When Bethany went home to Putney she found her father weeping and alone.
‘I knew there was something wrong,’ she said. ‘I knew I wasn’t lying. What’s the matter?’ Patsy had gone, torn the flowers from her greying hair, been born again as a Christian, and given up her life of sin, said her Dad. Now Patsy was living in an hotel for born-againers, going from door to door, converting as she went.
‘But, Daddy, it wasn’t sin,’ said Bethany. Empty coffee cups stood around, and biscuit crumbs, and sugar bowls with mice droppings in them, and piles of stained sheets on the floor. He needed her. Upstairs there was the sound of revelry. ‘It was never sin. Sometimes I’d wish I’d been brought up differently, sometimes I thought that you didn’t know what you were doing, the pair of you. Sometimes I was so scared – you and Mum never knew quite what was going on, you thought what they did was just ordinary sex, but sometimes it wasn’t, you have no idea. I tried to be kind, I tried to be loving, I tried to bring happiness into other people’s lives, especially the disabled, but, Dad, they sometimes sure as hell weren’t bringing happiness into mine.’
‘Don’t you start,’ said Dad. ‘I’ve had a bellyful. We had good times, didn’t we? Don’t take that away from me along with everything else. Your mum will be round here before long, trying to make me believe in Jesus Christ, and I can’t, I just can’t. Remember how he cursed the fig tree?’
‘Well, I can’t either,’ said Bethany, sadly. ‘I can’t believe. We went to the theatre too often. You made me read too many books.’
‘I suppose you hold that against me too,’ he said.
‘Of course I don’t,’ said Bethany. ‘Let me help you get this place cleaned up before Mum comes back. She’ll just die if she sees it like this.’
‘You will stay, won’t you?’ said Dad. ‘This is where you belong, your proper home.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bethany. ‘I really don’t know.’
It was three o’clock.
‘Who’s upstairs?’ Bethany asked.
‘That’s another thing,’ said Dad. ‘I think I’m getting old. People don’t seem to go. Once I used to tell them, quite quietly, it was time to get dressed and go, and they went.’
‘You always were a big man,’ said Bethany.
‘I don’t register that way any more,’ said Dad. ‘It’s got worse since your mother moved out. Now I tell them to go and they don’t: or worse, they turn up and walk in and use the bedrooms without so much as a by your leave, any time of day and night, as if this was Liberty Hall, and don’t even put money in the box. I don’t know who’s up there, Bethany. You’ve got to help. I need you here.’
‘But, Dad,’ said Bethany. ‘Carl May needs me too. I’m only on leave of absence, as it were.’ And she cooked him a meal. Only omelette and beansprout salad, because of course he didn’t eat meat, but better than boiled eggs and toast, on which he lived. It was four o’clock.
‘Beauty and the Beast,’ Bethany’s father remarked, watching her clear and wash up. ‘I must say you’re looking good. Why bother with a beast? I’m proud of you. We were right about sex, weren’t we, your mother and me? We grew you proud and true.’
Bethany’s father had a cavernous, grizzled face. His thick hair had turned greyish since last she saw him. He reminded her of Father Christmas, the kind she’d been taken to in stores when little and on whose knee she most hated to sit; agony shone out from behind the joviality. You had to not notice, for fear of hurting feelings. To hurt feelings was the real sin. It was four thirty.
‘We’d better put locks on the doors,’ she said. ‘And the front door, and the back door, and get a dog.’
‘I don’t believe in locks,’ her father said. ‘Lock the door and get robbed. The only time I ever locked my car was once in an underground car park and when I got back someone had broken into it and I had to get a new door.’
She’d heard the tale a hundred times, and taken many a lesson from it. If you kept the door unlocked, as it were, you didn’t get raped. Some personal doors, alas, were on permanent lock; she sighed. Her father, for all his experience, for all his principles, was an innocent. She’d had stitches twice, and neither she nor her mother had liked to tell him. She was glad her mother was born-again. She hoped she was happy.
‘We can’t have strangers coming and going,’ Bethany said. ‘Things have got to change.’
‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘The world goes round on love and trust. I’ve always believed that. Besides, we have nothing to steal.’ He made a concession. It was his principle to make concessions, save face wherever possible. ‘But a dog, now… your mother always wanted a poodle.’
‘I’ll get you an Alsatian pup,’ she said, and ran down the market and did so once she’d cleared up the rest of the house. The bedrooms were disgusting. It was five thirty-five. She’d said she’d be back at Britnuc at five thirty. She could feel Carl thinking about her. She didn’t want to feel it. He spooked her. ‘For a young man he is young, And an old man he is grey,’ she sang as she cleaned, as much to dull the puppy’s lamentations as anything else: it had been torn too young from its mother. But where was the young man? Where were they all? They so seldom travelled First Class and she so seldom Standard Fare. They never met.
‘Don’t lose your trust, Bethany,’ her father said, petting the puppy in a way which once would have made her jealous, but which no longer did now her father was old. ‘My little girl. Don’t ever forget how to love. Keep the flag of faith flying.’
She said she’d try. Somehow there seemed no place between the two of them, Carl May and her father, where she could properly dwell. It had to be one or the other, and she didn’t like cleaning, so that settled it. It was five forty-six. She called Carl May, and said she’d be late back, but she would be back. She was on her way.