36

‘I’m going to see your father today,’ Birdie said one morning as we stood in the launderette loading the driers with Radley bedding. It was an indication of her thorough assimilation into the household that she was now a full part of the chore rota. I was slightly taken aback by her news. Birdie had been dropping hints in that direction for some time, and I had vaguely envisaged arranging a meeting, but had done nothing about it. I hadn’t even broached the subject with father. I suppose I was nervous on his behalf in case they didn’t hit it off or, as was more likely to be the case, had nothing to say to each other. But there must have been an element of jealousy, too, because my protective feelings towards Birdie started to diminish almost from the moment she said she was going to see him. I felt outmanoeuvred.

‘How did you arrange that?’ Without me, I asked.

‘I wrote him a note, and he wrote back and told me to ring at a certain time, and we talked on the phone for a bit and he said he’d meet me in the Central Library this afternoon.’

Typical father. Only he could arrange such a potentially hazardous reunion in a library, where it would be impossible to talk comfortably. Birdie must have read my mind as she went on, ‘We’re only meeting there, because it’s somewhere we both know. We’ll find a café or something. He obviously couldn’t come to my house, and he said his wasn’t fit for visitors.’

‘You’ll recognise him because he looks like us,’ I said. ‘And he’ll be wearing a tweed hat, whatever the weather.’

I had half a mind to skulk around the library steps and watch this bizarre encounter, but didn’t of course. What was particularly galling was that all my information about the occasion would have to come from Birdie. I didn’t feel able to call father and casually ask how things had gone. He was hopeless at recounting detail anyway; all I would get would be monosyllables.

Instead Rad and I paid a visit to Auntie Mim in hospital. Mr Radley, who to my surprise went to see her every day, had warned us that she wouldn’t be looking well. She had been refusing food and was now being fed through a tube which she kept trying to yank out. ‘It’ll take her back to her youth,’ said Mr Radley. ‘She used to be a suffragette.’

We bought some flowers in the foyer shop and I picked up a copy of Country Living. It was what mother always took to people in hospital, with the idea that pictures of beautiful furniture and landscaped gardens might transport them from their gloomy surroundings. Or perhaps that envy might be a spur to recovery, I don’t know.

‘We can’t even take her grapes,’ said Rad.

We made our way through the labyrinthine corridors, our shoes squeaking on the vinyl. In Feltham ward where we had expected to find her the bed was empty and stripped. We exchanged a look of alarm before approaching the desk, behind which a nurse was sitting, filling in a time-sheet.

‘She’s been moved to Fairfax 2,’ she said, jerking her Biro in the direction we had just come from. Another half-mile of corridors took us out of the modern block through a covered walkway into the Old Buildings which had been condemned to demolition and reprieved several times. The floors dipped up and down like a switchback, doors were no more than thick polythene flaps, dusty pipes swarmed over the walls like vines, and the whole place had such an air of dilapidation and neglect that the prospect of successful recuperation there seemed remote.

Fairfax 2 was a female geriatric ward with six beds. Rad nodded at the nurse on duty, and twitched the bunch of flowers to indicate that we were visitors. ‘There she is,’ he said, approaching a bed in which a tiny, shrunken old woman was sitting propped up, asleep, mouth open. I noticed a basket of fruit on the bedside cabinet, and an open packet of biscuits.

‘I don’t think it is her,’ I said.

‘Isn’t it?’

We peered at the occupants of the other beds. In hospital night-gowns, with no make-up, white, once-permed hair now limp and straight, and papery skin sagging from cheekbone to jaw, they all looked the same. Any or none of them could have been Auntie Mim. We retreated to the desk, unnerved.

‘We’re looking for Mrs Smith,’ said Rad.

The nurse showed us to a smaller side ward with only three beds. Our relief at recognising Auntie Mim at last was somewhat tempered by dismay at her surroundings and condition. Even basic standards of cleanliness and hygiene seemed to have been abandoned: there were balls of dust and fluff and dried drops of God knows what on the floor. The windows were streaked with smears, and some of the curtains had great frayed rents in them. On Auntie Mim’s chair was a pile of dirty tissues, and a soiled bedpan had been left on the trolley at the foot of her bed. The patient herself looked extremely poorly. There was a tube up her nose, taped to her top lip, and a drip in her hand, which was bruised from wrist to knuckles. From beneath the bedclothes another tube emerged, leading to a plastic bag which was half full of clear, reddish liquid. My stomach heaved, and I buried my head in the glossy, scented pages of Country Living. Box hedges, yellow wallpaper, Toiles de Jouy, I turned the pages feverishly, Gieves & Hawkes, William Morris, Sissinghurst, quilts, that’s better.

‘She’s asleep,’ said Rad helpfully. ‘We’d better hang about for a bit to see if she wakes up. Are you any good at flower arranging?’ he asked, handing me the carnations. On the bedside cabinet was a slim vase containing a wilting posy of bluebells and daisy marigolds and other varieties of flower to be found in the front gardens of the houses adjoining the hospital: a gift from Mr Radley. I removed them and thrust our own offering into the murky water. We had obviously been sold a rogue bunch as most of them had broken stems and flopped down over the edge of the vase, leaving the remaining few standing up like fence posts.

‘Very nice,’ said Rad.

We hovered around the bed for a quarter of an hour or so before giving up. I sensed that Rad was as relieved as I was that she hadn’t woken while we were there. The only sounds in the room were faint snores and the scratch of a pen as the nurse laboured at her paperwork. And somewhere in the distance the hum of a floor polisher.

‘Do you think they ever go round and check who’s still alive?’ I said.

As we were leaving the woman in the opposite bed, who like all the other patients we had seen had been apparently comatose, started to groan as if in agony. The nurse glanced up briefly then carried on writing. On the way out Rad deposited the used bedpan on the desk and was rewarded with a cold stare and a bitten-off ‘thank you’.

‘We’ll come back another day,’ Rad said to me without much enthusiasm when at last we stepped through the automatic doors and breathed fresh air.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, colluding.

‘How did you get on then?’ I asked Birdie that evening.

‘Good. We recognised each other straight away. I’d have known him even if you hadn’t told me about the hat.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘Oh, you know, he asked me what I’m studying and what I want to do at university. We didn’t talk about the past at all. He didn’t even really acknowledge that he’s my dad: it was a bit like meeting some long-lost godfather. At one point he said he was really pleased to have met me at last and that he was glad I’d turned out so well. But I could tell it was going to get emotional, so I headed him off. He asked how Mum was and I just said, “Fine”, and he said, “Good, good”, and that was the end of that subject.’

‘So what else did you talk about?’

‘Books mostly. He wanted to know what I was reading and I said Virginia Woolf and he pulled a face and we had a bit of a dispute about whether she was a genius and then he told me to read Gibbon. Whoever he is.’

‘That’s his answer to everything,’ I said.

‘I just can’t work out how he and my mum ever got together. They’re so different. I mean he’s so sweet and old-fashioned.’ I was about to agree – indeed to chip in with a few anecdotes of my own – when she added, ‘like you.’

‘Do you think you’ll see him again?’ I said as if we were picking over last night’s date. I found myself unwilling to examine my feeling of relief when she said, ‘We didn’t arrange anything. I’m still wondering how or whether to tell Mum. She’ll find out sooner or later; I’m bound to let it slip.’

‘Will she mind?’

‘I’m not sure. She won’t like being deceived.’

‘I know the feeling,’ I said.

As a quid pro quo I told her about our afternoon in the hospital. She grew quite pale. ‘I’m not going to get old,’ she said, shuddering. ‘I’m just not.’