13
HARRY, AS HE had anticipated, didn’t make an appearance at dinner that night, and when I went to the porter’s lodge the next morning I found he’d left me a note apologising for his absence and saying he’d be pleased to see me for tea at the usual time. In the afternoon, he welcomed me in and took my jacket and I sat back in my chair and said nothing, thinking he might begin by offering some sort of explanation for his trip to London, but he only asked me how I had spent the previous day. It wasn’t until after I’d told him about my walk in the woods at Wytham, and the Ashmolean, that he made any reference to it, and even then it was only in passing. He told me he’d got back early enough to make it to dinner, but only just, and that because he tended to find the journey tiring these days, he’d ordered a quiet supper in his rooms. He’d spent the evening alone, sorting through some of his things and continuing the slow process of deciding what he would keep and what he would let go when it came to his retirement.
He gestures then to a stack of pictures resting in their frames against the sofa, saying that the cataloguing of his collection is something he is actually quite enjoying. He reaches forward and takes one from the top of the pile and passes it to me. The photograph I am looking at is about half a foot square and printed in black and white. There is a boy in this photograph, a small boy of no more than eight or nine years old. He is standing in front of one of the lions on Trafalgar Square and is wearing a winter coat and a scarf. He is flanked by two adults, each of them clasping one of his hands so that they are strung out in a line like figures cut from folded paper. The photograph is slightly faded, and from the way the three of them are dressed it appears to have been taken some time in the 1950s. The boy is wearing glasses, and when I look up at Harry and see that he has brought his glasses back down from his forehead, I realise that the photograph is of him. ‘These are your parents?’ I ask, and he says yes, and he tells me that what I am holding is the only picture he has of them, and how relieved he was to have come across the negative when sorting through the contents of their house after his mother’s death. ‘Until I found it I had to make do with my memory of the day. It was vivid enough, but it is good to see them there, all the same,’ he says, and he tells me about the three of them catching the train from Hull and tracking the banks of the Humber, heading west towards Goole before swinging south, and what it was like to arrive in London and find themselves among crowds suddenly. And how they had stopped a policeman on Trafalgar Square who, having given them the directions they wanted, had offered to take their picture and suggested they stand in front of one of the lions, and hold hands, and how as he’d stood there he’d been quite sure that his father wouldn’t have wanted to be photographed holding hands, not in public, and that it was only because it was the policeman’s idea that he had allowed it.
He talks then about his childhood in Hessle, his mother’s voice always singing, and how she had longed to become a pianist until her own mother had sold the piano one day, saying it took up too much space in the drawing room, and that it was because she had never recovered from this dashing of her hopes that she hadn’t let him learn a musical instrument, not wanting him to know what it was to experience something wonderful only to have it taken away. As he talks I stop listening properly, looking once more at the photograph that sits just to the left of Harry’s head, the one of the group of students standing on the Provost’s steps with Rachel in their midst, standing next to Harry, and it occurs to me that had I been in Harry’s position, I am not entirely sure I would have left it hanging there, knowing that I was coming to visit. Or, to put it another way, had I done so, I might have acknowledged its presence by talking about it in detail or at least by making some reference to it, rather than simply leaving me to notice it for myself.
And then, as Harry talks on about the East Riding he had known as a boy, I remembered him having told me over our tea that the reason he hadn’t stayed on for what he called ‘the Ball proper’ was because he hadn’t wanted to go alone, it being the year that his wife had died. My mind wandered again to the Ball, and to the fact I’d spent the whole of it with Richard. As far as I could remember, we’d made a fairly good night of it, the two of us together; I’d been almost happy as we wandered around in our drunkenness, feeling excited about the summer that was to come, and about being free from things for a time. I focused back in on Harry’s voice for a moment, hearing him talk of how his father had taken him running at Little Switzerland as soon as he was old enough, and how, when Harry had started to compete, he’d been there to see him win every race, whatever the weather and no matter how far he had to drive to wherever it was taking place. More images of the Ball began to flit in front of my eyes, one after the other, and it was as they did so that I realised that despite what he’d said about not having stayed on, I had seen him later on that night, I knew I had.
My realisation was, I think, prompted by my recollection of Richard having made a joke about what he was wearing, something about him being so much of a ‘Yorkshire tight-wad’ that he hadn’t even stretched to black tie. I couldn’t remember with any clarity the visual context in which I’d seen Harry, not at that stage. I remembered Richard’s joke though, probably because I’d thought to myself that Richard himself was far more obsessed with money than any Yorkshireman I’d ever met, and I’d said so, and we’d ended up arguing about it. In any case, I knew Harry had been there, and I couldn’t think why he would have told me so specifically that he wasn’t, it hardly being likely he’d have forgotten a night like that, particularly given the photograph that must have been hanging on his wall for at least the previous decade.
I begin to tune back in to the pattern of his speech, intending to take the next opportunity that arises to interject and ask him again about the Ball, wondering whether perhaps I’ve misunderstood him, but being almost certain at the same time that I haven’t, when I become aware that he has stopped talking altogether and is staring right at me.
‘Alex?’ he says, and I realise he has asked me a question. ‘You must forgive me if I’m being intrusive,’ he continues. ‘And you need not speak of it if it will distress you to do so.’ I smile, not having any idea what he’s talking about, and he is encouraged by this and carries on. ‘I heard of his death at the time of course, but I didn’t know you then, not in the sense that I do now. Not, at any rate, well enough to write and offer my condolences, if you understand. It was about five years ago, I think?’
When I understand that he is talking about my father I am caught off guard and I start to tell him about the shock of it, and how at first I had wondered whether perhaps he shouldn’t have been driving at his age, but that when it came to it, his innocence was proved beyond doubt. I start to tell Harry about the funeral, and how it rained throughout, but I stop when I get to the part about standing at the graveside under my umbrella afterwards thinking I was alone only to look up and see that a handful of people had gathered at the side of the church. It took me some time to work out who they were but eventually I recognised one of them, and then another, and realised they had been neighbours of ours from the village at the time of the accident, and that they’d come to watch the burial of Dr Death, as they’d sometimes referred to him in the years that followed when they thought neither my mother nor I was listening. Remembering the humiliation I felt the first time I overheard them calling my father this, knowing it wasn’t true, and knowing how angry it would have made him if he’d heard them himself, I get no further than that with the telling of my story, finding it is too much, after all, to talk of it.
‘We live by death’s negligence,’ Harry says, mistaking my sudden silence for grief rather than shame. ‘“Men may rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things,”’ he carries on, ‘“But who shall so forecast the years and find in a loss a gain to match?”’ I become aware that I am beginning to feel slightly sick, and uncomfortably hot. Because I want him to stop talking, I smile and thank him, and I say that I would like to go back to my room.
‘Of course, Alex,’ he says, standing with me. ‘Of course, I am sorry. And there is no need to thank me for the things I said; they are not my words. But there is consolation in them, I think, of a kind. You are right though, perhaps we have spoken enough for today. I am sorry if I touched on a subject I should not have done.’
‘No,’ I say, ‘of course not,’ and I turn to leave, but as I do my eye is caught by Rachel’s face looking out at me from the photograph on Harry’s wall. Without meaning to, I hesitate just long enough for him to notice me looking at her, and then I say to him, quite simply, that I remember having seen him that night, long after the Ball had started.
He takes off his glasses and begins to clean them, and I think it is the way he performs this ritual, methodically, slowly, carefully, showing no apparent intention of responding to what I’ve just said, that makes me lose patience. I look once more at Rachel staring back at me, and decide I’ve had enough of waiting, and that it’s time, finally, to talk about the little book of Browning.
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘I almost forgot. I’ve read the poems you asked me to.’
‘Good,’ he says quickly, not looking up from what he’s doing. ‘And how did you find them?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I said how did you find them?’
When I don’t answer he glances up, but only briefly, and I can read nothing in his face before he lowers it again.
‘It was the book itself that interested me, Harry, in actual fact, rather than its contents.’
‘Yes?’ he says, his head still lowered to his task.
‘You said in your letter you’d found it among some things of Rachel’s.’
Only then does he stop, putting his glasses back on and looking at me.
‘And?’
‘And I have a question for you,’ I reply, sitting down again and leaning right back in my chair, carrying on only when he sits down as well. ‘It’s just that she was reading it, that’s all, the month we came to visit you. I remember the cover you see. And the smell. She read to me from it, as a matter of fact, one night in our apartment. So when I opened the parcel you sent I recognised it straight away.’
‘Right,’ Harry says. ‘I’m not quite sure I—’
‘I know it’s the same book, Harry. I know it is. But what I don’t know is this. When exactly did you take it from her?’
I can see his jaw clenching and unclenching as he looks at me but he doesn’t answer.
‘You see, I don’t remember her being away from me that day we came to Oxford. Apart from when she went down to the lake after dinner. You will understand my difficulty, I think.’
‘Yes, Alex, I do.’
He says nothing else for at least a minute, and when he carries on he doesn’t answer my question, saying instead, ‘I believe the time has come for us to have that conversation.’
‘What conversation? We don’t need to have a conversation. You just need to tell me. When did you take it from her?’
‘It’s not quite so straightforward, Alex. You see—’
‘Oh come on, Harry. I think it is. Was it before she died?’
‘Alex. Please,’ and he stands again, suddenly, folding his arms in front of himself. ‘There are some things I have to tell you. Lots of things in fact. But before I can begin, I’m afraid there is more reading to be done.’
And then, to my amazement, he reaches over and takes something from the bookshelf and hands it to me, saying, ‘Tomorrow afternoon then, Alex. It’s late now, and dinner this evening will be the usual sort of affair so we shan’t have a chance to speak. Perhaps you could come a little earlier for tea tomorrow though, so we have plenty of time. Two o’clock, I think.’
I look down and see that what he has given me is a large padded envelope, taped up around the top and with something heavy inside. ‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ I say, incredulous at his suggestion. ‘You don’t seem to understand what I mean, not exactly.’ I know that my voice is shaking, but I know also that I can’t control my breathing enough to make it stop, and when I try to give the envelope back to him he shakes his head and doesn’t take it.
‘What, Alex?’ he asks. ‘What is it that I don’t understand?’
‘Why did you ask me to come here, Harry? Why won’t you answer my question about the bloody book? Why did you say you found it among her things?’
‘Alex—’
‘What things, Harry? I know you lied to me in that letter. Do you seriously think I’m going to sit through dinner again making small talk with virtual strangers while you decide how to answer me?’
‘Alex,’ he says again. ‘I think it is you, if I may say so, who has not entirely understood the situation. The decision of how I am going to answer your question was one I took a long time ago. I have simply been waiting until you asked it. And now that you have, there are a few more things you must see before I begin my story, that is all. I am trying to give you the best chance of comprehending the sequence of events I will describe. It’s important, Alex, that things are revealed to you in the right order, so you may see them as I have done.’
Feeling that I’m completely losing control of the situation, I hear myself telling him I’m finding his approach at best bizarre, and at worst deeply disrespectful to Rachel, and then I feel a resurgence in my stomach of the nausea that has been always there since the moment I discovered, sitting on the ground beside the policeman who would arrest me, that she was dead.
‘Are we not beyond that point, Harry?’ I carry on. ‘Are we not beyond it yet?’
‘What point is that, Alex? Are we not beyond what point?’ and I see that he is angry also, at the same time as appearing to be genuinely confused by my question.
‘Beyond the point of discussing the relative merits of one narrative structure over another. For god’s sake, Harry, don’t you see? Rachel’s death was the end of a life, not the beginning of a f*cking story.’
And then Harry looks at his pocket watch and walks over to the door, shaking his head as he goes. When he gets there and turns to face me it takes him a moment or two to catch his breath before he speaks.
‘You are right, Alex, of course you are. And I am sorry for you in your loss, you must know that by now. It’s just that the particular story I have to tell you is one that began a long time before Rachel died, a very long time in fact. And no matter how angry you feel, you must accept that I can say no more until you have read the things I’ve given you. It is best that you do so alone, and at your own pace.’ And he sighs. ‘Do not doubt the loss I suffered on the night that Rachel died. She was as a daughter to me, your wife.’
And then he reaches forward and holds the door open before saying, his voice grown quiet now, ‘I very much hope that will be something you come to see for yourself when you hear the things that I will speak of.’
I think it was because I was so surprised by what he’d just said, and because I was too bewildered to argue any more, that I did as he asked and went away. When I left his room I was holding against my chest the envelope that he’d given me, and as I walked down his staircase I heard him call out, ‘Six forty-five this evening then, as usual. Goodbye, Alex. And do make sure you find the time to read its contents before you go to sleep tonight. All of it. It is important that you do so.’
‘I’ll take you through to your father, sir,’ the nurse said. ‘I am so sorry we couldn’t. It was too late sir. It was twice in the air ambulance. It was a helicopter. It was the fastest they could have got him here. Twice they tried, and then on the table. His heart.’
I stopped her then and said there was no need to explain, that a doctor had taken me into a side room as soon as I’d arrived and told me everything there was to tell about my father’s death.
And this is what I would have told Harry when he’d asked me about it, if I’d been able to; this was the scene that came back to me as I walked away from his room that afternoon.
I would have told him that the doctor was almost as old as my father had been, and that he’d sat right back in his chair and kept his arms folded all the way through our conversation, as though he was afraid I might cry, or reach out to touch him, if he were to do otherwise. I heard very little of what he said to me, this doctor, my thoughts drifting instead to the helicopter rising above the fields of Hampshire and backing away towards Portsmouth. I imagined the pilot glancing down and seeing a line of traffic stretching out beneath him, and I imagined the police becoming smaller and smaller until they were indistinguishable from anybody else, their cars like any other but for their position pointing inwards in a ring around the burnt mess of my father’s car. And I realised then that there would have been nobody in the helicopter that afternoon who actually knew my father, who could have held his hand in theirs and recognised the weight of it, the particular softness of his knuckles against their skin and the warmth of it where it lay. And nor would there have been anyone to miss him when he hadn’t come home for lunch that day, or anyone to wonder where he was. No one who would even have known that he was driving that way, on his own, with nothing in the car but the bag of potatoes he’d just picked up from the farm shop.
As soon as my secretary had finally summoned up the courage to interrupt my meeting and to announce that the transport police had telephoned three times in the previous hour, I called them straight back and was told there had been an accident. When I said it would take me at least two hours to get there, no matter how fast I drove, they said not to hurry, and that the doctors would wait for me. And then they said it again. They would wait until I got there. ‘Don’t worry, sir. They can do that for you.’ I made the mistake of assuming this meant he would still be alive when I arrived, and it wasn’t until later on that afternoon that I discovered my father had died just after I’d set off on my journey. The doctor explained that sometimes they said this to people who were driving to the bedside of a dying relative. ‘It’s safer that way,’ he said. ‘Nobody rushes if we tell them that; nobody drives too fast.’
He would never have known what had happened to him, the doctor said. He could never have survived. He became unconscious almost on impact. Seconds, only. No more than that. It was almost certain that he wouldn’t have felt any kind of pain. ‘Often the best way,’ he said. And then he was up, and out of his seat, and grabbing my hand on his way out and shaking it, too hard, too fast.
And because I hadn’t got there any sooner, there was nobody there with my father when they switched off the machines and detached him from every kind of wire and drip and sack of fluid hanging from a stand and cleared away the blood such as they could and covered him in a blanket, a cotton blanket, white, with little holes all over it, the kind of blanket you might expect to see a baby in except it was big enough to cover the whole of his body, leaving him there, lying on a metal bed, quite on his own, right in the middle of the room.
Which is how I find him when the nurse has walked me along the empty corridors for what seems like an age, all the time staying just ahead of me and turning back to speak, the rubber soles of her shoes squeaking with every step like the laughter of children who know they shouldn’t be laughing. At first I can’t get into the room she’s taken me to. There are screens placed in front of the door, screens of fabric stretched across a metal frame, hinged into separate panels on top of wheeled feet. She directs me to step behind them. ‘You’ll find your way, sir. Behind there. That’s it.’ But the space is too narrow for me to turn in and, from where I am standing, I can’t get sufficient purchase on the handle of the door to open it. By the time she has stepped forward and wheeled away the screens so I can reach the door handle properly, my hands are shaking so much that she has to do it for me. I think she will come in with me but instead she closes the door behind me and we are alone together, my father and I. The lights have been switched off, and I look across to where he lies and as I see the familiar shape of him rising still under the blanket the room and everything in it disappears suddenly and for a second or two I can see nothing, only whiteness, and there is a kind of a roaring in my ears. When I can see again, I find that I am standing beside him and I have taken his hand from underneath the blanket and am holding it in my own. I look down at his face and see that the whole of his head has been strapped into some kind of a brace, giant screws on either side clamping his jaw together more tightly than it should be so that he looks as though he has been tortured rather than cared for. I place his hand on his chest and walk around to the other side of the bed and when I get there I remember the nurse telling me that it would perhaps be best if I didn’t look at that part of his head.
I am ashamed to say that I walked away from him then, over to the other side of the room, and I was sick into the sink that I found there and I ran the tap and washed it away and I didn’t tell the nurse later on that I’d done it. And then I went back to my father, on the other side this time, and I held his hand again and I realised that the reason his face was the colour of cold ash was because he had not one drop of blood left in him. His hand was too cold, and too heavy, and I leaned over his body and laid my head on his chest and I longed for it to rise and fall but it didn’t so I lifted up my head and kissed him once, on his forehead, and then I said goodbye.
The thing that seemed cruellest as I stood with him that afternoon was the violence of his injuries. They told me a week or so later that his neck had been broken and his skull fractured in twenty places. Six of his ribs had been smashed, and all the bones of both his arms had been rendered into pieces. Technically, his death had occurred when his heart stopped for the third time, with the shock of it, but there was never any chance, they said, not from the moment of impact. It seemed somehow unfair that a man as gentle as my father once had been should ever have known what it was to have suffered such violence himself.
When I went back to the nurses’ desk in the reception area I found the woman who had walked me to my father’s room and I thanked her, and then I asked her to thank the doctors on my behalf for what they had done. She handed me a folder of leaflets on bereavement counselling, and lists and lists of the things I would have to do in the months ahead. She held my hands in hers and said ‘I am so sorry,’ and I thought we had finished and I would be able to leave without having shed so much as a single tear in front of anyone. But then at the last she said, ‘Oh, and there’s me almost forgetting to give you these,’ and she reached down beneath her desk and passed me a plastic bag. ‘His shoes sir. And his watch and his wallet. There wasn’t anything else.’
Before that summer, the one with Robbie and the medicine cabinet and our foolish game gone wrong, he would pick me up and run around the garden with me, hurling me up towards the sky and laughing as though something extraordinary had happened when all it was was that the last of his patients had left for the afternoon and he had come to find me in my room and taken me outside for what he called my Runaround. And sometimes we would throw a ball to one another and my mother would call from the sitting room not to hit the wisteria it had only just been planted and don’t get him dirty it’s not his bathnight tonight you know it’s not. And then we would stop and he would go to the pub for his Justahalf, the drink he would never explain, the drink I knew I would choose as soon as I was old enough to go with him. And my mother would take me upstairs and wash the grass stains from my feet, and then she would put me to bed. And as I fell asleep on those cool summer nights, the windows open and a lamp burning in the corner of my room, I would sometimes hear my father’s feet crunch across the gravel on the drive and he would laugh as he came in and my mother and he would fall to their supper, silently.
Sometimes, when he was with a patient, the sound of his laughter would drift from his consulting room. It would echo around the house in the quietness of the afternoon so that whatever I was doing, submerged under a pile of cushions on my bed reading a story, or lying on the floor of the playroom whittling a stick, or sitting at the kitchen table colouring in a picture, I would hear it and stop and wonder when it would be time for tea, or whether Robbie might come soon and ring on the bell and run with me into the garden to play.
And on one of those afternoons when Robbie had come, when we were inside rather than out because it was raining, we were playing together in my bedroom, just above my father’s consulting room, and because of that we could hear him quite clearly, on and off, as we played. ‘Why does he laugh so much anyway?’ Robbie asked me, pushing me off the window seat and jumping on top of me and punching me on my arm. ‘Is it medicine do you think? Do you think he takes medicine or summink, your dad?’ And that was how it had begun, this plan of ours, or of mine, I can never remember which of us it was who thought of it first: to take the key from my mother’s bedside table while she had her afternoon sleep and to creep through the house past the door of his consulting room to the special room next to the pantry that I was on no account ever allowed to enter, and to unlock his dispensing cabinet and see if we could find it, this medicine, this medicine that might make Robbie laugh as much as my father did.
There was a moment in my mother’s bedroom, just after Robbie and I had tiptoed to the head of her bed and he was leaning over to take the key, when I caught the scent of the night stocks from where they stood in a vase on her dressing table. As I did so, I remembered going into the garden with my father to watch him cut them, and how I had felt when we brought them in and my father had given them to her, and the look on her face, and I thought to myself then that we shouldn’t be doing what we were doing, Robbie and I, because it would make her unhappy. But he had the key in his hand suddenly and we were running down the corridor and I could hardly breathe I was so excited and then it was too late.
I never heard my father laugh again. Sometimes in my memory it will sound still, suddenly, unexpectedly, incongruously, catching me unawares and stopping my breath in my chest and sending a pain sharp into the middle of my heart so that I think I might die with it. It was the kind of laugh that began as a chuckle and grew as his torso started to shake and grew again as his head fell back so that he had to pause and say Ye Gods Man and gasp two short breaths before starting all over again, slapping his thigh and roaring with it, his face red and shiny with tears so that my mother, if she was there, would start to laugh as well despite the fact she always looked as though she didn’t really want to, and she would say Oh Love stop please, stop you’re making my tummy ache.