The Lemon Table

  And he’ll lift his eyes to me expectantly.

  “Four servings. Preheat oven to 350°. Classic recipes for this dish often call for beef kidneys.” He’ll shake his head in mild disagreement. “If they are used, they must be blanched. Cut into small, half-inch-thick slices: 1½ lbs round or other beef steak.”

  “Or other,” he repeats disapprovingly.

  “Three-quarters of a pound veal or lamb kidneys.”

  “Or.”

  “Three tablespoons butter or beef fat.”

  “Or,” he says louder.

  “Seasoned flour. Two cups brown stock.”

  “Cups.”

  “One cup dry red wine or beer.”

  “Cup,” he repeats. “Or,” he repeats. Then he smiles.

  And for a moment I’ll be happy.

  The Fruit Cage

  When I was thirteen, I discovered a tube of contraceptive jelly in the bathroom cabinet. Despite a generalized suspicion that anything concealed from me was probably related to lust, I failed to recognize the purpose of this battered tube. Some ointment for eczema, hair loss, middle-age spread. Then the small print, flaked of a few letters, told me what I didn’t want to know. My parents still did it. Worse, when they did it, there was a chance that my mum might get pregnant. This was, well, inconceivable. I was thirteen, my sister seventeen. Perhaps the tube was very, very old. I squeezed it tentatively and was downcast when it softly yielded to my thumb. I touched the cap, which appeared to unscrew with lubricious speed. My other hand must have squeezed again, as guck squirted into my palm. Fancy my mother doing that to herself, whatever “that” might involve, since in all likelihood this did not comprise the full kit. I sniffed the petrolly gel. Somewhere between a doctor’s surgery and a garage, I thought. Revolting.

  This happened more than thirty years ago. I had forgotten it until today.

  I HAVE KNOWN my parents all my life. That must seem a statement of the obvious, I realize. Let me explain. As a child I felt loved and protected, duly responding with a normal belief in the indissolubility of the parental tie. Adolescence brought the usual boredom and false maturity, but no more than for anyone else. I left home without trauma, and was never out of touch for long. I provided grandchildren, one of each sex, making up for my sister’s devotion to her career. Later, I had responsible conversations with my parents—well, with my mother—about the realities of ageing and the practicality of bungalows. I organized a sit-down lunch for their fortieth wedding anniversary, inspected sheltered housing, discussed their wills. Ma even told me what she wanted done with their ashes. I was to take the caskets to a cliff-top on the Isle of Wight where, I deduced, they had first declared love for one another. Those present were to cast their dust into the wind and the seagulls. I already found myself worrying what I was to do with the empty caskets. You couldn’t exactly toss them off the cliff after the ashes; nor could you keep them for storing, I don’t know, cigars or chocolate biscuits or Christmas decorations. And you certainly couldn’t stuff them into some waste-bin at the car park which my mother had also thoughtfully circled on the Ordnance Survey map. She had pressed it on me when my father was out of the room and would occasionally confirm that I was keeping it in a safe place.

  Known them, you see. All my life.

  MY MOTHER is called Dorothy Mary Bishop, and her maiden name was Heathcock, which she gave up with no regret. My father is Stanley George Bishop. She was born in 1921, he in 1920. They grew up in different parts of the West Midlands, met on the Isle of Wight, settled on the outer rural fringes of London, and retired to the Essex-Suffolk border. Their lives were orderly. During the war, my mother worked in the county surveyor’s office; my father was in the RAF. No, he wasn’t a fighter pilot or anything; his talent was for administration. Afterwards he joined the local authority, eventually becoming deputy chief executive. He liked to say that he was responsible for everything we took for granted. Essential but unappreciated: my father was an ironical man, and this is how he chose to present himself.

  Karen was born four years before me. Childhood comes back in smells. Porridge, custard, my father’s pipe; washing powder, Brasso, my mother’s scent before the Masonic dinner-dance; bacon through the floorboards as I lay in bed; Seville oranges boiling volcanically while there was still frost on the ground outside; drying mud entwined with grass on football boots; bog-pongs from previous users and kitchen-pongs from backfiring waste-pipes; the ageing leather seats of our Morris Minor, and the acrid slack my father shovelled on the fire to bank it up. All these smells recurred, as did the unchanging cycles of school, weather, garden-growth and domesticity. The first scarlet break of runner-bean flowers; folded vests in my bottom drawer; mothballs; the gas-poker. On Mondays the house would throb to our washing machine, which used to crab itself berserkly across the kitchen floor, howling and bucking, before sending, at deranged intervals, gallons of hot grey water along its fat beige tubes to spit and gush into the sink. The manufacturer’s name on its metal badge was Thor. The god of thunder sits and growls in the outer reaches of suburbia.

  I SUPPOSE I should try and give you some idea of my parents’ characters.

  People used to assume, I think, that my mother had more natural intelligence than my father. He was—is—a large man, fleshy and bellied, with bunched veins corrugating the backs of his hands. He used to say that he had heavy bones. I didn’t know the weight of bones could vary. Perhaps it can’t; perhaps this was just something he said to amuse us kids, or to perplex us. He could seem ponderous, as his thick fingers paused over a chequebook, as he rewired a plug with the DIY book open in front of him. But children quite like one parent to be slow: the adult world then seems less impossible. My father used to take me up to the Great Wen, as he called it, to buy model aircraft kits (more smells: balsa wood, coloured dope, metal knives). In those days a return ticket on the Undergound was marked with a perforation, drawn but not cut; the outward portion occupied two-thirds of the ticket, the return one-third—a division whose logic I could never see. Anyway, my father would pause as we approached the barrier at Oxford Circus and look down at the tickets in his large palm with a gentle puzzlement. I would peck them nimbly off his hand, tear them down the perforations, drop the return thirds back into his palm, and swaggeringly present the outward stubs to the ticket collector. I was nine or ten at the time, and pleased with my sleight of finger; years on, I wonder if, after all, he was bluffing.

  My mother was the organizer. Though my father spent his life making sure that the borough ran smoothly, when he closed the front door he submitted to another’s system of control. My mother bought his clothes, arranged their social life, oversaw our schooling, budgeted, made decisions about holidays. To third parties my father used to refer to his wife as “the Government” or “higher authority.” He would always do this with a smile. Do you want some manure for the garden, sir, prime quality stuff, well rotted, judge for yourself, just feel a handful? “I’ll go and see what the Government has to say,” my father would reply. When I begged him to take me to an air show, or the cricket, he would say, “Let’s refer this to a higher authority.” My mother could trim the crusts from sandwiches without ever losing any of the filling: a sweet harmony between palm and knife. She could have a tongue on her, which I attributed to the accumulated frustrations of housewifery; but she was also proud of her domestic talents. When she badgered my father and he told her not to nag, she would reply, “Men only use the word ‘nag’ when it’s something they don’t want to do.” Most days they gardened. Together they had built a fruit cage: poles with rubber balls at their junctions, an acre of netting, and reinforced defences against birds, squirrels, rabbits and moles. Sunken beer-traps caught the slugs. After tea they played Scrabble; after dinner they did the crossword; then they watched the news. An orderly life.

  SIX YEARS AGO I noticed a large bruise on the side of my father’s head, just above the temple, by the hairline. It was yellowing at the edges and still indigo at the centre.
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  “What have you done to yourself, Dad?” We were standing in the kitchen at the time. My mother had opened a bottle of sherry and was tying a piece of paper towel round the neck so that it wouldn’t drip if my father poured it less than immaculately. I used to wonder why she didn’t pour it herself and save the paper towel.

  “He had a fall, silly old thing.” My mother pulled the knot tight with exactly the right strength, for she, more than anyone, knew that a paper towel will rip if tied too fiercely.

  “Are you OK, Dad?”

  “Right as rain. Ask the Government.”

  Later, when my mother was washing up and the two of us were watching afternoon snooker on the telly, I said, “How did you do it, Dad?”

  “Had a fall,” he answered, not taking his eyes from the screen. “Ha, knew he’d go in-off, what do these young lads know about the game? All potting with them, isn’t it, no safety skills at all.”

  After tea, my parents played Scrabble. I said I’d just watch. My mother won, as she usually did. But something about the way my father played, sighing as if fate had dealt him letters that just couldn’t live with one another, made me think he wasn’t trying.

  I SUPPOSE I’d better tell you about the village. In truth, it’s more of a crossroads, where a hundred or so people live in formal proximity to one another. There’s a triangular green bitten into by negligent motorists; a village hall; a deconsecrated church; a concrete bus-shelter; a post-box with an ungenerous mouth. My mother says the village shop is “good for essentials” which means that people use it to stop it closing down. As for my parents’ bungalow, it’s spacious and characterless. Timber-framed, concrete-floored, double-glazed: chalet-style, the estate agents term it—in other words, there’s a pitched roof enclosing a large storage space for rusting golf-clubs and discarded electric blankets. The only convincing reason my mother ever gave for living here is that three miles away there is a very good freezer centre.

  Three miles in the opposite direction is a shabby British Legion club. My father used to drive over there on Wednesday lunchtimes “to get out of the hair of a higher authority.” A sandwich, a pint of mild-and-bitter, a game of billiards against whoever happened to be there, then back around tea-time with his clothes smelling of cigarette smoke. He kept his Legion uniform—a brown tweed jacket with leather elbows and a pair of buff cavalry twills—on a hanger in the utility room. This Wednesday routine had been approved, even perhaps decided, by my mother. She used to maintain that my father preferred billiards to snooker because there were fewer balls on the table and so he didn’t have to think as much.

  When I asked my father why he preferred billiards to snooker, he did not reply that billiards was a gentleman’s game, or that it was more subtle, or more elegant. He said, “Billiards doesn’t have to end. A game of billiards could last for ever, even if you were losing all the time. I don’t like things to end.”

  My father rarely spoke like this. Normally he would talk with a sort of smiling complicity. His use of irony prevented him from seeming deferential, but also from seeming entirely serious. Our way of conversing was long-established: companionable, chummy, oblique; warm, yet essentially distant. English, oh yes it’s English, by Christ it’s English. In my family we don’t do hugging and back-slapping, we don’t do sentimentality. Rites of passage: we get our certificates for those by mail order.

  I PROBABLY SOUND as if I’m favouring my father. I don’t want to make my mother seem sharp, or humourless. Well, she can be sharp, it’s true. And humourless, for that matter. There’s a nervous trimness about her: even in middle age she never put on weight. And as she likes to repeat, she never did suffer fools gladly. When my parents first moved to the village they met the Royces. Jim Royce was their doctor, one of the old-fashioned sort who drank and smoked and went on saying that pleasure never did anyone any harm until the day he dropped dead of a heart attack while still well short of the average male life expectancy. His first wife had died of cancer, and Jim had remarried within the year. Elsie was an outgoing, bosomy woman a few years his junior, who wore characterful spectacles and, as she said, “liked a bit of a dance.” My mother referred to her as “Joyce Royce,” and long after it had been established that Elsie’s previous life had been spent housekeeping for her parents in Bishop’s Stortford, used to maintain that she had been Jim Royce’s receptionist and had blackmailed him into marriage.

  “You know that isn’t the case,” my father would sometimes protest.

  “I don’t know that it isn’t. Neither do you. She probably poisoned the first Mrs. Royce to get her hooks into him.”

  “Well, I think she’s a good-hearted woman.” Faced with my mother’s eye and silence, he added, “Maybe a little boring.”

  “Boring? Like watching the test card. Except it’s going yack yack yack at you all the time. And that hair comes out of a bottle.”

  “Does it?” My father was visibly surprised by this allegation.

  “Oh, you men. Did you think that colour exists in nature?”

  “I never thought about it.” Dad was quiet for a while. Uncharacteristically, my mother kept him company, then finally said, “And now that you have?”

  “Have what?”

  “Thought about it. Joyce Royce’s hair.”

  “Oh. No, I was thinking of something else.”

  “And are you going to share the benefit with the rest of the human race?”

  “I was wondering how many U’s there are in Scrabble.”

  “Men,” replied my mother. “There’s only an A and an E, clothead.”

  My father smiled at this. You see how they were together?

  I ASKED my father how the car was running. He was seventy-eight at the time, and I wondered how much longer they would let him drive.

  “Engine’s running well. Bodywork’s not too good. Chassis’s rusting.”

  “And how are you, Dad?” I was trying to avoid the direct question, but somehow failed.

  “Engine’s running well. Bodywork’s not too good. Chassis’s rusting.”

  Now he lies in bed, sometimes in his own green-striped pyjamas, more often in a poorly fitting pair inherited from someone else—someone dead, perhaps. He winks at me as he always did and calls people “Dear.” He says, “My wife, you know. Many happy years.”

  MY MOTHER would talk practically of the Four Last Things. That’s to say, the Four Last Things of modern life: making a will, planning for old age, facing death, and not being able to believe in an afterlife. My father was finally prevailed upon to make a will when he was over sixty. He never referred to death, at least not in my hearing. As for the afterlife: on the rare occasions we entered a church as a family (and only for marriage, baptism or funeral), he would kneel for a few moments with his fingers pressed to his forehead. Was this prayer, some secular equivalent, or just a leftover habit from childhood? Perhaps it showed courtesy, or an open mind? My mother’s attitude to the mysteries of the spirit was less ambiguous. “Poppycock.” “Load of mumbo-jumbo.” “Not having any of that done over me, you understand, Chris?” “Yes, Mum.”

  What I ask myself is: behind my father’s reticence and winks, behind the jokey kowtowing to my mother, behind the evasions—or, if you prefer, good manners—in the face of the four last things, was there panic and mortal terror? Or is this a stupid question? Is anyone spared mortal terror?

  AFTER JIM ROYCE died, Elsie attempted to keep up with my parents. There were invitations to tea, and sherry, and to view the garden; but my mother always declined.

  “We only put up with her because we liked him,” she said.

  “Oh, she’s pleasant enough,” my father would reply. “There’s no harm in her.”

  “There’s no harm in a bag of peat. Doesn’t mean you have to go round and have a glass of sherry with it. Anyway, she’s got what she wants.”

  “What’s that?”

  “His pension. She’ll be comfortable now. Doesn’t need Muggins here to help pass the time of day.?
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  “Jim would have liked us to keep in touch.”

  “Jim’s well out of it. You should have seen the expression on his face when she got yacking. You could hear his mind wandering.”

  “I thought they were very fond.”

  “So much for your powers of observation.”

  My father gave me a wink.

  “What are you winking at?”

  “Winking? Me? Would I do such a thing?” My father turned his head another ten degrees and winked again.

  What I’m trying to get a line on is this: part of my father’s behaviour was always to deny his behaviour. Does that make sense?

  THE DISCOVERY was made in the following way. It was a question of bulbs. A friend in a neighbouring village offered to pass on some surplus narcissi. My mother said my father would pick them up on his way back from the British Legion. She rang the club and asked to speak to my father. The secretary said he wasn’t there. When someone gives my mother an answer she isn’t expecting, she tends to ascribe it to the stupidity of her interlocutor.

  “He’s playing billiards,” she said.

  “No he isn’t.”

  “Don’t be a clothead,” said my mother, and I can imagine her tone all too well. “He always plays billiards on a Wednesday afternoon.”

  “Madam,” is what she heard next. “I have been secretary of this club for the past twenty years, and in all that time billiards has never been played on a Wednesday afternoon. Monday, Tuesday, Friday, yes. Wednesday, no. Do I make myself clear?”

  My mother was eighty when she had this conversation, and my father eighty-one.

  YOU COME and talk some sense into him. He’s going gaga. I’d like to strangle the bitch.” And there I was again. Me again, as before, not my sister. But it wasn’t wills, this time, or power of attorney or sheltered housing.

  My mother had that high nervous energy that crises bring: a mixture of anxious fizz and underlying exhaustion, each of which fuels the other. “He won’t listen to reason. He won’t listen to anything. I’m going to prune the blackcurrants.”