It was just after ten-thirty when my taxi turned into the gravel drive of 9 Rectory Road. As I let myself in at the front door I was, as always on returning from these excursions, struck by the contrast between the meanly proportioned, dark and dingy semi from which I had come, and the tactfully modernised and beautifully maintained Regency house which is now my home, with its gleaming paint-work and stripped wooden floors, its high ceilings and elegantly curving staircase, its magnolia walls hung with vivid contemporary paintings and prints, its comfortable, discreetly modern furniture, deep pile carpets, and state-of-the-art curtains which move back and forth at the touch of a button. The air was warm, but smelled sweet.
Fred acquired ownership of the house as part of her divorce settlement, and made its improvement her chief hobby until, with the opening of
Décor,
it became an extension of work, a laboratory for new ideas and an advertisement to potential customers. When we married I was glad to sell the serviceable but rather boring modern four-bedroomed detached box in which Maisie and I brought up our children, and to move into Fred’s house, the money I acquired in this way funding her ambitious improvements. Its three floors provided enough bedrooms for our combined children, two of mine, who were in any case at or about to go to university by then, and three of hers. Nowadays the house is extravagantly large for just the two of us, but Fred likes to throw big parties, and to host inclusive family gatherings at Christmas and similar occasions. Besides, she insists, living space is her luxury: some people like fast cars, or yachts, or second homes in the Dordogne, but she prefers to spend her money on space she can enjoy every day.
I hung up my coat in the hall, and called out ‘Fred!’ to announce my return, and found her, as I expected, in the drawing room. The lights were restfully subdued, the gas-fired artificial coals in the grate glowed and flickered welcomingly. Fred reclined on the sofa with her feet up, watching
Newsnight
on television, and I caught a glimpse of soldiers in battledress patrolling a dusty Middle Eastern street before she quenched the picture with the remote. I went over to the sofa and she tilted her face to receive a kiss.
‘Carry on watching if you want to,’ I said.
‘No, darling, it’s too depressing.Another suicide bomb in Baghdad.’
I sank down in an armchair, and took off my shoes. Fred said something I didn’t catch, I presumed about the news, something about a mine.‘How could you commit suicide with a mine?’ I asked. I saw from her expression that this was wrong. ‘Hang on,’ I said, and fumbled in my pocket for my hearing aid, which I had taken out in the train. As I inserted the earpieces I discovered that one of them was already switched on. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said you’re whining, darling. Or you were.’
‘I must have forgotten to turn one of these things off. Either that or it turned itself on somehow. I suspect them of doing that occasionally. ’
‘So how was your Awayday?’ Her tone was sympathetic, but the micro-humiliation of the whining hearing aid, reminder of my infirmity, lingered like the irritation of an insect bite, and diminished the pleasure of my homecoming.
Deaf, where is thy sting?
Answer: everywhere. Perhaps for that reason I painted a darker picture of Dad’s situation than I might otherwise have done. I described the state of the house, especially the cooker and the fridge.
‘He can’t go on living on his own much longer,’ I concluded.
Fred looked serious. ‘Well, darling, I don’t like to sound hard or unfeeling, but I have to say it: he can’t live with us.’
‘I know.’
‘I just couldn’t cope with it. Christmas, and a few other times a year I can manage, but not having him here permanently.’
The truth is that neither could I, but I am grateful that Fred is prepared to take upon herself the odium of this decision. ‘He wouldn’t want to anyway,’ I said. This is true. Dad has never felt at ease in Fred’s house. The big rooms and high ceilings intimidate him; they make him afraid of draughts and frighten him with visions of huge energy bills. He actually suggested to Fred once, in all seriousness, that she should divide the drawing room with a big felt curtain suspended from the ceiling to create a sitting area near the fireplace; I think the motorised rails for her velvet window curtains gave him the idea. He honestly feels more comfortable in his frowsty little nest crowded with furniture, where three or four steps will take you from the door to the furthest corner of the room, than he does in this splendidly proportioned and luxuriously appointed salon.
‘But what shall we do with him?’ I asked.
‘You’ll have to look for a care home of some kind.’
‘You mean here?’
‘Would he move up here?’ Fred asked doubtfully.
‘He won’t move anywhere willingly,’ I said. ‘But it would make sense. We could keep an eye on him more easily, have him round for meals occasionally.’
‘
You
could, darling, he’s your father,’ Fred said. ‘Of course he’ll always be very welcome here, but you’ll have to entertain him.You know how busy I am.’
I contemplated this prospect for a few minutes, Dad popping in every day for a chat, or rather grumble, and didn’t much care for it. On the other hand I am wearying of the regular pilgrimage to London to see him, and visiting him in a care home there, supposing I could find one, wouldn’t be any less of a fag.
‘I suppose I could see what’s available,’ I said, ‘and get him to look at some places while he’s up here at Christmas. I’ve no idea what they cost, have you?’
‘Anything decent is expensive,’ said Fred. ‘But if he sells his house that should cover it for a few years.’
I tried to imagine persuading Dad to accept this arrangement, living extravagantly off his diminishing capital, and failed.
‘And after a few years?’
‘If necessary we could take care of it.’ Clearly she didn’t think it would be necessary. ‘Speaking of Christmas,’ she said, ‘I want to have a big party here on Boxing Day, for friends and neighbours and clients. Buffet lunch and drinks.’
I pictured the pleasant, peaceful room full of people grinning and sweating and Lombard-reflexing away for all they are worth, and groaned inwardly.‘Won’t that be a lot of work for you, after Christmas dinner the day before?’ I asked, seeking an acceptable objection.
‘We’ll have it catered. Jakki knows an Asian company who don’t mind working over Christmas. She says they do delicious Thai curries and salads. People will be glad of a change from turkey and mince pies.’>
‘Dad won’t,’ I said.
‘Well then, he can have a cold turkey leg all to himself in his bedroom,’ Fred said crisply, ‘and as many mince pies as he can eat.’ I sensed that it would suit her very well if he were to choose this option.
Fred offered to get me something to eat, but I had bought a sandwich on the train and was not hungry. I poured myself a substantial whisky nightcap - a kind of rebellious oedipal act, perhaps, prompted by Dad’s homily on the subject, for it is not a regular habit of mine - and took it upstairs to sip in the bath before going to bed. I lolled in the steam and the warm water, leaching out the stress and fatigue of the day, then put on a pair of clean pyjamas and got into bed. I usually read a bit of poetry before I go to sleep. I keep my favourite poets on the bedside table - Hardy, Betjeman, Larkin - and dip into them at random. I was reading ‘Beeny Cliff’ when Fred came in to the bedroom:
O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free -
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.
Glancing up covertly from my book from time to time I watched Fred getting ready for bed, undressing, going in and out of her bathroom, putting on her nightgown, and was rewarded with a glimpse of her generously curved but firm bottom and the profile of a shapely bare breast. The bottom is her own work, but the breast owes something to the surgeon’s art. A few years ago she had a breast-reduction operation. At the time I was against it on health and safety grounds (given all the infections rampant in hospitals these days only a life-threatening illness would persuade me to have an operation), and the sight of her bandages and stitches initially made me queasy, but I had to admit that the final result, when everything had invisibly healed, was stunning. At about the same time she joined the Health Club and began serious exercising, taking courses in yoga, clocking up miles on running machines and stretching herself out like a medieval martyr on racks attached to weights and pulleys, sculpting her matronly torso into an alluring hour-glass shape. This wasn’t done for my benefit, but as part of a general personal make-over accompanying her new career, which included dieting, hair-colouring and the substitution of contact lenses for spectacles. It all had its effect on me nevertheless, provoking an unexpected onset of what Betjeman called ‘late flowering lust’, adulterous in his case, uxorious in mine. As I sneaked glances at Fred’s routine and entirely uncoquettish preparations for bed I felt a stirring in the loins, and had to resist the temptation to slide my hand under her nightdress as she got between the sheets and turned on her side, knowing that in my tired and slightly tipsy state I would not be able to pursue any amorous overture to a satisfactory conclusion. I settled instead for a comfortable cuddle, fitting my body spoonwise to the curve of her bottom and putting an arm round her waist, a waist that didn’t exist five or six years ago. I chanted ‘Beeny Cliff ’ silently to myself and fell asleep somewhere in the last stanza:
What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman is now - elsewhere - whom the rambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there nevermore.
I woke at three-thirty, probably because the effect of the alcohol had worn off, went for a pee, and tossed and turned for some time afterwards, unable to get back to sleep. I tried cuddling up to Fred again, but she shrugged me off, not with any conscious irritation, I believe - it was probably just a reflex action in her sleep - but the withdrawal of her warm body left me feeling rejected and vulnerable. My thoughts picked up from where they had left off when I fell asleep: sex with Fred, or rather not-sex with Fred, and Hardy’s elegy for his first wife, which led me into uncomfortable memories of Maisie.
I try not to think of Maisie too much. The last years of her life were so awful, not just for her, but for all of us. From the moment she told me she had found a lump under her armpit I knew with terrible certainty how it would end, but not how long it would take: the endless hospital appointments, the stuffy crowded waiting rooms, the anxious consultations, the operations and chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the brief periods of respite and hope, the unspeakable depression and despair when the next scans showed they had been delusory, the gradual mutation of the house into a hospice, first with the installation of a stair-lift, and then, when even that became too much for her to manage, the conversion of the lounge into a sick room with an en suite bathroom extension, and a Macmillan nurse calling daily. Maisie was determined to die at home. She got her wish, it was all we could do for her in the end, but it took its toll of me and the children. I think one of the reasons I’m so bitter about my deafness is that having got through all that, survived that, and then found new happiness with Fred, I somehow thought I had suffered my fair share of misfortune, paid my dues as the Americans say, and that life would be plain sailing from then on. But of course that isn’t how it works, not at all.
The only way he survived the strain of that time was through work, devoting every hour that wasn’t taken up with caring for Maisie and the children to his teaching and research. In the early stages of her illness they made love to comfort each other, but as Maisie’s condition worsened it became painful for her and difficult for him, and they stopped by tacit mutual consent. Maisie raised the subject once in a touching but embarrassing way, about six months before she died, saying she would understand if he needed what she called ‘solace’ from another woman, as long as she didn’t know about it, and none of her friends did. He assured her quite sincerely that he felt no such need. She told her sister that he was ‘a saint’, but he vehemently repudiated the compliment when it was relayed to him. He claimed no virtue for his continence. He simply felt numbed by the misery of the situation.The idea of entering into an emotional relationship with another woman while Maisie was dying by inches was unthinkable, and he was not the kind of man to resort to prostitutes or massage parlours.
After Maisie’s death, that is to say after about a year had passed and he had got over the immediate sense of grief and loss, mingled with relief that her suffering was over, and his own burden lifted, he became conscious that he was a free man again, and that he was being observed with an interest that was sometimes kindly and sometimes prurient - as if his circle of acquaintance were conspiring to help him find another partner, or secretly placing bets on who it would be. He was aware, too, that Anne and Richard, both then teenagers, and fiercely loyal to the memory of their mother, reacted with extreme suspicion whenever he was out late in the evening, or mentioned some female colleague approvingly in conversation. This, he found, had an inhibiting effect on his relations with the unattached women he met, fearing that any effort to be pleasant on his part might be misinterpreted - and probably it had the same effect on them. Then Winifred Holt came into his life, initially as a student taking a Combined Honours degree in Art History and Linguistics.
It was an unusual combination, since there were not many connections between the two subjects in content or methodology. In fact the only one he could think of, as he told her in her first tutorial (the Department still had a tutorial system in those days) was Jakobson’s application of his famous metaphor/metonymy distinction to Surrealism and Cubism. She cheerfully admitted that there was no rationale for her combination of subjects, she just happened to be interested in each of them for different reasons. She had always loved going to art galleries and looking at pictures, and as the mother of young children she was fascinated by the ease with which they acquired language and wanted to learn more about it. In truth she never had any natural aptitude for linguistics, but she made the best of her limited ability and, with only a little help from himself, scored a straight A in Art History for an extended essay on the difference between Surrealism and Cubism. He had always taken a mild interest in visual art, and it developed further through his association with Winifred.