‘What do I care what most people do? Most people live lives of such surpassing inanity I don’t know why they bother! Most people want to sit in their little red-brick boxes on their little estates watching television, or drive around going nowhere in their cars, or stuff their faces with junk, or go shopping — and I’m not saying that’s any worse than what people have always wanted to do. The difference is that now they’ve got everything laid on for them. The world’s been wrecked, laying on their houses and their cars and their cheap holidays and their cheap food — and a hundred years ago, most of them would have been pushing a plough with not a thought in their heads, and be none the worse off for it!’
Through the great pale window the distant skeletons of trees were faintly picked out against a wad of sky. The hospital was half an hour’s drive from Doniford, I didn’t know exactly where, just that we had driven directly away from the coast and the green hills and become gradually mired in a flat, grey, nondescript landscape cluttered with buildings and petrol stations, and street lamps with nothing human to light, and warehouses behind wire fences. This clutter was not, it appeared, to amount to anything so definite as a town: like a tundra, its formlessness was its single geographical feature. The hospital was a low red-brick building that stood like an island in the sea of its car park. Inside, in the foyer, it blazed with light and with wood-veneered surfaces. The foyer was carpeted, as was the lift. The woman at the reception desk wore a tailored black suit and high heels and the nurses wore vague white uniforms, so that the whole place had an atmosphere of discretion that bordered on secrecy, as though the question of sickness were inadmissible; as though, were a drama ever to unfold here, it would manifest itself in the spectacle not of disease but of celebration of life itself.
‘We were at mum’s yesterday,’ said Adam.
Paul assumed a peevish expression. ‘Yes, David says she’s got the hump about something. I suppose I’ve said something I shouldn’t have, have I? Is that it?’
‘She’d better tell you about it herself,’ said Adam.
‘The first Mrs Hanbury,’ said Paul, to me, ‘is a very sensitive creature where her own thin skin is concerned. She’s like the princess who can feel the pea through twenty mattresses — I believe she considers it to be the mark of good breeding. She’s what they call “high maintenance”. So’s the second, now that I come to think of it, though in a different way. The second gets the blues. Vivian’s blues are like those fogs you get in Scotland that last for two weeks. They sort of envelop you and quietly soak you to the skin.’
‘I don’t understand why Vivian didn’t come in,’ said Adam, for the third or fourth time. He was still holding the plastic valve in his hand. He had something of the butler about him, the castrated quality of a male given over to a life of service. He seemed to me just then to be completely without what I could only describe as poetry, or heroism; to lack, in any case, the promise or the threat of unpredictability.
‘I tell you, she’s got the blues. The first Mrs Hanbury’s got the hump and the second’s got the blues. What’s your woman like, Michael? Is she cheerful? I hope for your sake that she is.’
‘Sometimes she is.’
‘What does she make of that fur on your face? Does she like it?’
‘She doesn’t mind it,’ I said, although the truth was that Rebecca’s attitude to my beard was entirely ambivalent, and for that reason I maintained it, partly as a sort of doorstop to prevent our relationship swinging shut. For some reason, I felt that as long as I kept this semicircle of dark hair on my face I could never be said to have succumbed: I could not be negated, by love nor by hate.
‘Only doesn’t mind?’ he said. ‘I’d have thought she’d be one way or the other, if the women I know are anything to go by. The women I know like to take a definite position. As a military tactic it doesn’t work, that’s what I’m always telling them. If you take a position you’re open to attack. You’re better off keeping on the move. I always wondered whether women liked a beard,’ he said, consideringly. ‘But I could never get mine to grow. Does it increase sensation? Does she tell you that?’
I smiled in what I hoped was a mysterious fashion.
‘Oh, I see. That’s how it is. That’s how it is, is it?’ Paul looked around the featureless room impatiently. ‘Well, someone’s got to humour a sick old man — where’s Lisa? Why hasn’t she been in to see me?’
‘She doesn’t want to bring Isobel into the hospital,’ said Adam.
‘Why, does she think it’s catching, cancer of the dong? You see what I mean about protective parents,’ he said, to me again. ‘Have you been to their house? You have to take your shoes off before they’ll let you in. I feel like a horse with nothing on its hooves when I’m there. And my socks are always squiffy. That’s why Audrey won’t go there, you know. Her stiletto heels were soldered to her feet at birth. She’d go up in a puff of smoke if she ever took them off. Have you met Lisa? She’s a good girl really. She’s rather a solid girl. Very house-proud, isn’t she, Adam? Her father sells bathtubs.’
‘Jacuzzis,’ said Adam. ‘Don’t pretend you’ve never been in a jacuzzi, dad.’
‘The first Mrs Hanbury was fond of that sort of thing. I couldn’t stand it — it was like being boiled alive. And on the subject of hygiene, they’re an absolute breeding ground for germs — all sorts of people pile into them, you know, all together. You try to stretch your legs out and you find you’re playing footsie with the hairy calves of some overweight middle manager. Still, we’ve all got to earn our living, I suppose. Adam says he does rather well out of it. The problem is, you never know when that sort of craze will pass, do you? He might find himself out on his ear in a year or two, when people find some other way to waste their time and money. Do you see what I mean? It’s not like a farm, is it? You can never say, this is my patch of the earth, my place. This is where I have my being. You can’t say that about a bloody bathtub, can you?’
‘They’ve got a perfectly good patch of the earth,’ said Adam. ‘They own an eight-bedroom house in Northumberland with twenty acres of land.’
‘But it’s all in hock to the bathtubs! If the bathtubs go, so does the land!’
‘That’s how life is, dad. That’s how life is for most people. We’re not all as lucky as you.’
‘Luck has nothing to do with it,’ said Paul. ‘The best luck I’ve had is to be given the good sense not to meddle with what I have. I could have ruined it in a million different ways — look at Don Brice! Look at Si Higham, driving around in that big jalopy with the white leather seats, pleased as punch with himself, and for what? For selling all his land to the highest bidder and turning Doniford into suburbia!’
Paul was becoming quite exercised — his wiry neck and chest were dark red where I could see around the collar of the white hospital garment. I picked up Hamish, who had sat beside him on the bed all this while virtually motionless, looking straight ahead with a superior expression on his face. This time Paul let me take him with an exasperated gesture.
‘I don’t see what’s so wrong with that,’ said Adam. ‘He wasn’t farming the land — he wasn’t using it for anything. Anyway, where are people supposed to live?’
‘If they’ve got nowhere to live then they shouldn’t have been born.’
‘It’s a bit late for that,’ said Adam calmly.
‘You people,’ said Paul, ‘you people don’t understand how to desire what is actually yours — you’re always scheming, the lot of you! Always dissatisfied! Even that layabout Brendon, turning the lodge into a chicken farm when he thinks I’m not looking — a bunch of hangers-on, a pack of vultures is what you are!’