I carried Hamish to the window and together we looked down at the car park, with its symmetrical rows of shiny, unpersoned vehicles.
‘No one’s scheming, dad,’ said Adam behind me. ‘Brendon’s doing the chickens as a way of being more financially independent, that’s all. And Caris is never here — you can hardly call her a vulture.’
‘I’ll call her what I like,’ said Paul morosely. ‘She’s been a great disappointment to me.’
‘As for me, I’m just trying to help you. I’ve taken a week off work to do the lambs — even Michael is here to help you.’
‘Why?’ snapped Paul. ‘Why haven’t you got your own lives to lead? Michael, haven’t you got a family of your own? Parents of your own?’
‘Yes.’
‘And where are they?’
‘They live in Surrey.’
‘What are they doing there?’ said Paul, as though there were something outlandish about it.
‘They’re doctors,’ I said.
‘Doctors — are they really? Both of them?’
‘Yes.’
‘I suppose they don’t need much help then. I suppose they’re quite able to doctor on their own. Are they busy — out a lot? Don’t have time for you?’
‘Something like that,’ I said.
‘And all they’ll be leaving you is their surgical instruments, I suppose, and the house in Surrey. Mind you, that could be worth something.’
‘I don’t expect them to leave me anything.’
‘Well, they probably will, but you’re a good boy anyway. The problem with my brood,’ he said confidentially, ‘is that they’ve come in to land a bit early. They all think I’m going to pop my clogs before I’m seventy — even Caris shelled out the money for the train fare as soon as she heard I was hospitalised.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Adam.
‘She wouldn’t miss it for the world! And nor would Brendon, if he could only work out how to get here. As for the eldest son, he hasn’t let me out of his sight in years — the heir presumptive, if you know what I mean. Mind you, there’s always the jacuzzi salesman to consider. They’re bad for the heart, you know, those things. Eight bedrooms and twenty acres in Northumberland, don’t forget. He could be taking his leave any day.’
In spite of myself, I laughed.
‘Tell me what your mother’s got the hump about, there’s a good boy,’ said Paul to Adam, who was putting his coat on.
‘I’d rather she told you herself. I don’t really understand what the problem is.’
‘Well, she can’t tell me if she doesn’t come.’
‘There’s a phone beside the bed, dad.’
‘I can’t talk to her on the telephone. I never could — she uses it as an instrument of torture.’
‘Something to do with money. She says she hasn’t got her allowance. I didn’t know what she was talking about.’
Paul was silent. He held his head up in a soldierly fashion, as though bravely contemplating some doom-laden enterprise.
‘Tell Vivian to come in, will you?’ he said presently. ‘Tell the old girl to come in. Tell her I’m not too good. Put her in the car and bring her yourself if you have to. Will you do that for me?’
‘All right,’ said Adam. ‘She said she was coming anyway. She’ll probably be here before I even get a chance to speak to her.’
‘I don’t expect she will. Just do as I ask. Get the old girl in here where I can see her.’
‘It’ll probably be tomorrow rather than today.’
‘Make it as soon as you can, there’s a good boy,’ said Paul.
‘Has the consultant been in yet?’
‘What? Oh, yes.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He was an Asian fellow,’ said Paul. ‘Knew his stuff, though, I’ll say that for him,’ he added. ‘He said he came from Kerala in the south of India — a beautiful place apparently, he told me all about it, white buildings and trees, hot as hell. The Christians colonised it in the fifteenth century. Now he’s living in a suburb of Taunton. I said to him, if you know what beauty is, how can you stand to live without it? And he said, “Beauty is secondary, Mr Hanbury.”’ Paul put on an accent to relay the consultant’s sentiments. ‘I said to him, don’t they need consultants in Kerala? Yes, he said, they do. So I said, well, tell me why you’re here then. He looked a little taken aback, you know, a little superior. Then he started yakking on about skills and training and equipment, and suddenly I thought, here it is again! Selfishness! Greed! So I said, admit it, you’re here because they pay you more. And he admitted that he was!’
Paul gave a bark of laughter and sat back against his pillows with his arms folded. His expression was morbid.
‘When did he say you could come home?’ said Adam.
‘Monday. Tell Vivian that too. Tell her not to bring out the fatted calf. Tell her I’m on a hospital diet. Have you experienced Vivian’s cooking?’ he asked me. ‘Awful, isn’t it? The first Mrs Hanbury wasn’t bad, but she never ate the things she cooked, which used to make you wonder what she’d put in it.’
‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ said Adam.
‘Don’t forget, will you? You’ve got to bring Vivian in. Actually in, do you hear?’
‘Goodbye, Paul,’ I said.
I held out my hand and Paul grabbed it and pulled me nearly on to his chest. Hamish, whom I was holding, clung to my neck as we went over and Paul put his arms around my neck too, so that I lay across the bed like a fallen tree being strangulated by vines.
‘Kiss me,’ said Paul gruffly, and I obeyed by kissing his leathery cheek. ‘You’re a good boy,’ he said. He released my neck and gripped my face between the vice of his hands instead. ‘It’s rather soft, your fur,’ he said. ‘Do you put anything on it?’
‘No,’ I said, with difficulty.
‘I never petted mine enough,’ he said hotly, into my ear. ‘You’ve got to pet them and stroke them every day, then they’ll never give you any trouble. Every day, do you hear? The day you forget is the day they’ll get it in their minds to turn against you!’
He released my head and turned to Hamish, who was regarding him close to with a certain alarmed curiosity. He ruffled Hamish’s fair hair, before making an unexpected and not inaccurate attempt at Hamish’s bell noise.
‘Goodbye, fellow-me-lad,’ he said, laughing loudly.
*
In the car on the way back to Doniford I kept turning around and talking nonsense to Hamish and tickling his toes as he liked them tickled, aware as I did so that I was harbouring a feeling of guilt about what suddenly seemed to me to be the unsatisfactory state of his circumstances. As we drew into The Meadows, a mild feeling of oppression settled over me. In the flat, late-afternoon light which cast no shadows, unstirred by wind or rain, there was something actually inhuman about the place. I noticed that several of the houses had caravans parked in their driveways, white and rounded, like the babies of the stolid, red-brick adults, as though the big dwelling had mechanistically spawned the small. The caravans were the only things here that were neither square nor triangular, though I supposed that if they stayed long enough they might become so. The houses stared dumbly out of their windows.
‘What I like about this place,’ said Adam, steering us with conspicuous smoothness around the tarmac, ‘is the fact that it doesn’t remind me of anything.’
‘On the phone you described it as hilarious,’ I observed.
‘Well, it is, in a way,’ he said. ‘If you were going to be a snob about it.’
We passed a group of children in spotless tracksuits and baseball caps, who lifted their white faces to us as we went by.
‘I’m not saying we’re going to stay here for ever,’ said Adam. ‘But for now it actually suits us really well. At least it isn’t pretentious. It doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.’