Romany and Tom (9 page)

I put the brush and dustpan back in the cupboard and moved a magnet around on the door of the fridge.

‘Sorry for all the fuss,’ she said. ‘It’s all very strange, you know.’

By that summer my Sunday visits to their flat were interleaved with occasional weekday lunches at our house. I found I could wheel my dad from the car along the alley that led to the garden and almost directly into our kitchen. Things seemed to be going quite straightforwardly, although I sensed an underlying note of worry from my mum.

‘He was up at three o’clock last night,’ she said to me on the phone one morning. ‘I heard a noise. He was getting dressed. He said he had an
appointment
. I told him he must have been dreaming. Get back into bed, you silly old fool, I told him. And he keeps thinking we’re on holiday. He keeps asking about when we’ll be back in Oxford. But he seems all right this morning.’

I said I’d pop round.

I drove to the flat. I took the ticket for the NCP car park under the block, and as the barrier went up, I moved from brilliant August light into darkness. I turned the car tightly past the attendant’s booth with its cluster of ghostly TV screens, and past the empty bays of the upper level, each reserved with a single traffic cone. My tyres squealed on the corners as I spiralled down. It was only on the lowest level – four storeys below, and as silent as a mausoleum – that I’d ever found a space, where the ramp stopped up against a dead-end and a chained gate to a darkened generator room, where the only other cars were long since driven, parked in the shadows, shrouded under sheets like long low tombs, thickly caked in dust, spectral and strange.

I parked and got out. The sound of the car door closing bounced off the concrete walls. I thought of my mum moving around in the flat, floors and floors above. It felt miles away. Unnerved, I found the green exit door and climbed the stairs back up to the light. The steps emerged near the front door to the flats. I could see Jim the porter reading his paper. Palms and conifers framed the path as I breathed in the warm fresh air. A chaffinch was singing in the maple above my head.

Upstairs I rang the bell to the flat. Nothing. I rang again. Finally I heard the chain.

‘Who is it?’ It was my mum’s voice behind the door.

‘It’s me, Mum. Ben.’

She opened the door. In her hand was a frozen Macaroni Cheese – one of the ones I’d bought her from Marks & Spencer.

‘Sorry, dear, I was on the sofa with my leg up. I’ve rather bashed my knee. Nothing serious. Bruise probably.’ She held up the ready-meal. ‘No peas, so I was using this.’

‘Oh, Mum, how?’

‘I was trying to plug the TV in and lost my balance.’

‘But the TV is always plugged in.’

‘Is it? I couldn’t get it to work.’

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘In bed.’

‘But you said he was OK.’

‘He was. But now he isn’t, I suppose.’

‘Is he taking his paroxetine?’

‘No idea.’

‘But you said you were pleased he was trying some new tablets.’

‘Did I? I can’t police everything.’

I made a cup of tea and sat with her for a while.

‘He’s just switched off,’ she said, after a long silence. ‘As long as I am here, he is OK, but I daren’t go out, not even to the shops, and of course he is not interested in my interests.’

‘Was he ever?’

‘Oh, don’t be cruel, darling.’ She looked across the room, lost in thought. ‘We have our moments.’ She ran her finger across her knee. ‘But it’s getting worse.’

‘What is?’

‘Him. His absence.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s like sometimes a piece of him has . . . He’s just a little old man. Don’t expect too much, dear.’

‘I don’t, Mum. It’s OK.’

‘It
must
be Alzheimer’s. What else could it be?’

‘Well, his chest must be hard to cope with, and he needs his oxygen and everything, but I’ll speak to the doctor if it would put your mind at ease.’

‘Would you, dear? I would so appreciate it.’

With the two of us sitting there I remembered the afternoons when I was young, when she worked from home as a journalist. She’d let me lie on the floor and draw in the doorway, to be near her, as long as I was quiet. She’d made a new career for herself in the mid-fifties since abandoning hopes of acting amid the havoc of full-time motherhood. (‘I was offered an audition for a part in Marlowe’s
Edward II
, but was too tired to even read it.’) Instead – making use of her first husband Ken’s contacts as an author and theatre critic – she’d grabbed an opportunity to write about life with the triplets for the
Daily Express
. The piece went down well. It was sharply observed and drily humorous, and with Ken’s help, more select doors opened to the
Evening Standard
and the
Daily Mail
and soon she was writing regular columns. ‘No one had written about motherhood as light comedy before,’ she once said to me. ‘It wasn’t just your father who could be funny, you know.’ By the early sixties, she was editing the ‘
Femail’
page for the
Daily Mail,
and then
She
magazine came knocking and she was offered the chance to try her hand at some bigger celebrity interviews.

I pictured her tiny study just off the sitting room on the first floor in the house where I grew up. It used to be my room when I was baby. It was barely big enough for the desk and chair that sat in the middle of the room. It had a couple of filing cabinets either side, and piles of papers and cuttings and thick glossy
Spotlight
directories full of thousands of black-and-white publicity photos of endless actors and actresses. The pin-board was covered in clippings and reminders and phone numbers. (
Clear guttering. RING IAN HOLM!!
) She wrote at a small portable Adler typewriter with the phone to hand all the time – a big red GPO 746, with a rotary dial and a deafening ring. She smoked back then – Piccadilly, filter-tipped, the short ones in the wide hard box – and I’d listen to the rat-a-tat of the keys, the ding as she got to the end of the line, and the swoosh of the carriage-return. Suddenly she’d rifle through her address book, then pick up and dial – ‘Hello, Peter, darling, it’s Romany . . . Listen, I’m sorry to be a
frightful
bore but I’m writing this
dreadful
piece. Need a quick quote . . . you know how it is. Won’t keep you. Anyway, do you think
femininity
is
going out of style
?’ I’d lie quietly in the doorway to the sitting room with empty paper pulled out of one of her scrapbooks and spend an hour with a ruler and some coloured pens designing my own hand-drawn newspaper, complete with animal stories, TV listings and football results. I enjoyed the eavesdropping. It seemed like the outside world was the place to be.

An hour later, as I was leaving, she said casually, ‘I think I’m going to have to find a doctor, you know. Something odd is going on downstairs.’

For a moment I thought she meant something to do with the porters until I saw her face. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t like to bother you with these things, darling, but I have no one else to tell.’ She lowered her voice. ‘It’s like I’m trying to give birth to an
egg
.’

That night I spoke to Tracey.

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Sounds like a prolapse.’

‘
Really?
’

‘She’s had five kids. Three at one time. Women didn’t exactly do the exercises back then. Wouldn’t be surprised. The womb can no longer be supported. It can
drop
. Poor thing. You’d better call someone.’

Within a couple of days it was clear my mum would need a hysterectomy. Which meant time in hospital. Which meant I had to do something about my dad.

Chapter 8

‘How was the traffic, Tommy?’

My dad looked up across the table at the sound of his name.

We were sitting in a cramped office in a north London care home not far from their new flat. The overhead lights were bright. A geriatric psychiatrist – tall, thin, Irish, in a tweed jacket – was standing on the other side of the table, leafing though some paperwork. My dad looked as if he wasn’t sure if the question had been for him. He glanced at the stranger, blinked and said nothing, then looked at the backs of his hands.

‘The traffic, Tommy. All right, was it?’ said the psychiatrist again, casually. I could tell he was trying to defuse the impression that he was commencing some kind of assessment.

With my mum in hospital for her hysterectomy, my dad had agreed to let me check him into the care home for a few nights. He was OK about it. He knew he couldn’t have coped at the flat on his own, and our house was impractical with steep stairs and the clamour of three small kids. I hadn’t told him anything about a psychiatric assessment. I’d just told him there’d be a bit of form-filling and registration on arrival.

My dad, now aware he was being addressed, cleared his throat and said, ‘Yes, normal traffic.’

‘Good. That was lucky. Now then . . .’ The psychiatrist sat down and looked at him across the table. ‘Mind if I ask a few questions just to get you settled in?’

‘Fire away,’ said my dad.

‘Excellent. Right. Do you know where we are, Tommy?’

‘A fine establishment, no doubt. My son has good taste.’

‘Indeed. And the name of this “fine establishment”?’

‘Search me.’

The bluff charm. I suppressed a smile.

‘What day is it, Tommy?’

‘Always the weekend for me these days. Has been for years.’

It was hard to tell if my dad knew exactly what was going on and was just being funny to annoy the man in front of him, or was being smart to cover up his own mental deficiencies of which he was only too aware. I remembered how our local vet had once told me a small animal will fight right to the end to hide signs of ill health or weakness, moments after our family gerbil – at death’s door – had roused itself from a near coma and fiendishly bitten his hand. I looked at my dad. He didn’t look fiendish. He looked isolated and slightly peeved. I flashed a look at the care home manager who was standing silently at the back of the room, but resisted the urge to say anything.

The psychiatrist remained blank. He scribbled something down, then carried on. ‘What city are we in, Tommy?’

‘London, the last time I checked,’ my dad said, a little tightly.

I could sense him getting irate.

‘What floor are we on?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, I don’t know . . .
Haberdashery
.’ He slapped the palm of his hand on the armrest of his wheelchair. ‘I’ve had enough of this! You’ll be asking me the Prime Minister’s name next. Isn’t that what you do?’ He cast his eyes around the room. He could sense someone else behind him. ‘It’s like an
inquisition
! Ben, take me away from here, please!’

There was a commotion. Faces appeared at the door. A sheaf of paper was pushed on to the floor, fanning out across the carpet.

Within five minutes we were back out in the lobby and he had calmed down. He was still in his wheelchair. There were apologies and a cup of tea was offered. I felt bad. As though we’d tried to trick a child.

I went up with him to his room in the little lift with the extra handrails. It was a small single with half a view of the garden at the back – better than the front rooms that overlooked the noisy main road, I thought. A care assistant led the way and made himself busy, pulling on the bathroom light, opening and closing the wardrobe door, flicking the light switches on and off, showing us the call button, talking us through it, then left and said he’d be back shortly.

I opened my dad’s suitcase and hung up his clothes. ‘Got your best stuff, here, Dad,’ I said.

‘Your mother packed it,’ he said, looking straight ahead.

In among his shirts was a photograph of my mum in a frame. I wondered if she’d packed that too. I put it on his bedside table and arranged his travel clock and comb and pocket handkerchief around it. I moved them into three or four different positions to try to make them seem more homely, but whatever I did they just sat there like the lone possessions of a sentenced man. I tucked his shoes away against the wall.

He was sitting on the bed. He still had his blazer on and his hair was neatly parted. I glanced around the austere room. It looked like a Travelodge. Or the first day at a modern boarding school.

‘You’ll be all right?’ I said.

He looked up with a dull smile. ‘This is all part of it.’

He seemed to be giving me licence to leave. I reached for a platitude as my exit line. ‘I’ll pop back once you’re settled,’ I said. It sounded terrible. Shallow and insincere.

Downstairs, I went to sign out.

‘Is that your dad’s wheelchair?’ said the woman on reception, gesturing to the one we’d brought with us.