Fathers and Sons Read online

  Perhaps it helped that we’d decided not to move from Old Hall Lane for at least a year, much as we both wanted to. I always felt slightly awkward living in Judy’s former marital home; I could hardly wait for us to make a completely fresh start somewhere else. But the boys’ happiness was paramount and an early move might have destabilised them, so we stayed put for the time being.

  The twins and I had our moments, certainly: the time Dan did something beyond the pale and I chased him from the kitchen into the front room. He grabbed a wooden chair and thrust it towards me like a lion-tamer, shouting, ‘Back! Back!’ We stared at each other for a moment before bursting out laughing.

  But I can’t remember any major crises or set-piece confrontations. The boys were usually biddable and co-operative, and always open to negotiation.

  Who knows? Maybe we were doing things right. Maybe we were just lucky. As a stepfather, I was certainly exceptionally lucky in my stepsons. In terms of their characters and behaviour, they were a doddle.

  Meanwhile I was getting a hell of a kick out of all the everyday, routine things–reading them their bedtime stories, driving them to school playing their favourite music cassette (which for months on end was the theme from the movie Ghostbusters. Every bloody morning. Whenever I hear it now I experience a vague anxiety about whether I’ve remembered to put both lunchboxes in the car).

  I realised I had been incredibly fortunate. I’d drawn a Queen with Judy and two straight Jacks with her boys. What a hand. But there were new cards in the deck waiting to be dealt. In August 1985, exactly a year after that first family holiday in Cornwall, Judy said she had something to tell me.

  She was pregnant.

  Our first child was on the way. A son.

  It wasn’t the first time Judy had told me she was expecting our baby. In the early spring, she’d lost a pregnancy within a few days of showing positive on a home testing kit. But soon she was pregnant again and this time everything seemed to unfold normally. Two months became three and we were certain we could now see and feel her emerging bump.

  At sixteen weeks she went in to St Mary’s maternity hospital in Manchester for her first scan. The picture resolution wasn’t as good back in the mid-80s as it is now, with today’s extraordinarily sharp 3-D images, but we’d been given a few sample shots of other women’s early scans and figured we knew what to look for in the fuzzy black-and-white ultrasound pictures.

  The radiographer breezily introduced herself as Kath and took Judy through to the examination room. ‘I’ll come and get you when it’s all set up,’ she called over her shoulder to me. ‘Back in a few minutes.’

  I leafed through some magazines and waited, incredibly excited. Ultrasound scans were pretty new back then–I’d never even heard of them, to be honest–and the thought that in a few moments we’d be looking at grainy images of our unborn child nestling in the womb was extraordinary.

  Ten minutes became fifteen and still Kath hadn’t returned. Perhaps, I thought, there was a problem with the machine. Perhaps–

  ‘Mr Madeley…Richard…will you come through, please.’

  The radiographer’s voice had changed; she sounded quieter, serious. My heart began to beat a little faster, but not with excitement.

  It was only a few steps to the curtained-off cubicle, and as we got there Kath turned and met my eyes.

  ‘Look, it’s not good,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s not good at all.’

  I swallowed. ‘Has she lost the baby?’

  ‘Not exactly…it’s still there, obviously, but I’m very sorry to tell you that it seems to have died in the womb. I’ve sent for the consultant but I don’t think there’s anything we can do.’

  I stared at her a moment and then pushed through the green curtains to find my wife in silent tears on the examination couch. She turned to me, eyes glistening. ‘Richard, it’s died…I’m sorry…’

  The coming hours and days were extremely difficult for her. Once the radiographer’s verdict had been confirmed, there was the deeply distressing business of trying to deliver a dead baby. At first they tried to induce labour with drugs, but after a day or so it became clear that wasn’t going to work. Judy’s body was refusing to give up its tiny foetus.

  They switched tactics and she was wheeled into theatre for an abortion; the termination of a pregnancy that had already privately concluded itself.

  Afterwards, the consultant advised me to take my wife away for a few days, so Judy’s mother Anne looked after the boys while we flew down to the Côte d’Azure.

  It was as good a place as any to come to terms with what had just happened. But everywhere we looked there were babies. On the beach, in cafés, at our hotel; everywhere, all around us, all the time, babies, babies, babies.

  St Mary’s could find nothing seemingly wrong with our stillborn child. He was a boy and appeared physically perfect. They estimated he’d died at around fifteen weeks from cause or causes unknown.

  We were advised to keep trying. Kath confided in Judy that she too had lost a pregnancy in identical circumstances, and gone on to have healthy children. We quickly realised after conversations with friends and from a little basic research that early miscarriage and foetal death is incredibly common. In any case, at least it was clear Judy had no difficulty becoming pregnant, and she’d already carried twins to term.

  We put our sadness behind us and tried to stop worrying.

  Sure enough, three months later, Judy was expecting again.

  The date for the first scan arrived. There was no excitement now as we drove to St Mary’s, just a creeping dread we kept trying to push to the back of our minds. It was hard not to be fearful; there’d been no sign that anything was wrong the last time we arrived here.

  It was Kath who greeted us again and this time she allowed me to come straight through to the scanning unit. As she spread the lubricating jelly on Judy’s stomach and reached for the ultrasound camera, she smiled at us both. ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure it’s all going to be fine.’

  The grainy picture glowed into life on the screen above our heads and we held our breaths.

  Kath sighed. ‘Yes, there we are…see it?’

  We craned our necks. Judy was first to comprehend. ‘Is that it there? That little bean thing?’

  Kath laughed. ‘That’s it.’

  The child of the future seemed to be lazily bouncing up and down the screen, for all the world like one of those early Pacman computer-game figures.

  ‘Is that normal?’

  ‘As the day is long…Judy, you are very, very pregnant. Congratulations.’

  When we got home, we showed the Polaroid Kath had given us to Tom and Dan.

  ‘Wow. That’s amazing,’ they said, shaking their heads in wonder.

  Later, their mother upstairs, we looked at the picture again.

  ‘Can you really see the baby, boys?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither. But I promise it’s there. You’ve got a brother or a sister on the way.’

  It would be wrong to say the twins were excited about the prospect of a new baby in our home. They seemed genuinely pleased and curious, but not excited. Relaxed would be a better word. We’d been watching them carefully for any signs of incipient jealousy or resentment, but so far their day-to-day tranquillity seemed undisturbed.

  One evening I came in from the garden after a game of football with them and flopped down in front of the television with Judy.

  ‘What were you all laughing about out there?’

  ‘Names. Names for the baby. Tom wants to call it Hannibal if it’s a boy (The A-Team again); Dan prefers Face (more A-Team).’

  ‘What if it’s a girl?’

  ‘That depends on how you spell “Yeuch”.’

  She laughed. ‘They’re very unfazed by all this, aren’t they? What do you think? Honestly?’

  I decided to go for it. ‘I think it’s time we stopped worrying about them so much on this. They’re totally cool with it, Judy. You’re a brill
iant mother and they’ve grown up incredibly secure in themselves. They know how much we love them and it’s blindingly obvious to me that they’re not threatened by this baby. They’re looking forward to it. I really think we should relax.’

  But as her pregnancy developed, Judy suffered an endless series of crises of confidence. Not about her boys, not now, but about the baby inside her. Once it started kicking her anxiety lessened, only to swell up again during the inevitable periods when it lay still. Then she would be convinced that this child, too, had died. She had lost all confidence in her body’s ability to nurture and nourish a growing foetus.

  I did my best to comfort and reassure her but underneath a confident exterior I was as jumpy and superstitious as she. Sometimes, in the end, the only thing to do was drive across to St Mary’s for another scan. Kath, who had become a friend, had left standing instructions that these were not to be denied, within reason. The results were always the same.

  ‘His heartbeat is strong. He’s just asleep in there. You’ve nothing to worry about, Judy.’ Then a glance across at me. ‘Or you.’

  We knew by now we were having a boy, much to the twins’ unabashed relief. A routine amniocentesis check (where fluid around the baby is drawn off for tests) had confirmed its sex, as well as its health. And as the pregnancy passed the seven-month point and a viable birth became possible, everyone relaxed, even Judy. It was going to be OK.

  Suddenly, it was a time of birthdays. Tom and Dan turned nine in March. A few weeks afterwards I said goodbye to my twenties and three days later, on a Friday in May, Judy was thirty-seven. Now there was just the weekend to go before the next ring on the calendar was crossed off.

  Monday, May the 19th.

  I had done my best–was doing my best–as a stepfather.

  What kind of a father would I make?

  Chapter 11

  GENERATION IV

  Jack came out of Judy’s belly like a free-falling parachutist, legs and arms braced wide, back arched. The umbilical added to the illusion, looking like a ripcord waiting to be pulled to release his canopy.

  The operation to deliver him into the world was surprisingly violent, far more so than I had expected. Tom and Dan had been delivered by Caesarean too–there were potential complications to a natural birth–and so was their brother, as a large but benign cyst on one of his mother’s ovaries required simultaneous removal. It was this cyst, we speculated, that had interrupted the blood supply to the placenta in Judy’s previous pregnancy and caused it to fail. But who knows?

  Judy wanted me to be present for the birth and as I am not at all squeamish about blood and operations I was more than happy to be there. I had pictured delicate incisions being made, careful openings into the womb fashioned, a gentle easing-out of the infant within…

  It was more like a cross between a mugging and a smash-and-grab raid. Slash, clamp, slash, clamp, and then both the surgeon’s hands were vigorously wrestling the baby into the open air. The operating table creaked and swayed under the onslaught. Judy, comfortably numb from her epidural anaesthetic, stared at the starfish baby that suddenly dangled in the air above her.

  ‘My God! There he is!’

  All was bustle as our son was swept into the next room to be checked and de-gunged, while his mother’s cyst was removed without ceremony. Faint squawks and mews heralded Jack’s reentry into the delivery room and suddenly I was holding a tightly blanketed baby in my arms, while his living quarters for the last nine months were swiftly clipped off and sewn shut.

  The actor Peter Ustinov once said that his newborn daughter’s face had ‘something of the secrecy and doggedness of a Soviet Field Marshal about it’.

  As I lowered our swaddled son on to his mother’s shoulder, I could see what Ustinov meant, although I thought there was more of Churchill in my son’s expression than Zhukov. But there was something else; something more primitive in Jack’s face as he snuffled and wheezed after nine comfortable months having had the trying business of oxygenating his own blood managed for him.

  ‘He’s beautiful, Judy.’

  ‘Yes…he’s perfect. Our son. What does he remind me of, though? I can’t quite think.’

  We considered him together. Suddenly Judy snorted with laughter.

  ‘A dinosaur. That’s it. His little face looks like a baby T-Rex before its teeth come in.’

  It did, too. Jack, like his brothers, was destined to grow into a handsome lad but there was a distinctly prehistoric look about him in his earliest days, as if some crazed scientist had laced human DNA with a soupçon of reptile cells.

  ‘It does not,’ I lied. ‘Maybe a little beaky, that’s all…come on, he’s only been in the fresh air five minutes. Give a velociraptor a break.’

  And we laughed, suffused with happiness and relief. A draining nine months was over.

  Judy’s mother, Anne, was looking after Tom and Dan at home. Later, heading back to show them the Polaroid snaps of their mother and new brother, I found myself making a U-turn and driving back to the hospital. When I walked quietly into the ward again, the lights were low. Judy was fast asleep and so was our baby, wrapped in white blankets in the clear Perspex cot in the little nursery next door. Like my father before me, I stared and stared at my new-minted boy, scarcely able to believe in his existence. Finally a nurse ushered me out and fifteen minutes later I was showing my photographs to the excited twins in the kitchen at Old Hall Lane.

  ‘What d’you think, then?’

  Dan looked thoughtful.

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘OK. How come he looks so old?’

  ‘Because he’s been floating in water for nearly a year. It’s like your fingers and toes if you sit in the bath too long–they go all wrinkly. Everything will smooth out in a day or two.’

  Tom picked up one of the pictures and studied it.

  ‘Will he still look like a dinosaur?’

  A couple of days later mother and baby were home. Suddenly, the unease I felt about living in Judy’s former marital home intensified. I couldn’t bear to live in this house much longer; it was redolent of a past that wasn’t mine, and not an altogether happy one either.

  Judy agreed and we put it on the market. We found a buyer straight away and took out an eye-watering mortgage on a big three-storey Edwardian house in nearby Didsbury. The twins seemed totally unfazed by the move, which for them included a transfer to a new school. Perhaps we could have upped sticks earlier, after all.

  Our new home, on Old Broadway, had been built with families in mind. The whole street had. It was a graceful turn-of-the-century cul-de-sac, designed by a Russian émigré who had been inspired, apparently, by the elegant houses in St John’s Wood in north London. In fact, whenever Granada Television wanted to re-create a leafy London look for one of its dramas, they filmed in our road.

  A broad band of grass studded with mature trees ran down the centre of the street, which ended in a park. That meant there was no through traffic, so Old Broadway was popular with young families. In some ways the place felt like a throwback to another time; children of all ages played happily together in the street, unsupervised by grown-ups. ‘This is what things were like before the war,’ Judy’s mother commented with approval.

  The kids called themselves the Broadway Bombers; had done as far back as anyone could remember. They climbed the trees, built camps under the huge holly bushes that grew in a circle opposite our house, organised bicycle races and wandered in and out of each other’s houses. In summer the place felt like a middle-class commune.

  Perhaps the danger that finally penetrated our easy-going street was overdue; inevitable. One bright summer morning piercing screams rang through the air; terrible, blood-curdling cries.

  They came from near one of the houses closest to the park. It was our friend and colleague Tony Wilson’s home. He was away filming and in his absence catastrophe had arrived unannounced.

  Tony didn’t know it, but he had a stalke
r; a large, powerfully built woman who had become fixated on him. She had tracked the presenter to his house the night before, somehow got into the garage, and slept there. Tony had been picked up in the morning by a studio car, so his own was still in the garage. The woman thought the object of her obsession was still at home.

  When she knocked on the door, it was opened by Tony’s unsuspecting wife, Hilary. The woman told some tale about being an old friend of her husband; could she see him? They had so much catching up to do…

  Hilary was completely taken in, and said with genuine regret, ‘Oh, I’m really sorry, but he’s not here–he’s gone to work. He won’t be back for hours, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh, how disappointing…and I’ve come such a long way to see him again.’

  Hilary, a generous soul, felt sorry for the woman on her doorstep and invited her inside for a coffee. She led the way into the kitchen and turned around to ask if she took milk and sugar.

  Her visitor was now holding a Stanley knife. Without the slightest hesitation she stepped forward and slashed Hilary’s face with it, and again, and again. Hilary’s hands and arms were sliced open as she desperately tried to protect herself; eventually, half-blinded by her own blood, she managed to get away and run out through her front porch, screaming incoherently for help, her face in ribbons. Her attacker slammed the heavy door shut behind her.

  Appalled neighbours ran towards Tony’s stricken wife, and her screams suddenly became even louder.

  ‘My baby’s in there! Oh God, my baby’s in there!’

  Her son, only a few weeks old, was sleeping upstairs in the nursery.

  So far, incredibly, the baby hadn’t been woken by the uproar. The maniac downstairs was unaware that an infant slept, oblivious, directly above her. For the moment, at least.

  Hilary, now almost unconscious from loss of blood and shock, was given emergency first aid on the pavement; shirts, jackets, anything that could be folded and pressed on to her wounds was applied before the ambulance arrived and rushed her to hospital. Meanwhile, police cars had roared up at the house and officers began negotiating with the intruder through the letter box. They made no mention of the baby and prayed they could talk the woman out before he woke up.