It’s odd that all the time I could have asked him these things, I never did — as if I was never concerned to know the whole truth. And now, when the answers won’t come, I want to ask floods of questions. Why is this? It’s because for the first time I realize that Dad is in that book. He’s in there somewhere. It’s not some other man, in those pages, with a code-name, Shuttlecock. It’s a former consultant engineer, a golf player, a widower, the victim of a mental breakdown. I want to put the two together. Or — put it another way — the book is Dad. It’s more Dad than that empty effigy I sit beside at the hospital. When I pick it up I still possess Dad, I hold him, even though he’s gone away into unbreakable silence. At weekends when Marian talks to her plants I bury myself in Dad’s book.
‘Chapter Six: With the Maquis Again’.
[9]
Did I mention, by the way, a little while back, something about taking my kids out on the common at weekends to play healthy games with bats and frisbees? It doesn’t really happen, of course. You will have gathered that my relations with Martin and Peter aren’t exactly harmonious. Not that we don’t go out on the common. But that picture — the exuberant father, the frisky children — it’s quite wrong. I have to half drag them along, for a start. I get out my old cricket bat (my cricket bat, you notice, from distant school-days — Martin and Peter have never expressed the slightest interest in cricket); or I find the plastic football or the bright red frisbee I bought Peter for his last birthday (a marvellous invention, the sort of thing you’d expect two young boys to play with endlessly and tire out their Dad), and I say: ‘Right! We’re going to the common. No arguments!’
And what happens? I work up vain enthusiasm. They stubbornly refuse to enter the spirit of the game. They look bored. They want to know what the time is. There is something on television. They moan about being made to run and they argue about who should fetch the ball when, in a spasm of frustration, I take an excessive, but not unpleasing swipe with the bat, which sends it into the distance. They fail to be impressed by or to seek to emulate my expertise with the frisbee (I am very good at the under-hand boomerang shot). They look upon me as some sort of demented PT instructor. All this simply isn’t natural. And I have to confess another thing. Once, last summer (this is only one of a number of similar instances), when Martin was being particularly troublesome, pretending not to have found one of those knocked-for-six balls, which, when I walked over to him, he suddenly ‘spotted’ at his feet in the long grass beneath a tree, I had this sudden urge, as he stooped to pick it up, to raise my bat and bring it down, hard, like a club, on the back of his head. I could have done it, I really could.
So we go less and less to the common. Now I wouldn’t mind if it was just I who was the obstacle — if Martin and Peter went off to the common to play by themselves — but they don’t do this either. And these days it seems that I too, for some inexplicable reason, for some spiteful reason, because what I really want to do is precisely the opposite, am choosing to stay indoors when we could go out.
Today, for instance, is Saturday, the very last day in April. The weather’s still fine and warm. It’s been exceptionally fine all week. Everything’s grown so much in only a few days: the chestnuts on the common, the May trees, the sycamores — but enough of that. Marian slips an arm around me while she makes a morning cup of coffee. I still haven’t told her, incidentally, about my promotion.
‘Darling, why don’t we go out somewhere today after lunch — even before lunch? A picnic? We’ve done the shopping; there’s nothing to stop us. It’s the first decent Saturday of the year.’
And almost immediately, because it’s Marian who’s said it, not me, and even though the very same idea has been crossing my mind since breakfast, I say: ‘I don’t know. I’ve got things to do.’
‘What things?’
‘Oh, odd jobs. This and that.’
Lies, of course. There’s nothing I have to do. Though I suddenly see what I can do, what I will do.
‘Well, tomorrow,’ Marian says forbearingly. ‘If it’s still nice.’
‘I’m going to see Dad tomorrow.’
Marian looks peevish. This is a sore point. Because I insist on my visits to Dad, we lose days together.
‘I thought we might go to Richmond and walk along the river.’
I know why she has said this. It is one of my favourite short outings. There’s a pub on the river bank with seats outside where children can sit. Then you can walk along the towpath, upstream, past Ham House, as far as Teddington Lock if you want.
‘It’d be nice,’ she adds, and gives me a little solicitous look. I know what it means. It means that for some while now she’s been noticing there’s something on my mind, I’m wound up about something. She daren’t ask directly what it is, of course. She knows better than that. But her wisdom tells her what might be a remedy for it: relaxation; air; the sun on the water; dipping willows. You see, Marian is really a very good woman.
‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘But it’s all right — you go.’
Now this is a sharp move. It means that Marian must either say, ‘Well, I’m not going if you’re not coming,’ and then we bicker and have a scene; or she really must go without me and run the risk of seeming to neglect me. In the end she plumps (just as I would too) for bold assertion.
‘Okay. I will. I’ll enjoy it too.’
But now there’s an atmosphere of hostility.
‘I’ll take the car then?’ she adds.
‘No you won’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you won’t take the car, that’s why.’ (I want the car for my own reasons.)
‘Well, how do we get to Richmond?’
‘You can take a bus. You’ve heard about buses? A number 37, all the way. I’ll even give you the fare.’
‘Thanks.’
She plonks a cup of coffee down in front of me. We might as well have had an all-out scene. But she can still change her mind.
‘Won’t you come?’ she says after a sullen, coffee-sipping pause. The first sign of real weakness.
‘No!’ I say adamantly.
I go into the living-room, shutting the kitchen door. The boys are lolling about, reading comics. The television is still in the living-room. The boys could switch it on — there are Saturday morning programmes for kids — but they daren’t. They know I’d hit them.
I clap my hands, like an animal-trainer. ‘Right, you’re going out this afternoon, for a walk by the river at Richmond.’
They give me slow, uninterested looks.
‘It’s all right, I’m not coming. I’ve got things to do. You’re going with Mum — it’s her idea — on the bus.’ And almost immediately their eyes, which only a second before had been full of reluctance, begin to show enthusiasm — and relief. This hurts me. Believe me, it does. You see, when I said I didn’t mind if it was just I who was the obstacle, that was a lie. What is it that Marian’s got that I haven’t got? Why do the kids have no axe to grind with Marian?