Romany and Tom (10 page)

‘Yes.’

‘I’d put his name on it if I were you. It’s a nice one. They tend to go walkabout. Especially the nice ones.’ She handed me some Tipp-Ex.

I painted my dad’s name on the frame of the wheelchair with the little white brush. I finished and pushed it into the corner next to the others, where they all looked huddled together like numbered sheep in a pen.

As I put the top back on the Tipp-Ex, it was as though a door was closing.

I walked back to the desk, signed out and left.

My footsteps were muted by soft cushiony oatmeal carpet tiles. The air felt fresh and conditioned. There were star-gazer lilies in a vase on the ledge: the smell of Beverly Hills hotels. Wide windows spread the lush exhaling treetops of Regent’s Park and Primrose Hill out before me. There’s the zoo; I love the aviary. The city was beyond. If I’m ever ill again, let me be ill in a room like this. It’s like a soft shot of proper painkiller. An opiate. No harm can surely come to people in rooms like this. We are in a hidden space at the top of a secluded world: the film set of the ultimate BUPA pamphlet. I turned from the window and ran my fingers over the edges of the crisp freshly laundered bedlinen and cast my eye across the sleek white purring pristine equipment.

In the bed my mum was propped up. Muzzy. Relaxed. I wondered what she made of it. Maybe she thought this was what London was like these days. Maybe she thought this was just the way I did things. I was conscious of the imaginary weight of her and my dad in my arms for a moment. I just hoped the small health insurance policy she had taken out a few years ago using some of her savings (‘It was Toby’s idea’) was going to cover a hysterectomy at the luxurious private Wellington Hospital in the way her doctor had confidently predicted.

My dad was looking at her. He had been given a cup of coffee in some fine white china by a polite and amiable nurse in white hole-punched clogs, at whom he had winked. I’d brought him to see her in his newly Tipp-Exed wheelchair, although I’d hung my jacket over his name as we’d taken the gleaming lift to the top floor.

‘You look very at home, Romany,’ he said.

My mum smiled graciously.

I pictured her somewhere exotic – Acapulco perhaps. She’d been flown out there in 1968 to interview James Mason and Trevor Howard. Or perhaps on a balcony in Tangier in 1964, or in a cable car riding up to Mons Calpe in 1965, on both occasions with my dad, when Mediterranean cruises were still for dazzling couples who could leave their children behind with nannies and relatives. Maybe she’d be schmoozing with Goldie Hawn in Hollywood as she was in that photograph that used to be on her pin-board. I thought she had always effortlessly taken a glamorous opportunity as if it were some kind of noble right. The spotlight, to her, was warm not harsh. And this room was oddly glamorous . . . I suddenly caught myself daydreaming and reprimanded myself. What am I
thinking
? She’s had a serious
operation
. This is a
hospital
, not a hotel. ‘You’re going to need some looking after, Mum,’ I said, approaching the bed, ‘after all this silly trouble.’ I heard the sound of my own voice; I was overcompensating; it was as if I was speaking to one of my own children.

She turned the corners of her mouth up. It was barely a smile. More a meek ‘thank you’. Her face was lightly bleached of colour, like an old framed photograph left out in a sunny spot.

‘How about a few days with us? Get you back on your feet. Tracey can make up the spare room. Dad’ll be all right on his own for a bit. They’re taking good care of him down the road, aren’t they, Dad?’

‘We’re in your hands, my dear lad,’ he said.

And there it was. Not exactly a yes. More a set of light regulations to which they were now dutifully adhering. Like kids on a school trip. Their life now felt as much about coercion as anything else, however sweetly and efficiently I was managing it.

Chapter 9

The sun sparkled on the rooftops and windows of north-west London as I dropped down the steep hill to the main road below. The care home had asked me not to come back for a couple of days. They wanted my dad to settle in and get used to his carers. It was his first weekend in the new place. I’d heard he had been moved to a slightly larger room and I was in good spirits as I went up in the lift, but as I knocked and went in, he was sitting on the edge of the bed in almost exactly the same position as when I had left him in the previous room a few days earlier. For a moment it felt as though he hadn’t moved, had had no sleep, had sat upright for three days. On his bedside table was a heap of his things – clock, comb, biro, socks, a tube of toothpaste, all jumbled up and unsorted. It looked as though someone must have dumped them there in a hurry. I glanced in the wardrobe; two shirts had come off their hangers and were crumpled on top of his shoes at the bottom. The room appeared sparsely furnished. Four small indentations in the carpet showed where an armchair should have been.

‘No comfy chair, Dad?’

‘No.’

‘It’s a bit of a mess in here. What happened?’

‘Was like this when they put me in here.’

‘Where have you been sitting?’

‘Here.’ He gestured to the bed.

‘I’ll speak to someone on the way down. That’s not right. You need a chair.’

‘I’ve seen no one.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘No one has been here. I slept on the floor last night.’

‘
What
? What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you fall?’

He looked up and met my eye. ‘I dressed myself,’ he said. ‘Very tiring.’

I had to wait until the morning to speak to the senior manager. She apologised for the missing chair and said it had been replaced, and that my dad had been very confused for a couple of days. She asked me not to read too much into what he said and that appropriate care had been provided on every day since his arrival. I told her there was no sign of his suitcase or his oxygen tank in his new room and that he had no memory of being given any of the medication I had left. She told me it was all in hand. I had no option but to take her at her word. That night I lay awake in my bed and couldn’t sleep and stared at the cracks of light at the window and wondered if he was safe and asleep, or awake too, in an unfamiliar room, with unfamiliar cracks of light at an unfamiliar window. I also wondered if he was just lying on the floor.

I rang first thing in the morning. A carer – I didn’t recognise his voice – said he had had ‘a good night’ and had ‘eaten a good breakfast’. They were phrases I used to hear the nurses use in hospital to relatives, however unsettled a patient had been. I said I was pleased, and I wanted to believe him.

At home, Tracey made up the spare room: extra cushions and pillows; an armchair with a foot-stool; a tartan travel blanket; a portable television; some family photos; flowers cut from the garden. She was picturing little trips up the stairs during the day: a tray of food; some soup; a pot of tea; a slice of cake; a rerun of
Poirot
on TV.

But my mum was restless the first night. I could hear her turn over in the room upstairs, the soft footfall and faint creak from the floorboards as she went to the window and back. I’d taken her a tray of food in the evening but she had pulled a face. Among her cuttings I once found a light-hearted unpublished magazine feature she’d written about taking days off work, in which she said: ‘I was never brought up to be ill . . . I insist on soldiering on, spluttering all over everyone, sighing deeply, and making the family feel thoroughly guilty.’

The next evening, after we’d settled the kids down, she joined us for a meal downstairs but was unable to relax and went up to her room early. A couple of hours later – after I’d left to go out for a gig – Tracey was sitting alone in the kitchen when my mum appeared in the doorway in bare feet wearing only a white nightie with her grey hair down, as if she’d gone to bed but got herself up again. After the briefest of exchanges, she had suddenly made an unexpected grab for the kitchen cupboard, and pulling out a bottle of brandy, snatched out the cork, put the bottle to her lips and swigged with ostentatious insolence, before gruffly returning to her room.

‘I was stupefied,’ Tracey said. ‘It was just weird and embarrassing. I hardly had time to say anything. And you were out. And it was your mother.’

The next night she did the same in front of me.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked, refusing to rise.

‘Well, you won’t
offer
me a drink,’ she responded crabbily.

‘You have just had a
general anaesthetic
and a major operation,’ I protested. ‘The doctor said take it
easy
for a couple of weeks.’

With her back in her room, I wondered why it all had to be so brilliantly operatic. I wanted to help and sympathise but I resented this engineering of feelings, this melodrama, this intense sense of grievance. I felt estranged. It was a kind of wildness. Disproportionate. Unmanageable. In retrospect I wonder why I didn’t put my arms around her, seek more help, but it felt like a storm that could upturn trees, as though I could do no good and I’d be brushed away, and she was the one who needed to change.

As the next couple of days unfolded, she seemed to find her own – and our – company excruciating. If she was unsettled in the room upstairs, she offered little when she came down – just long stares out to the garden, her thumb under her jaw, her index finger pressed against her lips as if she’d shushed her own mouth. The children skirted round her watchfully. She’d take Blake on her lap and read to him from a storybook with big print, but if he wriggled it was an excuse to put him down. The girls grew wary. It was like listening to a silent rage.

‘Now what, Mum?’ I asked after three nights.

‘You tell me.’ She seemed adrift and defensive.

‘Home?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Here.’

‘No.’

‘Some time with Dad?’ I suggested. ‘At . . . where he’s staying now.’ (I couldn’t say its name.) ‘A couple of weeks? Get your strength back.’

She stared at the wall. I could tell she couldn’t bring herself to say yes outright. It must have seemed to her like a defeat, the care home a step too far. Then I saw her eyes brighten, as though a thought had come clearly to her.

‘Would they let me
visit
like that?’ she asked. ‘Just for a short time?’

‘I’m sure they would,’ I said. She could be a ‘visitor’ if she wanted.

‘For
Tom’s
sake.’

‘For Dad’s sake.’

And so she joined him for a couple of weeks. We went via the flat to collect some clothes and belongings, and she chose to wear a smart raincoat knotted at the waist and a mustard woollen beret for her arrival. She was to be invincible. My dad was pleased to see her. He smiled passively as she hovered nervously in the lobby, his trousers held up by his clip-on braces. He had shaving nicks on his face. I thought he looked like an elderly Ernie Wise.

After a week she asked if I would pop back and check up on the flat and bring her a couple of her scrapbooks to show the carers.

‘Any in particular?’ I asked.

‘Make sure you bring the
Burton
one.’

Chapter 10

In the summer of 1970, a few weeks before my dad began work writing for his new residency at the Dorchester, my mum interrupted my school holidays with an announcement.

‘I’ll be away for a few days in August, darling.’

‘How many?’

‘Five.’

‘Five? Where are you going?’

‘Mexico.’

If I remember anything about 1970 it’s that it was in colour, and it took place largely – as far as I was aware – in sun-soaked Mexico. In June, the FIFA World Cup was beamed into our north-facing little sitting room all the way from Mexico. It was the first World Cup not to be transmitted in black and white. The images glittered and flared. The Brazilian kit looked amazing: iridescent blue shorts; golden shirts. It was like the uniform of gods. The only other colour I could liken it to as an eight-year-old boy was
Jason and the Argonauts
. England wore dazzling all-white. It was like gazing into another lustrous technicolor world. I made my dad buy extra petrol every week from our local Red Lion garage so I could top up my Esso World Cup coin collection. The TV shone. My coins shone. Everything was brilliant.

‘Why are you going?’ I asked.

‘I am going to interview a couple of people for a magazine.’

‘Who?’

‘A couple of film stars.’

‘What are their names?’

‘Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.’

‘Oh.’ I went back to my coin collection.

My mum’s scrapbooks and souvenirs are full of notes, inserted scraps of paper, and handwritten annotations underlining the importance of ‘Burton’ in her own version of her life. Articles and letters are photocopied – sometimes in triplicate. Photographs are marked up with accurate dates and exclamation marks, and in 1985 (a year after his unexpected death at the age of fifty-eight) she wrote a lengthy retrospective story for the
TV Times
called ‘The Burton I Loved’. The fuss was not without reason.