If My Father Loved Me

I knew I didn’t want anyone else to be there, not even Lola and Jack. It wasn’t just furniture and clothes and memories I had to deal with. It was the way the very scent of the place entered into me and shook my soul.

Five (#uf61b01c4-938c-5016-a882-1870098b2887)

I unlocked the front door of Ted’s house and gently pushed it open.

The draught excluder caught on a heap of letters and circulars lying on the doormat, so I stooped down and cleared them out of the way. I was breathing hard. The air in the hallway smelled dense and mouldy.

In the kitchen I unlocked the back door to let in some air. The reek of mould was stronger in here. The silence pressed on my ears and in an effort to dispel it I rattled around opening cupboards and moving jars. There was the tin tea caddy from our old house, with pictures of the Houses of Parliament rubbed away where his thumb and palm had grasped it so many times. Inside, I knew, was the teaspoon with an RAF crest on the handle.

I lifted the lid off the breadbin and recoiled from the source of the smell, a puffy canopy of blue mould. Caz and Mel and I remembered after the funeral to empty the fridge and leave it with the door propped open, but we forgot the bread. Choking a little, I rummaged for a cloth and a rubbish sack. I went to wipe out the mould and the obscene furry nugget of bread that lay in the heart of it, but there was no point. I dropped the whole thing, bread bin and all, into the sack and firmly tied the neck. I was here to go through Ted’s belongings. I didn’t want to keep many of his possessions – there were more than enough memories already.

Upstairs there was the silence, even thicker and heavier. Ted’s was a quiet road, and behind these closed windows nothing had moved for a month. I turned on the bedside radio but the sudden babble made me jump and I switched it off again.

The blue-tiled bathroom with worn blue candlewick mats was a comfortless narrow space that reminded me again of the dripping green box at our old house. Ted humming ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ as he shaved. Me perched on the edge of the bath watching him. Through adult eyes I could see myself, gazing, hungrily following his every move, trying by the sheer power of concentration to draw some attention to myself. It must have been infuriating for him.

There was a bottle on the wooden shelf over the basin. I reached for it, unscrewed the cap and automatically sniffed.

It was as if I had rubbed the green glass and whispered an incantation to bring the genie smoking out of its prison. The scent of his cologne rushed into my mouth and nose and eyes, and my obedient brain performed its trick of instant recall. The here and now dropped away, and Ted was standing beside me, in his prime.

He was wearing a dark blazer and a lightly checked shirt with a cravat, paisley-patterned. He was freshly shaven, with his skin taut and shiny where he had rubbed and patted it with the cologne. His thick hair was slicked back with some kind of brilliantine. I could see the tiny furrows left by the bristles of the old silver-backed hairbrush that he kept on the tallboy in his bedroom.

He winked at me. ‘All ready, eh?’

‘Are you going out?’ I demanded.

Was this before or after my mother died? It must have been after.

I hadn’t minded before about him being out of the house so much of the time. It was the normal state of affairs, and Faye and I were used to being on our own together. I remember watching and helping her to bake cakes. The first Victoria sponge that was all my own work was decorated with the wobbly word ‘Dad,’ piped in blue icing using a paper bag and a serrated icing nozzle. It was two days before he came home to taste it and the lettering had bled into the sponge beneath.

‘I’m only nipping out for an hour or so,’ Ted said.

I had heard that one before. I wheedled, ‘Don’t go.’

He only winked at me, impatient to be gone. ‘Tell you what, I’ll ask Mrs Maloney to come and sit with you.’

Mrs Maloney was a widow who lived a few doors away. Our north London outer suburban street was on a steep hill and the semi-detached, semi-Tudoresque little houses stood in stepped pairs in their strips of garden. Mrs Maloney’s house was higher up than ours and I hated the thought of her looking down at our roof and the leggy rose bushes that lined the creosoted fence. She had wind, and was smelly and lugubrious. I hated being alone in the house, because of the spectres in the folds of the curtains and the whispers in the empty rooms, but I hated Mrs Maloney even more. She had to be fed tea and biscuits, and she sat in my mother’s chair swallowing belches and asking me nosy questions.

‘Can’t I come with you?’

I remembered the day at Phebus Fragrances so clearly because it was so unusual for Ted to take me anywhere.

‘Not this time, Princess.’

The doorbell rang, a long, shrill sound that meant the caller must be leaning hard on the button. Not all that many people came to visit us, not unexpectedly, and Ted and I glanced at each other in surprise. He went quickly to the bedroom window and looked down, making sure that he was shielded by the nets.

‘Do me a favour, Sadie. Go downstairs and open the door and tell this man I’m out. You don’t know when I’ll be back. Right?’

I opened the front door. There was a man in a pale fawn coat with leather buttons that looked like shiny walnuts. ‘Is your daddy in?’

I looked him in the eye. ‘No.’

‘When will he be back?’

‘I don’t know.’

The man stared at me so hard that it made me uncomfortable. But this wasn’t the first time I had had to do something like this for Ted. I prided myself on being good at it. I made my face a moon of innocence.

‘Right. Will you give him a message for me?’ The man took out his wallet and selected a card, then wrote a few words on the back. ‘Here you are. Don’t forget, will you?’

I tried to read what he had written as I went back up the stairs. But Ted was on the landing, waiting.

He held out his hand. ‘Well done, Princess.’ He pocketed the card with barely a glance. ‘Don’t want people knowing where we are every hour of the day, do we?’

Once he had made sure that his visitor had really gone he went out himself, whistling. I had homework to do, and after that there was the television for company, and if I needed anything I could always run up the road to Mrs Maloney. But I could never fall asleep until Ted came home again. I lay on my bed, watching the ceiling and waiting until I heard his Ford Consul drawing up outside.

Next I heard his key in the lock, then low voices in the hallway. Sometimes on these late nights there would be a woman’s giggle. Only then, when I knew that after all he hadn’t disappeared for good and left me behind, did I close my eyes. If there was a woman, I pulled the bedclothes over my head and clamped my ears shut.

I screwed the lid back on the bottle and reached to replace it on the shelf. Then I remembered that I was here to sort out his belongings and dropped it into a rubbish sack instead. I still didn’t like his cologne. Maybe it represented the way he wanted to be, or perhaps with his love of secrecy he just relished putting up another smokescreen. But to me it still smelled like a lie.

I cleared the bathroom cupboard of his smoker’s toothpaste and indigestion tablets and corn plasters. I worked methodically, telling myself that these were only inanimate things, the inevitable remnants we would all leave behind, which would be cleared away for us, some day, in our turn. By our children and their children if we were lucky, by strangers if we were not.

Next I went back to the bedroom. I took his jackets and suits off their hangers and piled them up, thinking that maybe they would do for Oxfam. The cuffs were frayed and the trousers bagged, but they were all dry-cleaned and brushed. Ted had grown seedier in old age – he didn’t bother to eat properly, preferring to smoke and nip at glasses of whisky, and he didn’t get his hair cut regularly enough or trim the tufts in his nose and ears – but he was always a dapper dresser. I folded up his thick white silk evening scarf and put it aside, thinking that Lola might like to have it.

The shoes were lined up in a row on the wardrobe floor. The leather was split with deep lateral creases but they were well polished. I turned one pair over and studied the worn-down heels and touched the oval holes in the leather soles. I could see the pattern of his tread, and now that I listened I could hear his footfalls in the silence of the house. But I couldn’t read the man any more clearly than I had ever done.

In the drawers of the tallboy there were socks and pants, and a coil of ties and paisley cravats. I put aside his RAF tie, frayed at the edges where he had tied the knot so many hundreds of times, and consigned the rest to the disposal pile.

I was up to my wrists in his old clothes now and the scent of him was everywhere, but I told myself it was just a job to be done. I kept at it and the pile of black rubbish sacks mounted up on the landing.

The bottom drawer of the tallboy was deeper than the rest. I opened it and saw that it was half full of papers. Reluctantly I knelt down and began to sift through them.

Most of the papers were old bills, but there was an address book with a brown leather cover, and an old-fashioned thumb index with black and red letters and numerals. I flipped through the pages, recognising one or two of the names, dimly remembering some of the others.

There was nothing hidden here. Ted was as inscrutable as he always had been.

In a creased manila envelope I found a handful of photographs. There was one of my mother and me, in the back garden of the old house. I was perhaps four years old, scowling under the brim of a sunhat and wearing a dress with a smocked front that I hated. Faye was characteristically looking into the distance away from the camera, as if she wished herself elsewhere. I had seen this picture before and almost all the others in the envelope, including one of Ted looking rakish and handsome in front of an MG. Somebody else’s MG, although he managed a proprietorial air. There were also four or five photographs of women.

One of them caught my attention. She had a plump face with a round dimpled chin and her hair was arranged in a lacquered fringe in front and drawn up at the sides with combs. The lipsticked margins of her smile spread fractionally beyond the true contours of her lips, giving her a slapdash, come-and-get-me look. She had eyes that slanted upwards and this oriental aspect was emphasised by a thick line of black eyeliner that flicked up beyond the edges of her eyelids.

Auntie Viv.

Viv wasn’t the first of Ted’s girlfriends to be presented to me after my mother died. I could remember Auntie Joyce before her and possibly Auntie Kath as well. But she was one of the longer-lasting aunties and she was memorable because she was friendlier to me than any of the others.

I sat down on the green candlewick cover of Ted’s bed. I was Jack’s age again.

My father called upstairs to me. ‘Sadie? Sadie, come down here and say hello.’

I came out of my bedroom. I had been reading The Whiteoaks of Jalna and wishing that Renny Whiteoak would come and take me away from Dorset Avenue, Hendon. There was a woman standing beside Ted in the hallway.