Where the Rainbow Begins

As usual with a blog, the extacts appear in reverse order, ie the last extracts first.  The last sequence,(extracts 6-11) about the hero vonfronting his father, is perhaps the most interesting.

“Simon, Kant is describing the architecture of conscience.  If you choose to ignore…”

“How dare you?  Just because I disagree, you’re turning me into a sordid little…” I had crossed a Rubicon.   Arguing made me feel pedantic, grubby – excited as well.

“… Expediency…”

“… Hypocrisy…”

“… Superficial…. Fashionable whining…  Rock and Roll…”

That’s when I noticed Rachel had fallen asleep.  I left the room, to have a pee.  To break the spell, come down to earth, be alone for a while so I could think of myself as Sir Galahad again.  When I came back, my father was on his knees, turning over a pile of papers.  Rachel had woken up.  I smiled, she stared at the Persian rug.

“Now would both of you listen to what I have to say?” he asked, standing up.  “There is a very practical solution.  As Simon knows, I am a member of the Lattice Foundation”  Never heard of it.  “And one of their trust’s runs a home for unmarried mothers-to-be.  It’s situated in a very pleasant late Georgian house near Chester.  Rachel could go there for nine months, and then have the baby adopted by a family.”

“Rachel doesn’t want...”

“Simon!  I can say things, too, you know.  And it’s only seven months, isn’t it?”
Is it?  I had never thought to ask.

“You see, Simon, I think perhaps you’ve been leading her astray.”

Rachel had turned her attention to the January gloom outside the window.  “Rache, do you really want to go to a home for fallen women, go through with the pregnancy, and then have your baby given away to some strangers?”  Make me look like a small minded, loud mouthed criminal for championing an alernative scenario?  When all I wanted was the end to her misery.  And, a little applause, I suppose, for my parfait knight role.  Oh, fuck!  I was beginning to doubt my own motives.

Rachel frowned.  The grandfather clock struck four, or five.  My father closed the curtains.  She blew her nose, and frowned again.  “Would there be” she asked at last, “nuns and things?”

“Well, it is run by an Anglican order..”

“Dad, Rachel is a Methodist.”  Phil had told me his wife enjoyed the hymns.

“Shut up!  Shut up both of you!  I’ll do anything as long as my - mum doesn’t find out.”

“But she…”

“It’s like Eton, is it Dad?  Best to put your name down at before your fourth birthday?”

“You really must learn, Simon, that sarcasm is not amusing.  Listen.  I am only prepared to put myself out to help Rachel, if you are both prepared to help each other.”

“Mr Perfect, I think it’s me that needs the help, not Simon.”  She glanced in my direction.  A smile, for the first time since I’d rang the door bell.  “Though he has been very good and that.”  A nervous smile.

My father was holding a thin volume in the palm of his hand.

“What book is it, dad?”  

“Listen to this.  It’s a very good Introduction.”  His familiar, confiding tone.  Perhaps the worst was over.  By the time Rachel came back from the loo, I could have sorted everything out.  “‘Kant is not a light of the world, but a whole solar system all at once.’  Well put, don’t you think?”

The eighteenth century philosopher, Immanual Kant  Did my father know the word could also begin with a “c”?   Usually, I repressed such disloyal, supercilious thoughts. “What - what’s Kant got to do with it?”

He responded with a stare - eyes welled with pain, disappointment, reproach.. Existential reproach.  For a second, Rachel’s suffering seemed banal, childish, sordid.  And it was my fault.  I’d betrayed him.  Forget the stupid pun.  I had failed to understand the relevance of A Critique of Pure Reason.  But now, too late, I understood.  What was Kant most famous for?  I realised my father was about to lecture me on the nature of Ethics.

“When your girl friend returns from the lavatory, I’ll read you both something.”  Me and my girl friend.  Dim, amoral proles, unfit to stride across the Parthenon, or the hills of southern England.

“Dad, you do realise, don’t you, I’ve never slept with her?”  I tried not to whine.  It was none of his business, really.

He sighed again.  “So you say, Simon.”

“It’s the truth.”  Thank God I had not succumbed to temptation.  It showed my motives were disinterested.  Liberal motives.  My father’s favourite kind.

“So you say” he repeated.  Perhaps my eyes had been glinting, in an unintended, sexual way.   Or I’d been treating Rachel with too much tenderness this afternoon.  Even if he accepted it wasn’t my child, there was no way my father would help if he thought I was behaving like a selfish bastard.  A bastard, just for being in love?  Possibly, chastly, in love.  How could know my own emotions, faced with the certainties of Immanual Kant?

He took his time coming to the door.  For a stupid second, I imagined it was the first day of school  But as soon as he saw us, my father smiled.  “I was just finishing some writing” he announced.  “Can either of you think of a synonym for ‘disassociate’?”

“Dad, this is Rachel.”

“Ah, you will be interested in my epic poem.  On the myth of Icarus.”   Oh God, somehow he’d heard about Anne, my very much ex-gilrfriend who had literary pretensions. 

Rachel looked bewildered, relieved, maybe.  Whatever my father’s words meant, they meant postponement.  “I’ve just completed the second to last stanza.” We went through to the drawing room.  “It’s intriguing isn’t it, trying to fit one’s thoughts to the rhythm of the iambic pentameter?”  

Rachel had yet to speak.  I wanted to be next to her, but she sat down in the middle of the two seater sofa.  Sank into the cushions, shy-defiant, dwarfed by two  black and white abstracts, now on the wall where the mock Gainsborough used to be.

Deep breath time.  “Dad, we’ve come to you because we need your help.  Or rather, Rachel does.  Rachel is Phil Davies’ daughter.”  He didn’t seem to recognise the name. “Rachel has a problem.”

My father’s eyes shrunk.  “I thought you might be in difficulties, arriving so precipitously.”  In normal circumstances, he liked to pretend he could anticipate my unannounced arrivals.  “In term time” he added, in his stern, you-really-ought-to-make-more-of-an-effort voice.

“A medical problem.”  If he really did possess telepathic powers, the rest of the conversation would be unnecessary.

“Aren’t you rather young to be an undergraduate?”
Rachel wriggled.

“Rachel isn’t at Cambridge Dad.  She’s the daughter of Phil Davies, the builder you used in Norfolk.  And her boy friend has…”

“Great Pemberton.”  Rachel’s East Anglian accent cut the comfortable air of the drawing room.  “My dad and granddad.  They’ve spent their lives in Great Pemberton.  Stupid, if you ask me.”

“Family roots” said my father, as if intervening in a seminar.  Wasn’t he shocked I had brought home someone who didn’t speak the BBC’s English?.  “Family roots are very important, Rachel.  I’ve been very unlucky - Simon, too.  We don’t have roots in the accepted sense.”
“Dad, could I tell you what’s happened?  Rachel’s boy friend...”

“My ex boy friend, more like.”

“Well, when he was her boy friend...”

“We only did it once.”

“Rachel is... Rachel’s...”
“... up the… pregnant, aren’t I?”

Silence.

“I think, Simon” my father said in the end, “it would a considerable mistake, more damaging than your first one..”

“Dad, what first mistake?  I’m not...”  Until then it hadn’t occurred to me he would assume I was the father, not a knight riding to the rescue.

“I’m only giving you my opinion.  Obviously, you both came here to ask for my opinion, so please listen to what I have to say.  You, Simon, have always had your romantic ideas, but I think it’s my duty as your father to point out...”

“It’s not your opinion we need, exactly...”

“... that marrying somebody, just because...”

“Rachel and I not are planning to get...”

“It’s not Simon what’s done it.”

“Rachel is desperate.  She wants to have an abortion.”  The word lingered.  “Needs to.  Desperately.”  Well, his initial reaction was bound to be shock.  “Of course it’s technically against the law at the moment, I know, but I thought...  There are ways round, aren’t there, dad?”  When he’d got used to the idea, everything would be all right, wouldn’t it?  “Rachel’s very young...  you might be able to help her to get it done safely.”

Another silence.  A silence the length of a one act play.  

At last, my father sighed.  

What more could I say?  What had happened to my powers of improvisation?  I looked at the Persian rug, praying for a trap door.  But, just because the situation was embarrassing, it didn’t mean Dad wasn’t going to help.  He stood up and walked towards his Chippendale book case.  For all I knew, he was looking for a medical dictionary.

“Please, where’s the toilet?” Rachel asked.  I gave directions.  

Some chance.  It felt like taking a five year old to her first day at school.  “I’ll do the talking.  Unless you want to talk...  Okay, don’t worry about it.  There really is no need to worry.  Honestly.  My dad has brought me up to be completely straight with him.”  Well, in a way.  I had almost used up my reserves of public school confidence.  “I promise you, Rachel, he’s not like other dads.”  I had promised twenty times already.
“What about a cup of tea?” she asked.  We were passing a sandwich bar.  Rachel’s first trip to London.  Nothing was as she’d expected - even the sandwiches.  “Are you sure there’s no where we can just - go?”  A wave of a wand, an anonymous destruction of the foetus, a miraculous return to square one.

Mind you, I only had a sketchy idea of what would be involved, from a medical point of view.  “Rachel, I’m out of my depth, and my father won’t be.”  We needed somebody who knew what to do, to make phone calls - to demand action, not plead for mercy.  Someone who understood how to dodge the law, not transgress it.  Rachel chewed her avocado sandwich, pulling a face at the taste, not listening to a word.