Shuttlecock (6 page)

In the midst of this general relaxation I suddenly noticed – several other eyes must have noticed it too, but the odd thing was that this event went, at first, quite unregistered – that one of the patients on the edge of a group away to our right was removing his clothes. He was a tall, gaunt man – over seventy, I would have said – with white hair, in a grey hospital suit. Before anyone made a move to stop him he had taken off not only his suit but his underwear as well. An attendant stood up, shouted at him, and immediately the patient broke into a loping run, not, it seemed, to escape pursuit, for his run had nothing urgent about it, but for some peculiar, cryptic purpose of his own. He ran, at about fifteen yards’ distance from us, right in front of our line of benches, with the aim, perhaps, of reaching the ornamental pond to our left; but before he could do so two chasing attendants closed on him.

Now all this could have been, in one sense, highly comical. But the man’s bony, yellowish body, his wide-open mouth as he ran, his shrivelled genitalia bobbing up and down, made you think – I don’t know how to put it – of something really terrible, not amusing at all. And this fact seemed to be endorsed by the reactions of the nursing-attendants. As they walked the patient back to his clothes they did not attempt to laugh the matter off. The mood of the sunny afternoon had changed. A third attendant
ran up with a blanket to cover the man. They all looked apologetic, ashamed – here where there was so much mental nakedness – as if they had allowed us visitors to witness something unthinkable. And the odd thing was that when I turned back again to Dad, whom I’d almost forgotten in the commotion, he was twisted round on the bench, his arms propped on the back-rest, his head turned away towards the roses so he could not see what was happening.

When Dad and I have sat for some minutes we get up and take a second stroll. This is part of the pantomime too. We walk round the pond and down the yew walk and back over the lawns to the ward. All this time, of course, Dad is utterly silent. As we walk across the trim grass in the hospital grounds I am reminded of how I used to trail behind Dad, lugging his bag of clubs, as a boy, on the golf course at Wimbledon. Every Sunday morning, after an early breakfast; the pigeons clattering out of the hawthorn bushes, the dew still glistening on the fairways. It was one of those gestures of kindness and good will I made only in the period when I had my hamster. I volunteered to be Dad’s caddy – no mean feat, when you consider the weight of a loaded golf bag, for a boy of ten. But I used to follow doggedly the little entourage that gathered round Dad at the club-house. They had names – I forget now, Arthur So-and-so, Harry Somebody – and they all had the confident, weathered looks of men who had had, as they used to say then, ‘good wars’ and become well set-up afterwards. Dad used to make a fuss of me in front of them and they’d tease me in return. Dad was proud of me; he could scarcely credit my new lease of good behaviour, and I don’t believe I ever knew him happier than during that time when I had Sammy. What changes that hamster
brought about. But what I remember most about those mornings is the ‘Wwhack! Wwhack!’ of the drivers at the tee; the little jibing, tense remarks that followed, heads tilting to follow the ball; and Dad always getting the best score and no one seeming to mind a bit, as if it were a pleasure to lose to Dad. Dad lifting back his club for the next drive, his body poised, and sweeping it down as if he really meant to punish the little ball, to annihilate it, and the ‘Wwhack!’ as it struck; and you always knew it would never fail (‘Good shot!’ and Dad smiles, shielding his eyes); up, up, with a ‘whirr’ like some flushed game-bird, up, over the gorse and the silver birch and the yellow bunkers, and down again; eighteen times, hounding the ball mercilessly, masterfully, towards the distant flags.

I don’t believe Dad will never speak again. It can’t be that this awful thing has happened to my father. Sometimes I get the impression that this silence of his is only a pretence, an elaborate, obstinate pretence; that all the time he looks through me and seems not to recognize me, he is really only pretending. The doctors have given him up, but I have a theory that if only I could say the proper things then Dad would answer. Perhaps, with the right words, the right question, I could shock him out of his condition. Perhaps I can ask him questions, now, say things, now, I would never dare utter normally. Like: I respect you Dad, I love you Dad. I looked up to you. I always did, though I never showed it. Why is it my own children don’t respect me?

During the war my Dad was a spy. He used to be dropped into occupied France and liaise with resistance fighters, keep watch on German installations and help to blow them up. He wrote a book about his exploits, in the fifties, and for a few years his name was well-known, he was one of the war-heroes. He isn’t so well-known now – his book’s long been out of print – but if you mention his name to people of a certain age, it still rings a dim bell, they know who you mean. Dad was involved in a succession of daring operations in France, which reached their height in the intense period between D-day and the Allied invasion of Germany. It was during this period that he was captured by and subsequently escaped from the Gestapo.

I read Dad’s book when it first came out, when I could scarcely have been eleven. It was called
Shuttlecock: The Story of a Secret Agent
. ‘Shuttlecock’ was Dad’s code-name during his final operations in France. I remember that I did not know this word and dared not ask Dad what it meant, and for some time I believed it was a special word invented solely for Father, until one day I found out what a shuttlecock really was: a thing you take swipes at and knock about, like a golf ball. Now I think of it, Dad must have got the idea for writing his book during that same period when I had my hamster. You remember in the early and mid-fifties, when the actual
after-effects of the war were fading, rationing was ending, there was a whole spate of war books and war films. He was already sitting up, late at night, in the spare-room-cum-study of our house at Wimbledon, making notes and rough drafts, by the time Sammy died. Perhaps when I next see Dad at the hospital I will say to him: You started
Shuttlecock
because of me, didn’t you? Because you and I seemed to be getting on fine.

But the irony of it was I fell away from Dad after I read his book. I’d already been falling away from him after Sammy was chucked into the boiler, but the book clinched it. Oh, it wasn’t that I didn’t find the book extraordinary, amazing – terrific stuff – that I didn’t admire Dad. But, having a hero for a father – even having a father who isn’t a hero but who works in a plush office and plays golf on Sundays with a little retinue of worshippers – all this is bad news if you’re an only son.

It wasn’t that I reverted to how things were before – to flying into fits and biting Dad’s hands. But this sullen hostility, this mutual evasion and distrust grew up between us. I gave up being his caddy, for a start (one of those Sunday mornings, Dad at the foot of the stairs: ‘Are you coming or not?’ Silence – mine. And then the front door slamming and Dad’s car revving extra hard outside.) And this was just at the time when Dad was starting to teach me how to use his driver. I made it pretty clear that I didn’t care two hoots (I cared, in fact, a good many hoots) about his being a famous spy – even though at certain functions and social gatherings I had to wear (along with Mother, of course, who did it sincerely) a grudging mask of idolatry. When his book came out and reflected glory shone upon me at school I made a point of not bathing in it and of acting as if I found the whole business a bore. So, he blew up ammunition
trains? He escaped from the SS? So? And the result of all this, of course, as time wore on, was that Dad gave me up. He ceased to be interested in me as I ceased to be interested in him. When I left school my future had already stopped being a concern of his. When I started in my present job – naturally, I resisted all pressure to become an engineer and to seek an opening in his firm – his reaction was unbridled scorn: ‘Police work, eh?
Police
work!’ And even when I got married, got a house of my own, had children –
his
grandchildren – he did not unfreeze. He fell back on his life with Mum, and on his work – where, of course, he was still as sprightly and as popular as ever. One particular bone of contention: he has never shown any affection for Marian – not even the attentions due to a daughter-in-law; which I’ve always resented, because if there was ever any feud, it was between Dad and me only. But Marian and Dad have never been friends; and this became more marked after Mother’s death.

When I come home on the Tube in the evening, scanning the rows of faces, reading the adverts for deodorants, hair-transplants and staff agencies, I think it strange that my father was a spy, that he knew adventure, danger, did all those heroic things. I think it even stranger that that same hero is now a human vegetable. His past exploits perhaps mean nothing to him; it’s as if it was never he who carried them out. Certainly, he can no longer talk about them.

And maybe that’s why I’ve taken up his book again. There are two copies of it in our house. One has my name in it and ‘From your loving Father’ in Dad’s writing – bold and slanting – and the date, September 1957. Ever since Dad went into his silence I’ve been poring over it. I must have read it a dozen times, and each time I read it, it
seems to get not more familiar but more elusive and remote. There are a thousand questions I want to ask, about things that aren’t actually stated in the book. About how Dad
felt
at the time, about what was going on inside him. Because Dad doesn’t write about his feelings; he describes events, and where his feelings come into it he conveys them in a bluff, almost light-hearted way, as in some made-up adventure story; so that sometimes this book which is all fact seems to me like fiction, like something that never really took place. What really happened, Dad, at Auxonne? At Combe-les-Dames? What was it like to blow up railways? To hide in a water tank, in four feet of water, all night, while the Gestapo hunted you? To be in constant danger? What was it like when German-hired Cossacks captured one of your comrades and burnt him alive? What was it like, what was it really like?

It’s odd that all the time I could have asked him these things, I never did – as if I was never concerned to know the whole truth. And now, when the answers won’t come, I want to ask floods of questions. Why is this? It’s because for the first time I realize that Dad is
in
that book. He’s in there somewhere. It’s not some other man, in those pages, with a code-name, Shuttlecock. It’s a former consultant engineer, a golf player, a widower, the victim of a mental breakdown. I want to put the two together. Or – put it another way – the book
is
Dad. It’s more Dad than that empty effigy I sit beside at the hospital. When I pick it up I still possess Dad, I hold him, even though he’s gone away into unbreakable silence. At weekends when Marian talks to her plants I bury myself in Dad’s book.

‘Chapter Six: With the Maquis Again’.

Did I mention, by the way, a little while back, something about taking my kids out on the common at weekends to play healthy games with bats and frisbees? It doesn’t really happen, of course. You will have gathered that my relations with Martin and Peter aren’t exactly harmonious. Not that we don’t go out on the common. But that picture – the exuberant father, the frisky children – it’s quite wrong. I have to half drag them along, for a start. I get out my old cricket bat (
my
cricket bat, you notice, from distant school-days – Martin and Peter have never expressed the slightest interest in cricket); or I find the plastic football or the bright red frisbee I bought Peter for his last birthday (a marvellous invention, the sort of thing you’d expect two young boys to play with endlessly and tire out their Dad), and I say: ‘Right! We’re going to the common. No arguments!’

And what happens? I work up vain enthusiasm. They stubbornly refuse to enter the spirit of the game. They look bored. They want to know what the time is. There is something on television. They moan about being made to run and they argue about who should fetch the ball when, in a spasm of frustration, I take an excessive, but not unpleasing swipe with the bat, which sends it into the distance. They fail to be impressed by or to seek to emulate my expertise with the frisbee (I am very good at the under-hand boomerang shot). They look upon me
as some sort of demented PT instructor. All this simply isn’t natural. And I have to confess another thing. Once, last summer (this is only one of a number of similar instances), when Martin was being particularly troublesome, pretending not to have found one of those knocked-for-six balls, which, when I walked over to him, he suddenly ‘spotted’ at his feet in the long grass beneath a tree, I had this sudden urge, as he stooped to pick it up, to raise my bat and bring it down, hard, like a club, on the back of his head. I could have done it, I really could.

So we go less and less to the common. Now I wouldn’t mind if it was just I who was the obstacle – if Martin and Peter went off to the common to play by themselves – but they don’t do this either. And these days it seems that I too, for some inexplicable reason, for some spiteful reason, because what I really want to do is precisely the opposite, am choosing to stay indoors when we could go out.

Today, for instance, is Saturday, the very last day in April. The weather’s still fine and warm. It’s been exceptionally fine all week. Everything’s grown so much in only a few days: the chestnuts on the common, the May trees, the sycamores – but enough of that. Marian slips an arm around me while she makes a morning cup of coffee. I still haven’t told her, incidentally, about my promotion.

‘Darling, why don’t we go out somewhere today after lunch – even before lunch? A picnic? We’ve done the shopping; there’s nothing to stop us. It’s the first decent Saturday of the year.’

And almost immediately, because it’s Marian who’s said it, not me, and even though the very same idea has been crossing my mind since breakfast, I say: ‘I don’t know. I’ve got things to do.’