If My Father Loved Me

‘I know they’ll support you. But I’m truly sorry I can’t be there as well. Ted was my father-in-law for fifteen years.’

‘It can’t be helped,’ I said. I too would have liked Tony to be here today, for my own sake as well as Lola’s and Jack’s. But there was no point in regretting his absence now, or at any other time.

‘How are you?’

‘I’m all right,’ I told him.

‘And the kids?’

‘They’re here.’

‘I’ll talk to them. I’m thinking of you, Sadie.’

‘I know. Thanks,’ I said and passed the receiver to Lola.

When we were first divorced, Jack and Lola both spent plenty of time with their father. We had agreed on unlimited access and it worked well. But in the last five years, since Tony met his new partner and particularly since the birth of their twin girls, the weekend visits have become less regular. This is no one’s intention, it’s just that Tony has less time to spare for children who can already feed and dress themselves. Lola is fairly sanguine about it, but Jack minds.

Graham glanced around the room, judging the atmosphere. ‘A few words, maybe?’ he suggested to me in a whisper.

I cleared my throat and stepped into the middle of the room while he rattled a spoon against a plate.

I had no idea what I was going to say. I don’t remember what I did say, except that it can’t have been very inspiring. Everyone listened politely, anyway. I thanked them again for coming, and lifted my glass that had one and a half mouthfuls of red wine at the bottom of it. Luckily everyone else’s glasses were well charged.

‘To Ted.’

The echo began as a muted, respectful chorus. But the next thing I saw was the faces all around me breaking into smiles and there was a sudden little wave of clapping, and some stamping and cheering. Ted, Ted, Ted. Jack’s white face poked round the hallway door.

‘My father,’ I added to the chorus, but under my breath. It wasn’t my unmemorable words that had provoked this, of course. It was Ted himself and I was being made aware of his popularity for perhaps the last time.

I looked around the room again, searching for a synthesis between my knowledge of him and what all these other cheerful, rational friends and neighbours felt. There was his dented old armchair but even as I stared at it I couldn’t shift the cold wedge that separated my memories of Ted from everyone else’s.

I shook my head and looked for the faces of my children and my old friends. They jumped out of the gloom at me, full of warmth and life. Mel’s red lipstick. Caz’s hennaed bob, Graham’s bald patch and habitual anxious frown. And Jack and Lola, my flesh and Ted’s too.

This is what matters now, not then, I rationalised. History’s gone.

I found myself with my fingers wrapped round my now empty glass, fondly beaming back at all of them. And my smile must have been particularly noticeable because there was another surge of clapping and cheering. How Ted would have loved all this.

It was another moment before everyone noticed that they were involved in an outbreak of spontaneous celebration, but when they did the applause gently faded into shuffling and coughing. This was a funeral, after all. Still smiling, Jean Andrews began dabbing her eyes.

My short speech and the clapping were taken as the signal for everyone to make a move. Caz and Mel swept plates and glasses into the kitchen as Lola and I stood by the front door, thanking everyone all over again for coming.

‘If only he could have been here.’ Jean Andrews sighed as she squeezed into her coat.

Half an hour later Caz’s and Graham’s Volvo followed Mel’s Audi down the road. Lola and Jack and I were left standing on Ted’s doorstep. The children looked at me, waiting for a lead. I closed the door firmly, double-locked it and dropped the keys into my pocket. Memories were neatly boxed up inside it with Ted’s clothes in the wardrobe and the old tea caddy with the pictures of the Houses of Parliament rubbed away where his thumb always touched the same spot.

‘Let’s go home,’ I said.

In the traffic on the M1 Lola told me, ‘I think that went really well.’

‘Yes, it did.’

I flicked a glance in the rear-view mirror. Jack was sitting sideways with his feet up on the back seat and his head tilted against the passenger window. There was no telling what he thought.

It was after five o’clock when I finally reached work, but that didn’t matter. Penny and I are self-employed and we put in the hours to suit ourselves. Her house is the end one of a pretty Georgian terrace, but it’s East- rather than West-End Georgian. The houses themselves were once fine but have become dilapidated and even recent gentrification hasn’t improved the immediate surroundings, which are grimy, traffic-clogged and unsafe after dark. Not that that worries Penny.

I walked down a small cobbled alleyway past the side of her house, under a sign that reads ‘Gill & Thompson Fine & Trade Bookbinders’. The old brick outbuilding, backing on to a murky stretch of the Regent’s Canal opposite some gasometers, was one of the main reasons why Penny bought the house when we first set up in business together. It had originally been a coal depot, where the long barges down from the Midlands unloaded their cargo, but together we cleaned it up and – roughly – converted it into a book bindery.

That was what I did, and do. I am a bookbinder, in the way that Ted was a perfumer. But without the mystery, of course.

I opened the door into the shop part of the bindery. Across the counter that divides it from the workshop I saw Penny. She was standing over a stitched book, rounding out the spine ready for backing. She was using the little old Victorian hammer I found at a bindery sale and bought for her, and she rolled and banged away at the stitching to make exactly the right swell that would form the spine of the bound book. She was so immersed in the job that it took several seconds for her to register the sound of the door opening and closing. But then she looked up over her half-moon glasses and saw me. ‘Hi,’ she said.

I walked round the counter end and took my apron off its hook, winding it round my middle and tying the strings without looking or thinking about it, the actions being so familiar.

‘I’m glad that’s over.’

My job was lying at the end of my bench. The dark-blue cloth-covered book boards for Ronaldshay’s three-volume Life of Lord Curzon that we were restoring for a regular customer of ours. The finishing, the gold lettering on the spine, still remained to be done, ready for the bound books to be collected tomorrow.

‘Are you okay?’

I picked up the first boards and stroked the cloth with my thumb. It was a good job, clean but nothing flashy. ‘Yes.’

I opened the as yet unbound book and automatically checked the title page. Then I put the board in the holder and adjusted the screws to position it correctly.

Penny was still standing with her hammer resting on the bench. ‘You needn’t have come in tonight, you know. Not straight from your father’s funeral. I could have done Curzon.’

‘I know.’ I smiled at her. Penny’s a good finisher. ‘But I wanted to.’

It was the truth. The concentration on a defined job, technically demanding but finite in scope, was just what I needed. And the bindery, with its ordered clutter and smells of glue and skins, is a soothing place. I always find it easy to be there.

Penny nodded and went back to her tap-tapping with the hammer. I switched on the heating element in the Pragnant machine and reached for a drawer of type. I decided that I would do the title in two pulls, and then put the author’s name and the volume number together in the third panel. Using tweezers, I picked the type from the drawer, dropped the letters and spacers for The Life of one by one into the slot of the type holder and checked them. The characters have to be placed upside down and although I can read as quickly that way as the right way up, it is still too easy to make mistakes.

The work absorbed me. Penny and I settled into the easy silence that we often enjoy when we are on our own in the bindery. It’s different when Andy and Leo, our part-timers, are there. They like to play music and talk about the jobs in hand. It’s still comfortable, but different. Less symbiotic.

I measured the available space on the book’s spine with my dividers, then checked it by eye. However carefully and accurately the lettering is placed, if the result looks wrong to the eye then it is wrong. I put the board back on the stand and slipped the foil out of the way. I pressed the handle forward gently to make a blind pull, just an impression of the letters lightly tapped into the cloth that I could rub away if they were misplaced. When I examined the result I saw they were indeed in the wrong position. About a millimetre too high.

I sighed and clicked my tongue, and Penny heard me.

She glanced over her specs at me. ‘Let me do it.’

‘Pen, I want to do it myself.’

I rolled the bar down by what I calculated to be the right amount and did another blind pull. This time it was exactly right.

Even though this was a routine machine-blocking job that I had done many hundreds of times before, I still had to summon up some courage to make the gold pull. If I got it badly wrong there was no chance of a repair. The boards would have to be made and covered all over again, and with the margins Penny and I operate on, and the backlog of work waiting to be done, we can’t afford the time. I took a steadying breath and pressed the operating lever forward. The type kissed the blue cloth and I pressed harder, going in with a smooth bold movement, and the gold tape frazzled as the letters burned out of it. I eased the handle back and bent forward to see the result.

There it was, The Life of in strong, gold, block capitals on the dark-blue cloth. I’d gone in a little too heavy, perhaps, and laid on a touch too much foil, but I could fix that. I stood back in a glow of satisfaction.

However many times I do it, finishing always gives me the most pleasure of all the stages of binding a book. I love the shape and balance of the letters, and the grace and infinite invention that are possible within the conventions of traditional tooling and decoration.