Deaf Sentence (25 page)

Before we leave I knock on the front door of the adjoining semi. The Barkers are not the most charismatic couple in the world but I rely on their goodwill to keep an eye on Dad and to phone me if they have any cause for concern. Mrs Barker opens the door. ‘Oh hallo!’ she says in a high-pitched whine, and giggles. It is a nervous giggle which punctuates all her speech.‘How’s your Dad?’The bulky shape of Mr Barker looms in the hall behind her, in shirtsleeves and braces, a cordless power drill held like a weapon in his hand. I tell them that I’m taking Dad to spend Christmas with us (‘Oh, that’ll be nice for him, won’t it?’ - giggle), and that I’d be grateful if they would keep an eye on the house. ‘There’s a leaking gutter on the side of the roof that needs attention,’ says Mr Barker.‘Is there? Thanks for telling me,’ I say. ‘I’ll get it seen to after he comes back.’ The Barkers’ house is in immaculate condition, its upkeep being Mr Barker’s chief occupation in retirement, and I know that the relatively scruffy appearance of Dad’s is a sore point. ‘Well, we’d better get going,’ I say. ‘Have a nice Christmas.’ ‘Yes, same to you!’ Mrs Barker giggles. Her spouse returns to whatever DIY operation I interrupted, but so barren of incident is Mrs Barker’s life that she stands at the door hugging herself against the cold, and watches as I escort Dad out of the house and settle him in the front seat of the car. She simpers and waves to us as we drive away.

 

 

 

The traffic in central London was even worse on the way back, and we had to stop at the first service station on the M1 for a late lunch, with the larger part of the journey still before us. The fog slowed the traffic, there were frequent hold-ups on the motorway, and I began to see that we wouldn’t reach home until well into the evening. Dad was garrulous at first, advising me on the route across London (‘
Don’t go through Camberwell and Victoria whatever you do, it’s the land of a thousand traffic lights
’), criticising other motorists’ driving (
‘Did you see that idiot? Not even a signal! Diabolical!’
), asking me to convert the price of petrol by the litre displayed at the garages we pass into gallons (
‘What, four quid a gallon? You must be joking!’
), recalling epic car journeys to play at hunt balls in remote rural venues: ‘
Hills? You’ve never seen hills like they have in Wales. The whole country is hills. There was the time Archie Silver - he was a bass player - dead now - he had five of us in his old Wolseley - all the instruments in a trailer - going down this hill like the side of a mountain and the brakes failed . . .’
Surprisingly, he didn’t seem worried by the fog. I think he attributed it to the cataract in his left eye. After lunch he fell asleep and I drove on in blessed silence. But when he woke up he wanted to pee. I had just passed a service station, and the next one was at least thirty minutes away. ‘Did you put that bottle in the car?’ he said, groping under his seat. ‘What bottle?’ I said, with a sinking feeling. I had forgotten all about my suggestion weeks ago that he should have a bottle with him for such an emergency. ‘The milk bottle, in a brown paper bag, in the hall by the front door. I told you to put it under my seat, when you took out my things.’ ‘I didn’t hear you, Dad,’ I said. I had driven to London without wearing my hearing aid and didn’t insert it until several minutes after my arrival, during which time he must have mentioned the bottle. Or possibly he mentioned the bottle later, when I was wearing my hearing aid, but in a low voice because he was embarrassed, or when I had my back turned to him, or when my mind was on something else and I wasn’t paying attention to him.‘Oh, well done, son,’ he said bitterly. I felt bad.

‘I could stop on the hard shoulder,’ I said. ‘You’re not supposed to, but if it’s an emergency . . .’ ‘Where would I go, then?’ he demanded.‘Climb over a barbed-wire fence into a field, in the dark?’ ‘No, of course not.You could pee up against the back wheel of the car, like a cab-driver - they’re allowed to by law, you know.’ He ignored this attempt to lighten the tone of the conversation. ‘What, with all these cars picking me out in their headlights? No thanks.’ In fact, I was glad he didn’t want to stop because it would have been dangerous: it was getting dark and visibility was poor. ‘What will you do, then?’ ‘I’ll hang on till the next place,’ he said grimly.

He really did very well. It was only as we were crossing the car park to get to the brightly lit complex of shops and cafés that he couldn’t control his bladder any longer. ‘Oh Jesus Christ!’ he said, doubling up and clutching his groin. ‘I’m sopping wet.’ ‘All right, Dad. Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Don’t
worry
!’ he exclaimed. ‘What am I going to do? Sit in the car in a pair of stinking wet trousers for the rest of the journey?’ I quickly conceived a plan. ‘We’ll go to the Gents. You go in a cubicle and take your trousers off, give them to me under the door and stay there while I go back to the car and get another pair of trousers from your case - you did bring another pair, didn’t you? Good. Then I’ll push them under the door, and you can change into them. All right?’

So that’s what we did. It worked well enough, except that I forgot to bring a pair of dry underpants as well as trousers from the car. I asked him if he wanted me to go back and fetch a pair. ‘Well, you don’t expect me to sit in that car for Gawd knows how long in trousers without pants, do you?’ he demanded through the cubicle door. ‘They’re pure wool you know, these trousers. They’ll chafe if I don’t have pants.’ This conversation, which had to be conducted at high volume and with much repetition through the door of the WC, gave considerable entertainment to other patrons of the Gents. So back I went to the car to rummage in his case for a pair of his droopy trunk-style underpants, and returned to the Gents with them. While he was changing I rinsed out the wet pants in a handbasin and dried them under a hot-air hand dryer. I received some curious looks as I performed this task, but I was beyond shame or embarrassment by this time, or perhaps it would be truer to say that I accepted it as a just punishment for being remiss over the bottle.

It’s been a long, draining day, the only compensation being that Dad duty got me out of some Christmas duties. Marcia helped Fred with the big Christmas shopping mission to Sainsbury’s in the morning, a chore I always detest: the gridlock of overloaded trolleys in the aisles, the long slow-moving queues at the checkouts, everybody behaving more like looters than shoppers, scrabbling for the best produce (last Christmas I actually saw a woman pinch the last box of organic mushrooms in the store from somebody else’s trolley while their back was turned). I was very glad to be spared all that. And I didn’t have to meet Fred’s mother, who came up from her retirement flat in Cheltenham by train, at the station - Fred did so herself, Jakki having generously volunteered to man, or woman, the shop, since she has no family to cater for.

When Dad and I arrived home at about seven Fred was decorating the big Christmas tree in the lounge, watched and advised by her mother, who was seated in an upright armchair by the fire in the Britannia pose she favours: back straight, head up, knees slightly apart under her full skirt, holding the
Daily Telegraph
she had brought with her like a shield. There was already a small heap of wrapped presents under the tree. The little crib with carved olive-wood Nativity figures bought in Bethlehem and presented by Fred’s parents years ago was in place on the bookshelves. Carol music filtered from the discreetly placed speakers. It was a pleasant scene, almost as if staged to make an impression. I have to admit that Fred does Christmas very well. But almost at once there was a little friction between us: she asked me if I would help her drape the coloured lights around the tree, and I said I was too tired and couldn’t it wait till tomorrow, so with an impatient sigh she did it herself while I got myself and Dad a drink, and the lights didn’t come on, and Fred got irritable, and in the end I had to lay the flex out on the floor and check that all the fragile little bulbs were screwed tightly into their sockets before I found the culprit which was breaking the circuit. I hope this is not a foretaste of contretemps to come. The trouble is that as soon as there is the slightest disagreement between Fred and me, our respective parents instinctively line up behind their offspring, and so the friction factor is squared. Dad urged me to finish my drink before attending to the lights and Fred’s mother mentioned that her late husband always used to regard the Christmas tree lights as his special responsibility. Mr Fairfax died five years ago.

Mrs Cecilia Magdalene Fairfax, to give her name in full, is a tall vigorous seventy-seven-year-old widow with an enormous bust which gives me some idea of how Fred might look at the same age if she hadn’t had her breast-reduction operation (she never told her mother about this, pretending that she had ‘dieted’). Cecilia has absolutely nothing in common with Dad and sometimes looks at him with a kind of horrified distaste, like a lady of the manor who finds that the under-gardener has unaccountably been invited into her drawing room by a member of the family and cannot therefore be ejected. He for his part regards her as a ‘stiff old bird’ whom it is his duty to cheer up with quips and anecdotes. He calls her ‘Celia’. When she corrected him once, he said ‘Cecilia’ was one syllable too many for an old man with false teeth. ‘So I call you “Celia” for short. You don’t mind, do you?’ She replied frostily, ‘If you must. But of course they are two quite different names. Cecilia was a virgin martyr of the Early Church. Celia was an ordinary Roman name, a pagan name.’ I think she would really prefer if he called her ‘Mrs Fairfax’. She invariably addresses him as ‘Mr Bates’, in spite of repeated invitations to call him ‘Harry’.

 

 

 

24
^th
December
. The house is filling up. Giles, Fred’s second child, and his wife Nicola arrived this afternoon, with their infant son, Basil, aged nine months, having driven up this afternoon from Hertfordshire in their black BMW 4x4, a huge high vehicle recently acquired in exchange for a Porsche to provide maximum protection for their precious offspring. It has almost opaque tinted windows to foil potential kidnappers, and a sticker on the rear window, ‘
Baby On Board
’, appealing to the consciences of drivers who might be intent on ramming them from behind. Of Fred’s three children Giles is the most prosperous. Andrew paid for him to attend Downside, and after university he followed his father’s footsteps into the City and a job in a merchant bank. Today he wears the expression of a man who has just been given a very satisfactory Christmas bonus and can barely restrain himself from telling you how much it was. Nicola is a commercial lawyer, but has decided to take four years out of her career to have two babies - the figures are specified precisely, like a balance sheet. One feels sure the babies will balance too, a boy and a girl. She is good-looking in a featureless sort of way, nicely dressed, pleasantly spoken and rather dull.

Fred’s youngest son, Ben, and his girlfriend Maxine arrived in the middle of the evening, later than expected, delayed not so much by the fog as by a festive lunchtime party at the premises of the TV production company he works for, ‘after which we had to chill out for a few hours in case we got nicked on the motorway’. I have always found Ben the most likeable of Fred’s children: a cheerful, relaxed, extrovert young man who declined his father’s offer to send him to Downside like his brother and opted for a local state school. He works in some capacity on one of those television programmes about buying and selling or swapping or renovating or redecorating houses to which British viewers seem to be addicted, there are so many of them on every channel. He describes the genre dismissively as ‘property porn’, but says it’s a good way to learn the ropes of documentary-making. Maxine, his partner for the past two years, is a TV make-up artist, pretty, leggy and friendly, with an estuary accent and hardly an idea in her head that isn’t connected with TV, fashion and cosmetics. She makes Ben take her to trashy horror films because she wants to see the make-up.The unspoken consensus of Fred’s family is that she is rather common, and Cecilia is painfully divided between a fear that Ben will marry her and a moral disapproval of cohabitation. But Maxine gets on well with Dad, who is rather smitten with her, and has bought her his biggest box of chocolates.

Fred, her mother, Giles, Ben and Maxine have gone off to Midnight Mass (pronounced ‘maass’ by the Fairfax family) which begins at ten-thirty with a carol service. Ben is not a practising Catholic, Giles only a nominal one, and Maxine doesn’t practise anything except make-up, but they accompany Fred and her mother in a spirit of seasonal solidarity. In the past I have sometimes gone with them, since it is just about the only religious service I positively enjoy, the carol singing bit anyway, but I didn’t like to leave Nicola, who has retired to bed with her baby, responsible for Dad. He has in fact gone to bed too, but last night I found him wandering about on the landing in his pyjamas looking for the bathroom in a dazed and confused state, with an enamel jug in his hand which I had given him to pee in if he was taken short, having somehow got it into his head that he had to empty the jug immediately in the bathroom, due no doubt to the antihistamine tablets which his doctor gives him as sleeping pills - they are safe but fuddle his old brain. I didn’t think Nicola would know what to do if she ran into him on the landing in similar circumstances.