‘I’m sorry there’s no poetry,’ Nicholas said. ‘The poetry editor takes it all. There’s the odd thing left, but believe me, I’m doing you a favour by not bringing it.’
‘About that,’ Ray said, ‘I want you to do something for me. Look in that drawer. There’s a key.’
Nicholas took a set of keys from the drawer by his father’s bed.
‘Keys to the flat,’ Ray said. ‘I wanted to get that collection sorted and delivered before I came back in here and I ran out of time.’
‘You’ll be out again soon and can do it yourself.’
Ray tried to smile. ‘I don’t want to waste any more time,’ he said. ‘I want it tidied up and delivered. You’ll find it all on the machine in a folder marked “Sniper”. All you need to do is make sure I haven’t forgotten anything obvious, then print it out and post it. You’ll find the address there, too, somewhere. Same lot, anyway. They’ve not moved.’
‘I’ll take care of it for the time being,’ Nicholas said.
Ray was sweating a lot and tended to use the books Nicholas had given him to fan himself with rather than for reading. There was a rash of tiny pustules across his chest and more telltale Kaposi’s sarcomas had appeared on his neck and at the top of his back. His bones were sticking out of his pyjama jacket, creating hollows where perspiration collected. He kept telling Nicholas to go back to work, that there was nothing to see here, move on, show’s over. He managed to stretch a smile across his increasingly skull-like features. Nicholas did leave, but not to go to work. He hired a car and drove to the outskirts of Manchester and then around the M63 to Hyde and he knocked on the door of his grandparents’ house. One visit to London in twenty-five years and now they were expected to go again for the second time in two weeks? Nicholas knew it wasn’t the upheaval of leaving home or the effort required for travel that was putting them off. They had never accepted their son’s sexuality. To them he was still the young Post Office worker who had married the bingo caller, for good or bad; or the young airman on the other side of the equator but still the right side of the sexuality divide; if not the innocent young boy they had brought up to embody the right values and follow the rules of normal behaviour.
‘You may not have another chance to see him,’ Nicholas advised them.
He went out for a walk to give them a chance to talk and when he came back his nana took him into the morning room, which had lost the paraphernalia of childhood but kept the brighter colours.
‘I can’t see your grandad going,’ she said.
Nicholas decided to see this as encouraging and he called Liz to let her know he was stopping the night and would be back the following day. In the morning, he rose early, made a coffee and sat in the back garden listening to a blackbird singing. He wondered if his father had ever done the same. Tea instead of coffee, perhaps. When he went back into the house, his nana was putting her coat on and collecting her handbag from the telephone table in the hall.
‘What about Grandad?’ Nicholas said.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Nana.
Nicholas paused, thinking hard, wondering what more he could do. His grandparents were proud people.
He shouted upstairs, ‘We’ll be leaving in a couple of minutes, Grandad.’
There was no answer.
‘Come on, Nana.’
They left the house and Nicholas started the car. They sat in it for a few moments with the engine running and then Nicholas depressed the clutch and selected first gear.
‘Just a minute, love,’ Nana said.
Nicholas looked out of the side window, which allowed him to see the front of the house. Everything was still. Then he saw movement behind the frosted glass and the front door swung inwards and his grandad appeared. He closed the door, locked it and stumped down the path. He stood at the kerb by the passenger door, clearly expecting his wife to give up her space in the front seat for him. With a barely perceptible sigh, she opened her door and eased herself out of the car. Nicholas shook his head and stared out of the windscreen. His grandfather lowered himself into the front seat, leaving the door to be closed for him, and then Nana climbed into the back.
‘All set?’ Nicholas asked and didn’t wait for a response.
When Nicholas saw the look on his father’s face as the three of them walked on to the ward, he knew it had been worth it. Fearful, grateful, relieved, humble: all of these expressions guttered like dying candles in the recesses of his sockets. Nicholas watched his grandad progress slowly down the ward, every muscle contracted, making sure he came into physical contact with nothing that might infect him. Nana had cast her eyes on her son the moment she’d stepped through the door and she allowed his deep-set gaze to reel her in without any concern for her surroundings.
They sat around the bed. Nicholas had taken his father’s hand and given him a hug, as much to show his grandparents there was nothing to fear as for the contact itself, but so far they had kept their hands to themselves. Nicholas went to get some drinks and when he came back he observed that Nana had moved closer to the bed and was holding her son’s bony, cannulated hand.
Nicholas spoke to the consultant to ask if he should try to persuade his grandparents to stick around for a night or two. The doctor said Ray was not in immediate danger, but that he was unlikely to be leaving the ward any time soon.
‘If at all?’ Nicholas asked.
‘Your father is at the end stage.’
Nicholas drove his grandparents back to Hyde that evening. There had been a handshake between Ray and his father, and Nana had kissed her son and hugged him and cried. Nicholas saw them back into the house and turned down the offer of a bed. He embraced his nana and thanked her and shook his grandad’s meaty hand, the old man’s grip still fiercely strong, and thanked him too. Nana, in turn, thanked him for taking them and bringing them back; his grandfather remained silent on the issue, but Nicholas was confident he had done the right thing, at least by his father.
Ray died three weeks later, at 10.17 a.m. on 19 April 1992. Nicholas was with him, holding his hand, having gone to visit on his way into work. Ray had been conscious for the first hour of the visit and Nicholas had told him that just the night before he and Liz had taken the decision to do something they had been considering for some time: they were going to adopt a child. Nicholas said that while theirs might not have been the most conventional father — son relationship, it had ultimately inspired him to become a father himself.
‘I don’t know,’ he joked to Ray, ‘I get the sense you’ve enjoyed being a dad and I want some of that, too.’
In response, he felt the slightest increase in pressure from his father’s grip.
Nicholas also reassured him that the publishers were very happy with the new collection and were pressing ahead with publication in the autumn.
‘Thank you, by the way,’ Nicholas said, ‘for the dedication. It means a lot to me.’
This time there was no answering squeeze. His father had gone.
The funeral, at Highgate Cemetery, was well attended. Nicholas recognised a lot of people from the party his father had thrown for him and Liz at the flat in Camden Town. One or two patients from Broderip Ward came and the consultant was spotted at the service, too. Ray’s parents both made the trip; Liz looked after them for the day.