Accidents in the Home (10 page)

—I have no idea what you're talking about, he would throw out at her exasperatedly, his reproach cold and sharp in his still perfect enunciation.

Euan wasn't senile; he still had his brilliant mind; he was extraordinary considering he was almost ninety years old. But it was as though he saved his brilliance for deeper things now and had cut loose from some of the clutter she had to pester him with: appointments at the eye hospital or at the doctor's, money matters, problems with his housekeeper, Elaine.

What happened to Marian that morning was that when she arrived at her usual time (she always went on Saturdays and Sundays to do his food and see everything was all right because Elaine didn't work on weekends), the front door wasn't double-locked and the alarm system wasn't switched on. All this really meant was that Euan must have opened the door already that morning, probably to give his usual handful of dried catfood to a visiting cat, and hadn't bothered to redo it all when he went back inside because he knew she was coming. But for some strange reason Marian completely and illogically misinterpreted these signs; she thought they meant her father had dressed himself and gone out before she arrived for a walk in the beautiful morning.

This was strange and illogical not only because if he had gone out for a walk he could perfectly well have double-locked the door behind him and set the alarm, but because for—how long, eighteen months? two years? three years? one forgot the timings of these stages of regress as one forgot the forward progress of one's babies—for some time now Euan had not been able to walk out into the streets unaided. He could get about the flat, using the route around chair backs and pieces of furniture that Marian and Elaine had designed for him and were careful not to disturb; he could even, with the help of his walker, which he hated, get himself out into his garden on a nice afternoon, as long as they had put his chair ready for him and beside it on a little stool his straw boater and his plaid blanket and his thick dark glasses against the glare. Then the neighborhood cats he gave food to came and repaid him with sinuous and uninvolving cat love. But he was too frail to walk out in the streets alone anymore; his legs were too unreliable ever since a fall a couple of winters ago when he'd cracked his pelvis, and he was prone to spells of dizziness (he had classes for this too, at the hospital, that she had had to organize for him).

So it was strange that without in the least examining her idea or its probability, but quite convinced that her father had gone off on a walk, Marian on that fine Saturday morning went on into the flat and began clearing up his breakfast things, running hot water into the sink for the washing up, collecting his nighttime glass from the bedroom, putting his porridge bowl to soak (Elaine would make porridge the night before and had taught him how to heat it in the microwave). She watered the plants on the kitchen windowsill, singing. She wouldn't have sung if she'd thought he was there; like her daughter Tamsin he had perfect pitch, and they both complained about her tunelessness and her taste in music. She was singing a song whose first line was “Do you know the way to San Jose?”: she couldn't remember whose song it was. It dated her, anyway. She had grown up listening to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, but it seemed to be these poppy middle-of-the-road tunes that had seeped in to the deepest layers of her awareness and that made her feel happy now.

The fine day seemed to fill the flat with an unusual light—she usually thought of it as a dark place, dark with his books, dark with the condensed shadow of his intelligence folded in upon itself. It was a University flat; they had always had a University house, and he had moved to this flat twenty years ago when Marian's mother died. Like the University it was Victorian gothic, with pointed casement windows and deep stone sills, heavy doors that shut with the deep clunk of finality, and an ancient vociferous and effective heating system. Euan said—to visitors, he said—that it was like waking up inside one of Ruskin's less temperate dreams. To Marian he simply said it was damp and depressing. In her irrational fit she was glad as she washed his breakfast things to think that this morning he had got into the open air, out among all the summer gardens blooming with flowers she had seen on her way over. This thought must have developed in her mind subliminally; if it had bubbled up into full consciousness then she would have waked and known it was not possible.

Afterward, when she had come out of the fit and was wondering how she had made such a puzzling mistake, she realized that she had felt more than simple gladness at his getting out into the fine day. She had taken the lightness of his step out into the morning so early and spontaneously for a sign, a coded sign from him that she could hang onto, however he tried to deny it: a sign of hope and of his openness still, after all, to pleasure. What easier gesture of acquiescence than to walk out impromptu into a new day? The sky was pale veiled blue, and the walls of the back area outside the kitchen window were grown over with white and pink valerian. His going out was like a revelation of easy possibilities they had both been tangling and obfuscating; they had both between them been making everything so difficult and so bitter.

And afterward when she was thinking about it she also wondered if she hadn't, in fact, been imagining his death. Her fantasy of him released to light and flowers was like a benign fantasy-death, as if she had found a magic bypass around pain and ugliness and been able to imagine them released from one another, from father and daughter, with a lightness and ease angels might have at parting, not human beings.

That was all it was. It was nothing, really; when Marian tried to tell Tamsin, later, it wasn't even a story, just a moment's blip in consciousness whose power, like the power of dreams, couldn't be carried back into ordinary life. At some point after she tipped the washing up water away she had heard a sound from the study—a book slammed shut, a chair thrust impatiently back—that in an instant recalled her to herself and filled the flat's emptiness with him and shriveled into nonsense her fantasy of light.

It wouldn't have seemed strange to Euan that Marian hadn't greeted him as soon as she came in the flat; if he was busy she often didn't bother him. She stopped singing as soon as she realized he was there: probably it was because of the singing that the book was slammed shut. Euan's need for silence while he was working was one of the things he and Elaine fought over most bitterly. He was adamant that with both doors shut and the volume down he could still hear her radio in the kitchen; and indeed, when they both solemnly insisted that this be put to the test, it seemed he could, even though he often failed to hear other much louder noises. Elaine joked skeptically about his selective deafness, but Marian believed in it. It would have something to do with his perfect pitch; if he suspected that a false note was sounding somewhere around him, some responsive strained tautness of antipathy in him would thrum and vibrate to it, however faint it was. He couldn't help it.

Marian made coffee and took a cup in to him. He was writing in the chair she had had made for him, with the sloping desk fitted across its arms, the angle-poise light aimed at his page from behind his shoulder, his magnifying glass for small print at his left hand, blanket across his knees. Books were piled up, some open, some stuffed with paper markers, on the tables to either side of him. She knew what he was working on; it was a piece about the relations of Dostoevski's thought to Russian Orthodox theology. Some of the books were in Cyrillic script. Marian could always tell by the way he sat or looked up at her whether it was going well or badly. When she and her brother were children, her mother used to bring reports from the study, as if his moods were a weather on which they all depended: if he was stuck, she and Francis might be sent off to the cinema for the afternoon. Her father was a big man, he had had the physique—bulky shoulders and thick neck—of a statesman or an actor or a laborer, not a man of letters. His face had always been complex and unfinished, with lowering brows and long rugged cheek planes; now it was pouched, and blotched with purple. The fine convolutions of inner life and expression had always translated themselves in him into the stubbornnesses and martyrdoms of the flesh. Today he brooded over his page without lifting his head; that might have been her singing.

—It's a lovely day, Daddy.

—Is it?

—Would you like to sit outside?

—No.

—But you know it cheers you up.

—Nothing makes me feel lower than being cheered up.

Setting the coffee down on its mat on the side table, she put her arm around his shoulders.

—Is it Saturday? he asked, which was supposed to mean that he wished it were Elaine and not she who had brought his coffee.

She kissed his head, its baldness blotched with brown age blemishes, flaky with dry skin. He twisted with irritation and resentment under her kiss, but she told herself that at some deeper level he was fed by it, kept alive, reminded that he was loved. Marian was not, by nature, a kisser or a toucher, but her mother had always done it and she had taken on the part when her mother died. Possibly what she had taken on was not simply the innocent tending it looked like. Possibly it was instead a part of the subtle fight of the female with the male, of female insistent sweetness against male bitterness, female blithe confidence against male doubt.

When they were children and their mother came back from the study with her reports, their attitude had been complicated. Everything arranged itself around the father and his work; there was no question about that. They were frightened if he was angry, proud when he did well and was acclaimed. But there was also a subtle kind of triumph in their subjection. They thought it was funny, his moodiness, his weakness, his need for them to surround him with consideration. It was a game they played with their mother, exaggerating their anxieties about him as if he were a ghoul or a troll; and weren't they stronger, she and they, because they didn't need anything so complicated or contingent? When they went off to the cinema or the shops, leaving him to his suffering over books written in languages they didn't understand, didn't they have a kind of swagger, because they could manage ordinary things?

Of course, all the while, it might have been they who suffered, not knowing it, while he pleased himself. Feminists would have said so, and Marian surely was one. Complication upon complication.

Marian didn't like to feel she was playing a part, any longer, in that complicated war of males against females. She had thought she had finished with that forever when her marriage finished: long, long ago. Her marriage—and far behind that, her childhood—seemed ages off, eras ago: like history. Hadn't everything in the world, and especially the things to do with men and women, changed out of all recognition since then? And hadn't she, Marian, proved it by spending her mostly single life as an independent woman and a teacher?

That morning, after the strange episode of her misinterpretation, the strange half hour or so of light and flowers, she was stricken with disappointment. She made Euan's bed and tidied his bedroom and prepared his trays of lunch and supper under a cloud of sadness and fatalism, as if something precious had been shown to her and lost.

*   *   *

THERE WAS
a problem with money. Marian's mother had inherited some property; the income from this property was never spent after Marian and her brother left home; it all went into an investment account. Now Euan had withdrawn some of these savings in cash, to avoid the family's paying tax on them after he was dead; he really had very little interest in money, but he liked to imagine himself as a man of the world, cunning and knowing when it came to material things. He kept the money hidden, despite all Marian's pleadings and warnings, in a space under the floor in the airing cupboard that no one was supposed to know about except Marian and Francis, in Toronto. The last time Marian fetched Euan some money from the hiding place, she discovered that two hundred pounds were missing. She didn't tell Euan, but crossed out in his little notebook the amount that there should have been and deducted what she had just taken out, as if nothing were wrong.

At home she confided in Tamsin over supper. Tamsin was her younger daughter, who lived at home with Marian and was unnervingly domesticated. Tamsin had had a very wild youth, which had culminated five years before in a dreadful crisis, with a stillborn baby and boyfriend who had accidentally overdosed and died. She had shaved her head, in those days, and had her nose and tongue pierced; but now, at twenty-six, she had her hair cut neatly short, like a boy's, and saved her wages to buy nice designer clothes. She worked in an office for an agency selling theater and concert tickets and appalled her father, who had in his youth handed out leaflets outside factories for the Communist Party, by announcing that she had voted Conservative at the last election (the one when nobody else did). She also sang with the city choral society, went out nightclubbing occasionally with the girls from the office, and, so far as Marian could tell, slept alone every night in her neat narrow bed.

—Nobody knows where this wretched money is hidden except me and Francis and Daddy, said Marian.

—And me, said Tamsin.

—You don't know.

—I guessed.

—The most likely thing is Daddy's taken some of it out himself and just forgotten to tell me. But two hundred? What for? And I think he'd find it quite difficult; you really have to get down on your hands and knees. Then there was the man who came to repair the central heating boiler a few weeks ago. Perhaps he had to look around under the floor for pipes, and he found it. But then why only take two hundred, not all of it?

—Maybe to mislead you, so that it wasn't obvious.

—And anyway, I'm sure it wasn't him. This is what's so horrible about the whole thing. He seemed a nice man, we've had him before, and he'd never do anything so stupid, obviously incriminating himself. He was only mending the thermostat, why would he need to look for pipes? Probably the whole thing's just a mistake: I miscounted, or we miscounted right in the beginning, or perhaps the building society made a mistake in the first place, and we checked carelessly.