When Ruth reached the age at which some little girls want to marry their fathers, she chose her grandfather, although he did not like the game. When she told Lawrence that she wanted to marry him, he ignored her, or he found some reason to leave the room.
In her teens, Ruth seemed interested only in pop stars and film stars who were either very old or dead. She never seemed to have a real boyfriend. One summer, during a family holiday at Butlins, she developed a crush on the ageing cabaret star. When they got home, she ran away, heading back to Bognor Regis to be with him. She was home again a week later and never mentioned him again. When, in her thirties, she married John, Lewis thought it might be a similar whim and has been waiting for it to pass, even though she was pregnant not long afterwards and that was years ago. Lewis does not find it easy to accept their dinner invitations but he adores the child. He had been expecting another girl, but it turned out to be a boy, the boy that he and Edie never had.
Lewis has tried to give the boy what his own father gave to him. He has attempted rambles. The boy walks along holding on to his toy binoculars through which one can look and see everything far less clearly than before. Like Ruth, though, the boy is anxious. Hoping to toughen him up, Lewis has instead given the boy a fear of bulls. Trying to capture a newt in a jar, Lewis trod on the creature, bursting its bright yellow belly, while the boy stood watching. To teach him how to climb a tree, Lewis helped the boy into the lower branches of one, and then got them both up onto the next branch and then the next, lifting and climbing, lifting and climbing, branch by branch without stopping to look down, until they were just about as high as they could go and they perched there, feeling proud of themselves, watching the insects that crawled along the ridges and valleys of the bark. It was only when the boy said that he wanted to get down again and Lewis had to contemplate the descent, that he realised the difficulty of it, of getting both himself and the boy safely down to the ground. He kept them up there for as long as he could before painstakingly bringing the boy down, scraping the skin from his limbs and afraid, the whole time, of plummeting. Like Ruth, the boy has a poor sense of balance. ‘Did you not think,’ said Ruth, later, inspecting the boy’s wounds, his sprained ankle, ‘about what you would do when you got up there? Did you think you could just stay there, the two of you, all night, or for ever?’ When the boy hurts himself, he cries as if he might never stop. On another occasion, when Lewis returned the boy to his mother with a toenail split down the middle, Ruth said to Lewis, as if he knew nothing about children, as if he had none of his own, ‘Children his age have a fear of being damaged.’
‘He’s only three,’ said Lewis. ‘He won’t remember this.’
The shortness of the boy’s memory is astonishing. His mother asks him if he wants to go to Pizza Hut for tea, and he says yes, so she tells him they will all go to Pizza Hut for tea. She puts on the boy’s coat so that, she says, he will be warm on the way to Pizza Hut. They leave the house and get into the car so that, she tells him, they can drive to Pizza Hut. When they have been driving for a minute or two, he turns to his mother and asks her, ‘Where are we going?’
When the broken toenail lifted after a few weeks, the skin underneath looked unsettlingly vulnerable. The new nail grew back a long time ago but the boy still mentions it.
The boy is now almost the same age as Lewis is in the photograph on the mantelpiece. ‘I’ll take him sledging,’ thinks Lewis. ‘When it snows I’ll take him sledging on a tea tray.’
Also on the mantelpiece are a handful of birthday cards — one from Miranda, one from his father that says ‘Joy’, one from Ruth that says, ‘You’re 70!’ It reminds him of Danny DeVito in Throw Momma from the Train shouting to his mother, ‘You’re alive!’ It reminds him of those messages that are placed by the bedsides of people with memory loss: ‘It’s Tuesday. Your name is Lewis.’ He has always been a Lewis. There has only ever been one person who called him Lewie, or Louie, as this person wrote it, filling him with vowels.
4. He wants to fly
WHEN LEWIS WAS eighteen years old, his father took him to see Billy Graham. Lewis thought at first that they were going to America, that they would fly above the clouds, like Icarus. They would fly west, through half a dozen time zones, and having reached adulthood in England, where Lewis could legally buy beer, he would find that he was underage again. He imagined Florida and the Sun Belt and felt warm just thinking about being there. He imagined himself wearing shorts on a beach.
This did not happen though. His father was not taking him to America but up to Manchester, where Billy Graham was appearing at Maine Road football stadium. In the week before they went, his father talked ceaselessly about this man they would see, and it was clear to Lewis that they would not only see but experience him. Lewis’s mother got fed up of hearing about it, but Lewis did not. He stayed close to his father, alert to any mention of Billy Graham and the imminent trip to Manchester. His father fairly hummed with anticipation; it radiated from him like heat, exciting Lewis too.
On the day of their journey, settling into their seats on the coach, his father said, ‘You can feel the buzz,’ and when he had said it a few times, Lewis almost could.
The coach driver, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, a dark tie and sunglasses, made an announcement from the front of the coach. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be taking off in a few minutes. I hope you enjoy travelling with us today,’ he said, as if what he really wanted was to be an airline pilot, as if he might also tell them, as they travelled, what their cruising speed was and what the weather was like at their destination.
There were many of these coaches bringing people to the meeting, tens of thousands of people arriving to see this man on this night alone. Despite the heat, Lewis’s father was wearing his suit. He’d put a clean hankie in the jacket’s top pocket; the tip poked out like a tongue or a flag of surrender. He’d polished his shoes, combed his hair and had a shave. He was wearing Brylcreem and cologne. He looked like a man going on a date. All he needed was a bunch of flowers clutched in his hand. He had smartened Lewis up too, fussing over him as if grooming him to be presented to someone important. He’d insisted on clean underwear, just as his mother always did except that was more for getting run over in, for the doctors to see. (She was equally mindful of firemen. Lewis would have chosen to sleep naked but his mother said he had to wear pyjamas because if the house burnt down in the night he did not want to have to go outside with nothing on, for the firemen to see him like that, in all his glory, did he?)
Inside the stadium, this crowd, the like of which Lewis had never seen before, waited. They reminded him of himself perched on the branch of a tree, wanting to jump off and just fly. If only you could want it hard enough it might really happen. His father marvelled at the vast choir and hoped that he might hear his favourite hymn sung by so many voices, ‘He Is Mine’ filling up the space.
When Billy Graham came forward to the microphones to lead a prayer, there was a hush, and then he spoke, and he sounded to Lewis like a politician announcing that the world was at war. He talked, though, about the forgiveness of sin, while Lewis’s father, sitting up very straight, sitting very still, listened intently. Lewis dared not make a sound. Silently, he sucked his sweets to nothing.