IT was time to go home.
Suddenly I was in a hurry – an almost unendurable hurry to get there. But I made myself walk. Buses kept passing that would take me to the door, but I let them go. I must go slowly. I had to think, and be ready. I’d already made enough mistakes to be getting on with.
In my pocket was the note Father had written me soon after I had gone to live in the L-shaped room. It still carried the myriad creases I’d inflicted on it in my self-pitying hurt because Father hadn’t crawled all the way to Fulham on his stomach to fetch me home. When I reached the Bridge – the boundary of home territory – I stopped near the middle and read the note again.
Dear Jane,
As you can imagine I find this letter hard to write. We haven’t been very close these last years, which may have been my fault, I suppose, though I don’t see where I went wrong …
I looked out across the river. It was such a familiar view, the green towpath on one side, the old houses and angular blatant factories on the other. Above my head, gulls wheeled about the grey graceful spires. A bus rumbled across behind me, making the Bridge jog gently. I closed my eyes, and the sounds and smells – the rank mud, the yeast from the brewery – were more familiar still, carrying me back into my childhood. It took no effort of memory to shrink till my head was below the level of the rail, my hand firmly embedded in Father’s. He was telling me a story – my favourite story, the one about the brass plate.
In his slow, serious voice he would read out, from the unpolished plate screwed to the wooden rail, the brief memorial to the brave South African lieutenant who had dived ‘from this spot’ into the Thames to save a woman’s life. ‘From this very spot?’ I would always ask, awed by the pinpointed locale of tragedy. ‘Yes,’ Father answered gravely. ‘Here he stood, and saw the woman float out from under the Bridge, shouting for help, and without even stopping to take off his coat he dived straight in.’ For years I thought Father had been there at the time, so convincingly did he invent details in response to my importuning. ‘He couldn’t swim very well himself, but he managed to get the woman to the bank, and then he died.’
‘But why? Why did he die?’ I remembered feeling almost frantic with anger that God should have let him die and spoil the story.
Father never hid the facts of life or death from me. ‘Perhaps he’d swallowed a lot of water, or perhaps he had a weak heart. Anyway, I don’t suppose he minded dying,’ he would add to comfort me. ‘After all, not many people get a chance to save a life and be remembered for ever.’
My eyes were still closed and I found my hand clenching hard on itself, as it used to grip Father’s, happy because it was the mythical lieutenant who had died and not anyone I really loved. The pattern of feeling came back to me so clearly, it was impossible not to remember at the same time how much I’d loved Father in those days – completely and trustingly and without complications.
I tried to remember when I first began to feel he was failing me – or I him, because now I was no longer sure which was at the bottom of my resentment. It must have been when I left school without matriculating. I wanted to be an actress, and anyway I was bad at almost everything at school and so hated it. Several of my friends wanted to leave early too, and aggrievedly compared notes about their parents’ reactions – which were all along the lines of how much we would regret not getting a proper education. I boasted that my father was different; he would understand that I was an artist and that to stay on at school would be a fruitless waste of time. But when I confidently put this theory to the test, I got a terrible disappointment. Father refused to understand. His reaction was the same as all the other parents’. I was ashamed and angry, and from then on nothing went right. Everything I wanted to do, he seemed to disapprove of. Every time he proved to have been right, I resented him more. Any time he proved wrong, I scored a point for myself.
So whose fault was it? Who started the race, who kept it going? I glanced at the note again.
‘I’ve always done my best …’ That had sounded so self-pitying when I had first read it. Now it seemed no more than the simple truth. ‘I think any parent would have felt as I did, being told a thing like that without any preparation. You almost seemed to enjoy telling me …’
I had enjoyed it. It had been another point scored, the decisive victory. It had proved hollow immediately, but at the moment of telling, I’d relished it. It had been war between us for so long. Or perhaps I’d been fighting alone …
Was it possible that I had formed a disillusioned mental picture of Father and fed it with misinterpretations of everything he did and said from that time on? Once I’d got it into my head that I was a disappointment to him, that he disliked, patronized, begrudged me … might not everything that happened tend to feed that belief? Had I, perhaps, wanted to feel ill-used, misunderstood? I read the last part of the letter.
‘I am still your Father and I don’t enjoy thinking about you alone somewhere. Your home is here and if you want to come back to it, you should feel free to. It’s not right for you to be among strangers. You are still my responsibility …’
It was difficult to understand why I’d been unable to see anything in this but frozen patronage and a loveless charity. Now I could see nothing but an undemonstrative man struggling to pull his world together, with pride and prejudice on one side and love on the other. Before, I’d always imagined he saw me as the murderer of my mother. Now I realized that never, in reality, had he indicated that he felt this. Wasn’t it more likely that he regarded me as something saved from a disaster, all the more to be cherished and perfected because I was all he had left?
I left the plate and walked on across the Bridge. I was getting tired now; I knew I should get on a bus, but it wasn’t far to go. I walked on, past the shops, past houses and pubs, past a montage of faces and gardens and windows and dogs, most of which I recognized remotely, like recollected bits of dreams. At last I came to the house, the house I’d been born in, as solid and brown and honest as ever, with its windows and front door so symmetrical and square-set, still making a face – a shocked, comically reproachful face – which I made back at it from force of old habit. ‘Don’t you say “Oh!” to me!’
The front garden was, as always, tidy and well-dug; the drive was clear of bus-tickets and weeds. Only in the windows were there signs of neglect. The white net curtains were yellow, their ruffles limp. They gave the eyes of the house a tired, morning-after look.
My mind winced from the prospect of this difficult meeting; but as soon as I came through the gate I couldn’t have turned back. It was like being passed from hand to clutching hand between two lines of people. As I climbed the steps heavily I found the right key ready in my hand.
But I didn’t have to use it. The door was opened from inside and my father stood in front of me. He seemed very tall because he was two steps up from me, and his face, in the shadow of the doorway, looked only half familiar and much, much older than I remembered. He was not dressed for the office and for the first time it struck me that I shouldn’t have expected to find him at home on a Thursday morning.
‘Jane,’ he said without surprise.
‘Hallo, Father, aren’t you at the office?’ I could hardly speak, I found. The fatuous words barely seemed audible over the beating of my heart.
‘I stayed at home, hoping you’d come,’ he explained simply.
He stepped back and I came into the hall. It was dim in there after the hard bright sunlight; dust-motes moved lazily in the ray from the fan-light. Everything had that only half-recognizable look. Nothing was actually changed, but there were no flowers; the mirrors had films over them, the carpet looked grubby and faded.
‘Place needs doing,’ said my father vaguely, seeing me glance round. ‘Come into the garden, I haven’t let that go.’
He had always been a good gardener, loving the dullest chores and often, I remembered, boring me over meals with details of manures and blackfly and suckers on the lilac. Now, after so long without a garden, I felt a rush of nostalgia as Father led the way down the steps at the back and I saw the clusters of narcissi and tulips growing straight out of the grass under the blossoming pear, and the clumps of new green on the cut-back perennials, standing out sturdily against the well-turned earth. As we walked along the path I picked a sprig of baby mint and rubbed it in my fingers to breathe the soft spicy smell of coming Summer. As I straightened again, with difficulty, I saw Father look quickly away.
‘I thought that late frost would be the finish of the bulbs,’ he said, ‘but it just kept them back a bit. Look at those tulips. Not a curled leaf among the lot. Same with the hyacinths.’
‘They’re lovely.’ I bent again to smell the bushy spikes, but Father stopped me by stooping quickly and snapping one off to give me.
‘Oh, don’t pick it! It seems so sad –’
‘We’ll put it in a glass of water. House needs some flowers.’
We wandered round and he told me what he’d been planting and transplanting. Before long he said, ‘Let’s sit down, you look tired.’ There were two canvas chairs arranged under the trees. ‘It’s not too cold for you?’
‘No, it’s fine.’
We sat down. I couldn’t get over him not being at the office. It seemed unnatural, somehow.
‘It’s good to see you,’ he said.
‘You, too.’ We smiled at each other. ‘Why did you come yesterday?’
‘Never mind that just for the present. Are you well? You look very well, I must say. Nice little frocks they make now.’ He reached out to touch the material of my smock and I noticed his hand shook. He saw me looking at it and met my eyes with a wry smile.
‘Getting to be an old man.’
I watched him covertly while we made fumbling conversation. The drinking had left its mark on him. Not just the shaking hands but in his eyes and under them and in the colour of his skin. I wondered whether to broach the subject but it seemed an impertinence. Evidently he felt the same about the change in my appearance, and the cause of it. The baby was not mentioned.
‘Would you like some lunch?’ he asked at last. ‘It’s well after two. You must be hungry.’
‘No, not terribly. What about you?’
‘I could do with a bite of something. You stay out here in the fresh air and I’ll bring you a snack.’
‘No, let me come and help.’
We went back into the house. Our mutual courtesy and restraint seemed quite natural inasmuch that we were strangers to each other. But there were so many important things to be talked about that I felt we couldn’t go on like this. Only I didn’t know how to begin.
‘Funny sort of house you’re living in,’ he said suddenly while I was laying a tray.
‘But you didn’t see my room. That’s quite different from the rest.’
‘Don’t like to think of you being in a house like that. That coloured fellow –’
‘Say coloureds don’t smell different from us. That one did. Smelt like a polecat.’
‘Oh, come now, Father,’ I said, not able to help laughing. ‘Polecats smell vile. John doesn’t smell at all like one.’
‘Awful old witch of a landlady, too. Surprised you haven’t had trouble with her.’
‘I have, now and then.’
‘Thought as much.’ He was bent over the stove, painstakingly stirring bits of parsley into a warming saucepan of tinned soup. ‘You say your room’s all right – can’t be very big, though. Not big enough for more than one person.’ It was his first even indirect reference to the baby.
‘No.’
He straightened up and looked at me with his tired eyes, yellow like the curtains in the front windows, the soup-spoon still in his hand. ‘Better come home, hadn’t you?’ he asked. The words hung sparkling in the air.
‘You wouldn’t mind?’
‘I want you to.’
‘You don’t owe me anything, Father. On the contrary –’
‘Who said anything about owing?’
‘Then why?’
‘The question is, why I ever wanted you to leave. It’s a question I find it more and more difficult to answer.’ I watched the stooping figure bend over the stove again. He was, I noticed now, thinner than before.
‘Have you been eating properly?’ I asked, sharply, as if he were my child instead of the other way round.
‘Oh yes …’ he said in the vague way that was quite new with him. I felt that if I asked him when his last meal had been, he wouldn’t be able to remember.
‘You don’t look awfully well,’ I ventured.
‘I’ve been drinking too much,’ he said with an indifference that shocked me more than the words. ‘It doesn’t do one any good.’
‘Then why do it?’
‘Because one keeps hoping it will do one good, I suppose,’ he said with a shrug. ‘This is ready now.’ He poured the soup carefully into a tureen.
‘It smells good,’ I said automatically.
We carried the food out into the garden. Outdoors my father straightened his body and his manner and speech became more positive and vigorous.
‘The house gets you down a bit, doesn’t it?’ I suggested, shooting in the dark.
‘I can’t seem to get around to cleaning it,’ he said apologetically. ‘It does depress me. Specially at night.’
‘I’ll serve,’ I said, reaching for the soup ladle.
‘No, please. Let me. You sit still and rest.’
I watched him ladling out the soup into the first soup plate without noticing that it was dusty from months of sitting unused on a shelf, and it came to me very clearly that there was nothing wrong with my father except being alone. He had been alone, I realized, not just since I left, but for as long as I’d known him, as I would be, even after my baby was born. Everyone who is without a mate is basically alone. It’s a special and very destructive form of loneliness.
‘Perhaps you don’t want to come back,’ he suggested calmly as he passed me my soup. ‘If so, I shall quite understand. Independence is a very important thing.’
We drank our soup. Father held his plate high so that the shaky journey of the spoon between it and his lips would be as short as possible. His eyes travelled round the garden as someone might cling to a good-luck charm during a moment of crisis.
‘I had thought of moving into a larger room,’ I said, keeping my voice steady and matter-of-fact. ‘Of course, there are difficulties.’
Father rested his plate on his knee and stared at the tulips. ‘Financial?’
‘Not at the moment, though I suppose before long –’
‘No need for those.’
‘I couldn’t, Father.’
‘Couldn’t what?’
‘Take money from –’
‘Me? No. I see that. I’ve been a little grudging in the past, I know. Spoiled my chances of helping that way for the moment. No, it would be from – another source.’
‘What do you mean?’
My father put his soup plate back on the tray slowly.
‘You haven’t finished your soup,’ I said.
‘You ought to eat it, you’re looking thin.’
He suddenly turned and looked at me. His hand came and covered mine, pressing hard so that I shouldn’t feel the trembling, but I could feel it. He smiled at me, but his eyes were full of tears.
‘I’ve got something bad to tell you.’
My mind jerked back and I heard myself saying, ‘No.’ Father kept his hand on mine and kept looking steadily at me, and after a moment I said, ‘Go on.’
‘Your Aunt Addy’s dead.’
There was only a short moment of sparkling numbness inside my head before a wave of grief engulfed me. There was no intervening stretch of shock before I could feel anything; in some part of myself I must have been expecting it. I felt as though sorrow had fists and used them to beat my heart. I sobbed with pain at the pictures that came – Addy in her funny circus hat, Addy pouring petrol on to the soggy bonfire, Addy holding her manuscript as tenderly as a child. I remembered the last phone call, how she had refused to let me come …
Father was standing beside my chair, holding me tightly. I pulled back from him and said, ‘Was she all alone?’
‘No, she was in the local hospital.’
‘But no – friends, none of us?’
‘Nobody knew. She didn’t let anyone know.’
‘The hospital – they should have told us!’
‘She wouldn’t give them any names. She must have wanted to be alone, Janie.’
I didn’t say what we both knew. Nobody wants to be alone when they’re dying, or when anything important is happening to them.
‘She’s left you everything – the cottage and all her books, and the rights to some manuscript or other.’
I sat dumbly. I had no more tears for the moment. Father sat down again, drawing his chair closer to mine, still holding my hand.
‘So you’re a bit more independent now. You could sell the cottage, or if you’d rather, you could keep it and live there, after the baby’s born.’ He said this without effort. It was easy and natural to talk about the baby now. ‘Only I don’t like to think of you being so far away – it’s a desolate spot. I’d rather you were near me at first. If you could stand it.’ He took back the handkerchief he had lent me and wiped his own eyes. ‘I’m being entirely selfish about this.’
‘If I come home, it’ll be purely selfish on my side, too.’
Our hands tightened. The two lies cancelled each other out.