The Lady in the Van

The headmaster looked at her sharply and wondered if Miss Tunstall was through the menopause.

  ‘We must find a paraphrase. But first the problems caused by this business of Midgley père. Ask Tomlinson to step over, will you, Daphne. Tell him to bring his coloured pencils. And a rubber.’

  ‘Tomato or my jam?’

  ‘Tomato.’

  The hospital was fifty miles away. His wife was making him sandwiches. He sat in his raincoat at the kitchen table, watching her apply a faint smear of Flora to the wholemeal bread.

  ‘I wanted to go over this last weekend,’ said Midgley. ‘I would have gone over if your Margaret hadn’t suddenly descended.’

  ‘You knew they were coming. They’d been coming for weeks. It’s one of the few things Mother’s got to look forward to.’ Mrs Midgley’s mother was stood staring out of the window. ‘Don’t blame our Margaret.’

  ‘I just never expected it,’ said Midgley.

  If you expected something it didn’t happen.

  ‘I expected it,’ said his wife, putting on a shiny plastic apron emblazoned with a portrait of Sylvia Plath.

  ‘I expected it. Last time I went over he came to the door to wave me off. He’s never done that before. Bless him.’ She slipped on a pair of padded Union Jack mittens and sinking to her knees before the oven gave the Shift a trial blast. ‘I think people know.’

  ‘He does come to the door,’ said Midgley. ‘He always comes to the door.’ And it was true he did, but only, Midgley felt, to show that the visit had been so short it needed extending. Though once, catching sight of him in the rear-view mirror, waving, Midgley had cried.

  ‘He was trying to tell me something,’ said his wife.

  ‘I know a farewell when I see one.’ A fine spray misted the oven’s pale grey walls. ‘Shouldn’t you be going?’

  ‘Is it Saturday today?’ said her mother.

  Ten minutes later Midgley was sitting on the stairs and his wife had started hoovering.

  ‘I’m not going to let him down. I want to be there when he goes,’ shouted Midgley.

  The vacuum was switched off.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He loved me.’

  ‘I can’t think why,’ said Midgley’s wife. ‘It’s not as if you take after him,’ and she switched on again, ‘not one little bit.’

  ‘Joyce,’ her mother called, ‘when is that chiropodist coming?’

  Midgley looked at his watch. It was three o’clock. At ten past Mrs Midgley took to dusting. It was always assumed the housework put her in a bad temper. The truth was if she was in a bad temper she did the housework. So it came to the same thing.

  ‘He had strength,’ she said, dusting a group of lemonade bottles of various ages. ‘Our Colin is going to be strong. He loved Colin.’

  ‘Does he know?’ asked Midgley.

  ‘Yes. Only it hasn’t hit him yet.’

  Hoarse shouting and a rhythmic drumming on the floor indicated that his son was seeking solace in music.

  ‘When it does hit him,’ said his mother, picking at a spot of rust on a recently acquired Oxo tin, ‘he is going to be genuinely heartbroken. There’s always a gap. It was on Woman’s Hour. Poor old Frank.’

  ‘I’ve never understood,’ said Midgley, ‘why you call him Frank. He’s my father.’

  She looked at the 1953 Coronation mug, wondering if it was altogether too recent an artefact to have on display.

  ‘He has a name. Frank is his name.’

  It was not only the date, the Coronation mug was about the only object in the house Midgley had contributed to the decor, having been issued with it in 1953 when he was at primary school.

  ‘I call him Dad,’ said Midgley.

  ‘He’s not Dad, is he? Not my dad, I call him Frank because that’s the name of a person. To me he is a person. That’s why we get on.’

  She was about to hide the mug behind a cast-iron money-box in the shape of a grinning black man then thought better of it. They had too many things. And there would be more coming from his dad. She cheered up slightly.

  Her husband kissed her and opened the back door.

  ‘It isn’t though,’ he said.

  ‘It isn’t what?’

  ‘Why you get on. Treating him like a person.’

  Seeing her stood there in her silly apron he felt sorry for her, and wished he had kept quiet.

  ‘You get on,’ he said (and because he was sorry for her tried to make it sound as if she was justified), ‘you get on because you both despise me.’

  ‘Listen.’ She brought him away from the door and closed it. Mrs Barnes next door, who had once described their marriage as uninhibited, was putting out a few opportune clothes. ‘Your father is 74. He is dying. Considering the time you’ve been hanging about here he is possibly already dead yet you resent the fact that he and I were friends. I seem to have married someone very low down in the evolutionary chain. You might want one or two tissues.’ And she darted at him and thrust them into his pocket.

  Midgley opened the door again.

  ‘It’s just that when you and he were together I didn’t exist.’

  ‘I am married,’ she shouted, ‘to the cupboard under the sink.’ A remark made more mysterious to Mrs Barnes by the sound of a passing ice-cream van playing the opening bars of the ‘Blue Danube’.

  ‘He is dying, Denis. Will you exist now? Will that satisfy you?’ She was crying.

  ‘I’ll make it right, Joyce,’ said Midgley. ‘I’ll be there when he goes. I’ll hold his hand.’

  He held hers, still in their Union Jack mittens. ‘If I let him down now he’d stay with me the rest of my life. I did love him, Joyce.’

  ‘I want him to stay with you the rest of your life. That’s what I want. I think of his kindness. His unselfishness. His unflagging courtesy. The only incredible thing is that someone so truly saintly should have produced such a pill of a son.’

  She took off Sylvia Plath and hung her behind the door. She had stopped crying.

  ‘But I suppose that’s your mother.’

  ‘Shut up about my mother,’ said Midgley.

  His mother was a sore point. ‘My mother is dead.’

  ‘So is your father by now probably. Go!’

  Midgley took her by the shoulders.

  ‘Things will change then, you’ll see. I’ll change. I’ll be a different person. I can … go. Live! Start!’ He kissed her quickly and warmly and ran from the door down the little drive towards the van. His wife rushed to the door to catch him.

  ‘Start?’ she shouted. ‘Start what? You’re 39.’

  ‘They had another do today,’ Mrs Barnes told her husband that evening. ‘It doesn’t say much for a university education.’

  * * *

  Coming off the Leeds and Bradford Ring Road Midgley stopped at a zebra to let an old man cross. The old man held up a warning hand, and slowly moved across, glowering at the car. Midgley revved his engine and the old man stopped, glared and went on with seemingly deliberate slowness. Someone behind hooted. Midgley did not wait for the old man to reach the kerb but drove off with a jerk. Glancing in his mirror Midgley saw the old man slip and nearly fall.

  At the hospital the first person he saw was Aunty Kitty, his father’s sister. She said nothing, kissing him wordlessly, her eyes closed to indicate her grief lay temporarily beyond speech. The scene played she took his arm (something he disliked) and they followed the signs to Intensive Care.

  ‘I thought you’d have been here a bit since,’ said his Aunty. ‘I’ve been here since two o’clock. You’ll notice a big change.’ They were going down a long featureless corridor. ‘He’s not like my brother. He’s not the Frank I knew.’ Visitors clustered at the doors of wards, waiting their turn to sit beside the beds of loved ones. Aunty Kitty favoured them with a brave smile. ‘I don’t dislike this colour scheme,’ she said. ‘I’ve always liked oatmeal. His doctor’s black.’

  Intensive Care had a waiting room to itself, presumably, Midgley thought, for
the display of Intensive Grief, and there was a woman crying in the corner. ‘Her hubby’s on the critical list,’ mouthed Aunty Kitty.

  ‘Their eldest girl works for Johnson and Johnson. They’d just got back from Barbados. The nurse is white but she’s not above eighteen.’ The nurse came in. ‘This is my nephew,’ said Aunty Kitty. ‘Mr Midgley’s son. Your father’s got a room to himself, love.’

  ‘They all do,’ said the nurse, ‘at this stage.’

  Midgley’s father lay propped up against the pillows, staring straight ahead through the window at a blank yellow wall. His arms lay outside the coverlet, palms upward as if accepting his plight and awaiting some sort of deliverance. They had put him into some green hospital pyjamas, with half-length sleeves the functionalism of which seemed too modish to Midgley, who had only ever seen his father in bed in striped pyjamas, or sometimes his shirt. The garment was open and a monitor clung to his chest, and above the bed the television screen blipped steady and regular. Midgley watched it for a moment.

  ‘Dad,’ he said to himself.

  ‘Dad. It’s me, Denis.’

  He put himself between the bed and the window so that if his father could see he would know he was there. He had read that stroke victims were never unconscious, just held incommunicado. ‘In the most solitary confinement,’ the article had said, the writer himself a doctor and too much taken with metaphor.

  ‘It’s all right, Dad.’

  He took a chair and sat halfway down the bed, putting his hand over his father’s inert palm.

  His father looked well in the face, which was ruddy and worn, the skin of his neck giving way sharply to the white of his body. The division between his known head and the unknown body had shocked Midgley when he had first seen it as a child, when his Dad took him swimming at the local baths. It was still the same. He had never sat in the sun all his life.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ said Midgley.

  ‘Are you next of kin?’ It was another nurse.

  ‘Son.’

  ‘Not too long then.’

  ‘Is the doctor around?’

  ‘Why? What do you want to know? There’s nothing wrong, is there? No complaints?’

  ‘I want to know how he is.’

  ‘He’s very poorly. You can see.’

  She looked down at her left breast and lifted a watch.

  ‘Doctor’ll be round in about an hour. He’s very busy.’

  ‘I wonder where he is,’ said Aunty Kitty.

  ‘She said he was busy.’

  They were back in the waiting room.

  Aunty Kitty looked at him with what he imagined she imagined was a look of infinite sadness, mingled with pity (‘Sorrow and love flow mingling down’ came into his mind from the hymn). ‘Not the doctor, your dad, love. Behind that stare he’s somewhere, wandering. You know,’ she said vaguely, ‘in his mind. Where is he?’

  She patted his hand.

  ‘I don’t suppose with having been to university you believe in an after-life. That’s always the first casualty.’

  For a while she read the small print on her pension book and Midgley thought about his childhood. Nurses came and went, leading their own lives and a man wiped plastic-covered mattresses in the corridor. Every time a nurse came near he made remarks like ‘It’s all right for some’ or ‘No rest for the wicked.’ Once the matron glided silently by, majestic and serene on her electric trolley. ‘They’re a new departure,’ said Aunty Kitty. ‘I could do with one of those. I’ll just pop and have another peep at your dad.’

  ‘What does that look on his face mean?’ she said when she came back. Midgley thought it meant he should have gone over to see him last Sunday. It meant that his dad had been right about him all along and now he was dying and whose fault was that? That was what it meant. ‘This unit was opened by the Duchess of Kent,’ said Aunty Kitty. ‘They have a tip-top kidney department.’

  The fascinations of medicine and royalty were equal in Aunty Kitty’s mind and whenever possible she found a connection between the two. Had she been told she was dying but from the same disease as a member of the Royal Family she would have died happy.

  ‘There’s some waiting done in hospitals,’ she said presently. ‘Ninety per cent of it’s waiting. Would you call this room oatmeal or cream?’

  A young man came through, crying.

  ‘His wife was in an accident,’ Aunty Kitty explained. ‘One of those head-on crashes. The car was a write-off. Did you come in your van?’

  Midgley nodded.

  ‘You’ll be one of these two-car families, then? Would you say she was black?’ A Thai nurse looked in briefly and went out again. ‘You don’t see that many of them. She’s happen a refugee.’

  Midgley looked at his watch. It was an hour since he had spoken to the nurse. He went in and stood at the desk but there was no one about. He stood at the door of his father’s room. He had not moved, his unseeing eyes fixed on a window-cleaner, who with professional discretion carefully avoided their gaze.

  ‘I always thought I’d be the first to go,’ said Aunty Kitty, looking at an advertisement in Country Life. ‘Fancy. Two swimming pools. I could do without two swimming pools. When you get to my age you just want somewhere you can get round nicely with the hoover. They’ve never got to the bottom of my complaint. They lowered a microscope down my throat but there was nothing. I wouldn’t live in Portugal if they paid me. Minstrels’ gallery, I shouldn’t know what to do with a minstrels’ gallery if I had one. Mr Penry-Jones wanted to put me on this machine the Duke of Gloucester inaugurated. This body-scan thing. Only there was such a long waiting-list apparently.’

  A nurse came through.

  ‘She’s the one I was telling you about. I asked her if your dad was in a coma or just unconscious. She didn’t know. They’re taking them too young these days.’

  ‘Aunty,’ said Midgley.

  ‘It isn’t as if she was black. Black you don’t expect them to know.’

  ‘What was my dad like?’

  Aunty Kitty thought for a moment.

  ‘He never had a wrong word for anybody. He’d do anybody a good turn. Shovel their snow. Fetch their coal in. He was that type. He was a saint. You take after your mother more.’

  ‘I feel I lack his sterling qualities,’ said Midgley some time later. ‘Grit. Patience. Virtues bred out of adversity.’

  ‘You wouldn’t think they’d have curtains in a hospital, would you?’ said Aunty Kitty. ‘You wouldn’t think curtains would be hygienic. I’m not keen on purple anyway.’

  ‘Deprivation for instance,’ said Midgley.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was never deprived. That way he deprived me. Do you understand?’

  ‘I should have gone to secondary school,’ she said. ‘I left at thirteen, same as your dad.’

  ‘I know I had it easier than he did,’ said Midgley. ‘But I was grateful. I didn’t take it for granted.’

  ‘You used to look bonny in your blazer.’

  ‘It isn’t particularly enjoyable, education.’ Midgley had his head in his hands. ‘I had what he wanted. Why should that be enjoyable?’

  ‘Mark’s got his bronze medal,’ said Aunty Kitty. ‘Did you not ought to be ringing round?’

  ‘About the bronze medal?’

  ‘About your dad.’

  ‘I’ll wait till I’ve seen the doctor.’

  It was half-past six.

  ‘They go on about these silicon chips, you’d think they’d get all these complaints licked first, somebody’s got their priorities wrong. Then he’s always been a right keen smoker has Frank. Now he’s paying the price.’

  Midgley fell asleep.

  ‘Robert Donat had bronchitis,’ said Aunty Kitty.

  * * *

  ‘Mr Midgley.’ The doctor shook his shoulder.

  ‘Denis,’ said Aunt Kitty, ‘it’s doctor.’

  He was a pale young Pakistani, and for a moment Midgley thought he had fallen asleep in class and was being woke
n by a pupil.

  ‘Mr Midgley?’ He was grave and precise, 26 at the most.

  ‘Your father has had a stroke.’ He looked at his clipboard. ‘How severe it is hard to tell. When he was brought in he was suffering from hypothermia.’

  Aunt Kitty gave a faint cry. It was a scourge that had been much in the news.

  ‘He must have fallen and been lying there, two days at least.’

  ‘I generally go over at weekends,’ said Midgley.

  ‘Pneumonia has set in. His heart is not strong. All things considered,’ he looked at the clipboard again, ‘we do not think he will last the night.’

  As he went away he tucked the clipboard under his arm and Midgley saw there was nothing on it.

  * * *

  ‘Only three phones and two of them duff. You wouldn’t credit it,’ said a fat man. ‘Say you were on standby for a transplant. It’d be just the same.’ He jingled his coins and a young man in glasses on the working phone put his head outside the helmet.

  ‘I’ve one or two calls to make,’ he said cheerfully.

  ‘Oh hell,’ said the fat man.

  ‘There’s a phone outside physio. Try there,’ said a passing nurse.

  ‘I’ll try there,’ said the fat man.

  Midgley sat on.

  ‘Hello,’ said the young man brightly. ‘Dorothy? You’re a grandma.’ He looked at Midgley while he was talking, but without seeing him.

  ‘A grandma,’ he shouted. ‘Yes!’ There was a pause. ‘Guess,’ said the young man and listened. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Girl. Seven and a half pounds. 5.35. Both doing well. I’m ringing everybody. Bye, Grandma.’

  Midgley half rose as the young man put the receiver back, but sat back as he consulted a bit of paper then picked it up again and dialled.

  ‘Hello, Neil. Hi. You’re an uncle … You’re an uncle. Today. Just now. 5.35. Well, guess.’ He waited. ‘No. Girl. No. I’m over the moon. So you can tell Christine she’s an aunty. Yes, a little cousin for Josephine. How’s it feel to be an uncle?… Bye.’

  Midgley got up and stood waiting. The young man took another coin and dialled again. It was a way of breaking news that could be adapted for exits as well as entrances, thought Midgley.

  ‘Hello, Margaret. You’re a widow. A widow … This afternoon. Half-past two … How’s it feel to be bereaved?’