Shuttlecock

[19]

Another Wednesday. The evenings are getting longer. Under the cedar tree, on the bench, in the hospital grounds, I had this feeling of calm, of refuge. I was safe here. As the sun sets, the red bricks of the hospital walls start to glow; the windows gleam like copper. You do not have to put yourself at risk at all or endanger anything if you never make a move.

For a long time I sat beside Dad, as silent and as still as he was, and I thought: this could go on for ever. Sometimes I wonder what I am more afraid of: of Dad never breaking his silence, or of his suddenly speaking.

I don’t know why this weight lay on my tongue, which only a while before, on my drive down, had been itching with questions. It is easy to frame questions when you know there will be no answers. I wanted to say to him: what does the name Debreuil mean to you? Tell me about Z. Tell me. Yet what I wanted to ask, even more than this, was: What happened, Dad, in the Château Martine? Did they torture you? But I didn’t. I sat in silence several minutes more. It seemed to me we were like two weights on a balance, a swaying see-saw, precariously poised. And then I said: ‘I have got some news, Dad. I am going to be promoted. Quinn told me. Have I told you about my boss Quinn?’

Sometimes Dad is so still and sits so rigidly, it seems that if I touched him with the tip of my finger and gave just a slight push, he would topple, slowly and ponderously, onto the grass.

When I left the hospital the calm feeling still hung around me, though it slowly wore off, so that as I drove through Sutton and Morden I started to look in the driving mirror to see if I was being followed (a new habit), and my tongue started to itch again to ask those questions I had meant to ask Dad. As I neared home it was itching even more, though not to ask questions — to shout at Marian and the kids.

You know those surprisingly long, light evenings in early summer, when lilacs bloom in gardens and even in such mundane and humdrum places as Sutton and Morden a breath of peace seems to hang in the air as if it were really hanging over some wide, virgin landscape. On the way home I took a detour towards Wimbledon. I drove up to the golf course and pulled up in the car-park by the club-house. It was the sort of lingering end to the day (long shadows, a faint breeze, a sweet scent to the turf) which golfers must love. The light was beginning to fade but I could see several figures still, in coloured sweaters and flapping trousers, out on the fairways. The lights were on in the club-house and the doors open. I could hear a babble of voices. Someone was talking loudly about the price of property. The car-park had been enlarged and an extension added to the club-house since the days I remembered. Several members were already leaving to go home, jingling car-keys with a satisfied air and shouting sarcasms to friends across the gravel. It didn’t seem that their plummy, somewhat hollow voices were the equivalent of the voices I had heard when I was a boy, but perhaps they were.

I went into the club-house. There were men with reddened faces and cigars sitting at the bar. They looked at me suspiciously. The barman looked at me suspiciously too. Against one of the walls was a glass-fronted cabinet containing silver cups and plates and, fixed to the wall, polished wooden boards recording the winners of annual tournaments and competitions. The names went back over thirty years. Amongst them, appearing in one instance (’55–’57), three times in succession, was Dad’s name. But there was no name with the initials A. L. Not a winner, I thought. I could say to the men with cigars, like some hard-talking detective, Which ones of you knew Prentis? Did anyone here know Z? (Why is it that the questions fail you when you most think they will lead somewhere?) The barman was still looking at me curiously. I said: ‘It’s all right, I’m looking for someone — not here,’ and turned to the door.

I loitered a little while at the edge of the car-park. Golf courses, like commons, try to marry wildness with civility. Dusk was falling. The sweatered figures were trailing in across the grass, like returning hunters, with their trolleys and bags. As the light faded the clumps of birches and hawthorns seemed to loom more definitely, and then only the little fluorescent marker-flags stood out, like sentinels, on the greens.

It kept ringing in my mind, as if, were I to turn round, they would all be standing there: ‘Arthur, Arthur.’

The figures drew near and I could hear their breathy, invigorated voices.

Wwwhack! Wwwhack!