closed. In the old days she hardly slept and no matter how quietly one crept upstairs her voice always sliced through the darkness. ‘Is that you, darling? Did you lock up?’

Now she was dead to the world, laid out for a wake, flat on her back with her hands folded across her chest; the light on and the World Service at full blast. Its calm authority conjured up a lost empire, and her post-war youth still whispered around Mummy’s face in the bedside light. During the day the harsh reality of old age was a constant challenge to my nerves, but at night I was transported outside time, when both my parents became beautiful and touching as they wrestled with oblivion on the pillow. One didn’t need phantoms in that creaky old house. The living were their own ghosts.