The Lemon Table (20 page)

My father smiled at this. You see how they were together?

I ASKED
my father how the car was running. He was seventy-eight at the time, and I wondered how much longer they would let him drive.

“Engine’s running well. Bodywork’s not too good. Chassis’s rusting.”

“And how are you, Dad?” I was trying to avoid the direct question, but somehow failed.

“Engine’s running well. Bodywork’s not too good. Chassis’s rusting.”

Now he lies in bed, sometimes in his own green-striped pyjamas, more often in a poorly fitting pair inherited from someone else—someone dead, perhaps. He winks at me as he always did and calls people “Dear.” He says, “My wife, you know. Many happy years.”

MY MOTHER
would talk practically of the Four Last Things. That’s to say, the Four Last Things of modern life: making a will, planning for old age, facing death, and not being able to believe in an afterlife. My father was finally prevailed upon to make a will when he was over sixty. He never referred to death, at least not in my hearing. As for the afterlife: on the rare occasions we entered a church as a family (and only for marriage, baptism or funeral), he would kneel for a few moments with his fingers pressed to his forehead. Was this prayer, some secular equivalent, or just a leftover habit from childhood? Perhaps it showed courtesy, or an open mind? My mother’s attitude to the mysteries of the spirit was less ambiguous. “Poppycock.” “Load of mumbo-jumbo.” “Not having any of that done over me, you understand, Chris?” “Yes, Mum.”

What I ask myself is: behind my father’s reticence and winks, behind the jokey kowtowing to my mother, behind the evasions—or, if you prefer, good manners—in the face of the four last things, was there panic and mortal terror? Or is this a stupid question? Is anyone spared mortal terror?

AFTER JIM ROYCE
died, Elsie attempted to keep up with my parents. There were invitations to tea, and sherry, and to view the garden; but my mother always declined.

“We only put up with her because we liked him,” she said.

“Oh, she’s pleasant enough,” my father would reply. “There’s no harm in her.”

“There’s no harm in a bag of peat. Doesn’t mean you have to go round and have a glass of sherry with it. Anyway, she’s got what she wants.”

“What’s that?”

“His pension. She’ll be comfortable now. Doesn’t need Muggins here to help pass the time of day.”

“Jim would have liked us to keep in touch.”

“Jim’s well out of it. You should have seen the expression on his face when she got yacking. You could hear his mind wandering.”

“I thought they were very fond.”

“So much for your powers of observation.”

My father gave me a wink.

“What are you winking at?”

“Winking? Me? Would I do such a thing?” My father turned his head another ten degrees and winked again.

What I’m trying to get a line on is this: part of my father’s behaviour was always to deny his behaviour. Does that make sense?

THE DISCOVERY
was made in the following way. It was a question of bulbs. A friend in a neighbouring village offered to pass on some surplus narcissi. My mother said my father would pick them up on his way back from the British Legion. She rang the club and asked to speak to my father. The secretary said he wasn’t there. When someone gives my mother an answer she isn’t expecting, she tends to ascribe it to the stupidity of her interlocutor.

“He’s playing billiards,” she said.

“No he isn’t.”

“Don’t be a clothead,” said my mother, and I can imagine her tone all too well. “He always plays billiards on a Wednesday afternoon.”

“Madam,” is what she heard next. “I have been secretary of this club for the past twenty years, and in all that time billiards has never been played on a Wednesday afternoon. Monday, Tuesday, Friday, yes. Wednesday, no. Do I make myself clear?”

My mother was eighty when she had this conversation, and my father eighty-one.

YOU COME
and talk some sense into him. He’s going gaga. I’d like to strangle the bitch.” And there I was again. Me again, as before, not my sister. But it wasn’t wills, this time, or power of attorney or sheltered housing.

My mother had that high nervous energy that crises bring: a mixture of anxious fizz and underlying exhaustion, each of which fuels the other. “He won’t listen to reason. He won’t listen to anything. I’m going to prune the blackcurrants.”

My father moved swiftly out of his chair. We shook hands, as we always do. “I’m glad you’ve come,” he said. “Your mother won’t listen to reason.”

“I’m not the voice of reason,” I said. “So don’t expect too much.”

“I don’t expect anything. Just glad to see you.” Such a rare expression of direct pleasure from my father alarmed me. So did the way he sat foursquare in his chair; normally he was aslant, or askance, like his eyes and his mind. “Your mother and I are separating. I’m going to live with Elsie. We’ll split the furniture and divide the bank balance. She can live in this place, which I must tell you I’ve never much liked, for as long as she wants to. Of course half of it’s mine, so if she wanted to move she’d have to find somewhere smaller. She could have the car if she knew how to drive, but I doubt that’s a viable option.”

“Dad, how long has this been going on?”

He looked at me without a blink or blush and shook his head faintly. “I’m afraid that’s none of your business.”

“Of course it is, Dad. I’m your son.”

“True. Perhaps you’re wondering if I’m going to make a new will. I’m not planning to. Not at the moment. All that’s happening is I’m going to live with Elsie. I’m not divorcing your mother or anything like that. I’m just going to live with Elsie.” The way he pronounced her name made me realize that my task—or at least, the task my mother had proposed—was not going to succeed. There was no guilty hesitation or false emphasis when he spoke her name; “Elsie” sounded as solid as flesh.

“What would Mum do without you?”

“Paddle her own canoe.” He didn’t say it harshly, just with a crispness implying that he’d worked everything out already and others would agree if only they gave it enough thought. “She can be a government of one.”

My father had never shocked me, except once: through the window I’d seen him wringing the neck of a blackbird he’d caught in the fruit cage. I could tell he was swearing too. Then he’d tied the bird to the netting by its feet, and let it dangle upside down to discourage other looters.

We talked some more. Or rather, I talked and my father listened as if I were one of those kids who comes to the door with a sports bag full of dusters, chamois leathers and ironing-board covers, purchase of which, their spiel hints, will keep them away from a life of crime. By the end, I knew how they felt when I closed the door in their faces. My father had listened politely while I praised the articles in my bag, but he didn’t want to buy. Finally, I said, “But you will think it over, Dad? Give it a bit of time?”

“If I give it a bit of time I’ll be dead.”

There’d always been a kindly distance to our dealings since I became an adult; things were left unsaid, but an amiable equality presided. Now there was a new gulf between us. Or perhaps it was the old one: my father had become a parent again, and was reasserting his greater knowledge of the world.

“Dad, none of my business and all that, but is it … physical?”

He looked at me with those clear grey-blue eyes, not reproachfully, just steadily. If one of us was going to blush, it was me. “It
is
none of your business, Chris. But since you ask, the answer is Yes.”

“And …?” I couldn’t go on. My father wasn’t some middle-aged friend drooling over totty; he was my eighty-one-year-old progenitor, who after fifty or so years of marriage was leaving home for a woman somewhere in her mid-sixties. I was afraid even to formulate the questions.

“But … why now? I mean, if it’s been going on all these years …”

“All what years?”

“All the years you’re supposed to have been down the club playing billiards.”

“I mostly was down the club, son. I said billiards to make things simpler. Sometimes I just sat in the car. Looking at a field. No, Elsie is … recent.”

Later, I dried the dishes for my mother. As she handed me a Pyrex casserole lid, she said, “I expect he’s using that stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“You know. That stuff.” I put the lid down and held my hand out for a saucepan. “It’s in the papers. Rhymes with Niagara.”

“Ah.” One of the easier crossword clues.

“They say all over America old men are running around like buck rabbits.” I tried not to think of my father as a buck rabbit. “All men are fools, Chris, and they only change by getting more foolish with every year that passes. I wish I’d paddled my own canoe.”

Later, in the bathroom, I opened the mirrored door of a corner cupboard and peered in. Haemorrhoid cream, shampoo for delicate hair, cotton wool, a mail-order copper bracelet against arthritis … Don’t be ridiculous, I thought. Not here, not now, not my father.

AT FIRST
I thought: he’s just another case, just another man tempted away by ego, novelty, sex. The age thing makes it seem different, but it isn’t really. It’s ordinary, banal, tacky.

Then I thought: what do I know? Why make the assumption that my parents don’t—didn’t—have sex anymore? They still shared the same bed until this happened. What do I know about sex at that age? Which left the question: which is worse for my mother, to give up sex at, let’s say, sixty-five, and discover fifteen years later that your husband is off with a woman of the age you were when you gave up; or still to be having sex with your husband after half a century, only to discover he’s having a bit on the side?

And after that I thought: what if it isn’t really about sex? Would I have been less squeamish if my father had said, “No, son, it isn’t physical at all, it’s just that I’ve fallen in love.” The question I’d asked, and which seemed hard enough at the time, was actually the easier one. Why make the assumption that the heart shuts down alongside the genitals? Because we want—need—to see old age as a time of serenity? I now think this is one of the great conspiracies of youth. Not just of youth, but of middle age too, of every single year until that moment when we admit to being old ourselves. And it’s a wider conspiracy because the old collude in our belief. They sit there with a rug over their knees, nodding subserviently and agreeing that their revels now are ended. Their movements have slowed and the blood has thinned. The fires have gone out—or at least a shovelful of slack has been piled on for the long night ahead. Except that my father was declining to play the game.

I DIDN’T TELL
my parents I was going to see Elsie.

“Yes?” She stood at the reeded-glass door, arms crossed beneath her bosom, head high, absurd spectacles glinting in the sun. Her hair was the colour of autumnal beech and, as I now saw, thinning at the crown. Her cheeks were powdered, but not enough to camouflage the occasional star-burst of capillaries.

“Could we have a talk? I … My parents don’t know I’m here.”

She turned without a word, and I followed her seamed stockings along a narrow hall to the lounge. Her bungalow was laid out in exactly the same way as my parents’: kitchen on the right, two bedrooms straight ahead, utility room next to the bathroom, lounge to the left. Perhaps the same builder had put them both up. Perhaps all bungalows are much the same. I’m no expert.

She sat on a low black leather chair and instantly lit a cigarette. “I warn you, I’m too old to be lectured.” She was wearing a brown skirt and cream blouse with large display earrings in the shape of snail-shells. I had met her twice before, and been reasonably bored by her. No doubt she was by me too. Now I sat opposite, refused a cigarette, tried to view her as a temptress, home-wrecker, village scandal, but saw instead a woman in her mid-sixties, plump, slightly nervous, more than slightly hostile. Not a temptress—and not a younger version of my mother either.

“I haven’t come to lecture you. I suppose I’m trying to understand.”

“What’s there to understand? Your father’s coming to live with me.” She took an irritated puff at her cigarette, then snatched it from her mouth. “He’d be here now if he wasn’t such a nice man. Said he had to let you all get used to the idea.”

“They’ve been married a very long time,” I said, in as neutral a tone as I could manage.

“You don’t leave what you still want,” said Elsie curtly. She took another quick puff and looked at the cigarette in half-disapproval. Her ashtray was suspended over the chair-arm by a leather strap with weights at each end. I wanted it to be stuffed full of butts louchely smeared with scarlet lipstick. I wanted to see scarlet fingernails and scarlet toenails. But no such luck. On her left ankle she wore a support sock. What did I know about her? That she had looked after her parents, had looked after Jim Royce, and was now proposing—or so I assumed—to look after my father. Her lounge contained a large number of African violets planted in yoghurt pots, an excess of plumped cushions, a couple of stuffed animals, a cocktail-cabinet telly, a pile of gardening magazines, a cluster of family photos, a built-in electric fire. None of it would have been amiss in my parents’ house.

“African violets,” I said.

“Thank you.” She seemed to be waiting for me to say something which would give her grounds for attack. I stayed silent, and it made no difference. “Shouldn’t hit him, should she?”

“What?”

“Shouldn’t hit him, should she? Not if she wants to keep him.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Frying pan. Side of the head. Six years ago, wasn’t it? Jim always had his suspicions. And quite a few times recently. Not where it shows, she’s learned that lesson. Whacks him in the back. Senile dementia if you ask me. Ought to be put away.”

“Who told you this?”

“Well,
she
didn’t.” Elsie glared at me and lit another cigarette.

“My mother …”

“Believe what you want to believe.” She certainly wasn’t trying to ingratiate herself. But why should she? It wasn’t an audition. As she showed me out, I automatically put out my hand. She shook it briefly, and repeated, “You don’t leave what you still want.”