Tim Parks - Goodness

It didn’t seem worthwhile arguing with someone whose views were so far beyond the pale, so I drank up, paid and got out. Though that evening, just for the record, as it were, I did suggest to Shirley that she might get involved in one of those groups that provides free crêches for working-class mothers.

‘Please,’ she said, chopping lemon, ‘are you out of your mind? Or do you want to turn me into your mother or something?’

So finally I put it to her. Could it really all be simply because she wanted a child?

Could all what be?

Her being so depressed and unfriendly (not to mention obtuse).

‘Oh that. Just a phase,’ she said, breezing about with saucepans. She kissed me on the side of the neck as I tucked into chops.

‘So it’s not that you want a baby?’ I often do wish, with Shirley, that I had my dictaphone in my pocket.

She shook her head rather exaggeratedly, refusing to take me seriously. I was patient.

‘No, because I mean if it is that, I mean, if you really want children,’ I took a deep breath, ‘then seeing as I don’t, I don’t know why, but I really don’t, I feel complete and happy without them, then I think the best thing to do would be for us to split up so that you’ll be in plenty of time to find another man and we can stop making life a misery for each other. Which seems a crime frankly. I mean,’ I hurried on, talking at her back now as she sloshed water in the pans — Shirley always seems to be doing something with pans — ‘I personally don’t want us to split up, at all, I really don’t, I just want us to be happy together. I’ve said it a thousand times. However, if you. .’

The saucepans are the new, slow cooking, heavy metal kind, and cost a good month’s salary. Though I’ll give her they’re stylish. I never objected to such purchases. On the contrary, I encouraged anything that would make her happy. I was always so relieved when there was something she actually wanted.

But now at last she turned. She stood with her backside hitched up against the draining board, her fingers gripped to its edge. She was wearing glossy blue running shorts. She looked at me and looked at me and at last after all these months she burst into tears. She wept and suddenly crouched down over pitted red-and-black chequered lino. She said of course she didn’t want us to split up. How could I even imagine such a thing? And she was sorry if she was being unpleasant and bloody-minded. She didn’t even know why she was like this herself. But she felt so upset about so many things. Honestly. And she burst into tears again.

Tears, I must say, have a quite overwhelming, even disabling effect on me. I have never been able to resist them. I had been unable to resist my mother’s as a child and I was unable to resist Shirley’s now. Hence at this point I gave up any attempt to follow the argument through to some sensible conclusion and hurried from the table to go and comfort her. We cuddled, she cried, I whispered softly, we kissed, looked into each other’s red eyes, confessed, forgave, kissed again and eventually, arriving somehow in the bedroom, made love, with me foolishly, if not unnaturally, hoping the tide had turned.

There followed a very happy two weeks of perfect reconciliation, relaxation, fun. So, yes, it was still possible. Everything was hunky-dory. Turkey was on. We bought our ferry tickets, got the car serviced. We were going to have a great time. Life was great. And then it began all over again: arguments, sulking, general bitchiness. Turkey off. Not only Turkey, but any other holidays I might be planning too. Okay? When I reminded her of all she’d said that evening, all she’d conceded, she either refused to acknowledge that such a scene had ever taken place, or she’d try some bright sardonic line like: ‘All under duress, Your Honour, under duress. My lawyer wasn’t present. I retract everything.’ Or she’d throw back her head, laughing, and say, ‘Oh George, I do love the way you always, always believe you’re right. You’re a phenomenon.’

I spoke to no one about this. Every morning I went into work, joked with Tony, my assistant programmer, flirted mildly with the secretaries, Joyce and Sandra, reported to Johnson and Will Peacock, wined and dined clients, made rude jokey propositions down the phone to switchboard. No doubt you can picture it, the average stale-tobacco, fluorescent-lit office life, with all the little formalities and pleasantries and gallantries, the way you live and brush up against people and talk behind each others’ backs and generally get on famously.

I spoke to no one. Probably it was the same for Shirley. Jolly and lively at work, glum and offhand at home. As if we were only our real selves of old when we arrived in the safe environment of the office, the school. If other people came, Mark and Sylvia, determined to be neighbourly (had we noticed the lock didn’t engage on the front door, and what about the state of the lawn?), forcing their way in with a few cans of Whitbread’s or a tin of chewy flapjacks, we put on a great front. Shirley was almost too dazzling, I drank heavily, but as soon as they were gone, we slumped. The television. A newspaper. Separate bedtimes.

And it was on one of these evenings, as I remember it, that my heart hardened. I use that Biblical expression because at last after a childhood of Bible studies I understood what it meant: a deliberate, quite conscious shutting oneself off from the tenderer emotions. My heart hardened. I’d had enough.

Grandfather had become entirely incontinent. I had my suspicions frankly that the old NHS had rather cocked up the prostectomy, maybe whipped out something they shouldn’t have, bit of sphincter or something, but as Shirley said, you’d never get to the bottom of it. Nor was Grandfather likely to generate much sympathy in tabloid newspapers or even a court of law were one to try for some compensation. Instinctively people would see he deserved it. So I spent a little time every morning checking out the geriatric home situation. I gave exactly fifteen minutes, ten thirty to ten forty-five, to phoning up all the various bodies concerned. I felt in this way I’d be informed and prepared when the crunch came and wouldn’t have to lose a whole week finding out the score right at some critical moment when I had a new project on my hands or something.

The problem, my enquiries revealed, was that the old man wasn’t suffering from senile dementia. Had he been suffering from senile dementia and hence truly in danger of doing damage to himself, accidentally putting the electric kettle on the gas, or setting his jacket on fire when lighting his pipe, then they would have taken him in (though with something like that on the cards one couldn’t help feeling it might have been worth hanging on to him for a while). Otherwise, they encouraged home care, and given that the social worker had reported my mother as being ‘valiant and willing, if a little overprotective’, they were of the opinion he should remain in Gorst Road.

Well, with property prices rising sharply again, I felt on reflection that this solution suited me for the moment too. Hang on a few years, then get a whole bundle of money for the house, enough not just to pay for Grandfather’s home but to leave something to spare for setting up Mother in a small place of her own as well. That way we wouldn’t be forced to take her in ourselves.

Until two things happened in the same week. Grandfather fell down the stairs and bust his hip, and Mother, who now had to wash him and change him like a baby at all hours of the day and night, came down with some sort of virus that completely floored her. She phoned me feebly at 7 a.m., having waited of course until the third day of this illness before ‘bothering me’.