If My Father Loved Me

We clinked our glasses before we drank.

‘How’s Jack?’ Mel asked. She shook a Marlboro out of the pack and lit it, then leaned back in her chair to look at me. Jack is my son.

‘Not bad,’ I said cautiously. ‘And Adrian?’

‘So-so.’

Adrian was Mel’s current boyfriend, if that’s a word you can still use when you aren’t young any more. At least, not young in the sense that my daughter Lola is young, although on the other hand at twenty she is so precisely of the modern world, so experienced and knowing, that I sometimes think she could be my mother instead of the other way round.

Mel and I have both turned fifty and we are therefore invisible except in the technical sense to, say, the young waiter who took our order. He was nice-looking, brown-skinned, with black hair slicked straight back from his face. I could see him stepping around the female trio and exchanging eye contact as he slipped them their starters. He said something that was evidently cheeky and they all laughed.

I don’t remember anyone mentioning the fact to me when I was as young as Lola, but you don’t feel yourself growing older. You reach an age – which probably varies according to your history and personal circumstances, but in my case was twenty-seven – and there you are, fully formed. As time passes you note your failures and allow yourself to appreciate what you have done well, but there remains the inner individual who isn’t aware of alteration either mental or physical. Inside my skin, a millimetre or so beneath the eroding surface, I remain twenty-seven years old. It’s a shock, when riding the escalator in Selfridges or somewhere, to confront an unexpected mirror and be obliged to check the discrepancy.

We’ve talked about this, of course, Mel and I. Being invisible to waiters and white-van drivers and brickies doesn’t bother us. What is alarming is the possibility that when we do start to feel our age, it might all happen at once. What if we go from being twenty-seven to being sixty-seven in a day, suddenly getting infirm knees and crochet shawls and a fondness for Book atBedtime, crumbling away into old ladies as the light falls on us like Rider Haggard’s She?

‘That will be scarier than Alien,’ Mel said.

Joking about our worries is something we have always been able to do together. What else should we do?

I lifted my glass of wine again. ‘Here’s to now,’ I said.

Being old hasn’t happened yet, that’s what the toast means, in spite of the escalator mirror’s warning and in spite of our awareness that it will, that it must.

‘To now,’ Mel echoed happily.

The waiter came with our food. He put Mel’s dish of scallops down in front of her and she immediately picked up her fork to take a mouthful. I had chosen mezzalune di melanzane, half-moons of ravioli stuffed with aubergine. We sampled our own portions and then traded forkfuls. Mel chewed attentively and pronounced my ravioli to be drab, and I agreed with her.

‘Go on,’ I said.

We had started talking about Adrian and I was watching her face as she relayed her concerns. I also wanted to enjoy the restaurant’s brightness and the sweet damp night outside, and the animated faces of the three women and the way the waiter’s long white apron tucked round his waist just so, by listening for a while longer instead of talking.

And there is another presence, too. A shadow at the back of the room, a black silhouette beyond the restaurant plate glass, already waiting.

I can smell him, even, although I haven’t put the awareness anywhere close to words. It’s still only premonition, a cloudy scent stirring in the chambers of my head, but he is there.

I don’t know it yet but it’s not an ordinary night.

Mel sighed. ‘You know, Adrian always makes me feel that he would like me to pat his cheek and say well done, or on the other hand don’t worry. He needs approval all the time. It’s tiring.’

‘Maybe the reassurance he really needs is that you’re not going to leave him.’

‘I can’t give him that assurance, unfortunately.’

We have been here before. We exchanged smiles.

‘Fucked up by my happy family history,’ Mel shrugged, only half joking.

Mel has never married. She is the middle child of five siblings, petted by two older brothers and idolised by two younger ones. Her father was a fashionable gynaecologist with a practice in Harley Street, and her parents had a house in the country as well as a Georgian gem in London. The Archers took their children skiing in Switzerland every winter and to Italy for summer holidays, although all this was many years before I knew Mel. Her widowed mother now lives in some style in South Kensington and her brothers do the kinds of thing that the sons of such families usually do. Mel insists that her childhood was so idyllic and her father such a wonderful and benign influence that she has never found a man or an adult milieu to match them.

All this I know about her.

‘What was your childhood like?’ she asked me, when we first met and we were finding out about each other.

‘Nothing like yours.’

And this was nothing less than the truth.

Mel’s dark eyebrows lifted.

‘It was ordinary,’ I lied. ‘There isn’t much to tell,’ I said, ‘except that my mum died very suddenly when I was ten. I lived quietly with my dad and then eventually I grew up.’

‘That’s very sad,’ Mel said warmly.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. I didn’t volunteer any more, because I don’t like to talk about my childhood. The past is gone and I am glad of it.

‘What are you going to do?’ I ask now, eating my ravioli.

‘About Adrian? End it, or wait for it to end, I suppose.’

‘You don’t love him.’

‘No. But I like him and I enjoy his company, quite a lot of the time.’

‘Isn’t that enough?’

She looked at me, tilting her head a little so that the ends of her curls frayed out against the background of the restaurant’s shiny turquoise wall. If I reached out my fingertips to touch, I thought, I would feel a tiny crackle of electricity.

Mel said, ‘You’re the one who’s been married and who lived with another man as well. Is it enough?’

I gave the question proper consideration. When Lola was eleven and Jack was three, and I was married to Tony, I fell deeply in love with a man called Stanley. It wasn’t that I didn’t care for my husband, because I did. Almost from the day I met him he made me feel that I was at anchor in some sheltered harbour while the storms raged out at sea, and for years I believed that was what I wanted. Tony was and is a good man who cared for the three of us. But sometimes I did long for the danger of towering waves and the wild wind filling my sails.

Stanley was gale force, all right. He was eight years younger than me. He was a not very successful actor who made ends meet by doing carpentry and he came to do some work in our kitchen. He was handsome and funny, utterly unreliable and unpredictable, and he stirred a longing in me that I have never known before or since. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, or my hands either. He would turn up and tell me that I was beautiful and intoxicating, and that I was all he had ever wanted. Happiness and wonder at seeming to mean so much to someone like Stanley made me suspend my natural disbelief.

Then he would disappear and in his absence the world went completely dark. I did try to convince myself that I was a wife and mother, and what I felt was mere lust, but I knew it wasn’t. When he came back again, when I was actually with Stanley, it was as if nothing else mattered. Not my children, my husband, my old friends, or our well-rubbed and fingermarked everyday world. What I wanted, all I wanted, was this. This passion and delight was the marrow at last where everything else grated like dry bones.

After two months of agonising I left Tony for Stanley and took the children with me. I truly believed that there was nothing else I could do.

Lola accepted the fait accompli with which I presented her, more or less, and although she never warmed to Stanley, she and I still managed to stay friends. Lola has always had an enviable degree of self-reliance. But Jack was already an insecure child, given to bad dreams and absence of appetite, and the upheaval tipped him severely off balance. At twelve, he still hasn’t recovered his equilibrium.

Tony and I sold our house, and I bought a much smaller one with my half of the money and Stanley came to live in it with us. For a few months I was shockingly happy, even in the face of my children’s discomfort and Tony’s misery. But then, slowly and inevitably, things began to go wrong. Stanley did less carpentry and spent more time in the pub. Then he went off with a travelling production of The Rocky Horror Show and met Dinah, who was playing Janet.

I was afraid that I would die without him, but I also thought that to be abandoned was no more than I deserved.

It’s not a very original story and I’m not proud of this portion of my life. I’m sorry for what I did and regret that I can’t put it right, not for Jack and Lola, or Tony either. Remembering the hurt I caused by abandoning my family makes me recoil and wish I could slam shut the doors of recollection. I can’t, of course, and I think about the damage every day.

But even so, and with the benefit of experience, what I really think – now that Mel has asked me – is that you can compromise in love as in all other things. If you have to, that is. But it’s much better not. If you give up your independence to share your life with someone, it should be a state of existence that improves on being single.

Sometimes, not all the time of course, but sometimes, when you’re sitting down to breakfast opposite each other or getting into a car together or just lying quietly in each other’s arms, you should catch your breath and think, being with this person here and now is what lends reason to and makes logic of everything else in the world.