32
It wasn’t the most salubrious of areas.
Jen held on to her bag as she walked from the bus stop, trying to look as confident, as casual, as she could. Trying not to give off a vibe that said, ‘I’m a stranger here, I don’t really know where I’m going and I clearly must have something in this bag worth stealing, otherwise why would I be holding on to it so tightly?’ In truth, there was nothing in there she couldn’t replace – except for the photos. She knew she should have had them copied before she came.
She had decided not to mention where she was going to anyone – not Jason, not Poppy, not Amelia. She didn’t think any of them would understand. She filed the idea away in her ‘Secrets’ file. At this rate, she was going to need an entire cabinet devoted to them.
She had caught the train down to Croydon, and then the bus to the other side of the town. She’d asked the driver to tell her when they got there, and he’d pulled a face and said, ‘Look out for all the boarded-up shop fronts,’ a phrase that was only marginally better than, ‘Get out at the chalk outline of the dead body,’ and which hadn’t exactly made her feel at ease.
She knew from the map that her dad’s flat was close by. She had never been there before, obviously. She wasn’t quite sure why she was there now. It was stupid, really. A whim. If it wasn’t for the fact that she just wanted to get inside – somewhere, anywhere – and shut the door before she got mugged or worse, she would have turned round and gone straight back to the bus stop.
She was taking a chance that he would be home. She hadn’t called ahead to check. She couldn’t have, even if she’d wanted to, because she didn’t have a number – and, anyway, once she’d made the decision to come, she’d had to move quickly before she changed her mind. She hadn’t really thought through what she would do if he wasn’t there. Leave a note, maybe. ‘Jen was here.’
She wasn’t expecting to gain a father, just maybe a bit of closure. Perhaps they could have some kind of a functional relationship for the last however many years he had left on earth. Jen could visit and take him out to the shops or the pub, and he could act like he gave a shit who she was.
She found the house on the edge of the estate. She made a note that, if she got lost on the way back to the bus stop, she should turn left at the salivating pit bull, tied to a child’s climbing frame with a bit of string that it could have chewed through in about a millisecond, if it had the brains to realize it. Number 25 had the guttering coming away on the upper floor, but an attempt had been made to plant some flowers in the tiny front garden. Unfortunately, someone had then decided to store their shopping trolley on top of them. Jen rang the bell for the ground-floor flat, and waited. After what seemed like an age, she heard noises in the hall, and then a voice.
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Jen.’
‘Jen who?’
Great. Now she was taking part in a live-action knock, knock joke.
‘Your daughter, Jen. Jennifer. Jenny. Jesus, Rory, how many Jens do you know? Let me in.’
She listened as he pulled back a bolt, then a chain and, finally, a deadlock. She felt sick. She barely knew this man, hadn’t even clapped eyes on him in more than four years.
He peered round the door, an old man with a slightly too flat nose and thin sparse white hair, who vaguely resembled her father. Jen didn’t know what reaction she had expected – maybe, in her most hopeful imaginings on the way here, delight that his daughter had finally sought him out, or even a gruff, ‘What do you want?’ What she got was the indifferent politeness of an acquaintance, and not a very close one at that.
‘Oh, it’s you. You’d better come in,’ he said, pleasantly enough.
Jen followed him down the corridor to the tiny kitchen at the back.
‘Cup of tea?’ he said, as if it had been four days, not four years, since they had seen each other last.
‘Lovely.’
There was something about him that was so familiar, that took her right back to when she was seven or eight, and he was an everyday fixture in her life. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was. It certainly wasn’t the way he looked. Back then, Jen knew more from photographs than memories: he had been tall and dark and in good shape. He was always sporty, she could remember that much, and he would try to encourage her to play football in the park with him. She had wondered in the past whether having another child, a son, might have made him want to spend more time with his family, might have made him stay.
‘So, to what do I owe this pleasure?’ Rory said as he fussed around with mugs and tea bags.
‘I don’t know … I … I got your letter, and I just thought, well, it’s been years …’
‘Come to see how the old fella looks, now he’s an octogenarian?’
‘You look well, actually.’
‘So you’re still at that hotel? I wasn’t sure you would be.’
Jen nodded. ‘We live in Wimbledon.’
‘What … you and … um …?’
‘Jason. My husband’s called Jason. We have two daughters, Simone and Emily. Both at college.’
Rory bristled. ‘I know that. Well, not the college bit. Clever girls, then, are they?’
‘They are.’
They sat in silence for a moment, while Rory poured water into the mugs and then squeezed the tea bags before plonking them on the counter. His flat could do with a good clean, she noticed. The kitchen counters had a sticky-looking film over them. There were cobwebs around the corners of the window. The whole place smelled slightly of stale air and unemptied bins. Clearly he was missing having someone to look after him.
‘So you and Maxine have split up?’
Rory handed her a mug of tea – or, at least, that’s what she assumed it was. It looked like a cup of dishwater with some milk thrown in.
‘She moved out a while ago. No big deal.’
‘How have you been?’
‘Are you doing OK, though? Healthy?’
‘Not too bad, considering. I manage. Jean from next door comes in now and then and gets some shopping for me.’
Jen stopped herself from asking whether Jean from next door was his new girlfriend. It wasn’t out of the question. ‘Right.’
Rory waved a pack of Hobnobs in her direction. ‘Biscuit?’
She took one.
‘How are your girls?’
‘Simone and Emily. They’re both at university, like I said. I have photos. Look.’
She produced them from her bag, with a flourish, and showed him the girls all the way back to when they were babies. Last time she had seen him, when he’d walked into the hotel four years ago, she had only had a few recent snaps of her two girls on her phone, and nothing of when they were growing up – plus she hadn’t wanted to deal with him then, had wanted to get him out of there as soon as she possibly could – so now she took him through the whole story. Then she dug out her iPhone and showed him the most up-to-date pictures she’d taken of them both, and of Jason. She flicked through any with Elaine in quickly, before he really noticed.
He examined them all carefully. ‘Lovely girls,’ he chuckled, once she’d got to the end.
‘Emily reminds me of you. She has this thing she does where she flicks her hair out of her eyes …’
Rory pointed up at his balding head. ‘Not any more.’
‘No, but you used to. I remember.’
‘You do?’ He smiled, as if that made him happy.
Jen felt as if she was about to burst into tears. He was so like himself, so like the man she remembered, but also immeasurably different. She didn’t know what she was doing here. It was too late, truthfully, to start thinking of this man as her father. You couldn’t make it real, just because you wanted it so much.
‘So I just wanted to make sure you were all right, really. It’s been a long time.’
‘Well, last time I came to see you at your hotel, I got the impression you’d rather I hadn’t.’
Jen could remember it clearly. She’d been busy at the time, but she could easily have taken ten minutes to speak to him properly. Instead, she had felt angry that he could just waltz back into her life after years of silence, and expect her to be pleased to see him. And she hadn’t tried to hide her irritation.
‘I’m sorry, a lot’s happened since then.’
‘We’re all getting older.’
Jen inhaled deeply. ‘Mum … I found the things you sent me. In Mum’s attic. I never knew.’
Rory gave a gruff half-laugh. ‘That’d explain why I never got thank-you notes, eh?’
‘I feel awful, Dad. I had no idea.’
‘Well, it was all a long time ago.’
If he felt relieved that she now knew the truth – emotional that he had been vindicated, after all these years – he wasn’t showing it. Maybe he had got too used to the idea of them being strangers.
‘I thought you’d just forgotten about me.’
‘I kept it up for a few years, but once you got to being a teenager I gave up. I shouldn’t have, I know that now. I just assumed that, now you were older, you would have got in touch with me if you’d wanted to, and so you must have decided you didn’t want to. It was only years later that it dawned on me you might never even have known I was trying to stay in contact.’
‘I still don’t understand, though. Why didn’t you just turn up? Insist on seeing me? Take me to McDonald’s, anything? Just because Mum said you couldn’t –’
‘It’s not worth raking it all up again, love. What happened’s happened.’
‘But I’d like to hear your side of it. I’ve always thought … well, that you weren’t bothered, to be honest. Can you just tell me what went on? I feel as if … I need to know everything, that’s all. Just to understand …’
It was her own fault, she thought later. She had pushed him for an answer.