A Spot Of Bother

18

George was fitting the window frames. There were six courses above the sill on either side. Enough brickwork to hold them firm. He spread the mortar and slotted the first one into place.

In truth it wasn’t just the flying. Holidays themselves were not much further up George’s list of favorite occupations. Visiting amphitheaters, walking the Pembrokeshire coast path, learning to ski. He could see the rationale behind these activities. One grim fortnight in Sicily had been made almost worthwhile by the mosaics at Piazza Armerina. What he failed to comprehend was packing oneself off to a foreign country to lounge by pools and eat plain food and cheap wine made somehow glorious by a view of a fountain and a waiter with a poor command of English.

They knew what they were doing in the Middle Ages. Holy days. Pilgrimages. Canterbury and Santiago de Compostela. Twenty hard miles a day, simple inns and something to aim for.

Norway might have been OK. Mountains, tundra, rugged shorelines. But it had to be Rhodes or Corsica. And in summer to boot, so that freckled Englishmen had to sit under awnings reading last week’s Sunday Times while the sweat ran down their backs.

Now that he thought about it, he had been suffering from heat stroke during the visit to Piazza Armerina and most of what he recalled about the mosaics was from the stack of postcards he’d bought in the shop before retiring to the hire car with a bottle of water and a pack of ibuprofen.

The human mind was not designed for sunbathing and light novels. Not on consecutive days at any rate. The human mind was designed for doing stuff. Making spears, hunting antelope…

The Dordogne in 1984 was the nadir. Diarrhea, moths like flying hamsters, the blowtorch heat. Awake at three in the morning on a damp and lumpy mattress. Then the storm. Like someone hammering sheets of tin. Lightning so bright it came through the pillow. In the morning sixty, seventy dead frogs turning slowly in the pool. And at the far end something larger and furrier, a cat perhaps, or the Franzettis’ dog, which Katie was poking with a snorkel.

He needed a drink. He walked back across the lawn and was removing his dirty boots when he saw Jamie in the kitchen, dumping his bag and putting the kettle on.

He stopped and watched, the way he might stop and watch if there was a deer in the garden, which there was occasionally.

Jamie was a bit of a secretive creature himself. Not that he hid things. But he was reserved. Rather old-fashioned now that George came to think about it. Different clothes and hairstyle and you could see him lighting a cigarette in a Berlin alleyway, or obscured by steam on a station platform.

Unlike Katie, who didn’t know the meaning of the word reserved. The only person he knew who could bring up the subject of menstruation over lunch. And you still knew she was hiding things, things that were going to be dropped on you at random intervals. Like the wedding. Next week she would doubtless announce that she was pregnant.

Dear God. The wedding. Jamie must have come about the wedding.

He could do it. If Jamie wanted a double bed he would say the spare room was being used by someone else, and book him into an upmarket bed-and-breakfast somewhere. Just so long as George didn’t have to use the word boyfriend.

He came round from his reverie and realized that Jamie was waving from inside the kitchen and looking a little troubled by George’s lack of response.

He waved back, removed his other boot and went inside.

“What brings you to this neck of the woods?”

“Oh, just popping in,” said Jamie.

“Your mother didn’t mention anything.”

“I didn’t ring.”

“Never mind. I’m sure she can stretch lunch to three.”

“It’s OK. I wasn’t planning on staying. Tea?” asked Jamie.

“Thank you.” George got the digestives out while Jamie put a bag into a second mug.

“So. This wedding,” said Jamie.

“What about it?” asked George, trying to sound as if the subject had not yet occurred to him.

“What do you think?”

“I think…” George sat down and adjusted the chair so that it was precisely the right distance from the table. “I think you should bring someone.”

There. That sounded pretty neutral as far as he could tell.

“No, Dad,” said Jamie, wearily. “I mean Katie and Ray. What do you think about them getting married?”

It was true. There really was no limit to the ways in which you could say the wrong thing to your children. You offered an olive branch and it was the wrong olive branch at the wrong time.

“Well?” Jamie asked again.

“To be honest, I’m trying to maintain a Buddhist detachment about the whole thing to stop it taking ten years off my life.”

“But she’s serious, yeh?”

“Your sister is serious about everything. Whether she’ll be serious about it in a fortnight’s time is anyone’s guess.”

“But what did she say?”

“Just that they were getting married. Your mother can fill you in on the emotional side of things. I’m afraid I was stuck talking to Ray.”

Jamie put a mug of tea down in front of George and raised his eyebrows. “Bet that was a white-knuckle thrill ride.”

And there it was, that little door, opening briefly.

They had never done the father-son stuff. A couple of Saturday afternoons at Silverstone racetrack. Putting up the garden shed together. That was about it.

On the other hand, he saw friends doing the father-son stuff and as far as he could see it amounted to little more than sitting in adjacent seats at rugby matches and sharing vulgar jokes. Mothers and daughters, that made sense. Dresses. Gossip. All in all, not doing the father-son stuff probably counted as a lucky escape.

Yet there were moments like this when he saw how alike he and Jamie were.

“Ray is, I confess, rather hard work,” said George. “In my long and sorry experience,” he dunked a biscuit, “trying to change your sister’s mind is a pointless exercise. I guess the game plan is to treat her like an adult. Keep a stiff upper lip. Be nice to Ray. If it all goes pear-shaped in two years’ time, well, we’ve had some practice in that department. The last thing I want to do is to let your sister know that we disapprove, then have Ray as a disgruntled son-in-law for the next thirty years.”

Jamie drank his tea. “I’m just…”

“What?”

“Nothing. You’re probably right. We should let her get on with it.”

Jean appeared in the doorway bearing a basket of dirty clothes. “Hello, Jamie. This is a nice surprise.”

“Hi, Mum.”

“Well, here’s your second opinion,” said George.

Jean put the basket on the washing machine. “About what?”

“Jamie was wondering whether we should save Katie from a reckless and inadvisable marriage.”

“Dad…” said Jamie tetchily.

And this was where Jamie and George parted company. Jamie couldn’t really do jokes, not at his own expense. He was, to be honest, a little delicate.

“George.” Jean glared at him accusingly. “What have you been saying?”

George refused to rise to the bait.

“I’m just worried about Katie,” said Jamie.

“We’re all worried about Katie,” said Jean, starting to fill the washing machine. “Ray wouldn’t be my first choice, either. But there you go. Your sister’s a woman who knows her own mind.”

Jamie stood up. “I’d better be going.”

Jean stopped filling the washing machine. “You’ve only just got here.”

“I know. I should have phoned, really. I just wanted to know what Katie had said. I’d better be heading off.”

And he was gone.

Jean turned to George. “Why do you always have to rub him up the wrong way?”

George bit his tongue. Again.

“Jamie?” Jean headed into the hallway.

George recalled only too well how much he had hated his own father. A friendly ogre who found coins in your ear and made origami squirrels and who shrank slowly over the years into an angry, drunken little man who thought praising children made them weak and never admitted that his own brother was schizophrenic, and who kept on shrinking so that by the time George and Judy and Brian were old enough to hold him to account he had performed the most impressive trick of all by turning into a self-pitying arthritic figure too insubstantial to be the butt of anyone’s anger.

Perhaps the best you could hope for was not to do the same thing to your own children.

Jamie was a good lad. Not the most robust of chaps. But they got on well enough.

Jean returned to the kitchen. “He’s gone. What was that all about?”

“Lord alone knows.” George stood up and dropped his empty mug into the sink. “The mystery of one’s children is never-ending.”