Women of a Dangerous Age

As the miles passed, her mind flitted between what had happened and what she was going to do with her life now, one possibility fading out as quickly as another came into focus: move to another country, change career, find a man, adopt a child, run away, become a recluse, retire under the duvet for good. Time for a change. But a change was impossible without a cash injection to pay her bills. Her father was unlikely to help her. She knew exactly what he’d say. ‘It’s your mess. You get out of it.’ She couldn’t count the number of times she’d heard that as she grew up. He believed in the school of hard knocks and, thanks to that, she’d learned her independence.

She eventually turned in between the two brick gateposts and parked beside her father’s old silver Honda. Her heart sank a little as she envisaged the twenty-four hours that lay ahead, but at least she would have to think about something other than herself. Grabbing her overnight bag from the boot, she walked through the side gate and round the corner of the house to enter it by the back door. Her father would be in his study, tuned out from any interference including the doorbell.

‘Dad!’ Ali yelled.

She was greeted by the muffled sound of barking: Sergeant, the ageing but still sprightly Border terrier who was her father’s fierce and constant companion.

She tried again. ‘Dad! I’m here.’

‘Be down in a minute.’ His voice travelled from the study where Ali knew he would be at his battered but trusty Corona typewriter, the laptop she’d given him ignored, surrounded by what mattered most to him: shelves containing his library of history books, including those he’d written himself; maps stuck about with pins marking out military campaigns hung beside pictures of the historical figures who fascinated him; a huge noticeboard littered with hundreds of yellow Post-it notes tracing the structure of his latest book. By his desk was a table covered in toy soldiers that he manoeuvred as if he was in the Cabinet War Rooms.

Ali went into the kitchen where she poured herself a gin and tonic – no ice, no lemon. Her father hated his drink diluted. The tonic was the only concession he made to his few guests.

When her mother had walked out, Ali had been thirteen. From that day, everything in this house had changed. She leaned against the sink, looking around the room. Without her mother to put a bunch of flowers at the centre of the table, to weigh in against the nasty aluminium Venetian blinds that replaced the floral curtains, or object to the removal of the dining chair cushions, the room had taken on the shipshape air of an officer’s mess. There was no feminine touch here. The welcoming smells of baking and stewing, washing and ironing belonged to the time when they had been a family. Her father had done his best and so had Ali, but this kitchen had stopped being the heart of the family home long ago. Anything not put away was neatly aligned on the pristine worktop. Without thinking, she pulled open a drawer to discover his cooking utensils regimented, all handles to the right. Knowing the contents of the other drawers would all be similarly arranged almost made her laugh. The stainless-steel sink shone. Dishcloths were draped on the Aga bar, all folded and hung in exactly the same way, their edges level. The pans hung above it in descending sizes. Order. That was what stopped you from going under. Like father, like daughter.

‘Al! There you are.’ He entered the room just as she shut the drawer. ‘Having a good poke around? Don’t blame you. Checking up, I suppose. No need.’ He laughed grimly as he grasped the whisky bottle and a tumbler, and poured himself a generous slug. ‘See you’ve helped yourself. Cheers.’

‘How are you, Dad?’ Ali ignored his accusation. No point in getting her visit off on the wrong foot. Plenty of time for that. He looked well. Despite the hours he spent at his desk, writing and researching, he still held himself ramrod straight. The legs of his trousers were sharply creased, the brass buttons on his blue jacket bright. His moustache was neatly trimmed although there was a piece of tissue stuck with dried blood just beside his nose.

‘Can’t complain. Deep in research over a little-known aspect of the Wars of the Roses. Made some fascinating discoveries. Won’t bore you with them though.’ He tipped back his head and sucked his whisky through his teeth with a noisy hiss.

Ali gritted hers in dislike of a drinking habit that had something unnervingly Hannibal Lecterish about it.

‘I wouldn’t be bored,’ she protested, despite knowing that within minutes of him detailing whatever historical minutiae he was studying, she would be yawning. She longed to be able to sit down and share his enthusiasm and had often thought how being thrown together should have made them closer. Instead, her mother’s departure thirty-two years ago had driven a wedge between them. A bitter cocktail of blame and guilt had driven each of them into their respective shells as they struggled to cope with the loss. As a teenager, Ali had blamed herself for not being a good enough daughter. As an adult, she learned that nothing was ever that clear-cut. Always, at first in the forefront of her mind and then, as time passed, fading to an infrequent fantasy, was the idea that her mother might come back for her. But they never heard from her again. Ali came to understand how devastated her father must have been, how humiliated when his wife left. His reaction had been to clam up, retiring to his study as frequently as he could, refusing even to mention her mother’s name. Moira Macintyre. Ali wondered whether he ever thought that he might have behaved differently towards her, his daughter, by trying to explain what had happened to her mother so that she would understand. She had long wanted to bridge the gap that had existed between them since her mother left, but he’d always rebuffed her.

‘Of course you would.’ He chuckled. ‘Tell you what, though. I’ve got a little surprise for you.’

‘You have?’ She pretended to think for a moment, knowing what was coming. ‘We’re going to the pub for dinner?’ He nodded, clearly looking forward to the evening out. So no surprise there, then. Whenever she came to stay, they always had their first meal in the Swan, and the next morning she went to the supermarket and stocked up for him before making lunch, then going home.

‘We are.’ He began to do up the buttons of his jacket. ‘But that’s not it.’

‘What then?’

‘Don called me, asking for you.’ His faded blue eyes shone with pleasure at the startling effect of his news.

‘Don?’ She repeated the name she hadn’t heard for years. ‘Don Sterling?’

He nodded.

‘Are you sure?’ He must have made a mistake. Don was a chapter in her life that had been closed for many years. Yet just the mention of his name was enough to unsettle her. She checked herself. Why was that surprising? They had been sweethearts since they met in the sixth form, both determined to escape their roots and make a new start. She remembered their disbelief when they’d both been offered places to study in London, she at the Cass and he at the London School of Economics. They had shared a rundown flat in Hackney from the start. The years during which they had lived together there had meant everything. Back then, she had believed that Don was her saviour and her soulmate, each of them useless without the other. To think that she had ever been so sentimental. Her friends had loved him. Her father had loved him – as much as he’d loved anyone since the disappearance of Ali’s mother. She’d loved him.

‘Are you sure?’ she repeated.

‘Oh, one hundred per cent,’ he said, satisfied with the effect his news was having. ‘He wanted to contact you so I gave him your email address. That was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?’

‘Well, yes, I guess. But why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘Because he only called a couple of days ago and I knew I’d be seeing you today.’ He spoke deliberately slowly, always impatient if he thought she wasn’t immediately cottoning on, never more so than when he was primed to do something else. Right now, get down to the Swan.

‘Don! I can’t believe it. I haven’t heard from him for years.’ When he left to join the Greenpeace ship – the dream job that nothing, not even Ali, could stop him accepting – his letters, at first frequent, excited and newsy, dried up to a trickle and then nothing as he abandoned himself to his new circumstances. In return, Ali’s had been frequent and sad, abandoned as she was by the second person she’d truly loved. She’d given herself to him so completely that she didn’t have any close friends to help her through.

‘Well, maybe you won’t hear from him now.’ Her father was heading for the door. ‘Maybe he’ll think better of it. Come on, table’s waiting.’

‘Maybe he will.’

Ali followed him out into the rain-slicked street, disconcerted by the long-buried memories that were beginning to surface. ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.’ But was it really? And to have lost twice over when she had been so young: her mother, then Don. And now, again. Despite her resolve, she couldn’t stop her thoughts returning to Ian. She wouldn’t talk about him to her father, but she couldn’t get him out of her mind. Wrapping her coat around her, bowing her head into the wind, she followed her father, imagining that the evening would now follow its familiar pattern. As indeed it almost did.

The pub was its usual humming Saturday night – at least four people at the bar and one table out of seven taken. Eric nodded at the other regulars, took his usual table and ordered a bottle of wine. He read the menu through, eventually ordering the steak and kidney pie that he always had, allowing her to order scampi, before he spoke to her again.

‘He sounded well, you know. Phoning from Australia, he was. Must have done well for himself. Always liked the boy.’ He stroked his moustache with little up-and-down movements of his finger.

‘I know you did, Dad. So did I.’ She remembered with a jolt just how much and added as an afterthought, ‘He saved me, you know.’

His finger stopped moving as he looked puzzled. ‘Saved you?’

‘After Mum left, don’t you remember?’

‘I don’t know what on earth you mean.’ His face closed up, just as it always did whenever her mother was mentioned. Thirty-two years of unasked and unanswered questions lay between them. Characteristically, he changed the subject. ‘How’s the business?’

‘Tough. Money’s tight at the moment,’ she answered automatically, then the frustration she had controlled for so long surfaced without warning, not giving him a chance to deliver his stock answer to her business problems. ‘Dad, why won’t you talk to me about her? She left so long ago and I still don’t know why.’

Across the table, he unrolled the napkin containing his knife and fork, then placed them very deliberately, first one, then the other, on either side of his mat. He didn’t look up as he aligned the salt and pepper exactly in the middle of the table. He was still expecting Ali to return to the matter of her business. All he had to do was wait long enough. He was oblivious to the recklessness that all of a sudden possessed her.

‘What I meant was that I used to blame myself for Mum leaving until Don made me understand that there could have been any number of reasons. That’s what I mean by “saving” me. He showed me a way through when you wouldn’t – or couldn’t.’ She surprised herself. That was more than she’d ever admitted to her father about what had happened. But it was true. To this day, she had no idea why her mother left or where she had gone. Divorce and death were words never mentioned in her hearing. She had only been thirteen, stretching her wings, testing the boundaries by bunking off school to smoke and snog boys down in the bushes by the public playground, by lying about going shopping when she and her friend Laura went to their first X-rated film or, when she was grounded, squeezing herself through the tiny bathroom window, shinning down the drainpipe and racing off to meet Mick Kirby and his mates in the car park of the local hotel. Life was hers for the taking. Or so she’d thought. Then, one day, she came home for tea to find the table laid and her mother gone. ‘You didn’t even tell me where she went.’

‘I didn’t know. That’s why.’ He sighed as if all the life had been punched out of him. ‘I didn’t know.’ He kept his eyes on his table mat, chipping with his fingernail at a scrap of food that was stuck to it.

‘But …’ Ali had so many questions that had been bottled up since that time. Now the moment to ask them had finally presented itself, she didn’t know where to start.

‘Perhaps I should have talked to you, but I didn’t know what to say.’ He looked in the direction of the pub kitchen, as if willing his dinner to materialise and give him an excuse to stop the conversation. ‘Not talking made it easier. Still does.’

Now that, she understood completely. That was another trait she had inherited from him: batten down the hatches and pretend nothing has happened. Keep going. Show no emotion. And the truth was that now she had breached his defences and could see his anguish, even after all these years, she didn’t want to make it worse. ‘Dad, I know that. I’ve always known and I learned from you to do the same thing. But sometimes, I do still wonder where she went. How could I not? Some of the girls at school joked about her running away, and I remember telling them she’d be coming back for me. Eventually everyone lost interest. But I didn’t.’ She didn’t want to remember the alienation she’d felt throughout the rest of her schooldays until she could reinvent herself at art college.

She shifted to one side as her scampi and chips was put in front of her and watched as her father tucked into his pie, his relief at having a distraction plain. She played with her food, waiting for him to continue. However, he ate as if his life depended on it, not pausing to talk. As soon as he had cleared his plate, he asked for and paid the bill, then stood up. ‘Finished? Let’s go home. We’ll talk there. Not here.’

Back at the house, he led her into the living room, a faded memory of what it once had been. The musty unaired smell gave away how infrequently the room was used. While her father lit the ancient sputtering gas fire, Ali drew the curtains against the increasingly wild night outside before sitting on the spring-bound sofa. Her father took the chair opposite, perching on its edge, his body stiff and angular: knees bent, elbows on them, hands clasped, staring at the floor.

‘Perhaps I should have spoken to you but I thought you’d come to terms with the loss of your mother in your own way.’ He raised his eyes to her, then looked away as he smoothed his hair with one hand. ‘I didn’t want to open old wounds and make it worse for you.’

Ali’s frustration got the better of her. ‘For God’s sake, Dad!’ How, after so many years, could he not understand her better than that? ‘She was my mother. You owed it to me to tell me what you knew. You still owe me.’

He got up and crossed to the bureau at the back of the room, pulling open a desktop drawer to remove an envelope before closing it again. ‘It’s complicated, Al. Too complicated for me.’ His voice was so low that she had to lean forward to catch what he was saying. ‘Moira had such a miserable upbringing herself, constantly undermined by her father and older brother. She wanted to do everything she could to make yours the perfect childhood. But, because of that upbringing, she grew up with no faith in herself. In the end, she left because she thought she was doing the best by us. There. Now you know.’

‘But how could she possibly have believed that?’ This went against everything she remembered about her mother. ‘Why couldn’t you make her see she was wrong?’ Her agonised plea came from the young girl she’d once been. Her eyes stung with tears.

Her father was looking ill at ease. He wouldn’t look at Ali, wouldn’t comfort her. So much so that Ali had the distinct impression that there was something he wasn’t telling her. This was as hard for her as it was for him. Now they’d finally come this far, she had to know – if only to put the subject to rest at last.

‘I tried, believe me. But she left with no warning. All I had from her was this.’ He passed across the envelope that contained something solid. ‘I never wanted to tell you this, because I thought it would hurt you as much as it did me. You didn’t deserve that. But maybe I was wrong.’