the oddity of their interaction reinforced by her being on her knees – that he started to wonder if she was trying to remember who he was.
‘Colette,’ she said eventually, ‘come and meet your half-brother, Harvey.’
When the girl looked up, her face under her curls was set in a tight frown. She may have been crying, although not, Harvey thought, out of sadness: her expression contained that classic mix of rage and self-pity that children’s faces emit when they have just been told off. She did not do as she was told; she did not come and meet him, but stayed where she was, raising her chin defiantly and staring as if he was complicit in – perhaps even the mastermind of – whatever slight had just been perpetrated against her.
Or maybe she was sad, about her – their – dad dying, and this was just what she looked like when she was sad. After all, Harvey had never met her before. He had been sent a photograph soon after her birth of the three of them at their New England lodge (not by Eli: the accompanying note, including the statement, ‘Eli is so overjoyed about his new child’ was all in Freda’s hand). Eli, in a big fisherman’s jumper, grinning beneficently, his arms around Freda, her trademark proprietorial smile cross-fertilized with an element of self-conscious sheepishness, as if to say, ‘Can you believe what little me has ended up with?!’, and in her lap, the baby. Harvey wondered who had taken it, as it was too professional – the light too dappled, the wood-panelled walls of the lodge too burnished, the composition of the threesome too perfectly arranged – to have been done on a self-timer. It looked, he thought, like something from OK! magazine. But he could not relate his memory of that infant, looking out at him from the photograph with something of the complacent gaze of a cow, to this fierce child with the thermonuclear stare.
‘Hello,’ he said: the word felt stupid in his mouth. Colette just nodded at him, and Harvey felt suddenly furious at Freda for spiking his route to his father’s bedside with this introduction, impossible as it was to brush off because of the absurd and irreducible fact of him and this thirty-six-years-younger girl being siblings. Freda must have known that his first thought would be to get to Eli’s bedside – and Harvey had really wanted to do this, although not so much because he just wanted to see his dad, more that he wanted to get the first sight of him over with. He was scared about it. Approaching the door, he had felt much like he had as a kid watching Dr Who, knowing that a new monster was about to appear. The ten-year-old Harvey, trembling beside his mother (who let Dr Who under her steel bar of what Harvey was allowed to watch, although in later series changed her mind, deciding that the Time Lord’s always-female assistants were becoming oversexualized) in his blue, bi-planed pyjamas, would not hide behind the sofa. He would, rather, watch intently, wanting the monster to appear as soon as possible; the worst thing was not knowing. He wanted to face it, so that he could know the fear, hold it and calibrate exactly how bad it was going to be.
‘Last time I saw you, you were a tiny baby,’ he said, his voice sounding astringent against the sentiment, holding down his rage at having to have this conversation now. Surreptitiously, he flicked his eyes over towards his father’s bed, more of which was visible from this angle. The movement of his eyes sideways reminded him of the painful glancing action always prompted by an attractive woman across a room. He could see the thin hump of a wasting body underneath bedding, but still not the face. It was facing the face that filled him with dread.
‘You saw me when I was a baby?’ said Colette.
‘No. I saw a photo …’
‘Oh. OK.’ She looked at him. Her frown deepened, producing little lines on her forehead. ‘Why is your tongue blue?’
The awkward stalemate this response induced was broken by the sudden appearance of Freda with her arms outstretched. Harvey, opening his to accept the hug, looked at her frame, spread like a net in front of him, and thanked the Lord again that he didn’t find her attractive. Although younger than him, and a woman – normally enough for his needs – there was something about Freda that inhibited Harvey’s reflex interest. She had that parched-face look so common to female humanist academics that Harvey felt they should try their utmost to avoid, thinking that they had fallen into the exact trap – unfemininity – which Victorian patriarchy had predicted for women should they become learned. This particular intellectual conundrum was a hangover not from his father but his mother, who, despite being herself a female humanist academic, and an arch-feminist, never emerged from her bedroom without a cosmetic face mask three inches thick.
It had occurred to Harvey many times that, physically, Freda was the opposite of everything Eli usually went for in women – except in respect of her youth, relative to him. It did not go unnoticed by Harvey that that was, as it were, the last thing to go – that all the other staples of Eli’s desire could be sacrificed, but not this one, not even in his dotage.
The hug went on for some time. Harvey, who had been hugged by Freda before, felt in it, as ever, no particular love or affection for him: but much love and affection for the idea of hugging. This one was tighter and longer than usual, but still somehow failed to convey any sense that she was pleased to see him. Uncomfortably, however, it did give him time to feel the full length of her body against his – the emotional distance between them allowed him, in a bleak, detached way, to take stock of her body in a way that he never had before – and, then, much to his consternation, come away from the hug, in spite of his long-held notions about her mannishness, with a hard-on.
‘Go …’ said Freda, pulling back from him, Harvey hoping against hope not because she had noticed it. She was speaking in what sounded to him like a stage whisper. ‘Go to him. Speak to him.’
‘Speak?’
‘He understands. He hears.’
Harvey nodded, not wanting to say anything that might disturb her reverence. The tumescence in his pants subsided. He choked down an urge – with him most days, although undoubtedly charged up by the situation – to shout an obscenity at the top of his voice. He walked towards his father’s bed, his feet padding against the quality carpet of the room.
Glancing back, he saw that Freda had crouched down again to whisper to Colette. The doctor and nurse in the room were busying themselves with notes and drips and bleepers: none of them offered to guide him – neither geographically nor spiritually nor even educationally – through the scene. Harvey felt again like a nonentity in some exclusive club, unable to make his presence felt. It even flashed through his mind to say Don’t you know who I am? He wished Stella were here, to hold his hand, even though Harvey was uncomfortable with hand-holding, because it made him feel more aware of the fact of fear, and because, sometimes, he could feel the small bones in her hands.
These thoughts were halted by the interruption into his vision, finally, of his father. Even then it wasn’t as Harvey had imagined it, a kind of naked confrontation with mortality. Eli’s head was propped up against the pillow, and covered nose to mouth with an oxygen mask. Attached to various intravenous ports, six or seven different tubes curled around his bed and into his body, like he was being gently cradled by an octopus. Machines, humming and bleeping and oscillating with sine waves, surrounded him in a stately circle, as if his father were whatever invisible deity lurks in the centre of Stonehenge. It felt to Harvey that all this apparatus was designed not just to keep Eli from death, but also his visitors: that it formed a buffer zone between them and the reality of his condition. So much so, in fact, that the sight of his father was almost an anti-climax after all the girding of his loins. Where is he? he wanted to say, and not in a metaphorical way – not in a This shrunken shell of a human being cannot be My Father! way – but physically: he wanted to rummage through all this stuff, all the sheeting and the wires and the plastic, chucking it over his head like a man sorting through the trash, to find him.
He also felt he couldn’t see him because of the things that were not there. People assume that the way to reveal an object is to remove its external trappings, but that doesn’t hold true for the human object. Glasses, for example: Eli had for Harvey’s whole life worn thick black beatnik spectacles, and without them, as now, he was somehow not Eli. The lack of glasses, along with the lack of a cigarette in his mouth – something Harvey had also grown up conditioned to see,