Yet when we turned the corner into the neat familiar road, a road that had, to my surprise, remained exactly where it was all the time I hadn’t been there, I felt wrapped in coldness. In my recent dreams — fading as they were like frescoes in the light — the suburban street had been darkly dismal under the yellow shadows of the streetlights, and filled with white flowers and a suffocating, deathly odor, like being buried in roses. But how could I falter now? Once inside the house, Dad threw open the door to the living room. I blinked; there she was, Mother, knitting in her huge chair with her feet up, an open box of chocolates on the small table beside her, her fingers rustling for treasure in the crinkly paper.
Dad left me while he changed into his pyjamas and dressing gown. The fact that he had a visitor, a stranger, didn’t deter him from his routine, outside of which there were no maps.
I stood in my usual position, just behind Mother’s chair. Here, where I wouldn’t impede her enjoyment with noise, complaints or the sight of my face, I explained that Dad and I had met in the pub and he’d invited me back for a drink.
Mother said, ‘I don’t think we’ve got any drink, unless there’s something left over from last Christmas. Drink doesn’t go bad, does it?’
‘It doesn’t go bad.’
‘Now shut up,’ she said. ‘I’m watching this. D’you watch the soaps?’
‘Not much.’
Maybe the ominous whiteness of my dreams had been stimulated by the whiteness of the things Mother had been knitting and crocheting — headrests, gloves, cushion covers; there wasn’t a piece of furniture in the house without a knitted thing on it. Even as a grown man, I couldn’t buy a pair of gloves without thinking I should be wearing Mother’s.
In the kitchen, I made a cup of tea for myself and Dad. Mum had left my father’s dinner in the oven: sausages, mash and peas, all dry as lime by now, and presented on a large cracked plate with space between each item. Mum had asked me if I wanted anything, but how would I have been able to eat anything here?
As I waited for the kettle to boil, I washed up the dishes at the sink overlooking the garden. Then I carried Father’s tea and dinner into his study, formerly the family dining room. With one hand I made a gap for the plate at the table, which was piled high with library books.
After I’d finished my homework, Dad always liked me to go through the radio schedules, marking programmes I might record for him. If I was lucky, he would read to me, or talk about the lives of the artists he was absorbed with — these were his companions. Their lives were exemplary, but only a fool would try to emulate them. Meanwhile I would slip my hand inside his pyjama top and tickle his back, or I’d scratch his head or rub his arms until his eyes rolled in appreciation.
Now in his bedwear, sitting down to eat, Dad told me he was embarked on a ‘five-year reading plan’. He was working on War and Peace. Next it would be Remembrance of Things Past, then Middlemarch, all of Dickens, Homer, Chaucer, and so on. He kept a separate notebook for each author he read.
‘This methodical way,’ he pointed out, ‘you get to know everything in literature. You will never run out of interest, of course, because then there is music, painting, in fact the whole of human history —’
His talk reminded me of the time I won the school essay prize for a tract on time-wasting. The piece was not about how to fritter away one’s time profitlessly, which might have made it a useful and lively work, but about how much can be achieved by filling every moment with activity! Dad was my ideal. He would read even in the bath, and as he reclined there my job was to wash his feet, back and hair with soap and a flannel. When he was done, I’d be waiting with a warm, open towel.
I interrupted him, ‘You certainly wanted to know that woman this evening.’
‘What? How quiet it is! Shall we hear some music?’
He was right. Neither the city nor the country was quiet like the suburbs, the silence of people holding their breath.
Dad was holding up a record he had borrowed from the library. ‘You will know this, but not well enough, I guarantee you.’
Beethoven’s Fifth was an odd choice of background music, but how could I sneer? Without his enthusiasm, my life would never have been filled with music. Mother had been a church pianist, and she’d taken us to the ballet, usually The Nutcracker, or the Bolshoi when they visited London. Mum and Dad sometimes went ballroom dancing; I loved it when they dressed up. Out of such minute inspirations I have found meaning sufficient for a life.
Dad said, ‘Do you think I’ll be able to go in that pub again?’
‘If you apologise.’
‘Better leave it a few weeks. I don’t know what overcame me. That woman’s not a Jewess, is she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Usually she’s happy to hear about my aches and pains, and who else is, at our age?’
‘Where d’you ache?’
‘It’s the walk to and from the station — sometimes I just can’t make it. I have to stop and lean against something.’
I said, ‘I’ve been learning massage.’
‘Ah.’ He put his feet in my lap. I squeezed his feet, ankles, and calves; he wasn’t looking at me now. He said, ‘Your hands are strong. You’re not a plumber, are you?’
‘I’ve told you what I do. I have the theatre, and now I’m helping to set up a teaching foundation, a studio for the young.’
He whispered, ‘Are you homosexual?’
‘I am, yes. Never seen a cock I didn’t like. You?’
‘Queer? It would have shown up by now, wouldn’t it? But I’ve never done much about my female interests.’
‘You’ve never been unfaithful?’
‘I’ve always liked women.’
I asked, ‘Do they like you?’
‘The local secretaries are friendly. Not that you can do anything. I can’t afford a “professional”.’
‘How often do you go to the pub?’
‘I’ve started popping in after work. My Billy has gone.’
‘For good?’
‘After university he’ll come running back to me, I can assure you of that. Around this time of night I’d always be talking to him. There’s a lot you can put in a kid, without his knowing it. My wife doesn’t have a word to say to me. She doesn’t like to do anything for me, either.’
‘Sexually?’
‘She might look large to you, but in the flesh she is even larger, and she crushes me like a gnat in bed. I can honestly say we haven’t had it off for eighteen years.’
‘Since Billy was born?’
He said, letting me caress him, ‘She never had much enthusiasm for it. Now she is indifferent … frozen … almost dead.’
I said, ‘People are more scared of their own passion than of anything else. But it’s a grim deprivation she’s made you endure.’
He nodded. ‘You dirty homos have a good time, I bet, looking at one another in toilets and that …’
‘People like to think so. But I’ve lived alone for five years.’
He said, ‘I am hoping she will die before me, then I might have a chance … We ordinary types carry on in these hateful situations for the single reason of the children and you’ll never have that.’
‘You’re right.’
He indicated photographs of me and my brother. ‘Without those babies, there is nothing for me. It is ridiculous to try to live for yourself alone.’
‘Don’t I know it? Unless one can find others to live for.’
‘I hope you do!’ he said. ‘But it can never be the same as your own.’
If the mortification of fidelity imperils love, there’s always the consolation of children. I had been Dad’s girl, his servant, his worshipper; my faith had kept him alive. It was a cult of personality he had set up, with my brother and me as his mirrors.