Mortimer Penelope - The Pumpkin Eater

“I must find Beth and tell her …” He raised himself on tiptoe, swaying from left to right with his chin high while the remains of the champagne tipped and swilled in the bottom of his glass. “Where is she? Where is Beth?”

“She’s over on the sofa,” I said. “Talking to Jake.”

He looked at me, momentarily sharp, as a man looks at a safe he means to burgle later. My memory struggled. “Eyes in the back of your head?” he asked.

I smiled, obscurely frightened, and allowed him to grasp my upper arm, steering me in front of him along the length of the room. His grip was too tight, his hand wrapped round my arm like a register of blood pressure. Beth was sitting decorously on the sofa. She was looking down at Jake, who sprawled on the floor holding the neck of a champagne bottle between his straddled knees; but at the moment when I broke through, shielding Conway, she raised her head. With his free hand, Conway signalled to her; she waved back, moving only her fingers, and her face, which had been shadowed and solemn, seemed to blaze with relief. Conway let go of my arm and I sat down by Jake. “Beth’s dying to ask your advice,” he said, stroking the back of my neck. “I’ve told her you know all about children.”

“What she needs,” Conway said, “is another half dozen, and quick. Knock some of these fancy ideas out of her head.” He squeezed her as he said it, and sounded tender.

“Oh, really, Bob! You’re so old-fashioned. Anyway, Jake’s got a marvellous idea for a new movie.” She gazed at me damply. Again my memory gave a lurch and I stared at her, not answering when she said, “He’s so terribly clever, isn’t he? Some of my scenes with John, they just made me cry .”

“You’re going to write it for Beth?” Conway asked.

“If that’s all right with you.”

“Sure it’s all right with me. But just set it in S.W.3 if you don’t mind.”

“Oh no,” Beth said. “It goes on in the South of France. Well, we could all go. Think what…fun we could have, the four of us.” She smiled at Jake with solemn eyes.

“Tell her,” Conway implored. “You tell her. Women are made for bashing, and for having kids. That poor little girl of mine is lonely as hell. It’s criminal, goddamit, not to have some more while the going’s good. Look at you, you’ve got swarms of ’em, and from the glint in the old boy’s eye tonight you’ll probably have swarms more. She’s always on about her figure. What figure, I ask her. Call that a figure? Flat fore and aft like a bloody paper doll. I bet your figure’s better now than it ever was. Isn’t it? Who cares about figures, anyway, but isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t…”

“You wouldn’t say no to another one, would you? Not if your old man asked you?”

“Her old man,” Jake said, “wouldn’t be such a bloody fool. Let’s have some more drink. Let’s have some music. And Christ Almighty,” he plunged to the window and threw it open, “let’s have some air !”

“They remind me of someone,” I said.

“Who do?”

“The Conways.”

“They’re two people. How can they remind you of someone?”

“I don’t know … My father’s ill. I didn’t tell you.”

“Oh, no. I’m sorry. What’s the matter with him?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s cancer, but my mother won’t say the word, she won’t tell me.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t think it’s cancer. I’m sure it’s not. It’s probably just some…bug or other. You mustn’t worry.”

“I don’t worry,” I said. “It’s just that … you always say how much you like him. I remembered I hadn’t told you.”

“Perhaps you ought to go down and see him?”

“She says only if he gets better, or if he gets worse. She wants to keep him to herself, I think. She loves him so much.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it? That’s wonderful.”

I could feel his displeasure. Trust her, he was thinking, to introduce a jarring note. I should have kept this news of illness and sadness until tomorrow.

“I’m sure he’s all right,” I said. “Don’t worry.” I got up from the dressing table. He was sitting, half undressed, on the bed. I knelt behind him, my arms round his neck. “They’ve almost finished the tower.”

“Oh. Good.”

“You’re a marvellous colour.”

“Well… it was hot.”

“Do you think she’s very attractive?”

“Who?”

“Who? Who? Beth Conway.”

“I suppose so. If you like that sort of thing.”

“Perhaps it’s Philpot she reminds me of.”

He turned inside my arms. “You love me, don’t you?”

His eyes, as always, were expressionless, but his voice and body were warm. “Yes,” I said. “Of course I do.”

“You missed me,” he stated. “You wanted me to come back.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not disappointed in me.”

“Why should I be?”

“I behave stupidly. I do bloody stupid things.”

“No. You don’t.”

“I love you. I need you. I want you. You’re important to me, important to me.”

“Yes. Yes, I know.”

He lay down, pulling me with him. “You’re… fixed up all right?” he asked. I didn’t answer. In dreams you need no parachute, no wings; in dreams you can fly.

My father groped for my hands. I gave them to him and he lifted them, pressing them against his eyes. After a while his own hands dropped, but I didn’t move. My mother was sobbing by the window, little squeaking sobs with no strength in them. I sat for a long time with my hands over my father’s eyes, until my arms ached and I was afraid of leaning on him too heavily. When I drew them away, gently as quilts from a sleeping child, I knew he was dead.

“I think he’s dead,” I said.

“Dead?”

“Yes. I think so.”

She ran to him, crying. I couldn’t bear to see her touch him, hold him, persuading him back to life.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t. It’s no good …”

“The doctor. The doctor …!”

“Yes, I’ll get the doctor.” I tried to lift her up. “But come away.”

She shook her head, twisting it from side to side on his chest. “George!” she called. “George…”

I went downstairs and telephoned the doctor. Then I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. The kitchen was full of trays. For two days and two nights my mother had said, “You must have a little snack, dear. Yes, I think I might have a little snack.” I tipped all the little snacks into the dustbin and emptied three teapots. My father is dead, I told myself cautiously. My father is dead. Somehow I felt that it should be a great statement, tragic, triumphant. My father is dead, long live … That was for sons, though. He had no son. He had never needed me until that moment when he took my hands. A son’s hands would have been hard, uncomforting. Perhaps he had been trying to say he was glad. Or perhaps, in those last minutes, barely alive, he had needed protection, a shield against some intolerable light. As I washed my hands under the kitchen tap and dried them, slowly, finger by finger, on the roller towel, I thought of all the things they had done; now they were mosses for a dead man’s eyes. Familiar hands, very similar to his: broad-heeled, long fingered, square tipped, the skin already puckering on the knuckles, the wedding ring loose. They felt empty. The only sensation I had was of empty hands.

Late that night we sat in his study, my mother and I. They had been to lay him out and for hours, it seemed, the house had been full of their mournful tramping, their buckets, their winding sheets (“Anything’ll do, dear, anything nice and clean. An old table runner, now, that’d do very nicely”). They had left his windows wide open, and the house was very cold. He lay like a little man struck by a blizzard on the double bed with its clean sheets and unnecessary heaps of pillows. He was askew, but I hadn’t the courage to straighten him out. The blowing wind and the smell of formaldehyde, the dark and the icy bed, frightened me against my will. We were snug, almost riotously snug, in the study. I had bought some brandy and my mother was slightly tipsy. Each time a door creaked we glanced up, but not at each other in case we should spread alarm.