Nothing to Be Frightened Of (26 page)

Chapter 47

I saw my father for the last time on 17 January 1992, thirteen days before his death, at a hospital in Witney, some twenty minutes’ drive from where my parents lived. I had agreed with my mother that we should visit him separately that week: she would go on the Monday and Wednesday, I on the Friday, she on the Sunday. So the plan was for me to drive down from London, have lunch with her, go and see Dad in the afternoon, then drive back to town. But when I got home (as I continued to call my parents’ house long after I had a home of my own), my mother had gone back on the arrangement. It was something to do with laundry, and also fog, but mainly it was to do with being absolutely bloody typical of my mother. In all my adult life I can’t remember a single occasion—apart from that set-up literary drive to the shops—when my father and I were alone together for a stretch of time. My mother, even when out of the room, was always there. I doubt it was fear of being talked about behind her back (in any case, she was the last topic I would have wanted to discuss with my father); it was more that no event in the house, or outside it, was validated without her presence. And so she was always there.

When we got to the hospital, my mother did something—again entirely typical—which made me cringe at the time, and rage ever since. As we approached my father’s room, she said she would go in first. I assumed this was to check that he was “decent,” or for some other unspecified wifely purpose. But no. She explained that she hadn’t told Dad I’d be coming that day (why not? control,
control
—of information, if nothing else) and that it would be a nice surprise. So in she went. I hung back, but could see Dad slumped in his chair, head on chest. She kissed him and said, “Raise your head.” And then, “Look who I’ve brought.” Not, “Look who’s come to see you,” but “Look who
I’ve brought.
” We stayed about half an hour, and my father and I had two shared minutes about an FA Cup match (Leeds o, Manchester United 1—a Mark Hughes goal) we’d both seen on television. Otherwise, it was like the previous forty-six years of my life: my mother always present, nattering, organizing, fussing, controlling, and my relationship with my father reduced to an occasional wink or glance.

The first thing she said to him in my presence that afternoon was, “You look better than you did when I last came, you looked terrible then, terrible.” Next she asked him, “What have you been doing?” which seemed a pretty daft question to me—and to my father, who ignored it. She followed this with subsidiaries about TV watching and newspaper reading. But something had been ignited in my father, and five minutes later, exasperated—and doubly so by his impaired speech—he gave her his reply. “You keep asking me what I’ve been doing.
Nothing.
” It was uttered with a terrible mixture of frustration and despair (“The word that is the most true, the most exact, the most filled with meaning, is the word ‘Nothing.’”). My mother chose to ignore the remark, as if Dad had lapsed into bad manners.

When we left, I shook his hand as I always did, and put my other hand on his shoulder. As he said goodbye, twice, his voice cracked into an eerie alto croak, which I took for some laryngeal malfunction. Later, I wondered if he knew, or strongly suspected, that he would never see his younger son again. In all my remembered life, he never told me that he loved me; nor did I reply in kind. After his death, my mother told me that he was “very proud” of his sons; but this, like much else, had to be osmotically deduced. She also said, to my surprise, that he was “a bit of a loner,” adding that his friends had become her friends, and that by the end she was closer to them than he was. I do not know if this was true, or a monstrous piece of self-importance.

A couple of years before his death, my father asked if I had a copy of Saint-Simon’s
Mémoires
. I did—a rather poncey, twenty-volume edition, bound in scarlet leather, which I had never opened. I brought him the first volume, which he read in a spine-breaking manner; and then, on subsequent visits, as requested, the following ones. Sitting in his wheelchair, while cooking duties briefly spared us my mother’s presence, he would recount some piece of cut-throat politicking from the court of Louis XIV. At a certain point in his final decline, another stroke skewed some of his intellectual faculties: my mother told me that she had three times found him in the bathroom trying to pee into his electric razor. But he carried on with Saint-Simon, and when he died, he was in the middle of volume sixteen. A red silk bookmark still shows me the last page he read.

According to his death certificate, my father died of a) stroke; b) heart trouble; and c) abscess on the lung. But these were the things he was treated for in the last eight weeks of his life (and the time before that), rather than what he died of. He died—in unmedical terms—of being exhausted and giving up hope. And “giving up hope” isn’t a moral judgement on my part. Or rather, it is, and an admiring one: his was the correct response of an intelligent man to an irrecoverable situation. My mother said she was glad I hadn’t seen him towards the very end: he was shrunken, had stopped eating and drinking, and didn’t speak. Though on her final visit, when asked if he knew who she was, he had replied with what were perhaps his last words: “I think you’re my wife.”

Chapter 48

On the day my father died, my sister-in-law, calling from France, insisted that my mother not be left alone in the house that night. Others urged the same, and advised me to get some sleeping pills (for sleep, that is, not suicide or murder). When I arrived—with some reluctance—my mother was robustly derisive: “I’ve been alone in the house every night for eight weeks,” she said. “What’s different now? Do they think I’m going to . . .” She stopped, looking for the end of her sentence. I suggested, “. . . top myself?” She accepted the words: “Do they think I’m going to top myself, or burst into tears, or do something stupid like that?” She then expressed a lively contempt for Irish funerals: for the number of mourners, the public wailing, and the widow being supported. (She had never been to Ireland, let alone to a funeral there.) “Do they think I’ll have to have somebody to hold me up?” she asked scornfully. But when the undertaker came to discuss her requirements—the simplest coffin, just a spray of roses, with no ribbon and absolutely no cellophane—she interrupted him at one point to say, “Don’t think I grieve any the less for him because . . .” This time, her sentence didn’t need completing.

In widowhood, she said to me, “I’ve had the best of life.” There would have been no point in the politeness of contradiction, of offering her a “Yes, but.” Some years before, she had said to me, in Dad’s presence, “Of course, your father’s always preferred dogs to humans,” to which my father, challenged, gave a sort of confirming nod which I took—perhaps wrongly—as a strike against her. (I also reflected that, despite knowing this, she would not have another dog in the forty or so years since the disappearance of
Maxim: le chien.
) And many, many years before that, when I was an adolescent, she said, “If I had my time again, I’d paddle my own canoe,” which I then took merely as a strike against my father, failing to consider that any such rescheduled paddling would have obliterated her children as well. Perhaps I am putting together quotes to which I am giving false coherence. And the fact that my mother did not die of grief, but was left for five years in her own canoe when least equipped to paddle it, does not signify either.

Some months after my father’s death, I was talking to my mother on the phone. I told her that friends were coming to supper, and it emerged that I was cooking one course and my wife the other. With something as close to wistfulness in her voice as I had ever heard, she said, “How nice it must be for the two of you to cook.” And then, adopting a much more typical tone, “I couldn’t even trust your father to lay the table.” “Really?” “No, he’d throw things down any old how. Just like his mother.” His mother! My father’s mother had died nearly half a century previously, while Dad was in India during the war. Granny Barnes was rarely mentioned in our household; my mother’s family, alive or dead, had primacy. “Oh,” I said, trying to keep the intense curiosity from my voice. “Was she like that?” “Yes,” my mother replied, disinterring a fifty-year-old snobbery, “she used to lay the knives the wrong way round.”

I imagine my brother’s mental life proceeding in a sequence of discrete and interconnected thoughts, whereas mine lollops from anecdote to anecdote. But then, he is a philosopher and I am a novelist, and even the most intricately structured novel must give the appearance of lolloping. Life lollops. And these anecdotes of mine should be treated with suspicion because they come from me. Another anecdotalist, recording my parents’ last years, might comment on how devotedly and efficiently my mother looked after my father, how coping with him wore her out, but how impressively she still managed the house and the garden all that time. And this would be true too, even if I could not help noticing a grammatical change in the way she ran the garden. During the final months Dad was in hospital, the tomatoes, the beans, and everything else in greenhouse and ground, were renamed “my tomatoes,” “my beans,” and so on, as if Dad had been dispossessed of them even before he was dead.

That other anecdotalist might complain how unfair this son is on his entirely crime-free mother by writing a short story in which he turns her into a battering wife. (Renard discovered an edition of
Poil de Carotte
being passed round Chitry-les-Mines with the anonymous inscription: “Copy found by chance in a bookshop. A book in which he speaks ill of his mother in order to take revenge on her.”) Further, how indecent it is for a son to describe his father’s physical decline; how this contradicts the affection he claims to feel; and how the son can only face unpleasant truths by looking for something undignified or risible, like the story of a confused old man trying to pee into his electric razor. And some of this might be true too. Though the business with the electric razor is more complicated, and I would like to defend my father’s behaviour here as almost rational. Throughout his life, he had shaved with razor and brush, the lather coming over the decades from bowl, stick, tube, and can. My mother never liked the mess he made in the basin—“Mucky pup” being the term of disapproval in our dogless household—so when electric razors came in, she kept trying to persuade Dad to get one. He always refused: this was one territory where he would not be ruled. I remember, during one of his first spells in hospital, my mother and I arriving to catch him in hopeless mid-shave: attempting, with weakened wrist, blunt blade, and inadequate foam, to spruce himself up for our visit. But at some point in his closing years, her campaign must have succeeded—perhaps because his legs failed and he could no longer stand at the basin. So I can imagine his resentment at this electric razor (which I also imagine her buying). It must have seemed both a reminder of his lost physique, and proof of a final defeat in a lengthy marital argument. Why would you not want to pee into it?

“I think you’re my wife.” Yes, remaining in character: this we hope for, this we cling to, as we look ahead to everything collapsing. So—and this has been a long way round to an answer—I doubt that when my time comes I shall look for the theoretical comfort of an illusion farewelling an illusion, a chance bundle unbundling itself. I shall want to remain in what I shall obstinately think of as my character. Francis Steegmuller, who had attended Stravinsky’s funeral in Venice, died at the same age as the composer. In the last weeks of his life, he asked his wife, the novelist Shirley Hazzard, how old he was. She told him he was eighty-eight. “Oh God,” he replied. “Eighty-eight. Did I know about this?” That sounds exactly like him—the “did” so different from a “do.”

Chapter 49