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If My Father Loved Me
Rosie Thomas
From the bestselling author of The Kashmir Shawl. Available on ebook for the first time.Sadie's life is calm and complete. She is a mother, a good friend, and the robust survivor of a marriage she deliberately left behind. She has come to believe that she has everything she wants, or deserves.But now her father is dying: the vital, elusive man who spent his life creating perfumes for other women is slipping away from her. When she realises that she can never make her peace with him, Sadie begins to look back over her childhood. In pursuing his separate life, Sadie's father ignored her, subjecting her to succession of 'aunties', leaving her loveless and alone.As Sadie confronts the truth about her father, her relationship with her son Jack appears to be breaking down and she is intent on saving it. Then the arrival of one of those fleeting women from her father's past starts a train of events that even Sadie cannot control…



If My Father Loved Me
BY ROSIE THOMAS



Contents
Title Page (#u5a2e270a-1039-553f-8d1b-842dc61170a2)
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 (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher

One (#uf61b01c4-938c-5016-a882-1870098b2887)
‘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 atBedtime, 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 (#uf61b01c4-938c-5016-a882-1870098b2887)
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?’
‘How old were you?’ he asked, restlessly moving his legs and frowning with the effort of recollection.
‘Six, or seven.’
‘Back in ’56, then.’
I was pleased that he knew the year of my birth. I wouldn’t have placed a bet on it. ‘Yes.’
‘We were working on contract for Coty.’ His hand moved a little in my grasp, as if he were trying to reach for something, and then fell back again. ‘I don’t remember the day. It must have been boring for you.’
We’re so polite to each other, I thought. We are like a rough sea swirling under a thin skin of ice.
While the old man and my father continued with their sniffing and scribbling I began to fidget and rock on my chair. I made a wigwam of dippers and then, with a hasty movement to stop it collapsing, I knocked over a bottle. The bottle rolled across the table and stopped in front of Ted.
He raised his head, his forehead corrugated with irritation and his eyes cold. It was a look I had seen often enough. ‘Why don’t you go out and sit by Miss Mathers?’
Miss Mathers was the woman with piled-up hair. I had seen them laughing together and heard Ted call her Babs, but I understood that she was Miss Mathers to me. I stood up obediently.
Miss Mathers gave me some pencils and some sheets of paper to draw on, then went back to her typing. She rolled letterheads and pale-pink and green flimsies sandwiched with carbon paper into her black-and-gold typewriter and busily stabbed the keys. Once or twice she answered the telephone in a sing-song voice: ‘Phebus Fraygrances.’
At twelve thirty Ted and I went out. After the dimness inside the warehouse the sunshine was so bright it made me blink. We strolled down Kingsland Road to a pub and I sat on a bench in the sun whileTed went inside. My excitement flooded back with the novelty of all this and I swung my legs so my white socks flashed. Ted brought out lemonade and a cheese sandwich for me, and a pint of beer and a ham-and-pickle sandwich for him. He took a long swallow of the beer and rubbed the froth from his clipped moustache. Then he slid a packet of Players from his pocket and lit one. He blew out the smoke in a long plume and sighed with pleasure. ‘Not a word to a soul,’ he said to me, pressing his lips with the side of his index finger. ‘No good for the old nose, booze and fags, are they?’
I was awed to be part of this conspiracy. The old man and Miss Mathers would have had to torture me before I would have breathed a word about my father’s lunchtime habits.
The afternoon of that day was the same, except that the hours seemed longer than the morning’s. My father and the old man were shut up in the lab together and Miss Mathers largely ignored me. I drew some desultory pictures on my sheets of paper and looked at shiny brochures with pictures of women and tins of talcum powder in them. Yet as Ted and I finally rode home in the bus, along Holloway Road and up to the Archway, I felt utterly triumphant. The new words I had learned still rang in my head: mimosa, musk, amber. Mr Phebus had given me a folded ten-shilling note when Ted took me into his office to say goodbye. But the best of it was the new footing I felt that I was on with Ted himself.
Before now, he had gone out in the mornings and come back again at night with the newspaper, a kiss for my mother and a joke for me. He brought different sounds and smells and a new atmosphere into the house with him, but I had no picture in my mind of where he had been. Quite often he was away at night too, or for days at a stretch, on business for Mr Phebus.
But after today, I felt that I was a part of his other world. There had been beer on his breath as we walked back to the warehouse after the pub, and he had put pennies into a chewing gum machine on a wall. We were both chewing one of the little white pillows as we walked diagonally across the bomb-site to the warehouse door. I had heard him joking with Miss Mathers, although I didn’t like the soft teasing sound that crept into his voice when he spoke to her. At Miss Mathers’s suggestion, I had carried their pot of tea into the lab at four o’clock. Ted and Mr Phebus were both in their shirtsleeves with scratched notes and discarded dippers spread everywhere, and I understood that they were too preoccupied to glance at me. I accepted my lack of importance with proper humility.
The impression of that day stayed with me for years. It defined my notion of work, as the utterly exotic somehow hemmed in by the tedious progress of hours. At the end of it, as Ted and I marched up the garden path to the house where my mother was waiting for us, I kept my thrilling new awareness locked inside me.
My father was an artist of the first degree. He was a nose.
The house that night seemed colourless and smaller and overfamiliar and my mother even quieter than usual. ‘What did you do?’ she asked, as she brushed my hair. The sheets on my bed were smoothed down and I knew without looking that my hot-water bottle with the rabbit cover was in its proper place.
‘Drew some pictures,’ I answered evasively. I didn’t want to share the experience, even with her.
‘That’s nice.’
I didn’t ask about her day’s absence. Maybe she had been to see the doctor about her headaches. Sometimes they made her eyes red and swollen so she had to lie down on the double bed, a small shape hunched up on the green candlewick cover with her back turned to the door.
‘It wasn’t boring,’ I told Ted now. ‘I loved it.’
‘He was a good perfumer, the old man, a craftsman. I learned everything I needed to know from him. No business sense, though. None at all.’
I had to lean closer to catch his words. His voice seemed to be fading to an echo of itself and his eyes were gradually falling shut. I thought he might be drifting into sleep and I had to stop myself from grasping his hand and shaking it hard to keep him with me. I watched the shallow rise and fall of his chest under his pyjama jacket.
Then his eyes snapped open again and he struggled to sit upright. ‘It stinks in here,’ he complained. His nostrils flared and deep lines pulled the corners of his mouth downwards. I sniffed the air and caught a whiff of vomit and a faint fecal undertone. If even I could smell it, the ward must indeed stink to Ted’s sensitive nose.
I sandwiched his hand between my two. ‘We need something stronger to block it out. I’ve got an idea. Shall I go out and buy some perfume to spray round?’ I could hear the cheeriness in my voice cracking and shivering like the sea ice, with grief welling up from beneath. ‘What would you like? Joy? Vent Vert? Or one of your own? How about Black Opal or Iridescent?’
‘I’ve smelled enough perfume for one lifetime,’ Ted said irritably.
I bent my head and waited. And then, when I finally stole a glance at his face, I saw that this time he really had fallen asleep.
I went down to the hospital visitors’ car park, where I could use my mobile phone, and called Lola to relay the news.
‘Oh God, Mum, I’m sorry. Poor Grandad. I’d better ring in and cancel my shift,’ she said at once. Lola worked in a bar during university holidays. At least she’s at home, I told myself, not up in Manchester as she was all term-time. We agreed that she would collect Jack from school in her car and they would come straight up to the hospital.
‘Drive carefully,’ I warned her. ‘Of course I will.’
Next I telephoned Penny at the Works, as we call the book bindery and small print shop we jointly own. Penny and I have been business partners for twelve years. I have always loved the physical weight and dimensions of fine books, the texture of paper, and the variety and intricate grace of typefaces, and Penny possesses the rare combination of design flair and business acuity. We work well together and although there are no great riches in what we do, we make an adequate living out of our leather bindings and hand-set printing.
‘Don’t worry,’ Penny told me. ‘Don’t even think about anything here, I’ll handle it. And I’m here if you need me, okay?’
Next I spoke to Caz. Caz has been my friend since we lived in adjacent rooms in a decrepit student house thirty years ago. We were married in the same year, and she and Graham had their two boys in quick succession, not long after Tony and I had Lola. We have shared the quotidian details of our lives ever since, to the extent that if I think of myself as having an extended family, Caz and Graham and their children are it.
‘What can I do?’ Caz said, as soon as I told her the news. If there is ever a favour to be done for someone else, an empty slot in a rota or a spare pair of hands required, Caz is always the first to volunteer.
‘Will you have Jack, if I have to stay over at the hospital? If Lola can’t hold the fort, that is?’
Jack didn’t currently get on all that well with Dan and Matthew, Caz’s boys, but in this emergency he would have to make the best of it.
‘Of course,’ she assured me. ‘Anything else? What about some shopping? Or listen, I’ve got a chicken, I can roast it and bring it over …’
Caz and I both use food as shorthand for love. With Mel and me it’s more a matter of romance and theatre.
Caz was saying, ‘It’s very sudden. He wasn’t ill before, was he?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It is very sudden.’ I don’t think that even Caz, whom I have known for all these years, has ever really noticed how little I actually talk about my father or about the past.
‘I’ll be thinking of you, darling,’ she said in her warm voice. ‘Call me as soon as there’s any news.’
Finally I dialled Mel’s office direct line. After I had told her what had happened she said, ‘That’s quite strange, isn’t it? The way we were talking about him last night?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you want me to come up and keep you company?’ It was a generous offer. Mel worked for a big headhunting company and I could guess at the rapid mental diary reshuffling she must be doing, although there wasn’t the faintest hint of it in her tone.
‘No. But thank you.’
‘Sadie?’
‘Yes?’
‘You can’t change or even affect what’s going to happen, you know. You just have to accept this, for him and for yourself.’
Mel understood me well and my need to control what went on around me. She knew that it was disturbing for me to feel powerless, as I did most of the time where Jack was concerned, although she didn’t know what had made me this way.
‘I know,’ I murmured.
After she had rung off I sat down on the low wall of the car park. The morning was grey under a monochrome sky, with none of the luminous quality of the evening before. Cars rolled through the entrance and circled past me, looking for slots. A young man in a Peugeot skidded into an empty place and leaped out, clicking the remote locking as he sprinted towards the hospital doors. His wife must be in labour, I thought. I watched an old couple extricate themselves with difficulty from their Honda. The wife took a pair of sticks from behind the passenger seat and gave them to her husband, waiting with exaggerated patience while he shuffled himself into the ‘go’ position. They set off on the journey towards the doors together, without having exchanged a word. A big Asian family filed past, followed by a white girl who looked younger than Lola pushing a baby in a buggy. All these people had their different reasons for coming here, to this place of crisis, and all of them brought with them the weight of their anxiety or the bubble of hope. Ted was dying, but so were other people behind the stained concrete façade, and at the same time others were struggling with pain or dreaming of recovery, and babies were fighting their way out into the light. Being part of this random community made me feel less isolated and the walls that contained my feelings seemed to grow thinner, as if they might rupture and I might be able to give way to grief.
A florist’s van drew up and the driver began unloading cellophane-wrapped bunches of flowers finished with puffs of gaudy ribbon. The last item to appear was a wicker basket with a huge hoop handle and a ruff of paper enclosing a mass of pink and white carnations. The sight made me smile and remember the day Lola was born. She was handed to me wrapped in a blanket, and I looked down into her fathomless black eyes and felt a stirring of love I had never known before.
Ted was living at that time with an auntie called Elaine. It was Elaine who sent flowers and a card (‘It’s a Beautiful Baby Girl!’) signed in both their names, with a line that read, ‘Your Dad’s up to his eyes, nothing new!’
When the driver came back from delivering the flowers he leaned against the back doors of the van and lit a cigarette. He saw me watching him and called out, ‘Just taking five, eh?’
‘Why not?’ I called back meaninglessly.
But suddenly the sky seemed to lighten and the diesel-heavy air of the car park softened and sighed in my ears. I could feel the gritty surface of the wall under my fingertips and hear the swish of traffic out on the dual carriageway. The stitching on the leather strap of my handbag was coming undone and I stared down at the tiny frayed ends of thread and the puckered edges of the stitch punctures. Real time and place blurred and swam almost out of my reach. It was one of those rare moments of extreme physical and mental awareness, when even the smallest incident seems to contain infinite richness and a profound meaning that only narrowly evades capture. I was wide awake, but I felt the altered dimensions of a dream world beckoning me. I swung my feet up on to the wall and rested my head on my bent knees. Behind my eyelids, in this quietness, I could talk to Ted and he to me. The dialogue had always been running back and forth between us, in this other place, the old skeins of angry words and bitter words tangled with the words of love and faith, which were the ones I wanted to hear and speak now.
We failed each other, I said, I you and you me, but it was not a failure on such a scale that we are apart now, today of all days.
I was still sitting there, caught up in my inner conversation, when the driver climbed back into his seat. He tooted his horn at me as he rolled away and at once I jerked back into ordinary awareness. I should be sitting at my father’s bedside instead of hovering out here with my mind freewheeling in space. I hurried across the car park and in through the revolving doors, past the coffee shop and gift stall, and took the lift up to the ward. In the airless, medical-scented atmosphere I already felt as if I had been at the hospital for days.
Ted was still asleep. His mouth had fallen open and his breath clicked faintly in his throat. I took my seat once more beside him but didn’t try to hold his hand in case I disturbed him.
The hours passed slowly. The nurse who looked in from time to time explained that he was connected up to monitors that were watched over at the nurses’ station. He was stable, he said, at present.
At the distant end of the afternoon Lola appeared. In this stuffy room my daughter looked supernaturally beautiful and healthy, with her bright eyes and polished skin, as if all the threats of mortality had been airbrushed out of her face. I clung briefly to her, breathing in her sweet and perfectly familiar smell. Jack sidled in in her wake. He edged round the bed and, after a quick glance at Ted, leaned his forehead against the window and stared out. I hugged him too and he submitted briefly, although I could still feel the tense curve of his body arching away from me.
‘Have you had something to eat?’ I asked him.
‘Yeah. Lo fixed me a sandwich. I ate it in the car.’
The red chair was the only one. Lola went out to the main ward and borrowed another. She handed me a bag of apples and took a framed photograph out of her nylon rucksack. It was of herself and Jack and me, taken on last year’s summer holiday in Devon, the one that usually stood on the dresser in our kitchen. For once we were all smiling, looking straight into the camera, and now I noticed that each of us had a variation of Ted’s strong features overprinted on our own. She placed the picture on Ted’s locker, angled so that he could see it when he woke up. ‘I thought he might like it,’ she said, ‘if he wakes up when we aren’t here.’
The love implicit in the simple gesture touched me and I felt sorry that I hadn’t thought of it myself. ‘A very good idea.’
‘We’re all he’s got,’ she said matter-of-factly and this was the truth. There was no wife, not even an auntie, now, if you didn’t count Jean Andrews. I didn’t know who Ted’s friends were, if there were any remaining.
‘How is he?’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jack’s head half turn at Lola’s question. He wanted to hear but didn’t want me to see him listening.
‘Holding his own,’ I said. I was afraid that even though he seemed to sleep, he might hear what we were saying. I would tell them Dr Bennett’s verdict later, out of Ted’s earshot.
Lola nodded. ‘Go and get a cup of tea, Mum and eat some fruit. I’ll be here.’
‘Do you want to come with me, Jack?’
‘No,’ he said.
I carried a polystyrene cup of tea out into the car park and sat in my place on the wall, sipping the tea and eating an apple. The traffic was heavier now, with after-work visitors arriving and a short line of cars waiting for a free slot built up at the entrance. I tried to recapture some of the comfort of my earlier unspoken dialogue with Ted, or even the sense that with the dying and the newborn and the passers-through we were part of a generous community, but there was nothing. I felt lonely and sad for him, and disappointed in myself.
But there’s still time, I thought. I can still reach him.
‘He woke up,’ Lola said when I reached the ward again.
‘Yes?’
‘We chatted for a bit, Jack, didn’t we?’
‘Yeah. He asked Lo about uni and me about school. He was okay. Then he just sort of shut his eyes and went to sleep again. He didn’t see the photo, though.’
This was a long speech for Jack. Hope began sliding through my veins. Outside on the main ward there were relatives gathered round the beds of the old men, two nurses were pushing a trolley loaded with pill bottles and checking lists of medication, and a woman in a green overall was offering tea and biscuits. It wasn’t over. In a week, maybe, Ted would be sitting up too and choosing a biscuit from the Tupperware drum. In another week or two I could be driving him home. I would bring him back to my house and slowly, slowly, we would learn a new language for each other. I could tell him that he had made me suffer when I was too young to deserve such treatment and he could explain to me what had made him do it. We would listen to each other and make sense of the unintelligible, and then slowly stitch up the weave of forgiveness.
Anything was possible. Everything was possible.
The three of us settled round his bed. On one side Lola stroked his hand and talked to him about her house-share friends at university, young people he had never heard of let alone met. She talked easily and I knew that Ted would like the sound of her voice with its regular gurgles of laughter. Jack flitted around the room. He leaned on the windowsill for long minutes and watched the birds coming to roost among the huge metal cylinders on the hospital roof, then turned away to pick with his thumbnail at a leprous patch of paint on the bed end. I sat still and watched the rise and fall of Ted’s chest. It already felt like routine to be sitting here. Was it only yesterday at this time that I had been walking through the shimmering evening to meet Mel?
Time passed slowly. The ward quietened as the visitors drifted away. I was half expecting it, but no one came to tell us it was time to leave. A new nurse, just arrived on night duty, came in to introduce herself and to change one of the packs of fluid that drained into Ted’s arm.
‘How is he?’ I asked softly, thinking of the monitors at the nursing station.
‘There’s no change.’
That meant there was no deterioration. I smiled my leaping gratitude at her.
At nine o’clock I told Lola and Jack that they should go home. It was over an hour’s drive and Jack had school in the morning.
‘Aren’t you coming?’ Jack asked.
‘I’ll stay here a little longer. Lola will see you into bed.’ I glanced at her over his head and she nodded. ‘Or if you’d rather, you can go to Caz and Graham’s.’
‘No,’ Jack said at once.
Lola bent over and kissed her grandfather’s forehead, then touched her fingertips to his lips. ‘See you later, Grandad,’ she whispered.
Jack touched the small steeple of bedclothes over his feet and snatched his hand back. ‘Bye,’ he mumbled. He followed his sister to the door and then hovered, torn between the impulse to rush back to Ted’s side and the need to keep his own distance from me and his sister. Sometimes Jack was so transparent I thought I could read his hurt and put everything right for him so easily; at others I was afraid I hardly knew him. ‘Bye,’ he said again. Lola was leading and he followed her.
‘Drive carefully,’ I warned automatically. ‘I love you both.’
‘Yes, Mum.’
I sat down yet again. An hour dragged by and Ted rolled his head on the pillows and feebly shifted his legs. The Night Sister suddenly appeared with the first nurse. They moved rapidly around him, checking his fluids, and the tubes and wires that led into him, and calling him by his name.
‘What’s happened? What’s wrong?’ My voice was sharp and loud.
‘There are some new signs. The doctor’s coming.’
I was squeezed out of my place at his side. Ted’s eyes were wide open now and I could see how much it hurt him to breathe.
‘Dad? Dad, I’m here … I …’
I couldn’t finish what I was saying because the doctor arrived and I was edged further away to make room for him. I stood obediently outside the room with my arms wrapped round my chest. The old men were mostly asleep although pools of light lapped one or two of the beds. I waited until the doctor came out again. He was wearing a dark-blue shirt under his white coat and a name tag that read Dr Raj Srinivasar. I saw all this in a split second. He indicated that we should step a little distance away.
‘Doctor?’
‘I’m sorry. The undamaged portion of your father’s heart muscle has been working very hard since the attack and we have been helping him as far as possible with drugs to stimulate the heart’s natural rhythm. But I am afraid even this is gradually failing him now. I think Dr Bennett explained?’
I bent my head. ‘Yes.’
It had been human but utterly vain to hope, of course. I wanted the doctor to go away and take the nurses with him, and leave the two of us together. Dr Srinivasar knew this, because when I had composed my face and turned back to Ted he was lying quietly, alone again, under a dim light. I closed the door of the little room and took my place in the chair once more. I thought there were fewer wires clipped to him now and the levels of liquid in the bags hanging over his head didn’t change.
He was awake and he didn’t look as if he was in pain. Keeping him comfortable, Dr Bennett called it. Ted licked his lips and his neck muscles worked as if to squeeze words out of his ruined heart. ‘You’ve been a good girl,’ he whispered.
Automatically, defensively, keeping my long-learned distance I muttered, ‘Not really.’
I wasn’t ready for Ted’s praise and in my unpreparedness I couldn’t have assured him in return that he had been a good father.
I would have snatched my answer back if only I could, but Ted surprised me. He let his head fall further back against the pillows and laughed. It was a small coughing echo of his old laugh, but still there was no mistaking it. He said one more thing after that, on a long breath. I thought it was ‘my girl’.
As the minutes ebbed and I waited I knew that now it was too late for us to make our spoken allowances to each other. He lay with his eyes closed and the rise and fall of his chest grew shallower until I could no longer see it. I pressed my face against his cheek. Tears began to run out of my eyes and into the sheet. I put my arm under his shoulder as if I were going to lift him up and held him close against me. If I could have lifted him properly and carried him across the divide before laying him down again to rest, I would have done it. As I wept I told him, the angry words and the bitter words threading with the words of love, that I loved him and I hated the childhood he had given me, and I would always love him. He didn’t answer and I didn’t expect him to. I knew that he was dead.
I sat with him for a little while; then there seemed no point in staying when Ted himself had gone. I took the framed photograph off the locker and tucked it under his arm where he could hold it close to his heart. Then I kissed him on the forehead and touched his lips with my fingers, as Lola had done. I closed the door of the room very quietly.
Dr Srinivasar and the Night Sister were waiting for me.
‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor said. He shook my hand, very formally.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
The Sister put her arm round my shoulders and led me into the empty visitors’ room. ‘Would you like to sit in peace for a while? Let me bring you a cup of tea?’
I shook my head. ‘No, thank you, Sister.’
‘There is a chapel in the hospital.’
I shook my head again. Ted had never been very godly and I took after him.
There was only one place I wanted to be and that was at home. We established that I would come back to complete the formalities relating to the death and I thanked her for everything that had been done for my father. I went out once more to the car park, now deserted under a heavy dark sky, climbed into my car and drove back dry-eyed to London.
Lola was waiting up for me. I told her that Ted Thompson was dead, then we sat down and cried for him together.

Three (#uf61b01c4-938c-5016-a882-1870098b2887)
The room was light and bare, with tall, plain windows. Rows of wooden seats faced a pair of non-committal flower arrangements on either side of a secular-looking lectern. The atmosphere was subdued, naturally enough, but also utilitarian. The light-wood coffin under a purple drape was utilitarian too, which was inappropriate for Ted, whose life had been many things but never that. And at the same time as I was thinking about the crematorium chapel and the flowers, and the coffin I had selected with the undertakers’ discreet guidance, I was also reflecting that Ted wouldn’t have cared what arrangements were made for his funeral. Or would have affected not to.
‘I haven’t got to sit through it, have I?’ I could hear him snort in the half-irritable, half-jovial way that he adopted in his later years. ‘Just do the necessary and make sure all and sundry get a drink at the end of it.’
I also wondered how abnormal it was to be standing at a funeral and thinking like this. But then our life together, Ted’s and mine, hadn’t been usual. Mel’s family had been normal, or Caz’s, or Graham’s. Not ours.
Mel was sitting a few seats behind me. She had never met Ted, but she insisted that she wanted to come, out of respect and to keep me company. Caz and Graham were with her. They had met him a handful of times, at my wedding and the children’s birthday parties, and the occasional Christmas celebration in the intervening years.
‘I liked your dad. Of course I’m coming to his funeral,’ Caz declared.
Ted had liked her, too. I remember him flirting with her at my wedding reception. He had probably cornered her in some alcove, before cupping her round face between his two hands and breathing in the scent of her skin as if she were some exotic flower. ‘I could create such a perfume for you,’ he would have murmured in her ear. This routine worked like a charm with a surprisingly wide range of women. Not with Caz, of course, although it would have been a matter of pride for him to have a go. But with plenty of others. More than I could or would want to remember.
Lola and I sat on either side of Jack in the front row of seats. Lola was wearing black trousers and a tight red jersey that made her glow like a damask rose in the colourless desert of the chapel.
Rosa damascena, from which the essential perfume oil attar of roses is distilled. In Bulgaria, principally. I was surprised by how much I remembered about Ted’s craft.
Lola blotted her tears with a folded Kleenex and glanced down at the two black feathered wings of mascara printed on the tissue. Jack sat upright and stared straight ahead of him, dressed in a tidied-up version of his school uniform.
When I broke the news to him, on the morning after Ted’s death, he said, ‘I see.’ And after a moment’s thought, ‘It’s very final, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Although he’s still here in a way, because we remember him and because we’ll go on talking about him as long as we are alive.’
Jack gave me one of his withering looks, as if he saw right through this threadbare platitude, but he didn’t pass any comment.
Apart from the six of us, the other mourners were Ted’s two first cousins on his mother’s side, who had come down from Manchester. There was no other family left. Then there was a handful of Ted’s neighbours, led by the large and forthright Jean Andrews, and the landlord and a couple of regulars from the pub Ted used to go to. I had never met any of these people before, but they filed up to me at the chapel door, and shook my hand and told me how sorry they were. A great character, your dad, they said. Thank you, I murmured. And yes, he was.
There was also an old woman wearing a ratty fox fur over a shapeless bag of a coat and a crumpled black felt hat with a bunch of silk-and-wire lilies of the valley pinned to one side. Muguet, Ted called the flower. It was one of his favourites. The yield of natural oil from the blooms was minimal, and so the fragrance was usually artificially created.
The woman in the black hat had nodded coolly to me as she walked in, but she didn’t introduce herself or offer condolences. I assumed she was one of those eccentrics who like to see a decent send-off, regardless of whether or not they actually knew the dear departed.
There were perhaps twenty-five people in all. Muted piped organ music whispered around us.
On being given the nod by the crematorium officiator, who wasn’t exactly a vicar and who certainly wasn’t lively enough to qualify as master of ceremonies, one of the cousins hobbled to the lectern. He read that passage from Canon Henry Scott Holland about not having gone away, but being in the next room, still with you. I thought it was a fine and comforting piece of writing, but unfortunately untrue. Ted was completely gone. The shadow of himself that he had lately become had followed the younger man, with his Spencer Tracy looks, his laugh and his silk ties and his perfumes, off and away out of our reach.
Lola’s shoulders shook and she pressed the Kleenex to her face. I reached around Jack to rest my hand in the smooth dip between her shoulder blades.
After the reading there was a hymn, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, which I had chosen for no more significant reason than that Ted sometimes hummed it while he was shaving. He would turn his face from side to side, catching the best of his reflection in the mirror above the bathroom sink as he whisked on the soap lather with an old bristle brush. Then with his lips twisted aside he would razor a long, crisp channel through the white foam, all the way from his cheekbone to his jaw. The humming was counterpointed in my memory by the dripping and clanking of pipes in our chilly bathroom.
Or maybe I never actually saw any of this ritual, only imagined that I had. And maybe I also imagined the conspiratorial half-wink he gave himself as the words of the hymn played on in his head, all things wise and wonderful, as if he were saying to himself, that’s you, my boy.
After the hymn the officiator gave a short address. Lola and the cousins and I had provided as much background as we could about Ted and his life, and it was a good attempt at a tribute, given that he had never met him. Practice helped, I supposed, since the man was probably doing this several times a day. He spoke of Ted’s popularity, his love of life and its opportunities, and his gifts as a perfumer. We were just shuffling to our feet again, to the first notes of the organ voluntary that the cousins had suggested to accompany the coffin’s slow slide between the curtains, when Jack scrambled past me. I thought for a second that he might be going to be sick, which had been one of his specialities as a younger child, but he pushed me back when I went to follow him. He marched up to the lectern and took his place behind it, and the recorded music was abruptly switched off. Lola and I glanced nervously at each other. He had given no indication that he wanted to make his own tribute and I regretted that I hadn’t thought of asking him.
Jack cleared his throat. ‘My grandad,’ he began. We waited in silence. ‘My grandad told me when I was just a little kid that pigeons are vermin.’
After another beat of silence I heard from the back of the room a snuffle that might have been suppressed laughter. I stared hard at Jack, seeing his stiff hair and the way his baby’s face would settle into the aggrieved lines of pre-adolescence. He didn’t blink.
‘At our other house before … before Mum and me and Lola moved, they used to sit on all the upstairs windowsills and on the gutters, and Grandad didn’t like all the … all the … mess they left. He pointed at it when I was going to bed one night and said it was smelly and they were dirty. And I looked at their feet, the ones that were standing on the windowsill, and they were all, like, scabby. Their plumage was dirty as well.’
This all came out in a breathless rush. Plumage was a very Jack word. Lola was signalling to him, little patting movements with her hands that meant slow down, speak slower, but he didn’t see her. His gaze was fixed on the back of the room.
‘I said, are all birds dirty, then? And he said, I remember it really well, he said no, birds are beautiful, they’ve got the gift of the air, all the freedom of the sky and it’s just the poor pigeons who live in London and eat rubbish and everything and sit on top of our dirt that makes them dirty. So they’re vermin in the same way as rats, because rats are really clean creatures, in fact. He told me that as well. Anyway …’
Jack paused and now he did look at his audience, letting his eyes slide over us. He had got into his stride. We all sat without moving.
‘Anyway, after that I got interested in birds. I liked the idea of the freedom of the sky. I wanted to think about them not being all vermin with diseased feet from living on our mess. So I started watching them and learning about them, and he was right, they are beautiful. Seabirds especially because the sea belongs to them as well as the sky, if you think about it. So it’s because of him. That I like birds. I owe it to him.’ He nodded sideways to the coffin under the purple drape. ‘That’s what I wanted to say, actually. Grandad knew about things. He didn’t always let you know that he knew, but he still knew. He was interesting, like that.’
The rush of confidence subsided as quickly as it had come. Jack’s voice trailed away and his gaze returned to the floor. We sat in silence for a few long seconds, waiting to see if he wanted to add anything else. At last the officiator cleared his throat and stepped forward, and at the same moment Jack’s head jerked up and he swung round to face the coffin. ‘I love you, Grandad,’ he blurted out. There were tears on his eyelashes. Then he turned round and marched back to his place between Lola and me. I tried to put my arm round his shoulders but he shook it off.
The piped music started up again. The curtains at the back of the chapel slowly parted and with a faint mechanical creaking the coffin slid forward. I kept my eyes fixed on it, feeling the faint tremors of Lola’s weeping.
Then I began to think about my mother.
I could remember her calling me in from the garden – Sadie? Sa-aa-die! – where I was playing some complicated and solitary only-child’s game.
I was ten when she died. I have so few memories of her and yet this tiny moment was suddenly crisp and rounded out with the sound of a radio playing in a neighbour’s garden, and the suburban scents of dusty shrub borders and cooking. It was exactly as if I were standing there beside the rosebushes again, torn between playing and responding to her call.
Yes? I answered now, silently and pointlessly, but there was no more. It was strange that Ted himself, who had been so vividly alive and such a forceful presence all my life, should seem absent from these proceedings, while my shadowy mother, dead for more than forty years, was close at hand.
I wish I had been able to go to my mother’s funeral. I think Ted sent me to a neighbour’s, although I can’t remember the precise circumstances. He excluded me, anyway and later he swept my mother out of our lives and made it as if she had never existed.
Ted’s coffin had travelled the full distance. The curtains swished shut behind it and we all stood silently while the organ voluntary wheezed to an end.
Afterwards we walked out into the bright daylight. There was some more handshaking and subdued conversation. The family and neighbours already knew that there was to be a gathering back at Ted’s house, and there was a slow movement towards the handful of parked cars. Polished shoes crunched on the gravel path and two or three people patted Jack on the shoulder as they passed.
The old woman in the black hat was waiting with the sun showing up the dust on her defiant fox fur. She came towards me with her head tilted expectantly. She had purply-red lipstick, gamely applied to pursed lips, and powdered cheeks. ‘You’ll be his daughter,’ she said. ‘I am Audrey.’
This meant nothing to me. I had never seen her before. She wasn’t one of the aunties. It occurred to me that it was her snuffle of laughter I had heard when Jack launched himself into his pigeon speech. ‘Thank you for coming,’ I murmured. ‘Would you like to join us for a drink, back at …’
But Audrey had already turned her attention to Jack. ‘And you’re his grandson. I liked what you said about him. You were quite right, Ted knew about things and it was one of the games he liked to play, not letting you know what he knew and then surprising you when you least expected it. Birds, or whatever it might be.’
Jack nodded, looking at her and sizing up the unwinking fox eyes and sharp fox faces that hung down over her bosom. I turned away because I had to speak to the undertakers, and when I had finished doing that and was ready to shepherd the last of Ted’s neighbours back to his house, Audrey was nowhere to be seen.
‘She went,’ Jack said and shrugged, when I asked him.
Ted had lived for the last seven years of his life in a red-brick terraced house in a side street within two miles of both the hospital and the crematorium. He liked to joke in his deliberately bluff, I-dare-you-to-be-bothered way about their convenient proximity. On my infrequent visits there I felt that, like all Ted’s places, it was too full of wedges of memory, bits of furniture or ornaments or even kitchen implements, that propped open doors of recollection and so let images back into the daylight that I would have preferred to remain in darkness.
After the crematorium, the neighbours and pub friends and Ted’s small family reassembled at this lumberhouse of inanimate memory triggers. Everyone came back, except the mysterious Audrey. Mrs Andrews had been in to air the rooms and do some dusting, and as a result the place looked tidier and emptier than it had done when Ted was alive. Caz and I had made an early-morning lightning swoop on Marks & Spencer’s and bought in enough finger-food to fill several trays. She worked her way round the guests with these while Graham and I followed with gin, Scotch or wine. We made it our job to fill and refill glasses as soon as they were half empty. The atmosphere lightened as people ate and drank, and then grew positively jolly. Jean Andrews’s cheeks turned pink and she told the Manchester cousins stories about growing up in Oldham. They tried to find acquaintances in common, without much success from what I could overhear as I passed by with my bottles.
The noise level rose. The pub landlord told a couple of jokes, on the grounds that they had been favourites of Ted’s, and everyone laughed.
Jack sat on the stairs and read a book while people trod past him on the way to the bathroom. He glowered when anyone tried to speak to him or congratulate him on his impromptu speech, particularly me. Lola’s tears had dried up. She moved between the groups, with the attention of one or two of the younger pub men fixed on her. She caught my eye once and winked. Caz and Graham still circulated with drink and food, and Mel just circulated. In the narrow room with Ted’s shiny brown furniture and faded curtains she seemed bigger than the rest of us, and Technicolored alongside our dark clothes and muted pastel faces.
After a while I glanced at my watch. It was well past the lunch hour and I wanted to look in at work before the end of the day because there was some urgent finishing to do. I raised my eyebrows at Graham, who is used to standing in for a husband at times like this.
When I called Tony to tell him that Ted was gone, he had said how sorry he was, then asked immediately when the funeral was to be.
‘Sadie, that’s the one day I can’t come. I’ve got to go to Germany for a big client meeting.’
I knew he would have come, if he possibly could. Tony is like that. He does the right thing. ‘Don’t worry. Graham and Caz will be there. We’ll organise it together.’
‘I know they’ll support you. But I’m truly sorry I can’t be there as well. Ted was my father-in-law for fifteen years.’
‘It can’t be helped,’ I said. I too would have liked Tony to be here today, for my own sake as well as Lola’s and Jack’s. But there was no point in regretting his absence now, or at any other time.
‘How are you?’
‘I’m all right,’ I told him.
‘And the kids?’
‘They’re here.’
‘I’ll talk to them. I’m thinking of you, Sadie.’
‘I know. Thanks,’ I said and passed the receiver to Lola.
When we were first divorced, Jack and Lola both spent plenty of time with their father. We had agreed on unlimited access and it worked well. But in the last five years, since Tony met his new partner and particularly since the birth of their twin girls, the weekend visits have become less regular. This is no one’s intention, it’s just that Tony has less time to spare for children who can already feed and dress themselves. Lola is fairly sanguine about it, but Jack minds.
Graham glanced around the room, judging the atmosphere. ‘A few words, maybe?’ he suggested to me in a whisper.
I cleared my throat and stepped into the middle of the room while he rattled a spoon against a plate.
I had no idea what I was going to say. I don’t remember what I did say, except that it can’t have been very inspiring. Everyone listened politely, anyway. I thanked them again for coming, and lifted my glass that had one and a half mouthfuls of red wine at the bottom of it. Luckily everyone else’s glasses were well charged.
‘To Ted.’
The echo began as a muted, respectful chorus. But the next thing I saw was the faces all around me breaking into smiles and there was a sudden little wave of clapping, and some stamping and cheering. Ted, Ted, Ted. Jack’s white face poked round the hallway door.
‘My father,’ I added to the chorus, but under my breath. It wasn’t my unmemorable words that had provoked this, of course. It was Ted himself and I was being made aware of his popularity for perhaps the last time.
I looked around the room again, searching for a synthesis between my knowledge of him and what all these other cheerful, rational friends and neighbours felt. There was his dented old armchair but even as I stared at it I couldn’t shift the cold wedge that separated my memories of Ted from everyone else’s.
I shook my head and looked for the faces of my children and my old friends. They jumped out of the gloom at me, full of warmth and life. Mel’s red lipstick. Caz’s hennaed bob, Graham’s bald patch and habitual anxious frown. And Jack and Lola, my flesh and Ted’s too.
This is what matters now, not then, I rationalised. History’s gone.
I found myself with my fingers wrapped round my now empty glass, fondly beaming back at all of them. And my smile must have been particularly noticeable because there was another surge of clapping and cheering. How Ted would have loved all this.
It was another moment before everyone noticed that they were involved in an outbreak of spontaneous celebration, but when they did the applause gently faded into shuffling and coughing. This was a funeral, after all. Still smiling, Jean Andrews began dabbing her eyes.
My short speech and the clapping were taken as the signal for everyone to make a move. Caz and Mel swept plates and glasses into the kitchen as Lola and I stood by the front door, thanking everyone all over again for coming.
‘If only he could have been here.’ Jean Andrews sighed as she squeezed into her coat.
Half an hour later Caz’s and Graham’s Volvo followed Mel’s Audi down the road. Lola and Jack and I were left standing on Ted’s doorstep. The children looked at me, waiting for a lead. I closed the door firmly, double-locked it and dropped the keys into my pocket. Memories were neatly boxed up inside it with Ted’s clothes in the wardrobe and the old tea caddy with the pictures of the Houses of Parliament rubbed away where his thumb always touched the same spot.
‘Let’s go home,’ I said.
In the traffic on the M1 Lola told me, ‘I think that went really well.’
‘Yes, it did.’
I flicked a glance in the rear-view mirror. Jack was sitting sideways with his feet up on the back seat and his head tilted against the passenger window. There was no telling what he thought.
It was after five o’clock when I finally reached work, but that didn’t matter. Penny and I are self-employed and we put in the hours to suit ourselves. Her house is the end one of a pretty Georgian terrace, but it’s East- rather than West-End Georgian. The houses themselves were once fine but have become dilapidated and even recent gentrification hasn’t improved the immediate surroundings, which are grimy, traffic-clogged and unsafe after dark. Not that that worries Penny.
I walked down a small cobbled alleyway past the side of her house, under a sign that reads ‘Gill & Thompson Fine & Trade Bookbinders’. The old brick outbuilding, backing on to a murky stretch of the Regent’s Canal opposite some gasometers, was one of the main reasons why Penny bought the house when we first set up in business together. It had originally been a coal depot, where the long barges down from the Midlands unloaded their cargo, but together we cleaned it up and – roughly – converted it into a book bindery.
That was what I did, and do. I am a bookbinder, in the way that Ted was a perfumer. But without the mystery, of course.
I opened the door into the shop part of the bindery. Across the counter that divides it from the workshop I saw Penny. She was standing over a stitched book, rounding out the spine ready for backing. She was using the little old Victorian hammer I found at a bindery sale and bought for her, and she rolled and banged away at the stitching to make exactly the right swell that would form the spine of the bound book. She was so immersed in the job that it took several seconds for her to register the sound of the door opening and closing. But then she looked up over her half-moon glasses and saw me. ‘Hi,’ she said.
I walked round the counter end and took my apron off its hook, winding it round my middle and tying the strings without looking or thinking about it, the actions being so familiar.
‘I’m glad that’s over.’
My job was lying at the end of my bench. The dark-blue cloth-covered book boards for Ronaldshay’s three-volume Life of Lord Curzon that we were restoring for a regular customer of ours. The finishing, the gold lettering on the spine, still remained to be done, ready for the bound books to be collected tomorrow.
‘Are you okay?’
I picked up the first boards and stroked the cloth with my thumb. It was a good job, clean but nothing flashy. ‘Yes.’
I opened the as yet unbound book and automatically checked the title page. Then I put the board in the holder and adjusted the screws to position it correctly.
Penny was still standing with her hammer resting on the bench. ‘You needn’t have come in tonight, you know. Not straight from your father’s funeral. I could have done Curzon.’
‘I know.’ I smiled at her. Penny’s a good finisher. ‘But I wanted to.’
It was the truth. The concentration on a defined job, technically demanding but finite in scope, was just what I needed. And the bindery, with its ordered clutter and smells of glue and skins, is a soothing place. I always find it easy to be there.
Penny nodded and went back to her tap-tapping with the hammer. I switched on the heating element in the Pragnant machine and reached for a drawer of type. I decided that I would do the title in two pulls, and then put the author’s name and the volume number together in the third panel. Using tweezers, I picked the type from the drawer, dropped the letters and spacers for The Life of one by one into the slot of the type holder and checked them. The characters have to be placed upside down and although I can read as quickly that way as the right way up, it is still too easy to make mistakes.
The work absorbed me. Penny and I settled into the easy silence that we often enjoy when we are on our own in the bindery. It’s different when Andy and Leo, our part-timers, are there. They like to play music and talk about the jobs in hand. It’s still comfortable, but different. Less symbiotic.
I measured the available space on the book’s spine with my dividers, then checked it by eye. However carefully and accurately the lettering is placed, if the result looks wrong to the eye then it is wrong. I put the board back on the stand and slipped the foil out of the way. I pressed the handle forward gently to make a blind pull, just an impression of the letters lightly tapped into the cloth that I could rub away if they were misplaced. When I examined the result I saw they were indeed in the wrong position. About a millimetre too high.
I sighed and clicked my tongue, and Penny heard me.
She glanced over her specs at me. ‘Let me do it.’
‘Pen, I want to do it myself.’
I rolled the bar down by what I calculated to be the right amount and did another blind pull. This time it was exactly right.
Even though this was a routine machine-blocking job that I had done many hundreds of times before, I still had to summon up some courage to make the gold pull. If I got it badly wrong there was no chance of a repair. The boards would have to be made and covered all over again, and with the margins Penny and I operate on, and the backlog of work waiting to be done, we can’t afford the time. I took a steadying breath and pressed the operating lever forward. The type kissed the blue cloth and I pressed harder, going in with a smooth bold movement, and the gold tape frazzled as the letters burned out of it. I eased the handle back and bent forward to see the result.
There it was, The Life of in strong, gold, block capitals on the dark-blue cloth. I’d gone in a little too heavy, perhaps, and laid on a touch too much foil, but I could fix that. I stood back in a glow of satisfaction.
However many times I do it, finishing always gives me the most pleasure of all the stages of binding a book. I love the shape and balance of the letters, and the grace and infinite invention that are possible within the conventions of traditional tooling and decoration.
‘Good,’ I said.
Penny finished her rounding and backing job with a final burst of tapping. She took off her glasses and ran her hand through her short hair with the result that it stood up on the top of her head like a grebe’s crest. I knew about grebes from one of Jack’s bird posters. ‘How did it go?’
What do you say about a funeral? ‘It was … well, processed.’
‘I know what you mean. Coffins on a conveyor belt. Mourners by numbers.’
‘A bit like that. Sort of next please! Jack made a speech, though.’
‘Did he?’ Penny was surprised, not surprisingly.
‘About pigeons. It was Ted who set off his interest in birds by telling him about the way pigeons live in London. He made a whole address out of it at the ceremony.’
‘I think that’s very appropriate.’
She was right. I was proud of Jack.
‘And then, at the drinks afterwards, everyone clapped and sort of cheered and tapped their feet when I made a toast to Ted.’
‘Ah.’
I took up the second cover and squinted at the panel where I would place the blocking. This second volume was thicker than the first and I would have to make an adjustment to positioning. I pinched at the spaces on the spine with my dividers, not wanting to expose my feelings to Penny.
She put her book in the press. It was a good edition of Keats’s Letters that we had restored and were going to rebind in full calf. Tomorrow she would paste a backing on the spine and cut the endpapers. I planned to hand-finish the leather binding with gold and blind tooling, the full works. It was a tasty job, as one of our old tutors at college would have said. If only we had a few more like it, as well as our regular bread-and-butter work of binding Ph.D. theses, law reports, photographers’ catalogue boxes and presentation Bibles.
‘I’m going to head inside,’ Penny said. ‘Evelyn’s going out and she wants me to give Cassie her tea and put her to bed.’
‘See you tomorrow,’ I said.
I made the pulls for the second and third volumes, using just the right pressure this time, then discarded the type and set up Lord Curzon. I loved the quiet in the bindery on evenings like this. Behind me, the tall window that looked out over the canal darkened and the pale struts of the gasometer supports briefly glowed like the skeleton of a spaceship.
If I was thinking about anything as I worked it was Penny. We had met as art students at Camberwell and had learned the principles of bookbinding together. We hadn’t a clue how to do the job, even when the course was finished, but we both went on to work in other binderies. I found a job as a very junior assistant to Arthur Bromyard, one of the great artist-bookbinders, while Penny went into a busy and aggressive trade bindery where most of the other workers were men. She was bullied there and responded by becoming even more superficially prickly and defensive than she had been at Camberwell. We stayed friends, just about, but she was scathing about what she regarded as my sheltered and arty-farty existence under Mr Bromyard’s gentle tutelage, and I thought she was wasting her talents banging out dozens of legal buckram-bound law reports day after day and standing up to the taunts of brutal men who didn’t understand her manners or motives.
I blocked in the rest of the title and the author’s name and the volume number on each of the three books, then laid out the results on the bench to examine them. The first pull had indeed been a bit too heavy. I took my little ivory-handled penknife out of my drawer and scraped very gently at the gold to loosen the excess. The penknife had once belonged to the Old Man, Anthony Phebus, who had given it to Ted. Years later Ted had handed it on to me, asking offhandedly if I could find a use for it, and I had discovered that it was good for just this purpose. I blew the dust away and rubbed my blocking lightly with a duster. Perfect, even though I had to pass the verdict myself. Within the constraints of time and resources, of course.
I found a paste tray and a roller, and briskly applied PVA glue to the boards. Once the books were glued into their finished covers I could go home. The sky against the window was completely black now.
Half an hour later I was placing the bound volumes in the old wooden press, neatly interleaving them with paper so the moisture in the glue didn’t cause any cockling, when the door opened again. I began turning the screw to tighten the pressure and looked to see who it was. I could hear running feet, but I couldn’t see anyone.
A second later Cassie burst round the corner of Andy’s bench. ‘Sadie! Sadie!’ she shouted.
Cassie was nearly three, the daughter of Penny’s partner Evelyn and a musician from Grenada. It was a year since the lovely but distracted Evelyn had left Jerry and brought herself and Cassie to live at Penny’s.
I had never seen Penny happier than she was with Evelyn. In fact, I didn’t think I had even seen Penny happy at all before, although there had been a series of women, even in her miserable days at the blokey bindery.
‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded.
‘Seeing you,’ Cassie yelled triumphantly.
I swung her off the floor and she sat astride my hip. She was wearing a zip-up fleece over Tellytubby pyjamas and smelled of warmth and soap. ‘Why?’
‘Because you are silly.’
I reached for my duster and dropped it over my head and face. ‘How about now?’
This was greeted with hoots of laughter. She twitched the duster off my face and rubbed her boneless button nose against mine.
I cleared a space on my bench and gently sat her down. I didn’t really like seeing Cassie in the bindery. There were too many instruments of harm in here, too many long-bladed knives and mallets and jars of glue and size. The sight of her anywhere near the big old hand-operated guillotine with its grinning, curved metal blade made sweat break out down my spine and in the hollows of my hands. I blew a raspberry against the back of her plump, pale-brown neck and told her to sit still.
I never worried about my own two when they were small the way I feared for Cassie. It was only when I got older and Lola and Jack didn’t need and certainly didn’t welcome my physical protection that I started to.
But Evelyn didn’t worry about Cassie either. She let her play on the bindery floor, where she chewed strips of discarded goatskin and banged her head on the iron legs of the guillotine. ‘Let her play, Sadie,’ she would say with a shrug.
Penny came in with a tea towel over her shoulder.
‘Pen …’ I began.
She held up her hands. ‘I know, I know. But she wanted to come and see you on her own. You’re here and I was watching her all the way.’
Penny was incapable of refusing Cassie anything. She loved the child with an absorbed, half-unbelieving passion. I loved her too; the familiar weight of a baby in my arms, the softness and tenacity and scent of her. I missed my own children’s infant selves – Lola was already overtaking me in the adult pecking order and Jack was angular and rejecting – and Cassie filled some of the space they had left empty. So she moved between the three of us women, bathed in the constant light of our adoration.
‘I’m just finishing,’ I capitulated. ‘Do you want to stay here with me, Cass, and then I’ll carry you up to bed?’
‘No bed.’
‘Yes bed.’
‘No.’
‘Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyessss.’
‘We’ll see,’ she suddenly bargained and I could hear her mother’s sweet cajoling voice. Evelyn seemed other-worldly, but she always got exactly what she wanted.
After I had checked that Curzon was properly positioned and all the machines and lights were switched off, I hoisted Cassie into my arms again, locked up and followed Penny up the path to the back door of the house.
The ground-floor rooms interconnected and together they functioned as kitchen, living area and bindery office. There were books everywhere, and newspapers, heaped up on battered but good-looking furniture. Penny’s rooms had always looked the same, in whichever of her houses, but since Evelyn’s arrival there had been some changes. She had feng shui’d the place as soon as she moved in, shifting the position of the table, lining up chairs and introducing frondy plants and scented candles. It was funny to see her Hello! magazines alongside Penny’s London Review ofBooks.
Penny was sitting at the computer making up invoices. This was usually my job.
‘I’ll do those tomorrow.’
I put Cassie down and she immediately ran away and hid.
‘Sade, will you tell me why you’re rejecting all offers of help and sympathy?’
I played for time. ‘Am I?’
I felt fraudulent, that was why. I had hardly cried yet for Ted and I couldn’t map even the outlines of what his loss meant to me. What could I look for from my friends, when I couldn’t locate my own grief? All I felt was numb, and exhausted to realise that my relationship with my father wasn’t going to end with the mere fact of his death. It was going to go on and on, for ever, the old disabling argument between love and bitterness.
Penny sighed. ‘Never mind,’ she said gently.
‘Shall I put her into bed?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. Tell her I’ll come up in a minute.’
I found Cassie behind the sofa, her usual hiding place. She let me carry her upstairs to her bedroom, on the second floor next to Penny’s and Evelyn’s. It was at the back of the house, and looked out over the bindery and the gaunt ribs of the gasometers. I drew the curtains, dark-blue ones with gold stars, and turned on the man-in-the-moon nightlight.
‘Time to go to sleep now.’
‘Lie down too.’
I slid under the duvet with her. She put her thumb in her mouth and began winding one of her curls round her forefinger. Lying there with my arms round her and her breath on my face, I felt some of the sadness melt away.
Downstairs again Penny was standing looking out of the window at the little backyard. Evelyn had put some tubs out there and there had been a spring display of daffodils.
‘She wants you to say goodnight. She’s nearly asleep.’
‘Do you want to stay and have a glass of wine?’
My own children would be waiting for me at home.
‘Thanks. Not tonight.’
‘See you tomorrow, then.’
I touched Penny’s shoulder. She was much shorter than me. She had always been squarely built and now, in her contentment, she was putting on weight.
I walked home along the canal towpath. The gates that gave access to it were locked at dusk, but the railings were easy to climb. Muggers and junkies hung out down there, especially in the thick darkness under the bridges, but tonight I wanted the silence and solitude of the path instead of threading the longer way through the busy streets. Lights were reflected as broken tenements of yellow and silver in the flat water, and dripping water echoed my footsteps. The city traffic sounded muffled; the rustle of rats clawing the litter in the rough grass on the land side was much louder. I walked briskly and saw no one.
Lola was on the phone. She mouthed ‘hello’ at me as I came in. When she hung up she said, ‘Mum, that was Ollie. I said I’d go and meet him and Sam for a drink, is that okay with you?’
She had stayed in with Jack, waiting for me to come back. Having her at home in university holidays had great benefits for me, although I tried not to take advantage of this too often. And I was glad that she felt like going out with her friends tonight. She had cried enough for Ted. I smiled at her. ‘Of course it is. Where is he?’
‘He said he was going to bed.’
‘Did he talk to you?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think he didn’t talk to you.’
‘Precisely.’
Lola and I have always discussed almost everything. Once she had forgiven me for leaving her father and got over the extremes of adolescent rebelliousness that followed it, that is. I feared sometimes that because I didn’t have a husband I admitted too many of my anxieties to her, but her response always was that she would rather know what affected me because whatever it was actually affected all three of us. Lola is always level-headed. In her case at least the cycle of family wrongness has been broken. And even her concern about Jack’s oddness wasn’t as deep as mine. ‘Sure, he’s kind of a weird kid. But not as weird as some, believe me. He’ll grow out of the bird thing, and the not talking. Probably when he gets a girlfriend.’
‘I’d just like him to have some friends, let alone a girl.’
‘Mum, he’s okay.’
She picked up her denim jacket now, with its badges and graffiti, and stitched-on bits of ribbon and braid. She was eager to get on her way. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Yes, I am.’ So I didn’t share everything with her.
Lola whirled out of the house. I went upstairs, knocked softly on Jack’s door and, when there was no answer, turned the knob. Sometimes he bolted it but tonight it opened. The light was out and I could hear his breathing, although something told me he wasn’t asleep. ‘Jack?’
There was no answer.
Cassie’s room had been sweet with the innocence and trustingness of babyhood, but in here all I could pick up was the darkness of rejection.
‘Goodnight,’ I whispered.

Four (#uf61b01c4-938c-5016-a882-1870098b2887)
He walked off up the road, very slowly, his bag slouched across his back and the soles of his trainers barely lifting off the pavement. At the corner he paused and looked right and left, but he never glanced over his shoulder to see if I was still standing in the doorway of the house. I watched until he turned left, in the direction of school, and plodded out of my sight. Only then did I go back inside and begin to put together my things for work.
I was shaking with the tension of the morning. It was the third day of the summer term and every morning so far Jack had refused to get out of bed. Then, when I finally hauled him out from under the covers, he refused to get dressed. He didn’t speak, let alone argue; once movement became unavoidable he just did everything very, very slowly.
‘Jack, you have to go to school. Everybody does. It’s a fact of life.’
He shrugged and turned away. While I stood over him, he had got as far as putting on his school shirt and it hung loose over his pyjama bottoms. I could see faint blue veins under the white skin of his chest and his vulnerability made me want to hold him, but I knew if I tried to touch him he would pull away.
‘Jack, we have to talk about this.’
‘Talk,’ he muttered finally, as if the mere suggestion exasperated him.
‘Yes, talk.’ I struggled to be patient and moderate. You could ache for him, for what he was going through, and at the same time irritation made you long to slap him. Hard.
‘Mum.’
‘Yes?’ I said eagerly.
‘Go away if you want me to get dressed.’
‘I’ll make you some toast. Would you like an egg?’
‘No.’
‘Downstairs in five minutes, please.’
Five minutes turned into fifteen. He ate his toast very slowly while I sat waiting.
‘You’re going to be late.’
‘Oh no.’
‘For God’s sake,’ I snapped, ‘what’s the matter with you? What’s wrong with school? If you won’t talk to me or anyone else how can we help you? What’s wrong?’
Jack fumbled with a knife, then dropped it with a clatter. He looked around the kitchen as if surveying his life, and then said out of a pinched mouth, ‘Everything.’
The bleakness of this was unbearable.
I remembered how it felt to be his age, at the mercy of the world and powerless to change anything. I tried to touch his hand but he pulled away as if my fingertips might burn him.
I took a breath. ‘Jack, listen. It just seems like everything, you know. It isn’t so bad. There are lots of things you enjoy and look forward to.’ Although if he had pressed me to name them, I couldn’t have got much beyond seagulls. ‘And you’ve got us, Lola and me, and your dad as well. If we try and work out what’s most wrong, I can help you.’ This sounded feeble, even to my own ears.
There was a small silence. Then he said flatly, ‘You?’
I understood that everything mostly meant his life in this house, with me and without his father.
It wasn’t that he didn’t see Tony: the three and a half weeks since Ted’s death had spanned the school Easter holidays and the two of them had been away together for three days’ fishing in Devon. Lola could have gone too, but she had preferred to stay in London. Once or twice a month Jack went over to Twickenham to spend a night with Tony and his second family, and there were weekday evenings too when he and Lola went out for pizza or a film with him. But that wasn’t the same as having a father who lived in the same house and didn’t have to portion out his time with such meticulous care.
Everything wasn’t school and friends or the lack of them, although I wanted to believe that it was. The trouble was home, and home was mostly me. In the last few weeks and months Jack had gradually stopped communicating, had withdrawn himself from our already dislocated family, but he had never let me hear the roots of his unhappiness as clearly as in that one word, you?
I wished just as much as he did that he had a live-in father. I wished he didn’t have to live with just two women, or that he and Lola were closer in age, or that he had been born one of those children who found it easy to make friends. And I wished that I had been able to break the cycle that began with Ted and me, and rolled on with me and Jack, in the way I had apparently been able to break it for Lola.
The silence extended itself. The need to cry burned behind my eyes, the pressure of years of denied weeping swelling inside my skull, but I didn’t cry and my inability to do so only increased my sense of impotence. Unwitting Jack, my unlucky child, was the focus of this mighty powerlessness. I couldn’t make the world right for him, I couldn’t even make the dealings between us right. Sympathy for him was squeezing my heart so I could barely speak.
‘I’m sorry,’ I managed to say.
He pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Going to school,’ was his only response.
I went with him to the door and watched him until he was out of sight. I longed to run after him, to go with him and shield him through the day, to turn his everything into nothing that mattered and let us both start again, but I couldn’t. It was hard to accept that after all the promises I had made to myself when they were small, about always being close to my children and never letting them down, there was still a breach between Jack and me. Ted was dead and gone but somehow his damned legacy was right here in our house with us.
I was angry as well as impotent. I slammed my hand down on the kitchen table, so hard that the pain jarred through my wrist bones, but nothing changed and my head still hurt with not crying.
I snatched up my bag and went to work. It was too late now to walk, even along the canal. I had to drive, in a 9 a.m. press of buses and oversized trucks, and when I arrived I made a mess of cutting some endpapers out of some special old hand-marbled paper that Penny and I had been saving. I had to throw the ruins away and use a poor substitute. Penny kept her head down over her work and although I could sense Andy and Leo glancing at each other, I didn’t look their way.
When I got home again Lola had already gone out to her bar job. In two days’ time she would be going back to university and she was trying to earn as much money as she could. Jack was sitting in front of the television, still wearing his outdoor jacket and his school tie. He looked grubby and utterly exhausted.
‘How was your day?’ I asked. I was going to make shepherd’s pie for supper, his favourite.
‘All right.’
‘What lessons did you have?’
‘The usual ones.’
He didn’t take his eyes off the screen but I didn’t think he was really watching it. There was wariness in the hunch of his shoulders and his fingers curled tightly over the arms of his chair.
‘What did you do in the lunch break?’
‘Nothing.’
I threw three potatoes in the sink and began peeling. ‘So, it was a pretty uneventful day, then?’ He twisted his shoulders in a shrug. But when I started browning the meat and vegetables, and he assumed my attention was elsewhere, he let his head drop back against the cushions. Then, when I glanced at him again, he had fallen asleep.
We ate dinner together – at least, Jack sat at the table with me, but he had a bird book open beside his plate. I was, temporarily, too tired of the battle to make any protest. He ate ravenously, though, as if he hadn’t seen food since breakfast time.
But the next morning, to my surprise, he put up less resistance to getting up and getting dressed. When the time came to leave, he shouldered his bag and silently trudged away. Maybe he was beginning to accept the inevitable, I thought. Maybe the tide had turned.
That day Colin came into the bindery. He lived with his mother, somewhere on an estate that lay to the east of Penny’s house, and he was a regular visitor. He pushed the door open, marched in and laid a heavy carrier bag on the counter. Penny was working on a big case for a photographer’s portfolio and Leo was trimming boards at the guillotine. Andy was on day release and in any case it was my turn to deal with Colin. We took it roughly in turns, without actually having drawn up a rota.
‘Morning!’ he shouted. He had an oversized head that looked too heavy for his shoulders and his voice always seemed too loud for the space he was in.
‘Hello, Colin. How are you today?’
‘All the better for getting this finished.’ He began hauling a mass of papers out of his bag. Penny and Leo were suddenly completely absorbed in their jobs.
My heart sank. Colin had been writing a book ever since he first came in to see us, and would regularly turn up with fragments of it that he wanted us to discuss. It was going to be a cookery book. He had chosen us, he announced, to be his publishers. Penny and I had often tried to explain to him the difference between binding an interesting collection of personal recipes and publishing a cookery book, but he took no notice. The sample material, in any case, usually consisted of recipes torn from women’s magazines and annotated with drawings and exclamatory scribbles in a variety of coloured inks, so we hadn’t worried too much about the day of reckoning. Now, apparently, it had finally arrived.
‘I have to have the books ready soon, of course. Mum’ll want to give one to all her friends, won’t she?’
A tide of magazine clippings, jottings on lined paper, sketches and headings like ‘A Good BIG Dinner’ blocked out in red felt-tip capitals spilled over the counter. They were accompanied by a nasty smell. Some of the papers were very greasy and I spotted a flaccid curl of bacon rind sticking to the reverse of one of them. I stopped myself from taking a brisk step backwards.
‘Colin, we’re not book publishers. I told you that, didn’t I?’
He gazed around him with an ever fresh air of surprise and bewilderment. ‘Yes, you are. I know you are. Look at all your books.’
‘We just put covers on them. We restore old books, we bind people’s academic theses, we take care of books that have already been published.’
‘Exactly.’ Colin nodded triumphantly. One of the most exhausting aspects of dealing with him was the way he agreed with your disagreement and just went on repeating his demands. ‘So you can put covers on mine. I’ll pay you, you know. I’m not asking for something for nothing, not like all these refugees coming over here and expecting to get given money and big houses. It’s not like that, you know.’
‘I know, Colin. But we aren’t publishers. Putting a cover on … on your manuscript here, that won’t get it into the bookshops like Smith’s in the High Street where people could buy it. That’s a completely different process. You have to … well, you have to have the text edited and all these recipes would have to be tested. Then artists and marketing people would have to look at designs for it, and thousands of copies would have to be printed by a big commercial printers, and then salesmen would have to sell it to booksellers …’ I felt weary myself at the mere thought of all this effort.
‘Exactly.’
‘But we don’t do any of these things, Colin.’ I reached out for his plastic bag and very gently began putting the rancid pages into it. From past experience I knew and feared what was likely to come next.
He watched me for a second or two, then he grabbed the bag from me and began hauling the contents out again. ‘It’s my book.’
‘I know, but I can’t publish it for you because I’m not a publisher.’
‘My book’s important, I’m telling you. It’s taken me a long time, these things take time to do properly.’ His voice was rising. We tussled briefly with the bag, me putting in and him taking out. The bacon rind dropped in a limp ringlet on the counter. ‘I’m not stupid, don’t make that mistake. I’m as good as anyone else and I was born here, not like these blacks and the rest of them.’
Leo’s mother and father came from Trinidad. He went on lining up trimmed law reports as if no one had spoken. True to form, Colin was now shouting. And equally predictably, the phone rang.
Penny went to answer it. ‘Gill and Thompson, Bookbinders. Good morning. Oh, yes. Hello, Quintin.’
Colin was thumping the counter and shouting that we weren’t bookbinders at all, didn’t deserve the name, not when we wouldn’t do a simple job of work for an ordinary person, who had been born here, not like some of them.
Quintin Farrelly was our most lucrative, knowledgeable and exacting customer. He was the owner of the Keats Letters. Penny blocked her free ear with one finger and struggled to hear what he was saying. ‘Yes, yes. Of course we can. Sorry, there’s just a bit of a noise in here.’
‘I’ll tell you what, Colin,’ I said. ‘There’s something we could do for you, if you’d like it.’
He stopped shouting, which was what I had hoped for. ‘What?’
‘Well. Let’s have a look at what Penny’s doing, shall we?’
I took him by the arm and showed him the photographer’s portfolio. It was A2 size, in dark navy-blue cloth with a lining of pale-green linen paper. The man’s name, Neil Maitland, was blind tooled on the lid. Colin examined the job with an aggrieved expression.
‘What do you think of it?’
Penny gave me a grateful thumbs-up. She wedged the handset under her ear and reached for the order book and work diary. ‘Yes, Quintin, I’m sure we can do that for you.’
‘It’s nice,’ Colin admitted, rubbing the green interior with a heavy thumb.
‘We could make you a beautiful case like this, and you can put your recipes and pictures in it, and then your mum can show it to all her friends.’
‘Can I choose the colour?’
‘Of course.’
‘And it would have to have my name on the lid, not this Neil’s.’
‘Of course.’
‘Any colour?’
‘Any colour you like, Colin.’ Including sky blue pink.
He expressed a preference for red. He left his bag of papers with us, stressing that it was to be kept in the safe whenever we were not actually working on it, and promised that he would call in again tomorrow to see how the job was progressing. Penny hung up, after asking after Quintin’s wife and the Farrelly children.
‘Christ on a bike,’ Leo muttered as the three of us raised our eyebrows at each other. ‘Anyone want a coffee?’
Jack was sitting in his armchair again when I got home from work, apparently absorbed in Neighbours. He looked dirtier, if that were possible, and even more exhausted than he had done yesterday. An empty plate blobbed with jam and dusted with toast crumbs rested on the floor beside him. It was Lola’s last night at home. She was ironing, also with her eyes fixed on the television. The forgiving winter gloom that usually hid the worst of our semi-basement kitchen had given way to a watery brightness that announced summer and showed up all the layers of dust as well as the peeling wallpaper. The place needed a spring-clean. The whole house needed a spring-clean and a new stair carpet wouldn’t have done any damage either. I let my bag drop to the floor.
‘Good day, Mum?’ Lola asked.
‘Er, not bad, thanks. What about you?’
She nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘Jack?’
Just the way that he shrugged his shoulders made me want to yell at him. I took a deep breath and began rummaging in the freezer. It was going to have to be defrost du jour tonight, because I didn’t have the energy to start a meal from scratch.
As soon as Neighbours was over Jack removed himself upstairs. I sat on the sofa and watched the remainder of Channel 4’s News, and when Lola finished her ironing (leaving a pile of Jack’s and mine untouched) she brought over two glasses of red wine and joined me. She kicked off her shoes and curled up so her head lay against my shoulder and I stroked her shiny hair.
‘I’ll miss you,’ I said, as I always did when she was about to go off. I did rely on her, more than I should have done, for companionship but also for the lovely warmth of her life that I enjoyed at second hand – the parties and nights out clubbing that she’d describe in tactfully edited detail the next day, the long phone conversations, the friends who dropped in and lounged around the kitchen, and the certainty that anything was possible that seemed to govern them all.
‘I know, Mum. I’ll miss you too. But I’ll be back for the weekend in a couple of weeks.’
‘So you will. Is there any more of that red? How does he seem to you, the last couple of days?’
‘He’ was always Jack in Lola’s and my conversations.
‘Very quiet.’
‘But he’s been making less fuss about school the last couple of days. I think maybe the worst’s over.’
Lola said, ‘I hope so.’
Jack ate most of the dinner, finishing Lola’s portion even after he had devoured his own second helping, then wiping his plate clean with chunks of bread torn off the loaf.
Lola tried to tease him about his appetite. ‘Hey, bruv. Is school food getting even worse?’
‘I was hungry, okay? What’s wrong with that?’
‘I never said there was anything wrong. Sorry I asked.’
After dinner Jack retreated again and Lola went out to meet some friends. She had left the ironing board folded but hadn’t put it away. I did the obligatory brief two-step with it as if it were a reluctant dancing partner and finally managed to set it horizontally on its metal strut. I took the first of Jack’s school shirts out of the basket and began pressing a sleeve. The steamy smell of clean laundry instantly filled my head. The olfactory nerve is the largest of the twelve cranial nerves; smell is the swiftest as well as the most powerful of the senses. My eyes stung, then filled up with tears and as I bent my head they dripped on to Jack’s shirt, making translucent islands of damp in the white polycotton. I finished the shirt and began another but I was crying so hard I couldn’t see properly. I hadn’t been able to cry for weeks on end and now I was sobbing over the scent of clean laundry just because it reminded me of the way home should smell, of cleanliness and care and therefore security.
‘The ironing? Don’t do the bloody ironing,’ Mel said when I called her.
I sniffed, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. I didn’t properly understand the tears, that was the worst part of it. If I had been thinking of Ted, it would have been different. But in the last month whenever he had come into my head it was with a numbness that cut me off even from the relief of missing and loving him. I thought with dry precision instead about our life apart.
‘Are you there? Sadie?’
‘Yeah, I’m here. Sorry. I really don’t know what this is all about.’ I could hear Mel at the other end lighting up a Marlboro and exhaling.
‘Your dad died. You’re grieving for him.’
I was going to say, I almost did say, ‘It’s not like that.’
Mel had told me how bereft she felt when her adored father died and that wasn’t how it was with me.
‘Do you want me to come round?’ she asked.
‘No. Yes, I do, but it’s late.’
‘Then let’s have dinner tomorrow.’
‘Lola’s going back to Manchester in the morning. I can’t leave Jack.’ I didn’t want to leave Jack, in any case. He needed me, even if he didn’t want me.
‘I’ll come to you. I’ll cook something for the three of us. Don’t be late home, dear.’
Jack didn’t answer when I knocked on his door. I called goodnight and told him to sleep well.
Lola saw Jack and me off in the morning and said goodbye. She would drive herself north later in the day.
Colin came in twice to the bindery, and on the second visit he was aggrieved to discover that we hadn’t even started work on his box.
‘There are twelve other jobs ahead of yours in the line,’ Penny told him, it being her turn.
‘Why isn’t mine as important as theirs?’
‘It’s not a matter of importance, it’s just that you can’t jump the queue. We’re busy here, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ She was brusque, but Colin tended not to notice subtleties like that.
‘Well. I’ve had some more thoughts about how I want it.’
‘Don’t you want to hear our estimate first of what it’s going to cost?’
I was trying to signal to her to go easy, but Colin was grandly insisting that cost didn’t matter to him. His money was as good as anyone else’s. The phone rang and as I was nearest I picked it up. A voice I half recalled asked for Mrs Bailey.
‘Speaking.’ At the same time I was frowning because although Jack and Lola went under Tony’s name, after the divorce I had deliberately reverted to my own. To Ted’s, that is. I had been happy to accept Tony’s when we married, but once I had rejected him I didn’t deserve the shelter of his name, did I? I went back to being just Sadie Thompson again.
‘This is Paul Rainbird, at the school.’
I remembered now that I had spoken to him when I called to say that Jack would be away on the day of the funeral. He was Jack’s head of year.
‘Is something wrong?’ Penny and Colin dwindled, their voices obliterated by the rush of blood in my ears.
‘No, nothing at all. I wanted to ask how Jack is.’
‘Why?’
‘We haven’t seen him for three days. Is he ill?’
‘He’s been at school all week,’ I said stupidly.
‘No, I’m afraid he hasn’t.’
The lack of protest in the mornings, the dirtiness and exhaustion and his appetite in the evenings fell belatedly into place. Wherever he had been going for the last three days, it hadn’t been to school. Dismay at my own obtuseness and sharp anxiety for Jack overtook the usual nagging concern. ‘I’d better come in and see you.’
Mr Rainbird said he would be at school until six that evening. I looked at my watch. Ten to four. Colin was reluctantly shuffling out of the door.
I untied my apron and hung it up, turned off the heating element in the Pragnant and closed the open drawers of type. ‘Jack’s been bunking off,’ I told Penny. ‘I’ve got to go in and see his teacher.’
The school wasn’t far from our house, so it didn’t take me long to drive there. As I parked the car there were streams of children coming out of the gates. I pushed my way in against the current, assaulted by the noise and the display of attitude. Children came in so many shapes, sizes and colours. Some of them stared, most didn’t bother. There were so many different statements being made within the elastic confines of school uniform, so much yelling and kicking and threatening and ganging up. Survival was the prize of the fittest – and you could see which kids were the natural survivors. They were the cool ones and the disciples of the cool ones, and the others who hung around on the fringes and took their cues from them. The rest straggled on in ones and twos, keeping out of the way, trying not to attract too much attention.
Lola had been the coolest of cool. She had achieved this by breaking every school rule and defying me daily about her clothes and her hair, and her attitudes and the hours and the company she kept. But even so, even when she was at her most grungy and rebellious, on some deeper level we had still been allies. When we weren’t fighting, she told me secrets. Not hers, that would have been too incriminating, but her friends’.
‘Isn’t fourteen a bit young?’
‘Mum, you mustn’t breathe a word.’
I took this as her way of alerting me to what she was doing or about to do herself, and no doubt her friends’ mothers did likewise. Lola and I were both women and for all our differences we had the comfort of being the same.
In my mind’s eye now I saw Jack, and he was smaller and paler than all these children, and different. Different even from the wary singles. He was churned around by the alarming tide as it swept him along. I clenched my fists into tight balls in the pockets of my coat, wanting to defend him.
I found my way to the Year Seven office at the end of a green corridor lined with metal lockers.
‘Sit down, Mrs Bailey,’ the teacher said, having stood up to shake my hand. There was just about room in the cubicle for a second chair.
‘Thompson,’ I murmured. ‘I’m divorced from Jack’s father.’
Briefly my eyes met the teacher’s. Mr Rainbird was wearing a blue shirt and slightly shiny black trousers, and his colourless hair was almost long enough to touch his collar. He looked tired. If, without knowing him, I had been forced to guess his occupation I would have said English teacher in a large comprehensive school. We faced each other across the desk piled with exercise books and mark sheets and he nodded, registering my statement, before we both looked away again.
‘Is Jack being bullied?’ I asked.
‘Has he said so?’
‘He hasn’t said anything. I know he’s not happy at school, not the way my daughter Lola was, but I didn’t know it was as bad as this.’
‘I remember Lola.’ Mr Rainbird nodded appreciatively. ‘Although I never taught her. How’s she getting on?’
‘Fine.’
There was some shouting and crashing outside the door, and several sets of feet pelted down the corridor. The teacher seemed not to hear it. I thought he was used to concentrating in the face of many distractions.
‘I don’t think he’s being bullied. Jack doesn’t stand out enough, either in a bad way or a good way. He’s a loner, but that seems to be out of choice. He’s very quiet, very serious. He doesn’t say much in lessons, but he listens. His work is adequate, as you know, although he doesn’t try very hard. He gives the impression of absence. But mostly only mental absence, at least until this week. Has anything changed for him lately, at home?’
‘His grandfather died, at the very end of last term.’
The teacher looked at me. He had a sympathetic, creased, battle-worn face. I thought he must be somewhere in his late forties. How many years of teaching Shakespeare did that mean he had notched up? Twenty-five, probably.
‘Yes, I remember now. Does Jack miss him badly?’
I tried to answer as accurately as I could. ‘Not in the everyday sense, because … well, he didn’t live nearby. But now that he’s gone, yes, I think so. It’s another absence in Jack’s life.’
I realised that I had dashed here in the hope that Mr Rainbird would be able to offer me explanations for the way Jack behaved and a suggestion for how to deal with him. But this was what he was looking for from me. I was his mother and he was only his teacher.
Mr Rainbird was tapping his mouth with the side of his thumb. ‘What about his dad?’
‘Tony remarried and had two more children. They live the other side of London. He sees Jack and Lola as often as he can, but he does have another family and a lot of calls on his time. Jack lacks a male role model.’
It was stuffy in the little room with the door shut and I felt hot.
Mr Rainbird half smiled. ‘Some people would say that’s no bad thing.’
I knew he said it not as a teacher and head of Year Seven, but as himself. I wondered if he was married and whether his wife was the sort who thinks all men are monsters.
I smiled back. ‘In Jack’s case, a father figure would be helpful.’
The root of Jack’s problem was with me, but the root of that problem went back much further. Back beyond Stanley, even Tony. I could do relationships with women, I reckoned, but I got it wrong with men. From Ted onwards. The smile suddenly dried on my mouth. I blinked, afraid of another surge of irrational tears.
‘So, what should we do?’ Mr Rainbird asked. He was looking down at his hands and I knew it was to give me a chance to recompose myself. ‘He can’t afford to go on missing lessons.’
I stared hard at the pile of exercise books until I had my face under control. ‘I’ll go home and talk to him. I’ll try and get to the root of this. And I’ll make sure he comes to school on Monday.’
‘I’ll talk to him too,’ he said. ‘Maybe between us we can work out what the problem is. What do you think he’s doing instead of being at school?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think he’s doing anything. I think he’s … just killing time.’ He was waiting for this to be over, dreaming of when he would be old enough to change something for himself. I remembered how that was.
We both stood up and Mr Rainbird edged round his desk to open the door for me. In the confined space he had to reach past me and his shirtsleeve brushed against my shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘Yes, thanks.’ I wondered how distraught I actually looked.
‘We’ll speak again, then.’ He didn’t attempt any empty reassurances and he didn’t make authoritarian demands. I liked him. We shook hands a second time and I retraced my path down the corridor and out to the gates. The school was quiet and empty now, the tide reaching its low ebb.
Jack was sitting in his accustomed place. There was plenty of evidence of toast, cheese, jam and yoghurt having been eaten. It was no wonder that he came home hungry. He would have had almost nothing to eat since breakfast because he went out with only enough money for a bus fare and a phone call home. We both knew that to take any more would only attract muggers. Jason Smith, he once told me, had had forty pounds in his pocket in school one day and made the mistake of mentioning it.
I made myself a cup of tea and swept up some of the food debris. I could feel Jack tensely waiting for me to say something. He had been waiting yesterday too, and the day before, and when I didn’t the relief had allowed him to fall into a doze.
I turned off the television and sat down with my tea. ‘I’ve just been to see Mr Rainbird.’
He flinched, just a little. I waited, but he didn’t volunteer anything.
‘I want you to tell me why you haven’t been to school for three days.’
His face was a crescent of misery. I had been keeping my imagination in check but now it broke loose and galloped away from me. I pictured drug deals, the skinny shifty kids who hung around by the canal, a leering fat man beckoning from a doorway. The images catapulted me out of my chair and I grabbed Jack by the arms and shook him hard. ‘Where’ve you been?’ I yelled. ‘Who have you been with?’
He stared at me. His eyes had rings under them and there was dirt and jam around his mouth.
‘Where? Who?’ I shouted again and my shaking made his head wobble.
‘Nowhere,’ he breathed. ‘Just … nowhere.’
‘You must have been somewhere.’
‘I walked around. Sat on a bench. Then when it was time to come home, I came home.’
‘For three whole days?’
He nodded, mute and despairing.
I sank back on my heels and tried to take stock. I wouldn’t gain anything by allowing anger to balloon out of my fears for him. ‘That must have been horrible. Much worse than going to school. You must have felt lonely.’
If he had let some pervert befriend him, if he had been sniffing glue out of a brown-paper bag, or stealing from Sue’s Superette on the corner, or buying crack or other things that I couldn’t even imagine, would he give me a clue?
He said, ‘I watched the pigeons. They’re filthy. Did you know that there are hardly any sparrows left in London?’
I closed my eyes for a second. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or infuriated. ‘Let’s not talk about birds right now, Jack. Let’s try to work out exactly what it is about going to school that makes you so miserable you’d rather sit alone on a bench all day.’
He appeared to consider the matter. I looked at the way that tufts of hair partly exposed the pink lobe of his ear and the prickle of recent acne along his jawline. In profile he resembled Tony, increasingly so now that his proper face was emerging out of the putty softness of childhood.
‘I dunno.’ The shrug again.
‘Yes, you do. Is someone picking on you? A teacher? Other kids?’
‘Not really. They think I’m sad. But I think they’re even sadder.’
The rock of his unhappiness held glinting seams of mineral disdain. Jack was sharp-witted and he wouldn’t have much time for losers, even though he might currently consider himself to be one.
‘All of them? Everyone? Isn’t there anyone you like or admire?’
‘Mr Rainbird’s okay. Most of the girls are just lame, they’re always sniggering and whispering and fooling about. Some of the boys are all right. People like Wes Gordon and Jason Smith. But they wouldn’t be interested in me. And the rest are dumb.’
This was the most information he had volunteered in about six months, since the end of the maddening old days when he used to respond to every remark or instruction with ‘why?’.
I supposed Wes and Jason would be the cool ones, big, blunt-faced boys surrounded by hangers-on like those I had seen swaggering out of school this afternoon. I couldn’t see Jack in their company any more than he could see himself.
I pushed my luck. ‘Go on.’
His face contracted with irritation and his shoulders hunched up. It was just like watching a hermit crab pull back into its shell.
‘That’s all,’ he snapped. ‘You always want stuff. There’s nothing, all right? I’ll go back to school on Monday if that’s what you want.’
‘I want you to want to go. What I want isn’t important.’
His head lifted then and he stared straight at me. It was a full-on, cold, appraising stare that told me Jack wasn’t my baby any more. ‘Is that so?’ he sneered.
I was still catching my breath when the doorbell rang. Jack turned the television on again and increased the volume.
It was Mel on the doorstep, with two carrier bags and an armful of red parrot tulips. I had forgotten she was coming. She took one look at my face. ‘You’d forgotten I was coming.’
‘No. Well, yeah. I’m sorry. I’ve just been having a set-to with Jack.’
‘Do you want me to go away again?’
‘Depends on what’s in the bags.’
‘Sashimi-grade bluefin tuna. Limes, coriander, crème fraîche, some tiny baby peas and broad beans, a tarte au poire from Sally Clarke’s, a nice piece of Roquefort …’
I opened the door wider. ‘Come right inside.’
Mel breezed into the kitchen. Her polished brightness made the dusty shelves and creased newspapers and sticky floor tiles look even dingier than usual. My spirits lifted by several degrees.
‘Hi, Jackson.’
Jack quite liked Mel. ‘Hi,’ he muttered.
‘I’ve come to cook you and your mum some dinner. However, that’s going to be tricky if I can’t hear myself think.’
‘Oh. Right.’ He prodded at the remote and Buffy went from screeching to mouthing like a goldfish.
Mel busily unpacked fish and cheese. ‘Great. How’s school?’
I tried to signal at her but she missed the gesturing.
‘It’s shit,’ Jack said.
‘So no change there, then.’
I thought I caught the faintest twitch of a smile on his face before it went stiff again. ‘No. None.’ He stood up and eased himself out of the room.
Mel started making a lime and coriander butter. I poured us both a drink and told her what had happened. While I talked I cut the ends off the sappy tulip stalks and stood the stems upright in a glass jug. The orange-red petals were frilled with bright pistachio green. The daub of colour in the underlit room reminded me of Lola’s jersey at the cremation.
‘I’m worried. Really worried,’ I concluded. ‘I never get to the root of anything with Jack. He clams up or walks away or shuts himself in his room. I never know what he’s thinking. What must it have been like for him, wandering around with nowhere to go and nothing to do for three days? Did he talk to the old dossers? I wonder how many weirdos tried to come on to him?’
‘Worrying won’t help,’ Mel said.
‘That’s easier said, believe me. You don’t know what it’s like.’
She had been searching a drawer for some implement but now she slammed it shut. ‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘Shit. Christ. Mel, I’m sorry. I’m a thoughtless cow.’ My face and neck throbbed with shamed heat. Mel didn’t talk about it much any more, but her childlessness was still a wound.
‘Where’s your sharp knife? Oh, it’s all right. I only want to trim the fish.’
‘Sorry,’ I murmured again. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’
Mel put the knife down. She came round the worktop and wound her arms round me and I rested my head against hers. The touch was comforting.
‘I think he’ll be all right, Sadie. I’ve got no grounds for saying so, but I still think it. Trust me, I’m a City headhunter.’ It was one of the things she often said, to make me smile.
‘I do trust you. In spite of your utterly high-powered, bewilderingly incomprehensible job.’
‘Good. Remember what Lola was like when we first met?’
‘How could I forget?’
‘Right, then.’ She let go of me. ‘Now, do the veg for me, please.’
I did as I was told, dropping the little peas and fingernail-sized beans into the steamer. ‘Let’s talk about something else,’ I suggested.
‘How about me?’
‘Perfect.’
Mel shimmied the length of the worktop, rapping the knife point on jars and pans. ‘I met someone.’
‘No.’ This wasn’t exactly an infrequent occurrence. I already knew that Adrian’s days were numbered.
She stopped dancing and held up her hand. I had been so preoccupied that it was only now I noticed that her face was as bright as a star. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I really have met someone.’
While she told me about this latest one we finished off the cooking, stepping neatly round each other, tasting and discussing and amending, as we had done many times before. These were the evenings I liked best, the companionable times of making unhurried food in a warm kitchen while the light turned to dark outside. I laid the table with blue-and-yellow plates and put the jug of tulips in the middle. I lit a pair of yellow candles and the glow wiped out all the dust and shabby corners, and shone on Mel’s star face and the flowers, and the photograph of the children and me that Lola had taken up to Ted’s hospital bedside.
Mel flipped the tuna off the griddle. ‘It’s ready.’
I went to the foot of the stairs and called Jack. He appeared almost at once, changed out of his school clothes and with wet hair combed flat from the shower. He sidled to his chair and sat down. Immediately he started wolfing down the fish.
‘Are you hungry?’ Mel asked.
‘Yes.’ He glanced quickly at me. ‘Didn’t get anything to eat at lunchtime.’
‘And why’s that?’
‘I should think Mum told you.’
‘Yeah. Here, have some of these baby beans. So, who did you meet? What amazing things did you do that were worth missing school for?’ Mel leaned forward, pushing her coils of hair back from her face so that she could hear better, her eyes and all her attention focused on him. There was no censure, only friendly interest.
‘No one. Nothing,’ Jack muttered.
‘Really? It sounds deadly boring.’
He nodded and went on eating. By the time the pudding came, he even joined briefly in our conversation. He talked slowly, as if he weren’t quite used to the sound of his own voice, but at least he was speaking.
After we finished and he said goodnight, Mel and I opened another bottle of wine.
‘Thanks, Mel.’
‘Tuna was a bit overcooked.’
‘I meant about Jack. Being so nice to him.’
‘I wasn’t nice, I was ordinary.’ This was true. Mel had a gift for being ordinarily warm and inclusive. Tonight it had just seemed more noticeable than ever.
‘You look very happy,’ I said. ‘This Jasper must be good news.’
‘I am happy. I wish you were.’
I felt some of the protective walls around me shifting, as if Mel’s darts might pierce them. I didn’t like it.
‘What did you mean, when you said your father was a con artist?’
What did I mean? There was the pressure inside me, building up inside my skull, threatening to break through the bones. ‘Ted was a great nose, a fine perfumer, but that wasn’t enough for him.’ I chose the words carefully, biting them off with my tongue and teeth. ‘He always wanted something more. There was so much yearning in him. He wanted to be rich and he never was. He wanted glamour but except for the illusion of perfume his life was humdrum. He thrived on secrecy, that nose-tapping and winking kind that men who think of themselves as men of the world go in for. To do with deals, scams, setting up little businesses. I think he must have lived through his fantasies and the reality was always disappointing. Women ultimately disappointed him. His daughter did, too.’
Mel leaned back in her chair. ‘You are his daughter.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you talk about the relationship as if it involves someone else.’
That was truer than she realised. Somewhere within the numbness around Ted’s death there was raw grief, yet I could only touch the outlines of it. As if the bereavement didn’t belong to me, but to someone I knew. As if I weren’t entitled even to the painful connection of grieving and therefore the potential relief that lay beyond it.
‘Mel, I’m not you. I didn’t grow up in your family.’
‘What about his house?’
‘Still there.’ Locked up, since the day of the cremation, with all his possessions inside it. Brooding, waiting for me.
‘Are you going to go and sort it out?’
‘Yes.’ It came to me now that my reluctance formed part of the numbness. Of course I feared going back to his house and unlocking the memories, but sooner or later I would have to make myself do it.
Mel insisted, ‘I’ll come and help you. I’m sure Graham and Caz will as well.’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
I knew I didn’t want anyone else to be there, not even Lola and Jack. It wasn’t just furniture and clothes and memories I had to deal with. It was the way the very scent of the place entered into me and shook my soul.

Five (#uf61b01c4-938c-5016-a882-1870098b2887)
I unlocked the front door of Ted’s house and gently pushed it open.
The draught excluder caught on a heap of letters and circulars lying on the doormat, so I stooped down and cleared them out of the way. I was breathing hard. The air in the hallway smelled dense and mouldy.
In the kitchen I unlocked the back door to let in some air. The reek of mould was stronger in here. The silence pressed on my ears and in an effort to dispel it I rattled around opening cupboards and moving jars. There was the tin tea caddy from our old house, with pictures of the Houses of Parliament rubbed away where his thumb and palm had grasped it so many times. Inside, I knew, was the teaspoon with an RAF crest on the handle.
I lifted the lid off the breadbin and recoiled from the source of the smell, a puffy canopy of blue mould. Caz and Mel and I remembered after the funeral to empty the fridge and leave it with the door propped open, but we forgot the bread. Choking a little, I rummaged for a cloth and a rubbish sack. I went to wipe out the mould and the obscene furry nugget of bread that lay in the heart of it, but there was no point. I dropped the whole thing, bread bin and all, into the sack and firmly tied the neck. I was here to go through Ted’s belongings. I didn’t want to keep many of his possessions – there were more than enough memories already.
Upstairs there was the silence, even thicker and heavier. Ted’s was a quiet road, and behind these closed windows nothing had moved for a month. I turned on the bedside radio but the sudden babble made me jump and I switched it off again.
The blue-tiled bathroom with worn blue candlewick mats was a comfortless narrow space that reminded me again of the dripping green box at our old house. Ted humming ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ as he shaved. Me perched on the edge of the bath watching him. Through adult eyes I could see myself, gazing, hungrily following his every move, trying by the sheer power of concentration to draw some attention to myself. It must have been infuriating for him.
There was a bottle on the wooden shelf over the basin. I reached for it, unscrewed the cap and automatically sniffed.
It was as if I had rubbed the green glass and whispered an incantation to bring the genie smoking out of its prison. The scent of his cologne rushed into my mouth and nose and eyes, and my obedient brain performed its trick of instant recall. The here and now dropped away, and Ted was standing beside me, in his prime.
He was wearing a dark blazer and a lightly checked shirt with a cravat, paisley-patterned. He was freshly shaven, with his skin taut and shiny where he had rubbed and patted it with the cologne. His thick hair was slicked back with some kind of brilliantine. I could see the tiny furrows left by the bristles of the old silver-backed hairbrush that he kept on the tallboy in his bedroom.
He winked at me. ‘All ready, eh?’
‘Are you going out?’ I demanded.
Was this before or after my mother died? It must have been after.
I hadn’t minded before about him being out of the house so much of the time. It was the normal state of affairs, and Faye and I were used to being on our own together. I remember watching and helping her to bake cakes. The first Victoria sponge that was all my own work was decorated with the wobbly word ‘Dad,’ piped in blue icing using a paper bag and a serrated icing nozzle. It was two days before he came home to taste it and the lettering had bled into the sponge beneath.
‘I’m only nipping out for an hour or so,’ Ted said.
I had heard that one before. I wheedled, ‘Don’t go.’
He only winked at me, impatient to be gone. ‘Tell you what, I’ll ask Mrs Maloney to come and sit with you.’
Mrs Maloney was a widow who lived a few doors away. Our north London outer suburban street was on a steep hill and the semi-detached, semi-Tudoresque little houses stood in stepped pairs in their strips of garden. Mrs Maloney’s house was higher up than ours and I hated the thought of her looking down at our roof and the leggy rose bushes that lined the creosoted fence. She had wind, and was smelly and lugubrious. I hated being alone in the house, because of the spectres in the folds of the curtains and the whispers in the empty rooms, but I hated Mrs Maloney even more. She had to be fed tea and biscuits, and she sat in my mother’s chair swallowing belches and asking me nosy questions.
‘Can’t I come with you?’
I remembered the day at Phebus Fragrances so clearly because it was so unusual for Ted to take me anywhere.
‘Not this time, Princess.’
The doorbell rang, a long, shrill sound that meant the caller must be leaning hard on the button. Not all that many people came to visit us, not unexpectedly, and Ted and I glanced at each other in surprise. He went quickly to the bedroom window and looked down, making sure that he was shielded by the nets.
‘Do me a favour, Sadie. Go downstairs and open the door and tell this man I’m out. You don’t know when I’ll be back. Right?’
I opened the front door. There was a man in a pale fawn coat with leather buttons that looked like shiny walnuts. ‘Is your daddy in?’
I looked him in the eye. ‘No.’
‘When will he be back?’
‘I don’t know.’
The man stared at me so hard that it made me uncomfortable. But this wasn’t the first time I had had to do something like this for Ted. I prided myself on being good at it. I made my face a moon of innocence.
‘Right. Will you give him a message for me?’ The man took out his wallet and selected a card, then wrote a few words on the back. ‘Here you are. Don’t forget, will you?’
I tried to read what he had written as I went back up the stairs. But Ted was on the landing, waiting.
He held out his hand. ‘Well done, Princess.’ He pocketed the card with barely a glance. ‘Don’t want people knowing where we are every hour of the day, do we?’
Once he had made sure that his visitor had really gone he went out himself, whistling. I had homework to do, and after that there was the television for company, and if I needed anything I could always run up the road to Mrs Maloney. But I could never fall asleep until Ted came home again. I lay on my bed, watching the ceiling and waiting until I heard his Ford Consul drawing up outside.
Next I heard his key in the lock, then low voices in the hallway. Sometimes on these late nights there would be a woman’s giggle. Only then, when I knew that after all he hadn’t disappeared for good and left me behind, did I close my eyes. If there was a woman, I pulled the bedclothes over my head and clamped my ears shut.
I screwed the lid back on the bottle and reached to replace it on the shelf. Then I remembered that I was here to sort out his belongings and dropped it into a rubbish sack instead. I still didn’t like his cologne. Maybe it represented the way he wanted to be, or perhaps with his love of secrecy he just relished putting up another smokescreen. But to me it still smelled like a lie.
I cleared the bathroom cupboard of his smoker’s toothpaste and indigestion tablets and corn plasters. I worked methodically, telling myself that these were only inanimate things, the inevitable remnants we would all leave behind, which would be cleared away for us, some day, in our turn. By our children and their children if we were lucky, by strangers if we were not.
Next I went back to the bedroom. I took his jackets and suits off their hangers and piled them up, thinking that maybe they would do for Oxfam. The cuffs were frayed and the trousers bagged, but they were all dry-cleaned and brushed. Ted had grown seedier in old age – he didn’t bother to eat properly, preferring to smoke and nip at glasses of whisky, and he didn’t get his hair cut regularly enough or trim the tufts in his nose and ears – but he was always a dapper dresser. I folded up his thick white silk evening scarf and put it aside, thinking that Lola might like to have it.
The shoes were lined up in a row on the wardrobe floor. The leather was split with deep lateral creases but they were well polished. I turned one pair over and studied the worn-down heels and touched the oval holes in the leather soles. I could see the pattern of his tread, and now that I listened I could hear his footfalls in the silence of the house. But I couldn’t read the man any more clearly than I had ever done.
In the drawers of the tallboy there were socks and pants, and a coil of ties and paisley cravats. I put aside his RAF tie, frayed at the edges where he had tied the knot so many hundreds of times, and consigned the rest to the disposal pile.
I was up to my wrists in his old clothes now and the scent of him was everywhere, but I told myself it was just a job to be done. I kept at it and the pile of black rubbish sacks mounted up on the landing.
The bottom drawer of the tallboy was deeper than the rest. I opened it and saw that it was half full of papers. Reluctantly I knelt down and began to sift through them.
Most of the papers were old bills, but there was an address book with a brown leather cover, and an old-fashioned thumb index with black and red letters and numerals. I flipped through the pages, recognising one or two of the names, dimly remembering some of the others.
There was nothing hidden here. Ted was as inscrutable as he always had been.
In a creased manila envelope I found a handful of photographs. There was one of my mother and me, in the back garden of the old house. I was perhaps four years old, scowling under the brim of a sunhat and wearing a dress with a smocked front that I hated. Faye was characteristically looking into the distance away from the camera, as if she wished herself elsewhere. I had seen this picture before and almost all the others in the envelope, including one of Ted looking rakish and handsome in front of an MG. Somebody else’s MG, although he managed a proprietorial air. There were also four or five photographs of women.
One of them caught my attention. She had a plump face with a round dimpled chin and her hair was arranged in a lacquered fringe in front and drawn up at the sides with combs. The lipsticked margins of her smile spread fractionally beyond the true contours of her lips, giving her a slapdash, come-and-get-me look. She had eyes that slanted upwards and this oriental aspect was emphasised by a thick line of black eyeliner that flicked up beyond the edges of her eyelids.
Auntie Viv.
Viv wasn’t the first of Ted’s girlfriends to be presented to me after my mother died. I could remember Auntie Joyce before her and possibly Auntie Kath as well. But she was one of the longer-lasting aunties and she was memorable because she was friendlier to me than any of the others.
I sat down on the green candlewick cover of Ted’s bed. I was Jack’s age again.
My father called upstairs to me. ‘Sadie? Sadie, come down here and say hello.’
I came out of my bedroom. I had been reading The Whiteoaks of Jalna and wishing that Renny Whiteoak would come and take me away from Dorset Avenue, Hendon. There was a woman standing beside Ted in the hallway.
‘Sadie, this is Auntie Viv.’
I didn’t want any more aunts. I wanted my father at home, sitting with just me in the evenings to watch Hancock’s Half Hour or maybe even helping me with my French homework. I wanted my mother back as well, of course, but even I, with my talent for wishing for what I was never going to get, knew that there was no point in dwelling on this one.
‘Hello, love.’ Auntie Viv grinned up at me. She was wearing a tight skirt with a fan of creases over the thighs, and high heels that tilted her forward and made her bum stick out. I noticed her teased helmet of silvery blonde hair.
‘Hello,’ I muttered.
Auntie Viv made me sit beside her on the sofa. Ted brought out the gin bottle and the best glasses with diamonds and stars incised on them.
‘Give her a little one,’ Viv suggested and, to my amazement, Ted poured me a small glass of sweet Martini.
‘Cheers, love,’ Viv said, and took a gulp of her gin and tonic. She scissored her fingers – red varnished nails, lots of rings – in my hair. ‘Hasn’t she got lovely hair? Is it natural?’
I thought this was a stupid question. I was twelve. As if I would be able to choose to have my hair permed or dyed or even set. And if I had, as if I would have chosen my side-parted, no-nonsense short wavy cut that I wore with a pink plastic hairslide in the shape of a ribbon bow. ‘Yes,’ I said stiffly, but I couldn’t help yielding a little to Viv’s admiration. They made an unfamiliar pair of sensations for me, the being admired and the yielding.
‘Auntie Viv’s a ladies’ hairdresser,’ Ted explained. ‘We’re planning a little business venture together. A range of hair-care products, exclusive, of course, but affordable too.’
‘Shampoos, setting lotion, conditioner,’ Viv said dreamily. ‘Your dad’s going to create them for me. My own range.’
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Will they be in Boots?’
Ted gave me one of his cold, quelling looks but Viv nodded. ‘Of course they will. And in all the salons. With my expertise in the field of hairstyling and your dad’s genius as a fragrance artist – he is, you know – we will be creating something every woman will want to buy and experience.’
I was impressed. Ted splashed some more gin into Viv’s glass. They settled down for a business talk, but Viv told me that I should listen in. The ideas of the younger market were always important, she said.
I listened eagerly for a while. Viv had a lot of ideas for names and the shapes of the bottles and packages. She drew sketches in a notebook, tore out the leaves and handed them to Ted and me for our approval. The bottles were waisted and curvy, like Viv herself, and the colours tended to the pink and gold. She wanted to call the shampoo Vivienne.
Ted was more interested in formulations and how to buy in ready-mixed solutions for the various products to which we could then add our own fragrance and superior packaging. ‘It’s the way we’ll make money, mark my words. Basic lines, but given an exclusive touch.’
They both drank a couple more large gins and I drained the sticky dregs of my Martini. ‘Thirsty work,’ Auntie Viv mouthed at me. The drink made me sleepy, and my arms and legs felt like plasticine when I shifted on the sofa. After a while Viv went into the kitchen, wobbling a little on her high heels, and made a plate of Cream Crackers with slices of cheese and a blob of pickle on top. Viv turned on the television. She chatted through the News, mostly gossip about her customers and questions about Ted’s work. She sat close up against him and let one of her shoes swing loose from her nyloned toes. After we had finished eating she leaned her head back against the cushions and closed her eyes. Her hand stroked the nape of my father’s neck.
‘Hop off to bed, now, Sadie,’ Ted said.
I began to protest, made confident by Martini and inclusion, but he fixed me with his icy grey stare.
‘Goodnight, pet,’ Viv murmured. ‘See you soon.’
In the morning she was nowhere to be seen. While I made myself toast and a cup of tea before school I asked Ted, who was silently reading the newspaper, ‘Will Auntie Viv be coming again?’
He looked at me as if I was mad. ‘Yes, of course she will.’ Then he refolded the Daily Express and went on reading.
That was the beginning of quite a good time. Ted was still out of the house a lot, maybe even more than before Viv arrived, but I assumed that when he wasn’t at home with me he was with her. Viv was safe territory, I felt. She brought me her Woman and Woman’s Own every week when she had finished reading them. She played about with devising hairstyles for me and chatted about lipsticks and clothes. One evening she brought a glass bottle with a bulb spray out of her handbag. She sprayed the insides of my wrists and showed me how to rub them together to warm the skin.
‘What do you think?’ Her face was pink with excitement.
I thought the perfume was wonderful. It smelled of cloves and carnations, and it made me think of velvet dresses and candle-light reflected in tall mirrors. Ted stood watching us, one hand slipped into his jacket pocket, one eyebrow raised.

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