‘You poor darling,’ Fred said, when I had finished my story.While we had been talking daylight had faded outside the windows and the red glow of the electric fire was the only illumination in the room. She came across and knelt on the floor and took my hands in hers. ‘How awful for you. And how brave you were.’
‘Not as brave as Maisie,’ I said.‘But would you do the same for me?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said hesitantly. ‘Catholics aren’t supposed to, of course . . . but if it came to the point, and you asked, I probably would. What you did for Maisie was an act of love.’
‘I’d like to think so,’ I said. ‘But the trouble is, I wanted her to die. I wanted the whole miserable business to be over - almost as much, I believe, as she did. I had to struggle to conceal my relief afterwards, disguising it under grief. It left me with a residual sense of guilt that I think I’ve never entirely got rid of. And now it’s all happening again. Of course I don’t want Dad’s life to drag on pointlessly - but not just because it would be horrible for him. Because it would be horrible for me.’
We talked for a long time, and Fred did her best to convince me that I had no reason to reproach myself over the death of Maisie, nor would I if I decided against the PEG procedure for Dad. She invoked some abstruse Catholic casuistry about ‘double effect’ - if you did something with a good reason but a bad side effect then it wasn’t a sin, something like that. I wasn’t sure how it fitted my case, but I was grateful for her support. In the event I was spared the decision. Dad developed a chest infection over the weekend and by the time I had the interview with Kannangara it was obvious that he was in rapid and irreversible decline. Meanwhile Fred and I camped out in the house in Lime Avenue. Neither of us felt like sleeping in Dad’s bed, or sleeping apart, so we took the mattresses off both beds and made up one for ourselves on the floor of the lounge, the one room in the house that still looked in any way inviting. We did not attempt to make love, but we caressed each other and drifted off to sleep in a comfortable embrace, my hand between her warm thighs. Sooner or later that is what our sexual life will dwindle to, I suppose, if we live long enough - a tender intimate touching; and one might as well accept that prospect as infinitely preferable to nothing at all (while hoping it will happen later rather than sooner, of course).
Between hospital visits Fred bought cleaning materials and we set about scouring the kitchen of its coating of grease, and the rest of the house of its coating of dust, just to have something to do; and within a few days living there was no longer the queasy ordeal it had been. I visited Dad every day, sometimes with Fred, sometimes alone. Eventually she decided she would have to go back home and relieve Jakki, who had been running the shop largely on her own. Richard came to the hospital one day, and when he spoke to Dad and held his hand I saw the last gleam of recognition in Dad’s eyes, perhaps sparked by a dim memory of how Richard had found him and accompanied him to hospital. By the end of the week he was a pitiful sight. His left wrist was bruised and bloody from the repeated insertion and displacement of the IV tube, which was now attached to his stomach. He was too weak to sit in his chair, and lay in bed in the same position until the nurses moved him, breathing noisily with the aid of a mask which supplied his lungs with humidified oxygen. He seemed to find the mask, attached to the back of his head by an elastic band, irritating, and made periodic attempts to pull it off, sometimes successfully. If I was there I would hold the mask to his nose and mouth and grasp his hand at the same time, and he became more peaceful. But one afternoon when I tried to do this he brushed the mask away again and again until he was exhausted, then closed his eyes and submitted to the mask being replaced with the elastic band. That evening back at the house I had a call from the ward nurse that he was sinking rapidly and I had better come. I called a minicab and was at the hospital in under half an hour, but the ward sister told me he had passed away five minutes after we spoke on the phone. She left me with him behind the curtains drawn round his bed. He looked stern, almost noble, in death and I was not sorry that I had missed his last laboured breaths. I wondered whether his stubborn resistance to wearing the mask that afternoon had been a sign that somewhere in his ruined consciousness he had decided to give up the fight for life, and let go.
19
22
nd
February
. Dad made the long journey north after all, not in an ambulance, but in a hearse. Tonight his body reposes just up the road in the mortuary of B.H. Gilbert & Sons, Funeral Directors, whose men fetched it from Tideway Hospital today.The local cemetery for Brickley, where Mum was cremated, is a dreary place, hemmed in by a council estate and a railway line where trains rattle noisily past every few minutes. I remember her funeral as a profoundly depressing occasion. There was a municipal strike on at the time, and a lot of uncollected garbage was blowing about the site in the strong March wind, and there were heaps of flowers all over the place, rotting inside their cellophane wrappings.There weren’t many mourners, and I knew there would be even fewer for Dad’s funeral if it were held in London. His two cousins, to whom I have written about his death, are both too old and infirm to travel from their seaside homes, and I can’t think of anyone in Brickley who would have come except perhaps the Barkers. When I drew up a list it mostly consisted of Fred’s family and mine, and the thought of inviting them back after the service to the house in Lime Avenue, even in its cleaned-up state, or hiring some place in Brickley, a district not noted for elegant licensed premises, was dispiriting. So we decided to have the funeral up here, and the reception at home. It’s been arranged for next Monday at twelve. It will be a cremation, and in due course I’ll take the ashes back to Brickley Cemetery where Mum was cremated and scatter them in the Garden of Remembrance where Dad scattered Mum’s. He left no instructions about his funeral, needless to say, but I think that’s what he would have wanted.
I saw his body once more after he died, next day in the hospital’s chapel of rest, but I rather wish I hadn’t. There must have been some delay before his body was laid out, by which time rigor mortis had set in, and they obviously had trouble fitting his false teeth, because his mouth was open and his teeth bared in a ghastly grimace. I found it uncomfortable to look at him, and sat behind his head as I thought about his long life. I had spent the previous evening going through old photographs I found in his chaotic desk, and it was pleasanter to fill one’s mind with those creased and dog-eared images in sepia or black-and-white: youthful Dad with his tenor sax slung round his neck, posing with the other members of a five-piece band, the Dulwich Dixies, its name emblazoned on the bass drum; Dad and Mum together, young and good-looking, on holiday somewhere flat and sandy in Thirties beachwear; Dad in the back garden at Lime Avenue, with me aged three straddling his shoulders and holding on tightly to his upstretched hands; a studio portrait of Dad looking deceptively heroic in his RAF uniform and angled forage cap; Dad and Arthur Lane in their tropical shorts, sunburned and grinning into the camera; Dad’s agency photos for modelling and TV work, wearing various costumes and expressions - here a comic Cockney in a flat cap, there a sober businessman in a chalk-striped suit . . .
Afterwards I registered the death at the local registry office, a tedious process because the staff were in a tizzy about a new computerised system (I glimpsed ‘DEATH MENU’ on a monitor screen); then I locked up the house and came home to make arrangements for the funeral. Fred has got her parish priest to officiate at the service, which is nice of her - and of him, considering that Dad was barely a Christian, let alone a Catholic. But it seems that the Catholic clergy are fairly easy-going about such matters now, accepting, I presume, that their main function is to bring comfort to the bereaved, and if that involves a little prevarication about the beliefs of the departed, so be it. It will be a short service, since there are funerals every half-hour at the crematorium. Fr Michael has given us a free hand in filling in the basic Catholic template. Anne and Richard will do readings. I’m going to say a few words - eulogy seems too pompous a word - about Dad, and I’ve tape-recorded some of his favourite classical music for the service. I thought of playing a few bars of ‘The Night, the Stars and the Music’ too, but Fred vetoed that.
I have given very little thought to Alex Loom in the past few weeks, having other things on my mind. Fred told me she had left messages on the answerphone a couple of times when I was in London, wanting to speak to me, which I didn’t bother to follow up, and when I came back to Rectory Road I found several emails from her in my inbox, saying she was very sorry to hear that my father was ill, but she urgently needed to see me as soon as I could manage it, and was willing to travel down to London if necessary.Today when I came in from delivering the music tapes to the undertakers Fred said that Alex had called again, and she had told her of Dad’s death. ‘She said she was very sorry to hear it, and she’d like to come to the funeral.’
The information disturbed me. If she came to the funeral we could hardly avoid asking her back to the house afterwards. ‘I hope you didn’t invite her,’ I said. ‘It would be quite inappropriate. She never even met Dad - he was upstairs sleeping off the booze when she turned up on Boxing Day.’
‘No, I pretended the arrangements weren’t settled yet. I should put her off, if I were you. And while you’re about it, darling, you might tactfully remind her that she still owes us for her curtains.’
‘You mean the ones she bought from
Décor
?’ I said, surprised. ‘That was quite a long time ago.’
‘Exactly,’ Fred said. ‘She paid a small deposit, and the balance was due when Ron fitted them for her in mid-January. She’s had a reminder.’
I asked how much was outstanding and Fred said it was four hundred pounds - ‘As I remarked at the time, she has very good taste.’
I went to my study to send an email to Alex and found a new one from her in my inbox, commiserating with me over Dad’s death and reiterating her wish to attend the funeral. I replied, thanking her for her condolences, and said that the funeral was to be a small private affair for the family only. I decided it would compromise the formal and distant tone of my message to mention the matter of the curtains.
23
rd
February
. Alex called me this morning, after Fred had gone into the city centre. She said she understood about the funeral, but she was very anxious to meet me to discuss something. I said I was far too busy, and would be for some time, sorting out my father’s probate, and disposing of his possessions and the house. I asked her what it was about, and she said she would rather explain in person, at her flat. When I said that wasn’t possible, she suggested Pam’s Pantry, and when I rejected that proposal too she reluctantly told me over the phone why she had been trying to reach me ever since my return from Poland.
‘I can’t go on being supervised by Colin Butterworth,’ she said. ‘It’s impossible, for obvious reasons. It’s the only thing we agree on. He asked me if there was anyone else in the Department I would like to transfer to, and I said no, there isn’t, but I would love to be supervised by you. He thinks it’s a brilliant idea, and he’s sure there won’t be any problem getting the University to approve it. You’d get some kind of payment, not a lot I guess, but something. And I don’t need to tell you I’d be absolutely thrilled.’
‘No, Alex,’ I said when she had finished her pitch.
‘Why?’ she wailed. ‘When I asked you before, you said it would be an insult to Colin, but that doesn’t apply any more.’
‘I just don’t want to,’ I said.
‘But why?’ she persisted.
‘If you really want to know, it’s because I don’t understand you, I don’t trust you, and I seriously doubt whether you are capable of writing a PhD thesis. I’m afraid I would end up writing it for you.’
She was silent for a moment.
‘I guess you’re upset about your daddy’s death,’ she said. ‘I can understand that. I’ll let you think about it for a while.’
‘I won’t change my mind,’ I said, and to change the subject I added: ‘By the way, Fred tells me you have an outstanding account with her, for some curtains. It would avoid embarrassment if you could settle it.’
There followed another of Alex’s enigmatic telephonic pauses. ‘Yeah, I’m sorry about that. Fact is, I’m short of cash at the moment. You wouldn’t lend me the money, would you?’
‘You mean lend you the money to pay my wife?’
‘Yeah. It’s only four hundred and fifty pounds.’
‘Fred said it was four hundred.’
‘Oh yeah, right. I paid a deposit of fifty, I remember now.’
It was my turn to pause for rapid thought. I was pretty sure her mistake had been deliberate, and pretty sure too that this loan would never be repaid. Her cool cheek amazed me, but for a moment I was tempted to pay her off, so to speak, with this favour. Then I thought of what mischief she might make with a cheque for £400 signed by me, unknown to Fred, and handing her a brown envelope full of used banknotes under the table at Pam’s Pantry might be equally compromising. ‘No, Alex,’ I said, for the third time, and rang off.
Later today I got an email from Butterworth saying that, for reasons I was aware of, it had become impossible for him to continue supervising Alex, and that he had tried without success to find a colleague willing to take her on. She herself had suggested I might be approached, indeed urged it with great enthusiasm, since she had already received valuable informal advice from me. He could think of no one better qualified than myself to supervise her, and was sure that there would be no problem about appointing me as an external supervisor with an appropriate stipend. He himself, needless to say, would be extraordinarily grateful if I would act in this capacity.