As it happened, p.29
As It Happened, page 29
‘Been here long?’ stepping round the table, insisting Maddox rise to embrace him, clasping him to him, Maddox a broader, stockier figure, his brother, after breathing heartily beside his ear, sliding into his seat, beside the window, Maddox retaking his own: the attenuated features of his brother’s face, sharp, inquisitive, eagerly engaging: a bird of prey, a warning glint as he examined Maddox across the table, the face, Maddox reflected, behind the smile, evoking warmth, camaraderie, affection (disillusionment, too, the way things had gone).
‘Not very.’
‘I asked them to reserve it. Not always possible.’ Paul indicated the privileged space beside the window, signalling, as he did so, to the waitress who had greeted him coming in at the door, another waitress, however, approaching, offering each of them a menu, his brother detaining her, familiarly, with a hand on her arm, until the food was ordered, Paul, once she had gone, reinforcing the impression he hadn’t much time to lose. ‘How are you feeling?’ direct, to the point.
‘Nuts. Anxious. Other than that …’ his brother smiling, the youthful, at-one-time-Church-loving candour, the affectionate tyro (over sixty years of age) with little, if anything, left to lose, learn, control or dismember: the spiritual exorcist turned broker.
‘I’m pretty good,’ Paul said. ‘Rarely better,’ suggesting – promoting – an example his brother might follow: the tailored suit, the blue shirt collar, the red tie: a sombre presence behind a genially unaffected one. ‘I got your message from Cary’ (his wife). ‘She assumed it must be money. I told her not. Who’s paying for your therapy? Gerry? Charley? I hear good reports of her in the City. Your kids? It can’t be cheap.’
‘I was paying for it myself,’ he said. ‘I can afford it. For you, too, if you want in,’ his brother smiling, Maddox adding, ‘I’ve dropped it. Charley must have told you. I’m back on the National Health.’
‘Any good?’ His brother, having ordered a drink by signalling to a waiter across the room – familiarity, once more, in operation – received it, Maddox indicating his own – ordered while he was waiting – was only half consumed.
‘How do you measure these things? Every few weeks I see a psychiatrist. One day a week I attend a geriatric clinic. The place is clean. The food like school dinners. The staff kind. The other patients recessive, confused, terrified, incorrigibly defensive. Auschwitz at the back of most of their lives. At the back of mine, in a curious way, too. Don’t ask why. Peer support, or so it’s described. The reassurance which comes from the knowledge, it’s suggested, if not insisted, you’re not alone. Not alone,’ he carelessly repeated.
His brother was smiling (again): a lean, attentive face, focused, acute, unlike his own: something of their father’s asperity, his sensitivity; something of their Uncle Joseph’s ability to move enliveningly into and out of any world he chose. And something, too, of their mother’s nature: the school secretary (without whom the place couldn’t function) and Sunday School leader (at the Cathedral, during and after the war), Paul’s own religious curiosity encouraged and promoted by her: his catechism learnt by heart by the age of thirteen, recited in instalments each Sunday afternoon: his (curious) indifference to cars, or anything mechanical: his decision, challengingly announced, at the age of eighteen, to go into the Church (‘take up the priesthood, for God’s sake!’ their uncle’s ambiguous cry): an open-minded, free-thinking, apostolically inclined aspirant: an ability to deter (discomfort) evil in all its genially recognised forms. ‘What happened to the therapy?’
‘I married her.’ He smiled. ‘Almost. Your kind of thing.’ His brother was no longer living with his wife, to whom, however, he remained affectionately connected: his recent address, and telephone number, Maddox had had to get from her, his brother, as in the rest of his life, persistently on the move. ‘She’s being threatened by complainants to the Medical Council as a result.’
Paul, having taken his glass, drank deeply, put it back on the table – still retaining it, however, in his hand, a strangely disowning gesture. He frowned: presumably, his brother, having gone nuts once, could do so again. ‘Get another. There are lots around.’
‘And fuck her, too?’ this, no doubt, evidence of regression.
‘What’s she like?’
‘Likeable. Enigmatic.’ He added, ‘I scarcely know her. Probably,’ he went on, ‘she has the same problem.’
He realised, not for the first time, that his habit of wanting to discompose his brother, interrupting his rhythm, was to do with a familial disappointment that Paul had left the Church – left, that is, in as cavalier a fashion as he’d joined it: somewhere out there, amongst the tall, glass-fronted buildings, each implacably reflecting its neighbours, opaque to its own interiors, was the arena, banked by computers, where his brother ‘entertained’, the vocational view he took of his operations, work an ‘enlivenment’ in much the same way as the Church, at one time, had represented an ‘enlivenment’, too: what his brother had described as ‘an appropriate exchange: illusion in place of disillusion: what do you think?’
Paul, to this extent, represented the family, an element and projection of it: its aspirations towards a wider world: his father, his uncle, his mother, his sister – finally, of course, the aspirations of Maddox himself, roamer of the aesthetic seas. Above all, regarding his brother, he recalled their uncle’s advocacy of the same, Paul an extemporised version of himself (their uncle had never married, Paul, to this extent, in lieu of a son, his protégé), as disapproving of his ordination as he was exultant at his ‘reclamation’: ‘a winner, from now on, whatever he does.’
Only on his defection (from the Church) to a bank, then the Stock Exchange, finally to a merchant bank, had Maddox’s admiration of his younger brother faltered, something of the epicurean in his nature, implicit once, now conspicuously to the fore, as, indeed, there was, and had been, in their uncle’s (as there had been, too, in Viklund’s). Paul, after all, had ‘enjoyed’ the Church – in a curious way, had relished it – identifying it less with duty or vocation than good intentions, if not downright pleasure (the pleasure he spoke most frequently of as ‘doing as opposed to being good’, an antediluvian interpretation, to Maddox’s mind). Sermonising had appealed to him, the ritual of service, the giving and the celebration of the host, evidence of a theatrical appetite, one of which, inevitably, he had quickly tired (‘the same performance, I realise, every time: do forgive me’): his popularity amongst clergy and congregations alike (his invitations to speak at churches, high and low, across London), a strange fervour associated with such a genial, seemingly spiritual enterprise: the prospect, amounting to promise, of higher office: ‘the spiritual credential of our family’, in their father’s words, transferring its authenticity to the material credibility of a bank: ‘First time they’ve had an ex-pastor in the place, can’t fail,’ Paul had explained, consistent with his mission, ‘to do all of them some good.’
‘Money can’t be that bad, after all,’ their father had suggested, hiding his disappointment more efficaciously than his brother had concealed his jubilation. ‘Didn’t Doctor Johnson concede its acquisition an innocent amusement?’ the same innocence, or so it had seemed – perhaps the same gullibility – which had warranted and sustained, for a while, his brother’s ecclesiastical career, informing Paul’s conclusion: ‘the same mission, Matt, by different means.’
Distracted, Maddox turned his attention to the street, a process of abstraction setting in, Paul, in his turn, diverted by someone grasping his shoulder, looking up, indicating Maddox: ‘My art historian brother, Matt. Professor Emeritus by any other name,’ the stranger, on his way to an adjoining table, reaching across to shake Maddox’s hand, smiling, offering, on his part, ‘No mistaking the one with money,’ his brother’s laughter, effortless, light, infectious, almost singing (liturgical, Maddox concluded), his uncomplicated receptivity to others.
It was, he reflected, that Paul had remained, still was, a credential (an endorsement, of some sort) which he, Maddox, had always cherished (admired: looked up to: he had a weakness for uncomplicated people, seeing them, for one thing, as so unlike himself) – a registration of belief (in something) which, to a degree, he had always envied. Paul was ‘healthy’, open, accessible, Maddox, his brother (labouring under the epithet Mad Ox), was evidentially not: unhealthy, enclosed. Remote.
Watching Paul acknowledging figures at a nearby table, he realised, not for the first time, that his brother was charismatic. Previously he had assumed him to be merely remarkable: adaptable, resilient, vocationally inclined, much in his nature, since it elicited no problems, taken for granted. Closeness in a family, however, often precluded a broader look: something undoubtedly of their father in his nature, but, more demonstrably, of their uncle, the St Albans macaroon: ‘the singing signore’, as one of his friends had described him, the frequenter of theatres, clubs and bars ‘in town’, a dropper of names, a provider of vehicles – discounts, to their father’s horror, no problem, trade-in prices his ‘speciality’, many of their customers acquired on his London forays: ‘I go into town to work, not to play. Don’t let your father mislead you. Most of our custom comes London way. Ask Lucy (their mother). She knows what a good team we are,’ something of the Josephean efflorescence even more apparent in Paul as he grew older – particularly at that moment as his brother turned back to him, their uncle’s excitation evident in his face as well as his manner.
‘Quite a crew.’ His brother indicated the men he’d been speaking to. ‘Arseholes, in reality. You could walk through them in daylight and not know they were there,’ a new-found cynicism replacing the charm: was his brother on the point of giving up this ‘career’, too, the opportunities for doing as opposed to being good unequivocally reduced? ‘Money and more money,’ his brother was saying, signalling the room.
He wanted Paul to be happy: the protective care he had exercised over his brother at Quinians: Maddox Major, Maddox Minor – a label Paul, understandably, had resented and instinctively fought against, his quicksilver reaction to (almost) everything deriving from a subordinate attribution: to be happy, that is, just as Maddox had wanted their sister – their older sister, who had shared few of their privileges – to be content. Familial responsibility, he assumed, had always resided in him, the eldest son: art, the general consensus, had never been an adequate response: ‘engagement’ not commentary or analysis had always been their trade.
He was reminded at that moment – his brother now turned to speak to someone else who, confidingly, had crossed the restaurant to speak to him – of a curious incident which had occurred after their father had died.
Having heard the news from the hospital in St Albans, he had driven there the following morning and, before visiting his mother – ill as well, at home in bed – he had asked to see his father’s body.
There’d been a delay of a quarter of an hour: he was then directed down corridors to the back of the building where he was met by a man in a khaki overall. Taken into a room with chairs and no window, illuminated solely through plastic panels in the ceiling, he was again requested to wait, aware of movements beyond a further door.
Some moments later the overalled man had reappeared from the corridor outside and, indicating the door opposite, announced, peculiarly, that his father was ‘ready’. Half expecting him to be sitting in a chair, or lying on a bed, transparently alive, Maddox opened the door and went inside.
The room was even smaller than the one in which he had Waited: illumination, again, came from plastic panels in the ceiling. On a bier in the centre of the room his father lay beneath a shroud, its edge drawn up beneath his chin, his arms and hands laid across his chest. At each corner of the bier a candle burned.
His father’s eyes were closed, the features of his face, as the head itself, considerably shrunken, to the proportion, almost, of a child’s. The hands – he’d scarcely been aware of them in recent years, other than when he had watched him construct his bench – were curiously gnarled, as if having been engaged over a lifetime in manual labour: suffered, overused, exhausted, the backward curl of the thumb indicating, misleadingly (as with Viklund, he was reminded), someone of an exclusively practical nature.
It was the head, however, which absorbed him, the exaggerated feature of the nose, first in profile, then face on as, helplessly, not sure what he was doing, he circled the body. It was as if – the first impression he’d had on entering the room – his father were posing: at any moment he would rise and, in his usual, unstressed voice, enquire, ‘How was that? Was it how it should be? Was I all right? What do you think?’ as he might after a demonstration run in the new model of a car. ‘Will they be pleased?’ followed by an invitation to come home with him.
He hadn’t been sure, at that point, what he was thinking or what he should do. Almost mechanically, he had lowered his head and kissed his father’s brow: its coldness, its hardness, like a piece of stone, had appalled him: nothing he associated with his father was there at all: something strange, inanimate, something unrecognisable, had, alarmingly, taken his place.
Moments later, unable to decide what he felt, he found himself walking round the bier, wringing his hands and enquiring, ‘What shall I do now?’ a surprising question, and a surprisingly piteous voice, not his at all, he no more aware of where it, or the question, had come from than he was of what had prompted him to come here in the first place. Tears, conspicuously absent when he’d first arrived, were running into his mouth, his voice, such as it was, repeating the startling question, that part of his mind aware of what was happening standing back appalled.
It was a denatured presence that had come out of the room, wiping its tears on the back of its hand, insufficiently composed even to take out a handkerchief: something more urgent had taken over. He had come to the hospital not to see his father, or even, however pressingly, to say goodbye, but to bring him back (take him home); the finality of what he had seen had severed everything he had previously, however tenuously, considered to be ‘himself’: a warm and receptive part of him had been wrenched out: whatever it represented, it had been left on the bier, the candle-lit, over-illuminated – artificially illuminated – windowless room a place from which all he had known of life, of affection, all he had known of nature, all he had known of art, had been removed: nothing, he had concluded at that moment, was worth the living.
Now he was looking at a refined version of those features, animated by impatience and displeasure: his brother, his last distraction gone, had turned his attention back to the table.
As the food was eaten he talked about his job, the people he worked with, enquired after his nephews: ‘I tried to get Charlie in on the racket. He wouldn’t have it. Said he was onto better. “Television is a vacuum,” he said, “you can have a hell of a good time filling it.” That boy will go far. He’s got a lot of Joseph in him. No universals, only chance,’ his tone not unlike that of their uncle. ‘So what is the prognosis?’ he asked finally. ‘They’ve taken you off the anti-psychotic medication and put you onto an anti-depressant. Is that progress or regression? Is it doing any good?’
‘It takes a while to have effect,’ he said. ‘On the whole,’ he went on, anxious to reassure him, ‘I’m very much better. I tried several,’ he added, ‘before settling on this one. At one point, with one of them, I thought I was dying. Not any longer.’ He smiled, in illustration. ‘I’m much improved.’
Once again, the image of his father returned, and once again he dispersed it by focusing on his brother.
‘You’re not short of money.’
‘Why do you equate everything with poverty?’ he asked.
‘It is, for some,’ Paul said. ‘You couldn’t have made much as a teacher, for instance. Even a professor. How much was it worth?’
‘Enough,’ he said.
‘Is the underlying problem us?’ he suddenly enquired, flinching, visibly, and adding, ‘We had a good childhood. Quinians. Lots of people got sent away.’
‘Sure.’
‘It can’t be that.’
‘Did you have a bad time at Quinians,’ Maddox said, ‘looking back?’
‘You were always there to look after me. After you left,’ he waved his hand, ‘I floated.’
It was the gesture alone that suggested unease: his brother was eating quickly: he had, presumably, somewhere else to go (something else to do, someone else to see). Already others were leaving the restaurant. He waved to the waiter for another drink. ‘You?’ he enquired, Maddox shaking his head. ‘I’m supposed to be off alcohol with the medication.’ He indicated his glass. ‘Water,’ he said to the waiter. ‘Still.’
‘If it’s not psychological, what do you think it is, assuming psychological means anything?’ his brother said.
‘Biological. But what’s biological? Electrical. Chemical. Hormonal.’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing unusual. Uncomfortable, perhaps. Difficult to acknowledge. No one likes to admit they’re nuts. Not even doctors like to diagnose it. Not least if they’re afflicted by it themselves. The stress is on how well you are. Trying to impersonate someone who knows what’s going on is a significant part of the battle.’
‘Why you?’ He examined Maddox intently, coldly, almost ruthlessly, defences of a sort, Maddox concluded, in place. ‘Why not me? Or Sarah? Why weren’t our parents nuts? What’s so special, or so inadequate, it should happen to you?’
