If My Father Loved Me
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.