My Father is drunk, behind the wheel of his family’s blue Ford Consul. He is very drunk indeed – and getting drunker, sucking on a half-bottle of Teacher’s – so it’s just as well the car is safely parked in the garage of his home in the Surrey commuter-belt.
It’s after midnight. Inside the house, My Father’s Sons are asleep upstairs. My Mother, too; very deeply. She has knocked herself out with pills, as she does on nights when My Father calls to warn her he’ll be late home. Virtuosic in passive-aggression, though unfamiliar with the term, she wants to be certain of greeting him on his eventual return with authentically oblivious unconsciousness. (Pretending to be asleep is never quite as satisfying, she has found.)
In the car, My Father is feeling disappointed. Deeply, vertiginously, cataclysmically disappointed. With what? It would be quicker to list the aspects of his life that don’t induce despairing moans from him, as his alcohol-sodden brain conducts a sluggish inventory.
Career? A disaster; a pathetic and shameful charade. In today’s newspaper alone, he has read stories about two of his Oxford contemporaries – one of them a woman, for Christ’s sake – achieving glittering things in politics. Things that he, My Father, should in any fair, rational, well-ordered world be achieving himself; things that anyone who knew him at Oxford would have considered him a hundred times more likely to achieve than either of those intellectual nonentities (one of them, for the love of God, a woman).
His marriage? He glances unconsciously upwards in the direction of the bedroom where My Mother is snoring with surprising vigour, for one so fastidious. Over. Utterly spoiled; ruined. Beyond hope – as it was, he blearily reflects, from the outset. Why, why, why, my father asks himself, did he do it? What, in the name of sanity, induced him to shackle himself to this paragon of barely disguised neurosis; this roiling vortex of negative emotion – anger, fear, distaste, joylessness – in female form. (He thinks, as he often does, of the idealistic young doctor Lydgate in Middlemarch, who marries the beautiful but vacuous Rosamund Vincy, knowing even as he carries off his prize, that bearing its weight will drain him of the strength to achieve any of his life’s highest ambitions.)
His love life? (Which, over the last few years, My Father has come to see as something entirely distinct from his marriage.) He shrivels inside as he recalls how he has just spent the afternoon and evening, trying unsuccessfully to get into the knickers of a woman only barely attractive enough to be fuckable. Not only has he sustained a humiliating rebuff, he has paid well over £6 for the privilege; the cost of several large vodka-and-lemonades, in the pub around the corner from the office; plus a taxi back to her place in Kilburn, which, it turned out, she shared with her invalid mother, whose unabashed refusal to make herself scarce put paid to any possibility of the evening’s entertainment being satisfactorily concluded; plus yet another taxi back to Waterloo, in the vain hope of arriving home early enough to forestall My Mother’s most terrifying retribution.
And then, of course, his children. The two boys asleep inside the house. Towards them, he feels – well, what does he feel? Perhaps a kind of despairing, defeated tenderness. My Father is not an unaffectionate man, and his sons are – at this point in their lives – reasonably endearing little boys. Bright, eager to please, anxious, biddable. At three-ish, My Father’s Younger Son is tousle-fringed, apple-cheeked, comically gap-toothed; somewhere on the quite appealing cusp between infancy and boyhood. And his Elder Son, who is seven-ish, is already showing signs of the kind of intellectual precocity guaranteed to win him a special place in My Father’s heart.
My Father thinks of himself as a dutiful man, too. So the certain knowledge, which has been growing within him for years, that at some point in the future, he will have to leave My Mother – and abandon his children to her emotionally vampiric care – must be difficult for him to live with. It seems likely he genuinely regrets that necessity, and intends to postpone it for as long as he possibly can. But he knows he will have to go; and that, in doing so, he will have failed as a father, as he has failed in so, so much else.
A failure.
That most terrible thing to be is what – this evening, locked out of his home and drunk in his car – he knows himself to be.
“I’m a failure,” he thinks to himself.
“I. Am. A. Failure.” He speaks the words aloud, separately, curious to hear how terrible they sound. “A total, complete and utter fucking failure.”
And then My Father – who has finished the Scotch – lets the empty bottle slip from his hand, and weeps.
Why, incidentally, is My Father in the car? Because My Mother has accidentally bolted both front and back doors. And also the French windows in the sitting room, which otherwise give way if firmly pushed, even when locked. But the garage stands open, as does the car (in these innocent days vehicle crime is almost entirely unknown in suburban Surrey), and My drunken Father, alert enough to recognise that hammering on the door to wake the sleeping household will not tend to diminish My Mother’s wrath, has calculated that the plushly sprung front bench-seat of his beautiful blue Ford Consul is the most comfortable place available for him to spend the night.
Failure.
Now that the word has been spoken aloud, it seems to echo and reverberate around My Father, with increasing volume and venom. He can’t get the sound of it out of his ears, or its appalling significance out of his mind.
He flinches, and shrinks into himself, almost as if under physical attack. My Father feels not just despairing self-pity, but a visceral horror at the stark undeniable reality of his situation. He would rather be dead, he allows himself to think, than be recognised by everyone as the total, irredeemable failure that he has somehow become.
And then, through the whisky miasma, it occurs to him that there is something clever that people do with hosepipes and car exhausts that would enable him to escape that fate.
For a moment, he contemplates this possibility.
But My Father is not a practical man, and he doubts whether, even if he could find a hosepipe, he would possess the manual dexterity to affix it satisfactorily to the exhaust.
So instead, he considers simply closing the garage doors, and improvising a way of sealing the gap underneath them, to prevent the noxious fumes escaping. The garage is only just big enough for the car, so if he opened all its windows, that would probably do the trick, he thinks. But what can he use to seal up the doors? On the garage shelves, there are only a few half-empty pots of paint, and some gardening tools; nothing suited to his dark purpose. Perhaps he could take off his clothes, ball them up, and wedge them in the gap?
But it’s cold now, and My Father doesn’t feel drawn to the idea of ending his life shivering in his Y-fronts. Or of being found that way by My Mother, in the morning. And also, he seems to have mislaid his briefcase, so he doesn’t have access to the writing materials he would need to leave a note (which, in fairness to My Mother and common decency, he feels he would have to do). And also, it belatedly occurs to him, his car keys are in the drawer of the bedside table in the room where My Mother is deep in pharmaceutically-facilitated slumber.
My Father’s attempt at ending his own life has, he realises, ended – though barely begun – in failure.
He allows his poor spinning head, receptacle of the brain that has so dismally failed him, to slump forward onto the steering wheel, where we cradles it in his arms.
Within seconds, he is sleeping as deeply as My Mother, though with none of the same angry satisfaction.
*****