The Terrapin Club was finally run to earth in the northernmost quadrant of Covent Garden, stuck between a unisex hairdresser and a shop that sold filing cabinets. Even then there was a difficulty, as the staircases ran both up and down, with only a Post-it-note-sized notice stamped TERRAPIN CLUB: MEMBERS ONLY to show the way. In the dining room a waiter in a white coat stood polishing a tray of tumblers, and a radio played Mantovani’s ‘The Song from the Moulin Rouge’. Mr Brancaster sat at the far end, fat white hand curved solicitously around a wineglass. When he saw Patrick he raised his forefinger up to the level of his temple and gave a mock-salute.

‘You’re three minutes late,’ he said, ‘so I took the liberty of ordering a drink.’ Mr Brancaster was a stickler for seemly cliché. He was the kind of man who partook of spirituous refreshment and availed himself of public transport. At some point in the past he had enjoyed marital relations, and Patrick was there to prove it.

‘Meeting with a client,’ Patrick told him, stowing his briefcase beneath the table. ‘Couldn’t get away.’

‘It matters not,’ Mr Brancaster said, loftily. He had never taken any interest in his children’s jobs. Chartered accountancy; estate management; rat-catching: it was all the same to him. Snapping his fingers, with a noise that broke the room’s silence as effectively as a dropped brick or a banshee’s wail, he exclaimed: ‘Waiter! Garçon! Jugend! Another glass of the wine that maketh glad the heart of man, if you please.’

It seemed that the waiter was used to Mr Brancaster’s foibles. He brought a glass of wine on a brass salver, so tiny that it might have been an ashtray, and then went back to burnishing his tumblers. There was still no one else in the room.

‘Who are the Terrapins?’ Patrick asked, taking a sip of the wine and regretting the partners’ dining room in Eastcheap. He had a vision of a shoal of miniature tortoises quietly manoeuvring their way up the rickety staircase. ‘Do they ever show themselves?’

‘Of course they show themselves,’ Mr Brancaster said. He was quiet for a moment and then went on: ‘The chairman of the wine committee is a Cinq Port baron.’

They had been having these birthday lunches for a dozen years: in carvery restaurants in the shadow of Holborn Viaduct; in pasta joints on the south side of Oxford Street; and now in the Terrapin Club. It was hard to know if this was a step up, or a retreat.

‘You’re looking well,’ Patrick said. It was a quarter past one. He would stay until 2.30, but no later.

‘I am well. My leech, never yet suspected of being a humbug, says he has never seen a fitter man of seventy-nine.’ As well as seemly cliché, Mr Brancaster liked professional archaisms. He was probably the last man in England to talk about barristers-at-law and water-bailiffs. Sappy, damson-faced and vigorous, white hair combed back from his forehead, blue-blazered and pink-shirted, he looked like a Butlin’s redcoat or the kind of old-fashioned comedian who strode up and down a line of chorus girls singing ‘Dapper Dan was a very handy man’.

‘And how’s Marjorie?’

Marjorie, as the younger generation of Brancasters never failed to remind each other, was dangerous territory. Without Marjorie there would have been no birthday lunches on neutral ground, and no Mrs Brancaster, still furious at her desertion, mouldering in the divorcée’s bungalow at Firle. But Mr Brancaster took this in his stride.

‘She keeps me young,’ he said, with what to anyone else might have been a glimmer of irony, but which Patrick knew to be absolute seriousness.

There were three or four other Terrapins in the dining room by now: innocuous-looking men in sober suits, who peered respectfully at the wine list and the framed photograph of the Duke of Windsor drinking a cocktail and looking as if he had just stepped in something nasty. A door in the corner opened and shut suddenly and the smell it released – mingled scents of cabbage, gravy and burnt sugar – was so like Patrick’s school canteen that he raised his head from the table and sniffed at it. Mr Brancaster, meanwhile, had summoned the waiter again (‘Waiter! Garçon! Jugend!’) and was putting on a tremendous performance – a really first-class show, even for him – about the lunch menu. Like the stink of the cabbage, this, too, brought back memories: of Mr Brancaster at school open days; at football matches; in saloon bars and on petrol station forecourts. No one, Patrick thought, had ever made such an exhibition of himself or failed to notice that an exhibition was being made.

‘It’s a pity the two of you don’t come and see us more often,’ he said, when the waiter had been sent scurrying away. ‘Marjorie’s often said so.’

But not even kind, tolerant Elaine could be persuaded to visit the house in Pinner where Mr Brancaster sat in state watching antiques programmes on the television more than once a year. ‘It’s not for me to complain,’ she had once said, ‘but people who go around deliberately ruining other people’s lives ought to be called to account every now and again.’

‘It’s a long way on a Sunday afternoon,’ he found himself saying, ‘and besides, the children have their own lives to lead these days.’ That was another effect that time spent in Mr Brancaster’s company had on you: he encouraged you to spout the same evasive language as himself. In fact there was no earthly reason why Patrick’s children could not have been forced to visit their grandfather on Sunday afternoons, other than their not liking him. For Mr Brancaster was an insensitive grandparent, who made bracing remarks about exam results, twitted the boys about non-existent girlfriends and, worse, could not see the damage he was doing. Looking at his father as he sat comfortably in his chair, the white hair so immaculately angled over his scalp that it might have been made of spun sugar – Marjorie was twenty years his junior – Patrick wondered, not for the first time, what he had wanted out of life. To be a success? Well, that depended on how you defined success. To be loved? Well, a fair number of people had, at one time or another, loved, admired, or at any rate tolerated him during the course of that seventy-nine years. No, he decided, what Mr Brancaster had really wanted to do, and showed every sign of continuing to want to do, was to impress his personality on the world around him.

‘I hope it’s not one of those days where the chef pretends he’s feeling under the weather,’ Mr Brancaster said, a bit too loudly for comfort. ‘I once had to go into the kitchen and grill the sardines myself.’

They were never any good, these birthday lunches, whether at the Holborn carveries, the Soho pasta joints or anywhere else. They were never any good because their effect was to focus attention on the past: a past in which Mr Brancaster, though conspicuous, would always be found wanting. Had he ever, Patrick wondered, made an original remark? Had he ever got beyond that fervently held first principle of pleasing yourself? And this was to ignore the spectre of Marjorie, which hung over everything the younger Brancasters had done, said, or plotted, in the past ten years like a giant bat. ‘It’s very hard,’ Mrs Brancaster had said, rather humbly and matter-of-factly, when the fact of Marjorie’s existence had first been drawn to her attention. There was no getting away from this, none. It was hard. And Mr Brancaster had made it harder still. It was not, Patrick thought, that you could excuse the things he did – had done – would continue to do – on grounds of increasing age. After all, you accepted that your parents’ behaviour would become more stylised as they grew older. Even his mother had adopted a high-pitched little-girl-lost voice and was keener than ever to talk about some quasi-aristocratic relatives whom they barely knew. It was just that his father’s behaviour – whether young, middle aged, or grandly decaying – had always been exactly the same.

‘Cyril! Kenneth! Derek!’ Mr Brancaster was calling out greetings to the other Terrapins, who stirred uncomfortably in the breeze of his salutations, like anguished dreamers. There was something terrifying about his bonhomie, Patrick thought, terrifying and somehow meaningless.

‘Happy birthday, dad,’ he said, remembering why he was there, still guilty despite all the evidence piled up in his favour.

‘Better than some,’ Mr Brancaster said. ‘Do you know there was a time in the RAF when they tried to serve me up with a plate of celery?’

The food began to arrive and they ate it: potted shrimps, which Mr Brancaster gnashed into fragments, like a lawnmower tearing up twigs; some bread rolls, which he tweaked out of their basket with his finger-ends and laid, one by one, on his plate like an oysterman displaying his catch. And then something odd happened. Caught in the wash of Mr Brancaster’s personality, and either anxious either to conciliate it or simply make some half-ironic comment, the waiter set down the next course – an outsize chunk of cod garnished with mange-tout – with what, in the context of the Terrapin Club, its dingy backdrops and dust-strewn carpet, amounted to a flourish. Something in the gesture struck home at Mr Brancaster. He said, suddenly and unselfconsciously:

‘This reminds me of the fish.’

‘Which fish?’ Patrick asked.

‘The fish. You, of all people, ought to remember the fish.’

Mr Brancaster had always been a high-grade exponent of private codes, crosswords solved by clues that only he had access to. This must be another one of them.

‘I remember all kinds of fish,’ Patrick said, a bit irritably. It was ten to two now: soon he would be gone.

‘No, the fish we caught that time at Happisburgh. On the beach. When the sea had gone out. And then we took it home and your mother cooked it.’

And, curiously enough, against all expectation, he did remember. Slowly, like a priceless carpet, the scene rolled out to fill his head. Long leagues of unmarked sand. The sea a distant, blue-white line. A commotion in a rock-pool, which turned out to be not, as they first thought, a cat but a three-pound cod left stranded by the departing tide. His father expertly despatching it with a rock-end to the head. He would have been seven, he supposed.

‘I do remember it,’ he said.

‘I knew you would,’ Mr Brancaster said. Vindicated, he grew quieter, less self-assertive. It would have been possible, had Patrick thought any of these things desirable, to borrow money from him, tell him a few home truths, even pass on a message from his wife. Outside the window the noise of Covent Garden boiled up from the street. A kind of calm settled on the proceedings. ‘All a long time ago,’ Mr Brancaster said, like a headmaster deciding for once to lay the imposition book aside. ‘Didn’t your mother say – didn’t she say it was the maddest thing I’d done in a long while?’

‘I expect she did,’ Patrick said. His mother, he remembered, had made the best of things, put her supper-plans aside and boiled up the cod in pint of milk.

‘All a long time ago,’ Mr Brancaster repeated, upping the level of his voice to a resonant, head-hunter’s chant.

After a while more food came, and Mr Brancaster attacked it with the same attritional fury. Patrick sat silent in his chair, his own meal untouched, oblivious to the Terrapins and their modest chatter, lost in this world of rolling sand, his father’s taut, eager, face, that blissful anaesthetic of endless skies, yachts dancing in the distance, time, for once, stood still, waiting for him to do whatever he wanted with it, and make it whole.

 

—2011