63 I’ve Got Somebody Here Who Wants to See You

Highgate, 1987

After the funeral, once the adjustable bed has been removed from the front room, the pale and flowery cards cleared from the sideboard, and Harry’s LP records, cufflinks and tiepins distributed among his grandchildren, Winnie is left living alone for the first time in her life. Her aloneness, though, is chiefly a matter of household arrangements and what other people see. What she feels is not solitude but a companionable haunting: she senses Harry’s presence in the shifting airs of the house, and hears him in floor creaks, waterpipe judders and latch rattles. Coming home with a quarter of tongue and a bread loaf, she sees him seated in the corner playing a trumpet to a stray Yorkshire terrier. In bed she is woken by him, Danny and Sonny at the back door, singing. From the kitchen window she sees him at the garden gate, joking with men on their way to the allotments. This is not his spirit, the little gypsy girl tells her, just her memories. Harry has passed over now, and if people don’t believe in Spirit, they cannot come back to see you. He will come one day, to fetch her. Until then, she must make do with her unspeaking memories.

These memories are now edited and recast by Winnie into scenes of unbroken love and contentment. Old arguments and betrayals become challenges that were overcome by their unchanging mutual devotion, all irritations are forgotten, and Harry’s knife-and-fork crockery percussion is recalled with the sighs of a lovelorn nineteen-year-old. It is as if she can now love him with the saved-up love she found unwanted when they first married, half a century of withheld words and tears now released and overwhelming her. Of all Winnie’s loves, this widow’s reverence may not be the most fierce, but it is the most ardent, impassioned and pure.

Pauline and Lynda are gobsmacked. Was their mam trying to make herself believe she and Harry had always loved each other in spite of their differences, or could it in some way be true? Winnie had once told Pauline that it was hard to change how you felt about things once you were past forty, but she seems to be achieving that now with respect to their dad. Not only that, as Lynda says; her new happy-families version of Hollingworth history wishes away all the hostility that preceded Winnie’s conversion to the cause of John.

Sometimes after listening to hours of forlorn and fanciful nostalgia, Lynda has to check an impulse to reprove her mam for her stories.

‘I talk to him every night in my mind, you know,’ Winnie tells her as they eat their teas with John and Karl.

‘I know, Mam. You will do, after all those years.’

‘I wish he’d come to fetch me.’

‘Don’t be daft. Come on, there’s no point talking like that . . .’

‘I do. There’s nowt for me here now.’

‘Mam . . .’ Lynda manages to damp down the exasperation in her voice and sound sympathetic, and privately she imagines, somewhere out in the spirit circles, Harry rolling his eyes, adjusting his tie in the mirror and going out for a pint to escape his wife’s mithering.

*

Although Harry is not ready to come back and take her away, another once-awaited rescuer is. One Saturday afternoon, Lynda is at home tidying away the dinner pots when the phone rings. It is Maureen, one of her cousins on her dad’s side of the family.

‘Ayup, Lynda,’ says Maureen. She sounds hesitant. ‘I’ve got somebody here who wants to see you. Can he come up?’

Maureen’s tone gives nothing away, but even so Lynda knows immediately who it is. She feels a light wave of nausea. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, alright. Bring him to my mam’s.’ Just when you’re settled, she thinks: just when your mam’s improving, your family’s alright, and your work’s going well. Last weekend they had a little party to cheer themselves up. Karl and his friends had raced up and down the garden paths in her wheelchair, and as she watched them she had felt they were all moving on nicely. And now out of nowhere this; the visitor who wants to see her.

She calls her mam, brushes her hair in the mirror, and wheels herself along the backings to Winnie’s back garden gate, where she waits.

When she sees him walking down the backings in his light overcoat and grey suit, her first thought is that he looks younger than she expected. Her second is that he looks a bit like Harry. But then he is a Hollingworth, after all.

‘Hello,’ she says.

‘Hello,’ he replies. ‘I’m Alf, love. It’s good to meet you.’

Over the years since she first told Lynda about Alf, Winnie has loosed enough fragments and details for her to put together the whole story. She knows about his leaving and his promise to return, and all about his character and feelings for her mam. She knows about the features and mannerisms, all fondly described by Winnie, that she has supposedly inherited from him, although on this point, she is unconvinced. Lynda believes that her mam sees similarities in the hairline, or a likeness in the smile, because she wants to see Alf living in her. The idea does not trouble her, it just lives in those seas of her mother’s soul that she cannot fathom.

‘Are you all right then?’ she says, as they wait for Winnie to come downstairs. She is aware of talking as if they were relatives who hadn’t seen each other for a few months.

‘Yes, thank you, love. Are you?’

‘Aye, not so bad.’

‘Is your family okay?’

‘Aye, they’re alright. Our Karl and John have gone to watch Sheffield United this afternoon.’

‘Oh.’

The conversation is slow, but then what do you discuss with a man you’ve never met before but who may be your father? The weather?

‘Turned out nice, anyway,’ she says.

Winnie comes in with her hair brushed smart, and wearing a cream floral dress. Alf looks across the room with wide eyes and a smile that is half joy and half apprehension.

‘Hello, Winnie.’

‘Hello.’

To Lynda’s surprise, she is curt, almost offhand.

‘Are you all right then?’

‘Aye, not bad.’

As it turns out the afternoon is not one for revelations or for driving off into the dusk never to return. Lynda makes a pot of tea, and the three of them sit around the table discussing families and the past in Highgate. They do not progress beyond small talk, and at no point go anywhere near the subject of Alf and Winnie’s affair, or Lynda’s birth. Listening, she feels that she ought to feel upset or enlightened, but more than anything she is indifferent. She feels now as she has always felt: Harry is her dad; behaviour can take precedence over biology. She has chosen her own life, and would never let someone else choose it for her.

Alf is a pleasant man, but she would like to tell him that she is Harry’s daughter and that is that. As she cannot, she is obliged to talk to him and her mam about the Hollingworths, and about children and grandchildren, and about Alf’s home in the East Riding. Winnie does not ask questions and appears no more interested in Alf than in the mantelpiece clock. Her rescue-ache faded years ago, and even if it hadn’t, her attraction to him would have been killed by her renewed and pious posthumous love for Harry.

Lynda wonders briefly if Alf will stay, but at four o’clock, after more tea and slices of cake, he gets up and says he must be making tracks. Had she been younger, she might not have believed that such an infatuation could linger for so long only to end in light chat over tea and fruitcake, but by now she knows that here this is how most things end, give or take the shouting and argument.

She and her mam walk down the path to see him off. He kisses Lynda, and embraces Winnie, and as soon as Alf walks away, Winnie turns and goes back inside.

‘Honestly, what did he come for?’ she asks, as she tidies away the tea things. ‘I’m not starting all that up again!’

‘I think he just wanted to see you, Mother.’

‘I’m sure I don’t know what he wanted.’

‘Well I don’t think it was . . . you know. You’re in your seventies, and he’s not so far off.’

‘What’s that got to do with it? I could tell from t’ way he was looking at me he was thinking summat.’

Let her enjoy her outrage, thinks Lynda.

‘You can tell him to keep away in future.’

‘Alright. I’ll tell him.’

But Lynda does not tell him, because Alf has understood. He does not come back. Neither she nor Winnie will see him again.