‘Well, I wonder why you wear them at all,’ I said.‘Anybody would think you haven’t got any decent clothes.’ I knew that upstairs he had two wardrobes full of respectable clothes in good condition.
‘What’s the point of my dressing up when I’m indoors?’ he said indignantly.‘I don’t see anybody here from one day’s end to another.’
This was a covert appeal for pity, and not without effect, but I felt obliged to continue on the offensive. ‘You knew you were going to see
me
this morning,’ I said.
‘That’s different,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I’ve been doing jobs.’
‘What kind of jobs?’
‘Cleaning the stove.’
‘How are you getting on with it?’
The electric cooker is a new acquisition, though not a new appliance. I had offered to buy him a new one but typically he insisted on getting a reconditioned cooker from a shop up the road, the kind that has white goods displayed outside on the pavement with handpainted placards boasting bargain prices. It was certainly cheap, but there was no manual with it, and I wasn’t able to get him one since the manufacturers have discontinued the model, so he has been struggling to master the controls ever since. The operation of the oven in particular has been a problem, sometimes resulting in the food being burned and sometimes not cooked at all.
‘Not bad,’ he said, with a shifty sort of grin. ‘I’ve nearly got it beat.’ Since he can blame nobody but himself for the purchase of this unsuitable cooker he has personified it as a cunning adversary which has somehow intruded itself into his house and against which he must pit his wits. ‘But just when I think I’ve got it sorted it comes up with another little wrinkle,’ he said. ‘It turns out that the grill doesn’t work if you close the flap.’
‘No, with the flap closed it becomes a second oven,’ I said. ‘I told you that, Dad.’
‘It’s no use telling me things at my age, you have to write them down,’ he said.
‘All right, I’ll write down a few basic instructions for you,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you go and get changed?’
While he was upstairs I went into the kitchen to make a few notes about the cooker. It was in an appalling state, like the whole room, coated with grease, inside and out, which he had made a few ineffectual attempts to scrape off. There were circular scorch marks on the Formica work surface next to it, left by saucepans that must have been nearly red hot when he put them down, and a great plume of soot was imprinted on the wall above the hotplates where a pan of cooking fat had obviously caught fire. I opened the fridge and found it full of bits of food, cooked and uncooked, wrapped in greaseproof paper and tin foil, the more unwholesome of which I disposed of in the dustbin outside the back door. An awful feeling of hopelessness and helplessness enveloped me. It is obvious that Dad can’t go on living on his own indefinitely, that sooner or later he is going to either set fire to himself or poison himself. But he will never leave the house willingly - and, in any case, where would he go?
When he came downstairs he was transformed, wearing a heather-coloured Harris tweed jacket, grey worsted trousers and a clean striped shirt with a tie. There was a food stain on the lapel of the jacket, but, I told myself, you can’t have everything. On his feet were a pair of polished brown brogues. His thin grey hair was combed back neatly from his forehead.‘Very nice,’ I said approvingly, scraping the congealed food off the jacket with my fingernail on the pretext of feeling the cloth.
‘You can’t get material like that now,’ he said. ‘Cost me five quid in Burtons. That was a lot of money then.’
‘Where d’you want to have lunch?’ I said.
‘The usual,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t like a change?’
‘No,’ he said.
The usual is the cafeteria in the local Sainsbury’s supermarket. Suggesting a change was just a token gesture: I’ve given up trying to persuade him to go elsewhere. Most of the restaurants in the neighbourhood are Indian or Chinese which he ‘wouldn’t touch with a bargepole’. I managed to lure him into an Italian trattoria once but the prices on the menu shocked him, and he claimed to dislike the taste of garlic and olive oil in the food. He looked sour and unhappy throughout the meal and I didn’t repeat the experiment. Pubs he regards as places for drinking beer, which he has given up because he believes it exacerbates his prostate condition, not somewhere to go for a hot dinner, which he wouldn’t enjoy anyway, surrounded by people enviably quaffing pints. So by a process of elimination we have ended up going regularly to Sainsbury’s.
‘OK, I’ll ring up and reserve a table,’ I said, but that was another quip he didn’t hear and I didn’t repeat.
‘What?’
‘I’ll ring for a minicab.’
There was a time when he would have bitterly opposed this extravagance, but of late he has grudgingly allowed me to pay for a cab on the outward journey on the understanding that we return by bus. As usual he said, ‘Have a glass of sherry first?’ and as usual I accepted. I don’t like his cheap syrupy sweet sherry, but the Sainsbury’s cafeteria is not licensed and I need a shot of alcohol to get me through the lunch. When we’d had the sherry I called the local minicab office and they said it would be five minutes, at which point Dad decided, typically, that he had to go to the loo again before he went out. I took the opportunity to sneak a second glass of sherry, in fact a small tumbler of the stuff, while he was upstairs but, as I feared, the minicab honked to announce its arrival outside the house before he had got his hat and coat on. Then he couldn’t find his keys to lock up the house. The minicab honked impatiently again. I looked out and saw that it was blocking the narrow channel between the rows of parked cars and was holding up the progress of another vehicle. I went out and asked the driver to go round the block and come back in two minutes. He muttered something I didn’t catch and drove off at speed. I was by no means confident we would see him again. I went back into the hall, where Dad was frantically going through the pockets of various coats and jackets hanging in the hall. ‘Don’t you have a hook in the kitchen where you keep them?’ I said.
‘They’re not there.’
I went into the kitchen and found the keys on the hook. ‘Here you are,’ I said, giving them to him.
His face lit up with relief. ‘Thank Gawd for that. Where were they?’
‘On the hook in the kitchen. Come on, let’s go.’
The cab driver was back, scowling from the window of his beaten-up red Honda, and I hurried Dad into the back of the car. We took off with a screech of tyres, rolling and sliding on the slippery vinyl seat.
‘I could swear I looked at that hook and they weren’t there,’ Dad said.
‘Never mind, Dad,’ I said.
‘Did I turn off the electric fire?’ he wondered.
‘Yes, yes,’ I said, though I couldn’t remember whether he had or not. I couldn’t face telling the driver to go back. And if the house burned down, I reflected darkly, that might solve the problem of how to get Dad out of it.
It’s a big new Sainsbury’s built on a brownfield site near the railway line. The cafeteria is clean and brightly lit, cordoned off from the long loaded aisles of the shop on one side, and overlooking a vast car park on the other. The food, I have to admit, is not bad, and extraordinarily good value. You bag a numbered Formica-topped table and line up with a tray, taking your cold items from the cabinets on the counter and ordering your hot dishes when you pay. One of the cheerful motherly women who mostly staff the place brings them to your table after an interval which depends on how busy they are. On the wall behind the counter are glossy coloured photographs of the dishes on offer which Dad stares at for some time before taking his place in the queue: this is his big treat and he is anxious not to waste it by making a bad choice. He usually has steak and kidney pie with two veg or fish and chips, with apple pie and custard for pudding. The bill for the whole meal for the two of us probably comes to less than the price of one starter at the Savoy Grill.
We must look an odd couple to the other customers, a mixture of students from the local sixth-form college, young mothers with babies and toddlers, local shop assistants taking their lunch break, and the chronically unemployed. It’s a multiracial working-class area, and people dress casually in the grungy modern style: layers of synthetic clothing emblazoned with trademarks, and trainers of baroque design with thick sculpted soles. Perversely I regretted having criticised Dad’s ragged attire earlier in the morning, thus goading him into a sartorial counter-attack. I am a rather formal dresser myself, never at ease with the fashionable open-neck look, and always wear a tie with a jacket or the navy-blue blazer I was wearing yesterday. I felt we were both conspicuously over-dressed for the venue; as if we had set out to go to the Savoy Grill but found we didn’t have enough money, so settled for Sainsbury’s instead.
Dad ate his meal quickly and greedily, then sat back with a sigh of satisfaction. Over a cup of tea he began to reminisce. Like all deaf people he finds it easier to talk than to listen, and I was happy to let him. Having heard all his stories many times before I don’t have to pay much attention in order to follow and respond appropriately. Something, probably the drizzle that had started to fall outside, darkening the tarmac of the car park, had reminded him of coming back from India at the end of the war to be demobbed, after a nine-month tour of duty in a small Air Force band. He has polished the phrasing of the story in the course of many repetitions. ‘We docked at Southampton, and took a train to London. It was raining, but we didn’t mind. It was lovely soft English rain, and the country looked so green! We hadn’t seen any green for months. Only dust. “Dust, spit and spiders, that’s India,” as Arthur Lane used to say. “If the Indians want it back, they’re welcome to it.”The green of the fields and the trees, coming up through Hampshire, was incredible, like water to a man dying of thirst. It was as if we were trying to drink England. We couldn’t get enough of it. We hung out of the windows as the train went along, getting soaked with the rain, not caring. And Arthur Lane - trust Arthur - he opened the door of our carriage - you know, the trains had separate compartments in those days, with doors - he pushed the door wide open and sat on the floor with his feet hanging out over the wheels, just staring at the fields, saying “Unbelievable, un-bloody-believable”.’ Dad chuckled at the memory. Arthur Lane was the drummer in the band Dad had spent most of the war with, and figured in many of his anecdotes, admired for his dry wit and independent spirit. I never met this legendary character in the flesh but have seen a snapshot of him and Dad in baggy khaki shorts, grinning and squinting into the glare of the Indian sun, Dad tall and thin with his hand on the shoulder of the squat and rotund Arthur.
Then the smile faded from Dad’s face and he sighed and shook his head. ‘Poor old Arthur,’ he said. ‘Dead now. Dead years ago. Did I tell you?’
‘No,’ I lied.
‘Yeah. Cancer.’ He lowered his voice as he pronounced the dread word, and mimed drawing on a cigarette.‘Lungs. Always was a heavy smoker, Arthur. Even when he was playing the drums, he’d have a fag on.’
‘Did you keep in touch with him after the war?’ I said, like a comedian’s feed.
‘We used to see each other in Archer Street,’ he said, naming the drab little street behind Piccadilly Circus where dance musicians used to congregate on Monday afternoons to fix up gigs, settle debts and exchange gossip, before discotheques took away their livelihood. ‘But when Archer Street died out, I lost touch with him. I heard he’d packed in the music business and got a day job, like so many. Then one day I thought I’d give him a ring, see how he was getting on. I don’t know why. Thinking of the old days I suppose, I just wanted to hear the sound of his voice again. His wife answered the blower. I never met her, but I recognised her voice. I said, “This is Harry Bates, is Arthur there?” And there was a long silence. I thought at first I’d been cut off. And then she said, “Arthur died eight years ago.” Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Arthur dead all that time, and I had no idea. He was younger than me, too.’ He pursed his lips and shook his head again. ‘There aren’t many blokes I knew in the business who are still around now.’
‘No. You’re a survivor, Dad.’
‘Well, I looked after myself, see? Gave up fags when I developed that cough - you remember? And I was never a drinker, not what you’d call a drinker. A glass of beer yes, but no spirits.’ He mimed holding a glass of liquor between finger and thumb and raising it to his lips. ‘Spirits was the death of many a good musician. When a customer in a club or the gaffer at a Jewish wedding treated the band to a round of drinks most of the boys would order double whiskies, but I always had just a half of bitter. You can get a taste for whisky.’ He added severely: ‘I hope
you
don’t drink whisky.’
‘Very rarely,’ I said. ‘Wine is my tipple, as you know.’
‘Yes, well, I don’t mind a glass of sweet white wine now and again, but not that sour red stuff you like.’
‘Don’t worry, Dad, I’ll get in some Liebfraumilch for you at Christmas.’
He looked at me with a rheumy eye. ‘Am I coming to you for Christmas, then?’
‘Of course you’re coming.You can’t spend Christmas all on your own.’ In fact nothing would please me more than not having Dad to stay at Christmas. Christmas is bad enough without the extra stress of looking after him and trying to smooth the inevitable friction between him and Fred and Fred’s mother, but the guilt at leaving him all alone in London for the duration of the holiday would be even worse.
‘I’m not sure I’m up to the journey,’ he said.
‘I’ll fetch you in the car, as usual,’ I said.
‘But I need to pee practically every half an hour,’ he said.
‘There are plenty of drive-ins all the way up the M1,’ I said. ‘And we’ll have a bottle in the car for emergencies.’