Man and Boy (24 page)

A mile from our family home, there is a small church on a hill.

As a boy, wandering where I wasn’t supposed to wander on light summer nights, I had sometimes lurked in the graveyard of this church, drinking cider and peering down the sights of my friend’s .22 air rifle.

We were not as cocky as we looked. At the slightest sound—the wind in the trees, the rustle of leaves across the cold stone of a grave, some ancient wood creaking inside the church—my friend and I would bolt in panic, terrified that the dead were about to reveal themselves to us. And now my father was going to be buried here.

I woke to the sound of the paper boy’s bike, the
Mirror
roughly shoved through the letter box, the low hum of the radio coming from the kitchen. For one moment between sleep and waking, it felt like just another day.

But after breakfast we donned our bleak uniforms of mourning, my son and I, both awkward in our black ties and white shirts, and we sat on the floor of my old bedroom, thumbing through box after box of photographs, consoling ourselves with images of my father, his grandfather.

Time ran backward, unraveled. There were bright color pictures of my dad with Pat—opening Christmas presents, riding his Bluebell bike with the training wheels still attached, Pat as an impossibly blond toddler, and as a sleeping baby in the arms of his grinning grandfather.

And lots of pictures with the colors fading now—my dad and my mom with Gina and me on our wedding day, me as a smirking teenager with my dad, a fit fifty-odd, our arms around each other in our hack garden—proud of his garden, proud of me—and still further back—me as a goofy eleven-year-old with my parents, still young, in the crowd shot of some cousin’s wedding.

And all the way back to the beginning of memory and beyond—a black-and-white shot of me as a crop-haired child with my dad and the horses on Salisbury Plain, another black-and-white picture of my dad laughing as he lifted me up on some windswept beach, and pictures in shades of gray of him in uniform and my parents on their wedding day.

No pictures of him as a child or a baby. I knew it was simply because they were too poor to have a camera. But it felt like his life had only begun with our little family.

Downstairs the flowers had started arriving. Pat and I went to the window of my parents’ room at the front of the house and watched the florist unloading them from his van. Soon the cellophane-covered bouquets covered all of the front lawn, and I thought of Princess Diana and the sea of flowers that washed up against the black railings of the royal palaces. It was just another job for the florist, and the first job of the day, but he seemed genuinely moved.

“I wish I had known this man,” I heard him tell my mother, and I knew that he meant it.

***

We had a laugh when the coffin arrived at the church. It was a desperate laugh, one of those laughs that are there as a dam against tears you are afraid will never stop if they are allowed to start, but a laugh all the same. We were following the coffin into the old church, my mother, my son, and I, but for some reason the four pall bearers stopped at the entrance. Although Pat and I had her between us, our arms around her, my mother kept going, her eyes on the ground. And she only stopped when she smacked her head hard against the end of her husband’s coffin.

She staggered backward, holding her forehead, looking for blood on her fingertips, and then she looked at me and we both laughed out loud. We were both hearing his voice, that old London voice full of weary affection. “What are you doing, woman?”

Then we went inside the coolness of the church and it was like stepping into a dream, a dream where everyone you have ever known—relatives, friends of the family, neighbors from the present and the past, men in Royal Naval Commando ties who had met as teenagers and were now seventy—had gathered together for one last time, row upon row of them, some starting to cry at the sight of my father’s coffin.

The three of us were in the front pew. Once the three of us would have meant my parents and me. Now it was my mother, my son, and I. Their heads were down, staring at the flagstones, the laughter all gone, but I watched the vicar as he began to quote from Isaiah—“They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

His sermon was about the good soldier who became a man of peace—the warrior who learned to be the loving husband, the kind father, the caring neighbor. And I could tell that he had worked hard at this speech, that he had talked to my mother and my uncles and Auntie Ethel next door who wasn’t really my auntie. But the vicar had never met my father and so he could never really capture him and his life.

It was only when the old song that my mother had chosen echoed through the crowded church that I had to get a grip of my heart, that I felt the weight of all that we had lost.

More than the hymns or the sermon or the well-meant platitudes or the faces of all the people he had ever known, it was this old song that got to me. Sinatra’s voice, very young, very pure, lacking all the swagger and cynicism of his later years. It rose and soared around that little church.

And my mother didn’t move, but I could feel her holding Pat more fiercely, as if she was afraid of being swept to some other place and time, somewhere in the lonely future when she could only sleep with the bedroom lights blazing or somewhere in the lost, unrecoverable past.

Someday

When I’m awfully low.

When the world is cold.

I will feel a glow

Just thinking of you.

And the way you look tonight.

And I could hear my father’s voice complaining at the choice, his voice full of wonder at this woman he had shared his life with but who never ceased to amaze him.

“Not early Sinatra, woman! Not all that swooning bobbysoxer stuff he recorded for Columbia! If you’ve got to pick Sinatra, then pick something from one of the Capitol albums of the fifties—‘One for My Baby,’ ‘Angel Eyes,’ ‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning’—one of the great saloon songs. But not that early stuff! And what’s wrong with Dean Martin? I always preferred old Dino anyway.”

It was true. My father’s favorite was Dean Martin. Sinatra, as much as he liked him, was a bit too much of the smooth romantic for my old man. He far preferred Dean Martin’s hard center. But of course the song wasn’t my father’s choice. It was my mother’s. It wasn’t about how he saw himself. It was about how she saw him, knew him, loved him.

But you’re lovely!

With your smile so warm

And your cheek so soft

There is nothing for me

But to love you

Just the way you look tonight.

The undertaker’s men carried my father’s coffin out of the church—gently, gently—and into the graveyard as we followed, dazed by the rituals of death, to the latest grave in a sloping field of white headstones.

The freshly dug plot was at the end of a long line of graves, and one day, after this church had seen many more funerals, it would be difficult to find my father’s resting place because it would be in the middle of a forest of white headstones, just one among the many. But not now. Not today. Today my father was the latest arrival in this eternal place. It was easy to find his grave today.

And there was his headstone—white and new, my father’s epitaph carved in gleaming black on the top half, leaving space for another inscription—for his wife, my mother, Pat’s grandmother—to one day be carved.

PATRICK WILLIAM ROBERT SILVER, D.S.M., it said, a name from the days when ordinary families gave their children as many names as they could remember, as many names as they could carry, and below the dates of his birth and death, BELOVED HUSBAND, FATHER, AND GRANDFATHER.

The vicar was talking—ashes to ashes, dust to dust, come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world—but all I could hear was a scrap from one of the old songs, a song asking someone to never, ever change.

We were on the edge of the open grave, at the front of a large crowd of mourners. Some of them I didn’t know. Some of them I had known all my life. And yet the faces that I knew were changed—I remembered laughing uncles and good-looking aunts in their middle years, the good years of new cars and bright clothes and summer days on the coast, their children growing or perhaps already grown.

Now these faces that I knew were older than I had ever expected them to be, and the confidence of their thirties and forties had somehow slipped away with the years. They had come to see my father buried, the first of their generation to go, and their own deaths must have suddenly seemed very real. They wept for him and also for themselves.

In the distance I could see the fields where I had roamed as a boy, dark brown in midwinter and as rectangular as playing fields, bordered by scrawny bare trees.

Did children still play on that ragged farmland? Somehow it seemed unlikely. But I remembered every brilliant stream, every muddy ditch, the stagnant pond inside the thick spinney, and all the farmers who chased us away, me and my friends, those city children with suburban lives.

Up here there was no sign of the housing developments and shopping centers that were very close by. Up here all you could see were fields. Up here this place felt like real country.

This was why my father had escaped the city. Those fields where I played as a boy—that was what my dad had dreamed of, and now he was going to be buried among them.

There was crying all around now—louder, uncontrolled, more stung with grief—and I looked up and saw the tears on faces that I loved. My dad’s brothers. Our neighbors. My mother and my son.

But I stood there dry-eyed as I watched them lower my father’s coffin into the freshly dug grave, one arm wrapped tight around my mother who had her own arms around her sobbing grandson, and my free hand stuffed deep into the pocket of my black suit, my fist holding my father’s silver medal as if I would never let it go.

“The world is changing,” said Nigel Batty. “It’s not the seventies anymore. This isn’t
Kramer
vs. Kramer
. In residency disputes, the law still favors the mother—and it always will. But there’s a growing awareness that not every lousy parent is a man.”

“I hate the thought of my son growing up around some other guy,” I said, more to myself than my lawyer. “I hate the thought of him being in the same house as someone who hasn’t really got any interest in him at all. Someone who’s only interested in his mother.”

“That’s not going to happen. No matter what she says—she left both of you. And you did a good job while your son was in your care. No matter what she tells her lawyer.”

“I can’t believe she’s making me out to be negligent. If she kept it clean, I could respect her. But this—it makes my blood boil, you know what I mean, Nigel?”

“I know.”

My lawyer was no longer Mr. Batty to me. Now he was Nigel. Now he had told me his story.

Seven years ago he had married a French woman he met while she was working for a barrister in London. They settled here and had twin daughters within a year of their wedding. But when their marriage came apart two years ago, his wife—soon to be ex-wife—decided she wanted to return to France. And with the Court of Appeal’s approval, she had received permission to take their daughters out of the country. Nigel Batty hadn’t seen them since.

“So my children end up losing one parent and no doubt loathing the other one,” he said. “Thanks to some dumb fuck of a judge who thinks that the mother is the only parent who counts. And there’s nothing special about me—plenty of fathers lose contact with their children, because the women they married want to punish them.”

I made sympathetic noises. It was late in the evening and the cleaning staff was shuffling around his empty office in the West End. He sat on his desk and stared down at the traffic clogged up on Hanover Square.

“My children would certainly be better off with two parents. But working that one out—the impossible task of letting them keep both parents—that would have taken a degree of compromise. And residency disputes are not about compromise. And they are not about what’s best for the children. They should be, but they’re not. They are invariably about what the mother decides she wants.”

He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

“Although the law tries to take the sting out of a residence order, it has to end in victory for one parent and defeat for the other. It has to. The one who loses is usually the man. But—and this is what has changed over the last twenty years—not always. And we can win this one. We deserve to win this one.”

“But she does loves him.”

“What?”

“Gina loves Pat. I know that she loves him.”

Nigel shuffled some papers on his desk, almost embarrassed on my behalf.

“I’m not sure that’s really relevant here, is it?” he said.

***

I watched them from the window. Gina emerged from the Audi’s passenger seat and let Pat out of the backseat—he had told me that Richard had fitted a child lock—and then, crouching on the pavement so that they were the same height, she wrapped her arms around him, burying his blond head against her neck, grasping her last few seconds with him before she gave him back to me.

Gina lingered by the car door—we couldn’t talk anymore, but she would wait until she saw me before she got in—and as I watched Pat run up the little path to our door, his eyes shining, I knew that he deserved to be loved as much as any child in this world is loved.

***

Later he was playing on the floor of his room with his
Star Wars
toys.

“Pat?”

“Yes?”

“You know Mommy and I don’t get on very well right now?”

“You don’t talk to each other.”

“That’s because we’re having an argument at the moment.”

He silently smacked Luke Skywalker against the side of the Millennium Falcon. I sat down on the floor next to him. He kept smacking Luke.

“We both love you very much. You know that, don’t you?”

He didn’t speak.

“Pat?”

“I guess.”

“And we both want you to live with us. Where would you prefer to live? With me?”

“Yeah.”

“Or with Mommy?”

“Yeah.”

“It can’t be both of us. You understand that, don’t you? It can’t be both. Not anymore.”

He came to my arms and I cuddled him.

“It’s difficult, isn’t it, darling?”

“It’s difficult.”

“But that’s what the argument is about. I want you to stay here. And Mommy wants you to stay with her. Her and Richard.”

“Yeah, but what about my stuff?”

“What?”

“All my stuff. All my stuff is here. What if I went over there to live—what about my stuff?”

“That wouldn’t be a problem, darling. We could move your things. You don’t have to worry about that. The important thing is where you live. And I want you to stay here.”

He looked up at me. They were Gina’s eyes.

“Why?”

“Because it’s the right thing for you,” I said, and even as the words were forming, I wondered if that was really true.

I had changed over the last six months, my months of bringing up Pat alone. The show with Eamon was just a way to pay the mortgage, not the way to prove my worth to myself and everyone else. Work was no longer the center of my universe. The center of my universe was my boy.

When I felt pride or fear or wonder or anything that reminded me that I was alive, it wasn’t because of anything that happened at the studio. It was because Pat had learned to tie his laces or because he had been bullied at school or because he said something or did something which just stunned me with love, something that reminded me that my son was the most beautiful boy in the world. If he went away then I would feel that I had lost everything. “I just want what’s best for you,” I said, wondering for the first time if I really wanted what was best for him or what was best for me.

***

“Your dad and I saw her at the Palladium when she was eighteen years old,” my mother said. “They called her—the Girl from Tiger Bay.” Her blue eyes got wide with excitement—why had I never noticed how blue they were in the past? In the gloaming of the Albert Hall, my mother’s eyes shone like something in the window of Tiffany.

Although they had always spent most of their evenings at home, my parents always took in a show every six months or so—Tony Bennett at the Royal Festival Hall, a revival of
Oklahoma!
or
Guys
and
Dolls
in the West End—and so now I was taking my mother to a show at the Albert Hall. Her personal all-time favorite—the girl from Tiger Bay.

“Shirley Bassey!” my mother said.

I had been dragged to a few Shirley Bassey shows before I was old enough to protest. But when I was growing up, her audience hadn’t been anywhere near as mixed as the crowd that confronted us inside Albert Hall.

Impossibly handsome young men with little Uzbek caps and plucked eyebrows looked for their seats along with stolid elderly couples, the men country-club formal in blazers, the women with that peculiarly frozen Maggie Thatcher hairdo that my mother’s generation sport on a night out.

“I never realized that old Shirley was so big with the gay crowd,” I said. “I guess it makes sense—the boys love that combination of showbiz glitz and personal tragedy. She’s our Judy Garland.”

“The gay crowd?” my mom said, bewildered. “What gay crowd?”

I gestured at the young men in Versace and Prada who stood out so obviously against the wool and polyester of the suburban set.

“All around you, Mom.”

As if on cue, the boy next to my mother—a male model type who was simply too good-looking to be heterosexual—stood up and squealed with excitement as the orchestra struck up the opening chords to “Diamonds Are Forever.”

“We love you, Shirley! You’re fabulous!”

“Well, he’s not gay,” my mom whispered in my ear, totally serious.

I laughed and put my arm around her, kissing her on the cheek. She leaned forward excitedly as Shirley Bassey appeared at the top of the stage stairs—her evening dress sparkling with what looked like fairy lights, her hands tossed extravagantly in the air.

“How did you do it, Mom?”

“How did I do what?”

“How did you manage to carry on after losing Dad? I mean, you were with him all your life. I can’t imagine what it must be like to try to fill a gap that big.”

“Well, you don’t get over it, of course. You can never get over it. I miss him. I’m lonely. Sometimes I’m frightened. And I still have to sleep with the light on.”

She looked at me. Shirley Bassey was prowling the front of the stage to thunderous applause and showers of bouquets. Yes, she was definitely our Judy Garland.

“But you have to learn to let go,” my mother said. “That’s part of it, isn’t it?”

“Part of what?”

“Part of what it means to love someone. To really love someone. If you love someone then you don’t just see them as an extension of yourself. You don’t just love them for what’s in it for you.”

My mother turned back to the stage. In the darkness of the Albert Hall I could see that her blue eyes were shining with tears.

“Love means knowing when to let go,” she told me.