When I had agreed to Margaret’s programme, I said: “In that case, I think I’d like to see my old father this morning.”
For an instant, she was caught open-mouthed, her looks dissolved in blank astonishment. Her own relation with her father had been so responsible. She had sometimes been shocked by mine. She had never seen me in search of a father, either a real one or a surrogate, in all our time together. She gazed at me. She gave a sharp-eyed, intimate smile and said: “You know, it isn’t much more than having a few teeth out, you do know that?”
It sounded like free association gone mad, but her eyes were lit up. To others I seemed more rational than most men; not to her. She had lived with a streak of superstitiousness in me as deep as my mother’s, though more suppressed. She had watched me book in, year after year, at the same New York hotel, because there I had heard of a major piece of luck. She had learned how I dreaded any kind of pleasure on a Tuesday night because one such evening I had enjoyed myself and faced stark horror on the Wednesday morning. Sometimes, in fact, I infected her. She wasn’t sorry, she was relieved, to hear this atavistic desire of mine. It might be a longish operation, Margaret had said: there was a shrinking from unconsciousness which was atavistic too. She, as well as I, wasn’t disinclined to make an act of piety, to make this sort of insurance for which one prays as a child. The fact that it was an incongruous act of piety might have deterred her, she had more sense of the fitness of things, but she took me in my freedom, and didn’t wish it to deter me.
So, by the middle of the morning, she had said our goodbyes, and we were driving out through the backstreets along which, the preceding spring, I had walked with Charles. The cluster of shops, the chapel, the gentle rise. When I was a boy, cars didn’t pass those terraced windows once a day; and even that morning, when the university Daimler stopped outside Aunt Milly’s old house, there were curious eyes from the “entry” opposite.
I led Margaret in by the back way. Passing the window of my father’s room, I stood on tiptoe but could see only darkness. When I went up the steps to the French window, I found the room was empty. We returned along the passage. I rang at the familiar front door (pulling the hand bell, perhaps it was still the same bell, as when I came back one night, late from a school debate, found our own house empty and rang Aunt Milly’s bell: there was my mother pretending to laugh off a setback, lofty in her disappointed pride). The bell jangled. After a time footsteps sounded, and a middle-aged man in his shirt-sleeves opened the door. I had seen him before, but not spoken to him: he was always referred to by my father as Mr Sperry. He was called my father’s “lodger”, though he occupied the entire house except for the single room.
I told him my name and said that I was looking for my father. Mr Sperry chuckled. He was long and thin, with a knobbly Adam’s apple and a bush of hair. He had a kind, perplexed and slightly eccentric face. I thought I remembered hearing that he was a jobbing plumber.
“I expect the old gentleman’s doing his bit of shopping,” he said.
“When do you think he’ll be back?”
Mr Sperry shook his head. “It’s wonderful how he does for himself,” he said. He had the most gentle manners: but it was clear that, though he had occupied the house for ten years, he didn’t know much about my father, and was puzzled by what little he did know. “I can’t tell you when he’ll be home, I’m sure. Would you care to come in?”
I exchanged a glance with Margaret. I said we hadn’t many minutes, there was a train to catch, we’d just hang about outside for a little while. That was true: and yet, kind as Mr Sperry was, he was a stranger, and I didn’t want to sit in childhood’s rooms with him.
Standing outside the car, Margaret and I smoked cigarettes. It would be bad to miss my father now. I kept looking along the road to the library, down the rise to the chapel. Then Margaret said: “I think that’s him, isn’t it?”
I was watching the other direction. She was pointing to a tiny figure who had just turned into sight, by the chapel railings.
She wasn’t certain. Her eyes were perfect: she could make out that small figure as I could not: but she couldn’t be certain because, owing to my father’s singularity, she had met him only twice.
Slowly, with small steps, the figure toddled on. Yes, it was my father. At last I saw him clearly. He was wearing a bowler hat, beneath which silky white hair flowed over his ears: his overcoat was much too long for him, and his trousers, as wide as an old-fashioned Russian’s, billowed over his boots. At each short step, a foot turned outwards at forty-five degrees. He was singing, quite loudly, to himself. He seemed to be looking at nothing in particular. He was only four or five houses away when he noticed us.
“Well, I declare,” he said.
Away from him, how long was it since I had heard that phrase? It was like listening at a college meeting when I was a young man: one heard usages, long since dead, such as this one of my father’s, stretching back three generations. “I declare,” he repeated, gazing not at me but at Margaret, for he kept his appreciative eye for a good-looking woman.
I explained that we had had to attend a university function the day before, and thought we would look him up. It would be easier if he had a telephone, I grumbled.
“Confound it,” said my father, speaking like a national figure who would not dare to have an entry in the directory, “I should never have a minute’s peace. Anyway–” he fumbled over Margaret’s name, which he had forgotten, but went on in triumph – “You tracked me down, didn’t you? Here you are as large as life and twice as natural.”
We followed him in, down the passage again, up the steps to the French window, saying that we would stay just a quarter-of-an-hour. In the dark odorous little room, my father switched on a light. To my mother, who had never seen it in that house or her own, electric light had been one of the symbols of a higher existence: and anyone who thought that proved her unspiritual didn’t know what the spirit was.
He offered to put the kettle on, and make us some tea. No, we didn’t want to drink tea at twelve o’clock in the morning. But he had to give us something. At last, with enormous gratification, he produced from a cupboard a bottle about one-third full of tawny port. “I’ve always liked a drop of port,” he told Margaret, and proceeded to tell her a story about going out with the waits at Christmas “when Lena was alive”, being invited into drawing-rooms and figuring as the hardened drinker of the party. That was one of the daydreams in which I didn’t believe. I looked out into the stone-flagged yard. There was a stump of a plum tree still surviving near his window. As far back as I could remember, that tree had never borne any fruit.
My father was talking with animation to Margaret. So far he hadn’t commented on the patch over my eye. Either he hadn’t noticed, or he thought that it was the kind of idiosyncrasy in which I was likely to indulge. I interrupted him: “As a matter of fact, I’ve got to have a minor operation tomorrow.”
“You’ve ruptured yourself have you?” he said brightly, as though that was the only physical mishap he could imagine happening to anyone. It had happened, apparently, to Mr Sperry.
“No,” I said with a faint irritation, tapping my patch. “I’ve got a detached retina.”
My father had never heard of the condition. In fact, he had only the haziest notion of where the retina was. Margaret, very patient with him, drew a diagram, which he studied with an innocent expression.
“I expect he’ll be all right, won’t he?” he asked simply, as though I wasn’t there.
“Of course he will. You’re not to worry.”
Not, I couldn’t help thinking, that he seemed overwhelmed by anxiety.
“I’ve never had any trouble with my eyes, you know,” he was ruminating. “I’ve got a lot to be thankful for, by gosh I have.” In fact he had kept all his senses into his late eighties. He surveyed me with an air of preternatural wisdom or perhaps of cunning.
“You ought to take care of your eyes, that you ought. I tell people, I must have told you once upon a time, be careful, you’ve only got one pair of eyes. That’s it. You’ve only got one pair of eyes.”
“At this moment,” I said, “I’ve got exactly half of that.”
This was a kind of grim comment in which Martin and I, and young Charles after us, occasionally indulged ourselves. My father was much too amiable a man to make such comments: but whenever he heard them – it had been true in my boyhood, it was just as true now – he appeared to regard them as the height of humour. So he gave out great peals of his surprisingly loud, harmonious laughter.
“Would you believe it?” he asked Margaret. “Would you believe it?” He kept making remarks about me, directed entirely at her, as though I were a vacuum inhabited only by myself. “He’s a big strong fellow, isn’t he? He’ll be all right, won’t he? He’s a young man, isn’t he?” (I was within a week of my fifty-eighth birthday). “I wish I were as young as he is.”
At that reflection, his face, usually so cheerful, became clouded. “I’m not so young as I used to be,” he turned his attention from Margaret to me. “I don’t mind for myself, I poddle along just as well as ever. But people are beginning to say things, you know.”
“What people?”
“I’m afraid they’re beginning to say things at the choir.”
I felt a stab of something like animal concern, much more as though he were my son than the other way about.
“What are they saying?”
“They keep telling me that they’re sure I can manage until Christmas. I don’t like the sound of that, Lewis, I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Do they know how old you are?”
“Oh no. I haven’t told them that.” He regarded me with the most extreme shrewdness. “If anyone asks, I just say I’m a year older than I was this time last year.”
He burst out: “They’re beginning to ask if the walk home isn’t too much for me!”
It wasn’t an unreasonable question, addressed to a very old man for whom the walk meant a couple of hours on winter nights. It wasn’t an unreasonable question: but I hoped that that was all. I said, I was ready to arrange for a car, each time he had to attend the choir. Anything to prevent them getting rid of him. Anything.
“That’s very good of you, Lewis,” he said. “You know, I don’t want to give it up just now.”
His tone, however, was flat: and his expression hadn’t regained its innocent liveliness. My father might be a simple old man, but he had – unlike that fine scholar and man of affairs, Arnold Shaw – a nose for danger.
A voice was saying: “You’re waking up now.”
It was a voice I had not heard before, from close beside me. I had awakened into the dark.
“What time is it?” It was myself speaking, but it sounded thick-tongued in the dark.
“Nearly three o’clock.”
“Three o’clock when?”
“Three o’clock in the afternoon, of course. Mr Mansel operated this morning.”
Time had no meaning. A day and a bit since that visit to my father, that had no meaning either.
“I’m very thirsty.”
“You can’t have much. You can have a sip.”
As I became conscious, I was aware of nothing but thirst. I was struggling up to drink, a hand pressed my shoulder. “You mustn’t move.” I felt glass against my lips, a trickle of liquid: no taste, perhaps a dry taste, a tingle in the throat: soda water?
“More.”
“Not yet.”
In the claustrophobic dark, I was just a thirsty organism. I tried to think: they must have dehydrated me pretty thoroughly. Processes, tests, injections, the evening before, that morning, as I lay immobilised, blinded: reduced to hebetude. This was worse, an order of magnitude worse, than any thirst after a drunken night. I didn’t want to imagine the taste of alcohol. I didn’t want to touch alcohol again. Lemon squashes: lime juice: all the soft drinks I had ever known: I wanted them round me as soon as I got out of here, dreaming up a liquid but teetotal elysium.
Through the afternoon I begged sip after sip. In time, though what time I had no idea, the nurse said that my wife had come to see me. I felt Margaret’s hand in mine. Her voice was asking after me.
“I don’t like this much,” I said.
She took it for granted that it wasn’t discomfort I was complaining of. Yesterday’s superstition, today’s animal dependence – those I was grinding against.
“It won’t be long,” she said.
“Too long.”
Her voice sounded richer than when I could see her: she told me Mansel had reported that the operation had gone according to plan. It would have been easier if he could have done it earlier in the week (“obstinate devil,” I said, glad to be angry against someone). It had taken nearly three hours – “One’s playing with millimeters,” he had said, with a technician’s pride. He wouldn’t know whether it had worked or not for about four days.
“Four days.”
“Never mind,” she said.
“That’s easy to say.”
“There isn’t much I can say, is there?” she replied. “Oh, they’re all convinced you’re remarkably well. That’s rather a comfort, isn’t it?”
I didn’t respond.
“At least,” she said, “it is to me.”
Patiently she read to me out of the day’s papers. At last she had to leave me, in the dark.
Yet, though my eyes were shut and blindfold, it wasn’t the familiar dark. It wasn’t like being in a hotel room on a black night, thick curtains drawn. It was more oppressive than that. I seemed to be having a sustained hallucination, as though deep scarlet tapestries, colour glowing, texture embossed and patterned, were pressing on both my eyes. I had to get used to it, until the nightly drug put me to sleep, just as I had to get used to my thoughts.
Early next morning, time was still deranged; when I switched on the bedside radio it was silent. I heard Mansel’s greeting and felt skilled fingers taking off the bandages, unshielding the eye. Five minutes of light. The lens, the large eye peering, the aseptic “It looks all right so far”, the skilled fingers taking the light away again. A few minutes of his shop: it was a relief to get back into someone’s working life. What hours did he keep? Bed about 10.0, up at 5.30, first calls, like this one, between 6.0 and 7.0. Training like a billiards player, he couldn’t afford to take more than one drink a night: three operations that morning, two more after lunch. He enjoyed his job as much as Francis Getliffe enjoyed his: he was as clever with his hands. Nearly all his techniques were new. Thirty years ago, he told me, they couldn’t have done anything for me at all.