For The Death Of Me (9 page)

It's amazing how much better you look when you're a super-resilient old bastard and you don't have a pipe down your throat and a tube up your knob. I'm not saying that Mac the Dentist looked as if he'd be on the golf course any time soon when we saw him at six that evening, but he was several hundred per cent improved on the version we'd seen in the morning.

We didn't crowd his small room . . . he wasn't given private treatment because of me but because he had health insurance to pick up the tab. Instead I let Mary and Ellie go in first, then followed when they'd had ten minutes.

‘You're here, are you?' he croaked. ‘I must have been fucking near the wooden waistcoat, then.' There was that old twinkle in his eye, one which, I feared for a while I'd never see again.

‘Wouldn't have missed it for the world,' I told him. ‘You ever give me another night like that and you'll wish you had pegged it.' I wanted to hug him, but since that was out of the question, I contented myself with sitting by his bedside, taking his hand and holding it against my face. ‘How are you feeling?' I asked.

‘Damn silly question, son, if you don't mind me saying so. At the moment it's as if somebody's shaved my chest with a chain-saw, but I'm sure it'll get worse in the days to come. I think I preferred it when I was dead.'

‘What did you score anyway?'

‘Net sixty-nine: I birdied the last two holes. It was probably holing that last putt that did it.'

‘That's not what the consultant told me. He said it could have happened at any point of any round you've ever played.'

‘You might never have been born in that case.' He looked up at me, suddenly solemn. ‘How's Mary handling it?'

‘She's fine now.'

‘Good, good. Losing her daughter and her husband within the space of a few years wouldn't have been much fun. Tell you something,' he whispered, ‘that I hope you'll appreciate. When I was in Never-never Land, I saw Jan. I remember it quite clearly. She was on the other side of a bridge: she waved to me and she called out, “Hello, Uncle Mac,” like she used to when she was a kid. I never could work out how Alex More could up and leave a daughter like her and a wife like Mary. Stupid bastard . . . not that I'm complaining, mind.'

‘You've done okay out of it. Now shut the fuck up and don't tire yourself out.'

I didn't really need to tell him that: he was so heavily sedated that it wasn't long before he drifted off, back into the curious, wacky, private world of the heroin medicated.

He was better next day, more alert, and as he had predicted, obviously less comfortable as the pain-killing dope was lessened.

The day after that, he was out of bed in a chair.

The third day after his op he was shuffling around in his slippers and we were able to have a longer talk, during which I persuaded him to agree to something I'd been pressing on him for a while. He could have retired years before, and become a full-time golfer. He hadn't, not because he needed extra years on his pension but because, as a dentist in a rural practice, he felt a loyalty to his patients. I'd tried the loyalty-to-Mary gambit often enough before, but he'd pointed out in his inimitable way that she was a patient too, and that my argument had just disappeared up its own arse.

This time, though, I had a stronger hand in the poker game between us. ‘You're going to have to get a locum in,' I said casually.

‘I know,' he admitted. ‘Don't bloody know how I'm going to go about it from here, though.'

‘It's done,' I told him. ‘A woman called Carol Salt starts tomorrow, that's Monday, if you've lost track of time. She lives in Crail, she's thirty-four, and she's looking to get back into practice now that her second child's going to nursery.'

‘How the hell did you . . .?'

‘I asked Conrad, a couple of days ago, to speak to the health board. They came up with her name straight away and I gave her a call. I saw her yesterday and we agreed terms. She's coming in on a locum basis initially, with a view to buying the practice.'

He drew me one of the longest looks I've ever had from him. ‘I just love it when you get authoritative,' he drawled drily. ‘Is that Dallas Salt's daughter?'

‘That's her; he practised in Dunfermline, didn't he?'

‘Aye, but he'd gone private before he retired. I heard that he offered to hand over to her but she turned him down.'

‘That's right. She told me that she believes in the NHS and wants to work in it.'

‘Good for her, then. But tell her to forget about buying the practice: if she wants it, once she's seen what fills my waiting room, she can have it. My patients aren't a commodity to be sold. She can pay me a fair rent for the surgery, but that'll be that.'

I grinned at him. He thought it was triumph, but it was pride: I'd known he'd say that, but I hadn't volunteered it to Carol.

‘Right,' he said, sipping from a glass of water,‘now you've sorted out my life, it's time you got back to your own.'

‘I know. Your surgeon's told me you're now officially on the convalescent list, so I've booked a plane back to Cannes on Tuesday.'

‘A plane.' He shook his head, then winced. ‘My son, hiring bloody planes. Why don't you just buy one?'

‘Not one, a fleet, actually; Susie and I have been thinking about buying an air-charter company. There's money to be made there.'

‘Get away with you. You don't know what to get up to next, you two.' He frowned. ‘Have you heard from Tom's mum lately?' The question took me by surprise but he's always been good at that. My dad's always had a fondness for Primavera; he didn't know the whole story of what happened last year, only that she was a bit silly and got banged up for deception, but even if he had, he wouldn't have shut her out. Like son, like father, I suppose.

‘Last Wednesday, as it happens. She came out to Monaco to visit him. She was as cut up as the rest of us when she heard what happened; she sends her love.'

‘You give her mine too, when Susie's not listening.' He winked. ‘You got the rest of the summer off?'

‘Yes, just like you. Once you're out of here, by the way, I want you and Mary, and Jonny and Colin, through at Loch Lomond. There's a pool to swim in and plenty of ground to walk around. It'll be good for your recovery.'

‘We'll see.'

‘You will, for sure. I've told Mary and Jonny to make sure it happens.'

‘Ah,' he said, ‘if my oldest grandchild's on-side, I'd better go along with it. He's grown into a formidable young man.'

‘That he has. He has a formidable girl-friend too; his mum's a bit worried about that, if you know what I mean.'

‘Tell her not to, will you? I remember when you and Jan turned sixteen, I decided that my prime responsibility as a father was to make damn sure you knew about the importance of contributing to the profits of London Rubber, then put my trust in your good sense. Christ, what else was I to do? Throw buckets of water over the pair of you?'

I smiled, although he didn't fully understand why. ‘That wouldn't have done a hell of a lot of good,' I confessed. ‘Don't worry, I've already had that discussion with Jonny. Told him to buy in bulk, to cut down the chances of being spotted in Boots by some loose-tongued friend of Ellie's or of his girl's mum. I reckoned that Harvey was a bit new on the scene to be expected to handle that one.'

‘Harvey will never be able to handle that one. Nice guy when you get to know him, but I don't think he was ever sixteen.' He paused. ‘You know, you're a bloody good uncle; make sure you're as good a dad.'

‘Susie says I'm doing all right.' I changed the subject. ‘Speaking of my brother-in-law, he's invited me to lunch tomorrow, in the New Club.'

‘That's a bit daring on his part. I didn't think they let actors in there. What's that about?'

‘I don't think it's about anything other than being friendly.'

‘Nah, son, Harvey being friendly is him taking you for a pint or, rather, you taking him but him insisting on buying. When he invited me to the New Club it was to ask me if it was okay to marry Ellie.'

I raised an eyebrow. ‘A major-occasion venue, is it? What could that be? You don't think my sister's up the duff, do you?'

‘What was that?' Ellie barked, from the doorway.

10

Happily she found the idea laughable. It was also inconceivable (a nice play on words, if I may say so): I had forgotten that after Colin's birth her marriage had been in such a sad and sorry state that she had decided to have herself sterilised. She had suggested to Alan Sinclair, her first husband, that he might have a vasectomy but he had chickened out.

When she developed an infection after the procedure and became pretty seriously ill, I offered to vasectomise him myself, with the garden shears. I'd never liked Alan, but that incident pretty much put an end to our relationship. When Ellie decided to bin the tosser, I couldn't have been happier.

Harvey January was a different sort altogether. My dad and I had raised four eyebrows between us when he first appeared on the scene. He's a lawyer, and not just any old lawyer but a Queen's Counsel, so we were concerned that she had picked on another work-obsessed, boring stuffed shirt just like Mr Sinclair. When we spent some time getting to know him, we found we were wrong. Harvey's actually a shy bloke for a lawyer. (I know, I didn't think it was possible, either.) But he's in no way boring, and his shirt doesn't have anything in it but himself; he wears tee-shirts on Sundays just like the rest of us. Learning to play golf, on my advice (or at last taking the game up: it will be a long learning curve for him) was the clincher. My dad takes the view that all golfers are inherently okay; I don't agree with that, but it got Harvey's feet well under Mac the Dentist's table. It worked with his potential step-sons too: Jonny takes a certain unspoken pleasure from giving a QC a shot a hole . . . including the par threes . . . and still taking a golf ball a round off him, while Colin's chuffed that he doesn't get any shots when they play. (That won't last long, though: Colin's an improver and he's passing him by.) To top it all off, he loves my sister and lavishes attention, and as much money as she will allow, upon her.

My dad was right about the New Club invitation, though: very strange that he should choose to take me, an actor, of all people, brother-in-law or not, to one of the most formal settings in Edinburgh. I'd been there once before, a guest at a reception organised by Clark Gow: no, that's not a person, it's an accountancy firm. They're our tax advisers, Susie's and mine, and one of their Scottish partners is a member. It's located in a reasonably modern, if formidably ugly, building on Princes Street, but that has nothing to do with the name. That goes back, I suppose, to the days in the eighteenth century when it really was new. Most of contemporary Edinburgh doesn't know that it's there, but that doesn't matter, because most of contemporary Edinburgh wouldn't aspire to membership. (To be honest, my impression is that if they did, they wouldn't have a cat's chance in hell.)

At the appointed hour, twelve thirty, I pressed the buzzer at the anonymous, unimpressive door (it cost me a quid, dropped in the can of the beggar over whom I had to step to reach it), announced myself as a guest of Mr January, and was admitted. (Actually it had cost me more than that quid. When I had left Monaco I'd travelled light, so I'd had to visit Edinburgh's other Harvey, Nichols, to pick up some appropriate clothing. It wouldn't have done for me to embarrass my brother-in-law.)

He was waiting for me in the foyer when I reached the top of the stair, in the three-piece outfit that is the advocate's uniform. He wore a striped shirt, his badge of professional rank. It's true: in that historic but strange institution, the Faculty of Advocates, junior counsel traditionally have worn plain shirts while seniors have always worn stripes. It's all changing, of course, as more and more women reach QC status. (Those who swore that such a thing would only happen over their dead bodies have all now passed on to that state. I wonder if they look up as the black high heels step over them: bet they do, the dirty old sods.)

He walked me through to the lounge for a pre-lunch drink, which in my case was a John Panton . . . ginger beer and lime with a dash of angostura, named after the famous golfer who's credited with inventing it. Harvey had a La Ina sherry, chilled.

We made small-talk for a while as we looked out of the picture window, across Princes Street to the castle, its skyline altered by the scaffolding stands that would seat the crowds at the following month's military tattoo. Harvey was as relieved as the rest of us at my dad's progress, and as pleased when I told him about Carol Salt's installation as locum, and about Mac the Dentist's agreement to become just plain Mac for the rest of his days.

I found myself asking him how he was settling into fatherhood or, at least, the step variety.

‘I'm astonished,' he confessed, ‘how much I'm enjoying it. There was never any prospect of children in my first marriage. I was too busy, and my wife had other priorities in her life. I know I've missed a large chunk of it, the early years, but at any stage it's great to watch children and become a part of their lives.'

‘Better not let Jonny hear you call him a child,' I advised him. ‘He thinks of himself as an adult, these days.'

‘He's starting to behave like it too. Between you and me, his mother's becoming a bit concerned that he should be properly prepared for manhood, and the responsibility that it brings with it: duty of care and all that, you know what I mean. With his girl-friend being seventeen, Ellen thinks I should . . .'