I rather wish he hadn’t, but our young Australian
houseguest reminded me at dinner last night that the longest day is fast
approaching. He comes from near Adelaide, where night falls comparatively
early, even in the height of the summer. As part of his grand tour of Europe,
he has spent a couple of days on Skye, where the sun barely sets.
June is racing by in a frenzy of activity. I’m ticking
off landmarks with depressing rapidity. Last week, old friends from London flew
into our nearby white-elephant airport and we watched Rafael Nadal stroll
through another men’s final at Roland Garros. It doesn’t seem long ago that I
was watching a profile of two young great white hopes, due to play each other
in their first French Open: Nadal v Gasquet. We all know what happened to the
boy from the Balearics with the winning smile and the humungous biceps. And
some will know what happened to the mercurial Gasquet, who never quite got his
act together – despite his imperious backhand.
The clay-court shenanigans are over for another year.
Meanwhile, nearer to home, our magnificent front-of-house rose, which still
stubbornly refuses to reach the first-floor balcony, is in full bloom. It was
The Daughter’s hope that she would be back home for the summer to see it in its
pomp, but already it’s heavy with flower and bowed from the onslaught of all
this unseasonable rain. Despite all the banana skins I have laid by its stem
and despite all the stones I have spread to stop Myrtle peeing in its vicinity,
the leaves are beginning once more to turn from a succulent green to a
black-spotted yellow.
All is not lost, though. The climbing rose that we
planted out back a mere three years ago is invading the side terrace. Every
time I open the door, its perfume pervades the air, alive with the activity of
bees that have thus far managed to survive the poisons of Big Aggro-Chemical.
With luck and a fair headwind, the kid should be back in time to catch its
grace and majesty.
Attack of the 50ft climbing rose |
Her first academic year, the year
of torture, is over. For all the desperate telephone calls and the familiar
congenital plaints of I am not worthy, nor gifted enough, she waltzed
through her ‘jury’ and came out top of her class. So she has committed herself
to textile design and booked another two years, which means that her father
will have to roll up his sleeves and commit himself to Work with a serious
capital W. She’s enjoying some time off for good behaviour at present in the
form of a stay oop north with her grandma. She stopped off to see her
friend Alice, who’s finishing her first year at Leeds University. Tilley had
more fun in two days in that dour Yorkshire city than she did in a whole year
of gay Paree. I just seem to get on so much more easily with English
people, she told me apologetically on the phone.
So, very soon it will be Wimbledon. They’re already in
training for grass at the Queen’s Club. Before that: cometh my father’s 86th
birthday. He survived his operation thanks to the miracles of modern-day
keyhole surgery. When I went to see him the following day at Southampton
General, he was sitting up in bed looking chipper and explaining the procedure
to my brother-in-law. I can’t even attempt to explain how they send their
cameras and surgical equipment up through an artery and then fiddle, cut and
stitch – or whatever it is they do – any more than I can get my head around the
concept of storing music and photographs on a chip the size of a sliver.
Suffice to say that he told me before I left for home that he felt fine – apart
from a bruised bladder and a blocked bowel.
Subsequently, his wound – tiny
enough – has started to weep. It’s nothing serious, but it means that one of my
already hard-pressed sisters has to take him regularly to the local health
centre for a change of dressing. Which means leaving my mother alone while he’s
gone. She did her fair share of weeping while I was serving my time at
Punishment Park. It’s bizarre how dementia befuddles your thoughts. At times, I
found her wandering lost and confused on the first-floor landing, wondering
perhaps where her ‘brother’ was and not knowing her eldest son from Adam. At
other times, we would sit and have the kind of easy, intimate, natural
conversations that I’ve never before been able to have with her. Up until those
surprising four days of close proximity, I’d never quite managed to equate the
woman I once described in a moment of frustration and rage as a psychological
terrorist with the charming, entertaining and humorous woman that both my
wife and my best friend have described to me. It’s as if the turmoil in her
head prevents her continuing the uneasy role of ‘mother’ and she has reverted
to her core being.
In moments of terrible lucidity,
she would look into my eyes and ask me, Am I going mad? or They’re
not going to put me in the loony bin, are they? Like George Washington, I
cannot tell a lie. Yet I found myself skirting the issue in the manner of a
seasoned politician and dwelling on the facts of short-term memory loss. But
you know that she knows. Several times she told me sincerely that she wanted to
die and, after nearly 85 years on earth as a card-carrying timorous worry-wart,
you can understand why she must feel worn out by the strain of it all. And if
they – or we – put her in the loony bin, then she surely will die. My father
told me on his hospital bed that he missed her. Realistically, though, he is
ill equipped to cope with someone so unwittingly demanding. Inevitably, the
family talk is not happy-talk. It’s all about carers and sheltered
accommodation and mobilising resources to keep someone alive who would really
much rather pop her clogs.
I’m back at home now and for the
time being I can simulate my filial duty by Skype. The perils, irony and
sadness of old age aren’t something that our young Australian back-packer needs
to worry about. He’s flush with the energy and optimism of youth, and looking
forward to getting back to his family and fiancé in South Australia after all
the weeks of his Grand Tour of Europe. He’s due to marry his sweetheart named
Tegan in October and is talking already of two children and playing with them
in a garden while he’s still young enough.
Cade by rose |
Cade
is a devotee of Grand Designs, who’s bought the book, the t-shirt and
the DVD. He’s watched our programme, he tells me, about 30 times and he has
vague plans of building a home for his family-to-be in straw. So he contacted
Debs by e-mail and asked cheekily if he could come and see us while flitting
around Europe. We like cheeky individuals in this house, particularly with
dollops of youthful charm. How can you refuse such chutzpah? Debs proposed a
deal of dinner, bed and breakfast and a starter-pack tutorial for some nominal
charge – and then departed for England. Dinah Washington would surely have been
mad about the boy and I know that I’m even now far too fond of him to
raise the matter of filthy lucre.
For
one so young, he’s sorted his life out with enviable clarity. He’s already
raised the money to buy two houses to let in the environs of Adelaide and
already learned that time is more precious than money. On the back balcony over
a protracted breakfast this morning, he sketched his plans to pay off the loans
before term and start building the modest family home of his dreams with the
profit.
I’ll take him down to the station,
so he can catch his train to Paris and thence, early tomorrow morning
(charmingly), to Luxembourg. I’m tickled pink because I’ve never met anyone in
my life before who actually wanted to visit Luxembourg. I’ve made him promise
to e-mail me his impressions of the principality.
In return, I’ll give him a signed copy of my book that was remaindered before it brought me my fortune, and forgive him the indiscretion of reminding me that the 21st June is just around the corner.
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