occasionally made buoyant by a glass or two of cognac but he’d never heard him swear, cuss, or even blaspheme throughout his childhood or his mature life. Peter disapproved of swearing.
Which was difficult for Jake, because his days at university had given him a taste for a cocktail of the sacred and the profane. Hardcore swearing and blaspheming. He liked to say Jesus Fucking H. Christ without ever knowing what the ‘H’ stood for. He liked to say Holy Cunting Moses. One time a cupboard door at his father’s home was hanging loose and while Jake was fixing it the screwdriver slipped and gashed his hand and he’d screamed Cunt the Fucking Pharisee, which as an ex-Sunday School boy and one-time chorister he himself had found both strong and surprising.
His father, who had stood back watching, merely blinked and then walked out of the kitchen.
After a moment Jake had followed him, finding him in the living room, tight-lipped and running the Hoover over the carpet. Jake switched off the Hoover at the plug and showed Peter the wound on his hand.
‘What do you expect me to say? Oh Jehovah?’
‘Not even that.’
‘It’s just words!’
‘Having the cupboard door hanging off its hinges is rather less ugly than hearing that sort of language.’
‘Dad, you were in the war! You were in Special Ops! You saw men spill their guts! Surely you know what is important and what isn’t!’
Peter rarely leaked body language, any more than he did ‘bad’ language. He was a master of control. The only time he might inadvertently express surprise, irritation or pleasure would be a reflex in which he would reach up and pinch the right lens-frame of his glasses between thumb and index finger, as if to somehow increase the magnification of the lens. He did so now. ‘Does it ever occur to you that that might be the very reason why I don’t approve of coarse language in the house?’
Jake had thrown up his hands. In the house, out of the house. When going to visit Peter you always felt you should have taken off your shoes at the door: sooner or later you would be made to feel you had trailed something nasty in with you.
If Jake hung around long enough his father might take a bottle of cognac out of the sideboard and pour two rather meagre splashes into heavy, large brandy balloons. Jake always wanted to ask: why have such a big glass for such a small measure? Having a glass of cognac with his father was like being invited to have a drink with the Housemaster on the day it came to leave school. He would ask what your plans were and pretend to be interested and listen with an approximation of a smile until you were done.
Peter and Jake’s mother had divorced when he was twelve and his mother had gone to live in Scotland. The age gap between them—alluring and attractive to her when she’d met and married him—was a trial in later years. Ultimately she had been relieved to leave behind an aging husband. Jake had been sent to boarding school, something Zoe never let him forget, and which he couldn’t anyway.
That time after the screwdriver incident they sipped their ritual brandy and just as Jake was about to put down his glass and say his farewells, Peter had opened up about bad language.
‘I know it’s different for your generation, but I am offended by it. I don’t like it when you blaspheme, since that offends my faith; and I don’t like it when you cuss because that represents a decline in values.’
‘Yes, but what values, Dad?’
‘You don’t understand. Speaking, talking—language, that is—represents the most orderly, civilised and rational expression of human nature. All this foul-mouthed cussing is a gap where you can’t think of anything to say. It’s the opposite of being rational and ordered. The very opposite. It wants to unpick civilised behaviour, rationality and order.’
‘Yep. I just don’t happen to believe in rationality and order very much.’
‘Oh! You think we should give up? Let everything slide into the sewer?’
‘Not at all. What I mean is we are rational some of the time, but not all the time. We’ve no idea what’s under the rationality. Foul language as you call it is an expression of that.’
‘Ah! So we agree on one thing! It’s a call to the unconscious, to death and to ordure.’
‘Isn’t that what’s underneath everything?’
Peter sneered behind the lip of his brandy glass. ‘You don’t know the first thing about death, sonny. Not the first thing.’ Then he admonished himself. ‘I’m sorry, that was unmanly of me.’
‘Unmanly? Dad! Loosen up a bit, will you? Look, swearing: it’s just letting off a bit of steam. A safety valve.’
‘We won’t agree on that.’
Jake stood up. The time had come to leave. They always shook hands, firmly and with eye contact: his father had taught him that one should always make eye contact when shaking hands. Jake had watched Zoe and Archie hug affectionately on meeting and departing. He had wondered if resistance to the embrace was a male thing, but after a couple of years Archie was happy to offer him a hug, too. Meanwhile he and Peter had got through the years with firm handshakes and they weren’t about to start hugging now.
And yet now that he saw his father lying on the hospital bed he wanted to hug him. This father who suddenly,inexplicably and contrary to a lifetime of restraint had started swearing.
Peter lifted his head from the pillow. ‘You know they got Charlie, don’t you? Poor fucker.’
‘Charlie?’
‘We lost him. I’m sad about that. Good fellow in a scrap. Did you see that escarpment where we came in?’
‘Escarpment?’
‘Christ, I’ve been through this enough times. There’s an overhang above the cave high in the rock. If we’ve got a man spare we want one stationed there all the time. Right fucking there.’
‘Dad—’
‘I’m not fucking well discussing it. This isn’t the village fucking hall. Just see to it. I’m going to have to tell Charlie’s fucking wife when we get back. If we get back. All because of a bit of cunt, I ask you.’
Jake had brought grapes and lemon barley water. He placed them on the cabinet.
‘Grapes?’ Peter said. ‘Where in hell did you get those this time of year?’
‘The supermarket, Dad.’
Peter reached up to squeeze his lens-frame, but his glasses were folded and lying on the same cabinet. He was about to say something when the ward sister walked in and picked up his chart from the clip at the foot of the bed.
‘I want this place cleared of all these fucking whores.’
‘Now now, Mr Bennett,’ said the ward sister firmly. ‘We’ll have a bit less of that.’
‘Get the bitch out of here, Jake. Do you know, if the army made soldiers’ boots from cunt leather they would never wear out.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,’ Jake said. ‘Can I have a word?’
Jake stepped outside the private room with the ward sister and closed the door on Peter. ‘Look, I’ve never heard him say such things.’
The sister was a burly woman with large bovine eyes and a bleach-blond curl spilling over her brow. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, I’ve heard worse than that.’
‘Really? I haven’t!’
‘Well. You know.’
‘It’s like he’s time-tripping. He’s back in the war. It’s like he’s still fighting it. Is it the medication?’
‘Not really. The bone cancer has caused the bone to crumble and get into his bloodstream. The calcium runs to the brain. He’s not always like that. Most of the time he’s very sweet.’
‘That’s a relief. Look, I’ve got a bottle of brandy in my bag and a paper cup. I know you’re not supposed to, but… is it all right if he has some?’
‘I haven’t seen anything.’
‘Thanks.’
Peter had been a soldier on Special Operations in the war. An officer in the elite SAS force, he had
