Case Histories by Kate Atkinson
They sat on either side of him, waiting for him to die. Victor was beached on his bed in what had once been the marital bedroom, a room that was still decorated in the overblown female style that their mother had once favoured. Was Rosemary getting ready at this very moment to welcome Victor into the clammy soil of the family plot? Amelia imagined her parents clasping each other’s bodies in a cold embrace and felt sorry for their poor mother who probably thought she had escaped Victor for ever.
And anyway, Amelia pointed out to Julia, picking up the argument despite her best intentions, neither of them wanted to be close to their father in life, so why would they want to be close to him in death? Julia said that wasn’t the point, it was ‘the principle of the thing’, and Amelia said, ‘When did you start having principles?’ and so the conversation went downhill again, long before they had got round to discussing the more difficult topic of the funeral service itself, for which Victor had left no guidelines.
When had they decided to stop calling him ‘Daddy’ and start calling him ‘Victor’? Julia sometimes called him ‘Daddy’, especially when she was trying to cajole him into a pleasanter mood, but Amelia liked the distance that ‘Victor’ gave. It made him more human somehow.
Victor’s chin was bristled with white and this new beard, coupled with the weight he had lost, made him seem unfamiliar. Only his hands seemed not to have shrunk, still huge, like bony shovels, brutish against his stick-like wrists. He suddenly mumbled something neither of them could make out and Julia cast a look of panic across the bed at Amelia. Julia had expected him to be dying but she hadn’t expected him not to be himself. ‘Do you want anything, Daddy?’ she said loudly to him and he shook his head as if trying to dislodge a cloud of flies but it was impossible to say whether or not he had heard them.
Victor’s GP had told them on the phone that district nurses were coming in three times a day. ‘Popping in’ was the phrase he had used, which made everything seem convivial and informal, but neither Amelia nor Julia had expected those adjectives would be applicable to Victor’s death, as they certainly hadn’t been applicable to his life. They thought the nurses would stay, but the minute Amelia and Julia arrived, one of them said, ‘We’ll be off now then,’ and the other shouted to Victor over her shoulder, ‘They’re here!’ in a cheerful way as if Victor had been waiting anxiously for his daughters, which he wasn’t, of course, and the only one pleased to see them was Sammy, Victor’s old golden retriever, who made a gallant attempt to greet them, his arthritic hips moving stiffly as his claws clacked across the polished boards of the hallway.
Victor had had a massive stroke, the GP said on the phone. A month ago, a different GP had told them that there was nothing wrong with Victor except for old age and that he had ‘the heart of an ox’. ‘The heart of an ox’ had seemed a muddled axiom to Amelia, wasn’t it ‘heart of a lion’ and ‘strong as an ox’? What was an ox? Just a cow? There were so many facts that Amelia no longer felt certain about (or perhaps she had never known them). She would soon be nearer fifty than forty, and she was sure that every day she could feel more neural pathways disappearing – fusing and arcing and dying – leaving her unable to retrieve information. Right up until the end Victor’s mind had been as methodical as an efficient library, whereas Amelia felt that hers was more like the cupboard under the stair where ancient hockey sticks were shoved in beside broken hoovers and boxes of old Christmas decorations, and the one thing you knew was in there – a 5-amp fuse, a tin of tan shoe polish, a Philips screwdriver – would almost certainly be the one thing you couldn’t lay your hands on.
Victor’s mind might have remained organized but his house hadn’t. After they left home it had steadily deteriorated until it was now almost squalid, like one of those houses where environmental health officers had to be brought in to clean up after some unfortunate had lain dead and unnoticed for weeks, in a pool of their own putrefaction.
Everywhere you looked there were books, all of them mildewed and foxed, none of them inviting you to read them. Victor had long since given up maths, it was years since he had kept up with research or shown any interest in journals or publications. When they were children Rosemary had told them that Victor was a ‘great’ mathematician (or perhaps it was Victor himself who had told them that), but whatever his reputation it had long since faded and he had been nothing more than a plodding member of the department. His speciality had been probability and risk, which Amelia didn’t understand at all (he was always trying to demonstrate probability to her by tossing coins), but it struck her as ironic that a man who studied risk for a living had never taken one in his life.
‘Milly? Are you all right?’
‘What is an ox?’
‘A cow. A bullock.’ Julia shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Why?’
They had eaten ox heart as children. Rosemary, never having so much as boiled an egg before her marriage, had learned to cook the sort of stalwart, old-fashioned food that Victor favoured as being both nutritious and cheap. Boarding-school food, the kind he was brought up on. The very thought of all those liver-and-bacon casseroles and steak-and-kidney puddings made Amelia feel sick. She could still see a bloody heart sitting on the kitchen counter, dark and glistening and swagged with threads of fat, looking as if it had only just stopped beating, while her mother, huge knife in hand, contemplated it with an enigmatic expression on her face.
‘Oxtail soup, I remember that,’ Julia said, making a disgusted face. ‘Was it really made from a tail?’
Rosemary had slipped out of her own life very easily. She had shown no tenacity for it at all when she discovered that the baby girl she was carrying when Olivia disappeared had a twin, not Victor’s longed-for son, but a tumorous changeling that grew and swelled inside her unchallenged. By the time anyone realized it signalled a life ending rather than a life beginning it was too late. Annabelle lived for only a few hours and her cancerous counterpart was removed, but Rosemary was dead within six months.
Victor seemed to be snoring – a deep, wheezing noise as if his windpipe was narrowing and collapsing. This was followed at regular intervals by a dreadful gasping when his reflexes kicked in and he found another breath. Amelia and Julia stared at each other in alarm. ‘Is that a death rattle?’ Julia whispered, and Amelia said, ‘Shush,’ because it seemed impolite to talk about the mechanics of death in front of the dying. ‘He can’t hear,’ Julia said, and Amelia said, ‘That’s not the point.’
This noise subsided after a while and Victor gave all the signs of being peacefully asleep. Amelia made them both tea – scrubbing out the stains from the mugs first – and they drank the tea standing by the window, looking down into the darkness of the garden.
‘What about the funeral service?’ Julia whispered. ‘He won’t want anything Christian, will he?’ Apart from a few feeble attempts on Rosemary’s part to send them to Sunday School, they had been brought up without religion. As a mathematician, Victor considered it his duty to inculcate scepticism in his daughters, especially as he thought they were frivolous girls – apart from Sylvia, of course, who had always traded on being a bit of a maths swot. After she left their lives, ‘swot’ was turned into ‘prodigy’ by Victor and later still into ‘child genius’ so that the longer she was gone the cleverer she became, whereas, as far as Victor was concerned, Amelia and Julia grew more brainless the older they got. There was a time when Amelia might have argued with him, although it would more likely have been Julia who would have put up a spirited defence of ‘the arts’ because Amelia found it difficult to counter Victor’s hectoring style. Now she wasn’t so sure. Wasn’t he right? Didn’t they, after all, know nothing?
‘And so what do you think?’ Julia said. ‘He has left the house to us, hasn’t he? Do you think he’s left us any money? Christ, I hope he has.’ Victor had never discussed his will with them, never discussed money with them. He gave the impression of having none, but then he had always been miserly. Julia started airing her grievances about the family pl
‘But we’d probably be cursed for life,’ Julia said, ‘like women in Greek tragedy who don’t observe the correct rituals for their dead father, the king,’ and Amelia said, ‘We’re not characters in a play, Julia, this isn’t Euripides,’ and Julia said, ‘No, really, Milly, it’s bad enough that we don’t love him,’ and Amelia said, ‘Whatever,’ and frowned when she heard herself sounding like one of her students.
Julia announced she was going to have a nap and she cradled her head in her arms on the grubby bedspread so that she looked as if she was paying some kind of strange homage to her dying father. Victor’s big hands rested on top of the coverlet, folded piously in a way that suggested he was prepared for death. It would have taken only the slightest effort for him to raise one of those hands and rest it on Julia’s head, to give her a final benediction. Had he ever touched them in a kind way? A kiss, a hug? A tender caress on the cheek? If he had, Amelia couldn’t recall it. ‘Wake me if anything happens,’ Julia mumbled, ‘if he dies or something.’ Julia was still a heavyweight sleeper and she was as dead to the world as Victor within minutes. Amelia looked at the dark curls on her sister’s head and felt a rush of affection for her that was more like a pang of grief.
Julia hadn’t had much work recently. She used to work all the time, provincial theatre, archly modern plays in tiny London studios and bit parts in television – underclass victims in The Bill and terminal patients in Casualty (she’d died twice in ten years) – but now she never even seemed to be called to auditions. She had done some kind of corporate training video last year but it was for an oil company subsidiary and Amelia had been annoyed with her for doing it, saying that she ‘should have considered the politics of it’, and Julia had said that it was easy to have ‘the luxury of politics when you have enough food to eat’, and Amelia said, ‘That’s a ridiculous exaggeration, when did you ever starve?’ but now she was sorry because Julia had been happy when she told her about the job and she’d spoiled it for her.
Amelia had seen almost all of Julia’s work and although she always told her how ‘wonderful’ she was, because that was theatrical protocol, she often found herself thinking that Julia wasn’t really very special at all when she was on stage. The best thing she’d seen her in was a pantomime in Bristol, a generic kind of piece, probably Cinderella, where Julia had been cast as a dog – a black poodle with a lion cut and a French accent. Julia’s shape, short and busty, had somehow been perfectly suited to the costume and she had caught a certain kind of Parisian arrogance that the audience loved. She hadn’t needed a wig, her own untamed hair had been piled up in a topknot with a bow in it. Amelia had never thought of Julia as a poodle before then – she had always imagined her as a Jack Russell. It seemed suddenly very sad to Amelia that the best role of Julia’s career was as a dog. And that she didn’t need a wig to play a poodle.
Was he dead? He looked very much like he did when he was asleep – lying on his back with his eyes closed and his beaky mouth open – but there was no sign of the rise and fall of his troubled breathing and his skin was an odd putty colour that suddenly brought back the memory of a dead Rosemary in a hospital bed, so unexpected that Amelia couldn’t move for a moment. She must have fallen asleep as well. The bad daughters of the king who couldn’t even sustain a deathbed vigil.
Sammy got up awkwardly from the rug by the side of the bed and hobbled over to Amelia, thrusting his dry nose into her hand enquiringly. ‘Poor old boy,’ Amelia said to the dog. She shook Julia gently awake and told her Victor was dead. ‘How do you know he’s dead?’ Julia asked, foggy with sleep. She had a livid red mark on her cheek where her watch had dug into her.
‘Because he’s not breathing,’ Amelia said.
An almost festive air had been created between them by Victor’s departure and although it was only six o’clock in the morning, Julia, as if following some prescribed post-mortem procedure, poured them a large brandy each. Amelia thought she would be sick if she drank it and surprised herself by enjoying it. Later, they walked, quite drunk at eight in the morning, to the local Spar to buy provisions, filling their basket with things that Amelia would never normally have bought – bacon, sausages, floury white rolls, chocolate and gin – giggling like the little girls they had forgotten they ever were.
Back at the house they made bacon-and-egg rolls, Julia eating three for the one that Amelia had. Julia lit up a cigarette the moment she had finished eating. ‘For God’s sake,’ Amelia said, waving the smoke away from her face, ‘you have some kind of oral fixation, you do know that, don’t you?’ Julia smoked in a theatrical fashion, making a performance of it, as she did of everything. She used to practise in the mirror when she was a teenager (as Amelia remembered it, a lot of Julia’s younger life had been practised in the mirror). The way Julia was holding her hand up to the morning light revealed the ghostly silver thread of the scar where her little finger had been sewn back on to her hand.
Why had they had so many accidents when they were young? Were they trying to get Rosemary (or indeed anyone) to notice them, to single them out from the mêlée of Amelia-Julia-Sylvia? Even now, Julia and Amelia were clumsy, always covered in bruises from bumping into furniture or tripping over carpets. Last year alone, Amelia had dropped a heavy pan on her foot and trapped her hand in a car door, while Julia had sustained a whiplash in a taxi and sprained her ankle falling off a stepladder. Amelia didn’t think there was much point in seeking attention once you were over forty, especially if there was no one to give it. ‘Do you remember the way Sylvia used to faint?’ she asked Julia.
‘No. Sort of.’
Every time she remembered Victor was dead, Amelia felt giddy. It was as if someone had lifted a great stone off her body and now she might be about to rise up, like a kite, like a balloon. Victor’s corpse was still tucked up in bed upstairs and although they knew they should do something, phone someone, react in an urgent way to death, they were overcome with a kind of indolence.
In fact it wasn’t until the next day that they journeyed to the Poor Clares’ convent and, after an interminable wait, spoke to ‘Sister Mary Luke’ – the ridiculous name that, even after nearly thirty years, neither of them could get used to. When they told her that Victor was dead, Sylvia looked astonished and said, ‘Daddy? Dead?’ And just for once her saintly composure slipped and she burst out laughing.
As a nun in an enclosed order, Sylvia was so excluded from normal life that it never occurred to them to consult with her about the funeral. By then they had already decided what to do with him anyway. After the undertaker had eventually removed Victor’s body, Julia had produced the gin and they had proceeded to get horribly drunk. Amelia couldn’t remember when she had been so drunk, possibly never. The gin, chasing the morning brandy, made them almost hysterical and somewhere in the midst of this lengthy alcoholic orgy they tossed a coin to determine Victor’s final fate.
Julia, histrionic as usual, was cross-legged and clutching on to her crotch, saying, ‘Oh God, stop it, I’m going to wet myself!’ and Amelia had to run outside and be sick on the lawn. By this time it was nearly dawn and the damp night air almost brought her back to sobriety.
Amelia had claimed heads but the coin had come down tails (which was a one in two probability, thank you, Daddy) and Julia declared that ‘the old fucker was going to be burnt’.
Amelia was awake early, too early. She wouldn’t have minded if she’d been at home – her real home, in Oxford – but she didn’t want to rattle around on her own in this place and Julia wouldn’t be up for ages. Amelia sometimes wondered if her sister’s genes hadn’t been spliced with a cat’s. Julia scoffed at the ‘provincial hours’ that Amelia kept – Julia hadn’t been in her bed before two in the morning since they arrived, emerging bleary-eyed at midday, begging hoarsely for coffee (‘Sweetie, please,’) as if she had been on some great nighttime quest that h
It had amazed them when they discovered that Victor – who neither of them could remember ever having watched television – not only owned a huge widescreen set but also subscribed to cable, and to everything, not just sport and films but all the X-rated channels. Amelia had been shocked, not so much by the ‘adult’ content of these (although it was disgusting enough) but by the idea of their own father sitting there, night after night, in his old armchair watching Red Hot Girls and God knows what other filth. She was relieved that Julia – usually so airily tolerant of the shortcomings of the male sex – was as horrified as she was. One of the first things they did was to get rid of the armchair.
Amelia watched only the news and documentaries on television, occasionally the Antiques Roadshow on a Sunday, and was astonished at the absolute crud on offer twenty-four hours a day. Did this supply some sort of narrative in people’s lives? Did people honestly think that this kind of balderdash was a high point of evolution? ‘Oh, lighten up, Milly,’ Julia (predictably) said, ‘what does it matter what people do? At the end of the day we’re all dead.’
‘Well, obviously,’ Amelia said.
As soon as they cleared the house of Victor and his worldly goods they would be able to put it on the market and be done with it. Or at least get it ready to put on the market, as Victor’s solicitor had muttered ‘probate’ with a kind of Dickensian gloom. Nonetheless, the will was entirely straightforward, everything divided down the middle, with nothing going to Sylvia because (apparently) she had expressly asked for nothing. ‘Like Cordelia,’ Julia said, and Amelia said, ‘Not really,’ but, surprisingly, they had left it at that. They were fighting less since Victor’s death two days ago. A new air of camaraderie had been fostered between them as they raked through Victor’s clothes (fit only for shoddy) and dumped pitted old aluminium cooking pans and maths books that disintegrated at their touch. Everything in the house seemed unsavoury somehow and in the kitchen and bathroom Amelia wore rubber gloves and cleaned constantly with antibacterial spray. ‘He didn’t have the plague,’ Julia said, but without conviction because she had already boiled all the sheets and towels that they were using.