The evening sun was still hovering at the tops of the trees when Claire stepped into the shady garden at the back of St Elwin’s nursing home. Here and there mottled patches of sunlight spattered the grass, growing longer with every passing minute. She searched the garden and spotted her father sitting on one of the benches at far end of the lawn, one of the last places enjoying full sun.
She waited for the familiar feeling to come, that tightening of her chest, the sense of growing doom, but all she could feel was the breeze on the bare skin of her arms and the sound of bees dancing through the waving lavender in complex patterns, like little girls round a maypole. Hear heart rate was steady, her breathing even. She walked calmly across the grass to where he was sitting.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘They told me you’d be out here.’
The shock on his face would have been funny if the whole situation hadn’t been so horribly sad. ‘Wh—why …?’ He seemed to recover himself a little. The surprise hardened into suspicion. ‘You came back.’
‘Yes,’ Claire said, sitting down on the far end of the bench. ‘I did.’
She saw the question in his eyes, the one he really wanted to ask, but his lips remained a grim slit. Fine, she thought to herself. Be awkward. I don’t care any more.
‘The nurse told me you had bypass surgery.’
He glanced towards the building, scowling. ‘They shouldn’t have told you anything.’
‘I’m family,’ Claire said simply, ‘and I asked. You didn’t leave any instructions that relatives shouldn’t be told.’
She saw anger and discomfort in his eyes and guessed the reason: he hadn’t told the nursing home that, because he hadn’t expected anyone to ask.
‘When are you going to go home? They said you came here to recuperate because there wasn’t anyone to stay with you.’
He glared at her. ‘You volunteering?’
‘No.’ She looked away at the bright flowers in the well-tended borders. ‘Where do you live?’
As the words left her mouth, she thought what a strange question it was to ask one’s own father. She turned back to find him studying her. His eyes narrowed.
‘Why do you want to know?’
She was tempted to laugh. Had he always been this way? So paranoid? So untrusting? She hadn’t seen that about him as a child, but she took a few moments to sift back through her memories and realised there’d been a sense of it then too; she’d been too scared of him to see it.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Tell me or don’t tell me. I thought that’s what people did when they were trying to get to know each other. Is there anything you want to know about me?’
He thought for a few seconds. She could tell he still thought he was walking into an ambush, but he asked the question anyway. ‘You were always a sharp little thing … What do you do? For a living?’
‘I’m a travel agent. I used to work in advertising, but I run my own business now.’
‘Why that?’
She gave a little one-shouldered shrug. ‘For a long time I wasn’t sure. I’d always wanted to travel. But recently I’ve been thinking more about it, trying to look back and see where it all started. I think it’s because I used to sit in my room at night with my atlas that had all the pictures in and dream of where I could escape to when I was old enough to leave home. I suppose I have you to thank for that.’
Not an easy thing to say. Not an easy thing to hear, either. But it was the truth. She was tired of dancing around with him, of trying to find the right thing to say to please him. It might not be pretty, but it was clean and simple. Liberating.
For some reason, he seemed to respond to that better than if she’d been nice to him. He stopped looking at her as if she was about to pull out a knife and stab him. He stared away at a clump of pampas grass in the centre of the garden. ‘Lewisham.’
Claire frowned. ‘Pardon?’
‘You heard. It’s where I live now.’
She nodded. ‘I live in Highbury. In Gran’s flat.’
At the mention of his mother, the shutters came down again. His jaw tensed and his nostrils flared slightly, but Claire quickly realised it wasn’t her he was angry with. He wasn’t even upset that his mother had left her granddaughter the flat that should have been his. He was angry with himself.
Of course he was. In her father’s world, everything was about him.
It was odd. She’d never been able to read anything but displeasure from him as a child, but now, as she stepped back from her own emotions and viewed him objectively, watched his body language, she found it surprisingly easy to tell what was going on inside his head. Guilt. Frustration. Rage. Self-pity. They were all there, but well hidden so only the tiniest ripples showed on the surface.
‘If you want, I’ll come and visit you again,’ she told him. ‘But if you don’t want, I’ll leave and you won’t have to see me again.’
He grunted, not giving an answer one way or the other.
‘It was you who asked to see me in the first place. You must have had some reason for that.’ Claire watched him carefully as she said this. ‘Or was it really just because you wanted to satisfy your curiosity?’
He glanced at her and looked away. Claire waited. She realised with a jolt that she could feel the struggle that was going on inside him, the war between the bit of him that wanted to reach out to her and the bit that wanted to push her away, as he always had done. The very air around them seemed to pulse with it.
He did care, just as Maggs had said. He just refused to show it.
Because he was afraid.
That didn’t make sense to her; he’d always seemed this towering presence in her mind, one that had wielded terror instead of being cowed by it, but as she thought about it more she realised it was the only thing that did make sense – the frightened man made others fear him, so he didn’t feel so weak and vulnerable himself.
It might have kept him safe, but it hadn’t made him very happy. And now he was a lonely old man who’d had to come to a nursing home after major surgery because he’d driven everyone who truly cared about him away.
He still hadn’t answered, so she stood up. ‘It’s up to you.’
She realised there was one last thing she needed to know, especially if this was going to be the last time she saw him. That, as she had told him, would be up to him, but she had to take this chance while it was presented to her.
‘Why did you wait all these years before contacting me? Why didn’t you get in touch when Mum died? Or when Gran died?’
He shook his head. The anger was back, but also the guilt, so heavy she thought she saw his shoulders bow under it. He kept staring at that damn pampas grass as he spoke, and his voice took on a gravelly tone. ‘I knew I was no good for them – for Cathy or my mother. It was easier not to think about them, not to think about you. I just …’ he turned an looked at her ‘… put you all out of my mind.’
That’s when Claire’s anger flared. It broke away from her like a horse about to bolt. She drew in a breath to answer him, to tell him what the hell did he think of by pretending she didn’t exist, but something stopped her.
Wasn’t that what she’d done too? Father was horrible, so bury him away, never think about him? Had she learned this survival mechanism from him? She kept trying not to be like him and, in doing so, she only seemed to conform even more tightly to his pattern. And she didn’t want to end up like this – a broken person beneath an iron husk.
The only way to slip from his grip would be to take back control, the control she’d never had and he’d always guarded so tightly, and she could think of only one way to do that, only one way to stop herself nursing her hurt and anger, like he had, and using it as armour against an unfair world.
‘Dad?’
He looked round at her, surprised as she was at the word that had just come from her lips.
She had to forgive him, as unfair and counterintuitive as that seemed. It was the only way she’d be able to let go. Of the hurt, of the anger, of the wilful blindness. She had to do it for herself, not for him.
But she wasn’t going to beg. From now on they’d meet as equals or not at all.
‘I need to know. I’ll come and visit again if you want me to, but you have to tell me you want me to.’
He stared up at her, and somehow she glimpsed a younger man inside that shell, a man who was angry and hurt and afraid. Still he didn’t speak.
She pulled a business card from her bag and handed it to him. ‘These are my contact details. If you change your mind, use them.’
She took one last look at him and then she turned and walked back across the lawn and into the house, knowing that it was probably the last time she’d ever see him.