Читать книгу A Film by Spencer Ludwig - David Flusfeder, David Flusfeder - Страница 5

Spencer Ludwig, film-maker, arrives at his father’s apartment somewhat out of sorts.

He dawdles at the threshold. Blue carpet, brown walls, black door, he looks for something that will strengthen him against the inevitable onslaught of his father’s and stepmother’s world. If he had a camera with him, he would use it—extreme close-up: the carpet, his sneakers, the apartment door. Before pressing the bell he would whisper, and he does, Here goes.

Spencer has become a frequent visitor to his father’s apartment. He has made this journey—tube from Stockwell to Heathrow, plane to JFK, subway to 50th Street—four times already this year, arriving, like this, encumbered by luggage and laptop, sticky and half dazed. His father, the idol and enemy of Spencer’s youth, is eighty-six years old and in failing health.

‘Here goes,’ he repeats.

Voices are raised from inside the apartment, as they often are. Jimmy?! his stepmother yells, unanswered, maybe unanswerable.

TALK TO ME! Spencer has dawdled long enough, but he lingers some more. Coming out of the subway station, sweating under the weight of his luggage on a cold spring day, he had walked past his father’s apartment building and the Museum of Modern Art and steeled himself with a double espresso and a half-hour of internet poker at a coffee shop on 6th Avenue. There he had sat squeezed at the window between an almost respectably dressed young man and a blonde woman of unearthly thinness. The young man occupied himself in expectorating and muttering. The woman pecked away at her laptop. Spencer tried to keep his attention upon his own laptop and avoid contact with the young man’s sounds or the bird woman’s words on her screen.

HUNTER

I guess that’s pretty lame.

Hunter, he presumed, was a male character, based, as cruelly as her thin vengeful yearning could make him, on her most recent disappointing boyfriend.

Spencer played poker. He clicked and bet and clicked and bet and folded and clicked and raised and reraised and clicked. He was late to see his father, and he wasn’t winning in this session, and its instrumental purpose became lost in the seedy relentlessness of the pursuit itself. Spencer, so tentative in most areas of his life, is ferocious in pursuit and defence of his work, ferocious in his love for his daughter, Mary, and ferocious, sometimes obsessional, in his playing of poker. Once, in Paris in autumn, during a film festival, he stayed all night in his hotel room, eschewing screenings and dinners and parties and meetings with distributors in favour of screen-staring, of clicking and betting and clicking.

A lucky river when he was foolishly chasing a draw against a competent opponent who was extracting the maximum from his top two pairs won Spencer $225. Before he lost the little he had left in his online account, and became too offended by the swirling clutches of mucus and saliva from the young gentleman on his right and the dismal work of the woman on his left

HUNTER

I know. I’m sorry. But I do love

you, you know. That cute thing

you do with your mouth, I just

want to kiss it.

he put his laptop in its case and hoisted his load and went to his father’s apartment.

Here goes. And it is all going full throttle in there, geriatric rage, the hatefulness of old people who have terminally disappointed each other. Spencer’s father is sitting at the table in the corner of the living room working on a jigsaw puzzle, dwarfed by the skyscrapers through the high glass windows that arouse a giddy vertigo in Spencer. His wife is stumping and ranting around the apartment, and Spencer’s stepbrother, Jacksie, is walking after his mother, trying to appease while giving her further fuel to go on.

Jacksie is in his late fifties, but apart from some issues with his prostate and a spreading of the gut, he wouldn’t seem much more than forty or so. He dresses as he has always done, as a sporty suburban child, in shorts and sweatshirt, and the only alarming things about his appearance are the perpetual hurt look in his eyes and the blizzardy whiteness of his teeth. Jacksie lives in California, which is where his teeth are from.

‘I want a toaster-oven,’ Spencer’s stepmother says, spitting out the words as if the world is denying her a basic human right, which she will avenge even if governments should fall and stars be extinguished.

‘You’ll get your toaster-oven,’ Jacksie says.

‘Well where is it?!’ his mother says.

‘Hey Spencer, what’s up?’ Jacksie says.

‘Hello Jacksie.’

‘Look Pop! Look who’s here! You know who this is?’

Jacksie treats Spencer’s father as if he is an imbecile, which Jimmy Ludwig can hardly ever be bothered any more to resent.

Spencer’s father has a very nice smile. Sometimes it is even sincere, as it seems to be now, as he gets up from the table and walks over, stooped and frail, to greet his son. Spencer pulls away the trailing oxygen tube that has become wrapped around his left ankle, and they hug. Before Spencer receives his inevitable insult from his father about his appearance, he reflects that an ease that was entirely absent from their relationship is now present. They used to make each other physically uncomfortable. Spencer tries to remember when he stopped fearing his father.

Jimmy Ludwig used to be an attorney, specialising in corporate law, patents disputes, the breaking of international contracts. He came over to the US with his English wife after having spent an uncomfortable few years as a Polish immigrant in London after the War. He worked as an engineer in a factory while attending law classes at City College. Sometimes he joked that his first wife was cheaper than language classes.

After he became successful he developed a taste for Italian suits, the dapper effect spoiled only a little by the trousers always being cinched and belted to one side, his propensity to collect food stains on his shirt and tie. He carried on working until seven years ago, when he suffered a stroke that deprived him of some of his powers of expression and comprehension. In the past year, his body has started to disintegrate. Now he sits in a room and is rude to his wife and solves jigsaw puzzles and watches boxing on TV in between visits to doctors who give him sampler packs of speculative medications and tell him they can do nothing for him.

Neither he nor his second wife is capable of looking after themselves or each other. Despite Spencer’s history with his father, he has found himself, for motivations he doesn’t quite understand, being a dutiful and attentive son.

When Spencer is in New York, he ferries his father to doctors’ appointments and plays backgammon against him, remorseless competition for twenty-five cents a point, with breaks for meals, when Spencer’s father either quarrels with Spencer’s stepmother or eats in a morose efficient silence, while Spencer makes occasional attempts to heal his father’s marriage, and he is always relieved when the week is over.

‘Still best-dressed man,’ Spencer’s father says.

Spencer dresses badly out of a sort of principled vanity. Believing that a gentleman should either be a dandy or a schlump, he wears a uniform of black sneakers and baggy black jeans and loose fitting black T-shirts with a faded image or logo on them.

‘How are you doing?’ Spencer says.

‘I’m doing shit,’ Spencer’s father says. ‘Good to see you.’

‘And you.’

Spencer’s stepmother takes a moment to greet Spencer. He wonders, ever since he was a child he has wondered, why she always manages to leave lipstick smears on her front top teeth. He would have thought that she would have noticed this by now or that her husband would have pointed it out, but Spencer’s father no longer talks to his wife.

‘I fell over. Do you want to see the bruise?’ she says to Spencer.

Spencer, without meaning to, takes a step back in recoil.

‘Uh. No. It’s OK,’ he says.

‘There are some things a stepson shouldn’t see!’ Jacksie yells. His voice is always full-volume, as if he is accustomed to dealing with the nearly deaf.

‘We’re going to Gribitz,’ Spencer’s father says.

Spencer’s father has problems with his lungs, his blood pressure, the nerve endings of his hands and feet, he is in constant pain from stenosis of the spine; but he is most concerned about his inability to empty his bowels.

‘Pop’s got a lot of issues with his BMs,’ Jacksie says.

Jacksie always calls Spencer’s father Pop, even though he had his own father once and, apart from one excursion to Kennedy Airport when Jacksie was young, there has never been any aspect of their relationship that could be described as father-son.

‘Charlie,’ says Spencer’s father.

Charlie is his default name for any man. When Spencer was young, his father would sometimes consent to tell his son bedtime stories set in the War. There were three characters, Steve, Mike and their leader, Charlie. Charlie was the daring one, who would, with ingenuity and audacity, deliver the pals from evil and imminent death. Spencer had initially projected himself as Charlie but then accepted that he was as yet unworthy of the role and decided instead that it was his father’s name for himself.

‘I’ve got something to show you that you’re going to love,’ Jacksie says. ‘Sit down. Make yourselves comfortable.’

Spencer angles his father’s chair to face the television set and sits beside him. Waiting for their appreciation is a DVD of Jacksie’s home in southern California. Jacksie, after some struggles to comprehend the workings of the remote control which Spencer longs to tear out of his hand, manages to solve the problem of how to press the play button.

Jacksie sits on a smaller chair that is closer to the television.

‘This is my home,’ he says. ‘A friend of mine did this. I think you’ll find it’s very good.’

On the screen, Jacksie and his wife Ellie wave at the camera from a terrace. There are vines in large urns beside them. A verdant hillside behind them is dotted with similar houses, Spanish colonial style, white stucco walls, terracotta roofs.

‘On a clear day you can see all the way to Catalina,’ Jacksie says.

He sits forward avidly watching as if he were seeing it for the very first time.

‘What do you think of the camerawork?’ Jacksie asks. ‘I think it’s execrable,’ Spencer says. ‘Yeah, it’s good isn’t it?’

Spencer’s father has fallen asleep. Spencer surreptitiously photographs him with the camera on his mobile phone. There are new messages on it, from his daughter, which he wants to respond to, and from his producer, whom he is seeking to avoid.

‘Hey! Spence! I hope you’re paying attention!’

‘Yes. Oh. Sorry.’

Spencer returns his attention to the screen. An urn of grapes, a dying spaniel, a shot of Jacksie and Ellie on their veranda accompanied by a dreary plinkety-plonk of a faux jazz soundtrack.

‘Jerry, who filmed this, composed the music himself,’ Jacksie says.

‘Yes, well, I suppose he might have,’ Spencer says.

When the thing is finally over, Spencer feels compelled to say something nice.

‘Well, your house is very beautiful,’ he says.

‘It certainly is!’ Jacksie says. ‘My little piece of Eden. I bet you really want to visit us now.’

‘I do. Seeing this makes me want to see it in person.’

‘It would have exactly the same effect on me,’ Jacksie says.

And back in stumps Jacksie’s mother, Spencer’s stepmother, Spencer’s father’s second wife. When Spencer first met her, thirty-five years before, she was a tanned suburban beauty. He was six years old, she affected to adore him. Now her skin is heavily lined, her eyes are bitter and narrow, her limbs and back are bent and crooked, and her scalp can be seen through the sprayed dyed helmet of her hair, which she has tended to once a week at the ironically named beauty parlour. She is seventy-four, twelve years younger than her husband. They have been married for thirty-four years, far longer than either were with their first spouses.

‘I think we need a day bed,’ she says.

‘OK,’ Jacksie says.

‘We’re going to need help here. I can’t ask someone to sleep on the sofa. Don’t you think so, Spencer?’ ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

‘Jimmy!’ she yells, waking up her husband. ‘I’m talking about the day bed!’

Jimmy Ludwig slowly opens his eyes. He fixes a look of uttter pained hopelessness on to his wife that comes close to breaking his son’s heart, shakes his head, which produces a corresponding wince of pain, and stands up to inspect his jigsaw puzzle with his chin pressed uncomfortably to his chest.

‘Where’s your collar? Jimmy! I said, Where’s your collar?’

He does not risk a movement of the head this time. He lifts a jigsaw piece, which might be an azure tip of one of the flowers in a pot beside four ginger kittens, and inspects it by rolling his eyes up so he can just about see it from the painful angle that his vision is forced to examine the world from.

‘Dad,’ Spencer says. ‘You should probably put on your collar.’

Spencer retrieves his father’s neck brace from beneath the magazine rack, where it had fallen, or been discarded, on to a pile of his father’s completed jigsaw puzzles.

Spencer’s father accepts the collar, a wide strip of yellow foam bandaged by a strip of white cloth that has become a little grubby through frequent use. He wraps it around his damaged neck, a strip of Velcro seals it shut, and his chin is supported, and lifted a little. He makes another little grunt, which might be of protest, or acceptance—although that is unlikely—but the noise is partly lost in the constant low rumble and hiss of his oxygen machine.

Spencer’s father’s first name was originally Izio. (His last name was originally Lewissohn, but that was discarded a couple of generations before he was born.) When he arrived in London he thought it advisable to have an English-sounding name, as if that would somehow obscure his utter foreign-ness. He attempted to call himself Tim, because that was the name of a colonel he had served under whose manners had impressed him. Meeting his future first wife at a Polish ex-servicemen’s dance in Clapton, he tried out his adopted name. In his thick accent, the word came out sounding more like Jim, which was what she called him. He was too embarrassed, for both of them, to correct her, and so he was, as it were, christened.

‘I want to have the day bed over there,’ Spencer’s stepmother says.

‘That’s where Pop sits,’ Jacksie says.

‘Don’t you think I need a day bed?’

‘I’m not saying you don’t. That’s not the issue,’ Jacksie says.

‘Tell me then. What is the issue?’

Jacksie seldom stands up to his mother, so his effort now is quite impressive. Nonetheless, he looks to Spencer for support, and lifts his hands, as if to protect his face.

‘Don’t you think,’ Spencer says, ‘that you could have the day bed, without disruption? Maybe you could put it over there, against that wall.’

‘I don’t want it against that wall. I want it here.’

‘But. That’s where my father sits,’ Spencer says. ‘That’s where his chair is.’

‘The chair can move!’

‘Maybe,’ Jacksie says, emboldened by having an ally, by he and his stepbrother outnumbering, if not outvoicing, his mother, ‘maybe Pop doesn’t want the chair to move.’

Spencer’s stepmother explodes in self-pity and rage.

‘You know what I don’t like around here?! No one cares about me. No one asks me how I am! The toaster-oven has been broken for three days!’

‘Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll get you a new toaster-oven,’ Jacksie says.

‘All we’re saying,’ Spencer says, ‘is that you can have a day bed and my father doesn’t have to move his chair. There’s enough room here for both.’

His stepmother ignores him, turns her spite on to her son.

‘And let me tell you something. You want to hear something? I don’t care any more. I don’t want a fucking toaster-oven.’

And with that, she stumps off again, before stumping back in again to remind Spencer that his father has an appointment with Dr Gribitz in just under an hour.

‘Mom?’ Jacksie says.

‘Don’t fucking Mom me,’ Spencer’s stepmother says, and stumps back towards the bedroom on her crooked legs. (The soul writes itself on the body.)

‘Do you mind if I use the phone?’ Spencer says.

‘Of course I do!’ his father says in an attempt at humour.

‘Be quick,’ his stepmother says, poking her head around the bedroom door. ‘You’re taking Dad to Gribitz.’

His first call is to Cheryl Baumbach at the Short Beach Film Festival.

‘I’m here in New York,’ Spencer says. ‘That’s great. That’s terrific.’

‘Coming down tomorrow, I hope. I just wanted to check that you had received my DVDs’. ‘I’m sure we have.’

‘Particularly Robert W’s Last Walk. For the retrospective.’ ‘For the…?’

‘You said you wanted to screen all my films.’

‘Well we do. Of course we do. We’re very excited.’

She does not sound excited. She sounds absent, almost uninterested, and Spencer’s stepmother returns to fuss and flurry around them and Spencer’s father continues to ignore her.

‘Spencer!’

‘Yes,’ he says to his stepmother. ‘Just one more call.’

He signs off to Cheryl Baumbach with an attempt at the sort of benevolent charm one might expect from a director whom festivals deem worthy of a retrospective and then he calls his daughter.

Mary is ten years old. She is air whereas he is earth, free where he is most trammelled. Her company delights and somewhat intimidates him. Her mother, to whom he was nearly married, is sensible, and worldly. The period when he was with her, when he had temporarily learned to clean the dishes the same day they were dirtied, to wash the basin after he shaved, to respond to a direct question with more than a grunt, had lifted Spencer in the opinion of his father, an unearned respect that he has not entirely squandered.

Mary has a cold and she is looking for something from him that will make her feel better. Mary has a direct relationship to the world that usually involves acquisition.

‘Daddy. Will you get me an iPod?’

‘No honey. I won’t get you an iPod.’

‘Why not? You’re in America. You’re in New York’

‘You’re ten years old. You don’t need an iPod.’

He does not need to listen to the list of her friends who own iPods, the Roses and Lilys and Poppys and all the others, who stand out, pink skinned, yellow haired, floral named, from the Shinequas and Taaliyahs and Chanels at her primary school (and who, presumably, do not own iPods or iTouches or iTastes). Unspoken but loudly declared in the list she reels off are all the indignities and unfairnesses of her life, and the precarious-ness of her loyalty to Spencer.

‘Spencer! Gribitz!’

‘Yes yes. I know. Look, honey. I have to go in a moment. I’m taking Papa Jimmy to his proctologist.’

She does not ask what a proctologist is, because Mary, like her mother, does not wish to appear unknowledgeable about any subject. But showing off his vocabulary of fancy medical terms will not protect him from his daughter’s needs or scorn.

His daughter does not have to stay loyal to him. There is another man in her world, whose name is Doug. Mary’s mother has demonstrated her preference for Doug over Spencer so why shouldn’t Mary feel the same way? She lives with him and Doug has money, so Doug can buy her an i-anything if only she would ask him—it is a tattered piece of loyalty that impels her to persist with Spencer anyway. And she has a headache. And her stomach hurts. She is off school and Mummy has said that she may not go to Grace’s party, which is unfair.

‘Not if you’re sick, honey,’ Spencer says, nobly resisting the opportunity to join forces with his daughter against her mother.

Spencer had tried to be a family man. He had done what he thought was his best at making a go of it, family Christmases, family holidays, but he had not convinced anyone of his sincerity, least of all himself.

Mary’s mother made more money than Spencer did and she saw the world rather as Spencer’s father did, a straightforward place where value was measurable by money, in which the person who owned the most things was the winner.

‘Errol Flynn said that if he left behind any money after he died then his life would have been a failure.’

‘Who’s Errol Flynn?’

And Spencer’s stepmother continues to stamp around. Gribitz…Dad…appointment…Car! ‘A movie star, baby,’ Spencer says.

‘I’ve never heard of him,’ says Mary, dismissing Errol Flynn utterly and perhaps with him the entire Hollywood Golden Age.

When Mary was born, Spencer made the mistake of announcing that he had received his emotional pension plan, here was someone who would look after him when he was old and friendless. Sometimes he aroused the maternal instinct in her, often they had fun, usually they could make each other laugh. But at other times she was like a highly strung puppy made peevish and insecure by the ineffectualness of its owner.

‘I’ve got a stomach ache. Will you get me an iPod?’

Generously, she is giving him a final chance, and how he wants to say yes, a part of a father’s job is to protect a child’s innocence, and why shouldn’t he pretend along with her that buying luxury goods is a cure for most conditions?

‘Look. I—’

But his stepmother finally intervenes. She can bear this no longer. Her world is manageable only when she is charge of all of its details, and to her this is unbearable, that her nebbish of a stepson is enjoying himself on the telephone when the routine demands he now be making the call to the garage to release the car.

‘The doctor! The garage! Dad’s appointment! Gribitz!’

‘I’m sorry,’ Spencer says (and how he hates himself for making an apology, even such an unreflective one). ‘I’m talking to my daughter. She’s sick.’

His stepmother inhales and exhales rather dramatically before speaking. She looks magnificently triumphant.

‘Well we’re sicker!’

‘I’m sorry, honey, I’d better go. I’m taking Papa Jimmy to his doctor.’

‘I hate you! You’re rubbish!’

‘Oh,’ he says, but he is talking to air.

Jacksie is moving his hands ineffectually into and out of his pockets. Spencer’s stepmother is carrying small plastic bags containing a variety of small coloured objects. Spencer’s father is struggling into his jacket, refusing any assistance. And how Spencer wants to film this. Obtaining the release might be problematical but people are vain, and usually want to be on screen, regardless of the circumstances.

He hasn’t allowed himself any equipment. Usually Spencer carries a small camera with him. Recently, between jobs (Michelle, his sometimes producer, has been calling, but Spencer can’t talk to her), he has been gathering autobiographical footage to use in a speculative future film, in which he supposes that images ripped away from context (physical, emotional) will be montaged with stock footage, crowd scenes, moments of intimacy or war. But his most recent girlfriend, Abbie, had grown tired of this. She had been one of his students and he had failed her on the course just to prove that this was not some clichéd master-servant relationship. This had made her angry. You think it’s because you’re some kind of artist, and some others even think so too. But I’m not fooled any more. It’s because you’re frightened of real life, you need to put something between you and real life.

Expertly, rather cruelly, he had demolished her childish notions of real life. But all the same, as he packed to leave for the airport, he deliberately left his camera behind. He would show her that he had no need for filtering or mediating experience. And he would prove it so well that he would have no need to report his triumph back to Abbie.

Spencer has almost given up on his ambition to produce a single great film. If he were to be honest with himself, which sometimes he is, then he would have to admit that he has not entirely given up believing this might be possible, that the films of Ludwig could join the team, Ruttman, Vertov, Fassbinder, Reed, Lang, some Marker, Ray, Dreyer, Ford, Buñuel, Bresson, Hawks, Wilder. The list could go on; but even if his films were doomed never to join the A-list, he would want at least a shot or two to enter the minds of his audience and be installed there, a single glorious image, with all the vividness of lived experience or unforgettable dream.

Man without a movie camera went to New York. Images that have interested him along the way he has recorded with his telephone. He will allow himself this, he decided. Just as long as nothing is altered or arranged for the picture.

His father disentangles himself from his oxygen machine, and crumblingly attaches himself to one of his portable cylinders.

‘Let’s get out of this shithole,’ he says.

There is silence and then some confusion in the room.

‘What did he say?’ Spencer’s stepmother says.

Jacksie winks at Spencer’s father and then at Spencer.

‘Still the dude, Jimmy. You the man! High-five!’

Spencer’s father ignores him. He has the portable oxygen cylinder switched on and the breathing tube attached to at least one nostril.

‘Toaster-oven,’ Spencer says. ‘He says we’ll get the toaster-oven.’

‘Oh. Are you sure? He’s already been out once today. Jimmy?! YOU’VE ALREADY BEEN OUT TODAY. YOU MUST BE TIRED!’

Spencer’s father ignores her as he always does. He looks lavishly away and continues to fumble with the breathing tube. Spencer’s stepmother considers the situation. It does not make her unhappy for her husband to be away from her if he is in the care, and responsibility, of his son.

‘You’ll need something to eat.’

‘We won’t need anything to eat,’ Spencer says.

‘His blood-sugar levels shouldn’t get too low. A little and often is what Dr Kornblut says. At least take some fruit. JIMMY? WOULD YOU LIKE A PIECE OF FRUIT? I’VE PACKED YOU A PLUM AND A BANANA IN A BAGGIE.’

‘It’s the old Jimmy. Decisive, man of action. You see that, Mom?’ Jacksie says.

‘Here,’ says Spencer’s father, impotently holding out the dangling breathing tube.

Spencer fixes the tube while his stepmother stumps out of the living room, and then she comes in again and stumps out and back, bringing more items each time, until Spencer has the portable oxygen cylinder in a carry-bag, the spare cylinder in a rucksack along with one baggie that contains a banana and two plums (which Spencer resolves to take a photograph of as soon as they are out into the hallway), another baggie with Spencer’s father’s medications, a fold-up umbrella, a sweater, four Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, which she knows that Spencer likes and which prove that she is not entirely without a sense of care and fellow-feeling, and some sections of the New York Times.

‘Mom. They’re only going out to the doctor,’ Jacksie says.

‘You want to come with us? Maybe it’ll be fun,’ Spencer asks.

‘Sure. But no, I better stay here with Mom.’

‘Maybe you should take your two o’clock medicines now.’

Spencer’s father spectacularly ignores his wife.

‘Don’t you think that’s a good idea, Spencer? Honey? Spencer thinks it’s a good idea.’

Spencer’s father averts his head from whichever direction his wife approaches. She reaches to wipe his hair back into place and he bats her hand away.

‘ Your medicines,’ she says, and Spencer’s father ignores her.

‘Why don’t you take your medicine,’ Spencer says, and his father makes an all-things-are-meaningless gesture and grumpily holds out his hand for the pills.

He is on sertraline for his depression and prednisone for his breathing and proamatine to raise his blood pressure and rosuvastatin to lower his cholesterol and tramadol for back pain and fludrocortisone for his adrenal gland and alfuzosin to shrink his prostate and darifenacine to calm his bladder and aspirin to stave off another stroke. Spencer’s stepmother keeps all the medications, his and hers, in little white boxes that have separate compartments for the days of the week.

‘And the spare oxygen. Don’t forget the spare oxygen.’

Spencer says, I won’t, and checks the gauge reading on the portable oxygen tank.

‘Two,’ his father says.

‘It’s on two,’ Spencer says. And Spencer checks the volume on the spare oxygen tank and puts it in the tote-bag along with his father’s cap and scarf and his stepmother’s discarded sections of the New York Times.

‘Have you called for the car?’ Spencer’s stepmother says and Spencer says that he has and tells his father, We’re all set.

‘ Take the cane,’ Spencer’s stepmother says, and Spencer nods and finds the cane in its place under the hall table, which has mail ready to be sent secured under the base of a carved wooden Buddha, a souvenir from a trip to South-East Asia made in the days before she got sick.

‘Don’t forget the toaster-oven,’ Spencer’s stepmother says.

‘Where’s the affidavit?’ Spencer’s father says.

‘What’s he saying?’ Spencer’s stepmother says. ‘What affidavit?’

And Spencer is familiar enough with his father’s mind to know that he is referring to something non-legal that he has decided is integral to their outing. One of the symptoms of his aphasia is that he tends to substitute a word that he was accustomed to use for work for something that he requires in the present.

‘What?’ says Spencer. ‘Your pills? You’ve taken them.’

His father irritably shakes his head.

‘ The affidavit,’ he says, and shakes his right hand in a loosely held fist.

‘What’s he saying?’ Spencer’s stepmother says. ‘Why is he doing that? That tremor is new. Do you think we should take him back to the neurologist?’

By we Spencer’s stepmother means you. She cannot bear to be alone with her husband any more.

‘I think I get it. You mean the backgammon?’ Spencer says.

His father nods, no less irritably.

‘That’s what I said, the affidavit.’

Spencer adds the backgammon set to the tote-bag and their preparations are complete. His father consents to take the cane in his left hand. Spencer’s stepmother stumps along with them for their journey to the elevator, which is precarious because Spencer’s father just follows his own erratic path, making no allowances for the tube that connects his nose to the oxygen cylinder that Spencer is carrying. Spencer, with the tote-bag over his right shoulder, the cylinder over his left (and both hands poised to catch his father should he fall), has to twist and skip to keep the oxygen tube straight. The elevator operator is a kind man who has grown old inside his brown uniform. The badge he wears on the breast pocket of his jacket announces just his first name.

‘How are you doing today, Mister Ludwig? Mister Ludwig.’

It is only recently that Spencer has been honoured by being greeted formally by the doormen and elevator operators of his father’s building. In former times his appearance had been too disreputable, his manner too odd by Museum Tower standards, to merit more than a nod, a request every time he stepped into the elevator for his floor number, even though he had been visiting his father and stepmother here for close to twenty years. But the group mind of the building’s staff had promoted Spencer in the aftermath of his father’s stroke and his display of dutiful care to the rank of someone to whom it was appropriate to show respect.

Spencer’s father stumbles into the elevator, and relievedly allows himself to fall against its rear wall with his hands behind him in case he needs to push off again.

‘Thank you James.’

‘You’re welcome, Mister Ludwig.’

Spencer’s father waits in the lobby of his building with his oxygen tank and the supplies for their journey while Spencer walks the half-block to the garage where Spencer’s father keeps his car. He holds the dollar bill that his father has given him to tip the car-jockey with and which Spencer obscurely resents.

He has tried to persuade his father to sell the car. It costs money to maintain and garage. He hardly uses it, indeed he shouldn’t use it at all because of his medical conditions, and when his son comes to visit him, he is the one to drive it, a black Cadillac El Dorado that had been new six years before, but now is battered and dented from his father’s geriatric adventures in city traffic. Despite his attempts to persuade his father to surrender the car, Spencer likes driving it. It is a much better car than the one he has in London.