If My Father Loved Me

I thought this, for just long enough, about being with Stanley.

If you don’t have these times that snag your breath and make you smile with happiness, and if all you are doing instead is rubbing along, wrapping up the packages of irritation and disappointment and sliding them out of sight, then you would be better off alone.

‘Is it enough to share your life with someone you like well enough, but don’t love?’ I repeated.

Mel nodded.

‘No, it’s not enough,’ I said.

‘Of course it isn’t,’ she agreed.

Mel and I knew that we were fortunate, because we’d often discussed it. We had evenings like this one. We could do our work, eat out, book holidays, see friends, choose films, argue about politics, cook meals, laugh and talk a lot. Once in a while drink too much. True love in addition would have been magnificent, but I knew that I didn’t want to sacrifice any of the above just to settle for a compromise, for a merely pale and ersatz version of love.

I also thought that maybe Mel herself thought a little differently from me. With Adrian and his predecessors she had devoted more time to the pursuit of passion than I ever did. But then, Mel didn’t have children to consume her energy, draining it with their needs and the exhausting negotiations of parent–child love.

Mel’s own cheerful explanation for her persistence would have been that she was still looking for a man to replace her daddy. Whereas I had run so far and so fast from mine that by now I had shaken off all male bonds altogether. Except for Jack, of course.

Mel’s thoughts must have been travelling along a path parallel to mine. And, as often happened, they moved faster. ‘Tell me about your father. I don’t think you ever have, not properly. What was he like? Do you look like him?’

‘Not really. Our eyes and hands are the same shape.’

Her questions made me shiver.

I had been thinking about him as I walked through the opalescent evening. I could feel his shadow here in the restaurant. There was no reason for this tonight of all nights, other than premonition, but he was already in my mind.

‘Go on.’

I told her, reluctantly, that my father was a perfumer, and a con artist.

Mel fixed all her formidable attention on me. Her black eyes held mine and I knew that if I chose to say more she would listen intently. If I should happen to need advice or a reliable insight, those would be forthcoming too. But all my instincts told me – as they always tell me – to hold my tongue and to keep my history to myself. ‘You would like him, all women do. He was a perfumer’s “nose”,’ I added.

Stay there, stay away, I wanted to warn him. The shadow was lengthening as he came closer.

‘Go on,’ Mel repeated. She was ready to be fascinated.

With only the one obvious exception, myself, women did find Ted Thompson utterly magnetic. He was a good-looking man, for one thing, with the looks of a Forties movie star. He loved being told that he resembled Spencer Tracy.

‘Do you hear that, Sadie?’ he would say and laugh. ‘Your old man? What do you think?’

‘I can’t see it,’ I’d mutter. ‘You just look like my dad.’ That was what I wanted him to be, just my dad.

The real basis for his success with women, though, was his interest in them. He had a stagy trick of cupping his target’s upturned face in his hands and then breathing in the warmth of it as if the skin’s scent were the most direct route to knowing its owner. He would close his eyes for a moment, frowning in concentration, then murmur, ‘I could create such a perfume for you. The top notes sweet and floral to reflect your beauty but with the firmest base, cedarwood with earth and metal tones, for your great strength.’

Or some such nonsense, anyway.

‘His job was to mix essences, the building blocks of scent, to create perfume. He told me it was like painting a picture, making the broad brushstrokes that give the first impression and then filling in the details, the light and shade, to create the fragrance that lingers in the memory.’

As I talked I was thinking about the words from my childhood, ambergris and musk and vetiver. Not the scents or essences themselves because I didn’t inherit Ted’s nose and could barely have distinguished one from another, but the pure sounds of the words with their velvety textures. I recalled them the way other children might remember television programmes or ice-cream flavours, and I was back to being ten years old again. I could hear the click of heels on the unloved parquet of our hallway and the scrape of unpruned garden branches in the wind, working like fingernails at the glass of the front room’s bay window.

‘Why did I never know that? It sounds highly exotic.’

‘Yes.’

It was exotic, in its way, Ted’s world. But you couldn’t describe my growing up on the edge of it as anything of the kind.

‘What about the other thing? The con artist bit?’

‘That’s a manner of speaking. Perfume is nothing more than a promise in a bottle, Ted used to say. It exists to create an illusion.’

My discomfort was growing. I didn’t want to talk to Mel about my father. We had reached an unspoken truce long ago, the old illusionist and me, and chatting about him and his life’s work, even to Mel, was outside the terms of the agreement.

‘I thought smell was the truest of the senses.’

‘Smell may be. But perfume, on the other hand, is meant to disguise and flatter, and lead the senses astray.’

‘I have just realised something. You never wear it, do you?’

‘No,’ I said.

Mel always moved in a cloud of scent. She changed her allegiances but the emphasis was constant. Ted wore cologne. He had created one for himself and he used it liberally. I never thought it suited him. It was too salty and citrusy, too fresh and clean and outdoor, and when I was a child the discrepancy between the man I knew and the way he smelled was always troubling. The scent rose in my head now, like the first warning of a migraine.

‘Why?’

‘I prefer the smell of skin,’ I smiled. I remembered the way Lola and Jack used to smell when they were babies.

‘What’s the real reason?’

‘There’s no other reason,’ I said.

I put down my knife and fork, placing them very precisely together between uneaten half-moons of ravioli.

Mel stared at me for a moment, then she lightly held up her hand. If I didn’t want to talk about my father she wasn’t going to force me to and I appreciated her tact. But in the little silence that followed I understood that the closed topic made an uncomfortable feeling between us. Mel was hurt by my reticence. For the first time, she had noticed that I wasn’t entirely open with her. This meant that she was wondering what else I held back and how well she did know me, and therefore whether our friendship was really as close as she had let herself believe.

I wanted to reach out and take her hand, and tell her not to mind.

I wanted to assure her that I hid nothing except my history, and this no longer mattered to me. But I didn’t do it and the moment passed. The brown-skinned waiter came and took our plates away, asking me if everything had been all right.

‘Fine,’ I murmured. ‘Just a bit too much.’

Mel sat back in her chair and lit another cigarette. The three young women had ordered puddings and were enjoying a chocolate high. The quartet of old friends had already left, hurrying back to relieve their babysitters. The noise in the restaurant was slowly diminishing.

‘How’s your mum, by the way?’ I asked.

She looked at me as if she were going to protest that this blatant change of topic was beneath me, but then she shrugged. ‘She’s being quite difficult.’

This was not new. Mel’s glamorous mother had become elegantly and minutely demanding in her old age. We talked about her for a while, until the atmosphere between us warmed again. We exchanged some news of Caz and Graham, my oldest friends whom Mel had met many times and with whom she was now friendly in her own right. She asked about Penny, my business partner, and Penny’s lover Evelyn, and Evelyn’s baby, Cassie. I gave her the small pieces of information eagerly, trying to make amends.

Then we studied the pudding menu together. Mel spotted it first and her face puckered with delight before she started laughing. She pointed the item out to me.