‘Rebecca. My wife.’
‘Well, I hope he doesn’t get his looks from her. How does life treat you, Michael? With its gloves off, judging by the bags under your eyes.’
‘I’m very well.’
‘If you say so. Where are you living? Have you got some nice place in the country where your boy can stretch his legs?’
‘We live in Bath.’
‘Ah, Bath. I always liked the idea of Bath. The reality never quite lived up to it, though. I’d take the women there and you wouldn’t see them for dust. They’d be off and into the shops like rats up a drainpipe. And how do you earn your crust in Bath?’
‘I work for a charity.’
‘Of course you do. Paying your debt to society — I’m glad somebody is! And you’re taking some leave — or rather, you’re down here for a week’s babysitting while the missus exercises her feminist imagination. I wouldn’t leave a woman alone in Bath for a day, let alone a week, but I suppose she’s acclimatised. Or is she the enigmatic type as well?’
Hamish seemed happy enough sitting on the plush bed, but I was worried that he might knock the wire hoop. It would be very painful, I imagined, if he did. I furtively grasped the back of Hamish’s shirt.
‘Caris is here,’ said Adam.
‘Not as far as I can see she bloody well isn’t,’ said Paul.
‘She came down yesterday on the train.’
‘Well, don’t leave her alone in the house. She’ll have packed everything up and sent it to the Donkey Sanctuary or the IRA or whoever the hell else she’s feeling sorry for this week. Have you seen Caris?’ he asked me.
‘Yes.’
‘Nuts, isn’t she?’ he said delightedly. ‘She’s getting fat, too. Her mother never got fat, but then she never had to. All she had to do was sit on her little arse in Doniford reading magazines and drinking diet milkshakes until they came out of her ears. But Caris won’t have anything to do with all that — her mother shoved it down her throat and now she won’t have anything to do with it. And more’s the pity,’ he continued, settling back into his pillows, ‘because she was a good-looking girl, a fine-looking girl. Her mother competed with her, that was the problem. She could be very cold. Caris got the idea that it didn’t do to be so pretty. Of course, she’ll tell you it’s all my fault,’ he concluded cheerfully, with his arms folded behind his head. ‘Women stick together in the end — ask Mary Wollstonecraft.’
‘I’ve been up at the farm with Adam,’ I said, by way of a diversion.
‘Oh you have, have you?’ He looked slightly discomfited, as though I had revealed myself to be untrustworthy. ‘What are you doing up there?’
‘We’re lambing, dad,’ said Adam, loudly.
‘All right, all right,’ said Paul irritably, flapping his hand. ‘I’m not some old fart in a home — I just didn’t know what he meant, that’s all. So you’ve been up at Egypt, have you? What do you think of the place? Marvellous, isn’t it? I always say that as the rest of the world gets worse, Egypt gets better. The principal of entropy does not apply. You’ve no idea, the torture it is to me to be in here, with spring coming on to the hill and everything waking up. I tell you, I can hear the grass growing! I only hope this isn’t what death is like, you know, an empty box and a view of the car park. I should have gone to a normal hospital,’ he said petulantly. ‘I’d have been far happier on a ward, with a fat black lady taking my temperature.’
‘You didn’t want to go on a ward!’ protested Adam. ‘You wanted to come here.’
‘Thought I’d never come out of one of those places alive, didn’t I?’ muttered Paul. ‘Now I don’t know which is worse, dying with the riffraff or living alone in this hell. Besides, I thought the nurses would be better looking. The nurses are absolute dogs,’ he said, to me. ‘They send them to me specially. I’m not allowed to be stimulated.’
I made to remove Hamish from the bed but Paul shot out a hand from behind his head and gripped his arm with it.
‘Oh, leave him be,’ he said. ‘I like the feel of a warm boy next to me.’ He cackled delightedly at himself.
‘I don’t want him to hurt you.’
‘You mean you don’t want him hearing my filth — are you another of these protective parents? None of them will let me lay a hand on their babies, you know. I think Laura hoses hers down with antiseptic after they’ve been at Egypt. As for the new one, I have to request audiences with her, like Vivian did with the Pope. And she’s a Hanbury — my own flesh and blood!’
‘I didn’t know Vivian had seen the Pope,’ said Adam, from the bathroom, where he had gone to fill his father’s water jug.
‘That’s because she hasn’t,’ called Paul. ‘He wouldn’t have her. The Pontiff turned her down.’
Adam laughed. ‘Did he?’
‘He took the view,’ said Paul, ‘that dissolving Vivian’s marriage would be like dissolving a set of functioning molars. I think he’s a very sensible chap. You can’t go saying a marriage didn’t happen when there are two strapping children to show that it did. So he stood her up. She went all the way to Rome and he stood her up. At least, that’s where she said she was. She could have been anywhere. She was probably getting pissed on sangria with that hippy friend of hers and her dago shopkeeper husband. Now that I come to think of it, she did come back with her tan. Do you know Vivian’s tan?’ he asked me. ‘It’s very amusing. She looks like she’s been embalmed in salad dressing.’
‘Dad, do you want me to turn up the pump?’ said Adam. ‘The dial’s set lower than it was yesterday.’
‘The funny thing,’ said Paul, to me, ‘is that after His Holiness rebuffed her she kept going back for punishment. To Mass.’ He pronounced it to rhyme with ‘arse.’ ‘And because she’d had the gumption finally to leave her miserable drunk husband she wasn’t allowed to take the holy Host. She was considered to be excommunicated. For some reason she didn’t know she was, though. One day she was standing in the queue and when she got to the priest and stuck her tongue out he wouldn’t give it to her. He popped his wafer right back in the bowl and put his hand over it, as though she might steal one! Some interfering old bitch had told him that Vivian was excommunicado. So after that she went along and sat at the back and when everyone else got up to join the queue she stayed where she was and pretended to read the hymn-book. I said to her, how can you bloody let them do that to you! How can you let them win, do you see? I’ll bet they loved seeing her sitting there all contrite, while they were busy rogering the altar-boys — leave that bloody thing alone!’ he said to Adam, who was scrutinising a plastic valve from which a pale tube led to the hard delta of veins in Paul Hanbury’s brown, hairy wrist.
‘It’s just that it seems very low.’
‘I don’t want that bloody stuff in my veins!’
‘Dad,’ said Adam heavily, ‘all you’re doing is subjecting your body to unnecessary pain.’
‘I wouldn’t walk around with a blindfold on either.’
‘There’s nothing vital about pain.’
‘What do you mean! How will I know what’s happened to me if I don’t feel it? Answer me that! That’s how you walk over a cliff in life! You can’t go around numbing yourself and sedating yourself against half the things that happen to you and expect to get any sensation from the other half — that’s what it means, to do things by halves! Do you know,’ he said, to me, ‘I’ve been going to the dentist in Doniford all my life and I’ve never had an anaesthetic. While this big fellow —’ he pointed to Adam ‘— has to be unconscious before he’ll let them so much as clean between his teeth.’
‘I think you’ll find, dad, that most people have an anaesthetic when they go to the dentist.’