Six years I had with Ray. We’d celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday, which meant he was certainly thirty, but not yet thirty-five. Then like a fool I went on holiday with Mum and Dad. Worst decision I ever made. But they asked me to go. Joyce was supposed to go with them, but then she was suddenly pregnant after years of trying, and it would be a mistake to travel in that condition. And it was beginning to become clear that Mum and Dad really needed someone to go with them. They even let me choose the details of the trip.
Mum was soon on her feet after her hospital stay in 1975. The polyps meant her no harm, just like we’d been told, though they needed to be checked every now and then. Everything seemed to be back to normal, and it took all of us a good long time to understand that nothing would ever be the same again.
The difference was all in my little Dad. It wasn’t just his hair going white, his whole outlook changed. He and Mum were still inseparable, but it wasn’t the same kind of inseparable. The balance went out of it. Balance went, and fear came in. It wasn’t any more that they dealt with life instinctively as a couple, although they were always together. It was simply that he couldn’t bear to let her out of his sight, which seemed the same at first but was almost the opposite.
Soon we noticed, Joyce and me, that Dad was becoming absent-minded, but in a way that was anxious rather than vague. He would fret if Mum so much as left the room, as if he didn’t know where she was unless he could actually see her. He’d ask, ‘Where’s your Mum?’, trying to sound unconcerned, and if we said, ‘Don’t you know? Do you really not know?’, he’d say, ‘In the kitchen,’ or ‘In the bathroom,’ with an uncertain edge to his voice that we weren’t meant to notice if he guessed right. Usually he guessed right. Then everything was supposed to be back to normal. He’d manage to stay calm as long as she came back into the room before too long. The funny thing was that he never actually went looking for her, he wanted to stay where he was, he just wanted her to be there too. So his behaviour had two things in it, the needing her to be there and the not wanting to go anywhere.
Another funny thing was that if he knew she was there, he stopped paying attention to her. If she was drying her hair with her old-fashioned pink plastic hair-drier — I don’t know why she didn’t pick up something more up-to-date from the shop — then he knew that as long as the whirring noise went on she was still there, and he’d close his eyes and seem to doze until the noise stopped.
I don’t know whose idea it was that Dad should retire a couple of years early. Perhaps he wasn’t up to doing the job any more. Maybe he couldn’t concentrate properly on filling prescriptions, even though Mum was in the shop with him. Of course Dad made out that nothing was wrong, and Mum wouldn’t say anything about how it was that might sound like criticism, even to me. But maybe he kept looking at her, and when he brought his attention back to the prescription form, which someone was waiting for, it was as if he’d never seen the piece of paper in his hand before.
At first retirement seemed to suit Dad fine. He was quite happy at home, as long as Mum left a note saying she was working in the shop. First of all she would put it in his jacket pocket, but then she learned to pin it to the outside of the jacket instead. If she left it loose, it might end up on the floor, and then he’d be very agitated by the time she came back for lunch, or after work. He’d say, ‘Where have you been all day?’, but if she said, ‘Where do you think I’ve been?’, he’d say, ‘At work, of course. In the shop.’ It was strange. When Mum started taking Dad to doctors, they agreed that Dad wasn’t becoming demented. That wasn’t the problem.
The crumbling of Dad’s behaviour was all to do with Mum and her whereabouts. Apart from that, his mental powers were no different. He knew what day it was, who was Prime Minister — in fact, he could reel them off in reverse order, with dates, all the way back to Pitt. He even kept up with new drugs and brand names though he didn’t work more than the occasional Sunday shift in the shop, as the pharmacy rota prompted. If the new pharmacist took ill or had time off, Dad could hold the fort, just as long as Mum stood near him, and didn’t serve a customer while he was filling a prescription. Sundays weren’t usually that busy. Dad was all there mentally, as long as Mum was right there beside him.
Mum wouldn’t let on how all this got her down, but you didn’t need ESP to realise that she really needed to get away. So I fell in with this idea of a holiday in France, nipping across on the hovercraft early in the summer season. Even Dad liked the idea of the hovercraft, a British invention and stylish and fun. I’d also been reading Geoffrey of Monmouth, and I took it into my head to visit some of the places he mentions in France. Geoffrey — or Galfridus as he called himself, writing in Latin, Galfridus Monemutensis — isn’t most people’s idea of a historian, but some things that seem fanciful in his writings turn out to be true. True-ish, at any rate. So he talks about how Merlin brought Stonehenge to Salisbury Plain from Mount Killaraus in Ireland, which isn’t so different from where archaeologists these days reckon the stones came from. And he talks about how the Venedoti decapitated an entire Roman legion in London and threw their heads into a stream. And what was found in the bed of the Walbrook in the 1860s but a large number of skulls? With practically no other bones to keep them company.
So I was excited despite myself to read Geoffrey of Monmouth on Arthur’s last battle, about Kay the Seneschal being carried dying to Chinon, the town he himself had built. About Bedivere the Cup-bearer, borne with loud lamentation to Bayeux, the city his grandfather had founded, where he was laid to rest ‘beside a wall in a certain cemetery in the Southern quarter of the city’. I didn’t expect to trip over the bones of a Grail Knight, the way I’d tripped over Ray’s foot at Box Hill, but I really wanted to visit those towns, and to snuffle up the distant whiff of events from long ago.
Of course it wasn’t like that. We made a sort of visit to Bayeux, but for most of the holiday Dad stayed in the hotel. He didn’t want to go anywhere. It turned out that he felt unsteady coming downstairs, and so he sat down on the top step and wouldn’t come down any further. That’s where he stayed, and he wanted Mum to stay there too. I led Dad back to the room and persuaded Mum to come out with me, that first day. Dad was afraid that someone would try to talk French to him while Mum wasn’t there, even though all the staff spoke excellent English, so we left the phrase-book behind just to pacify him. Somehow it wasn’t there when we got back — God knows what he’d done with it — so next day the pressure on Mum to stay was more intense.
Mum arranged a swap of rooms, so that she and Dad were on the ground floor, but then it turned out he felt just as unsteady on the three steps that led down from the hotel lobby into the street.
I was only away with Mum and Dad for ten days, but that was enough to finish six years. Not just to put an end to them, but to make them disappear. When I got back it was a Wednesday. In the evening I phoned the Hampton flat. Mum and Dad finally had a phone by then, but there were no answering machines in 1981. I mean they existed, but nobody had one. Nobody in Isleworth or Hampton anyway. When I got no answer, I started worrying immediately. Ray was nothing if not reliable. I rang every hour that evening, and before nine the next morning. I kept up that pattern every day, even though I knew after the Wednesday that I’d have to wait until Sunday to find anything out. Sunday at Box Hill, where the bikers go.