Today I felt better and ready to resume normal life. I had a look at my email this morning, expecting to find a lot of messages from Alex, but there was just one, saying she was sorry to miss the party and looked forward to seeing me again in the New Year. There were a lot of seasonal ads for Viagra - ‘Give her a present she’ll really appreciate! ’ ‘Get a power charge for the Christmas break!’ I wonder what they will come up with for the next big holiday - ‘Rise Again this Easter’? And there was a computer-generated message from the University library recalling Liverwright’s book on document analysis. I wondered idly if Alex was going to borrow it again and try to remove the turquoise marks with some chemical solution.
23rd December.The epic journey is over. Operation Fetch Dad is accomplished - not without difficulty. Many times today I wondered if it would have been more sensible to do it by train, but whenever I have considered this option in recent years it seems to entail so many possibilities of things going wrong that I decide against it. The trains just before Christmas are crowded, so I would have to reserve seats, and book a minicab from Brickley at a time which, allowing for possible traffic jams in central London, would get us to King’s Cross in good time to catch the appointed train, but not so early that we would be hanging about in the station for ages waiting to board it. Then even if this leg of the journey worked to perfection there was always the possibility that the train would not be ready for boarding when we got to King’s Cross because it had been late in arriving, or had been cancelled, in which case our seat reservations would be invalid, and we would have to join a Gadarene rush for unreserved seats on the next train. All in all, it seemed preferable to take my chances on the road. I knew it would be slow, I knew there would be traffic jams, but once I had got Dad in the car and his luggage in the boot I wouldn’t have to worry about getting anywhere at any particular time, and I could be confident that sooner or later we would get to Rectory Road.
I left home in the winter dark at 6.30 a.m., with only a cup of tea inside me, whizzed through the nearly empty city centre and was soon cruising down the M1 in light traffic, with Radio Four turned up to a volume which nobody with normal hearing could have borne. The road bulletins were making worrying remarks about fog in the south, delays at airports, etc., but I made good progress as far as a service station near Leicester, where I stopped for breakfast. After that the traffic and the atmosphere gradually thickened and I didn’t get to the end of the M1 until just before ten. From there it was a slow drive across a misty London, its streets congested with Christmas shoppers frantically stocking up with food and drink as if for an expected siege, and I didn’t reach Lime Avenue until gone eleven. Dad was waiting for me in the darkened house, the curtains drawn in every room, wearing his overcoat and cap, with his bags packed and his walking stick in his hand. He looked as if he had been ready for hours. We shouted at each other for a few minutes. ‘Where have you been?’ he demanded. ‘I told you I’d get here at about half-ten,’ I said. ‘I thought you said half-past nine,’ he said. ‘How could I get here by half-past nine without getting up in the middle of the night?’ I said irritably. ‘It’s a long way.’ ‘Too bloody long, if you ask me,’ he said. ‘What did you have to go and move up north for?’ ‘The job was there, Dad,’ I said, as I have said many times.
I go through a check list with him:‘Have you cancelled the milk?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Have you cancelled the newspapers?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Have you left the central heating on?’ A sullen ‘Yes’. He has in fact turned most of the radiators off, but I calculate that the hot water circulating through the system will serve. ‘Have you told the Barkers?’ ‘What?’ he says. ‘Have you told the Barkers, next door,’ I repeat, thinking he hasn’t heard me. ‘Told them what?’ he says.