Romany and Tom Read online

  I looked up at my mum on the other side of the bed. Her grey teeth were misaligned. They looked different. ‘Oh, Mum, did something happen to your tooth, the front one?’ I said with concern in my voice, but she took it as a boxer takes an aggressive jab.

  Her eyes flashed. ‘What do you expect? I am old, darling. Nothing works,’ she said, with affected affront. She looked at me coldly and pulling a face like an old crone, waggled the tooth at me with her index finger, as if she’d been braced for an attack of some kind and was getting in a quick retaliatory upper-cut.

  I threw her a look of exasperation. She simply mimicked the look back at me.

  I turned and caught Roly’s eye.

  ‘It was ever thus,’ his vicar’s face said equably.

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t want a scene. I took a slow breath, and absorbed the impact of the counter-punch silently, like a fighter swallowing down early punishment.

  Turning to the laptop, I popped open a picture of Jean, my daughter. She is eight in the photograph, standing at the top of the battlements of Lulworth Castle, an iron weather-vane behind her and and a grey-green valley barrelling away to the sea beyond. She is wearing a pale blue shell jacket and is smiling without complication straight at the camera with a perfect unblemished face.

  ‘Who is that?’ my dad said.

  If I have a regret it is that we had our children too late for my parents to enjoy them. They were in their early seventies – not old for some folk these days – but their frailty and inflexibility were already taking hold when the girls were born. I have pictures of them in the sunlit sitting room on the north London road where we lived at the time in which they are each holding one of the newborn twins swaddled up in hand-knitted cardigans and baby-grows. It is 1998. My dad looks well in the photograph – smart in the mustard corduroy shirt I’d bought him for his birthday; his hair and skin are good. He is smiling down at baby Jean, but on his face uncertainty is written among the warm creases of affection; it’s as if he is saying, ‘I am trying, but I won’t be able to deal with this.’ Was it just too late to put aside his own preoccupations? Had he simply forgotten how to cope? Or was he never going to be any good at it?

  ‘It’s Jean,’ I said, ‘in Dorset.’

  ‘One of the twins, darling,’ said my mum over-loudly.

  ‘Really,’ he said almost dreamily. ‘How marvellous.’

  It was obvious he wasn’t sure who it was, or if he was, he had very few memories of her on which to draw. Bad health had made him more introspective. Grandchildren had slipped down the list of priorities. Apart from the occasional prompt from a framed photograph of a face in a pram on the sitting-room sideboard, they just hadn’t been on his mind much these past few years.

  I clicked the mouse and up came a picture of Jean’s twin sister, Alfie. She is reaching both arms out towards the camera, her fingers outstretched, the pink tartan of her coat bunched on her shoulders, her face clear and mischievous.

  ‘And that’s Alfie, Dad.’

  ‘Ahhh.’ He paused. ‘So clever . . . So clever . . . this machine.’

  I looked at him. He was no longer looking at the screen. He was running his finger along the edge of the laptop’s keyboard, diverted and seduced by the technology. I remembered him breaking an awkward early silence on a hospital visit to see me when I was ill with the news that his new Laguna-blue Mazda 323 had power-steering and anti-lock brakes.

  Breezily I clicked through more: holiday snaps; landscapes; the kids in dressing-up costumes and new school uniforms; days out. Facts and faces blurred into one, but when we got to a close-up of my son Blake, five at the time, my dad spoke up.

  ‘There! Ahhh. The boy!’

  He had a soft spot for Blake. In him, of all the children, it was as if he saw a glimmer of me. The young son. Unformed. A distant innocence. Is that too sentimental? In the photograph, Blake is standing reflectively on the deck of the small Brownsea Island Ferry, his hands on the white steel rail, squinting out across Poole Harbour on a salt-fresh spring day. He is wearing an orange Winnie-the-Pooh baseball cap that jumps out against the clear blue Dorset sky and the yellow wooden slats of the wheelhouse: a serious thoughtful face in cartoon colours. I thought of the day I visited the care home near Bristol when I went upstairs to find the two of them – my dad and Blake – lying on their backs side by side on the covers of my dad’s single bed, each with their little feet crossed identically at the ankle. Blake must have been nearly four. They were gazing up at the ceiling, picking out animal shapes in the swirls of Artex plaster, seventy-five years between them. They were, as Blake said on the train home that day, ‘being two mans together’.

  I could sense my mum getting restless. She activated her speaking watch – her eyesight had been worsening – and the robotic voice announced that twenty minutes had passed. Roly had warned me this would be approaching her limit. I gently shut the lid on the laptop.

  My dad’s eyes were closing again.

  My mum let out a long sigh. ‘Is the car far, dear?’ she said to Roly.

  ‘No, not really. How are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘I think perhaps . . .’ She trailed off. My dad’s eyes were open again. ‘I think maybe we should, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘As you wish,’ said Roly, unperturbed. ‘Shall I meet you downstairs?’

  ‘Yes, you fetch the car.’

  Roly raised his eyebrows at me, and rolled his eyes quickly. I raised my hand as if to say, ‘It’s fine.’

  Then suddenly, my dad spoke. ‘I think it is time . . .’ he announced, with an unexpected authority that made all three of us stop what we were doing. Was this going to be a momentous announcement? A change to his will? An admission of guilt? We turned to him, but it was followed by a pause as the rest of the thought began to escape him. All the words must have been there together in the right order in his head a moment before, but now the ones at the end of the sentence he had planned were fainter, as if washed over by an incoming tide. We hung there for a few seconds, wondering if he might finish, watching him draw down air, and then just as suddenly as he had started I saw the remainder of the thought return like a boomerang and he said loudly, ‘I think it is time that we stopped fatso over there from eating any more.’

  I froze. Two people by the neighbouring bed looked round quizzically, a hint of irritation in their faces. The woman in the bed opposite – who had restarted on her chocolate digestives – carried on eating methodically, still idly leafing through a magazine. My mum was fastening the popper on her handbag. Roly was smirking. I turned back to my dad to show my objection but he was already distracted, picking at something fascinating on the back of his hand. I felt the small ripple of adrenalin break and disperse.

  Roly turned to go, stifling a smile.

  ‘I’ll bring Mum down in five minutes. Meet you at the door,’ I said, still thankful no one had complained.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. And then in a louder voice, ‘Bye, Tom. See you tomorrow.’

  My dad looked up and smiled and nodded generously.

  With Roly gone, I filled my mum in on some family news to pass the time. She was still wearing her coat and her bag was still on her lap. When it was time to go she looked at my dad complicatedly, her face a little thunderstorm, but spoke no words. Their eyes met.

  ‘Yes, you go, Romany,’ he said quite clearly and assertively. There was no animosity, no expectation that she should stay.

  She kissed him tenderly on the temple, and for a brief moment, as her eyes closed and her lips touched his skin, her affection for whoever was in her mind – him, or a version of him – seemed unconditional. I looked at them. They were like two old inosculated trees: different stock but rooted in the same ground, until the branches and trunks had curled and conjoined, then grafted together. I wondered what kind of axe it would take to split them.

  We turned to go.

  ‘Back in a few minutes, Dad,’ I said.

  As we padded towards the lift, my mum said, ‘
Do you think there’s a little shop down by the entrance?’

  ‘Possibly. I didn’t notice one though.’

  ‘Do you think there’s an off-licence?’

  ‘Not in a hospital, Mum, no.’

  We walked on in silence. Every brief trip out in someone’s car dangled the slender possibility of a half-bottle.

  Downstairs we stood by the doors waiting for Roly to pull up. People came and went.

  ‘So strange,’ she pondered. ‘Having him in here . . .’

  There was a pause. I felt a clot of sympathy rise in my throat, but she carried on before I could reply,

  ‘. . . among these awful people.’

  I stared straight ahead. The theatrically snobbish ennui chimed loud and familiar – languid, affected, dismissive, unlikeable – born of a deeper dissatisfaction I’d heard in her for years, a perceived sense of injustice swollen with time. She resented the moment not because she really found the circumstances repellent but because of how they hampered her, as if today had been just one more unfair cross for her to bear. I wondered – not for the first time – where it all came from, what she thought she was still owed, what had caused her such disappointment, and what brought it to the front of her mind, even now, with her own husband in a hospital bed upstairs, with them both in need of each other as never before. Did she still see her tragedy as the greater? Was this still her scene? I looked out towards the car park and wished she’d made peace with it all years ago. Or toughened up, or something.

  Roly arrived.

  I helped her into the car.

  ‘Bye, then, Mum.’

  She turned on a smile, gave a royal wave through the window, and they were gone.

  Back upstairs my dad was still awake. I stroked his dry white hair again for a while. I was conscious of only being able to do such a thing unselfconsciously since I’d had kids of my own. The selfless affectionate act seemed to be part of being a parent, part of stepping to one side and putting someone else in the place of importance, of no longer always having to be at the heart of your own life all the time. With me, it also came from being used to hospitals now; I’d spent a long time in one of them in 1992. I recognised the equipment. I wasn’t alarmed by the drips and drains and the sugary smell of illness. I had no urge to walk away the moment I stepped on to the ward. I knew the value of the warmth of human contact.

  ‘You are a kind boy,’ he said as I was leaving.

  Later, I caught the train home, and, as it hurtled through the landscape, past the flashing trees, the blankets of wheat, the sheep walking slowly on the hillsides, I wondered if it would be the last thing that I’d ever hear him say to me.

  Chapter 2

  Five years earlier, the first week of July 2001 had been hot and thundery. Headache weather. My mum and dad were living in Oxford, where they’d been since selling the family home in Barnes in south-west London at the end of the eighties. My dad was seventy-five. He’d smoked a packet of twenty cigarettes a day without filters for fifty years until he was nearly seventy, and was now spending most of his time sitting in a green leather armchair overlooking a nondescript urban stretch of the river with an oxygen tank within easy reach. His bed had been moved into a room on the same floor and he hadn’t used the stairs in weeks. When he coughed, it was a condensed and heavy sound. His doctor had him on asthma inhalers; it sounded worse than that to me. ‘Your father’s low,’ my mum would say. ‘Not a word all day.’ Some mornings he wouldn’t even get up, or returned to his bed after only a couple of hours – twenty-seven shuffling footsteps from his armchair – like a sick dog to its basket. My mum was seventy-six. Robust yet weary. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ she said bleakly on the phone to me one evening. ‘Well, he can, but I can’t.’

  I knew we were at a fork in the road. Oxford had been a surprise choice to most of the family – the reasons only became clear to me later – and while my mum and dad had enjoyed more than twelve years of self-sufficiency, we were now all realising it was in the middle of nowhere compared with where the rest of us were living: Roly was north of Bristol; Jennie, my half-sister, was near Glastonbury; Toby, my half-brother, was near Esher in Surrey; Simon, my eldest half-brother, was in Edinburgh; and I was in London. None of us were in a position to respond quickly to an emergency, or pop out for some useful shopping, or casually drop round for moral support. It was also not lost on me that Tom was my father, not theirs. Although he’d been in their lives since they were children, he was only their stepfather – walking in out of nowhere before they were ten. It seemed clear which path was in front of me. And so on a warm and still morning a month later my mum caught the train up to London to view some possible flats for her and my dad near us.

  Call me hopeful, but as I climbed – aged thirty-eight – into the car to collect her and drove along our street, beneath the flickering sunlight and shadows of the tall overhanging lime trees, I imagined I was making the drive to see them for the first time in a new flat near me, and the moment seemed full of possibility and change for the better – of fixing things and getting differences sorted out – as though all the years of hardened paint that overlaid us could be scraped away to reveal the original wood that made us up, mellowed with age and full of a forgotten warmth.

  I should have known better. There was a familiar heaviness to her step as I glimpsed her coming towards me along the commuter-filled platform at Paddington. She was walking the self-aware solemn stately march I had seen her adopt so often in public, her shape reflected in the windows of the little blue-and-white Thames Turbo Express train from Oxford. Her ‘best’ coat had been chosen for the occasion. It was a present from the actress-broadcaster Katie Boyle, given to her when they were working together editing an ‘agony aunt’ column at the TV Times in the early eighties – one of the final jobs handed to my mum after almost thirty years working as a freelance columnist and feature writer. A voluminous cream duvet of a coat from neck to knee, with rough-cut leather tie straps, and toggles for buttons, edged in fluffy mountaineering fur, it seemed completely at odds with the fine weather. Perhaps it was colder in Oxford, I thought. Or perhaps it was going to get worn whatever the weather; it was her best coat and it was a trip to London after all. Not a tall woman, perhaps five foot three, she wore on her head a crimson felt beret and her small wide archless feet padded along the platform in dark blue comfortable slip-on pumps secured with broad elastic straps. She was the last to the ticket barrier by quite a distance; bustling commuters were long gone. I smiled when I thought I was within her focal range. When she finally saw me, she cocked her head slightly to the side and threw one of her lightly pained, self-commiserating smiles back at me.

  ‘Ready?’ I said enthusiastically as she approached.

  ‘Not really.’

  In the car, she was quiet, one elbow on the window ledge, her fingers touching her brow. Every now and then she breathed in quickly and loudly and let out a long sigh, more like a huff. She did it unconsciously, I am sure, as another problem was turned over in her mind but not quite resolved, but it was a habit she had had for years, and to the outsider it could sound sudden and dramatic and intrusive; the instinct was to feel obliged to ask, ‘What’s wrong?’ or, ‘Everything all right?’

  I ignored it.

  ‘Are you happy to be coming to London?’ I said.

  ‘I am not sure “happy” is the word, dear.’

  ‘Surely a bit of you is excited, no?’

  ‘I think we are too old to be excited.’

  We drove up on to Bishops Bridge.

  ‘What about the theatre? It’ll be on your doorstep again. You could look up some old friends. Elspet, perhaps.’

  ‘One step at a time, dear.’

  We cut along Clifton Road and then up and over the stepped terrace of Maida Vale, and soon we were pulling through iron art deco gateposts into the driveway of a huge, stately thirties mansion block on the Finchley Road. A muscular front-line of London plane trees held the thrumming traffic at bay. The e
state agent was pacing up and down outside on his mobile.

  We viewed two flats. One was almost on the top floor, looking south, with a panoramic outlook over Lord’s Cricket Ground, but my mum said the windows were too high and they’d see nothing but empty sky from their armchairs. The second was on the first floor facing north, overlooking a side street; it was dark, empty and unfurnished and smelled faintly of cheese and decaying fruit. As she padded round the empty rooms I could see her struggling to imagine anything other than a long slow incarceration.

  Outside we waited on the pavement at the lights on the Wellington Road. The sun was high and bright, bouncing off the bonnets and windscreens. My mum loosened her coat and rooted around in her handbag for her special sunglasses. One of her eyes was in worse shape than the other. ‘Macular degeneration,’ her doctor had said. ‘Not uncommon, but not much we can do.’ I’d looked it up. Vision worsens in the centre of the eye; typical in old age; recognising faces becomes a problem; peripheral vision is better. I could picture her tipping her head to one side like a bird on a lawn to read cooking instructions or an address on an envelope. Her house had taken on extra floor lamps and illuminated magnifiers in recent years, and silences were often broken by the sound of her digital talking watch ordered from the Royal National Institute for the Blind catalogue; one press of the button and a clipped and distorted Americanised female voice announced the time through a tiny speaker: It’s. Three. Fifty. Eight. Pee. Em. I remembered being awake at night in their Oxford house, up in the spare room under the eaves, the pivot-roof window open, no sound but for the clicks of unfamiliar surroundings and the occasional car hissing past on the rain-slicked Thames Street below, and just as sleep had been overwhelming me again, I’d been startled awake by a voice in the dark from the room next door: It’s. Four. Twenny. Seven. Ay. Em. She’d always been a light sleeper. I used to imagine her finger hovering over the button under the bedclothes. She kept biscuits in a tin next to the bed to keep her going through the night.