‘Christ, Lu,’ said Nick before I could answer. (I would have answered yes.) ‘Dad doesn’t want to sit up in the middle of the night waiting to see a sodding ghost. That would be asking for trouble for anyone who was doing it. I tell you, farting about with this type of stuff doesn’t do anybody any good. Look at the shags who go in for mediums and séances and psychic phenomena and the rest of it. Raving nuts, the lot of them. And stop being so interested in this thing. Dad just feels very low and a bit confused and he’s got Gramps on his mind. Leave it, Lu.’
‘All right, I will. But you think everybody goes by mood because that’s the way you work yourself. You’re bloody bright, Nick, but on almost everything except Lamartine you muddle up what you think with how you feel. I prefer to take what your father says at face value. But I promise to drop it. I’m off to bed now anyway. See you both in the morning.’
‘You mustn’t take too much notice of Lucy,’ said Nick when we were alone. ‘She misses the old cut-and-thrust of academic discussion up there. I’m no good to her on that one, and the faculty wives can’t follow two consecutive remarks on any subject. She’s all right, actually. I know you can’t understand what I see in her, and I’m not sure I can myself, but I love her. Anyway. How are you really feeling, Dad?’
I hesitated. I had not until that moment thought of what I now urgently wanted to say, any more than I had consciously rehearsed a single word of my diatribe about death, which, it occurred to me belatedly, I had delivered as if I had had it by heart. I stopped hesitating. ‘I feel I ought to have done more for Gramps. I don’t just mean what everybody’s bound to feel, about wishing you’d been more considerate and nicer and everything. I could have tried to help him live longer. For instance, perhaps those walks of his were too taxing. I ought to have thought about that, talked to Jack Maybury and so on.’
‘Look, to begin with, Gramps wasn’t your patient. And Jack’s a good doctor; he knew what was best for him. And he was a vigorous old boy; he’d have died a bloody sight sooner, out of misery, if he’d been cooped up in the house all the time. Don’t worry about that.’
‘Mm. Would you like a whisky, or a beer?’
Nick shook his head. ‘You have one.’
While I poured, I said, ‘And the stairs here, they’re very steep. I ought to have tried—’
‘What could you have done? Put in a lift? And I don’t think climbing stairs gives you strokes, does it? That’s heart, I thought.’
‘I don’t know.’ I hesitated again. ‘It made me think of your mother.’
‘Mum? What’s she got to do with it?’
‘Well, I … feel responsible for that too, in a way.’
‘Oh, Dad. The only people responsible were the chap driving the car, and perhaps Mum herself a bit, for crossing the road without looking properly.’
‘I’ve always wondered whether she stepped out deliberately.’
‘Oh, Christ. With Amy holding her hand? She’d never have risked anything happening to Amy. And why should she? Knock herself off, I mean.’
‘That bit’s obvious. Thompson letting her down.’ Thompson was the man for whose sake Margaret had left me, and who had told her, four months before her death, that he was not after all going to leave his wife and children and set up a home with her.
‘That’s Thompson’s headache, if it’s anybody’s, which I don’t believe.’
‘I ought to have tried to stop her going.’
‘Oh, balls. How? She was a free agent.’
‘I ought to have treated her better.’
‘You treated her well enough for her to stay with you for twenty-two years. This is a load of crap, Dad. What’s bothering you isn’t that you were in any way responsible for her death, but that she died. Same with Gramps. Both those things remind you that you’ll be going the same way yourself one of these days. I know you’ll hate me taking a leaf out of Lucy’s book, but that is egotistical. Sorry, Dad.’
‘Okay. You may be right.’ He was certainly right about the first part of it—the small but permanent despair, and the illogical feeling of dread, that come from having spent so many years with a dead woman, talked, met people, gone to places, eaten, drunk with her, most of all (of course) made love to her, and had children by her. Even now I woke up three or four mornings a week assuming that Margaret was still alive.
‘How’s Amy?’ asked Nick. ‘From the look of her…’
I stopped listening as I heard, or thought I heard, a rustling noise at ground level outside the house, near the front door. I jumped up, ran to the window and looked out. The overhead lights were still on, showing walls, flowerbeds, road and verges as colourlessly empty as if nobody had ever been near them. The noise had stopped.
‘What’s up, Dad?’
‘Nothing. I thought I heard someone at the front door. Did you hear it?’
‘No. Are you all right?’ Nick looked warily at me.
‘Of course.’ It disturbed me that what I might or might not have heard, and identified, had happened immediately at the mention of Amy. I had no idea why I made this connection. I tried to think. There’s … been some talk of a burglar in the district. You were saying.’
‘Did you see anything?’
‘No. Go on.’
‘All right. I was just wondering how Amy feels about Mum’s death these days.’
‘I suppose at that age you forget a lot quite quickly. You put things behind you.’
‘But has she? What does she say about it?’
‘We haven’t gone into any of that.’
‘You mean you haven’t discussed it with her at all? But surely—’
‘You try asking a kid of thirteen how she feels about having her mother knocked down and killed in front of her eyes.’
‘No, you try.’ Nick stared at me. ‘Look, Dad, for some reason you’ve got death on the winkle. That’s all right with me, as long as you keep it as a sort of hobby. But one can’t afford to let a hobby get out of hand, so that it stops you paying attention to what’s really important. You must talk to Amy about this business. I’ll set it up for you if you like. We could all—’
‘No, Nick. Not yet. I mean give me a chance to think about it first.’
‘Sure. But I’m going to bring it up again, if that’s all right. Or even if it isn’t all right, actually.’
‘It is all right.’
Nick got up. ‘I’m buggering off now. I’m afraid I haven’t been much use to you today.’
‘Yes you have. Thank you for coming down, and for staying.’
‘A breeze. I’m afraid I’ve spent most of the time telling you what to do and what not to do.’
‘I probably need that.’
‘Yes, you do. Good night, Dad.’
We kissed and he went. I drank more whisky. The items on my personal agenda seemed impossibly many and varied. For a time I walked about the room and stared at each of the sculptures in turn. They suggested nothing to me, and I found I could not imagine what I had ever seen in any of them, whether as works of art or as quasi-people. I heard a scratching at the door and let Victor in. He bounded past me, impelled perhaps by the fragments of some memory of having been disturbed by Nick’s passing within earshot. I stooped down and began to stroke him; he strained against my hand, purring like an old-fashioned and not very distant motor-bike. When I settled in my reading-chair by the bookshelves, he joined me, and made no objection to my using his back as a desk. The book I opened on him was the Oxford text of Matthew Arnold’s poems. I tried to read ‘Dover Beach’, which I had often thought an acceptable, if rather prettified, account of life in general. Tonight I found something too easy in its stoicism, and thatdarkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night,