Czytaj książkę: «If My Father Loved Me»

Contents

Title Page

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

Copyright

About the Publisher

One

‘My father was a perfumer and a con artist,’ I said. ‘You would like him. All women do.’

I was telling Mel this, my dear friend Mel, on what was then still an ordinary night.

We had arranged to meet in a new restaurant and I had got off the tube one stop early and walked for ten minutes to reach it. It was that tender time between winter and very early summer that is too fragile and understated, in the city, to count as a proper spring. The plane trees in the great squares were shyly licked with pale green and there would be cherry blossom in suburban gardens. I noticed that the sky was pale grey, almost opalescent, and shafts of light like cathedral pillars struck down between the concrete buildings.

When I arrived Mel was already at the table, waiting for me. She was wearing her leather jacket and her hair frizzed out in black spirals all round her face. Her trademark red lipstick was still fresh, not yet blotted with eating and drinking. She stood up when she saw me and we hugged, laughing with the pleasure of seeing one another and to acknowledge the small festivity of a new restaurant, the familiar sprawl of London outside the windows, the stealthy approach of summer and also the fact that life was kind to us both.

As we sat down Mel said, ‘Let’s get a bottle of wine and order some food, then we can talk.’

Mel and I have been saying this, or a near version of it, all through the five years that have gone by since we met. The talk is always the most important ingredient, although food and wine are right up there too. It was our interest in cooking that brought us together, on a week’s master class hosted by a celebrity chef at some chichi and terrible hotel in the Midlands. The first time I saw Mel she was wearing her black curls bundled up under a white cook’s cap in a way that was all about business and nothing about looking fetching, and I liked her immediately. She was quietly laying out her knives while our fellow students were crowded up at the front trying to catch the chef’s attention. (And that was just the men, Mel said.)

She looked confident and successful. It turned out that she knew how to cook and wasn’t afraid of the bad-tempered prima donna who was supposedly there to inspire us. I wasn’t the only one who warmed to her, but it was to my room that she brought a bottle of wine on the second evening and it was to me she chose to open her heart. I learned that Mel Archer was trying to come to terms with the knowledge that she was never going to have a child of her own, let alone replicate her fecund mother’s perfect family. It was causing her pain, like a bereavement.

In my turn I told her that I was newly divorced. I was hard up and quite depressed and I had a daughter who was trying single-handedly to recreate the cliché of the teen rebel queen, as well as a six-year-old son who was going through an awkward phase. The one that had lasted since he was four days old.

We were both going through a difficult time in our lives.

‘We should swap problems,’ Mel said.

She made me laugh, and we opened another bottle and the talk went on and on. At the week’s end we came back to London with some overblown new recipes, a shared sense of relief that we would never have to work in a commercial kitchen under our master chef’s direction and a friendship that we both knew would endure.

Over the years I have told her everything, and nothing.

‘What are you going to eat?’ Mel asked, when we had studied the menu.

‘The pasta, I think.’

I always choose what I want to eat very quickly. While I waited for Mel I looked down the line of tables. They were placed close together and I could eavesdrop on two or three overlapping conversations. There were the first-daters craning eagerly forward over their plates and the married couple who had run out of things to say. On our other side were a noisy quartet of old friends and three young women of whom one was leaning forward through a veil of cigarette smoke to say to the others, ‘Just wait and see, he’ll be regretting it within, like, six weeks.’ The red nail polish she was wearing looked the same shade as Mel’s lipstick.

I felt a little quiver of affection for her and the other diners, for the arrangements that we had all made in order to be here and the problems with parking, and the balancing acts about how much to drink and whether or not a pudding would be permissible. I loved the city and felt happy to be here in the middle of it with Mel for company. At that moment, I wouldn’t have changed a single thing about my life.

‘What do you think of this menu? Scallops and mushrooms is always a good combination,’ she finally decided. ‘I’m going to have that.’

A young waiter took our order and Mel chose a bottle of Fleurie from the list. A different waiter came and poured the wine, taking care with a wrapped napkin not to spill a drop on the bleached wood of the table top. A new recruit, not yet confident.

We clinked our glasses before we drank.

‘How’s Jack?’ Mel asked. She shook a Marlboro out of the pack and lit it, then leaned back in her chair to look at me. Jack is my son.

‘Not bad,’ I said cautiously. ‘And Adrian?’

‘So-so.’

Adrian was Mel’s current boyfriend, if that’s a word you can still use when you aren’t young any more. At least, not young in the sense that my daughter Lola is young, although on the other hand at twenty she is so precisely of the modern world, so experienced and knowing, that I sometimes think she could be my mother instead of the other way round.

Mel and I have both turned fifty and we are therefore invisible except in the technical sense to, say, the young waiter who took our order. He was nice-looking, brown-skinned, with black hair slicked straight back from his face. I could see him stepping around the female trio and exchanging eye contact as he slipped them their starters. He said something that was evidently cheeky and they all laughed.

I don’t remember anyone mentioning the fact to me when I was as young as Lola, but you don’t feel yourself growing older. You reach an age – which probably varies according to your history and personal circumstances, but in my case was twenty-seven – and there you are, fully formed. As time passes you note your failures and allow yourself to appreciate what you have done well, but there remains the inner individual who isn’t aware of alteration either mental or physical. Inside my skin, a millimetre or so beneath the eroding surface, I remain twenty-seven years old. It’s a shock, when riding the escalator in Selfridges or somewhere, to confront an unexpected mirror and be obliged to check the discrepancy.

We’ve talked about this, of course, Mel and I. Being invisible to waiters and white-van drivers and brickies doesn’t bother us. What is alarming is the possibility that when we do start to feel our age, it might all happen at once. What if we go from being twenty-seven to being sixty-seven in a day, suddenly getting infirm knees and crochet shawls and a fondness for Book at Bedtime, crumbling away into old ladies as the light falls on us like Rider Haggard’s She?

‘That will be scarier than Alien,’ Mel said.

Joking about our worries is something we have always been able to do together. What else should we do?

I lifted my glass of wine again. ‘Here’s to now,’ I said.

Being old hasn’t happened yet, that’s what the toast means, in spite of the escalator mirror’s warning and in spite of our awareness that it will, that it must.

‘To now,’ Mel echoed happily.

The waiter came with our food. He put Mel’s dish of scallops down in front of her and she immediately picked up her fork to take a mouthful. I had chosen mezzalune di melanzane, half-moons of ravioli stuffed with aubergine. We sampled our own portions and then traded forkfuls. Mel chewed attentively and pronounced my ravioli to be drab, and I agreed with her.

‘Go on,’ I said.

We had started talking about Adrian and I was watching her face as she relayed her concerns. I also wanted to enjoy the restaurant’s brightness and the sweet damp night outside, and the animated faces of the three women and the way the waiter’s long white apron tucked round his waist just so, by listening for a while longer instead of talking.

And there is another presence, too. A shadow at the back of the room, a black silhouette beyond the restaurant plate glass, already waiting.

I can smell him, even, although I haven’t put the awareness anywhere close to words. It’s still only premonition, a cloudy scent stirring in the chambers of my head, but he is there.

I don’t know it yet but it’s not an ordinary night.

Mel sighed. ‘You know, Adrian always makes me feel that he would like me to pat his cheek and say well done, or on the other hand don’t worry. He needs approval all the time. It’s tiring.’

‘Maybe the reassurance he really needs is that you’re not going to leave him.’

‘I can’t give him that assurance, unfortunately.’

We have been here before. We exchanged smiles.

‘Fucked up by my happy family history,’ Mel shrugged, only half joking.

Mel has never married. She is the middle child of five siblings, petted by two older brothers and idolised by two younger ones. Her father was a fashionable gynaecologist with a practice in Harley Street, and her parents had a house in the country as well as a Georgian gem in London. The Archers took their children skiing in Switzerland every winter and to Italy for summer holidays, although all this was many years before I knew Mel. Her widowed mother now lives in some style in South Kensington and her brothers do the kinds of thing that the sons of such families usually do. Mel insists that her childhood was so idyllic and her father such a wonderful and benign influence that she has never found a man or an adult milieu to match them.

All this I know about her.

‘What was your childhood like?’ she asked me, when we first met and we were finding out about each other.

‘Nothing like yours.’

And this was nothing less than the truth.

Mel’s dark eyebrows lifted.

‘It was ordinary,’ I lied. ‘There isn’t much to tell,’ I said, ‘except that my mum died very suddenly when I was ten. I lived quietly with my dad and then eventually I grew up.’

‘That’s very sad,’ Mel said warmly.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. I didn’t volunteer any more, because I don’t like to talk about my childhood. The past is gone and I am glad of it.

‘What are you going to do?’ I ask now, eating my ravioli.

‘About Adrian? End it, or wait for it to end, I suppose.’

‘You don’t love him.’

‘No. But I like him and I enjoy his company, quite a lot of the time.’

‘Isn’t that enough?’

She looked at me, tilting her head a little so that the ends of her curls frayed out against the background of the restaurant’s shiny turquoise wall. If I reached out my fingertips to touch, I thought, I would feel a tiny crackle of electricity.

Mel said, ‘You’re the one who’s been married and who lived with another man as well. Is it enough?’

I gave the question proper consideration. When Lola was eleven and Jack was three, and I was married to Tony, I fell deeply in love with a man called Stanley. It wasn’t that I didn’t care for my husband, because I did. Almost from the day I met him he made me feel that I was at anchor in some sheltered harbour while the storms raged out at sea, and for years I believed that was what I wanted. Tony was and is a good man who cared for the three of us. But sometimes I did long for the danger of towering waves and the wild wind filling my sails.

Stanley was gale force, all right. He was eight years younger than me. He was a not very successful actor who made ends meet by doing carpentry and he came to do some work in our kitchen. He was handsome and funny, utterly unreliable and unpredictable, and he stirred a longing in me that I have never known before or since. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, or my hands either. He would turn up and tell me that I was beautiful and intoxicating, and that I was all he had ever wanted. Happiness and wonder at seeming to mean so much to someone like Stanley made me suspend my natural disbelief.

Then he would disappear and in his absence the world went completely dark. I did try to convince myself that I was a wife and mother, and what I felt was mere lust, but I knew it wasn’t. When he came back again, when I was actually with Stanley, it was as if nothing else mattered. Not my children, my husband, my old friends, or our well-rubbed and fingermarked everyday world. What I wanted, all I wanted, was this. This passion and delight was the marrow at last where everything else grated like dry bones.

After two months of agonising I left Tony for Stanley and took the children with me. I truly believed that there was nothing else I could do.

Lola accepted the fait accompli with which I presented her, more or less, and although she never warmed to Stanley, she and I still managed to stay friends. Lola has always had an enviable degree of self-reliance. But Jack was already an insecure child, given to bad dreams and absence of appetite, and the upheaval tipped him severely off balance. At twelve, he still hasn’t recovered his equilibrium.

Tony and I sold our house, and I bought a much smaller one with my half of the money and Stanley came to live in it with us. For a few months I was shockingly happy, even in the face of my children’s discomfort and Tony’s misery. But then, slowly and inevitably, things began to go wrong. Stanley did less carpentry and spent more time in the pub. Then he went off with a travelling production of The Rocky Horror Show and met Dinah, who was playing Janet.

I was afraid that I would die without him, but I also thought that to be abandoned was no more than I deserved.

It’s not a very original story and I’m not proud of this portion of my life. I’m sorry for what I did and regret that I can’t put it right, not for Jack and Lola, or Tony either. Remembering the hurt I caused by abandoning my family makes me recoil and wish I could slam shut the doors of recollection. I can’t, of course, and I think about the damage every day.

But even so, and with the benefit of experience, what I really think – now that Mel has asked me – is that you can compromise in love as in all other things. If you have to, that is. But it’s much better not. If you give up your independence to share your life with someone, it should be a state of existence that improves on being single.

Sometimes, not all the time of course, but sometimes, when you’re sitting down to breakfast opposite each other or getting into a car together or just lying quietly in each other’s arms, you should catch your breath and think, being with this person here and now is what lends reason to and makes logic of everything else in the world.

I thought this, for just long enough, about being with Stanley.

If you don’t have these times that snag your breath and make you smile with happiness, and if all you are doing instead is rubbing along, wrapping up the packages of irritation and disappointment and sliding them out of sight, then you would be better off alone.

‘Is it enough to share your life with someone you like well enough, but don’t love?’ I repeated.

Mel nodded.

‘No, it’s not enough,’ I said.

‘Of course it isn’t,’ she agreed.

Mel and I knew that we were fortunate, because we’d often discussed it. We had evenings like this one. We could do our work, eat out, book holidays, see friends, choose films, argue about politics, cook meals, laugh and talk a lot. Once in a while drink too much. True love in addition would have been magnificent, but I knew that I didn’t want to sacrifice any of the above just to settle for a compromise, for a merely pale and ersatz version of love.

I also thought that maybe Mel herself thought a little differently from me. With Adrian and his predecessors she had devoted more time to the pursuit of passion than I ever did. But then, Mel didn’t have children to consume her energy, draining it with their needs and the exhausting negotiations of parent–child love.

Mel’s own cheerful explanation for her persistence would have been that she was still looking for a man to replace her daddy. Whereas I had run so far and so fast from mine that by now I had shaken off all male bonds altogether. Except for Jack, of course.

Mel’s thoughts must have been travelling along a path parallel to mine. And, as often happened, they moved faster. ‘Tell me about your father. I don’t think you ever have, not properly. What was he like? Do you look like him?’

‘Not really. Our eyes and hands are the same shape.’

Her questions made me shiver.

I had been thinking about him as I walked through the opalescent evening. I could feel his shadow here in the restaurant. There was no reason for this tonight of all nights, other than premonition, but he was already in my mind.

‘Go on.’

I told her, reluctantly, that my father was a perfumer, and a con artist.

Mel fixed all her formidable attention on me. Her black eyes held mine and I knew that if I chose to say more she would listen intently. If I should happen to need advice or a reliable insight, those would be forthcoming too. But all my instincts told me – as they always tell me – to hold my tongue and to keep my history to myself. ‘You would like him, all women do. He was a perfumer’s “nose”,’ I added.

Stay there, stay away, I wanted to warn him. The shadow was lengthening as he came closer.

‘Go on,’ Mel repeated. She was ready to be fascinated.

With only the one obvious exception, myself, women did find Ted Thompson utterly magnetic. He was a good-looking man, for one thing, with the looks of a Forties movie star. He loved being told that he resembled Spencer Tracy.

‘Do you hear that, Sadie?’ he would say and laugh. ‘Your old man? What do you think?’

‘I can’t see it,’ I’d mutter. ‘You just look like my dad.’ That was what I wanted him to be, just my dad.

The real basis for his success with women, though, was his interest in them. He had a stagy trick of cupping his target’s upturned face in his hands and then breathing in the warmth of it as if the skin’s scent were the most direct route to knowing its owner. He would close his eyes for a moment, frowning in concentration, then murmur, ‘I could create such a perfume for you. The top notes sweet and floral to reflect your beauty but with the firmest base, cedarwood with earth and metal tones, for your great strength.’

Or some such nonsense, anyway.

‘His job was to mix essences, the building blocks of scent, to create perfume. He told me it was like painting a picture, making the broad brushstrokes that give the first impression and then filling in the details, the light and shade, to create the fragrance that lingers in the memory.’

As I talked I was thinking about the words from my childhood, ambergris and musk and vetiver. Not the scents or essences themselves because I didn’t inherit Ted’s nose and could barely have distinguished one from another, but the pure sounds of the words with their velvety textures. I recalled them the way other children might remember television programmes or ice-cream flavours, and I was back to being ten years old again. I could hear the click of heels on the unloved parquet of our hallway and the scrape of unpruned garden branches in the wind, working like fingernails at the glass of the front room’s bay window.

‘Why did I never know that? It sounds highly exotic.’

‘Yes.’

It was exotic, in its way, Ted’s world. But you couldn’t describe my growing up on the edge of it as anything of the kind.

‘What about the other thing? The con artist bit?’

‘That’s a manner of speaking. Perfume is nothing more than a promise in a bottle, Ted used to say. It exists to create an illusion.’

My discomfort was growing. I didn’t want to talk to Mel about my father. We had reached an unspoken truce long ago, the old illusionist and me, and chatting about him and his life’s work, even to Mel, was outside the terms of the agreement.

‘I thought smell was the truest of the senses.’

‘Smell may be. But perfume, on the other hand, is meant to disguise and flatter, and lead the senses astray.’

‘I have just realised something. You never wear it, do you?’

‘No,’ I said.

Mel always moved in a cloud of scent. She changed her allegiances but the emphasis was constant. Ted wore cologne. He had created one for himself and he used it liberally. I never thought it suited him. It was too salty and citrusy, too fresh and clean and outdoor, and when I was a child the discrepancy between the man I knew and the way he smelled was always troubling. The scent rose in my head now, like the first warning of a migraine.

‘Why?’

‘I prefer the smell of skin,’ I smiled. I remembered the way Lola and Jack used to smell when they were babies.

‘What’s the real reason?’

‘There’s no other reason,’ I said.

I put down my knife and fork, placing them very precisely together between uneaten half-moons of ravioli.

Mel stared at me for a moment, then she lightly held up her hand. If I didn’t want to talk about my father she wasn’t going to force me to and I appreciated her tact. But in the little silence that followed I understood that the closed topic made an uncomfortable feeling between us. Mel was hurt by my reticence. For the first time, she had noticed that I wasn’t entirely open with her. This meant that she was wondering what else I held back and how well she did know me, and therefore whether our friendship was really as close as she had let herself believe.

I wanted to reach out and take her hand, and tell her not to mind.

I wanted to assure her that I hid nothing except my history, and this no longer mattered to me. But I didn’t do it and the moment passed. The brown-skinned waiter came and took our plates away, asking me if everything had been all right.

‘Fine,’ I murmured. ‘Just a bit too much.’

Mel sat back in her chair and lit another cigarette. The three young women had ordered puddings and were enjoying a chocolate high. The quartet of old friends had already left, hurrying back to relieve their babysitters. The noise in the restaurant was slowly diminishing.

‘How’s your mum, by the way?’ I asked.

She looked at me as if she were going to protest that this blatant change of topic was beneath me, but then she shrugged. ‘She’s being quite difficult.’

This was not new. Mel’s glamorous mother had become elegantly and minutely demanding in her old age. We talked about her for a while, until the atmosphere between us warmed again. We exchanged some news of Caz and Graham, my oldest friends whom Mel had met many times and with whom she was now friendly in her own right. She asked about Penny, my business partner, and Penny’s lover Evelyn, and Evelyn’s baby, Cassie. I gave her the small pieces of information eagerly, trying to make amends.

Then we studied the pudding menu together. Mel spotted it first and her face puckered with delight before she started laughing. She pointed the item out to me.

Pecan, almond and walnut pie (contains nuts).

Mel and I collected menu misspellings and absurdities. Lola maintained that this was very sad and middle-aged, but it was a source of innocent amusement to us and we didn’t care. The addition of this latest one helped us to forget the doubts I had raised by putting a wall round my past.

‘I’m going to put my nut allergy right behind me and have that,’ I said.

‘Split it with me?’

‘Done.’

While we ate our nuts we talked about the Government’s ridiculous plans for the tube, and about our respective jobs, and a film about South America that Mel had been to with Adrian, which I wanted to see. The restored rhythms of the evening were familiar and precious to me, and I regretted that I had caused any disturbance in them. Maybe some time I could talk to Mel about Ted and the way I grew up, and maybe even should do so. But not now, I thought. Not yet.

It was eleven o’clock before we found ourselves out in the street again. A cool wind blew in our faces, striking a chill after the warmth of the restaurant.

Mel turned the collar of her leather jacket up around her ears. ‘Call me later in the week?’

‘I will,’ I promised. I felt full of love for her, and stepped close and quickly hugged her. ‘You’re a good friend.’

I saw the white flash of her smile. And I could smell the warm, musky residue of her perfume. I couldn’t identify it by name, but I thought it was one she often wore.

‘Trust me,’ Mel said. ‘I do.’

She touched my shoulder, then turned and walked fast up the street. Mel always walked quickly. She filled up her life, all the corners of it.

I retraced my steps more slowly to the tube station. I liked travelling on the Underground late at night and watching the miniature dramas of drunks and giggling girls and hollow-eyed Goths and couples on the way to bed together. I never felt threatened. I even liked the smell of Special Brew and Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the homely detritus of trampled pages of the Evening Standard and spilled chips. That night there was a ripe-smelling old dosser asleep in one corner, and a posse of inebriated Australian girls who tried to start up an in-compartment game of volleyball using a red balloon. Two gay men with multiple piercings looked on coldly, but the tramp never even stirred.

The walk at the other end through the streets to my house was much quieter. The street lamps shone on parked cars and skips and front gardens. Once, on this route, I saw a dog fox at the end of a cul-de-sac. He stood silently with his noise pointed towards me and his ears delicately pricked. I was surprised by how big he was. After inspecting me he turned and vanished effortlessly into the darkness. Tonight, however, there were only cats and a couple of au pair girls hurrying back from an evening at the bar on the corner of the main road.

I was thinking about Mel as I walked, reviewing the little breach that I had caused and telling myself that it didn’t matter, it was nothing, our friendship was strong enough to weather it. If Mel had a fault it was her possessiveness, her need to feel that she was at the centre of her friends’ lives. Of course she would hate any suggestion that she was shut out.

The houses in my street had steps leading up to the front doors. As I walked under the clenched-fist branches of pollarded lime trees, I had glimpses of basement kitchens barred by area railings. I saw alcove bookshelves, the backs of computers and the occasional submarine blue glimmer of a television, but most of the downstairs windows were already dark. I reached my steps and walked up, my house keys in my hand. The lights in our house were all on. Lola must still be up.

I turned the Yale key and the door swung open. In front of me lay the familiar jumble of discarded trainers and shopping bags, and the council’s plastic boxes for recycling bottles and newspapers. Lola’s old bicycle was propped up against the wall even though she hardly used it nowadays, and one of the three bulbs in the overhead light fitting was still out. I had been meaning for days to bring up the stepladder from the basement and replace it.

Jack was sitting on the bottom stair. His face was a motionless white triangle under a stiff jut of hair. His arms were wrapped round his knees and his chin rested between them. His eyes fixed on mine.

‘Jack? What are you doing? Where’s Lola?’

My voice sounded sharp. The main feeling I had at the sight of him, out of bed at almost midnight, was irritation. He should be asleep. He should be recharging, ready for another school day. He should be many things that he was not.

‘Lola’s in her room.’

‘So should you be.’

I put down my bag and eased past the bicycle handlebars.

‘Why?’

It should be obvious even to a twelve-year-old boy that midnight is not a suitable time to be sitting around on the draughty stairs in a house in which the central heating has gone off for the night. But it was – or used to be – Jack’s way to question the obvious with earnest attention, as if even the simplest issue were a matter for philosophical debate. Most recently, though, he has more or less stopped talking altogether.

I sighed. ‘Please, Jack. It’s late. Just go to bed.’

He stood up then, pulling his pyjama sleeves down to cover his fists. He looked small and vulnerable. He said, ‘There’s some bad news. Grandad has had a heart attack.’

I turned, slowly, feeling the air’s resistance. ‘What?’ I managed to say.

‘Mum, is that you?’

Upstairs a door clicked and Lola materialised at the head of the stairs. She ran down to me.

‘What?’ I repeated to her, but my mind was already flying ahead.

That was it. Of course, it was why he had been in my thoughts tonight. I had smelled his cologne, glimpsed his shadow out of the corner of my eye even in the slick light of a trendy new restaurant.

Was he dead, then?

Lola put her arm round me. Jack stood to one side with his head bent, curling the toes of one foot against the dusty mat that ran down the hallway.

I looked from one to the other. ‘Tell me, quickly.’

‘The Bedford Queen’s Hospital rang at about nine o’clock. He was brought in by ambulance and a neighbour of his came with him. He had had a heart attack about an hour earlier. They’ve got him in a cardiac care ward. The Sister I spoke to says he is stable at the moment.’ There were tears in Lola’s eyes. ‘Poor Grandad.’

‘We tried to call you,’ Jack said accusingly.

But I’d forgotten to take my mobile phone out with me. It was on my bedside table, still attached to the charger. I put to one side my instant regrets for this piece of negligence. ‘Is there a number for me to call?’ I asked Lola.

‘On the pad in the kitchen.’

I led the way down the stairs to the basement with my children padding behind me.

The light down there was too bright. There were newspapers and empty cups and a layer of crumbs on the table.

‘My father. Mr Ted Thompson,’ I said down the phone to a nurse on Nelson ward in the Bedford Queen’s Hospital. She relayed the information that Lola had already given me. ‘Should I come in now?’ I asked. I didn’t look at them, but I knew that Jack and Lola were watching my face. We hadn’t seen their grandfather since Christmas. We observed the conventions, meeting up for birthdays and Christmases, prize-givings and anniversaries, and we exchanged regular phone calls, but not much more. That was how it was. Ted had always preferred to live on his own terms.

‘I’ll check with Sister,’ the nurse said. A minute later she came back and told me that he was comfortable now, sleeping. It would be better to come in the morning, Sister thought.

‘I’ll be there first thing,’ I said, as though this was important to establish, and hung up. Lola put a mug of tea on the counter beside me.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

Jack lifted his head. ‘Is he going to die?’

He was over eighty. Of course he was going to die. If not immediately, then soon. This was reality, but I hadn’t reckoned with it because I wasn’t ready. There was too much unsaid and undone.

‘I don’t know.’

I put down my tea and held out my arms. Lola slid against me and rested her head on my shoulder. I stroked her hair. Jack stood a yard away, his arm out of one pyjama sleeve. He was twisting the fabric into a rope.

‘Come and have a cuddle,’ I said to him. He moved an inch closer but his head, his shoulders, his hips all arched away from me.

After a minute I pushed a pile of ironing off the sofa in the window recess. Lola and I sat down to finish our tea and Jack perched on a high stool. He rested his fingertips on the counter top and rocked on to the front legs of the stool, then on to the back legs. The clunk, clunk noise on the wooden floorboards made me want to shout at him, but I kept quiet.

In the end Lola groaned, ‘Jack, sit still.’

‘It’s quite difficult to keep your balance, actually,’ he said.

Lola sniffed. ‘What if he’s going to die? I don’t want him to die, I love him.’

‘So do I,’ Jack added, not to be outdone.

It was true. My children had an uncomplicated, affectionate relationship with Ted. They teased him, gently, for being set in his ways. He remembered their birthdays and sent them occasional unsolicited cheques. In a corner of myself I envied the simplicity of their regard for each other.

I stroked Lola’s hair. ‘Let’s all go to bed,’ I suggested. ‘Grandad’s asleep. If anything changes they’re going to ring us. We’ll see him tomorrow.’

I followed Jack up the stairs into his bedroom. I sat on the end of the bed and he lay on his back with his arms folded behind his head.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

‘Can we tell Dad what’s happened?’

‘Of course. In the morning.’

Tony wouldn’t appreciate a call about his ex-father-in-law in the middle of a week night.

Jack turned on his side, presenting his back to me.

‘I’m going to sleep now.’

‘That’s good.’ I leaned over and kissed his ear, but he gave no response.

The air in Lola’s room was thick with smoke and joss.

‘Lo. Have you been smoking in here?’ Obviously.

‘We’ve been sitting worrying, waiting for you to get back.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’ Did all mothers have to apologise so often? Was this the main transaction in every family, once your children stopped being little? Or was it just the case in my family?

‘Goodnight, Mum.’

‘Goodnight, darling. I love you.’

In my own bedroom I turned on the bedside light and drew the curtains. Then I lay down on my bed, still fully dressed. I stared at the ceiling. Now that I tried to picture my father’s face, I couldn’t conjure up his features. All I could see was his shadow.

‘Don’t die,’ I ordered the dark shape. ‘Not until I’ve had a chance to talk to you.’

I felt cold, even though the room was warm. I knew that I was afraid of his going, but it was at a distance, as if I couldn’t reach inside my own heart and get at the fear and the love that went with it. I was reduced to making a numb, dry-eyed acknowledgement, a nod in the direction of real feelings, as though my emotions belonged to someone else.

Two

They had put him in a small room off the main ward. There he was, lying on his back, his head propped on pillows. I saw that his profile had become a sharper, bonier version of the one I knew, as if layers of fat and muscle had been scraped away from his skull. His nose looked bigger and his skin was pale and shiny, stretched tight over the bones.

I hesitated at the door but he opened his eyes and turned his head to look straight at me. ‘Hello, Sade. Sorry about this. Damned nuisance.’

I smiled at him. ‘Hello, Dad.’

All night and as I drove out of London I had been dreading this moment. I had been afraid of how he would look and of what we would say to each other with the spectre of death in the room. Now that I was actually here I saw that he was hooked up to wires and tubes ran into his arms. He looked ill, but still not so different from his usual self, and my fear was not in speaking of painful matters, but that he might go away before we had a chance to talk at all.

There was a red plastic chair in the cramped space beside his bed. I sat down and took one of his hands, lacing my fingers with his. We had so rarely touched each other. Somewhere deep inside my head I could feel the pressure of tears, but I knew I wasn’t going to cry. ‘How do you feel?’

He ran his tongue over his lips. ‘Rough as a bear’s back.’

‘What happened?’

‘Chest pain. I rang Jean Andrews and she came right over.’

I knew Mrs Andrews. She was Ted’s neighbour. It would have been Mrs Andrews who came here with him in the ambulance. He was wearing his own pyjamas, and his glasses and a paperback book were lying on his bedside locker, so she must have packed his bag for him, too. She was probably the last of the line of Ted’s girlfriends, or ‘aunties’ as I was taught to call them when I was little, although I don’t believe Jean really performed any services for my father beyond looking out for him and bringing him the newspaper.

‘Why didn’t you call me?’

He moistened his lips again. There was a covered jug and a plastic beaker on the locker, so I poured some water and held the beaker for him while he drank a mouthful. Afterwards I took his hand once more.

‘Thanks. I thought I’d see the quack first, let him take a shufti. Might all have been a false alarm.’

The vocabulary made my neck stiffen, just a little, as it always did.

Ted had served in the RAF during the war. He was not a pilot but an aircraftsman, working on the maintenance of Spitfires that flew in the Battle of Britain, although he didn’t like to be too specific about his exact rank and responsibility. When on the back foot he still reached for words like prang and crate and willco, as if this threadbare old slang could lend him some extra strength or status.

He lived increasingly in the past, like many old people, although the difference with Ted was that the geography of that other country was largely imaginary. But the boundaries between truth and illusion didn’t really matter all that much, I thought. Not any longer.

My fingers tightened on his. ‘I’m here now,’ I said.

‘How’s my cutie? And Jack?’

When she was a little girl Ted always called Lola his cutie. He was delighted to have a granddaughter, although he protested that it made him feel old. ‘She’s going to be a heartbreaker,’ he used to say. ‘Just look at those bright eyes.’

I should have made sure he saw more of his grandchildren on ordinary days, not just the set-piece ones armoured with conventions and pressured by expectations. I should have tried to forget my own growing up and let the next generation make amends for our failures.

‘Lola’s just fine. She’s going to come in and see you later, or maybe tomorrow. And Jack’s okay, although he doesn’t like school that much.’

‘Neither did I when I was his age. I used to sit next to a boy called Peter Dobson. He would shake his pen deliberately to make blots all over my work, and he and his chums used to lie in wait for me after school and pull my books out and run off with my comics.’

‘I don’t think things have changed for the better.’

I realised that there were pins and needles in my arm and my wrist ached with the tension of lightly holding his hand. I shifted my position and he asked, ‘Are you comfortable?’

‘Yes. Are you?’

He sighed, restlessly shifting his thin legs under the covers. ‘Not very.’

A nurse came in. He was young, dressed in a white jacket and trousers. He glanced at the whiteboard over the bed and I followed his eyes. A note in bright blue magic marker, scrawled over the previous occupant’s smeared-out details, declared that this was Edwin Thompson, ‘Ted’. ‘Hello, Teddy-boy,’ the nurse said, examining the bags that leaked fluids into my father’s arm. ‘My name’s Mike. How are you feeling? Not so good?’

‘I feel as you would expect, having had a heart attack last night,’ Ted answered. I smiled. Ted didn’t take to being patronised, even in his hospital bed.

‘And who is this young lady?’

‘I’m his daughter.’

‘Well, now then, I need to do your dad’s obs and then the doctors are coming round. Could I ask you to pop up and wait in the visitors’ room? You can come back as soon as rounds are over.’

‘I’d like to talk to his doctor.’

‘Of course. Not a problem.’

I walked up the ward, past bedridden old men, to sit and wait in a small side room.

A long hour later, the same nurse put his head round the door. ‘Doctor will see you now, in Sister’s office.’

As I passed I saw Ted lying on his back in the same position. His eyes were closed and I thought he must have fallen asleep.

The consultant cardiologist was a woman, younger than me. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but Ted had talked about the quack and finding out what he had to say. That was Ted all over: proper jobs, like this one, were done by men.

The doctor held out her hand, with a professionally sympathetic smile. ‘Susan Bennett,’ she said and we shook hands.

I sat down in the chair she indicated.

I remembered the shadow that had slid into the restaurant last night and found myself repeating over and over in my head, don’t, please don’t say it, just let him get better …

Susan Bennett explained that it had been a serious attack, bigger than they had at first suspected. A large proportion of the heart muscle had been affected.

I listened carefully, intending to work out later what was really being said, but I understood quickly there was no need to try to read between the words. Dr Bennett gave me the unvarnished truth. There was no likelihood of long-term recovery, she said, given the damage that had already occurred. The question was when rather than if the end would come, and how to manage the intervening time.

‘I see,’ I murmured. The voice in my head had stopped. All I could hear was a roaring silence.

I realised that Dr Bennett was asking me a question. She wanted to know, if there were to be another huge heart attack, how I felt about an attempt to resuscitate my father. Did I want them to try, or should they let him go in peace?

‘I … I would like to think about it. And perhaps to talk to him about it. What usually happens in these cases?’

What am I supposed to say, I wondered? No, please just stand aside, don’t bother to help him? Or, I absolutely insist that your technicians come running to his bedside with their brutal paddles and try to shock him back into the world?

‘Every case is different,’ she said gently. ‘I’m sorry to have to give you bad news.’

‘Does he know?’

‘We haven’t told him what I have just told you, if that is what you are asking.’

‘He’s over eighty,’ I said, as if his age somehow made the news slightly less bad. What I actually meant was to deplore the total of years that he and I had allowed to pass, until we had unwittingly reached this last minute where his doctor was telling me that Ted was going to die soon.

She nodded anyway. ‘If there is anyone else, any other members of the family, it might be a good idea if they came in to see him soon.’

‘How long is it likely to be?’

‘I don’t know,’ Susan Bennett said. I liked her for not pretending omniscience. ‘We’ll do what we can to keep him comfortable.’

I walked slowly back to his bedside. I noticed the shiny floors with a faint skim of dust, and the chipped cream paint of the bed ends. Ted’s eyes flickered open as soon as I sat down in the red chair. He wasn’t asleep – he had been waiting for me.

‘Did you hear what that nurse called me? Teddy-boy,’ he muttered in disgust.

‘I know.’ We both smiled. I leaned over his hand as I took hold of it again, studying the map of raised sinews and brown blotches. Please don’t die, I wanted to beg him. As if it were his choice.

‘What did the doctor say?’

‘That you have had a heart attack. They’re monitoring you and waiting to see what will happen over the next few days.’

‘Yes?’

‘She sounded optimistic.’

But my tongue felt as though it was sticking to the roof of my mouth. Coward, coward, coward. I shouldn’t be lying to him, but my father and I were not used to talking to each other about matters like love, or guilt, or disappointment. Was I supposed to start now, going straight to dealing with impending death? And how was I going to say it? You are going to die. And so I want to tell you that I love you, even though I haven’t said so in forty years, and that love is in spite of everything, not because of it?

I bit my lower lip until distracting pain flooded round my mouth.

Ted only nodded, lying wearily against his pillows. He was looking away from me, out of the window at the grey angle of building and the narrow slice of cloudy sky that was the only view from his bed.

If he asks anything else, I resolved, I will tell him the truth. If he wants to know whether he is dying, he will ask me. Then we can hold each other. I will put my arms round him and help him and look after him, whatever is coming.

I waited, trying to work out the words that I would use and listening with half an ear to the sound of trolleys moving on the ward. A nurse walked past the door with a pile of linen in her arms and I watched her black-stockinged ankles receding.

The silence stretched between us. I rubbed the skin on the back of Ted’s hand with the ball of my thumb, noticing how loose and papery it felt. He didn’t say anything, but the muscles of his chin and throat worked a little, as if he wished that he could. As the minutes passed I began to long for talk, even if it didn’t mean much, or anything at all, just so long as there was some exchange between us.

The last few times we had seen each other, Ted reminisced about the war and about the make-do years that followed it when he was first married to my mother. He talked a lot about the glory days of the Fifties too, when he was discovering that he could follow his nose into a career that allowed him to meet rich women and powerful men. He spoke of the old days with a longing for his lost kingdoms, although oddly enough he never romanticised his gift itself. (He was always matter-of-fact about the mystery of creating perfumes. ‘It’s chemistry, memory and money,’ he used to say. ‘And mostly money.’)

I thought now that maybe I could reach out to him by talking about the past, even though it was such a quagmire. I tried harder, flipping through the scenes in my mind’s eye, searching for some neutral time that I could offer up. ‘Do you remember that day when you took me in to the Phebus labs? I must have been six or seven, I should think.’

‘Old Man Phebus,’ Ted said quietly.

I can’t remember why Ted took me to work with him on that particular morning. Maybe my mother was ill, or had to go somewhere where she couldn’t take me. Outside school hours she and I were usually at home, occupied with our quiet routines that were put aside as soon as Ted came in. We were happy enough on our own together, Faye and I, yet even when I was very young I understood that hers was a make-do contentment. It was only when Ted was there that I saw her smile properly. For people in shops, occasional encounters with neighbours, even for me, there was a tucked-in version bleached by melancholy. Because I didn’t know anything different I thought that was how it was for all families. Fathers went out and eventually came back, redolent of the outside world, and mothers and children waited like patient shells to close themselves round this life-giving kernel.

That day Ted and I travelled to work by bus, and I sat close up against my father in the blue, smoky fug on the top deck. It was exciting to ride so high above the streets, and to be able to look straight in through smeary windows and see cramped offices and the rumpled secrets of half-curtained bedsits. Phebus Fragrances occupied a small warehouse building off Kingsland Road, in Dalston, on the fringe of the East End. It seemed very far from our house in a north London suburb. There was a bomb-site to one side of the warehouse, and summer had turned the piled rubble lush with the blue-purple wands of buddleia and the red-purple of willowherb. It must have been the school holidays because there were children out playing on the open space. I held my father’s hand as we walked from the bus stop and felt sorry for them because they weren’t going to work as I was.

Anthony Phebus was Ted’s earliest mentor in the perfume business. Ted always called him the Old Man. Ted had started working for him not long after I was born, as a bookkeeper and general office administrator, although of course he didn’t actually have any bookkeeping skills or relevant office experience. In the years after the war he did a variety of jobs, from van-driving to working as a garage hand, but when I was born he decided that it was time to move up in the world. He applied for the job with Mr Phebus and impressed the old man so much with his apparent expertise with figures that he was offered the position on the spot. I knew this part of the story well, because Ted liked to tell it with a wink.

‘I learned on the job.’ He smiled. ‘Always the best way. You don’t know what you’re going to be able to do until you have to do it, and when you have to it’s surprising what you can do.’

In any case, Ted Thompson didn’t stay long with the ledgers and file cabinets in the outer office. Anthony Phebus’s business was as a commercial fragrance supplier. If a perfume house wanted to design a new scent, or if a manufacturer of face powder or shampoo needed a fragrance to set off a new product, they commissioned Mr Phebus to develop one for them. In his laboratory, with a tiny staff and minimal investment, the old man would mix and sniff and frown and adjust and finally come up with a formula that he would sell to the manufacturer. Sometimes he made up the perfume oil itself, juggling with money and loans to buy in enough raw materials just as he played with the balance of ingredients in his latest creation. Cosmetics manufacturers knew that he would give them what they wanted. Quite soon after joining the company Ted was helping him to do it. Phebus Fragrances was a long way down the scale from Chanel or Guerlain, but the old man did enough business to survive.

When we arrived Mr Phebus was at his desk in an untidy cubbyhole of an office, but he stood up straight away and came round to shake my hand. I was frightened of his eyebrows. They were white and jutted straight out from his forehead like a pair of bristly hearth brushes.

‘And so, Miss Sadie, you work hard and make my fortune for me today?’

I looked up at Ted for confirmation and he gave me a wink, followed by his wide smile.

The ‘lab,’ as Mr Phebus and Ted always referred to it, was a windowless room lined from floor to ceiling with ex-WD metal shelves. On the shelves, drawn up in precise rows, were hundreds and hundreds of brown glass screw-top bottles. Each bottle was labelled or numbered in the old man’s neat, foreign-looking script. In the centre of the room was a plain wood table with another clutch of bottles ranged on it in a semicircle, a line of notepads and pens, a pair of scales and some jars of what looked to me like flat white pencils. There was a sink with a dripping tap and some bright overhead lights.

‘This is where we make our magic, eh?’ Mr Phebus laughed. ‘Where your good father learns to make dreams for beautiful women.’

I didn’t like the reference to beautiful women or their dreams, not in relation to my father. The only women he should have anything to do with were Mum and me. I kept my mouth shut in a firm line and waited.

‘Sit down here, miss,’ Mr Phebus said and I slid into a seat. As well as having alarming eyebrows, I thought he talked in a funny way, as though ‘s’s and ‘th’s were ‘z’s. When I was older I learned that the old man had been an analytic chemist in Warsaw, but he had come to London with his wife before the war. He started work with a cosmetics house and he turned himself from a chemist into a perfumer by sheer hard work.

‘Your father, Mr Ted here, he has what we call a nose,’ Mr Phebus grandly announced.

I remember looking at my father’s face and realising it was a handsome one compared with Mr Phebus’s, and feeling proud of my father’s youth and good looks. But his nose seemed relatively unremarkable. ‘So have I,’ I retorted, pressing the end of mine and squashing it.

‘We shall see,’ the old man said. I thought he was not very observant if he couldn’t see it already.

The three of us sat down at the plain wood table and Ted gave me my own jar of the flat white pencils. Now I could see that they were in fact strips of thick blotting paper, the same size as the spills my mother used for lighting the gas. Mr Phebus was humming and setting a line of the little glass bottles between us. He unscrewed the top of one with a flourish and told me to take my blotter. I glanced at Ted and he pointed to the white paper strip. Mr Phebus already had one and as I watched he slid the tip of it gently into the liquid in the bottle.

‘Now you,’ he said. I copied him exactly as he lifted the blotter to his nose and breathed in. His eyebrows twitched and I looked again at Ted, wanting to laugh. My father pressed his forefinger against one nostril and winked again. I sniffed hard at my dipper, as Mr Phebus had done. A dense, sweet cloud instantly filled my nose and rushed up through the secret insides of my face until it seemed to squeeze its fingers round my brain. I coughed and closed my eyes, and as I let my hand fall the scent’s power receded, although I could still feel the pressure of it above my cheeks and the stinging shock in the tender membranes of my nose.

‘What is that?’ I whispered.

Mr Phebus said, ‘That is lavender. It will be one of the top notes of the scent we are working on today.’

‘Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly.’ I had heard the song on Listen with Mother and I was pleased to make this unexpected connection. But Mr Phebus held up his hand and frowned. We were working. The lab was no place for rhymes or any kind of inattention. He unscrewed another bottle and we went through the same process, dipping and smelling. This one was nasty as well as strong. The stink was sharp, like cats or the brown-tiled lavatories at my school, and I screwed up my face in disgust.

‘Cassia,’ Mr Phebus said. ‘Very important. You must remember that not all perfume essences smell sweet and pretty. We often use these sensual animal stinks like musk and civet for our base notes, to anchor the structure. Men and women are animals too, you know, and we all respond in the same way.’

I frowned at him, battling my incomprehension.

The door opened and a woman with her hair swept up on the top of her head looked in at us. ‘Phone call for Mr Thompson,’ she said.

I shivered on my wooden seat with pleasure at the importance of this. We didn’t have a telephone at home. Ted sprang up and went out, not remembering to look round at me. Mr Phebus went on unscrewing bottles and motioning to me to dip and sniff. Some of the smells were like flowers pressed and squeezed to make them powerful instead of sweet and gentle, others were surprising, reminding me of orange peel, or Christmas, or the sea at Whitstable where we had spent a summer holiday. By the time my father came back there were ten used white dippers on the table in front of me. I was beginning to feel bored and slightly queasy.

‘Now, miss,’ Mr Phebus said, pulling at the thistly tuft of one eyebrow. ‘Pay no attention to your father. Can you remember which one was lavender?’

Ten dippers with their tips discoloured or turned translucent by the oils now lay on the table in front of me. I stared at what was left of the evidence and then reluctantly I picked up several in turn and sniffed at them again. My head felt muzzy and too full of potent fumes. The dippers smelled less strongly now; their separate characters and the names Mr Phebus had given them had become hopelessly confused. I took a wild guess. ‘That one?’

‘No, that one is jasmine.’

Ted laughed and sat down again on the wooden chair beside mine. He tilted it back on two legs with his arms folded, in the exact way my mother told me not to do at home. My eyes were stinging. I felt that I had let him down.

‘Don’t worry, you can learn the difference if you try hard enough,’ Mr Phebus said. ‘I managed it. I spent many years of hard work, memorising thousands of notes, which is what we call the different basic scents and that is only the very beginning of what a perfumer must know. He must have other skills too, and most of all he must have imagination that lifts him from being a mere technician into an artist of fragrance.

‘I am an artist, in my small way, but only of the fourth or maybe third degree. But your father here’ – he paused for effect, with his eyebrows pointing at me – ‘he is, at once, a natural. He smells a note only once and he remembers it. And he knows, because the artistry is in his heart and in his mind, he knows what he will add and what he will withhold to coax from these bottles, these not romantic little jars, the dreams of women.’

Women and their dreams, again. I was torn between pride in my father and a new discomfort that rubbed at the margins of my understanding. I didn’t like the feeling of insecurity that came with it.

‘Of course, he still has very much to learn. Many years of practice.’

Ted laughed out loud delightedly. ‘Better get on with it, then.’ He was always enthusiastic in those days. He rubbed his hands and smacked his lips, full of raw appetite for life. I didn’t recognise his hunger then for what it was, but I already knew that my mother entirely lacked what Ted possessed. I loved her, of course, and I took for granted her devotion to me, but she wasn’t thrilling in the way my father was. She was always there and I never noticed her constancy until she wasn’t any longer. One morning she was at home and that same afternoon she was never coming back. That’s how sudden her death was from the brain haemorrhage. Afterwards, when I thought about her, I would remember her quietness and restraint. She used to brush my hair and tie ribbons in it, looking down or away instead of into our joint reflections in the mirror of her kidney-shaped dressing table. She wore plain jerseys and calf-length colourless skirts that hid her pretty legs. It was as if even before she left us altogether she occupied only the corners of her own life. Whereas Ted joyfully overflowed out of his, and ran in a hot current through hers and mine as well.

Mr Phebus said, ‘Let’s have Black Opal three and four, then.’

Ted brought some bottles from the shelves and they drew their notepads and jars of blotters towards them. The two of them began nosing and muttering together, and I half listened while unfamiliar words washed over my head. They talked about heart and base notes and aldehydes and sparkle and synthesis, and the names of natural essences and the chemical polysyllables of synthetics rolled off their tongues. I didn’t remember tongue-twisting phenylethylene or galaxolide, but the mysterious-sounding beauty of naturals – vetiver and musk and mimosa – did stay with me.

They were still with me now as I sat by my father’s bed and held his dry hand. Only the names, not the scents. I failed Mr Phebus’s first test and I knew I was not an artist like Ted.

I was talking too much, I realised. It would be tiring for him. ‘Do you remember?’