The surgeon came to see us just before six. It was well daylight outside, and Ellie was awake. Happily, he was smiling when he opened the door. Relief came from my sister and my step-mother in waves, and even from Conrad. I have to confess, for all that I’d convinced myself that Dad would pull through, a tear came to my eye when I saw the confirmation in that big, chunky man’s face. I saw something else there too: pure exhaustion. The procedure had taken six hours from start to finish.
He looked at Mary, then Ellie, and finally at me. ‘Positive news,’ he announced, ‘I’m happy to say. We’ve replaced your father’s failed aortic valve with a metal one, and it seems to be functioning well. He’s in a recovery room just now; I’m going to keep him heavily sedated for a while, and still on the ventilator, but that’s just routine. I’m entirely happy with the way things have gone.’
‘Can we see him?’ Mary asked.
‘From a distance. He’s still under, and in theatre conditions. Once you’ve done that, I recommend that you all go home and get some rest; maybe come back in around twelve hours, if you’d like. Any questions?’
‘How close a call was it, Mr. .?’ I asked.
‘Blacker,’ he replied, ‘Cedric Blacker. As close as there can be. If there hadn’t been a doctor present when he collapsed, he wouldn’t have made it. He can thank his golfing chum for keeping him alive till the ambulance arrived.’
‘He’ll thank him, don’t you worry. So will we all. I know said doctor. He’s a gin-swilling old sod normally. Thank God he was on the ball yesterday.’
The four of us were gowned up. . Conrad held back at first, but I insisted that he join us. . and shown into the recovery room. As soon as I clapped eyes on him, lying on that bed, zonked out on whatever sedative they’d pumped into him, with a pipe in his mouth and umpteen tubes leading into and out of various parts of his body, all my euphoria disappeared. I’d never imagined seeing him so weak, so old, so vulnerable; the sight filled me with all kinds of dread. He wasn’t out of the wood yet. Indeed, looking at him, he seemed to be in the heart of the forest.
The sight of him took me back to my mother’s last illness. It took me back to identifying Jan’s body in a tiny, impersonal room in a Glasgow hospitaclass="underline" Jan, my lover, my wife, my soul-mate. . my sister.
It took me forward too: I imagined other people on that bed. Susie, Ellen and Prim. I saw all of them lying under that sheet. And I saw myself too; oh, yes, I saw myself, with a row of gowned people staring misty-eyed at me. Not the kids, though: I couldn’t imagine my children in such a situation. What parent can?
Once we had all seen enough. . most of the time I looked at the monitors, convincing myself that all the peaks were regular and steady. . and once I had given an update to the small group of diehard journalists who were still standing guard, we took Mr Blacker’s advice and headed home. More specifically, we headed for Dad and Mary’s, in Anstruther, with me at the wheel, Conrad beside me and the girls sleeping in the back. . my sister could sleep for Britain. I bought a bag of morning rolls, and the four of us had an old-fashioned Scottish breakfast. . much the same as a full English breakfast, but heavier on the black pudding and with potato scones thrown in. Then Ellen headed back to St Andrews, to Harvey and my nephews, Jonny and Colin, and I headed for the phone to call Susie.
She was as relieved as the rest of us, and she’d had a sleepless night too. Prim was with her: she had called her an hour before, asking anxiously for any news. I was touched that she’d been as scared as the rest of us, but I was struck too by something else, the ease with which she seemed to have fitted back into our circle, in spite of her efforts to wreck me a year earlier. It spoke volumes about something, but at that moment I was too damn tired to figure out what it was.
I slept for the rest of the morning and into the early afternoon; in fact, it took Conrad’s knock at the door to waken me. ‘Time to get ready, Oz,’ he called, ‘if you still want to see your nephews, that is.’ I had agreed with Ellie that we would take Mary’s car and pick her up from St Andrews. Harvey was in court in Edinburgh that day and she would go home with him. I reckoned that Mary would want to be closer to Dad for the next few days, as, indeed, I did, so I had asked Conrad to book three suites in the Caley Hotel.
It’s amazing how much better you look when you’re a super-resilient old bastard and you don’t have a pipe down your throat and a tube up your knob. I’m not saying that Mac the Dentist looked as if he’d be on the golf course any time soon when we saw him at six that evening, but he was several hundred per cent improved on the version we’d seen in the morning.
We didn’t crowd his small room. . he wasn’t given private treatment because of me but because he had health insurance to pick up the tab. Instead I let Mary and Ellie go in first, then followed when they’d had ten minutes.
‘You’re here, are you?’ he croaked. ‘I must have been fucking near the wooden waistcoat, then.’ There was that old twinkle in his eye, one which, I feared for a while I’d never see again.
‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ I told him. ‘You ever give me another night like that and you’ll wish you had pegged it.’ I wanted to hug him, but since that was out of the question, I contented myself with sitting by his bedside, taking his hand and holding it against my face. ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.
‘Damn silly question, son, if you don’t mind me saying so. At the moment it’s as if somebody’s shaved my chest with a chain-saw, but I’m sure it’ll get worse in the days to come. I think I preferred it when I was dead.’
‘What did you score anyway?’
‘Net sixty-nine: I birdied the last two holes. It was probably holing that last putt that did it.’
‘That’s not what the consultant told me. He said it could have happened at any point of any round you’ve ever played.’
‘You might never have been born in that case.’ He looked up at me, suddenly solemn. ‘How’s Mary handling it?’
‘She’s fine now.’
‘Good, good. Losing her daughter and her husband within the space of a few years wouldn’t have been much fun. Tell you something,’ he whispered, ‘that I hope you’ll appreciate. When I was in Never-never Land, I saw Jan. I remember it quite clearly. She was on the other side of a bridge: she waved to me and she called out, “Hello, Uncle Mac,” like she used to when she was a kid. I never could work out how Alex More could up and leave a daughter like her and a wife like Mary. Stupid bastard. . not that I’m complaining, mind.’
‘You’ve done okay out of it. Now shut the fuck up and don’t tire yourself out.’
I didn’t really need to tell him that: he was so heavily sedated that it wasn’t long before he drifted off, back into the curious, wacky, private world of the heroin medicated.
He was better next day, more alert, and as he had predicted, obviously less comfortable as the pain-killing dope was lessened.
The day after that, he was out of bed in a chair.
The third day after his op he was shuffling around in his slippers and we were able to have a longer talk, during which I persuaded him to agree to something I’d been pressing on him for a while. He could have retired years before, and become a full-time golfer. He hadn’t, not because he needed extra years on his pension but because, as a dentist in a rural practice, he felt a loyalty to his patients. I’d tried the loyalty-to-Mary gambit often enough before, but he’d pointed out in his inimitable way that she was a patient too, and that my argument had just disappeared up its own arse.