My Favourite Wife (31 page)

Then, with his wife holding his hand and his daughter on his lap, the little girl laughing with delight at her father’s sudden presence, her small teeth even and white and perfect, they catch a black London cab to the hospital, and what Bill Holden can only think of as his punishment.

Bill pulled back the curtain and there was his father in his hospital bed. He went quickly to the bedside, and kissed the old man on the cheek, trying to mask his shock.

The old man, Bill thought, fighting back the tears, afraid he was going to disgrace himself. What had happened to the old man?

His father looked unkempt for the first time in his life. The face was unshaven, his sparse hair too long, the eyes rheumy with drugs and bewilderment. He did not look like Picasso now. The brief peck on that patchy grey beard was like brushing his lips against sandpaper. It was like kissing death itself.

In just a few short months something had eaten up the old man, eaten him away. He looked like a husk of his former self, the shell of the strong, proud man he had always been.

The broad-shouldered boxer’s body looked drained of all strength and energy and purpose, and as a young Filippina nurse propped him up on pillows to receive his latest visitors, the oxygen tank standing like a black sentinel by his bedside, the old man looked like a sick child – weak, passive, heartbreakingly unable to perform this simple act by himself.

Bill hugged him, straightened up and their eyes met. As Becca and Holly embraced the old man, something passed between the son and the father, something unspeakable and unsayable, but
then it was gone, replaced by all the strained jollity of the hospital ward.

‘What have we here?’ Bill said, peering into the bags he carried. ‘Presents!’ Holly cried.

On the bedside table Bill placed a box of sweets with a picture of the Pudong skyline and a duty-free bag holding a portable DVD player and a stack of DVDs, and he was as creakingly jovial as a department store Santa on Christmas Eve.

‘Your favourites, Dad,’ Bill said. ‘Liquorice Allsorts and cowboy films.’ For want of anything better to do, Bill began pulling DVDs out of the duty-free bag. ‘Let’s see – you’ve got
The Wild Bunch…Shane…The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance…True Grit…High Noon
…’

The old man examined his box of sweets.

‘Gary Cooper and Bertie Bassett,’ he said wryly, his voice a rasping wheeze, like something with a puncture. ‘Who could ask for anything more?’ His old voice had gone. He had a new voice now. He turned to the nurse. ‘This is my son,’ he said. ‘He’s a bigshot lawyer.’

The nurse gave Bill a big white grin. ‘He gets more visitors than anyone,’ she said, and then, to the old man, raising her voice as though he were deaf or simple or both, ‘He’s very popular.’

‘They don’t know me, darling,’ the old man said.

The nurse was a good woman, Bill could see that, but there was something about her tone, combining condescension and kindness in equal measure, that Bill resented, because it made him realise that the old man’s illness had set him apart from the rest of the world.

Becca and Holly sat on the bed, Holly enthusiastically relaying the latest gossip from her ballet class, the old man and Becca smiling at her as she prattled away. Bill tried to busy himself by unloading his presents, and throwing out old flowers, and going to fetch tea.

When he came back two elderly neighbours had arrived, bringing petrol station flowers and banter about the old man being looked after by all these attractive young nurses. And when the old man suddenly found it impossible to take another breath, they all watched in silence as he placed an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose and struggled to fill his exhausted lungs with just one more mouthful of air.

Becca took Holly off to the toilet. When the old man was finished he flopped back, the mask in one hand, shaking his head. Then Becca came back with Holly and the grey, stubbled face was all smiles.

The nurse was right. There were many visitors. They kept coming, bringing grapes to the cancer ward, and soon the little curtained-off space was crowded. Bill thought how foolish he had been to think that his father might die alone. There was no chance of that. Too many people loved the old man to let him die alone.

It had been a small family for such a long time, just Bill and his old man, such a small family that Bill grew up and went away and started his own family wondering if they had ever really qualified as a family at all. No mother, no wife, no woman. Just a father and his son.

But the old man had his own family behind him, the brothers who were still alive, and the widows of the ones who were not, and Bill saw that there were many people who loved the old man because of who he was, and without the obligation of blood. They all came, and there was a sad grandeur to these final days in the hospital, as if all the friends and neighbours and work mates of a lifetime had to be gathered here, in this special place, to show they cared and to say goodbye.

And Bill thought,
Who will be there to mourn me?
Perhaps that was what had troubled his sleep on the long flight back – not the thought that his father might slip away with nobody by his bedside, but Bill’s fear that when it was his own turn, he surely would.

When it was time for Becca and Holly to leave they kissed his father goodbye and Bill walked them to the lobby. Just beyond the glass doors an old man in stripy pyjamas and carpet slippers was smoking a cigarette. Becca picked up Holly and Bill wrapped his arms around them.

‘You’re out on your feet,’ Becca said. ‘Come home, Bill.’

But their old home was being rented out to the family of a lawyer from New York to pay the mortgage, and Becca was staying at her sister’s place with Holly now that her father was feeling stronger. And Bill wanted to stay.

‘I can’t leave him, Bec,’ he said, and she didn’t argue with him.

He kissed them and let them go. Then he went back to the crowds around his father’s bed. The little curtained-off space had taken on a festive air. There were people he had not seen in years, people he had never met. Introductions were made, hands shaken, cheeks kissed.

But in the end everybody left the old man except Bill, for it was getting late, and you can’t stand by a hospital bed forever. There is no timetable for these things, Bill realised. He attempted to make the mental leap to the brutal fact that this was it, there was only one ending, and although the doctor said weeks rather than months they did not really know. Bill could not truly believe it, he could totally not comprehend that the world could keep turning without his old man.

It was late now and he watched the nurse, a different one, a tall young Czech, hold the oxygen mask over his father’s mouth. He and his father held each other’s stare for a moment and the old man closed his eyes. He was scared, Bill saw, and somehow that surprised him, although he thought – who wouldn’t be?

‘My son,’ the old man said when the nurse took the oxygen away. ‘A handsome devil, isn’t he?’

He had never heard his father boast about him before and it seemed ludicrous, fake, completely out of character.

The nurse tucked in the blankets. There was a rubber sheet under the old man’s bed, like the kind Holly had had when she was very small. ‘I come back later for to give wash,’ the nurse said.

‘We’ve got a lot of catching up to do,’ the old man said, fighting for breath again, shaking with the effort, and for a moment Bill wondered if the oxygen tank was empty.

The nurse left them alone. The lights went out. They could hear the sound of a hospital ward at night. That echoing sound that never quite managed silence. Distant voices, restless sleep.

The two men smiled at each other and Bill took the old man’s hand and it seemed completely natural although he hadn’t held his father’s hand since he was five years old.

Those old builder’s hands. The hands of a tough man, a man who worked with his body not his head, a physically capable man.

‘Don’t die, Dad,’ Bill said, and the tears came with the words, burning his eyes. ‘Please don’t die.’

They had a lot of catching up to do.

The old man woke up in the night, writhing in his bed, and Bill was suddenly awake, rising out of the chair and hitting the button that called for help. There was too much pain, he couldn’t stand it. Bill stood by the bed as a black nurse he had not seen before came and calmly gave the old man a little white pill in a plastic container. The nurse tucked in his sheets, gave Bill a weary smile and then left them. In the next bed a man cried out a woman’s name in his sleep. Bill stroked his father’s hand as the old man lay back, eyes closed, mouth open, and every breath another battle.

‘I wish it had been better between us,’ Bill said after a while, very quietly, almost to himself, and the feelings he had held back for so long came tumbling out. ‘You were always my hero. I always admired you. I always thought you were the most decent man I ever knew.’ He patted his father’s hand, so lightly that it seemed as if he hardly touched it. ‘I always wanted whatever it was that
you and Mum had.’ Bill was silent for a bit. The ward was very still now, but he could sense all those bodies in the darkness beyond the curtain. He took a breath. ‘And I always loved you, Dad,’ he said. ‘It might not have seemed that way, but I never stopped loving you.’

His father was sleeping.

A few hours later the ward was stirring. There were voices, the smell of food, gathering light. A breakfast tray lay untouched in front of the old man.

‘How long have you known?’ Bill asked him.

‘A while,’ the old man said. ‘Didn’t want to worry you.’ He pushed the breakfast tray a bit further away. ‘Got enough on your plate.’ Bill could hear the breath in the ravaged lungs. ‘Tell me about your life,’ the old man said, closing his eyes. ‘I want to hear about it. Tell me how it’s going out there.’

‘Sure.’ Bill pulled his chair closer to the bed. ‘It’s going well, Dad. When you feel better, you’ll come out again. When Becca and Holly are back. I’ll fly you out. I will. First class this time, Dad.’

He thought of all the times his father had bored him or made him impatient and ashamed and he wanted to make up for all that, he wanted to take it all back, and now it was too late, now it would always be too late.

‘We’ll meet you at the airport and it will be great. You’ll stay with us, Dad,’ Bill said, and the tears came again, because he knew he might as well be promising a round trip to the moon. ‘You’ll stay with me, Dad, you’ll stay with us, and it will all be good.’

And the old man gently touched Bill’s hand, as though his young son was the one in need of comforting.

During the day they could not talk, not with all the visitors around, not with all the chitchat and sympathy. At night, if the old man was not too distracted by the pain and not too numbed by the
drugs they gave him to obliterate the pain, then they could do their catching up.

‘And are you all right? You and Becca?’

Bill wished he had the stomach to lie. But he was sick of it. That’s why he would never make a truly accomplished liar. Because it ate him up. It took something from him that he would never get back.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

The old man looked at him with hooded eyes, and Bill felt some of the old scared feeling that he always felt when he had displeased his father.

‘Got somebody else, have you?’ the old man said, guessing it all, and Bill wondered how this one-woman man knew so much about the frailty of modern relationships.

Bill thought about lying, his last chance to lie, and then nodded. He waited for more questions, but the old man said nothing.

Bill looked up at him. ‘You and Mum stayed together. If she hadn’t died then you’d be together now. How do you do that? How do you stay with someone for a lifetime?’

The old man winced with pain. He exhaled once, and seemed to writhe against the pillows. Bill jumped up but his father motioned for him to sit down.

‘We weren’t perfect,’ he said. ‘Children always think their parents are made of different stuff to them. But we were no different. We had our moments.’

Bill tried to place his mum and dad in their moments, and in the modern world, he tried to put them into somewhere like Paradise Mansions, into the mess he had made of his own life. But it was beyond his imagination.

‘But you stayed together,’ he said. ‘Whatever happened, you stayed together.’

The pain was strong now. You could see it written all over the old man’s face. Bill was standing again. The old man held the metal
box with the red button, but he didn’t press it, as if unsure if he should call the nurse now or try to wait a while.

‘Because you don’t leave your child for a woman,’ the old man told him, and he gave Bill a look as though he knew nothing. ‘Nobody’s that good in bed.’

The old man liked bragging to the nurses. It was as if he had to impress the last young women he would ever know. Anything would do.

‘Look at this,’ he said, fondling his portable DVD player as the Czech nurse looked at his chart. ‘One of the latest gadgets. My dad bought me this.’

Bill laughed with disbelief. His dad bought him that? He couldn’t let the old man get away with that. It meant he was slipping off the edge of sanity. And it frightened Bill. He touched his father’s arm, covered in black-and-yellow bruises from all the needles for the blood tests and the IV drip and the injections for the pain.

‘It was me,’ Bill said, with a smile to ease the way. ‘Remember? I got it for you.’

Unexpected tears sprang into the old man’s eyes, confused and humiliated at this casual contradiction.

‘But my dad
was
here,’ he said with real anger. ‘I saw him.’

The Czech nurse glanced at Bill and on her impassive face he saw the message loud and clear.
Their minds go, you know. All the chemicals. By this stage they’re in their own little dream world
.

‘You want shave?’ said the nurse, raising her voice. ‘You want nice I give little shave?’

‘I’ll do it,’ Bill said.