‘What?’
I looked around to check there was nobody seated near us. Fortunately the lunchtime rush was over, and most of the other tables were unoccupied. ‘You can have a bottle in the car,’ I said in a louder voice.
‘Oh, very nice,’ he said bitterly. ‘Supposing we’re stuck in a traffic jam and all the people in the other cars are looking at me through the windows?’
‘Then you can do it under a blanket,’ I said irritably. ‘Anyway, you’re not as bad as you make out.You haven’t needed to go since we came in here.’
‘
Now
I do,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘That tea’s gone right through me.’ It’s the kind of remark that sets Fred’s teeth on edge, and Fred’s mother’s teeth even more.
When we had both been to the Gents we went round the shelves picking up some groceries for Dad. Although he knew I would pay at the checkout he insisted on buying the cheapest products - so cheap that many of them have no brand names on them at all: cans of baked beans with a plain white label stating baldly in black type ‘Baked Beans’, or loaves of sliced white bread with ‘Economy White Loaf ’ printed on the plain plastic wrapper. They even had bottles of ‘German Liebfraumilch’, with no other information on the label about its provenance, for under two pounds. When we got outside, with a couple of full carrier bags, the drizzle had turned into a steady downpour, which I made the excuse to grab a black cab that was just delivering a passenger, bundling Dad into the back seat before he had a chance to protest. He kept his eye on the meter throughout the journey, commenting incredulously every time the digits moved forward, and averted his eyes when I paid the driver as if it was a transaction too shameful to witness.
Back at the house, Dad covered his eyes with a silk handkerchief and fell asleep in his armchair in front of the electric fire. I dozed off myself for a while, but I woke first and did not rouse him. In truth, the longer I can perform my filial duty of keeping him company without having to make conversation, the happier I am. He was slumped in his chair, with his head back and his mouth open, as if gasping for air. He is, indeed, a survivor. When the war broke out he had the wit to volunteer for service in the Air Force as a musician instead of waiting to be called up and drafted into some probably more dangerous and certainly less congenial occupation. On East Anglian airfields he paraded in marching bands at the funerals of young airmen killed in training accidents, and in the evenings played at dances and ENSA concerts for the entertainment of heroes returned from bombing missions over Germany, who had a one-in-two chance of not returning in the future. He was posted to the Shetlands, possibly the safest place in the British Isles at the time, and sent me, his three-year-old son, cartoon-style sketches of himself fishing and playing golf watched by puzzled sheep. In the last year of the war his band was sent to India, another combat-free zone. He always travelled by train and boat, turning down the offer of a lift home from Bombay in a military plane although it would have meant a much quicker demob, and completed six years’ service in the Royal Air Force without ever going up in an airplane, a form of transport he regarded, not without reason, as inherently dangerous. Nor has he ever been up in one in peacetime, though he has sat inside several parked on the ground, impersonating passengers in TV airline commercials. He is a man of great resilience and resourcefulness, who overcame a disadvantaged background and adjusted deftly to changing circumstances. A natural but largely untutored violinist as a youth, he left school at fourteen to work as an office boy, was turned on by jazz, a kind of music not hospitable to the violin (Stéphane Grappelli excepted), taught himself to play the saxophone and clarinet, supplemented his office-job earnings by playing in dance bands in the evenings, went professional, played in nightclubs, orchestra pits, radio big bands, sang ballads on the air in a sweet high tenor voice that suited the taste of the Thirties, came back from the war to find crooners were all the rage, blew the dust off his violin when Mantovani made the instrument popular again, played palm-court background music for banquets and wedding receptions, learned to play reels for hunt balls, and had a regular job with a quartet of his own in a West End nightclub for several years. When the club closed and he tried to get back into doing gigs he found they were few and far between, so acquired an Equity card and an agent to find him work as a TV and film extra in the daytime. He still catches glimpses of himself on television occasionally in repeats of very old sitcoms and rings me up to ask if I saw him, and I always pretend that I did.
He has also been a man with many other interests - serially. At different periods of his life he always had some hobby or recreation which consumed all his spare time and energy until he would suddenly lose interest in it and let it lapse, sometimes returning to it years later. For a long period it was golf - a convenient recreation for a man who worked in the evenings and was free in the weekday afternoons when municipal courses are uncrowded - but try as he might, practising for hours and studying golf manuals, he could never get his handicap down into single figures, and eventually his knees began to trouble him and he gave up the game. Then it was sea angling, taking day trips to Brighton to fish off the West Pier until it burned down, a disaster that upset him deeply and seemed to crush his enthusiasm for the pastime.Then it was collecting antiques, trawling through the local second-hand stores and flea markets for promising-looking small objects (there was no room in the house for large ones) and poring over library books in an effort to date and value them. Then it was dealing in stocks and shares. Then it was calligraphy.Then it was oil painting. He invariably taught himself these various skills from library books and magazines, or cadged advice and information from more experienced practitioners. The idea of, for instance, joining a painting class was anathema to him. He was an instinctive autodidact. Perhaps for this reason he never really excelled either as a musician or in any of his leisure activities, but I take my hat off to his professional versatility and the range of his enthusiasms, beside which my own life seems dull and narrowly specialised.
All the more poignant, then, is it to contemplate him now, stripped of all these life-enhancing interests. He has only one hobby these days: saving money, observing prices, economising on food, clothing and household bills. It’s no use asking him what he is saving the money for, or pointing out that if he drew more deeply on his assets he would be very unlikely to exhaust them, and that in such a contingency I would provide whatever funds were necessary. Indeed he is apt to take such comments as unfeeling hints that he hasn’t got much longer to live - which is of course, in actuarial terms, true, but not what I mean to convey. One of the reasons I selfishly let him drowse on in his armchair was the consciousness that we hadn’t yet touched on this sensitive area, and the less time there was available to do so before I had to leave, the better. I knew that the drawers of the bureau desk behind my back were stuffed with a disordered collection of old bills and bank statements, tax forms and share certificates and National Savings certificates, chequebook stubs and paying-in books and building society passbooks and Premium Bond counterfoils and God knows what else, and that when he woke up he would almost certainly want my advice on some item plucked from this financial midden. Sure enough, when he awoke of his own accord, and had revived himself with a cup of tea, he went over to the desk and pulled out some correspondence to do with National Savings.
‘This woman up north keeps pestering me to buy more Savings Certificates,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter with her?’
‘I don’t suppose she signed them personally,’ I said. ‘They’re computer-generated.’ I glanced at the papers, which were form letters bearing the printed signature of the Commercial Officer of the National Savings headquarters in Durham.‘You’ve got several certificates that have expired. They want to know if you want to cash them in or buy new certificates.’
‘Can’t I just leave them there?’ he said.
‘Well, you can, but they’ll earn less interest than new ones.’
‘But if I buy new ones I’ll have to wait another five years for them to . . . whatd’youcallit . . .’
‘To mature, yes.’
We silently contemplated the possibility that he might not live long enough to enjoy the accumulated interest on his loan to the government.
‘I think I’ll leave them where they are,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you cash them in and treat yourself to something.’
‘What?’ he said, meaning, for once, not
What did you say?
but
What sort of thing?
‘I don’t know . . . Hire a limousine to take you to Brighton.’
‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous,’ he said.
‘You’re always complaining you miss the sea. You could fish off the marina.’
‘I tried that for a while. It’s nothing like the old West Pier. You have to walk for miles to find a place to cast. Then it’s miles back to find a lav.’
He obviously felt this was a knock-down argument against my frivolous suggestion, and I did not contest it.
‘There must be something you would like to do,’ I said.
‘No, there isn’t,’ he said dourly. ‘I’m past doing things. If I can get through the night without getting up more than three times, if I can do a decent job in the lavatory after breakfast, if I can make my dinner without burning anything, if there’s something worth watching on the telly . . . that’s as much as I can hope for. That’s a good day.’
I could think of nothing cheering to say to this.
‘Take my advice, son,’ he said. ‘Don’t get old.’
‘But I
am
old, Dad,’ I said.
‘Not what I call old.’
‘I’m retired. I’m on a pension. I have a Senior Citizens railcard and a bus pass. I always have to get up in the night at least once. And I’m deaf.’
A faint grin lightened his countenance. ‘Yes, you are a bit Mutt and Jeff, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘I’ve noticed. I wonder where you get that from? At your age I had perfect hearing.’
Having asserted this superiority over me, his mood improved. ‘What would you like for your tea?’ he said. ‘We could have those baked beans with a bit of bacon.’
I looked at my watch. ‘I’ll have to be going soon,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you stay the night? The bed in your room is made up.’
‘No thanks, Dad. I’ve a lot on tomorrow.’ Lie.
‘Well, have a bite to eat first.’
I said I would if he would let me cook it and show him how the grill on the cooker worked.
‘No need, I’ve got it taped now,’ he said.
But I insisted, to ensure that the meal was edible, and grumblingly he acquiesced.
I left the house at about six. He watched me putting on my overcoat in the cramped hall under the low-wattage bulb, and pulled back the felt curtain over the front door to let me out. We shook hands, his musician’s fingers cool and soft in mine. ‘Well, goodbye Dad,’ I said. ‘Take care of yourself.’
‘’Bye son, thanks for coming.’ He gave me a smile that was almost tender, and stood at the open door until I passed through the front gate. I raised my arm in a final salute, and set off for the station with a guiltily light heart. Duty done.
5
5
th
November.
The responsibility for Dad’s welfare weighs heavily on me because there is no one to share it with. I am the only child of parents who themselves had no siblings. Dad and I have practically no relations with whom we are in contact, and none at all living in London. He has two elderly female cousins on his mother’s side, living in retirement in Devon and Suffolk respectively, with whom we exchange Christmas cards, and that’s about it. My own children visit their grandfather very occasionally, but they both live at some distance from London and have busy lives of their own. And he has almost no friends. Those he had in the music business are either dead, or he has lost touch with them; and he never had what one would call a social life. Work was his social life, as I knew from the rare glimpses I had of him doing it: swapping jokes on the stand between sets, chatting to customers in a nightclub, always laughing, smiling, shaking hands, because that’s what’s expected of a dance musician, as he explained to me once. ‘The punters are out to enjoy themselves and they like you to look as if you’re enjoying yourself too, even if you’re feeling miserable.’ So in the hours when he wasn’t working he didn’t want any social life, he just wanted to play golf or fish or pursue one of his other hobbies. He was at work in the hours when ordinary folk were enjoying their leisure, and if he happened to be at home in the evening it was because he hadn’t got a gig or a regular job, so he wouldn’t be in the mood for spending money on going out. Even on Sundays he was often playing at a Jewish wedding or bar mitzvah. The main victim of this lifestyle was my mother, who had little social life, and an unglamorous working life for about twenty-five years as an underpaid clerk in the office of a local builder’s merchant. She had some friends in the street, but since she died most of them have died too, or moved away, and Dad is only on nodding terms with most of his neighbours, apart from the Barkers in the adjoining semi - a railway clerk, now retired, and his wife, who have been there for some thirty years, and whom he trusts without liking. Occupying the house on the other side of the alley fence is a Sikh family with whom he has a relationship that is politely distant on both sides. In effect, he is all alone in Lime Avenue, and I am probably the only person who crosses the threshold of the house these days apart from the doctor and the man who reads the electricity meter. It’s a lonely and vulnerable existence. What’s to be done? I discussed this with Fred when I got back home the night before last.