Let Go My Hand Read online

  EDWARD DOCX

  LET GO MY HAND

  PICADOR

  For O, S, W & R

  who taught me the meaning of love.

  Act 4, Scene 6: On the Dover Cliffs.

  GLOUCESTER Let go my hand.

  Here, friend, ’s another purse; in it a jewel

  Well worth a poor man’s taking: fairies and gods

  Prosper it with thee! Go thou farther off;

  Bid me farewell, and let me hear thee going.

  EDGAR Now fare you well, good sir?

  Shakespeare, from King Lear

  ‘First we’ve got to clear the ground.’

  Ivan Turgenev, from Fathers and Sons

  ‘Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”

  Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”

  God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”

  God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but

  The next time you see me comin’ you better run”

  Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”

  God says, “Out on Highway 61”’

  Bob Dylan, from ‘Highway 61 Revisited’

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE: PORTRAIT OF A FATHER

  DOVER

  EVERYTHING AFFECTS EVERYONE

  RALPH

  L’AUTOROUTE DES ANGLAIS

  JACK

  AIRE DE REPOS

  THE MEANING GAP

  LOST

  THEN TRY FOR UNDERSTANDING

  ON THE ESCARPMENTS

  FOR WHICH RELIEF MUCH THANKS

  PART TWO: TWO RIDERS WERE APPROACHING

  THE LIBERATOR OF THE LAKE

  PÉAGE

  THE EARTH’S BRIGHT EDGE

  THE HARD PROBLEM

  PUPPETS & PROPHETS

  PART THREE: PORTRAIT OF HIS SONS

  MONSTERS OF THE DEEP

  THE FACE OF A GHOST

  ALL FOR ONE

  DENIAL

  THE UNDERWORLD

  THE WHEELCHAIR

  SHOOTING THE RAPIDS

  PART FOUR: LET US NOT TALK FALSELY NOW

  FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

  FEINSCHMECKER HOCHGENUSS

  REQUIEM

  THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

  PART FIVE: PAINTINGS ON THE WALL

  THE CELESTIAL CITY

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PART ONE

  PORTRAIT OF A FATHER

  DOVER

  I should never have agreed to any of this. But I only start to feel the reality when we arrive in Dover and pull into the ferry terminal. I wind down the window for border control and the cold air blusters in – all sea salt, diesel and ship rust – and I can hear gulls screaming like there’s been a murder.

  I hand over the passports.

  ‘Holiday?’ the border guard asks.

  And I hoist myself a grin: ‘Yes.’

  She glances over at Dad and I lean back so that she can see past me and decide if we’re the kind of people who might want to blow up the ferry for some insane reason not to do with anything that matters. We’re in the ragged old camper van because we don’t have a car. Dad has fallen asleep in the passenger seat, which is all wrong, given that we used to do this every summer with him at the wheel, long after my older brothers didn’t want to come with us and it was only me and Mum and Dad.

  Back come the passports. I stow Dad’s with mine in the little compartment under the wheel as if I’m the one who’s in charge. Then I take a self-conscious breath of that sea air again, making out to myself that it’s a big surprise, which it always is, and I roll us gently up to the next booth, where a guy from the ferry company hands me one of those oblong pieces of paper with the number of the lane in which you’re meant to queue for the boat. Ours says ‘76’, which is five years older than Dad. I hang it from the rear-view mirror and head towards the lanes of eager cars waiting to board. And all of a sudden, my emotions rise and I don’t know where to look or how to be.

  The thing is that right about now, when I was a little boy, Dad would pull up and jump out of the driver’s seat to make the tea, racing with himself, like he was one of those Grand Prix mechanics. And because in those days the van was packed too full to get to the hob when we were travelling, and probably because he didn’t want to disturb Ralph and Jack because they could be such difficult bastards, he’d hunker on the tarmac and light the little camping stove. And I’d be right there crouching down beside him, watching the tiny blue flame roar and stretch in the blustery wind, hands on the knees of my best summer-holiday jeans, five years old but acting as if I was working for Ferrari, too. And all the while in the van, my brothers would be reading, and Mum would have her window down and she’d be hanging her arm out and craftily smoking her Luckies and hoping that the line didn’t get called before the water was boiled because she knew that once he had started, Dad wouldn’t give it up until he’d had his ‘cuppa’, as she liked to say in her best British accent.

  So next I need to work out whether Dad and I are going to have some tea while we wait, which I will have to make, since his ‘capacity for fine movement will continually diminish’, as they say in one of the eight hundred PDFs I’ve read about ‘what to expect’ and ‘how to prepare’. And this seems like another impossible thing that we have to decide.

  A man in a high-visibility jacket waves us into ‘lane 76’ with the other vans and four-by-fours. I pull up and the handbrake clicks like some old watch wound to the end of its spring. And because I don’t want to speak to Dad with this emotional surge going on, I open my door and climb out all in one movement – as if I am the one who gets cramps in his legs.

  But straight away I wish I had stayed in the damn van. Because now I’m standing in the car park looking at the darkened windows of this off-road estate car with all these kayaks on the roof and bikes on the back and the father of the family is getting out and saying, ‘I got it – two caps and a latte,’ and he’s shooting me a look across the hood like he’s this big leader of men or something and don’t I just know he’s a great father and he’d probably be a great warrior, too, if he had to be, which he doesn’t. And I’m shaking like maybe I am going to blow up the ferry. And so I turn round and next thing I’m sliding open the noisy rear door of the van, which needs oiling, but when are we going to do that?

  ‘How you feeling, Dad?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m fine.’ Dad smiles, looking back from the passenger seat up front. He is wearing terrible clothes as usual – his custard-yellow fleece, his beige over-washed chinos, his lightweight walking boots of which he is unaccountably proud. ‘Thinking about a jog,’ he says.

  I nod slowly. We row back and forth between jokes and sarcasm these days like we’re scared of landfall.

  ‘Just had one,’ I say. ‘You were asleep.’

  ‘Another half-marathon?’

  ‘Yep – and a couple of klicks sea-kayaking.’

  He looks at me and sucks his teeth. We hate a word like ‘klick’.

  ‘Actually,’ he says, ‘I might do some of that aggressive yoga.’

  ‘It’s very spiritual out there, Dad.’

  He surveys the massed ranks of SUVs silently laying waste to whatever future humanity might yet sneak. His jaw spasms from time to time and he yawns a lot.

  That sea air has slipped in around my shoulders and cooled me down. I climb up and Dad starts loosening the catch on his seat so that he can swivel it to face backwards. I start filling up the kettle from the water carrier. It looks like we’re going all the way on tea. So I set up the grey plastic table in the back at which we have had so many convivial meals. Dad bought the van in 1989, just before I was born; it’s a metallic blue, boxy, unfashionable 1980s-style VW and you wouldn’t want it – even if y
ou inherited it strife-free. But – for us at least – it’s got soul. Which counts. Or which should count.

  From the edge of my eye, I can see that Dad is struggling to get the passenger seat swivelled round. When you’re not having trouble with your legs, you can press your feet into the floor and turn it that way. But Dad gets this feeling of pins and needles a lot, he says; he’s got what they call ‘lower limb onset’. All the same, I don’t want to be doing everything for him – and I’m not sure what is tactful – here, now, ever. So I leave him to it and fire up the stove.

  Part of me is thinking that Ralph better show up. But another part is thinking that maybe we’re better off without him and that we should keep it to just the two of us – me and Dad – for as long as possible because Ralph has got some kind of metaphysical rabies. Yet another part of me is wondering how Jack can do and say what he is doing and saying. How can he now refuse to come? At what point does he concede Dad might be for real? And surely Jack is worse than Ralph because if his behaviour isn’t passive-aggressive then I don’t know what is. At least with Ralph you get straightforward aggressive.

  Ralph and Jack are actually my half-brothers – twins; Ralph the thin one, Jack less so. They have a whole other view of Dad. Like he is more or less a different man to them. My mother used to say that they were ‘psychologically impacted’ by him. But who knows – maybe it’s the genes? I read somewhere that genes are like the ingredients and your family environment is analogous to how you cook them up.

  I glance across. Now Dad is kneeling down in the front footwell, pushing the seat round with his arms and shoulders. He raises his head so that we’re looking at each other properly for the first time since he woke up – or pretended to wake up. Then he comes right out and asks me the same thing I asked him: ‘And how are you doing, Louis?’

  ‘Been better,’ I say.

  He nods. ‘Well, just so you know, Lou – and to answer your question – I’m feeling happy right now. Really happy.’

  I don’t know how to be with this so I say: ‘Maybe you should have spent more time in the footwells of clapped-out vans, Dad.’

  And then he smiles at me properly – like he smiles all the time now – really sad-but-happy, really sorry-but-glad, like we’ve sorted everything out between us. These new smiles don’t help and I wonder sometimes if they’re a side effect of the drugs. I’m here for him. But it’s not like that makes it fine for him to be smiling at me like this every five minutes. And it’s not like I agree. Or not any more, I don’t. Not now we’re actually doing it.

  So I go and stand in the narrow galley at the stove in the back and make like I’m extra busy spooning the leaves into the pot.

  He’s turned the seat, which he’s pleased about. He levers himself through the gap from the front – his arms are still good – and he sits down with a theatrical sigh of satisfaction.

  ‘How long do we have?’ He nods in the direction of the sea.

  And this is pretty much the worst question he could have asked but it takes him a half-second to realize it.

  ‘I mean how long do we have before the ferry sails?’

  ‘We’re early,’ I say.

  And this is the worst answer. We’ve had this problem for the last eighteen months, of course: half of what we say now sounds too significant and the other half sounds so vacuous that I don’t know why we waste our time saying it at all. Maybe that’s why we jump into jokes all the time. Maybe that’s why we have always jumped into jokes. But we’re trying to live in the present – whatever that means. And what else can we do? We have to go on talking. We are a talking family. Talking – language – is what made us the most successful of the hominids; that’s what Dad would say. Does say. Often.

  ‘You must have had your foot down, Lou.’

  ‘Not really,’ I say. ‘The roads were empty.’

  ‘Lucky we didn’t come in the Aston or the Maserati.’

  ‘Yeah – or we’d probably be there by now.’

  Dad weighs this a second, like maybe we should segue into serious. But then he says: ‘Slow driving – do you think there’s a new movement in that?’

  ‘What? You mean like Slow Food and Slow Cities?’

  ‘Yes.’ He is animated now; ideas seem to make the muscles in his face come back to life again. ‘You can pretend that Slow Driving is a whole new philosophy and get paid to give lectures to people with too much time on their hands. I can see the book now.’ Dad nods and holds up finger and thumb as though describing the quotation on the back cover: ‘“The crushingly obvious repackaged again – for people who missed it the first three times.” Chuck in a smattering of quotes from the Greeks off the Internet and you’ll be away, Lou.’

  Dad is big on the Greeks. He calls Christianity ‘the great hijack’.

  ‘I thought the Greeks were mainly pre-car, Dad, pre-driving.’

  ‘I mean Greek quotes about life. Turn it round.’

  ‘Turn what round?’

  ‘Your argument.’

  ‘I’m not making one.’

  ‘Yes you are. What you’re saying is that the Greeks were able to examine life more deeply because they drove so much slower than we do.’

  ‘I’m not saying anything.’

  ‘All their philosophy, the plays, the democracy, the sculpture, the Olympics . . . it was all because the Greeks were the original Slow Drivers.’ He draws a professorial breath and makes as if to address the midweek Life Coachers’ get-together in Notting Hill. ‘Ladies and gentlemen . . . we all know for a fact that everybody was so much happier before today. But the question is why?’

  ‘The question is why.’

  ‘Let me tell you.’

  ‘Wait . . . Charge us first. Then tell us.’

  ‘Take, for example, Ancient Greece. We stopped being happy . . .’ He pauses in mock profundity. ‘We stopped being centred when we stopped Slow Driving.’

  I shake my head. Dad and I have a whole list of words and phrases we just don’t like. ‘Centred’ is right up there with ‘klicks’ and words like ‘legend’ and ‘eclectic’ and ‘curated’. We don’t know why exactly – but not liking particular points of vocabulary unites us in some secret back-channel way; flashlights we shine across the misty swamp of everything that lies between us.

  And now the kettle is steaming the window where Dad has drawn back the crappy little curtain and we’re feeling good again.

  ‘Did you bring those croissants?’ he asks.

  Croissants, devilled kidneys and oysters: my dad’s three favourite foods.

  ‘Oh yeah. Six.’

  ‘Well, get them out then, Lou, what are you waiting for?’

  I ease the croissants from the top of the blue cool box that always travels with us and then I get the milk out and the two surprise-hit metal mugs that I bought one time when we were in New York together for Christmas with my American-Russian grandparents. And then I pour the teas in the way I’ve seen Dad do it a thousand times – holding the pot high as he thrusts the water down the spout, trying to make it hit the leaves hard on the way out so as to compensate for the fact that we’re pouring too early, which we always do. And now there’s the taste of tea and croissants and the sound of the sea on a pebbled shore someplace close by and an apricot morning light that is streaming in and showing up all the marks on the windscreen from all the thousands of miles we’ve done together.

  But we’re only about three way-too-hot sips into the Darjeeling when everyone around us in their off-road cars decides to start their off-road engines as if there is a sudden danger that the ferry might fuck right off without them and disappear for ever, taking France with it. And I’m shaking my head at Dad – like this always happens – and we’re both finding it pretty funny.

  So now we’ve got to gulp down the tea, burning our throats through to our lungs, so that we can get a stronger top-up from the pot, because really the second cup is what it’s always been about. And we’re cramming our croissants as if we’re three years o
ld like my nephews. And the next line along is already moving.

  ‘We better get weaving,’ he says.

  That’s one of his favourite words.

  And for a moment it feels like we are going on holiday after all.

  My father was born in Yorkshire in the last hours of Churchill’s wartime ministry; but he drank his first milk under Clement Atlee. So he likes to say. And every once in a while, despite the decades in London, you can still hear a previous England in his voice – the old timbers creaking beneath the rebuilds, the extensions, the facades.

  He was an only child. His father was from Yorkshire and owned a famous stonemason’s yard. He was locally renowned for his lettering but made most of his money overseeing the rebuilding of thousands of miles of dry-stone wall. My grandmother was a dressmaker from Lancaster. She, too, worked all her life and had a lucrative sideline, this time in making curtains. So the two of them were financially much better off than they ever pretended – especially by the end. But after Dad left his first wife for my mum, they cut him off and refused to speak to him.

  Thus my grandmother died estranged from her son. No time to change things or understand. I sometimes think about that. All of their life together, all of those hours raising a child and then suddenly a feud; then silence; not another word; for ever. I think my grandfather attempted some kind of a reconciliation with Dad, but he got Alzheimer’s and the end was messy and fraught and gruelling.

  I never met my father’s parents. Ralph and Jack remember them quite well though. They would go and play in the stoneyard beside their old house on the outskirts of Halifax. Ralph’s take is that they were absurdly proud, covertly cruel, small-hearted people – grudge-bearers, secretly miserable and afraid. Jack’s is that they were decent, determined, hard-working, law-abiding, scrupulously fair folk who found a way to get on and had no time for those who did not. I can’t be sure – I’ve seen pictures of them in the 1950s and their world is unimaginable to me; the way they stand – awkward with the camera and unable to smile because (so they seem to want to say) a smile has to be earned. When I was little and Dad was teaching me things – the planets, the map of the world, the history of Europe – he used to make out that he was the last living embodiment of the Wars of the Roses. But now he says that even those echoes are fading and that Britain is a story that people no longer know how to write.