Precious Lives Read online

  All this, then, was the background to his usual avoidance of going to the infirmary or ever admitting he felt ill. But go he had to, on this occasion, with much sighing and muttering to the kindly Nixons about how his father had died there, his mother had died there, his wife had died there, and if anyone thought he was going to stop in there they had another think coming. He did not, however, need to stop in. The orthopaedic surgeon, who saw him in the fracture clinic, said he had a fracture of his distal third of ulna (‘Double Dutch,’ my father commented) and put it in plaster, but not a full-arm plaster. A below-the-elbow plaster was not ideal for his injury but in view of his age it was considered advisable. All my father cared about was getting out ‘in one piece’, as he put it.

  Once home, he set himself to manage with one hand, thinking up all kinds of ingenious methods of continuing to do all the things he usually did. He wanted no social workers ‘prying’. To all concerned, he gave the standard answer – ‘I’m managing grand.’ Maybe he wouldn’t have managed if my sister hadn’t come to help at first – to be greeted with: ‘What are you doing here? I didn’t send for you.’ No, but she’d deduced the situation from a telephone call and decided to come. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you can make yourself useful and finish planting my gladioli.’ She planted the flowers and then some vegetables and then she went home and we came up, conveniently, for our usual summer stay at Loweswater. Panic over.

  By the time the day came for him to have the plaster taken off he’d become positively fond of the outpatients’ department. He’d been there three times, to have his plaster checked, and was supremely confident by 12 June, loving the fact that he knew exactly where to go and what to do and what would happen. I was directed by him as though I couldn’t read a notice or follow the evidence of my own eyes and, for a man renowned for being incapable of queuing, he settled down almost patiently when we reached the area where we had to wait to be called. I saw his eyes darting about, taking everything in, and though he initiated no conversation with the people either side of us (that would have been lowering his standards too far) he nodded when spoken to and managed to acknowledge various pleasantries.

  I went in with him to watch him have his plaster taken off. I didn’t want to, but he clearly thought he was offering me a treat so I had to accept. The doctor was a young woman. My father concentrated on her left hand. Confronted with any woman, he always subjected the third finger of her left hand to minute inspection: ring, or not? The doctor was not wearing a ring. I knew this would be commented on later and that it would be pointless telling him that the lack of an engagement or wedding ring did not necessarily signify what he thought it did.

  ‘How are you, then, Mr Forster?’ the doctor asked (pronouncing his name as ‘Foster’).

  ‘There’s an “r” in it,’ my father said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘There’s an “r” in Forster,’ my father said, pronouncing it as ‘Foster’, as he always did, just as the doctor had done, without sounding the ‘r’. My mother was forever telling him that if he wanted the wretched ‘r’ pronounced then he had to pronounce it himself. He never did, though he expected others to do so.

  The doctor kindly didn’t point this out. She smiled and apologised and got on with her job.

  ‘We’ll soon have this off,’ she said; ‘then you’ll be as right as rain.’

  ‘You hope,’ said my father.

  His wrist, his whole forearm, emerging from the plaster looked so frail, so desperately fragile, but he flexed his long, knobbly fingers strongly enough and the doctor was admiring. She said he would have to be careful, not to do too much with his right hand for a while, not to lift anything heavy or grip anything too tightly. The wrist would feel weak and there was bound to be some stiffness and loss of mobility at first, and some slight pain, but the fracture had mended remarkably well, which it often did not do in elderly people. To this my father said, ‘I’m ninety-two’ (though he was not, not until December). The doctor exclaimed that she couldn’t believe he was a day past eighty and he smirked. He loved confounding people with his great age.

  ‘Come back if there are any problems,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Oh, I won’t be coming back here,’ my father said. ‘No fear of that.’

  I couldn’t imagine how he could say that, but he was absolutely convinced he would never need to visit the infirmary again. His accident, the injury to his wrist, was merely an aberration, never to be repeated. He didn’t even think about the possibility of this being the beginning of a whole sequence of calamities – no, it was the end. He’d made a silly mistake in allowing his wrist to be fractured and he would not make it again. On 15 June, three days after the plaster was removed, he was back in the garden, tidying it up. He walked carefully round the spot where he had tripped up (it was now precisely marked and cursed for ever), trailing his rake behind him. I sat on the bench and watched. He raked a flower bed, using his right hand without any care not to grip the rake too tightly, and whistled. He was home, back in his garden, back in his routine. He had survived. He might put nothing into words but his buoyancy after this wrist episode was visible: life was good again. It might be a battle, but then life had always been seen by him as a battle above all else, and the point was he was still winning. He had no intention of, or desire to, lay down his arms and surrender to old age and fractures and, ultimately, death.

  But the next year, his ninety-third, saw a definite change in attitude. With it came the first hint of boredom with his life, imperceptible initially and then registered reluctantly. It was the garden that started it. On 11 March, he cut the grass front and back for the first time in the season and found it ‘heavy going’, as he dolefully recorded in his diary. It depressed him to have to acknowledge this. Then when he went to town the next day, he wrote afterwards, ‘Glad to get home. A. so-so.’ He struggled on, but preparing the ground for his usual vegetables and bedding plants became harder and harder. It distressed him to look about his garden and see the state it was in with the growing season not yet really begun. Weeds everywhere, soil not turned over, shrubs straggly … suddenly he was overwhelmed by the size of it. He couldn’t keep up. Nature was getting ahead of him, everything was getting out of hand and he didn’t know what to do. Mr Nixon was very kind and had taken over the trimming of the hedges, but he couldn’t, and didn’t want to, depend on Mr Nixon any more than he already did. He didn’t want to depend on anyone – what kind of life would that be? A little of this worry seeped through into our phone conversations but whenever I said I’d hire a gardener to help him, dared to suggest it, he’d bellow, ‘No! I’m not starting that game. I’ll manage.’

  Pride was saved by my nephew Simon, my brother-in-law Johnny’s son, aged twenty-three and temporarily living back home in Rockcliffe, near Carlisle. He would go twice a week and do the heavy work, and I would pay him, but my father need never know that. He was fond of telling us how, when he was a lad, young folk had helped old folk (and he tolerated no cynicism about the reality of this) and he would see nothing suspect about a young man coming voluntarily to help him garden, especially one he’d known since he was born. ‘At a loose end, is he?’ he said when I tentatively mentioned Simon’s willingness to garden for him. ‘Send him along, then, and I’ll find something for him to do.’ If he was playing a game, my father played it convincingly. Simon, anyway, fully understood the delicacy of the situation and responded accordingly. He had actually never gardened in his life and hadn’t the first idea what to do, but he was strong, willing and, most important of all, quite happy to accept my father’s orders without question. He did what he was told how he was told. And he was not a chatterer. If asked a direct question, he replied, but he asked none himself, which was entirely to my father’s liking. The two of them would have a break, sitting on the bench in the garden, and say virtually nothing to each other for the twenty minutes it lasted. These sessions gave new meaning to the phrase ‘companionable silence’. Sometimes my fathe
r would fish a pound out of his pocket and send Simon to the nearest shop to buy a coke for himself and some beer for him. While Simon was with him in the garden he felt secure enough to garden and firmly believed he was doing most of the work himself. After the grass was cut for the last time on 25 October, Simon wasn’t needed any more. Gardening was effectively over. He’d made it, another summer was over.

  This was when ‘Nothing Doing’ began to be the standard entry in his diary. The winter approached and again and again he recorded ‘Nothing Doing. Dark Soon. Long Day.’ Not even the weather seemed worth describing in all the previously enthusiastic detail. A lot of sorting went on – ‘Sorted Garage’ … ‘Sorted Drawers’ – but not much else. He’d had to stop taking his daily walk to Denton Holme, unless a neighbour gave him a lift there and back, because he couldn’t manage the whole distance and getting on and off the bus had become too perilous. He shuffled along instead to the Spar grocery at the end of his road and made of this a new routine. He couldn’t make it to the cemetery any more so there were no more Sunday visits to my mother’s grave. Going to town was out of the question, even given a lift. Mrs Nixon kindly got him anything he wanted from there. All his beloved routines, in fact, had either been wrecked or severely trimmed. He was restless and frustrated and, worst of all, bored. Even watching television had palled – ‘Rubbish On’, he wrote, and ‘Bad TV’. And ‘the blood’ was back as a worry. On 28 April he referred to it mysteriously in his diary as ‘A. had A Loss. But OK’. This ‘loss’ was of blood and it scared him. He was very much afraid that blood in his urine was a sinister sign and that it signified something rather more serious than a fractured wrist. But he didn’t consult his doctor. He waited to see if this ‘loss’ would be repeated. It wasn’t, to his relief, reinforcing his belief that if abnormalities were ignored they would go away.

  But what didn’t go away was this new boredom. Suddenly, he actively wanted visitors, to break up the monotony. Visitors, of course, had always been mere irritations. While my mother was alive, he had had to put up with them for her sake. Visitors were liked by women and he accepted that. But once she’d died, and he had discouraged them, he’d cut the few social contacts he had had other than his family. Now he wanted them restored. He was even aggrieved that these ties had been severed, forgetting he’d done the severing himself.

  ‘I don’t know what’s happened to Mrs G——’ he said. ‘She hasn’t come near for years.’

  ‘And how often have you been to see her?’ I asked smartly.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘How often have you visited her?’ I repeated.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ he said, angrily.

  ‘It isn’t daft. She’s a widow, she likes visitors too, a bit of company, but you never think of visiting her, you just expect her to visit you.’

  ‘I never said that. I just said she hadn’t been near for ages.’

  ‘Well, I’m telling you why. Visiting is a two-way affair. You can’t expect visitors if you don’t visit. It’s no good wanting them if you give no sign you want them.’

  ‘I don’t want them. I never said I did.’

  But he did want them. Complaining that he had no visitors was the only way he could bring himself to admit it. It was a weakness he’d never experienced before and he found that recognising it was uncomfortable. He decided it was his right, as a very old man, to be visited and in his head he began compiling a black list of those who, in his opinion, were failing in their duty. It infuriated him to learn that one nephew had had the audacity to drive through Carlisle on his way to Scotland and had not visited him. ‘Scandalous,’ he said. But when one cousin, also just on her way through Carlisle, this time on a long and tiring drive south, did make the effort to call, he was furious because her visit was so short. ‘Twelve minutes!’ he roared that night on the telephone. ‘Twelve minutes, that’s all she warmed the seat for! Haven’t seen her for ten years and she turns up without a by-your-leave and stops twelve bloomin’ minutes. Wasn’t worth opening the door.’ I asked if he’d offered his visitor a cup of tea. ‘Tea?’ he echoed. ‘I’m ninety-three.’

  Where once the ringing of the doorbell had enraged him, he now longed for it to ring. A phone call a day from one of us wasn’t enough human contact. He wanted someone to keep him company on the long, dark, wet winter days, though on his terms. His two most faithful visitors were my brother-in-law, Johnny, and Marion’s husband, Jeff. Both popped in as often as they could. Neither ever received any noticeable signs of welcome. ‘Oh, it’s you at last,’ he’d say. ‘I wondered where you’d got to.’ Mrs Nixon began coming in for half an hour or so in the afternoon on weekdays, bringing with her a piece of delicious home-made cake, or a scone, for his tea, but very quickly she’d created out of her kindness a trap for herself. In no time at all he began to regard her visits as obligatory and she got the same kind of response as Johnny and Jeff if she failed to come – ‘Where have you been, then? I waited for you all afternoon; didn’t know what had happened.’ When I tried to suggest maybe he was expecting too much of Mrs Nixon, who might after all have her own life to lead, he maintained, ‘She likes to watch the racing on my TV. I don’t mind – keeps her happy.’ Poor Mrs Nixon was forced into feelings of guilt if she did not visit him every day and any remonstrations on my part were greeted scornfully with ‘She’s got nothing better to do’ by my father.

  Going into 1994, there was no more cheerful talk of just popping off. Instead, a siege mentality was setting in. He announced now that he was ‘hanging on’ and, as ever, ‘managing’, but the old defiance had gone. He wasn’t as sure of himself, though there was still no suggestion that he wished he were dead – absolutely not. Nor was there any mention of possibly having to give up his own home. If he thought about this, he never confessed it. The game was one of stoicism, as it perhaps always had tended to be, though never played in such difficult circumstances. Whereas my mother had endlessly wished aloud to die, my father never did, not even now, at the mighty age of ninety-three. Such talk he rated as daft. It was pointless wishing to be dead. Your time would come when it came and that was that. It irritated him when my mother, or anyone else, wished for their own end. It was morbid and ridiculous. Death would come soon enough, they could count on that, so they should shut up.

  By May 1994, he was frequently jotting down, ‘A. off colour’. He could do even less gardening than the year before, but that summer he had Anthony to help. Anthony was a proper gardener, trained at an agricultural college, a farmer’s son who lived near us at Loweswater and whom I’d discovered was currently going into Carlisle twice a week to study for another A-level. He was only too pleased to stop off at my father’s and earn a bit of money helping. At first, my father was wary – this was no Simon, he knew nothing about Anthony – but after the boy’s first afternoon he was thrilled. Anthony was apparently a wonder to behold, knowing everything there was to know about every aspect of gardening. He worked so hard and to such purpose my father was amazed to find himself telling the lad to slow down, there was another day coming. Like Simon, Anthony was not talkative but he was amiable and polite and took enquiries of the ‘Are you courting?’ variety good-humouredly. My father was intrigued by him – it was odd how, for a man so unsociable, he liked to find out about strangers if he could do it over a period of time and in his own way. They, naturally, were not allowed the same liberties with him. Anyone trying to find out anything about my father had always been given short shrift. But Anthony, not surprisingly, had no desire to cross-examine my father and came and went without any need to establish any but the most professional of relationships. He regarded my father as a character and left it at that.

  So did most people, and my father liked the role. He certainly had no pretensions to being thought of instead as a wise old man. Old age, in his own opinion, had brought him no automatic wisdom. I once asked him if he thought he was wiser as an old man than he had been as a young man, and he said no, the world still made a monkey out of him.
He’d worked hard and kept his nose clean and it had done him no good at all. Politics were beyond him and by then he was quite happy that this should be so. All politicians were out for their own good. When I protested that this wasn’t true and cited examples he was derisive. ‘Nelson Mandela? I’ll tell you what, he likes his suits, cost a pretty penny of somebody’s money.’ It was no good reacting to this with anger or by trying to disprove the insinuation – my father was entirely cynical about the great and good. Nobody, in his twisted opinion, was ever motivated by the common good. ‘Mother Teresa? She gets a rake-off somewhere along the line, likely.’