Collected Stories (70 page)

Father would have been pleased by their attendance.

He thought, ‘Dying isn’t something you can leave to the last moment.’

He was like the old man, too. He had to remember that. Being pulled in two directions had saved him.

He walked away from Mother and had a cigarette.

His boss had told him unequivocally ‘to rest’. He had said, ‘To be frank, you’re creating a bad atmosphere in the office.’

*

Harry’s fourteen-year-old daughter Heather had run away from boarding school. Returning from the shops two days after Alexandra had left for Thailand, he found her sitting in the kitchen.

‘Hello there, Dad,’ she said.

‘Heather. This is a surprise.’

‘Is it okay?’ She looked apprehensive.

He said, ‘It’s fine.’

They spent the day together. He didn’t ask why she was there.

He got on well with the boy, who seemed, at the moment, to worship him. He would, Gerald said, understand him for another couple of years, when the boy would be fourteen, and then never again.

Over Heather, he felt sorry and guilty about a lot of things. If he thought about it, he could see that her sulks, fears and unhappinesses, called ‘adolescence’, were an extended mourning for a lost childhood.

After lunch, when she continued to sit there, looking at him, he did say, ‘Is there anything you want to ask me?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What is a man?’

‘Sorry?’

‘What is a man?’

‘Is that it?’

She nodded.

What is a man?

She hadn’t said, ‘What is sex?’ Not, ‘Who am I?’ Not even, ‘What am I doing here in this kitchen and on earth?’ But, ‘What is a man?’

She cooked for him. They sat down together in the living room and listened to a symphony.

He wanted to know her.

It had taken him a while to see – the screechings of the feminists had made him resistant – that the fathers had been separated from their children by work, though provided with the consolations of power. The women, too, had been separated from important things. It was a division he had had in the back of his mind, had taken for granted, most of his life.

*

They were lower middle class; his father had had a furniture shop. He had worked all day his entire life and had done well. By the end he had two furniture shops. They did carpeting, too.

Harry and his brother had helped in the shops.

*

It was the university holidays when Harry accompanied his father on the train to Harley Street. Father had retired. He was seeking help for depression.

‘I’m feeling too down all the time,’ he said. ‘I’m not right.’

As they sat in the waiting room, Father said of the doctor, ‘He’s the top man.’

‘How d’you know?’

‘There’s his certificate. I can’t make out the curly writing from here, but I hope it’s signed.’

‘It is signed.’

‘You’ve got good eyes, then,’ Father said. ‘This guy will turn me into Fred Astaire.’

Father was smiling, full of hope for the first time in weeks.

‘What’s wrong, sir?’ said the doctor, a man qualified to make others better.

He listened to Father’s terse, urgent account of inner darkness and spiritual collapse before murmuring, ‘Life has no meaning, eh?’

‘The wrong meaning,’ said Father, carefully.

‘The wrong meaning,’ repeated the doctor.

He scribbled a prescription for tranquillisers. They’d hardly been in there for half an hour.

As they went away, Harry didn’t want to point out that the last thing tranquillisers did was make you happy.

Harry was puzzled and amused by Father striking out for happiness. It seemed a little late. What did he expect? Why couldn’t he sink into benign, accepting old age? Isn’t that what he, Harry, would have done?

He was taking Mother’s side. This was the deep, wise view. Happiness was impossible, undesirable even, an unnecessary distraction from the hard, long, serious business of unhappiness. Mother would not be separated from the sorrow which covered her like a shroud.

In life, Harry chose the dullest things – deliberately at first, as if wanting to see what it felt like to be Mother. Then it became a habit. Why did he choose this way rather than his father’s?

*

His daughter Heather had always been fussy about her food. By the time she was thirteen, at every meal she sat at the table with her head bent, her fork held limply between her fingers, watched by her mother, brother and father. Could she eat or not?

Harry was unable to bear her ‘domination of the table’ as she picked at her food, shoved it around the plate and made ugly faces before announcing that she couldn’t eat today. It disgusted him. If he pressurised her to eat, Heather would weep.

He saw that it isn’t the most terrible people that we hate, but those who confuse us the most. His power was gone; his compassion broke down. He mocked and humiliated her. He could have murdered this little girl who would not put bread in her mouth.

He had, to his shame, refused to let Heather eat with them. He ordered her to eat earlier than the family, or later, but not with him, her mother or brother.

Alexandra had said that if Heather wasn’t allowed to eat with them, she wouldn’t sit at the table either.

Harry started taking his meals alone in another room, with a newspaper in front of him.

Alexandra had been indefatigable with Heather, cooking innumerable dishes until Heather swallowed something. This made him jealous. If Mother had never been patient with him, he wanted Alexandra to tell him whether he was warm enough, what time he should go to bed, what he should read on the train.

Perhaps this was why Heather had wanted to go to boarding school.

His resentment of her had gone deep. He had come to consider her warily. It was easier to keep away from someone; easier not to tangle with them. If she needed him, she could come to him.

A distance had been established. He understood that a life could pass like this.

*

Father, always an active, practical man, had taken the tranquillisers for a few days, sitting on the sofa near Mother, waiting to feel better, looking as though he’d been hit on the head with a mallet. At last, he threw away the pills, and resumed his pilgrimage around Harley Street. If you were sick, you went to a doctor. Where else could you go, in a secular age, to find a liberating knowledge?

It was then that Harry made the stupid remark.

They were leaving another solemn surgery, morbid with dark wood, creaky leather and gothic certificates. After many tellings, Father had made a nice story of his despair and wrong meanings. Harry turned to the doctor and said, ‘There’s no cure for living!’

‘That’s about right,’ replied the doctor, shaking his pen.

Then, with Father looking, the doctor winked.

No cure for living!

As Father wrote the cheque, Harry could see he was electric with fury.

‘Shut your big mouth in future!’ he said, in the street. ‘Who’s asking for your stupid opinion? There’s no cure! You’re saying I’m incurable?’

‘No, no –’

‘What do you know? You don’t know anything!’

‘I’m only saying –’

Father was holding him by the lapels. ‘Why did we stay in that small house?’

‘Why did you? What are you talking about?’

‘The money went on sending you to a good school! I wanted you to be educated, but you’ve turned into a sarcastic, smart-arsed idiot!’

The next time Father visited the doctor, Harry’s brother was deputed to accompany him.

*

Harry had a colleague who spent every lunchtime in the pub, with whom Harry would discuss the ‘problem’ of how to get along with women. One day, this man announced he had discovered the ‘solution’.

Submission was the answer. What you had to do was go along with what the woman wanted. How, then, could there be conflict?

To Harry, this sounded like a recipe for fury and murder, but he didn’t dismiss it. Hadn’t he, in a sense – not unlike all children – submitted to his mother’s view of things? And hadn’t this half-killed his spirit and left him frustrated? He wasn’t acting from his own spirit, but like a slave; his inner spirit, alive still, hated it.

*

‘Harry, Harry!’ Mother called. ‘I’m ready to go.’

He walked across the grass to her. She put her handkerchief in her bag.

‘All right, Mother.’ He added, ‘Hardly worth going home now.’

‘Yes, dear. It is a lovely place. Perhaps you’d be good enough to put me here. Not that I’ll care.’

‘Right,’ he said.

*

Father, the day he went to see the doctor, remembered how he had once loved. He wanted that loving back. Without it, living was a cold banishment.

Mother couldn’t let herself remember what she loved. It was not only the unpleasant things that Mother wanted to forget, but anything that might remind her she was alive. One good thing might be linked to others. There might be a flood of disturbing happiness.

*

Before Father refused to have Harry accompany him on his doctor visits, Harry became aware, for the first time, that Father thought for himself. He thought about men and women, about politics and the transport system in London, about horse racing and cricket, and about how someone should live.

Yet his father never read anything but newspapers. Harry recalled the ignorant, despised father in
Sons and Lovers
.

Harry had believed too much in people who were better educated. He had thought that the truth was in certain books, or in the thinkers who were current. It had never occurred to Harry that one could – should – work these things out for oneself.

Who was he to do this? Father had paid for his education, yet it gave Harry no sustenance; there was nothing there he could use now, to help him grasp what was going on.

He was a journalist, he followed others – critically, of course. But he served them; he put them first.

Television and newspapers bored Alexandra. ‘Noise’, she called it. She had said, ‘You’d rather read a newspaper than think your own thoughts.’

*

He and Mother made their way back to the car.

She had never touched, held or bent down to kiss him; her body was as inaccessible to him as it probably was to her. He had never slept in her bed. Now, she took his arm. He thought she wanted him to support her, but she was steady. Affection, it might have been.

*

One afternoon, when Alexandra had returned from the hypnotherapist and was unpacking the shopping on the kitchen table, Harry asked her, ‘What did Amazing Olga say today?’

Alexandra said, ‘She told me something about what makes us do things, about what motivates us.’

‘What did Mrs Amazing say? Self-interest?’

‘Falling in love with things,’ she said. ‘What impels us to act is love.’

‘Shit,’ said Harry.

*

The day she ran away, after the two of them had eaten and listened to music, Heather wanted to watch a film that someone at school had lent her. She sat on the floor in her pyjamas, sucking her thumb, wearing her Bugs Bunny slippers. She wanted her father to sit with her, as she had as a kid, when she would grasp his chin, turning it in the direction she required.

The film was
The Piano
, which, it seemed to him, grew no clearer as it progressed. When they paused the film to fetch drinks and food, she said that understanding it didn’t matter, adding, ‘particularly if you haven’t been feeling well lately’.

‘Who’s not feeling well?’ he said. ‘Me, you mean?’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Anyone. But perhaps you.’

She was worried about him; she had come to watch over him.

He knew she had got up later to watch the film another couple of times. He wondered whether she had stayed up all night.

In the morning, when he saw how nervous she looked, he said, ‘I don’t mind if you don’t want to go back to school.’

‘But you’ve always emphasised the “importance of education”.’

Here she imitated him, quite well. They did it, the three of them, showing him how foolish he was.

He went on, feebly he thought, but on nevertheless: ‘There’s so much miseducation.’

‘What?’ She seemed shocked.

‘Not the information, which is mostly harmless,’ he said, ‘but the ideas behind it, which come with so much force – the force that is called “common sense”.’

She was listening, and she never listened.

She could make of it what she wanted. His uncertainty was important. Why pretend he had considered, final views on these matters? He knew politicians: what couldn’t be revealed by them was ignorance, puzzlement, the process of intellectual vacillation. His doubt was a kind of gift, then.

He said, ‘About culture, about marriage, about education, death … You receive all sorts of assumptions that it takes years to correct. The less the better, I say. It’s taken me years to correct some of the things I was made to believe early on.’

He was impressed by how impressed she had been.

‘I will go back to school,’ she said. ‘I think I should, for Mum.’

Before he took her to the station, she sat where her mother sat, at the table, writing in a notebook.

*

He had to admit that lately he had become frustrated and aggressive with Alexandra, angry that he couldn’t control or understand her. By changing, she was letting him down; she was leaving him.

Alexandra rarely mentioned his mother and he never talked seriously about her for fear, perhaps, of his rage, or the memory of rage, it would evoke. But after a row over Olga, Alexandra said, ‘Remember this. Other people aren’t your mother. You don’t have to yell at them to ensure they’re paying attention. They’re not half-dead and they’re not deaf. You’re wearing yourself out, Harry, trying to get us to do things we’re doing already.’

Alexandra had the attributes that Mother never had. He hadn’t, at least, made the mistake of choosing someone like his mother, of living with the same person for ever without even knowing it.