1996: Growing Old

Unpublished short story, 1996.

Ted Leary took early retirement shortly before his fifty-eighth birthday. He had no serious health problems apart from a tendency to high blood pressure that seemed to worry his GP rather more than it worried him. But there was no future for him in his job, and he had begun to worry about the possibility that he might drop dead in his office, saying to himself as his eyes closed for the last time : ‘There was nothing in life but this.’

His wife had left him several years ago and he had no desire to start again. As he used to say: ‘To get married once may be considered carelessness; to get married twice looks like stupidity.’

He had a small house with an undemanding garden; he had satellite television on which he could watch the sports he loved and learn to love new ones; he had a room full of books that he had always meant to read.

He also had two daughters. Both were now in their early thirties, but they did not neglect their old father. In fact, they were assiduous in visiting him. As he told his friend and next-door neighbour, Mrs Cordell, he could sometimes wish that they were a little less assiduous.

The elder daughter, Veronica, was thirty-three, but looked younger. She was tall with reddish hair, and wore clothes that looked casual but were in fact carefully chosen. To everyone else in the world she was known as Ronnie, but Ted could not bring himself to call her that, so he persevered with Veronica, even though she sometimes seemed to have forgotten that it was her name. As he said to Mrs Cordell, he had no objection to a woman doing a man’s job if she was capable of it; but when women started wearing men’s clothes and taking men’s names it was destroying all the fun in life.

Ronnie had never married, and though she had cohabited with a young man for quite some time, Ted couldn’t bring himself to see him as a son-in-law. So when Ronnie came to visit, as she did every couple of weeks, she generally came alone.

Ronnie had happy memories of her childhood. The sixties had been a decade for the young, and it seemed that her parents had been young alongside her. They had gone into the country and her Dad had run races with her and let her win. They had watched Top of the Pops together; her Dad had been as keen on the Rolling Stones as she was. When she was old enough to assist with the housework she had been nicknamed ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, to everyone’s enormous amusement.

But somewhere in the mid-seventies – ‘I blame that Edward Heath’ Ronnie used to say – she had begun to grow up and Ted had started to grow old. Ronnie had never come to terms with that. She loved her father dearly, but it was the father of her childhood that she loved, a father who could run and jump and laugh and sing along with the television.

She couldn’t absorb the fact that he was now a ‘pensioner’, as he liked to describe himself, though of course he was still several years short of the actual Old Age Pension. She talked to him as she would to one of her contemporaries, rather than as was appropriate for an elderly relative.

So when she told him about her various lovers, she described them in the most intimate detail, analysing their prowess with a ruthless irony that made him shudder. His flesh crept to imagine his ex-wife discussing him in such terms.

Likewise, no gynaecological detail was considered unsuitable for her father’s ears. When she had a minor operation for an ovarian cyst, he was spared neither the symptoms nor the surgical procedures.

Even more embarrassingly she insisted on taking a keen interest in what she called his ‘love-life’. She kept repeating that it was ‘never too late’, and suggested that he should take advantage of one of the many introduction agencies that existed. Sometimes she would pick up a copy of the Guardian and read to him from the Soulmates column, pointing out the large number of ladies looking for men in their late fifties. She even tried to imagine a romance between him and Mrs Cordell.

Ted found this rather distasteful. He complained of it vociferously to his neighbour, though omitting any mention of the lady herself in his daughter’s plans. ‘She seems to think I’m a lovesick teenager. You learn to do without that sort of thing as you grow older.’ Mrs Cordell nodded her whole-hearted agreement.

More innocuous, but equally irritating, was the way that Veronica, remembering her father’s love for the Rolling Stones, would chat on about Nirvana and Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine as though these were part of the currency of Ted’s life, not noticing that his wireless was permanently tuned to Radio Two.

But even her tastes in music were like an open book in comparison with the times when she talked about her work. Ronnie was a well-paid computer programmer, and she was absorbed in her skills; but when she spoke of them Ted felt as though he were on another planet. He had never mastered the use of a pocket calculator, and indeed believed that they were a pernicious instrument which prevented children from learning ‘proper’ mathematics. The term ‘internet’ conjured up an image of something rather like a tennis-court, and he sat silent while Ronnie displayed her knowledge.

Maud had been born only two years after Veronica, but for some inscrutable reason her personality was the utter reverse of her elder sister’s. She was much shorter, with dark hair, and her taste in clothes was distinctly old-fashioned. She had been happily married for some years, and had twin daughters aged seven. She worked as a junior school teacher, specialising in children with behavioural problems, a field in which she had achieved a well-deserved professional reputation.

The only trouble, as Ted used to confide in Mrs Cordell while they drank their morning coffee, was that she tended to treat him like a difficult child. Whereas Ronnie had never come to terms with the fact that her father was now over forty, Maud tended to see him as being afflicted with all the symptoms of advanced senility. Although his hearing was quite normal for a man approaching sixty, she could not address him without raising her voice slightly and slowing down the delivery of her words. ‘So – how – are – things – with – you – Dad? – Are – you – managing – to – cope – with – the – gardening – or – should – you – be – trying – to – get – some – help?’ she would say on arriving at the house.

If he enquired after her work she would merely answer ‘stressful;’ or ‘I’m due for promotion this year’, as though the details of what she actually did in the classroom were far too arcane for an old man like him to grasp. Likewise she might mention that she had been to the theatre, but she would seem embarrassed to even name the play, let alone discuss its contents, as though she belonged to a world of high culture that was utterly foreign to her father.

Whereas Ronnie kept happy memories of a golden sunlit childhood, Maud seemed to have drawn a very thick curtain between herself and her younger days, perhaps because that was the only way she could maintain a proper distance between herself and the difficult children she spent her days teaching. Certainly there was a palpable distance between herself and Ted, forbidding any intimacy. This was the father who had changed her nappies, yet she seemed visibly flustered if she had to visit the bathroom while at his home. Like most children of the nineties, her two were aware of the elementary facts of sex, but they had been firmly warned that such things must under no circumstances be alluded to in Grandad’s presence.

‘She’s making a very good career, and I’m proud of her,’ Ted told Mrs Cordell, ‘but she’s so bloody patronising.’

In September it was Ted’s birthday. Maud and Veronica both came to see him, arriving just after lunch. The two grandchildren were at school, so it was just the three of them. They handed over their presents – two CDs by Oasis from Ronnie and a set of health videos for the over-sixties from Maud.

It was a fine autumn day, with bright sunshine, though the air was sultry. ‘Let’s go out for a walk,’ said Ronnie enthusiastically; ‘we could go up over the hill and across the common, like we used to do when we were kids.’

‘It’s a bit far,’ said Maud, ‘we don’t want Dad to get overtired.’ She habitually spoke of him in the third person, as though he were a baby or a dog, even though he was sitting just across the table from her.

‘You’ll manage it all right, won’t you,’ said Ronnie, giving her father a hug. ‘You’ll probably manage it a lot better than I will. It’s a bad time of the month for me.’

Maud looked as though she were going to blush, shocked that a man of Ted’s years should have to listen to talk of months. But she merely said in a rather surly tone: ‘All right then.’

Neither of them actually consulted Ted, who had been rather hoping to see an old movie on television, but since the decision had been made, who was he to question it?

They set off up the hill. As they walked, Veronica chattered incessantly – about records, films, computers, her partner’s bad habits and anything else that entered her mind by free association. Maud said little, concentrating on helping her father if the gradient seemed too steep for him. When she did speak, she generally addressed her remarks to her sister rather than to her father.

From the top of the hill they looked down onto the common, all bathed in sunlight. Despite some new building, it was substantially unchanged from the days when they had all been young. But as they came down the hill the weather seemed to change. Maud felt a large spot of rain on her face.

‘I told you it was too far to come,’ she almost screamed at her sister. For once Veronica said nothing.

There was a flash of lightning, and a good half minute later a distant roll of thunder. The rain began to fall heavily.

‘Oh God!’ shrieked Maud, ‘he hasn’t brought his hat.’ Veronica fumbled in her handbag and fished out a folded newspaper. She fashioned it into a crude paper hat and stuck it on her father’s head, laughing at her handiwork. It reminded her of the birthday parties they had had when they were young.

‘There’s nowhere to shelter,’ said Maud, ‘except under those trees – and that’s not a good idea in a thunder-storm.’

‘The best thing is to go down to the road and get a bus,’ said Ronnie. ‘We can go into town and then get another bus back home.’

The rain fell steadily and the thunder still echoed in the distance. They walked on towards the road. Then Ronnie called out urgently:

‘I can see a bus coming. If we go quickly we can get it.’

All three walked rapidly towards the road. As the bus arrived the two young women set off at a run. Maud asked the driver to wait, while Ronnie waved frantically and cried: ‘Come on Dad, quickly.’

Ted, bedraggled in the pouring rain, started to run. He was still about thirty yards from the bus when he stopped as though to take breath, put his hand to his heart, and then pitched face forward onto the pavement. His paper hat rolled into the gutter.

* * *

There was only a small congregation in the crematorium. Veronica and her partner, Maud with her husband and the two girls, Mrs Cordell, and three of Ted’s former workmates. The service lasted just twenty-five minutes as another funeral was due. On the way out Mrs Cordell shook the hands of both daughters, expressed her sympathy and told them how fond their father had been of them both.

Ronnie took Maud on one side: ‘I know you think it was all my fault, but when I remember that last moment, with him running, and the paper hat on his head, it reminded me of the good days, when we were young. He was still at his best when he died.’

Maud looked back at her with a cold, unforgiving stare: ‘It was stupid to expect an old man to run like that. We’ve all got to grow up some time and it’s high time you did.’

Three days later the bank contacted them about the will. Ted had left a thousand pounds each to his granddaughters. Ronnie got his record collection, Maud his books. The house, and all the rest of his savings, went to Mrs Cordell.

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Unpublished short story, 1996.

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GROWING OLD