If My Father Loved Me

If My Father Loved Me

BY ROSIE THOMAS

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.