If My Father Loved Me

The bleakness of this was unbearable.

I remembered how it felt to be his age, at the mercy of the world and powerless to change anything. I tried to touch his hand but he pulled away as if my fingertips might burn him.

I took a breath. ‘Jack, listen. It just seems like everything, you know. It isn’t so bad. There are lots of things you enjoy and look forward to.’ Although if he had pressed me to name them, I couldn’t have got much beyond seagulls. ‘And you’ve got us, Lola and me, and your dad as well. If we try and work out what’s most wrong, I can help you.’ This sounded feeble, even to my own ears.

There was a small silence. Then he said flatly, ‘You?’

I understood that everything mostly meant his life in this house, with me and without his father.

It wasn’t that he didn’t see Tony: the three and a half weeks since Ted’s death had spanned the school Easter holidays and the two of them had been away together for three days’ fishing in Devon. Lola could have gone too, but she had preferred to stay in London. Once or twice a month Jack went over to Twickenham to spend a night with Tony and his second family, and there were weekday evenings too when he and Lola went out for pizza or a film with him. But that wasn’t the same as having a father who lived in the same house and didn’t have to portion out his time with such meticulous care.

Everything wasn’t school and friends or the lack of them, although I wanted to believe that it was. The trouble was home, and home was mostly me. In the last few weeks and months Jack had gradually stopped communicating, had withdrawn himself from our already dislocated family, but he had never let me hear the roots of his unhappiness as clearly as in that one word, you?

I wished just as much as he did that he had a live-in father. I wished he didn’t have to live with just two women, or that he and Lola were closer in age, or that he had been born one of those children who found it easy to make friends. And I wished that I had been able to break the cycle that began with Ted and me, and rolled on with me and Jack, in the way I had apparently been able to break it for Lola.

The silence extended itself. The need to cry burned behind my eyes, the pressure of years of denied weeping swelling inside my skull, but I didn’t cry and my inability to do so only increased my sense of impotence. Unwitting Jack, my unlucky child, was the focus of this mighty powerlessness. I couldn’t make the world right for him, I couldn’t even make the dealings between us right. Sympathy for him was squeezing my heart so I could barely speak.

‘I’m sorry,’ I managed to say.

He pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Going to school,’ was his only response.

I went with him to the door and watched him until he was out of sight. I longed to run after him, to go with him and shield him through the day, to turn his everything into nothing that mattered and let us both start again, but I couldn’t. It was hard to accept that after all the promises I had made to myself when they were small, about always being close to my children and never letting them down, there was still a breach between Jack and me. Ted was dead and gone but somehow his damned legacy was right here in our house with us.

I was angry as well as impotent. I slammed my hand down on the kitchen table, so hard that the pain jarred through my wrist bones, but nothing changed and my head still hurt with not crying.

I snatched up my bag and went to work. It was too late now to walk, even along the canal. I had to drive, in a 9 a.m. press of buses and oversized trucks, and when I arrived I made a mess of cutting some endpapers out of some special old hand-marbled paper that Penny and I had been saving. I had to throw the ruins away and use a poor substitute. Penny kept her head down over her work and although I could sense Andy and Leo glancing at each other, I didn’t look their way.

When I got home again Lola had already gone out to her bar job. In two days’ time she would be going back to university and she was trying to earn as much money as she could. Jack was sitting in front of the television, still wearing his outdoor jacket and his school tie. He looked grubby and utterly exhausted.

‘How was your day?’ I asked. I was going to make shepherd’s pie for supper, his favourite.

‘All right.’

‘What lessons did you have?’

‘The usual ones.’

He didn’t take his eyes off the screen but I didn’t think he was really watching it. There was wariness in the hunch of his shoulders and his fingers curled tightly over the arms of his chair.

‘What did you do in the lunch break?’

‘Nothing.’

I threw three potatoes in the sink and began peeling. ‘So, it was a pretty uneventful day, then?’ He twisted his shoulders in a shrug. But when I started browning the meat and vegetables, and he assumed my attention was elsewhere, he let his head drop back against the cushions. Then, when I glanced at him again, he had fallen asleep.

We ate dinner together – at least, Jack sat at the table with me, but he had a bird book open beside his plate. I was, temporarily, too tired of the battle to make any protest. He ate ravenously, though, as if he hadn’t seen food since breakfast time.

But the next morning, to my surprise, he put up less resistance to getting up and getting dressed. When the time came to leave, he shouldered his bag and silently trudged away. Maybe he was beginning to accept the inevitable, I thought. Maybe the tide had turned.

That day Colin came into the bindery. He lived with his mother, somewhere on an estate that lay to the east of Penny’s house, and he was a regular visitor. He pushed the door open, marched in and laid a heavy carrier bag on the counter. Penny was working on a big case for a photographer’s portfolio and Leo was trimming boards at the guillotine. Andy was on day release and in any case it was my turn to deal with Colin. We took it roughly in turns, without actually having drawn up a rota.

‘Morning!’ he shouted. He had an oversized head that looked too heavy for his shoulders and his voice always seemed too loud for the space he was in.

‘Hello, Colin. How are you today?’

‘All the better for getting this finished.’ He began hauling a mass of papers out of his bag. Penny and Leo were suddenly completely absorbed in their jobs.

My heart sank. Colin had been writing a book ever since he first came in to see us, and would regularly turn up with fragments of it that he wanted us to discuss. It was going to be a cookery book. He had chosen us, he announced, to be his publishers. Penny and I had often tried to explain to him the difference between binding an interesting collection of personal recipes and publishing a cookery book, but he took no notice. The sample material, in any case, usually consisted of recipes torn from women’s magazines and annotated with drawings and exclamatory scribbles in a variety of coloured inks, so we hadn’t worried too much about the day of reckoning. Now, apparently, it had finally arrived.

‘I have to have the books ready soon, of course. Mum’ll want to give one to all her friends, won’t she?’

A tide of magazine clippings, jottings on lined paper, sketches and headings like ‘A Good BIG Dinner’ blocked out in red felt-tip capitals spilled over the counter. They were accompanied by a nasty smell. Some of the papers were very greasy and I spotted a flaccid curl of bacon rind sticking to the reverse of one of them. I stopped myself from taking a brisk step backwards.

‘Colin, we’re not book publishers. I told you that, didn’t I?’

He gazed around him with an ever fresh air of surprise and bewilderment. ‘Yes, you are. I know you are. Look at all your books.’

‘We just put covers on them. We restore old books, we bind people’s academic theses, we take care of books that have already been published.’

‘Exactly.’ Colin nodded triumphantly. One of the most exhausting aspects of dealing with him was the way he agreed with your disagreement and just went on repeating his demands. ‘So you can put covers on mine. I’ll pay you, you know. I’m not asking for something for nothing, not like all these refugees coming over here and expecting to get given money and big houses. It’s not like that, you know.’

‘I know, Colin. But we aren’t publishers. Putting a cover on … on your manuscript here, that won’t get it into the bookshops like Smith’s in the High Street where people could buy it. That’s a completely different process. You have to … well, you have to have the text edited and all these recipes would have to be tested. Then artists and marketing people would have to look at designs for it, and thousands of copies would have to be printed by a big commercial printers, and then salesmen would have to sell it to booksellers …’ I felt weary myself at the mere thought of all this effort.

‘Exactly.’

‘But we don’t do any of these things, Colin.’ I reached out for his plastic bag and very gently began putting the rancid pages into it. From past experience I knew and feared what was likely to come next.

He watched me for a second or two, then he grabbed the bag from me and began hauling the contents out again. ‘It’s my book.’

‘I know, but I can’t publish it for you because I’m not a publisher.’

‘My book’s important, I’m telling you. It’s taken me a long time, these things take time to do properly.’ His voice was rising. We tussled briefly with the bag, me putting in and him taking out. The bacon rind dropped in a limp ringlet on the counter. ‘I’m not stupid, don’t make that mistake. I’m as good as anyone else and I was born here, not like these blacks and the rest of them.’

Leo’s mother and father came from Trinidad. He went on lining up trimmed law reports as if no one had spoken. True to form, Colin was now shouting. And equally predictably, the phone rang.

Penny went to answer it. ‘Gill and Thompson, Bookbinders. Good morning. Oh, yes. Hello, Quintin.’

Colin was thumping the counter and shouting that we weren’t bookbinders at all, didn’t deserve the name, not when we wouldn’t do a simple job of work for an ordinary person, who had been born here, not like some of them.

Quintin Farrelly was our most lucrative, knowledgeable and exacting customer. He was the owner of the Keats Letters. Penny blocked her free ear with one finger and struggled to hear what he was saying. ‘Yes, yes. Of course we can. Sorry, there’s just a bit of a noise in here.’

‘I’ll tell you what, Colin,’ I said. ‘There’s something we could do for you, if you’d like it.’

He stopped shouting, which was what I had hoped for. ‘What?’

‘Well. Let’s have a look at what Penny’s doing, shall we?’

I took him by the arm and showed him the photographer’s portfolio. It was A2 size, in dark navy-blue cloth with a lining of pale-green linen paper. The man’s name, Neil Maitland, was blind tooled on the lid. Colin examined the job with an aggrieved expression.