Our dinner was going beautifully. My brother and I were already exchanging complacent smiles. Everyone present was coming across as a model of flexibility and discretion. When the dessert course began, Jaime, eight years old and unimprovable throughout, reached for the fruitbowl. It contained oranges, apples, grapes — and a single peach. As Jaime’s fingers met its surface, Kingsley, like a man hailing a cab across the length of Oxford Circus during a downpour on Christmas Eve, shouted:
— HEY!!!
… It was an extraordinary manifestation, hideously harsh, hideously sudden. The sound Kingsley had uttered would have been just about appropriate if Jaime had reached, not for a peach, but for the pin of a hand grenade. There was no silence: everyone reeled back, groaning, swearing. Even Jaime whispered ‘Jesus Christ’ as he shrivelled up in his chair. I can’t remember — I can’t even imagine — how we survived the rest of the evening.
But the ménage lasted for fifteen years.
‘Philip had a biscuit.’ Jaime had a peach.
If you’re a grown man who is frightened of the dark — what happens when someone leaves you? When they leave you alone in the dark like that, what happens to you? It is rudimentary, it is zero-rudimentary. Part of you becomes a child that wants its mother.
I think it’s right that it should have been Jaime who gave my father his last episode of pleasure on this earth. Jaime was then twenty-three. By that time it would be strictly true to say that Kingsley had forgotten about the night of the peach. It would be strictly true to say that.
So I should tell my mother: I know you hated it when he played on your feelings (‘The sentimentality,’ you said, ‘makes you want to reach’), but you did bring him back to life and love. That’s the best way of looking at it, Mum. He got Stanley out of the way and then he wrote The Old Devils and Difficulties with Girls and The Folks that Live on the Hill and the Memoirs and ‘A Twitch on the Thread’ and The Russian Girl and You Can’t Do Both and The Biographer’s Moustache and The King’s English and a few more poems.
He could never have written them without you, because you reminded him of love. Mum: you were the peach.
That’s the best way of looking at it.
Completely Relahible
Wednesday, 20 September. The biographer has taken Kingsley into University College Hospital in Gower Street. Oh happy day. I experience deep and furtive gratitude. All afternoon I go around muttering, Muchas gracias, señor. O, muchíssimas gracias …
I learn details later. I know I couldn’t have done it.
In the ambulance the attendant revealed that he had read some of Kingsley’s novels but more of mine. Luckily Dad didn’t take this in.
When he reached Casualty they put him in a wheeled bed. The biographer tried to prevent him from (deliberately) sliding out of it and Kingsley yelled: ‘Doctor! Nurse! Stop this man!’
A porter and two nurses had to manhandle him into his room.
Before he fell asleep he beseeched the biographer, saying, ‘Don’t leave, oh, please don’t leave.’
I definitely couldn’t have done it. But maybe, if I had, he wouldn’t have done it: beseeched. How effective, now, is the Empire State Effect?
At six-thirty I rose up from Goodge Street tube. My brother and I had a cup of coffee and entered the hospital, entered the lift. Briefly we clutched each other, seized each other’s arms with clawed hands, as the lift climbed: ordeal readiness.
Alone in his private room Kingsley is in bed lying on his side, turned away from the door. Top of the Pops, of all things (he always used to mock us for watching it), is playing on the small TV: ‘uncouth minstrelsy’, and couples ‘performing at rather than with each other, making rope-climbing or gunshot-dodging motions with an air of dedication, as if all this were only by way of prelude to some vaster ordeal they must ultimately share’.* ‘I’m in hell.’
This comes out of nowhere. Philip and I have an expression — eyes abruptly focused and widened — that denotes growing alarm. We have need of it now as our father, with worrying agility, climbs out of bed and sets about removing his pyjamas, which are light green. When did I last see him naked? Cambridge?
Sitting on the side of the bed (an affectingly bear-shaped figure, softly hulking in the dusk), he says,
— I’m not going to attack you.
I am more surprised by the fluency than the content. Fluency is now soon lost, but his agitation, and his sudden wariness, are eloquent enough. Philip asks,
— What’s actually worrying you, Dad?
— The people here.
— But they’re all right. They’re there to help you.
— No they’re not. Not really.
— Do you think we’re deceiving you too?
— No. I trust you two. It’s more that I think there are things you’re not seeing.
— You wrote about this, Dad, I said. Don’t you remember? The last thing in your Memoirs. Called ‘A Peep Round the Twist’. You broke your leg and went to hospital. You went slightly nuts for a little while. You thought they were all out to get you. Like now. It’s the same.
This undoubtedly interested him, and he attended to it. I thought I saw amusement in his eyes, but it wasn’t amusement, not quite. It was the undesigning pleasure his face showed when he was being flattered. Modesty contending with something hoity-toity in the elevation of the head.
He put his pyjamas back on again. Then he took his pyjamas back off again. Eventually in near-darkness he got into bed and turned away from us and from the world.
We went to the nearby pub with the wonderful name: the Jeremy Bentham. That old utilitarian (1748–1832) was a philosopher whom Kingsley, probably, would have considered worthy of having a pub named after him. Unlike some. My father wouldn’t like to see his sons drinking in the Bertrand Russell or the A. J. Ayer. I knew A. J. Ayer, and thought about him now, during one of the silences: his death, his memorial service, Roy Jenkins’s puzzling eulogy (he talked about Ayer’s ‘obituary impact’). A. J. Ayer was the stepfather of my second great love: the dedicatee of my first novel. He used to play chess with me, on a pocket set usually passed from lap to lap. And he almost always won. Your only hope was to make it into the endgame with your knights intact. Then you could get him so frazzled by proliferating possibilities that he would disgustedly resign or even throw the whole set in the air … Allan Bloom: ‘It is the hardest task of all to face the lack of cosmic support for what we care about. Socrates, therefore, defines the task of philosophy as “learning how to die”.’ I was not yet thinking about death, only of ravages and qualified recovery. But is there a philosophy of it? Is there a philosophy of death?
The next day Philip goes in to see him and Kingsley’s opening words are: fuck off.
And the day after that I go alone, peering, first, through the square, head-high window set into the door. I imagine that this precaution is now general among his visitors. Almost anything at all could be happening in there …
That sunny Saturday I looked through the spy window and jerked back with delight, with profusely gratified hope. Groomed and shaved, my father sat hooked forward in the armchair with a pen in his hand. His face was set in fascinated concentration. Maybe he’s writing, I thought. I’m going to walk in and he’ll tell me that he has come out of this with a great novel, a sequence of sonnets, an epic poem.
— Ah. Now come and look at this.
I stand over his shoulder. The sheet of A4 consists of variously slanted columns of arabic numerals, something like:
017 212 2010 0175687278
017 222 [weakly crossed out] 2100 0175867278
017 221 2100 [weakly crossed out] 0175687872
017-221 6102 017 586 7872 [weakly crossed out]
The figures on the left are attempts at my phone number, the figures on the right attempts at his own. One of the wrong numbers has this spelt out next to it: COMPLETELY RELAHIBLE. I didn’t know then that my mother, hating to do it, had had the house number changed. Kingsley was ringing h
ome all day. And Kingsley was ringing home all night.
— Let’s go through that again, he says.
— Wait. Here. You don’t need the 017, Dad. We’re all on the same prefix. All on the same exchange. Here.
I write out: MART: 221 6110. HIL: 586 7872.
— That’s completely reliable, Dad.
— Let’s go through it again.
And we go through it again, with him writing it out. Thirty times. Forty times. Only your children and your parents (it transpires) demand of you these marathons of repetition. He pauses, apparently satisfied for now, and casually asks, ‘Why am I here?’ I tell him. He can’t remember any of it. Then he sits up and says with enthusiasm,
— Let’s go through it again.
Meaning the numbers.
— We’ve got it!
When the time came for me to go he didn’t plead with me. He only said, as I hugged him,
— Little hug.
I straightened up. He said,
— One little more hug.
And I hugged him again.
Women’s Breasts
Alzheimer’s, my mother tells me, is the most likely diagnosis. ‘He could go on like this for years.’ What do you do at such a prospect, if you’re English? You don’t weep and wring your hands. You shrug, and laugh ‘dryly’. You do what Cliff does at the end of Stanley and the Women:
[He] did the brief lift of the chin South London people use to mean Told you so or Here we go again or Wouldn’t you bleeding know. People elsewhere too. Perhaps all over the world.
— Well you certainly broke new ground with Stan, I told him, one day in 1984.
He was vigilant. He knew I had my reasons (trend-crazed and bleeding-heart, according to him) for questioning the argument of the book. Literature affirmeth nothing, we’re told. But Stan affirmed something. Still, I wasn’t about to go through all that with him.
— How do you mean?
— There’s a woman in it with big breasts who isn’t sympathetic.
— Who?
— The ex-wife. Nowell. That’s a first for you, isn’t it?
— Balls.
He thought about it quickly. He could name a couple of sympathetic women with small breasts, but he struggled to find any unsympathetic women with big breasts.
— There’s too much in general about women’s breasts in your stuff, I said. What’s the line in That Uncertain Feeling?* And remember Ann Jones?
— Ann Jones?
Ann Jones won Wimbledon in 1969. She was, as the English say, a big girl; there was some talk about Billie Jean King, her opponent in the final, exploiting this fact by ‘crowding’ Ann on her volleys.
— She had a wonderful body and a goofy face. And you used to put your thumb over it on the TV so you could look at her breasts.
— What of it?
— You once told me that the sexiest part of a naked woman was her face. And I remember another conversation. Jane was there. I said, ‘Are you a total tit-man? Don’t you like any other bits? Don’t you like legs?’ And you said, ‘Well I like to know they’re both there.’
— What of it?
— Nothing, really. But you might think about reducing Nowell’s breasts in the second edition. And by the way. There’s a huge piece in the London Review by Marilyn Butler saying that Stanley is pro-women after all. That’s balls, isn’t it.
— Oh, absolutely.
Kingsley’s legs are both there. And so are his animal parts. In these he has begun to take a new interest — symptomatic behaviour, for one in his condition. He seizes himself (but only for a moment), like a child with many siblings who comes across an unattended toy. Philip had a biscuit. Jaime had a peach.
Here a terrible symmetry beckons. I am thinking of Kingsley’s father and his propaganda about insanity and self-abuse. The wards. The thinning of the blood.
How does it go in Dead Souls? ‘Old age, inevitable and inescapable, is terrible and menacing, for it never gives anything back, it returns nothing!’ No, that’s right. It mocks you, but it never gives anything back.
Aren’t Old Boulders All?
Sunday, 24 September. When I entered he turned over in bed and looked at me.
— Oh, Christ, he said feelingly.
The biographer was standing in front of the window and wearing a helpless smile. Kingsley said,
— What time is it?
— Six, I said.
— In the morning?
— Six in the evening.
— Six in the evening? But that one — the biographer — was telling me it was six in the evening.
— It is six in the evening.
Kingsley was having no more of this. He spun round, not huffily so much as decisively and finally. He spun round, swivelling away from the world.
Six, six, six. What he actually said to Philip on Friday, I learn, was not fuck off. What he said was: ‘Kill me, you fucking fool!’ His room stands at the median height of the westward skyline. A vast sun is aimed at the window. ‘I’m in hell,’ Kingsley had said. And at six in the evening you do feel that the room is about to burst into flames.
I Want It Now. Ronnie and Simona are eloping (this is the American South) to a place called Old Boulder State Park. Ronnie falls asleep. The jolting of the car wakes him:
‘Aren’t old boulders all?’ Ronnie fumbled for a cigarette. ‘I mean old boulders all? Jesus, I mean all boulders old? What made them name a bloody park after this one, I wonder?’
Aren’t old boulders all. Perhaps this is Kingsley’s state: like waking from a tragic nap at a strange time of day. Ronnie is soon saying all boulders old. But what if you get stuck on old boulders all?
Here is a notebook entry for Wednesday, 27 September:
K’s agitation. Some internal psychodrama that he will never say anything about to you or anyone else. He hasn’t got the words. Though he might do it on the page, if he gets back.
This is strenuous moonshine. He wasn’t coming back. Words and memories were leaving him: like banks of lights and switches, sighing as they closed down.
— I feel a bit … You know.
— What, Dad?
— You know.
— Anxious? Uneasy?
— Not really. Just a bit … You know.
I know? In his choice of words my father is not a delegator, particularly in accounts of his own state of mind. But here he is, smiling trustingly and, it seems, calmly, and lost for words. I now see that this was an alternate-world Kingsley, an anti-Kingsley, confined from now on to a regime of tautologies and commonplaces. What his brain was doing was the opposite of writing* … His hands today are all over the place, waving, interclasping, and again waving. Should I regale him with his description of the critic and writer John Berger?†— All this with my hands. It’s nothing sinister.
I am impressed by the rare and immediate success with the adjective (‘Or is that a complement, Dad?’ I once asked him. ‘Yes but it’s first-and-foremost an adjective,’ he said, momentarily enraged by a competing pedantry).
— It’s just so I know where they are, he says.
— Gives them somewhere to be.
— Exactly.
Then I went through with something I had planned to say. I said,
— Do you remember the book you wrote called Ending Up? They did it on TV, with John Mills and Michael Horden and Wendy Hiller and Googie Withers. Remember? Anyway, one of the characters in the book you wrote, a nice old boy called George Zeyer, suffers from nominal aphasia. He can’t remember common nouns, he can’t remember the names of common objects. In the book you wrote this gives him the chance to be very entertainingly boring in three different ways. In the first phase he’s incredibly boring because he just stumbles along improvising as he goes. Like: ‘This chap’s got a thing, you drive around in it. It’s got a, you know, it turns round.’* In the second phase he’s incredibly boring because he tries to get over the difficulty with rehearsed formulas and paraphrases. Like: ‘They hit him with
a screwing-up job and the iron thingummy for the fire.’† In the third phase he’s incredibly boring because he’s cured! He’s completely back to normal and he can’t stop displaying his mastery of the common noun. Like: ‘Table, sheet, chair, glass, bottle, spoon.’‡ All this, Dad, in the book you wrote.
He is contemplating me with delighted admiration.
— Do you remember?
— No, he said.
After a pause I probed on for a while. His amnesia was turning out to be strangely selective. He remembered the first lunch he had with Isabel and me (‘very clearly’), but not the second, which was much more recent … As I took my leave I unthinkingly quoted from an old Peter Sellers record (a family catchphrase), and he repeated it. Perhaps he was experiencing the simple pleasure of recognition; but I saw in his face something I hadn’t seen for a month: the willingness, the readiness, the capacity to laugh. Why take that from him? Why take that from him, and the words?
Back at the flat I looked through Ending Up. Frequently I wiped my eyes, from laughter, and from the opposite of laughter. Here is George Zeyer again, fully recovered (this is just before his riff of unstoppable chosisme):
‘I was just saying to Bernard here that a sense of humour is more precious than pearls or rubies or any number of motorcars or luxury yachts or private aeroplanes or castles … I mean to say, supposing you do eat off silver plate with a pearl-handled knife and fork and drink your wine out of cut glass …’ After listing further concrete signs of affluence, George went on to question their real worth to anybody without a sense of humour.
Now (but not then) I think of Stan and the psychiatrist’s great speech:
‘When [mad people] laugh at things the rest of us don’t think are funny, like the death of a parent, they’re not being penetrating … They’re laughing because they’re mad, too mad to be able to tell what’s funny any more. The rewards of being sane may not be very many but knowing what’s funny is one of them. And that’s an end of the matter.’