Glittering Images (47 page)

‘I suppose he must miss the office a lot.’

‘Well, why should he? He’s got his horrid conservatory! I keep asking him to grow orchids but he won’t; it’s sheer bloodymindedness. He could perfectly well grow orchids if he wanted to.’

‘How’s Peter?’

‘No help at all, I’m fed up with Peter at the moment. The least he could do is drop in every week to have a drink with your father and talk about the office but he’s always working late or going to the Test Match or playing golf or whizzing off to a smart dinner party with Annabel. Of course I blame Annabel for being too possessive; I always did think she was a thoroughly selfish girl – oh, there’s the telephone. Maybe it’s Peter ringing up in remorse after neglecting us for so long. Darling, go and dig your father out of that ghastly conservatory and tell him we’re about to have drinks.’

Nelson accompanied me through the door on to the terrace and padded at my heels as I walked around the side of the house. However outside the conservatory, which he knew from experience was too warm for his comfort, he sat down in the shade to wait. Meanwhile my heart had begun to thud at a brisk pace again. I felt as if every step I had ever taken in my life had led to this moment when I would open the conservatory door and face once more but with new eyes that fierce mysterious man who had brought me up.

I reached the door. I opened it. I crossed the threshold into the sultry heat. I was reminded of a jungle being colonized by a single ruthless British soldier intent on building his own private empire on which the sun would never set.

‘Ah, there you are,’ said my father from the far end of the conservatory. ‘Glad to see you’ve arrived in one piece. That stupid woman says she’s going to make champagne cocktails – why you’re not utterly ruined by her petting and pampering I can’t imagine, but there we are, she means well and it’s not every day she has the excuse to waste my money on champagne. Where’s your dog-collar? Nice to see you looking like a normal chap for a change. Suppose it’s too much to hope that you’ve given up that damnfool superstitious pantomime that calls itself the Church of England.’

I touched the cross hidden beneath my shirt and walked on down the conservatory to meet him.

‘Then as to success of life, I think that all turns on the meaning attached to success. From one point of view, I do not doubt that my professional career may fairly be described as successful, but that is not the point of view which at any time has secured my acceptance.’

HERBERT HENSLEY HENSON
Bishop of Durham 1920–1939
Retrospect of an Unimportant Life

My father was seventy years old but could have passed for a man in his early sixties. He had a trim neat upright figure, not tall, and he moved with none of the hesitation of old age. His hair, which had once been a mundane brown, was now an equally mundane pepperish-white; short, straight and ruthlessly parted it receded sharply on either side of his high forehead. The eyes behind his glasses were blue. He had a long straight nose and a sharp pugnacious chin. His mouth drooped at the corners when he sulked and tightened into a thin-lipped line when he was angry but he had a swift rare pleasant smile which revealed that he had kept his teeth; my father hated dentists almost as much as he hated doctors and was convinced they were charlatans intent on making money by the most dubious means.

As I approached him I saw he was wearing his scruffiest gardening clothes. ‘Thought I’d change while your mother’s pampering you over the first round of those damned cocktails,’ he said as we shook hands. ‘Did she send you to fetch me?’

I told him about the telephone call which might have come from Peter, and my father, giving an eloquent sniff, began to scoop a small pile of earth from the work-bench into an empty flowerpot.

‘Mother said you hadn’t seen much of Peter lately,’ I added, removing my jacket in acknowledgement of the heat.

‘He’s been too damn busy. I’m just fit for the scrap-heap, of course, now I’m retired. And that stupid wife of his has been giving him extravagant ideas by bullying him into taking a holiday on the Riviera. “What’s wrong with England?” I asked him but he just laughed as if I were senile. He never bothers to keep me up to date with what’s happening at the office. Wish to God I hadn’t retired but I always said no one should stay at the helm after the age of seventy so I had to stick to my guns and practise what I preached. And now what have I got? One son who doesn’t answer my letters, another son who prances off abroad and a wife who nags me to grow orchids! It’s enough to make one puke. I’m fed up with the whole bloody business of being alive. Roll on extinction, I say, and thank God there’s no after-life. That really would be the last straw.’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t answer that last letter of yours, Father,’ I said. ‘That was wrong of me. But can I now renew my invitation to Cambridge? I’d be very pleased if you and Mother –’

‘Can’t leave my plants. Various things at a critical stage. Need daily attention.’ My father scooped up the last fragments of earth and pressed them ferociously into the flowerpot before demanding, ‘Why all the sweetness and light? What’s going on? Why are you here? Are you in debt?’

‘My dear Father –’

‘You don’t have to soften me up before you ask for a loan. Come on, Charles – out with it! I knew as soon as you telephoned yesterday that you were in some sort of trouble –’

‘I have indeed been in very great trouble,’ I said, ‘but it has nothing to do with money and I’m getting better now.’

He pushed the spectacles high up on the bridge of his nose so that he could stare at me through the lenses. ‘You’ve been ill?’

‘I’ve been through a time of severe strain but I’m now, with the help of my new spiritual director, beginning to –’

‘Your new
what
?’

‘Spiritual director. A specialist in spiritual health. Like a doctor of the soul.’

‘Very nasty. Sounds like quackery. You ought to be careful, Charles. Some of these quacks can do a lot of damage.’

‘I assure you he could hardly be more respectable – he’s a clergyman as well as a monk, and –’

‘A monk! I don’t like the sound of this at all, Charles. No man in his right mind would be a monk. But what’s the matter with you? Lost your faith?’

‘No, I’d lost my spiritual way but I’m finding it again, and Father Darrow – the monk – thinks you can be of enormous importance in helping me along the road to recovery. That’s actually why I’ve come here today.’

We stood facing each other, my father still holding his trowel, I still holding my jacket while my shirt stuck to my back. My heart was now thudding more briskly than ever.

‘Well, of course I’ll help you in any way I can, Charles. That’s what fathers are for. But this all sounds damned odd to me and I’m not sure I understand what’s going on. Stop talking about spiritual this and spiritual that and put it in plain no-nonsense English. Have you had a nervous breakdown?’

‘Father Darrow refused to call it that. Perhaps one could say that my entire way of life broke down so that I found myself unable to go on without pausing to solve a number of severe problems.’

‘Severe – oh, rubbish, Charles! That nasty monk’s been putting a lot of nonsense into your head! You don’t have any problems – you’re making the biggest possible success of that peculiar profession of yours!’

‘That was the problem.’

‘My God, don’t tell me you’re going to chuck everything up and rush off to be a missionary in Africa!’

‘No, before I can even begin to reassess my calling I have to get my soul in order, and that’s why –’

‘There you go again, talking in ghastly clerical whimsy-language! Why the devil you can’t just say you’re in a bloody muddle, I don’t know. God, how you worry me, Charles! For years and years I’ve slaved to bring you up to be –’

‘You did a wonderful job, Father. Before I say what I’m going to say next I want to tell you how very much I admire you and how very grateful I am to you for all you’ve –’

‘What the
hell’s
all this? Nasty sentimental maundering – talking like a damned foreigner – pull yourself together, Charles, and for God’s sake stop embarrassing me!’

There was a pause. I looked at him and knew the hour had come – and suddenly as he looked at me I saw he knew it too; he knew that no fierce rebuke could stop me now from saying what had to be said. We stood there in the stifling conservatory, in that little jungle which he was doggedly colonizing with his incorruptible British spirit, and it was as if we both saw the sun setting on the empire which he had been so valiantly sustaining for so long.

I said, ‘I’ve got to know. I can’t live with the uncertainty any longer. Help me – you said you’d help me – that’s what fathers are for, you said –’

‘I’ll help you best by telling you to wash your hands of that bloody monk and stop acting like a bloody actor in a bloody melodrama!’

‘Are you my natural father?’

The sun finally set on the empire and the night began to fall.

My father turned away to face the work-bench again so that I could see his face only in profile, and then slowly, very slowly, he took off his spectacles. I felt as if I were seeing an actor remove his mask at the end of some long Greek tragedy. Then slowly, very slowly, like the old man he was, he sat down on a wooden stool and stared with unseeing eyes at the spectacles in his hands.

At last he said in a tired voice, ‘So it was all for nothing.’

‘How can you conceivably say that?’ I was shattered. Automatically, hardly knowing what I did, I upturned a giant flowerpot so that I could sit down at his side.

‘Didn’t want you ever to know. Thought if you guessed it would mean I’d failed and if I’d failed it would mean everything was a mockery – the marriage, all my ideals, everything. But you guessed. So I’ve failed. And it’s all been for nothing.’

‘I don’t think you’ve failed,’ I said. ‘I’ll never think you’ve failed. And if I don’t think you’ve failed then it can’t all have been for nothing.’

He moved abruptly away. I knew why. He was terrified that he might prove unable to keep the depth of his distress to himself. The silence lengthened as he turned his back on me and pretended to examine one of the vines, but at last he said, ‘I suppose you want to know everything.’

‘I must. I’m sorry.’

‘Well, don’t blame me if you don’t like it!’ said my father, making a frail attempt to recapture his characteristic truculence. ‘If you think he was a bloody hero you’re making a very big mistake.’ And then before I could reply he said in a rush, ‘His name was Alan Romaine …’

‘Alan Romaine,’ said my father. ‘Alan Romaine. Typical. Just the sort of name he
would
have. Maybe he picked it out of a French novel. Wouldn’t surprise me. Nothing about him ever did surprise me. Alan Romaine …

‘He was a doctor. But not your ordinary decent quack who runs gamely around the local houses with a stethoscope and is always a bit pressed for time. This quack was special. He had grand ideas. He was going to play the hero in a big London hospital and later he was going to have rooms in Harley Street where all the titled women could consult him about their aches and pains. He knew people. He name-dropped. He was about to begin a specialist’s training in gynaecology at Bart’s but that summer he had a little time to fill in so he came down to Epsom as a locum. Romaine liked Epsom. Near London … scene of the Derby … racing … smart people … glamour … just his sort of place. Once he’d arrived he settled down in double-quick time and prepared to conquer everyone in sight.

‘He was only twenty-seven. Obviously he’d done well. Plenty of brains. First-class at cricket and tennis. Modest, though – knew how to behave. All the women from nineteen to ninety treated him as a Greek god but because he was such a sportsman he was popular with the men too – all the men except me. I just took one look at him and thought: bounder. Cad. Too flashy by half. And I wondered about him. He never spoke of a family. Nobody really knew anything about him. He was a gentleman, of course, but … not to be trusted.

‘He drank quite a bit. No one seemed to notice but I did. Once at a dinner when the ladies had withdrawn he had a third glass of port after a heavy raid on the claret decanter and I said to him, “You’re drinking rather a lot for a doctor, aren’t you?” That made him angry. “Poor old Ashworth!” he said. “So old, so staid, so dull!” But I said, “You’d better watch your step. Hard-drinking bounders don’t wind up in Harley Street. They wind up in the gutter.” For a moment I thought he was going to throw his glass at me but instead he laughed and said, “You’re just jealous – and don’t think we can’t all guess why!”

‘As you know, I’d wanted to marry your mother for some time,’ said my father, turning away at last from the vine and moving back to the work-bench, ‘but I was much older than she was and I wasn’t glamorous. I was just a plain man who wore glasses and worked hard. Of course I had my ambitions but unlike Romaine I didn’t go around advertising them, and meanwhile I wasn’t happy in my job and I was tempted to make a complete change. I was also tempted to turn my back on Epsom for a while – I couldn’t bear the thought of being an onlooker when Helen married a man whom I felt sure was no damned good – and when it seemed to me that the marriage was inevitable I decided to volunteer for the Army.

‘As you no doubt remember I gave you a censored version of that decision when you were fifteen. However what I didn’t tell you was that the Army decided straight away that they didn’t want me. There was no interval while they made up their minds; they just weren’t interested in a thirty-two-year-old civilian with poor eyesight. Well, I was glad in the end that I didn’t have to leave the law but sorry to be stuck in Epsom while Helen was still steering this disastrous course – and don’t think I hadn’t tried to alter that course, because I had. But she’d just told me to leave her alone. Finally I said, “Always remember, whatever happens, that I love you and I want to marry you.” Perhaps I had a premonition that he’d jilt her. But on the other hand I’m not the sort of fellow who gets premonitions.