Another Kind of Country (8 page)

‘OK,’ he said to her, ‘let’s do it.’

Her look was unsmiling but the dark eyes were warm.

‘It will also give me the chance to hear more about you, Patrick, about your life and how you came here.’

Miller nodded. In his heart he knew he couldn’t tell her
all
of it.

December 1979

Putney

London

He knew she’d be
at school, that he would get only her answering machine.

Patrick Miller had known that for the past week but that hadn’t stopped him phoning every day, twice, three times, sometimes he lost count, just wanting to hear her voice:
This is Sophie, I’m not here but do please leave a message for me. Byeeee
.

In his mind he could see the phone, white, on the small desk where she marked school essays in the corner of her sitting room. He could see himself sitting on the sofa she’d bought in an Oxfam shop, newspapers littering the space around him, waiting for her to finish, to share a glass of wine with him, talk to him, go to bed with him . . .

It wouldn’t change anything, listening to her voice, the trilled goodbye, the hint of laughter in her voice. He could almost taste her voice, the way he’d tasted her lips, her breasts.

He dialled anyway. She’d said it was over, his
obsessions
were too much for her, too intense for a schoolteacher who just wanted an
ordinary
life. She’d had enough of his rants about Thatcher, about the destruction of society, about the virtues of a socialist system.

He’d pleaded, told her he’d change.

Sophie had said she didn’t want him to change. He was what he was. She admired his commitment, his idealism. She just couldn’t live with it. She’d asked for her key back.

He’d always kept his bedsit in Putney, never moved in completely to her flat in West Ken. Putney was where he wrote, kept his papers, filed his cuttings.

Until Sophie
dumped him, he’d never realized how small the bedsit was, how cell-like. From the high window you could see the buses on the Broadway, red galleons of life cruising past while you loitered, marooned amid your sea of papers and books and jottings, the phone in your hand, pressed to your ear, waiting for her voice.

‘Hello.’ Not Sophie’s message, a strange voice. A man’s voice.

Miller almost threw the phone to the floor, as though his ear had been stung. He stared at the phone.

A wrong number. Dial again. Carefully this time, reciting the numbers to himself as he dialled.

It rang only once.

‘Hello.’ The same male voice. ‘Who is this?’

This time Miller cradled the phone in the rest with care. Someone else has the key now. His heart seemed to be pounding its way out through his chest. He felt he couldn’t get his breath.

And his own phone was ringing.

Miller stared at it, let it ring, picked it up gingerly.

A woman was sobbing on the line.

‘Sophie?’ Hoping against all hope that she was weeping for him.

‘Patrick! Oh, Patrick . . .’ More sobbing, hysteria in the voice, in his ear.

Not now, Mum. Not now, I’m trying to stay alive myself.

Miller said, ‘What’s up, Mum? You OK?’

‘Patrick, Patrick,
it’s the lies they’re telling me, the hateful letters – and somebody phoned me yesterday—’

His mother broke off. In a way, he was used to her crying jags. He waited for her to finish, wondering about the new holder of the key to Sophie’s flat. Anything to keep his mind off the big house on leafy Compton Avenue in Wolverhampton: the big house where his mother alternated between bouts of depression and frenetic attacks of housekeeping.

‘What’s wrong, Mum?’

Sniffles. Snuffling. Gulped breath.

Miller hoped this wasn’t going to be one of his mother’s marathon phone sessions.
Who is this?
But Sophie must at least have mentioned his existence to the new key-holder. Or maybe not.

His mother’s snuffling sounded as if it were running out of steam.

‘C’mon, Mum, tell me nice and slowly. Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.’ Sometimes they changed her tablets or the dosage, you never could tell with this pharmaceutical shit. One of these days he was really going to dig into that stinking industry and expose it for the cesspool it was.

‘It’s horrible, Patrick. Another letter came this morning, that’s the second one, and somebody phoned yesterday – in the morning, I was having a cuppa while I was reading the
Telegraph
—’

‘Mum, what letters are you talking about?’

Silence on the line. His mother would be sitting on the piano stool they kept beside the polished occasional table in the hallway, phone clenched in bony fingers, cigarette burning in the cut-glass ashtray on the table beside the phone.

‘They’re saying things about your father, Patrick, horrible things.’

‘What things?’

‘I can’t . . .’ Miller
was afraid she’d start crying again. ‘They’re too horrible for me to say, Patrick, just too horrible and disgusting.’

Poison-pen letters about Dr Sir Roger Miller, distinguished gynaecologist, knight of the realm and avowed enemy of the National Health Service.
How fucking inevitable
.

‘Two letters, Patrick, saying these dreadful things and then – can you believe it? – signing himself “a well-wisher”. Whoever he is, he’s not a well-wisher, is he, Patrick?’

‘No, Mum, I don’t think so. It’s just some nasty person trying to stir up trouble.’
Who is this?
‘Have you told Dad about the letters, Mum?’

‘Of course not. You know how busy your father is, night, noon and morning at his surgery and at the hospital and then somebody writes these awful things about him – I can’t distress him with these letters, can I, Patrick?’

After all these years, Miller thought, you still love my father. Despite everything, you still keep your eyes closed because you’re afraid to open them. And you love being Lady Miller, wife of Dr Sir Roger, ennobled by the Queen herself at Buckingham Palace. No wonder you’re on medication. No wonder you escape into your private worlds of polishing and scrubbing and chemical-fuelled fantasy, washed down with sherry or wine or whatever is to hand.

‘Why do people do these things, Patrick?’

‘I don’t know, Mum.’ Why did the people of Britain elect a maniac like Thatcher? Why do we aid and abet in the destruction of our own society?

He heard the dragging on the cigarette, saw the jewelled fingers clawing at the untipped Senior Service, knew that she was pulling herself together. Until the next time.

‘Are you in that paper today, Patrick?’

‘It’s Thursday, Mum, I’m in the paper on Wednesdays.’

‘So you were in it yesterday.’

‘Yes, Mum, my piece
was in it yesterday.’

‘Sometimes I remember to buy it, just to look at your little photograph at the top, but it upsets your father, that paper does, you know what he thinks of it.’

A red rag. A comic. No better than an undergraduate offering – and with even less sense
. Any upright British subject – especially one elevated at Buckingham Palace by the sovereign – could only recoil from it in distaste.

‘Yes, Mum, I know Dad doesn’t read the
Guardian
. But maybe you should tell him about that phone call and let him read those letters.’

‘I couldn’t do that, Patrick. Maybe I should just burn them. But – you’ll come to visit soon, Patrick, won’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Back to a polished mausoleum of the living dead, where the only words ever spoken were words that avoided and/or concealed the truth. Where nobody ever asked,
Who is this?

‘You promise, Patrick? We haven’t seen you for so long.’

‘Yes, Mum, I promise.’

‘Just don’t talk politics, Patrick, you know how your father is about all that stuff.’

‘Yes, Mum, I know.’

‘Sometimes,’ she drew on the cigarette again, he could see her powdered cheeks hollowing, ‘sometimes I think you don’t know your father at all.’

They said goodbye. Miller waited for his mother to put the phone down first.

He remembered her on one of his rare visits home from university. He’d let himself in, found her drunk on the sofa, the wine bottle still upright amid the fallen-over plastic pill containers. His mother had looked at him as if trying to remember who he was. He remembered the red gash of her mouth, the crimson lipstick smeared below her dribbling nose. The multicoloured pills were splashed like smarties across the polished surface of the coffee table. He’d taken her to the downstairs loo, waited while she vomited. ‘I didn’t take any, Patrick, honest.’ He’d lifted her from her knees beside the lavatory, washed her face, settled her against the mound of pillows on the double bed. ‘You mustn’t tell your father, Patrick, please, promise me, he has enough on his mind.’
Like his round of golf this Saturday afternoon
.

And you never
did say anything, did you, Patrick Miller? You couldn’t bear to see her hurt but you didn’t want to stick around and face the music, did you? You wanted to escape, to flee the Compton mausoleum.

And now Sophie has fled.

Who is this?

The voice on the phone was that of a stranger but Miller knew only too well – and for too long – who and what his father was.

January 1964

Wolverhampton

England

‘Sod it!’

The Compton bus was
just pulling away as Patrick Miller came running around the corner. After seven o’clock the buses came only hourly. Sodding dentist, keeping him waiting in the unheated waiting room warmed only by ancient
Titbits
and
Reveille
s and
Woman’s Weekly
. Hadn’t even apologized, just another schoolboy customer with an overweight bag of books and his school cap folded in his pocket.

‘Least you had plenty of time to get your homework done!’ Dentist’s idea of an apology, concluded with a guffaw and, ‘How’s your dad, haven’t seen him in ages. Tell him I was asking for him.’ Fat twit. At least the nurse had smiled her toothy smile at him from behind the dentist’s back.

He shook his shoulders, felt the schoolbag settle more comfortably on his back.

‘Miss your bus, young fella?’ The owner of the newsagent beside the bus stop was fixing the folding metal gate across the doorway of his shop.

Patrick nodded. Mr Mapother was OK, he kept the
Hotspur
for you even if you were a day late.

‘You’d better get a move on.’ The newsagent pushed the neck of the lock home, tugged at it once, then straightened. ‘It looks like rain and it’s a good walk to Compton.’ He nodded, said goodnight.

Patrick watched him until he turned the corner. He’d never said more than ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ to the newsagent and yet the man knew he lived in Compton. Wolverhampton was that kind of place. It seemed large, stretching out in all directions, but really it was no more than a big village where everybody knew if you burped or broke wind. And when your father was a doctor who drove a Jag, well, there was no hiding at all. Not even if you did your burping or wind-breaking in the dark.

Queen Square was dark now, shops
and banks and offices closed or closing, the last shopkeepers exchanging goodnights at the end of another day. It wasn’t such a bad place, Miller thought, but he’d be leaving it as soon as his time at the Royal Grammar School for Boys was done.

He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the darkened window of the newsagent’s. He thought he looked ghostly under the dim street lamp. He peered at himself in the window. The half-light hid the spots at the corners of his mouth. He’d hated that, the blonde nurse bent over him, handing the silver instruments to the dentist, no place for the pimples to hide. Pity you couldn’t fill the bloody things with something, the way the dentist filled his cavity.

He started to walk, had only reached the corner of the square when the rain started to fall. The clock above the red-brick bank said five past seven: it was just possible that his father was still at the surgery. He turned up the collar of the navy school gaberdine coat and dashed across the street. A car horn blared angrily; through the falling rain he had a glimpse of the driver’s face, pale, bespectacled, the snarled obscenity silent behind the thumping windscreen wipers.

He sprinted downhill
towards the football ground. His schoolbag bounced against his sodden back. The lights on the ring road were against him but he made a dash for it. Another horn hooted in anger. Rainwater sluiced from the black tarmac over his shoes.

Even in the rain the brass plate on the tall gate pier seemed to shine:
Roger Miller, Obstetrician/Gynaecologist
. Patrick drew the gate shut behind him and stood under the big tree beside the garden path. He shook the rain from his dark hair, loosened his collar, swung the schoolbag from his shoulders.

The bay windows of the big double-fronted house were in darkness. The fanlight over the door glowed yellow but Patrick knew that the light in the hallway was on a time switch.

Patrick grimaced. Sodding dentist. Bloody bus. And the rain falling more heavily than ever, splashing through the bare branches of the sheltering tree.

The door of the surgery swung open. Mrs Oliphant’s huge bulk filled the lighted doorway. From his earliest childhood, on one of the rare occasions his mother had taken him there, Patrick had taken his father’s receptionist’s name to be Mrs Elephant. It was impossible not to smile in the presence of Mrs Oliphant. Your smile was begun by the flabby roundness of her huge body and the smaller roundness of her head; your smile lingered in the warmth of Mrs Oliphant’s kindness and good humour.

Her round head was covered in a white see-through rainhat tied under her multiple chins, like a football encased in a plastic bag. Patrick watched her turn her head to the dark skies. He imagined her nostrils twitching, her small eyes twinkling. He smiled as she took a firm grip on the red shopping bag and raised the big black umbrella in her other hand.

Mrs Oliphant squealed in delight
when Patrick dashed up the path.