Half in Love
There was no denying it: Polly's father was dying at a very inconvenient time. For weeks, she had been organising her family's survival during her absence. Other mothers seemed to manage week-ends or even weeks away, blithely going off for holidays in Paris or Prague, conferences in New York or health spas in the countryside, but she had spent thirteen years without a break. Now, she had no choice. A supermarket delivery ordered on the internet would come when things were due to run out. Polly had cooked and frozen several meals which only needed to be reheated, instructed Theo on which route to take when driving the children to school and practised taking them back on the bus.
"You don't have to do this," said her daughter, crossly. "I'm not some teeny-weeny ickle cry-baby girl like you were."
"You might think that now, but you're only eleven. You might find it a bit more confusing than you think, when you're on your own," Polly answered.
Her departure had to be organised with military precision. She had chosen flights which coincided with a dip in her work-load, shuffling cases around and toiling at week-ends in order to make four days free. She had marked her absence on calendars, and in emails, so that everyone from her colleagues to her cleaner knew when she would be gone. Even so, Theo reacted with horror when it finally dawned on him that she would be gone the following week.
"What? But I'm flying to Germany on Wednesday for a very important meeting! Can't you cancel it?"
"No, I'm afraid not," said Polly. "My father is dying, you see."
Theo had got her to have a Caesarian section when their first child was due to be born in order to fit in with his schedule, and had then taken only half a day of paternity leave. He had an important job as a lawyer in the City; Polly's job, as a part-time solicitor, always had to make way for his, and for the children's needs. She felt like one of those flat-fish that live on the bottom of the ocean, whose eyes have moved to the same side of its head.
"You need to come out and see him," her mother told her, with uncharacteristic insistence.
"It's not easy to jump on a plane at the drop of a hat, you know."
"Yes, it is. Just do it, Polly. You won't have much longer."
Polly's parents had retired to the South of France.
"I'm fed up with my country," Ben said. "It's become a nasty, noisy, impatient place. People here still have time to smell the flowers and listen to the birds sing."
They loved life in Provence. It wasn't just the sun, which warmed their increasingly arthritic bones; it was living close to nature, on the wild, rocky hills. Sarah was a passionate gardener, and Ben a bird-watcher. Sometimes, Ben would ring his daughter just to tell her about the birds he had seen on walks: not just ordinary birds, but thrilling buzzards circling over the valley, white barn owls, and the invisible, trilling nightingales that haunted the woods below.
"Listen, darling, can you hear it singing?" he would ask on summer nights; and faintly, Polly could hear the distant bubbling melody.
But it is one thing to retire to France at sixty-five, and another at nearly eighty; and one thing to live in a holiday home during the summer, and another to live in it during winter. The bitter cold of their mas was barely dented by open fires, the only source of heating because Sarah refused to get central heating.
"I like the smell of wood-smoke," she would say. "People survived for centuries like this, and besides, it's bad for the furniture. It's like all this nonsense about hygiene; no wonder children have so many allergies."
Slowly, between holidays, Polly and her sister had watched their father dwindle. He had been a tall, strong, Vikingly man, but now they were taller than he was. He became a wheezing voice on the telephone, saying tremulously,
"I do love you so much, my darling. I think about you all the time."
"I love you too, Pa."
He never asked her to visit; he knew that, unlike Lucy, she had more commitments, but Polly tried. She would bring the family over in the summer, something they never enjoyed quite as much as she hoped, because Tania and Robbie didn't understand how their high-pitched voices set his hearing-aid ringing. Now, though, she was on a plane, scudding over a miniature landscape sprinkled with snow. The Mistral was blowing. Icy winds tossed the olives so that their boughs streamed like disorderly silver hair, and the dark columnar cypress stooped submissively before each blast.
"How is he?" Polly asked, kissing her mother at the airport.
"So-so. He has better days and worse days."
"Is the cancer still growing?"
"Inevitably. But we muddle on."
Sarah always looked so well-organised that it was a shock to re-enter the house, and see the usual mess, dirt and dinginess.
"Hasn't Francoise been?" Polly asked.
"Yes, yes, but she always tries to throw things away and get rid of cob-webs," said her mother. "She doesn't understand, like most peasants."
Polly's father was sitting, wrapped in a scarf and overcoat, in the tiny sitting-room by the fire. The stink of smoke was overwhelming; he was poking irritably at a log of olive-wood that had fallen out of the grate.
"You silly man, you've only made it worse!" Sarah picked up the log with a pair of tongs. Quarrelling over the fire was one of their eternal battles, and Polly was almost reassured.
Ben, though, looked terrible. His face was yellowish white, apart from his nose; his withered hands were almost blue at the nails. Polly kissed him, and began to chafe his hands gently. The skin was so frail that she was afraid it might tear.
"You should wear gloves, Pa."
"Hate them. Did you bring my sausages and pork pie?"
"Yes, I did, though why you need them in a country full of lovely charcuterie is a mystery."
"French food is rubbish. Full of garlic."
"But garlic is good for you," said Sarah, reprovingly. To Polly, she murmured, "He just wants the food he ate as a child. He can't eat much, just mush, because of his teeth." She raised her voice. "There, I've put another log on the fire again, Ben. Aren't we cosy?"
Polly smiled, but the truth was, they were not cosy at all. Her bedroom was arctic, and her parents' little better. Ben now slept on a bed in the living-room, the warmest room in the house, but it was still horrifyingly primitive. Only half the mas had been restored; the other half was crumbling into the courtyard in pale, cheesy lumps. Overhead, death-watch beetle ticked in the beams, and every time a gust of particularly strong wind blew, the lights flickered and sometimes fused. Her parents had no reading lights, other than the single spotlight which they both squabbled over, and perhaps that was why they failed to see how smeared the windows were, or how thick the dust. Polly, coming from her own clean and comfortable home, always had fantasies about setting the house to rights, like a latter-day Martha Stewart, but the reality was beyond her energies. Sarah threw nothing out, and now newspapers and magazines were piled in towering piles, alongside paperback thrillers, cardboard boxes and plastic bags.
"Don't touch those!" she shrieked, when Polly made a move to burn some of the papers.
How her mother kept things going in these conditions was remarkable. Damp drew new maps across the whitewashed walls, now tinted a pale yellowish grey, and her parents' two cats hunted for mice in the woodpile by the fireplace. There was no hot water unless she remembered to turn on the electric boiler a couple of hours before it was needed, and her mother refused to wash up in anything but cold, so all the plates and cutlery was greasy.
"Don't waste the hot water!" she would call, whenever Polly tried to clean. The water whistled and trilled in the pipes - narrowed, like arteries, with calcium.
"I hate living like this," her father muttered.
"Why don't we go out for lunch?" Polly asked, trying to be cheerful. At least in a café or bistro, her parents would be warm.
"The wind's too cold."
Once again, a log rolled forward, and filled the room with smoke, setting Ben coughing and wheezing. He had to take regular inhalations of steroids, but his thin chest rose and fell with alarming speed, like that of a trapped bird. Her mother was constantly trying to get him to eat more tomatoes ("Come on! They help fight those free radicals!" she would say. If Sarah had been able to, she would have bossed around the cells of his body, Polly thought) but what they really needed was better heating. When Polly opened a window to try and let the smoke out, her father would whimper about the cold.
"Close the door."
"Get up and close it yourself," Sarah said.
"I can't." Ben wheezed, furious.
"If you don't make yourself move, and get out more, you'll become a permanent invalid."
Polly raged silently. She had always been closer to him, while Lucy took her mother's part; but it was also true that Sarah nursed their father with patience. A dozen times a day, she would search out the particular vest he wanted, or help him rise from the toilet. It was like looking after a toddler, although her children had no sympathy for those weaker than themselves. Tania and Robbie didn't like their grandparents, partly because they simply didn't know them but also out of the fear the young feel for the old.
"He's so whiskery," Robbie whispered to his mother, "I don't like kissing him, or her, because of the bristles."
"And their breath smells," said Tania. "Why don't they brush their teeth properly?"
"They're just old," Polly said. "Be kind to them, they love you and give you nice presents, remember?"
"Yes, but they're so ugly," said Robbie.
He had exactly Sarah's hands, eyes, legs and mouth, and sometimes when Polly cuddled him she had a dizzying foreknowledge of what her flawless son would look like as an old man, long after she herself was dead.
Poor boy, she thought; poor boy. So this is how it will be for them, too, one day.
In summer, when they visited, they lived so much out of doors that the acute discomfort of the house mattered less, but now whenever she passed the shrouded swimming pool she was assailed by memories of her children, jumping joyously in. It was so strange being here in winter, without them. Here, brown as frogs, they had dived or sunned themselves, and in these wild, untended groves she had walked as a teenager herself, enchanted by the mysterious, twisted, dryad-like forms of the olive trees, or swum in the greenish waters of the pool. Now, such charms were absent. It took an hour to run a bath, the pipes straining, and it was the only time Polly ever got warm. Even wearing thermal socks and vest (which, to her shame, she barely changed because laundry seemed like such an effort) she was freezing. Her father hated it even more than she did. Every so often, when Sarah was out of the room, he would unwrap a packet of firelighters, and defiantly throw a white cube onto the first, where it would flare up for a brief, glorious moment with an evil oily smell and a brilliant flame.
"Rage, rage against the dying of the light," he murmured.
Sarah would always tell him off, furiously.
"You silly old man, you could set yourself on fire if you topple over, don't you see?"
She kept trying to pretend that nothing was wrong, that he could get better. That she herself could cope.
Polly stayed up with Ben, trying to give Sarah a break.
"Do you remember how you loved to climb that place at the bottom of the waterfall?" her father whispered. Polly smiled lovingly at him.
"Yes, I do. That's where the nightingales sang loudest, wasn't it?"
"I remember how I'd watch you, terrified, and then there was the time when you were almost at the top and a wasp stung your hand, and you let go. You took such risks, then."
"Yes, I did. I suppose I didn't know what I had to lose."
"Don't be afraid, my darling. A life lived in fear is only half a life."
Polly stroked his cold hands, their long, knotted fingers like winter roots.
"I still think of you and Lu as girls, even though I know you're not."
She laughed, but it was true that she felt more like a girl with her parents than a middle-aged mother. Looking at how wrinkled they were, she felt her own skin to be once again smooth and plump, whereas normally she compared it sorrowfully to her children's. She massaged her father's shoulders, feeling the curved spine beneath her fingers, frail as that of a dried leaf.
"Are you in pain?"
"Constantly. But she doesn't realise. If only she'd let me have some wine."
All through her life, whenever Ben had seen some elderly person shuffling along with the aid of a zimmer-frame, he had said, half-joking,
"If ever I get to be like that, just shoot me. Promise me, Polly, you'll shoot me."
Now, however, he was in a far worse state than those. He could actually walk quite well, for a brief few paces, holding onto supports, and a stick, but Sarah watched him anxiously and, it seemed to her daughter, with barely controlled impatience.
"Be careful, Ben. The last time you fell, it took me twenty minutes to get you back up on your feet. If my back goes, then everything goes."
"Oh, be quiet, woman. Can't you see I'm in pain?"
"Moan, moan, moan," said Sarah. "You shouldn't be in pain, you're on enough pills to kill a horse."
"Well, a horse doesn't have what I do, does it?"
It was like living with her own children, only worse. For years, Polly's parents had quarrelled, but they had been the quarrels of a tempestuous love affair. They had stuck it out, triumphantly, despite sulks and spats, and if Polly's own marriage was an altogether more placid affair, she and her sister watched as fascinated, half-apprehensive spectators. Now, it seemed, all that was gone.
"He's driving her mad," Lucy told her before Polly came out. "Honestly, Pol, she's a saint the way she puts up with his temper. You've got to help her keep his drinking under control."
"Pa's always drunk more than is good for him, Lu, but Mum drinks too", Polly said.
"Not in the same way."
Polly had watched her parents put away a litre of wine at lunch and another a dinner when Ben was well - but now Sarah tried to stop her father from having any wine.
"The doctor says it's good for me."
"Rubbish. If you combine it with your pills, it could kill you. You know drink makes you even more tottery than you are before."
"I'm not tottery! Tell me one time when I've fallen over because of drinking!"
"On February 12, at that lunch of Liz Sugden's", said Sarah, crisply.
"That wasn't drink, woman, that was tripping over an uneven floor. Bloody Provencal floor tiles," said Ben.
"It was the drink," said Sarah, in exasperation. "It's dangerous for you."
"It isn't just the totteriness, he gets so nasty," said her mother, afterwards. "If he has more than a couple of glasses, you know what he's like, and he just won't stop."
"I know."
Polly remembered this only too well. When her father was in his cups, his good-nature vanished. He had ranted at Theo for being what he called "a stiff-necked American prick", at Polly for being "such a surrendered mother that you can't even find your own bum," and at her children for being "selfish, self-centred little pigs." Fanned by booze, the brave, mad side of him would roar up, like an all-devouring flame. There was a story about her father, and how he'd found a man selling blackbirds in cages when they'd first come to France, and how he'd torn open the cage bars with his bare hands, and punched the bird-seller. He'd been drunk, of course.
At the same time, he was so pitiful in his need.
"Just another little drink, Pol. She doesn't have to know."
"But she would, Pa."
"It's the only thing I have left which gives me any pleasure," Ben said. "I can't eat anything except mush, I can't read, I can't listen to music, I can't have sex - "
"Yes, it is terrifically bad luck, Pa," said Polly hastily. Sex indeed, she thought indignantly: how could he expect it when they were both eighty? Her mother had told her what a relief it was to have separate beds these days. Yet she could see how her father still longed to be touched. The greatest pleasure he had was when one of the two cats jumped on his lap and condescended to lie there, with Ben's cold hands in its thick soft fur.
She doesn't love him any more, she thought sadly. Sarah was still active and energetic; she maintained the garden far better than she did the house, and liked entertaining and seeing other retired expatriates in the area, whom Ben had no time for.
"They're all such Philistines," he said. "They come here because the booze is cheap, not because of Matisse. Just a little drink, Pol."
"No, darling."
"O for a beaker full of the warm South/ With beaded bubbles winking at the brim," he said.
"My favourite poem," she said; "Do the nightingales still sing here?"
"Every year. I'd like to hear them one more time."
"Oh Pa, you will," she said, almost crying. "This beastly wind won't last forever, and soon the spring will be here, and then the summer. Look, the cherry trees are in blossom, and the primroses are out. It won't be long."
"The nightingales will sing, but not for me," he said.
Outside, the sun was shining heatlessly, a clear, relentless light that etched every line on his haggard face. His thoughts were tossed about, like the frantic birds fleeing from tree to tree outside.
"I used to love her so much," he said; "but she's become so hard, Pol, so hard."
"Poor Ma. This must all be a tremendous strain on her."
"On her! She has no idea what a strain it is on me. Life just isn't fun any more, Pol. Sometimes I'm in such pain, I cry out, and instead of being sympathetic she glares at me."
It was true, Sarah did; but then Polly's father was impossible to live with. He would bellow her name, over and over, for the slightest thing, and unable to hear her reply would become ever more furious at being ignored.
"Yes, Ben, it is coming," Sarah would call, with heavy irony. To Polly, she said bitterly, "He never thanks me, you know."
Was this what awaited her, and Theo? Polly tried to imagine her husband becoming as weak and frail as her father, in thirty year's time. He, too, was a tall, handsome man but she had married him partly because he was so very different from Ben. Where her father was impetuous, unreasonable, romantic and sentimental, Theo had proposed to her in the manner of a businessman, suggesting a convenient arrangement of mutual benefit to both parties. At the time she had taken it as evidence of his delightful sense of irony. She had never realised it was the truth.
How can I bear it? Polly thought, shivering in her solitary bed at night. She had rung home every day to find out how the children's day had gone.
"Fine. Dad's got everything under control, I don't know why you make such a fuss."
The Mistral howled down the chimney, sending more smoke into the living room.
"What are you doing there, Mum?" her son asked.
"Mostly, putting logs on the fire."
"That doesn't sound very interesting."
Sometimes, she wondered what she was doing there, other than acting as a witness to her parents' incessant bickering. After two days, the Mistral suddenly stopped. It rained, and the air became warmer.
"Look, the sun's come out," said Sarah, putting on her glasses to count out Ben's pills. "Maybe we could go outside if it stays like this, just for a breath of fresh air."
"What's the point?" said Ben. "It's all cold and ugly. Oh, how I hate being old!"
Her mother went for a bath, and an afternoon nap; Ben who slept through much of the morning and afternoon, now woke in the night. Polly could hear the water shrilling in the pipes. She hoped her mother was using the Jo Malone bath oil she had brought her. Sarah looked so, so exhausted.
"Just one more little drink."
"No, Pa. Maybe later, with supper."
"No, now. While she's asleep."
He looked at her with trembling eagerness, and Polly couldn't bear it.
"Just one, mind you."
She opened a bottle of good Bordeaux, furtively easing out the cork.
"I'll say it was for me."
"Ah!" he said, sipping. His whole face relaxed, and he smiled. "Thank-you, darling."
Colour returned to his pale face. Why, all he needed was a little wine, Polly thought, hopefully.
"One more, darling. A beaker full of the warm South. You can see it doesn't do me any harm."
She poured him another. He grinned at her, and her heart contracted with love and pain, because he looked himself again.
"That's better."
He drained it all, determinedly, then gasped for breath.
"Remember: 'for many an hour/I have been half in love with easeful death.'"
"Yes," Polly said. She understood, now, and stroked his hand tenderly.
"She wouldn't listen," he said. "She's been trying to hold on, even when it's just no fun any more."
"Would you like to try going outside for a moment, dearest Pa? To get out of the smoke and into the light?"
"Yes, darling. You know, I can hear that nightingale singing."
It was the water in the bath-pipes, but Polly didn't tell him. He smiled, as she buttoned up his coat, wrapped his scarf more securely around his neck, and put his hat on his poor, bald, shrunken head. He stood very erect, like a soldier. Slowly, they walked to the French windows, and stepped out. The warmth fell on their faces, and their eyes dazzled.
"Isn't that beautiful?" said her father.
Copyright Amanda Craig
First published in Good Housekeeping's Great Escapes, 2008