The last time he sees his guilty mother she goads him into snarling back, calls him mad, meaning insane, focussing him on the gene pool. At his married daughter’s house he sees her mother years after they separated, not recognising her, thinks, initially nervous, of a neighbour woman with grey hair quietly knitting, imagines a harmonica soundtrack playing out her dolorous days.
Creating a new life he remarries years after his teenaged first wedding, buys a rustic house, indulges his younger bride’s exotic pets, then, when these become commonplace, children. Shaping human folly in documents he treasures, he details the hopes of third-person characters squeezing what they can from life’s terrifying countdown, marches them through blasted domestic landscapes but not without compassion missed by his offended family stuck for words.
After long being estranged from his sister, walking past her house he sees her again. Thin, hands trembling, she strives with her old envy, beats back the past, tells him he still looks good, her marriage so crushed its echo haunts her conversation ever after. The last time he sees that married daughter she fusses with the jealous husband she will divorce, anxious for her father to leave, thoughts perhaps tormented by imminent betrayal.
Life disappears as fast as tightly-edited movie scenes. He recalls wartime paratroopers spilling from a plane, and others where the hero appears in the second half suddenly years older, his face looking, laughably, as if it had slugged out ten rounds with make-up’s death department. He knows good times, some bad that linger, all those pets dying one after another, arthritis creeping like an assassin through his body.
He continues portraying his now ageing characters’ loss, grief, steering lonely lives, their bleak yearning for endless chances to make better decisions. The last time he sees the one woman he truly loves, on a windswept corner, happy ever afters nowhere in sight, he gives up on lost causes, toughens, but in vain, sadness stealing over him like ivy, endings always painful to write.
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