It's over a quarter of a century since he first went deaf, and I've long been used both to raising my voice and to his pretending not to understand even so, for comic effect. He can probably hear me, actually, even if he hasn't turned his hearing aid on. "Bit crowded at this time of year, Brighton."
"Not depriving the world of some great new book?" "Not interrupting the muse, am I?" he asks, as I make him coffee. He has a touch of Fred Astaire's lightness and quickness about him. His features are as neat and well ordered as his three-piece suit and polished toe caps. When he takes the hat off it reveals the last of his trim silvering hair receding above the leathery corrugations of his forehead, and brushed precisely flat. Not always in a black homburg-sometimes in a brown trilby.
He has always been turning up like this in my life, unannounced, on the move, a law unto himself, excused by his deafness from the usual social conventions. He just happens to be passing, driving from somewhere in southeast London to somewhere else, on his way to put his head round the doors of building contractors and architects in Woolwich or Eltham, selling them roofing. The good year, shortly before the end of his life, the year's reprieve between his first cancer and the second.
My exasperation evaporates in the warmth of it.ġ969, yes, when I was writing my first play. And my father's familiar smile, like the sun coming up. The hat is followed by a pair of spectacles-a hearing aid-a trim gray moustache. Of course! Naturally! The black homburg! Just when I've got a chance to work undistracted! Why hadn't he phoned, like anyone else? Why hadn't he rung the bell or shouted "Anyone at home?" Why hadn't he at least taken his hat off? I'm looking at the last homburg in southeast London, perhaps in Western Europe. But then no one still wears homburg hats. No one round our way locks their front doors in 1969. The year must be 1969, I realize from the internal evidence when I reconstruct the scene in my memory. Around the edge of it, with a certain deferential caution, comes a hat. The two older children are at school, my wife's out with the baby, the house is empty. The handle of my study door softly turns.
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