If My Father Loved Me

‘Worrying won’t help,’ Mel said.

‘That’s easier said, believe me. You don’t know what it’s like.’

She had been searching a drawer for some implement but now she slammed it shut. ‘Thanks for telling me.’

‘Shit. Christ. Mel, I’m sorry. I’m a thoughtless cow.’ My face and neck throbbed with shamed heat. Mel didn’t talk about it much any more, but her childlessness was still a wound.

‘Where’s your sharp knife? Oh, it’s all right. I only want to trim the fish.’

‘Sorry,’ I murmured again. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

Mel put the knife down. She came round the worktop and wound her arms round me and I rested my head against hers. The touch was comforting.

‘I think he’ll be all right, Sadie. I’ve got no grounds for saying so, but I still think it. Trust me, I’m a City headhunter.’ It was one of the things she often said, to make me smile.

‘I do trust you. In spite of your utterly high-powered, bewilderingly incomprehensible job.’

‘Good. Remember what Lola was like when we first met?’

‘How could I forget?’

‘Right, then.’ She let go of me. ‘Now, do the veg for me, please.’

I did as I was told, dropping the little peas and fingernail-sized beans into the steamer. ‘Let’s talk about something else,’ I suggested.

‘How about me?’

‘Perfect.’

Mel shimmied the length of the worktop, rapping the knife point on jars and pans. ‘I met someone.’

‘No.’ This wasn’t exactly an infrequent occurrence. I already knew that Adrian’s days were numbered.

She stopped dancing and held up her hand. I had been so preoccupied that it was only now I noticed that her face was as bright as a star. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I really have met someone.’

While she told me about this latest one we finished off the cooking, stepping neatly round each other, tasting and discussing and amending, as we had done many times before. These were the evenings I liked best, the companionable times of making unhurried food in a warm kitchen while the light turned to dark outside. I laid the table with blue-and-yellow plates and put the jug of tulips in the middle. I lit a pair of yellow candles and the glow wiped out all the dust and shabby corners, and shone on Mel’s star face and the flowers, and the photograph of the children and me that Lola had taken up to Ted’s hospital bedside.

Mel flipped the tuna off the griddle. ‘It’s ready.’

I went to the foot of the stairs and called Jack. He appeared almost at once, changed out of his school clothes and with wet hair combed flat from the shower. He sidled to his chair and sat down. Immediately he started wolfing down the fish.

‘Are you hungry?’ Mel asked.

‘Yes.’ He glanced quickly at me. ‘Didn’t get anything to eat at lunchtime.’

‘And why’s that?’

‘I should think Mum told you.’

‘Yeah. Here, have some of these baby beans. So, who did you meet? What amazing things did you do that were worth missing school for?’ Mel leaned forward, pushing her coils of hair back from her face so that she could hear better, her eyes and all her attention focused on him. There was no censure, only friendly interest.

‘No one. Nothing,’ Jack muttered.

‘Really? It sounds deadly boring.’

He nodded and went on eating. By the time the pudding came, he even joined briefly in our conversation. He talked slowly, as if he weren’t quite used to the sound of his own voice, but at least he was speaking.

After we finished and he said goodnight, Mel and I opened another bottle of wine.

‘Thanks, Mel.’

‘Tuna was a bit overcooked.’

‘I meant about Jack. Being so nice to him.’

‘I wasn’t nice, I was ordinary.’ This was true. Mel had a gift for being ordinarily warm and inclusive. Tonight it had just seemed more noticeable than ever.

‘You look very happy,’ I said. ‘This Jasper must be good news.’

‘I am happy. I wish you were.’

I felt some of the protective walls around me shifting, as if Mel’s darts might pierce them. I didn’t like it.

‘What did you mean, when you said your father was a con artist?’

What did I mean? There was the pressure inside me, building up inside my skull, threatening to break through the bones. ‘Ted was a great nose, a fine perfumer, but that wasn’t enough for him.’ I chose the words carefully, biting them off with my tongue and teeth. ‘He always wanted something more. There was so much yearning in him. He wanted to be rich and he never was. He wanted glamour but except for the illusion of perfume his life was humdrum. He thrived on secrecy, that nose-tapping and winking kind that men who think of themselves as men of the world go in for. To do with deals, scams, setting up little businesses. I think he must have lived through his fantasies and the reality was always disappointing. Women ultimately disappointed him. His daughter did, too.’

Mel leaned back in her chair. ‘You are his daughter.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you talk about the relationship as if it involves someone else.’

That was truer than she realised. Somewhere within the numbness around Ted’s death there was raw grief, yet I could only touch the outlines of it. As if the bereavement didn’t belong to me, but to someone I knew. As if I weren’t entitled even to the painful connection of grieving and therefore the potential relief that lay beyond it.

‘Mel, I’m not you. I didn’t grow up in your family.’

‘What about his house?’

‘Still there.’ Locked up, since the day of the cremation, with all his possessions inside it. Brooding, waiting for me.

‘Are you going to go and sort it out?’

‘Yes.’ It came to me now that my reluctance formed part of the numbness. Of course I feared going back to his house and unlocking the memories, but sooner or later I would have to make myself do it.

Mel insisted, ‘I’ll come and help you. I’m sure Graham and Caz will as well.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’