Goodness Read online

  Goodness

  Also by Tim Parks

  Loving Roger

  Tongues of Flame

  Home Thoughts

  Family Planning

  Italian Neighbors

  Juggling the Stars

  Goodness

  Jim Parks

  Copyright © 1991 by Tim Parks

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Grove Press

  A division of Grove Press, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003-4793

  First published in Great Britain in 1991 by William Heinemann Ltd., London.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cover design by Krystyna Skalski

  Cover illustration by Carter Goodrich

  Parks, Tim.

  Goodness/Tim Parks—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  “First published in Great Britain in 1991

  by William Heinemann Ltd.”—T.p. verso.

  ISBN 0-8021-1390-7

  ISBN 0-8021-3304-5 (pbk.)

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9112-0

  I. Title.

  PR6066.A6957G6 1991 91-21937

  823’.914—dc20CIP

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Printed on acid-free paper

  First American Edition 1991

  First Evergreen Edition 1993

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Goodness

  Prologue

  My father was a missionary murdered in Burundi in 1956. It was very much his own fault. He had been warned to leave and by not doing so he risked getting the rest of us killed too. When we were captured in our white mission bungalow, my mother, my sister and I were given the choice of dying with him or of saying some simple formula that renounced our faith, after which we would be allowed to leave the country. I was too young of course either to have a faith or to renounce it, though I don’t doubt what my decision would have been. My mother on the other hand was torn. She’s a superstitious woman and believes in the power of words spoken even when not meant, the kind of person who would feel guilty at discovering that the phrase she had innocently repeated in some foreign language was blasphemy. Even today she wonders if she won’t be punished for all eternity for having responded to her maternal instinct and saved both herself and us.

  It’s curious thinking about this now. Presumably a shot rang out and dispatched my father. I don’t remember, I was too small. I haven’t the slightest memory either of him or of Africa. If I think of his martyrdom at all it is with total incomprehension. And if I mention the grotesque affair now it is only because over the years I have come to see it as just the first, the most absurdly emblematic, of a long series of incidents in which other people’s pretensions to goodness were to clash, to my considerable detriment, with the most naked common sense.

  Part One

  BEFORE HILARY

  A Bundle of Unpleasant Contradictions

  After my father’s death we came back to England to live with my widowed grandfather and spinster aunt in an ill-conceived semi-detached in Park Royal, about mid way between the Middlesex Hospital and where they later built the A40. My grandfather, who had escaped his country labourer background with a naval career that pulled him up to the dizzy heights of home ownership, lace curtains, embossed wallpaper and the like, was of the opinion that he was doing us a great favour putting a roof over our heads, and having never been able to stomach my fervently evangelical father, adopted a told-you-so attitude that was to weigh heavily on my sister Peggy and myself throughout our childhood, and even more so, one imagines, on my mother who had no money to go elsewhere.

  ‘Those jungle boys,’ the old man would begin, though I don’t suppose he could have been much over fifty then, ‘haven’t got souls to save, have they?’ He smoked a pipe, as grandfathers will, or used to, and regularly occupied a heavy shapeless armchair in an ungenerous living room choked with green Wedgewood and Hummels. ‘Never saw the point of missionarying,’ he grunted.

  I remember, from where I would be lying on the hearthrug, being fascinated by his facial skin, especially on the cheeks where the pores were so thick and large as to suggest the texture of some old neglected sponge. Certainly they had soaked up enough in their time. His hair was already white and prickly short, the kind old men scratch vigorously. ‘Shifty sods too.’ He sucked in through his nose. ‘Saw enough of that lot in my time to know to leave well alone, I did.’

  Naturally he was speaking, even in those early days, over the urgent clamour of the television which he watched fixedly but didn’t appear to need to listen to. Unless it was encroaching deafness. He puffed one pipe while scraping the bowl of another. ‘If Arthur’d had any sense at all he’d have kept a gun in the house. Couple of loud bangs would have had that lot scarpering. That’s what I say.’

  My mother only said. ‘Please, Dad. Please,’ and would get up and go into the kitchen. He might shout after her: ‘For God’s sake, Jenny, can’t you even take a joke? Or are you going to mourn after him your whole bloody life?’ She wouldn’t answer. She would never answer. This is my mother’s way. For my own part, I remember feeling desperately sorry for her, yet incapable of intervening, since I always suspected that Grandfather, incorrigibly unpleasant and offensive as he was, was right. What was the point of missionarying? What possible sense did it make? My father must have been mad to go out there talking to blacks with their bones in their noses, their drums, their funny clothes, when they wore them (we had photographs). It wasn’t that I was of an age to hold any progressive beliefs on the equal value of all cultures and religions. Quite the contrary. Just that somehow, from the cradle, I didn’t believe in the saving and transformation of souls. My intuition has always been that people are who they are and forever remain so, or at best will simply become more and more themselves, more and more that spirit that you can’t help but feel destined to be. Just as it is destiny to be black, destiny to be white. This is what self means, surely. Otherwise who are we?

  Only Peggy objected. Only she stood up for Father. She said: ‘You shouldn’t say those kinds of things, Grandad.’ We sat, lay, stood in that smoky suburban sitting room in West London: floral carpet, a pattern of coronation crowns and sceptres on the wallpaper, the grey TV carelessly wrapping and rewrapping time into odd half hours of this and that. Peggy said: ‘Black people have souls just like us. Yes they do. Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in His sight.’

  What would she have been, seven, nine? She wore her hair in a ponytail and stood chubbily round-bottomed by Grandfather’s chair. She said: ‘Daddy was a good man. He loved the Lord Jesus and he wanted to save people so they wouldn’t go to hell. And now he has gone to heaven to wait for us there.’

  While she spoke of course, my Grandfather would keep mumbling and rumbling his prejudices, since this wasn’t really a conversation so much as two people at either end of life speaking their parts in each other’s presence. ‘Man would’ve done better if he’d thought of his own wife and kids before those bloody chimpanzees.’

  I might catch the sound of my mother crying softly in the kitchen.

  ‘God is looking after us,’ Peggy insisted.

  ‘With the help of muggins here’s pension I suppose,’ Grandfather came back. Until eventually he turned from the television to look at her out of sunken brown eyes. Though there was still a glint there. He would have been wearing his pub-going dark waistcoat, shirt-sleeves rolled up; a bulky, heavy-breathing presence.

  Staring him out, she said: ‘Don’t
be such a miserable old grumbler, Grandad. It’s sinful to grumble and be miserable.’

  The sight of her, rather than anything she said, would at last make him forget his racist grouching. He’d say, ‘Come here, Peggy love. Come and sit on Grandad’s knee.’

  She pouted. She might well have had her hands on her hips. Probably she was already aware of striking poses. Certainly Grandfather recognised them when they were struck. He liked to grab her and cuddle her hard on his knee and say things like: ‘My jewel, my Peggy. I do like a little girlie with some sparkle about her.’

  My mother cooked, Grandfather rowed with or cuddled Peggy, and around six thirty Aunt Mavis came back, flopped down in an armchair, kicked off her shoes, treating us to a whiff of feet which nobody commented on, and lit a cigarette. I even remember the brand, Park Drive. They were the first I tried myself, stealing from her handbag. With her and Grandad together and the windows forever closed against ‘the damp’, we thus sat out the 1960s in a thick Virginia smog.

  Very quietly, to myself and Peggy, when she had us on our own walking to church perhaps, my mother would say: ‘Smoking is evil. Because it’s an abuse of the body the Lord gave you.’ It was the nearest she came to criticising Grandfather openly. She said: ‘Our bodies are precious, holy. Every human body, His temple, made in His image. That’s why you must never smoke. You must promise me you’ll never smoke.’ I suppose one might have objected that martyrdom was an even greater abuse of this image of God’s we were supposed to be taking care of. But as a boy this never occurred and later there would seem no point in being cruel, since, come eighteen odd, you have learnt to humour rather than rebel. You have already won your freedom. Or at least you’re of an age to think in such terms.

  In line with her firm belief in the holiness of the human body, my mother wore no make-up, no earrings, no jewels at all apart from her wedding and engagement ring; she was a well-built, auburn, rather attractive woman, I suppose, with a pale quiet intense energy. Her sister, Aunt Mavis, on the other hand, made up heavily and did everything to hair and skin that the fashions of each season dictated. Barely two years younger than my mother, she nevertheless affected the manner and aspirations of the teenage factory girls she worked with. I remember her, well into her thirties she must have been, still talking to us with adolescent dreaminess of Mr Right and the very large family she intended to have, when quite probably she had never so much as been kissed. She was ugly. Her features were oddly flat, she had no chin, and there was something out of true about her eyes, so that only one ever appeared to be looking directly at you.

  As I grew older I began to appreciate that Aunt Mavis was a figure of fun, even ridicule. She said things out of the blue, laughed when there seemed no reason to, or alternatively cried. At nine or ten perhaps I began to feel seriously embarrassed about her, especially if I brought friends home, embarrassed that she was part of our family at all. It seemed so extraordinary, this having to accept the imposition of people you weren’t comfortable with. Forever chattering and clapping her hands, forever retailing the small change of factory gossip, a curiously vacant expression hovered about Aunt Mavis’s flattened features, a disturbing lack of focus. She wasn’t a normal person. Apart from the television, she dedicated most of her spare time to the Harrow branch of the Elvis Presley Fan Club, of which she claimed to have been a founder member. And perhaps she was. It was inane enough. All I know is that as she chunnered on and on, always senseless, always excited, full of affected gestures and expressions which often she misunderstood, I simply wished and wished she would disappear.

  Twenty years later, during the months of guerilla warfare that tore the heart out of our marriage, I remember Shirley telling me that I had been entirely conditioned by this family of mine, that I had just soaked up the pathetic piety of my mother, the coarseness of my grandfather, the amorality of my sister, and a fair dose of poor Aunt Mavis’s dumbness too. These are the kinds of things one says in arguments, I suppose, and my own feeling is that nothing could be further from the truth. What kind of combination would that be? Piety, coarseness, amorality?

  ‘They don’t mix,’ I told her.

  ‘Dead right,’ she said, ‘you’re a bundle of contradictions, George Crawley, and unpleasant ones at that.’

  But those were the good old days, pre-Hilary. I can’t recall Shirley and I arguing in quite the same aimless, indulgent way afterwards.

  Walking Wounded

  My mother led a strange life. At home, in Gorst Road, she was little more than a slave. Even Aunt Mavis used to demand things of her, would say: ‘I’m the modern woman, aren’t I? Bringing home the bread, the least I can expect is to have my bed made for me.’ She blinked, gormless and vapid.

  Mother bowed to it. She did everything, shopped, cooked, washed up, cleaned, mended, gardened, darned, scrubbed, laundered, ironed. She was always tired, her skin always rough with work. And it occurs to me that apart from the brief interlude of her marriage, of Africa, she had been doing more or less the same thing in the same house since her early teens when her own mother died. For all of which she received no pay and less thanks, not a person who didn’t take her for granted.

  Yet the curious thing was that at our church, the local Methodists, Mother was a figure of considerable importance: a taker of meetings, reader of lessons, organiser of conferences and outings; a woman of quick decision, easy authority and loud, strong singing voice. We sang, ‘He who would valiant be,’ and she was booming and triumphant. For Father had been valiant. We sang, ‘For all the saints, who from their labours rest,’ and she had tears in her eyes, thinking of the saint my father had been, the rest he had deserved.

  She was much loved, even revered. People came to her with their problems. They came with the most intimate problems, the most serious, even legal problems. For them she was both comfort and oracle. People came and wept with her, prayed with her, told everything. I always found, and to this day still do find, this fact extraordinary. I myself was unable to talk to my mother about anything: about religion, about my own wilderness of doubt, about my dead father, about Grandfather’s unpleasantness, about Aunt Mavis’s queerness, most of all about puberty (Peggy’s an explosion, physical and behavioural, my own slower, more furtive and guilty, later bold and deceitful). I was unable to talk to her about anything, and she in turn made no attempt to tackle anything intimate with me, nor with Peggy, who, through her friends at school, became my chief source of the vital information one inevitably grubs around for at that age.

  I remember looking in Mother’s handbag. I was supposed to be getting change for collection. She wasn’t going to church for some reason. She had problems with her hips sometimes. Bouts of something or other. And ferreting for her purse amidst a mess of hankies, keys and scraps of paper, breathing the forever memorable, blown-nose and old-leather smell of her bag, I came across a tampon, a cylinder wrapped in ricepaper. I said: ‘What’s this, Mum?’ At once she was flustered. I latched on immediately. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Put it away.’ ‘But what is it, Mum?’

  You would have thought, looking back, here was her opportunity to give young George his lesson, to guide him towards some mature understanding of the female body. But no, she says: ‘It’s a cigar.’ I couldn’t swear, but this may be the only straight lie my mother ever told me. ‘For Grandfather.’

  I looked at the long tube in its flimsy paper cover. It looked the right shape for a cigar, the big ones they advertised with organ music on the box. I said: ‘But you don’t like Grandad to smoke.’ ‘For his birthday,’ she wriggled. ‘It’s next Friday you know.’ She found a painful smile. ‘We can waive a rule for his birthday, can’t we? Bless his dear heart.’

  And I swallowed it. The extraordinary thing being that she then went out and actually bought a cigar for the old man’s birthday. Odd, no, to think of my mother being so cunning, so resourceful in her prudishness? For what? To save my innocence? In a world where the worst is anyway chalked on every wall. In a family w
here, that very evening, Peggy had already told me everything, mocking my innocence, even showing me quite graphically (using a ‘Q’ tip) how you fitted them in.

  Yet almost everybody in the church brought their problems to this woman, their confessions. They came to her after service in the hall where we had coffee and she would go off with them to the vestry, leaving Peggy and I to kick our heels in the yard amongst stacks of coal and tiles from the roof they’d had to remove because they were dangerous. They came to her at home in Gorst Road, sometimes late in the evening and she took them to her room. ‘Here comes another of the walking wounded,’ Grandfather would announce when the bell ding-donged in the middle of the Man from Uncle, Harry Worth’s Half Hour. ‘Out with the bandages. Call the nurse. Or is it to be last rites?’ And when one Saturday afternoon a black came, he said with his extraordinary flair for insensitivity: ‘Don’t you think we should frisk him? Don’t want any trouble.’

  But despite his prejudices and scorn Grandfather never actually prevented anybody from coming in. Even the most dishevelled of tramps (for Mother was famous for giving tea to vagrants in the kitchen – ‘Four sugars, ma’am’); even, as the sixties progressed, the occasional Indian (if Grandfather despised blacks, he truly loathed Indians). And this was another thing with my mother, that however much derision she attracted, and probably still attracts, she generally gets her way; and even if she doesn’t answer back, she has a quiet authority in her passivity, a power really, something terribly persuasive about her softly focusing brown eyes. Charisma. It was her ‘ministry’.

  ‘My ministry,’ I heard her explaining when she turned down Eddie Foulkes who owned the Hallmarks Plastics factory on Bowes Road and always put a tenner in the collection plate. I was on hands and knees on threadbare carpet in the dark light at the top of the stairs. They were by the porch below. She had prayed about it and the Lord had told her no.