The Lemon Table

  My father moved swiftly out of his chair. We shook hands, as we always do. “I’m glad you’ve come,” he said. “Your mother won’t listen to reason.”

  “I’m not the voice of reason,” I said. “So don’t expect too much.”

  “I don’t expect anything. Just glad to see you.” Such a rare expression of direct pleasure from my father alarmed me. So did the way he sat foursquare in his chair; normally he was aslant, or askance, like his eyes and his mind. “Your mother and I are separating. I’m going to live with Elsie. We’ll split the furniture and divide the bank balance. She can live in this place, which I must tell you I’ve never much liked, for as long as she wants to. Of course half of it’s mine, so if she wanted to move she’d have to find somewhere smaller. She could have the car if she knew how to drive, but I doubt that’s a viable option.”

  “Dad, how long has this been going on?”

  He looked at me without a blink or blush and shook his head faintly. “I’m afraid that’s none of your business.”

  “Of course it is, Dad. I’m your son.”

  “True. Perhaps you’re wondering if I’m going to make a new will. I’m not planning to. Not at the moment. All that’s happening is I’m going to live with Elsie. I’m not divorcing your mother or anything like that. I’m just going to live with Elsie.” The way he pronounced her name made me realize that my task—or at least, the task my mother had proposed—was not going to succeed. There was no guilty hesitation or false emphasis when he spoke her name; “Elsie” sounded as solid as flesh.

  “What would Mum do without you?”

  “Paddle her own canoe.” He didn’t say it harshly, just with a crispness implying that he’d worked everything out already and others would agree if only they gave it enough thought. “She can be a government of one.”

  My father had never shocked me, except once: through the window I’d seen him wringing the neck of a blackbird he’d caught in the fruit cage. I could tell he was swearing too. Then he’d tied the bird to the netting by its feet, and let it dangle upside down to discourage other looters.

  We talked some more. Or rather, I talked and my father listened as if I were one of those kids who comes to the door with a sports bag full of dusters, chamois leathers and ironing-board covers, purchase of which, their spiel hints, will keep them away from a life of crime. By the end, I knew how they felt when I closed the door in their faces. My father had listened politely while I praised the articles in my bag, but he didn’t want to buy. Finally, I said, “But you will think it over, Dad? Give it a bit of time?”

  “If I give it a bit of time I’ll be dead.”

  There’d always been a kindly distance to our dealings since I became an adult; things were left unsaid, but an amiable equality presided. Now there was a new gulf between us. Or perhaps it was the old one: my father had become a parent again, and was reasserting his greater knowledge of the world.

  “Dad, none of my business and all that, but is it . . . physical?”

  He looked at me with those clear grey-blue eyes, not reproachfully, just steadily. If one of us was going to blush, it was me. “It is none of your business, Chris. But since you ask, the answer is Yes.”

  “And . . . ?” I couldn’t go on. My father wasn’t some middle-aged friend drooling over totty; he was my eighty-one-year-old progenitor, who after fifty or so years of marriage was leaving home for a woman somewhere in her mid-sixties. I was afraid even to formulate the questions.

  “But . . . why now? I mean, if it’s been going on all these years . . .”

  “All what years?”

  “All the years you’re supposed to have been down the club playing billiards.”

  “I mostly was down the club, son. I said billiards to make things simpler. Sometimes I just sat in the car. Looking at a field. No, Elsie is . . . recent.”

  Later, I dried the dishes for my mother. As she handed me a Pyrex casserole lid, she said, “I expect he’s using that stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “You know. That stuff.” I put the lid down and held my hand out for a saucepan. “It’s in the papers. Rhymes with Niagara.”

  “Ah.” One of the easier crossword clues.

  “They say all over America old men are running around like buck rabbits.” I tried not to think of my father as a buck rabbit. “All men are fools, Chris, and they only change by getting more foolish with every year that passes. I wish I’d paddled my own canoe.”

  Later, in the bathroom, I opened the mirrored door of a corner cupboard and peered in. Haemorrhoid cream, shampoo for delicate hair, cotton wool, a mail-order copper bracelet against arthritis . . . Don’t be ridiculous, I thought. Not here, not now, not my father.

  AT FIRST I thought: he’s just another case, just another man tempted away by ego, novelty, sex. The age thing makes it seem different, but it isn’t really. It’s ordinary, banal, tacky.

  Then I thought: what do I know? Why make the assumption that my parents don’t—didn’t—have sex anymore? They still shared the same bed until this happened. What do I know about sex at that age? Which left the question: which is worse for my mother, to give up sex at, let’s say, sixty-five, and discover fifteen years later that your husband is off with a woman of the age you were when you gave up; or still to be having sex with your husband after half a century, only to discover he’s having a bit on the side?

  And after that I thought: what if it isn’t really about sex? Would I have been less squeamish if my father had said, “No, son, it isn’t physical at all, it’s just that I’ve fallen in love.” The question I’d asked, and which seemed hard enough at the time, was actually the easier one. Why make the assumption that the heart shuts down alongside the genitals? Because we want—need—to see old age as a time of serenity? I now think this is one of the great conspiracies of youth. Not just of youth, but of middle age too, of every single year until that moment when we admit to being old ourselves. And it’s a wider conspiracy because the old collude in our belief. They sit there with a rug over their knees, nodding subserviently and agreeing that their revels now are ended. Their movements have slowed and the blood has thinned. The fires have gone out—or at least a shovelful of slack has been piled on for the long night ahead. Except that my father was declining to play the game.

  I DIDN’T TELL my parents I was going to see Elsie.

  “Yes?” She stood at the reeded-glass door, arms crossed beneath her bosom, head high, absurd spectacles glinting in the sun. Her hair was the colour of autumnal beech and, as I now saw, thinning at the crown. Her cheeks were powdered, but not enough to camouflage the occasional star-burst of capillaries.

  “Could we have a talk? I . . . My parents don’t know I’m here.”

  She turned without a word, and I followed her seamed stockings along a narrow hall to the lounge. Her bungalow was laid out in exactly the same way as my parents’: kitchen on the right, two bedrooms straight ahead, utility room next to the bathroom, lounge to the left. Perhaps the same builder had put them both up. Perhaps all bungalows are much the same. I’m no expert.

  She sat on a low black leather chair and instantly lit a cigarette. “I warn you, I’m too old to be lectured.” She was wearing a brown skirt and cream blouse with large display earrings in the shape of snail-shells. I had met her twice before, and been reasonably bored by her. No doubt she was by me too. Now I sat opposite, refused a cigarette, tried to view her as a temptress, home-wrecker, village scandal, but saw instead a woman in her mid-sixties, plump, slightly nervous, more than slightly hostile. Not a temptress—and not a younger version of my mother either.

  “I haven’t come to lecture you. I suppose I’m trying to understand.”

  “What’s there to understand? Your father’s coming to live with me.” She took an irritated puff at her cigarette, then snatched it from her mouth. “He’d be here now if he wasn’t such a nice man. Said he had to let you all get used to the idea.”

  “They’ve been marri
ed a very long time,” I said, in as neutral a tone as I could manage.

  “You don’t leave what you still want,” said Elsie curtly. She took another quick puff and looked at the cigarette in half-disapproval. Her ashtray was suspended over the chair-arm by a leather strap with weights at each end. I wanted it to be stuffed full of butts louchely smeared with scarlet lipstick. I wanted to see scarlet fingernails and scarlet toenails. But no such luck. On her left ankle she wore a support sock. What did I know about her? That she had looked after her parents, had looked after Jim Royce, and was now proposing—or so I assumed—to look after my father. Her lounge contained a large number of African violets planted in yoghurt pots, an excess of plumped cushions, a couple of stuffed animals, a cocktail-cabinet telly, a pile of gardening magazines, a cluster of family photos, a built-in electric fire. None of it would have been amiss in my parents’ house.

  “African violets,” I said.

  “Thank you.” She seemed to be waiting for me to say something which would give her grounds for attack. I stayed silent, and it made no difference. “Shouldn’t hit him, should she?”

  “What?”

  “Shouldn’t hit him, should she? Not if she wants to keep him.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Frying pan. Side of the head. Six years ago, wasn’t it? Jim always had his suspicions. And quite a few times recently. Not where it shows, she’s learned that lesson. Whacks him in the back. Senile dementia if you ask me. Ought to be put away.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “Well, she didn’t.” Elsie glared at me and lit another cigarette.

  “My mother . . .”

  “Believe what you want to believe.” She certainly wasn’t trying to ingratiate herself. But why should she? It wasn’t an audition. As she showed me out, I automatically put out my hand. She shook it briefly, and repeated, “You don’t leave what you still want.”

  I SAID to my mother, “Mum, have you ever hit Dad?”

  She traced my source instantly. “Is that what the bitch says? You can tell her from me I’ll see her in court. She should be . . . covered in tar and feathers, whatever they do.”

  I said to my father, “Dad, it may be a stupid question, but has Mum ever hit you?”

  His eyes remained clear and direct. “I had a fall, son.”

  I went to the medical centre and saw a brisk woman in a dirndl skirt who gave off a quiet reek of high principle. She had joined after Dr. Royce had retired. Medical records were of course confidential, if abuse was suspected she would be obliged to inform the social services, my father had reported a fall six years ago, nothing before or since to arouse suspicion, what was my evidence?

  “Something someone said.”

  “You know what villages are like. Or perhaps you don’t. What sort of someone?”

  “Oh, someone.”

  “Do you think your mother is the sort of woman who would abuse your father?”

  Abuse, abuse. Why not say beat up, wallop, smack round the head with a heavy frying pan? “I don’t know. How can you tell?” Do you have to see the maker’s name embossed back to front on my father’s skin?

  “Obviously it depends what the patient presents with. Unless a family member reports suspicions. Is that what you are doing?”

  No. I am not denouncing my eighty-year-old mother for suspected assault on my eighty-one-year-old father on the say-so of a woman in her mid-sixties who may or may not be sleeping with my father. “No,” I said.

  “I haven’t seen a great deal of your parents,” the doctor went on. “But they are . . .” She paused before finding the correct euphemism. “. . . they are educated people?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Yes, my father was educated sixty years ago—more—and so was my mother. I’m sure it’s standing them in very good stead.” Still angry, I added, “By the way, do you ever prescribe Viagra?”

  She looked at me as if now sure that I was merely a troublemaker. “You’ll have to go to your own doctor for that.”

  WHEN I GOT BACK to the village, I felt a sudden depression, as if it were I who lived there and had already grown weary of this jumped-up crossroads with its dead church, brutal bus-shelter, chalet-style bungalows and overpriced shop that is good for essentials. I manoeuvred my car on to the strip of asphalt exaggeratedly known as the drive, and could see, at the end of the garden, my father at work in the fruit cage, bending and tying. My mother was waiting for me.

  “Joyce Bloody Royce, well they deserve one another. Pair of dimwits. Of course, this poisons the whole of my life.”

  “Oh, come off it, Mum.”

  “Don’t you ‘Come off it’ to me, young man. Not until you’re my age. Then you’ll have earned the right. It poisons the whole of my life.” She would allow no contradiction; she too was reasserting herself as a parent.

  I poured myself a cup of tea from the pot by the sink.

  “It’s stewed.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Ponderous silence ensued. Once again, I felt a child seeking approval, or at any rate trying to avoid censure.

  “Do you remember the Thor, Mum?” I suddenly found myself saying.

  “The what?”

  “The Thor. When we were kids. The way it used to travel all over the kitchen floor. Had a mind of its own. And it was always flooding, wasn’t it?”

  “I thought that was the Hotpoint.”

  “No.” I felt oddly desperate about this. “You had the Hotpoint afterwards. The Thor was the one I remember. Made a lot of rattling and had those thick beige hoses for the water.”

  “That tea must be undrinkable,” said my mother. “And by the way, send me back that map I gave you. No, just chuck it away. Isle of Wight, clothead. Mumbo-jumbo. Understand?”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “What I want, if I go before your father, as I expect I shall, is just scatter me. Anywhere. Or get the crem to do it. You’re not obliged to collect the ashes, you know.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk like this.”

  “He’ll see me out. It’s a creaking gate that lasts the longest. Then the Receptionist can have his ashes, can’t she?”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “Put them on her mantelpiece.”

  “Look, Ma, if that happened, I mean if you died before Dad, she wouldn’t have the right anyway. It’d be up to me, me and Karen. It wouldn’t have anything to do with Elsie.”

  My mother stiffened at the name. “Karen’s a dead loss, and I couldn’t trust you, son, could I?”

  “Ma . . .”

  “Sneaking round to her house without telling me. Chip off the old block, you are. Always were your father’s son.”

  ACCORDING TO ELSIE, my mother blighted their life with her constant phone calls. “Morning, noon and night, especially night. In the end, we just took the plug out.” According to Elsie, my mother was always making my father pop back and do jobs about the house. She used a succession of arguments. 1)The house was half his anyway, so he had a duty to maintain it. 2)He’d left her without enough money to employ a handyman. 3)He presumably didn’t expect her to start going up a ladder at her age. 4)If he didn’t come at once she’d walk all the way to Elsie’s house and fetch him.

  According to my mother, my father was back at her door almost as soon as he’d left, offering to fix things, dig the garden, clean the gutters, check the level in the oil tank, anything. According to my mother, my father complained that Elsie treated him like a dog, wouldn’t let him go to the British Legion club, had bought him a pair of slippers he particularly disliked, and wanted him to break off all contact with his children. According to my mother, my father begged her constantly to take him back, to which she would reply, “You’ve made your bed and you can learn to lie in it,” though in fact she only intended to make him stick it out a little longer. According to my mother, my father didn’t like the slapdash way Elsie ironed his shirts, or the fact that all his clothes now smelt of cigarette smoke.


  According to Elsie, my mother made so much fuss about the back door swelling, so that now the bolt only went half way in and a burglar could be through that in a jiffy and rape and murder her as she lay in her bed, that my father reluctantly agreed to go over. According to Elsie, my father swore that this was the last time ever, and that as far as he was concerned the whole bloody house could burn to the ground, preferably with my mother inside it, before he would be persuaded to drive over again. According to Elsie, it was while my father was working on the back door that my mother hit him over the head with an unknown instrument, then left him lying there, hoping he would die, and only called the ambulance several hours later.

  According to my mother, my father kept pestering her to get the back door fixed and said he didn’t like to think of her there alone at nights and the whole matter would be resolved if only she’d let him come back. According to my mother, my father turned up unexpectedly one afternoon with his toolbox. They sat and talked for a couple of hours, about old times, about the children, and even got out some photos which made them both damp-eyed. She told him she’d think about having him back but not until he’d fixed the door if that was what he’d come to do. He went off with his toolbox, she cleared away the tea things, then sat looking at some more photographs. After a while, she realized she hadn’t heard any banging from the utility room. My father was on his side, making a gurgling noise; he must have had another fall and struck his head on the floor which of course is concrete out there. She called the ambulance—God, they were slow coming—and put a cushion under his head, look, this cushion, you can still see the blood on it.

  According to the police, Mrs. Elsie Royce made a complaint to them that Mrs. Dorothy Mary Bishop had assaulted Mr. Stanley George Bishop with intent to murder. They had investigated the matter fully, and decided not to proceed. According to the police, Mrs. Bishop made a complaint to them that Mrs. Royce was going about the local villages denouncing her as a murderer. They had to have a quiet word with Mrs. Royce. Domestics are always a problem, especially what you might call extended domestics like this one.