Fathers and Sons Read online

  I wonder if he had a premonition.

  Chapter 9

  LEFT BEHIND

  The Ford was slewed diagonally across the front drive where he’d left it. Even though it was close to midnight when I pulled up outside the house where my father had died nearly twelve hours earlier, a sense of urgency and drama lingered over the spot; the same unmistakable atmosphere generated by the breaking news events I had experienced a hundred times before, covering other people’s stories.

  The driver’s door was still wide open, office papers spilling out from the foot well and on to the drive. All the courtesy lights in the car were burning, but with a yellow tinge. The battery was running flat.

  The front door of number 53 was open too, but no sound emerged, no sobbing or anguished conversation; just a thick fog of silence. My wife of nine days and I stared at each other, drained after the 150-mile non-stop drive back from our honeymoon in the West Country.

  I looked inside the car. It was in wild disorder, a complete contrast to my father’s usual neatness. The floor-mat on the driver’s side was scrunched up and wedged tight under the foot pedals; I could only think it had jammed there as he kicked out in a reflex response to the agonising pains in his chest. Business papers and memos were strewn everywhere; I had no idea why. It couldn’t have been the work of a passing thief because my father’s wallet lay on the passenger seat, banknotes untouched inside.

  The gear stick was still in first. The handbrake had been pulled up with such force that later I had a hard job releasing it.

  I sat in his seat for a while, picturing how it must have been. Then, for the first time, I wept for my dead father.

  My first marriage was a mistake mostly of my own making. I rushed into it and no one tried to stop me, least of all my parents. Lynda was the girl in the flat below mine. I moved into the shared house a few weeks after arriving in Carlisle; I was settling in at the radio station all right but, God, I was lonely. My new colleagues were nothing like the young newspaper journalists I had left behind in London. BBC local radio was pretty stuffy back then and Radio Carlisle was run like an outpost of Radio Four. Everyone was much older than me–I was still only nineteen–and from completely different professional backgrounds. They were kind and welcoming but socially we had nothing in common.

  Most evenings after work I’d either sit alone in a pub with a pint and a paper, or watch TV in my bedsit. For the first time in my life I was experiencing homesickness. It made me wonder how on earth my father had managed when he arrived in a strange city in a strange country, so much further from home than I was. Carlisle was hardly Canada; I could always belt back down the motorway for the weekend. Nevertheless, I began to think I’d made a bad mistake. Then I met Lynda, a pretty, feisty girl who ran a boutique in the little city. She was confident, a few years older than me, and we hit it off straight away.

  Within what seemed like five minutes I had asked her to marry me. It was a classic folie à deux; I should never have asked her and she should never have said yes, but somehow we found ourselves setting up home together in a rented bungalow miles from anywhere at the foot of the Caldbeck fells. A few months later we were walking up the aisle of a tiny country Cumbrian church in the next village. She was twenty-eight and I barely twenty-one. Our astonished parents were the only witnesses.

  As a cure for my loneliness, it worked. As a marriage, it didn’t. Looking back, I can hardly believe I was so reckless with two lives and for a long time I couldn’t understand why my parents hadn’t counselled their boy to show more caution. During my brief engagement I could tell they had misgivings they tried to conceal. Five years later, after my divorce, I decided it was time to ask my mother what they had really thought about my whirlwind wedding.

  ‘Obviously we could see you were rushing into things,’ she said, ‘but we couldn’t understand why. You never told us then how lonely you were, just like you didn’t let on about the bullying at school. I suppose we thought the two of you were on a great romantic adventure. So we didn’t say anything.’

  ‘I bloody well wish you had, Mum. It might have made me stop and think. Anyway, why couldn’t you?’

  ‘It was your father. He wouldn’t allow it. I’ve told you before how worried he was that he was going to lose touch with you. I kept telling him that was nonsense but he just couldn’t get it out of his head. He thought if he warned you against marrying in haste you’d…oh, I don’t know, you’d react badly, withdraw from him. You always were your own person. He figured you’d get married anyway, and resent him for trying to stop you. Then if it didn’t work out, you’d resent the fact he hadn’t stopped you.’

  I was astonished. I couldn’t understand how my father had managed to think himself into such a tortured position. He seems to have succumbed to a kind of superstitious inertia. It was totally out of character for him to be paralysed by what amounted to sheer second-guessing.

  He’d given me plenty of unasked-for advice in the past and I’d never taken it amiss. I’d never taken it much either, whether he was advising me to get a haircut–‘You’re a reporter. You have to look smart at all times. You never know who you’ll suddenly have to interview’–or berating my choice of car. ‘Why don’t you get yourself a Ford? You look ridiculous in that foreign thing you’ve got yourself.’ If, on one of our strolls together through Hartswood, he had quietly advised me to put the brakes on my marriage plans for a while, I would have listened. I might have argued, but I’d have listened.

  Why, in the last months of his life, did he fall into such melancholy introspection about his relationship with me? I had no hint of it at the time and it grieves me now to think he was afraid he might be losing his son’s affection. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I loved and trusted him completely. Increasingly I relished the way I could speak to him on equal terms, as my boyhood slipped away behind me.

  Now, I think the insecurity instilled in him during his childhood was whispering to him again. Since he was a boy he had been chronically sensitive to rejection. Denstone had put the tin lid on it. Perhaps he thought he was trapped in a closed loop, beginning and ending with renunciation. His father had pushed him away, now his son was about to do the same.

  Of course I wasn’t. Time would have proven this but there wasn’t much of that left, not for him. So Dad kept his counsel and I blithely went my own way.

  Meanwhile, the Madeleys were preoccupied. As Chris’s last months swirled and washed away during a rainy spring, all our unknowing eyes were fixed upon the summer ahead. It was to be the occasion of not one, but two family nuptials: mine, and my sister’s.

  We didn’t know that a third church service would close the season with a dark flourish.

  Nineteen seventy-seven was shaping up to be quite a summer. Two weddings and a funeral.

  My sister was married that June. Elizabeth’s was a big, jolly, family affair–the Shawbury Madeleys came down to Brentwood en masse and Geoffrey played the organ for his granddaughter in the crowded church.

  By contrast, there were just four guests in the little rural chapel where Lynda and I swore our vows to each other on the last Saturday in July–my parents, and the bride’s mother and stepfather. The happy couple were insistent: no big ceremony, no best man, no bridesmaids. We decided to invite our parents only at the last minute.

  Looking back, it’s pretty obvious what was going on. We were unsure of ourselves; not at all certain this marriage was wise. Intuitively, we didn’t want too many witnesses to the official start of what could turn out to be a serious mistake. It was almost like being in a new play that has had shaky rehearsals. You’d rather your friends and family stayed away on opening night.

  But we crashed on regardless and emerged, slightly dazed, into the hot summer sunshine outside the church. A few snaps were taken and then it was across to the pretty little town of Cockermouth for the wedding breakfast. Table for six.

  It was the last-but-one occasion I would see my father alive.

/>   After lunch Lynda and I headed down to Shropshire and the ancient Feathers Hotel in Ludlow for our wedding night. My parents, who had driven up from Brentwood very early that morning, put up at our place on the edge of the fells. After breakfast my father drove 350 miles back home to Essex, dropped off my mother, filled up the tank and headed north again to Manchester. He had a gruelling week ahead making presentations all over the country for a big Ford PR push.

  It was a chaotic schedule. I have his year planner for 1977 in front of me now, open at the first week in August. The diary shows him crazily criss-crossing Britain like a bluebottle in a room. Dad cursed the organisers who had arranged for him to drive from Manchester straight back down to London, on to Kent, back north to Harrogate, south again to Birmingham, and finally, on Friday the 5th, hundreds of miles north to Glasgow. He made his last speech there late in the afternoon and immediately called my mother.

  ‘Right, that’s it, I’m finished. I’m not staying away from you one more bloody night–I’m coming home. Should be back around midnight if the roads are OK.’

  He sounded dog-tired to my mother. I was in the room as she spoke to him (Lynda and I were flat broke and were eking out our honeymoon with two or three days at my parents’ house before going to Somerset). I could hear the concern in her voice as she said, ‘Chris, you sound exhausted. You’ll fall asleep at the wheel. Stay up there in Scotland tonight and get your sleep. You can come back in the morning.’

  ‘No, I want to come home tonight. You know how much I’ve been missing you, Mary. It’s been horrible without you this week. Anyway, Richard’s heading off to Somerset tomorrow and I’d like to see him before he goes. Who knows when he’ll be back again.’

  ‘But Chris–’

  ‘Stop worrying. I know my limits. Anyway, Friday’s the best night of the week on Radio Four–I can listen to it most of the way down. That’ll keep me alert. Stop worrying…I’ll see you later.’

  Next morning I came downstairs to find him sitting at the breakfast table.

  ‘Hi, Dad–how are you feeling? You look knackered.’

  ‘Well, that’s how most of us look after an eight-hour drive at the end of a ghastly week. Anyway, how’s marriage? When are you both pushing off to Somerset?’

  And so our last conversation together slowly spooled out over tea and toast and the Saturday papers. I can’t recall much of what we talked about, but I remember him teasing me about my car, an ancient left-hand-drive Citroën 2CV I’d just imported from Belgium.

  ‘What are you doing driving a French tin can like that? I’m ashamed to have it in the drive…can’t you park it round the corner when you come down? You should get yourself a Ford. Haven’t you heard about honouring your father? Tsk, tsk.’

  ‘At least my car wasn’t designed in a dump like Detroit.’

  And so on.

  My last sight of my father is in reverse image. I’m looking at him in my rear-view mirror as I nose my battered, chugging car out of the drive and down the road between the spreading trees. He is standing on the pavement, one arm round my mother, the other waving a vigorous goodbye. Both her arms are wrapped around his waist. For once he is not wearing his Saturday suit but an old cricket jumper. Shirt and tie underneath, though.

  I have rolled back the Citroën’s striped canvas top and am waving my left hand high in the air in return. With the top down and windows open, I can just hear his final words to me, fading and falling with the Doppler effect as I pick up speed.

  ‘Call that a car? You won’t make the North Circular in that…I’ll be towing you back here in an hour.’

  And then we’re rolling down the hill to Seven Arches Bridge and he’s gone, slowly bobbing further and further behind me in the backwash of my life. Forever gone.

  Lynda had become very fond of my father. Her own parents had divorced years before, and she was not especially close to the man her mother had gone on to marry. Her own father had retired to a far corner of northwest Scotland and she saw little of him. So she made a point of getting on with my dad. He always responded warmly to people who liked him and they had a friendly, easy relationship.

  Unlike the one I had with my new wife on the first day of the second instalment of our honeymoon. We spent it on a beach looking out over Bridgewater Bay. We’d had an ugly row the night before–a trivial disagreement which spiralled into a worryingly intense conflict, a sign of things to come–and were still subdued when we arrived back at our holiday camp, which was tucked into a fold of the Mendip Hills.

  A torn piece of notepaper had been pinned to the door of our little chalet. ‘Mr Madeley–please phone home urgently.’

  There were no mobile phones in 1977 so I had to walk into the nearby village to find a public call box. While I waited for the giggling girl inside to get off the phone, I ran through the possibilities. None of them were particularly encouraging. I couldn’t think of one good reason why my parents would need to contact me. I was sure it was bad news.

  I caught the girl’s attention and made dialling gestures, mouthing ‘very urgent’ at her. She put her tongue out and turned her back.

  I decided the likeliest thing was that my grandfather had taken a turn for the worse. He had been diagnosed with cancer a few months earlier and most of his lower intestine was subsequently removed. He had just turned eighty and the oncologist at Shrewsbury Hospital gave the family a bleak prognosis; Geoffrey Madeley, he said, would be unlikely to see another birthday.

  But we had begun to wonder if the consultant was being overly pessimistic. Geoffrey had looked surprisingly hale at Elizabeth’s wedding and played Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’ with his customary gusto, all the stops pulled out and not a chord fluffed.

  Perhaps, I thought now, we had been watching his last hurrah.

  The girl hung up, scowling at me as she left the box. I dialled my parents’ number and my mother picked up at once. She must have been sitting by the phone.

  ‘Hi, Mum, it’s me. What’s happened?’

  Before she could speak there was banging on the door behind me. ‘Hang on a sec.’

  It was the girl again. ‘I left my comb in there. Give it me.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake…’ I pushed it through a broken pane and turned back to the phone. ‘Go on.’

  I heard my mother take a couple of shallow breaths. Then she spoke in a calm, quiet voice.

  ‘Your father died at one o’clock this afternoon, he was in my arms, it was a massive heart attack.’

  Her sentence, delivered with the economy of a newsroom ticker tape, was a knockout punch.

  I came to a few minutes later. I was standing a few feet from the phone box, fumbling for a cigarette and dropping matches over the pavement. My fingers were numb, my ears were ringing and my legs were giving way. I managed to stumble to a low wall and half-sit, half-collapse on it.

  I don’t know how long I was there but I began to get odd looks from passers-by. One man stopped. ‘You all right, then?’

  I wanted to say I was fine, it was only that my father had just died, I’d be OK in a minute. But I could only stare at him. He wandered off uncertainly.

  After a few minutes I got some feeling back in my legs and the electric hum in my head faded. I stood up and walked slowly back to our holiday home.

  When I came through the door, Lynda stared at me. ‘Good God, you look terrible. What on earth’s happened?’

  ‘Dad’s dead.’

  It sounded to my ears as if I had just told the worst, wickedest lie of my life.

  My father’s sudden death was a detonation of shocking force, instantly punching a wide hole through the fabric of his family. Like the survivors of a surprise air raid, we wandered around in shock, peering into the smoking crater and trying to make sense of our abruptly ruined landscape.

  We believed that a great cosmic mistake had been made. I walked the woods alone the day afterwards, looking up at an iron-grey sky through the green canopy and saying through grinding teeth: ‘You
take it back, God. You just fucking take it back, all right? You’ve fucked up and now you have to fix it. You can do anything, can’t you? So fix this, you bastard. Fix it now.’

  My sister, who had taken delivery of her bound wedding photographs a couple of days earlier, was seized by the irrational belief that the whole thing was some kind of elaborate joke organised by our father. He hadn’t died at all; at any moment there would be a knock at the front door. We’d open it to see him standing there, grinning sheepishly as we dragged him inside, weeping and laughing in our relief.

  My mother was mostly silent, except at night when she sobbed quietly for hours in her bed. She was very far away from us. One night I went in and held her hand. After a while she sat up and said a strange thing.

  ‘I feel so sorry for him…he has such a long way to go and he’s so tired and frightened. Poor Chris…’ Later, she would have no memory of saying this or what it might have meant.

  My mother must have felt horribly alone. Both her parents had been dead for years. Her Canadian family was scattered across North America. Both her children were married, and one of them lived at the other end of the country. Now her husband had been torn from her side without so much as an hour or even a minute to prepare herself.

  In an instant she had become a housewife without a husband. It was a catastrophe.

  There was no word from Geoffrey or Kitty.

  Up at Kiln Farm, a great silence had fallen.

  The chief mourners were in fits of laughter. The widow was dabbing at her eyes with a tissue; the deceased’s children were doubled up. Ahead of their black limousine, the hearse, with its flower-decked coffin, reversed awkwardly again from the cemetery entrance. The driver had almost hit the stone gateposts twice as he tried to drive between them; now he was lining up for his third attempt. He couldn’t understand it. He had made this simple right-hand turn dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times. Why couldn’t he manage it today?