A not so uncommon symptom of grief? But I don’t think Sam was so sorely stricken. You have to remember that my mother was seventy-eight. People do die at that age. I would have said (though I know now there was more to it) that it was simply the fact of death — how to deal with it, how to get away from it as quickly as possible — that implanted that look of terror on Sam’s face when I emerged, that glowing evening, from my last meeting with my mother. Fear, yes; grief, I’m not so sure. As to the hole that his wife’s death left in his life, Sam had a simple and well-tried expedient for this, one that he had been applying, in fact, for a considerable time before my mother breathed her last: substitoots. It was in the embrace of one such substitoot (not to say prostitoot) that Sam himself breathed his last, some nine months after his wife’s funeral. And if I were asked to describe in a word the bereft husband’s demeanour and behaviour at that sad ceremony, I would have to say: shifty.
On the question of grief in general — but with particular reference to mine — Sam was obliged to adopt a cool and unsentimental line, in keeping with the realities of stepfatherhood, with the circumstances of his entry into my life all those years ago in Paris, not to mention with the role he had unwittingly been playing, of Claudius to my Hamlet—“Fie, ’tis a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead …” Thus his ability to bury my mother and carry on with life with a minimum of morbid fuss merely proved his consistency and demonstrated, moreover, how I should have behaved with Ruth.
But, in fairness to Sam, his world was neither as regular nor as callous as this. My grief undoubtedly troubled him. It gnawed at him; isn’t that why, to take the kinder view of the deed, he had me moved in here? My picture of things is — fuller — now, but it seemed that that shiftiness at my mother’s funeral carried an element of apology. As if he were saying, comparing his scant powers of mourning to mine: I’m sorry — it’s the best I can do.
And along with the hint of apology there was a measure of genuine, vaguely envious incomprehension. No, he didn’t understand it, this — romantic love. It was some other sort of glue, a durable, serviceable and remarkably flexible glue, that had held him and my mother together for so long. But if pressed on the point — I never did press him on the point; I should have tried that last day I saw him — Sam might have admitted that this marriage to my mother was itself a kind of long-term, plausible “substitoot”: Ruth and I were the real thing.
You never know the people you think you know. How could I have foreseen that my arch-enemy Sam, the man who had pronounced such merciless judgement on my future, would one day take me to one side and, with a halting attempt at a wink and a nudge, want to know what my “secret” was? He should have spoken about secrets. How could I have known, during those rampant days in Paris, that this man who had the run, to say no more, of our apartment, would one day complain to me, as if I were some chafing fellow, free spirit, about this woman (my mother) who seemed so unfairly and stubbornly unwilling to let him go out to play. (Not that she actually stopped him.)
But by the time that these confidences occurred, I had done what Sam would never have believed of me. Gangling, sulky, flat-footed, ungrateful bookworm, I had married an actress. I was all set — or this was how Sam pictured it — to become a playboy myself.
She was seventy-eight. He was sixty-six. There would always have come a time when that age gap between them would tell. In the early days there was of course that element of expedient confusion in Sam which enabled him to adopt with me a brotherly stance while craving from his own wife a maternal indulgence. But he would discover that you cannot expect maternal indulgence without reckoning also on maternal authority, and you cannot expect maternal anything if you yourself aspire to (pseudo-) paternity.
The old delusion, the old foible of stepfathers: that in the fullness of time, their new-found charges will come to view them as the genuine article. It was a challenge that Sam, being a man of bold and competitive spirit, could not decline: to become my father, to achieve (masterwork of substitution) that synthetic breakthrough. Somewhere along the line, Sam and my mother must have broached the question of children of their own — and shelved it. I was a barrier — I see it now — to such future issue. If Sam was ever to have “real” offspring, he had first to make me his child.
He failed, of course. That day when I refused the inestimable boon of Ellison Plastics and he cut me off, as if I were his true son and heir, set the seal on his failure — though it did not stop him trying again. How obvious it all was, how easy to confound him. The more he tried, the more I rejected him. The more he strove, not being my father, to become my father, the more I resurrected, like a shield, my real—
“You see, pal, your ma keeps a tight rein.…”
It is a summer afternoon in the late Sixties. Years have gone by. They have loosened some of the fixed positions of the past, hardened others. Every so often, under a flag of uneasy truce, I go to see my mother and stepfather in their new and opulent retreat (the Tudor mansion with all mod cons) in Berkshire. All this, I am still proddingly reminded, might have been mine. But the challenge Sam once set himself has not been met; I have not repented; and the time for real fatherhood, for growing up and begetting real children, is long past — my mother is well over fifty. So Sam has reverted to his own childish dreams, meaning, now, fooling around with secretaries, taking dubious foreign business trips and generally indulging in part-time good-time. He has the money for it and the opportunities — all around him he sees now visions of rising hemlines and lapsing morals — and he has still, let’s not be uncharitable, the looks.
There he sits on a sun-lounger by his very own swimming-pool, clearly a man who has not yet decided the time has come to make prudent arrangements with his body, since he wears only a pair of skimpy, powder-blue shorts, the waistband of which is not excessively at odds with his belly. The hair on his head, it is true, is receding, but the thicket of hair on his chest is set off by his smooth, solarium tan. A further dark pelt runs downwards from his navel into his shorts. He smokes a cigar; cradles a tall drink; sits amid the attributes of wealth.
He has everything, it seems. Except — poor man — the unqualified licence of my mother to do just as he likes. He has not yet — this will be a later phase, and anyone looking at him now might find it hard to credit — succumbed to those fantasies of old-world, pedigreed patricianship which will have their unlikely fruition in the discovery of John Elyson, once of this College. But he already sees himself as a lord of the manor with limitless droit de seigneur. The reality is that he is still subject to my mother’s infinitely subtle methods of manipulation, still the victim of her maternal sway. Still in short trousers.
He takes the cigar from his lips, then clenches it again more tightly in the corner of his mouth. The fabric of the shorts bites into his thigh. The man — he can’t help it — has an outsize, unflagging but anxious libido that requires regular attention. Moreover, though he has never enjoyed the gratifications of true fatherhood, he has not been spared its pains: even a stepson’s manhood threatens his own — even a bookish, sulky, flat-footed stepson.
“A damn tight rein.”
As if he would have me believe he never transgressed. Or as if the fact that she kept a tight rein was a justification of, a tacit testimony to his (actual and numerous) transgressions.
The blue water of the pool wobbles listlessly. The trouble was I always liked him. He resettles himself on the lounger. This is Berkshire, not Bermuda, but on this Sunday afternoon even the temperate hills and genteel lawns of the Home Counties are blessed by flagrant, sub-tropical heat. We sit by the pool, just the two of us. My mother is indoors, taking a siesta. She favours, these days, an afternoon rest. She will emerge soon, in a summer frock sensibly yet becomingly attuned to her advancing years, bearing a jingling tea tray.