Romany and Tom (34 page)

He made notes with a blue fountain pen while I talked. I had only stopped because the tears had made talking impossible. There were tissues sprouting from a square box on the table next to me. I was sitting in a wing chair. It was protective. He put the lid back on his pen and clicked it shut, and leaned back in his chair.

‘Well, you’ll be pleased to hear the prognosis is very good,’ he said with a smile. ‘You have a recurrent depressive disorder. How serious? I’d say moderate to severe. You are extremely vulnerable. The shorter the gaps between episodes, the heavier the depression. Soon they will happen spontaneously without a trigger if untreated. You have a strong family history. To be honest, you probably should have been on anti-depressants twenty years ago.’

I walked from his room that day into the undimmed London afternoon, clutching a prescription for tablets that were to leave me car-sick and somnolent for days, with the promise that when I’d taken them for a few weeks and settled down I could talk to someone properly, someone sympathetic he could recommend who would understand and help me get on top of it all.

That night I wondered if the clouds hadn’t lifted a little, and I gave the kids the biggest hugs that left me wet-eyed over their tiny shoulders. Blake drew a picture of a lion, a tiger, a palm tree and a lizard with a massive tongue that curled round and round the page before ending in a speech bubble that said
The End
.

‘Were you five once?’ he said, apropos of nothing.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Were you happy when you were five?’

I felt myself start to cry. ‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Was Mummy five?’

‘Yes, she was.’

‘Did you know her then?’

‘No, we hadn’t met.’

‘How old was I?’

‘You weren’t born yet.’

It was clearly another fact he thought he needed to take away and ponder. He blinked a couple of times.

‘Oh,’ he said thoughtfully, and I pictured him walking back from the rose garden after being chased by my mum with the same look on his face. And I could hear the girls laughing and playing in their room and I thought how they all thankfully still seemed so happy in spite of the chaos I had brought.

Then Tracey got home from the studio and we sat and talked.

Two days later I was woken early by the sound of the phone. As I reached for the receiver I glanced at the clock. It was 6.33 a.m. No good news ever arrives at 6.30 in the morning.

‘Ben, it’s Roly.’ He sounded different. Quavering. ‘The hospital just called. They said that Tom died in the night.’ He couldn’t quite pronounce the word ‘died’ properly. It came out with a squeak.

‘OK,’ I said. I felt in neutral. ‘What else did they say?’

‘It was a staff nurse. She just said, “Is that the Bain residence?” Not much else.’

‘OK.’

‘They’ve asked me to go down. Do you want to see him?’

‘I don’t think so.’

That’s all I can remember of the conversation. Perhaps not much more was said. Just the bare facts for now. I said I’d call Jennie. Roly would tell our mum and his brothers. I hung up. Tracey had guessed, but I said it anyway, ‘My dad died last night,’ as if to make it real. She reached out to hold me and I leaned in for a moment awkwardly, but then rolled on to my back and closed my eyes. If I was aware of anything, I seemed to feel relief. Even though I’d been told to wait two weeks before I could expect any change, I wondered if the pills from the psychiatrist could be doing anything yet to dampen my reaction.

I thought of my dad a few days earlier when I had last seen him: the gnomic face; the stick legs; the nebuliser; the coffee stain. It seemed like an outlying memory. Distant and still. And then a train of thought led me to the photograph of us all on the park bench on Hampstead Heath in the low orange October sunlight and I saw the someone I was going to miss, and I felt the first few confused tears trickle on to my cheeks.

We lay there for about an hour watching the light at the window, exchanging a few words, and I couldn’t help thinking how the creaking scaffolding on the front of the house had kept me awake in the night; and how I’d lain there for a couple of hours between two and four, and at one point heard a strange noise downstairs like the sound of the letterbox slamming shut on its spring – even though there’d been no wind – and wondered if it had happened around the time he had died, and it was a message; but then I felt stupid because I’d never believed in ghosts.

Blake and Alfie appeared – Jean was at a friend’s overnight – and got into bed next to us, and I told them what had happened.

‘Are you sad?’ Blake asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It was sad when Miss Steele at school died too.’

‘Yes. That was sad as well.’

‘Is Granny dead too?’

‘No, Granny is still alive.’

‘Oh.’

There was a moment’s silence. I could smell Alfie’s hair, still so fresh and clean even after a night’s sleep.

‘Are you sure he is dead?’ Blake said. ‘He might wake up.’

‘They’re sure.’

I went downstairs and made coffee and took it back to bed. Tracey cried a little bit. I went upstairs to call Jennie from my studio. She was in the village shop she now ran with her husband Eddie, near the north Somerset coast. Eddie was out on a delivery.

‘Hello, Jen,’ I said. ‘Bad news, I’m afrai . . .’

The words were barely out of my mouth and I could hear her convulsing in tears and choking on her words at the other end of the phone. It seems it was on everyone’s mind. I gave her the simple facts I knew. She said she’d only been in to see him the day before and how distressing it had been: the oxygen; a little banana and some grapes to eat; the few words he had said were lost inside his mask. And then I heard her compose herself and say, ‘That’ll be one pound twenty, please,’ and I heard the till open and shut.

I rang Roly back and said I would catch a train down in a couple of hours. He’d already been to the hospital and back and picked up a few belongings. He said they’d told him he’d died peacefully in his sleep. A little unexpectedly. His breathing had been shallow yesterday but they hadn’t been expecting him to die.

I was at the care home by lunchtime. My mum was alone in her room. I sat close to her. Roly stood in the doorway already talking loudly about funeral arrangements. I wanted him to shut up. My dad had only been dead a few hours. It was impossible to tell what she was feeling. She seemed largely unmoved, no different to any other day.

‘It’s hard to know what I’m supposed to miss,’ she said a little sternly. ‘He has been away for so long.’

Afterwards as we were walking to the car, I heard her voice calling us. She had come out of her room and was at the far end of the car park. ‘Roly, are you coming tomorrow?’ she shouted, projecting her voice.

‘Yes,’ he called back.

She cupped her hands up to her mouth in the shape of a megaphone and called out matter-of-factly, ‘BRING ME SOME PAPER TISSUES.’

Chapter 34

In the small car Tracey was sitting in the back. I was driving, and my mum was in the front passenger seat. It had been a largely silent fifteen-minute ride from the care home. The lanes and dual-carriageways of South Gloucestershire slid by unremarkably. I kept to the speed limits; it felt oddly respectful to drive within the law; and a speeding ticket wouldn’t have looked good, not on this day of all days.

I’ve watched as hearses and funeral cortèges with their back-seat sombre faces drive solemnly along city streets, turning heads and slowing traffic; it seems to be the only time such deathly speed is tolerated in the frantic tarmac-grab of city driving. It is as if, as passers-by, we recognise it as an attempt to bend time to our will, to slow it down, to stave off the final death-y part of death – the burial part, the cremation part, the sound-of-soil-on-wood part – to delay it a little longer, to tidy and formalise it into an orderly moment that happens at our own speed, in our own time, not randomly and unfairly. Yet here we were bowling unexceptionally along the A38 at forty-three miles per hour, no coffin up in front with
Dad
in flowers along the side, just a lorry with
Peter Green Chilled
printed on it slowing us down, making me think for rather too long about the potential for compilations of soothing early Fleetwood Mac tracks.

‘Where are we going again?’ my mum said, breaking the silence.

‘To Tom’s funeral, Mum.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said thoughtfully, her finger pressed to her lips, her eyes loosely on the road.

It was the third time she’d asked the same question in the fifteen-minute journey. Of course the care home had warned me she was confused, that we should bear with her, that the week had taken its toll, and one lapse I would have understood, but three now startled me. It seemed unfair. And so quick. As if she’d been clinging to a ledge for so long and had now just let go. And I wondered if it felt like being stoned or drunk. Dreamlike and disconnected. I reached out with my left hand and squeezed her arm.

‘We’ll be there in a moment, Mum. All the family are coming.’

‘Where to?’

‘To the funeral.’

‘How kind. How did they find out about it?’

I kept it brief.

Vaguely Dutch, and isolated in the surrounding fields, the huge steeply sloping tiled roofs of the modern crematorium buildings rose out of the sleepy landscape. Viewed from the approach, it was as if four giant Lego tents had been huddled together in a paddock beside the road. The place looked barely used. Roly had said it had only just opened. Spindly young trees needing twenty years of growth to achieve the right amount of dappled gravitas lined the approach road and car park. It could have been a new superstore. I hovered, deciding where to put the car.
With those other cars over there, or was that for staff only? In this easy space right here, or is that too far away and looks like we want to make a quick getaway?
I settled on something near the main pathway to the chapel to make it easier for my mum. I say ‘chapel’ although not in a religious sense. Roly, who had hand-picked the location from his weekly experiences in the local funeral game for its light and airy aspect, had made it clear – having spoken to the office – that the ceremony did not have to have a religious angle. We all knew it needed to be godless; my dad wouldn’t have had it any other way. I liked the way the website put it:
The chapel can be altered to create a suitable environment for a service of any religion or belief
. I presume atheism is still a belief. ‘We might make room for a prayer,’ Roly had added. ‘For Mum’s sake.’ Or perhaps because he couldn’t imagine it all going by without one.

It was colder than I was expecting when I opened the door of the car. Winds were gusting across the empty beds and manicured hummocks of grass. The chill only accentuated the instinctive humble walk and cowed head of funeral attendance in the figures I could see approaching the building, as they hurried, not too disrespectfully, hands in pockets, shoulders forward. Rain was starting to spit. My mum was wearing her ‘best coat’ again – the same all-enveloping cream duvet that she wore to first visit flats in London five years earlier. Before it had seemed like a statement of flamboyance; today, it seemed like a comfort blanket. As though she were a shock victim being led from an explosion.

It was a relief, once inside, that the chapel – in spite of the disappointing weather – was indeed as light and airy as Roly had promised. The imposing steeply tiled roofs on the outside were transformed into sharp white vaults on the inside, with a near vanishing point where the seam of glazing met the bright sky high up; quite heavenly for some, I’m sure, but enough to lift the sceptical heart too. The rest was blond and amber wood, flagstones, breeze-blocks and rough-cut stone pillars: part Scandinavian-modern; part Celtic barn. ‘If you don’t believe in God, what do you believe in?’ I once asked my dad. ‘Nature,’ he said. Exactly what he meant I’d never been sure. The here and now, the immutability of the seasons, perhaps. We come. We go. We flourish. We die. I looked around the room and wondered if it was OK on that basis for him. If he’d been attending someone else’s funeral in the same room, I could picture him running his hand over the stone pillars and leaning into me and whispering, ‘Nice job. Shame about the cross on the wall.’

I imagined him in his coffin. Jane, Roly’s ex-wife, had wanted to put him in something smart for the occasion; she’d chosen his double-breasted blue blazer and tartan trousers and had helped get the body dressed. It wouldn’t have been my choice – not that I could have gone through with it – but if I had, I think I would have picked one of his snappy bird’s-eye-check Savile Row suits from the late fifties, with a knitted tie, and perhaps a ciggy between his fingers. The smoking may have killed him, but one last defiant stand might have seemed appropriate.

I looked out into the largely empty chapel. The website said there was room for ninety. We must have mustered about eighteen. Almost all family. A couple of faces from the care home. I’d taken out a ‘death notice’ in the
Guardian
at 48p a word:

WATT, Tommy. Bandleader, arranger and jazz pianist. Died peacefully on 20 May 2006 aged 80. A much-loved husband to Romany, father to Ben, and stepfather to Simon, Roly, Toby and Jennie. Funeral – Friday 26 May, 1p.m., Westerleigh Crematorium, Bristol. Flowers – R. Davis and Son.