If My Father Loved Me

After a minute I pushed a pile of ironing off the sofa in the window recess. Lola and I sat down to finish our tea and Jack perched on a high stool. He rested his fingertips on the counter top and rocked on to the front legs of the stool, then on to the back legs. The clunk, clunk noise on the wooden floorboards made me want to shout at him, but I kept quiet.

In the end Lola groaned, ‘Jack, sit still.’

‘It’s quite difficult to keep your balance, actually,’ he said.

Lola sniffed. ‘What if he’s going to die? I don’t want him to die, I love him.’

‘So do I,’ Jack added, not to be outdone.

It was true. My children had an uncomplicated, affectionate relationship with Ted. They teased him, gently, for being set in his ways. He remembered their birthdays and sent them occasional unsolicited cheques. In a corner of myself I envied the simplicity of their regard for each other.

I stroked Lola’s hair. ‘Let’s all go to bed,’ I suggested. ‘Grandad’s asleep. If anything changes they’re going to ring us. We’ll see him tomorrow.’

I followed Jack up the stairs into his bedroom. I sat on the end of the bed and he lay on his back with his arms folded behind his head.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

‘Can we tell Dad what’s happened?’

‘Of course. In the morning.’

Tony wouldn’t appreciate a call about his ex-father-in-law in the middle of a week night.

Jack turned on his side, presenting his back to me.

‘I’m going to sleep now.’

‘That’s good.’ I leaned over and kissed his ear, but he gave no response.

The air in Lola’s room was thick with smoke and joss.

‘Lo. Have you been smoking in here?’ Obviously.

‘We’ve been sitting worrying, waiting for you to get back.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’ Did all mothers have to apologise so often? Was this the main transaction in every family, once your children stopped being little? Or was it just the case in my family?

‘Goodnight, Mum.’

‘Goodnight, darling. I love you.’

In my own bedroom I turned on the bedside light and drew the curtains. Then I lay down on my bed, still fully dressed. I stared at the ceiling. Now that I tried to picture my father’s face, I couldn’t conjure up his features. All I could see was his shadow.

‘Don’t die,’ I ordered the dark shape. ‘Not until I’ve had a chance to talk to you.’

I felt cold, even though the room was warm. I knew that I was afraid of his going, but it was at a distance, as if I couldn’t reach inside my own heart and get at the fear and the love that went with it. I was reduced to making a numb, dry-eyed acknowledgement, a nod in the direction of real feelings, as though my emotions belonged to someone else.

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

They had put him in a small room off the main ward. There he was, lying on his back, his head propped on pillows. I saw that his profile had become a sharper, bonier version of the one I knew, as if layers of fat and muscle had been scraped away from his skull. His nose looked bigger and his skin was pale and shiny, stretched tight over the bones.

I hesitated at the door but he opened his eyes and turned his head to look straight at me. ‘Hello, Sade. Sorry about this. Damned nuisance.’

I smiled at him. ‘Hello, Dad.’

All night and as I drove out of London I had been dreading this moment. I had been afraid of how he would look and of what we would say to each other with the spectre of death in the room. Now that I was actually here I saw that he was hooked up to wires and tubes ran into his arms. He looked ill, but still not so different from his usual self, and my fear was not in speaking of painful matters, but that he might go away before we had a chance to talk at all.

There was a red plastic chair in the cramped space beside his bed. I sat down and took one of his hands, lacing my fingers with his. We had so rarely touched each other. Somewhere deep inside my head I could feel the pressure of tears, but I knew I wasn’t going to cry. ‘How do you feel?’

He ran his tongue over his lips. ‘Rough as a bear’s back.’

‘What happened?’

‘Chest pain. I rang Jean Andrews and she came right over.’

I knew Mrs Andrews. She was Ted’s neighbour. It would have been Mrs Andrews who came here with him in the ambulance. He was wearing his own pyjamas, and his glasses and a paperback book were lying on his bedside locker, so she must have packed his bag for him, too. She was probably the last of the line of Ted’s girlfriends, or ‘aunties’ as I was taught to call them when I was little, although I don’t believe Jean really performed any services for my father beyond looking out for him and bringing him the newspaper.

‘Why didn’t you call me?’

He moistened his lips again. There was a covered jug and a plastic beaker on the locker, so I poured some water and held the beaker for him while he drank a mouthful. Afterwards I took his hand once more.

‘Thanks. I thought I’d see the quack first, let him take a shufti. Might all have been a false alarm.’

The vocabulary made my neck stiffen, just a little, as it always did.

Ted had served in the RAF during the war. He was not a pilot but an aircraftsman, working on the maintenance of Spitfires that flew in the Battle of Britain, although he didn’t like to be too specific about his exact rank and responsibility. When on the back foot he still reached for words like prang and crate and willco, as if this threadbare old slang could lend him some extra strength or status.

He lived increasingly in the past, like many old people, although the difference with Ted was that the geography of that other country was largely imaginary. But the boundaries between truth and illusion didn’t really matter all that much, I thought. Not any longer.

My fingers tightened on his. ‘I’m here now,’ I said.

‘How’s my cutie? And Jack?’

When she was a little girl Ted always called Lola his cutie. He was delighted to have a granddaughter, although he protested that it made him feel old. ‘She’s going to be a heartbreaker,’ he used to say. ‘Just look at those bright eyes.’

I should have made sure he saw more of his grandchildren on ordinary days, not just the set-piece ones armoured with conventions and pressured by expectations. I should have tried to forget my own growing up and let the next generation make amends for our failures.

‘Lola’s just fine. She’s going to come in and see you later, or maybe tomorrow. And Jack’s okay, although he doesn’t like school that much.’

‘Neither did I when I was his age. I used to sit next to a boy called Peter Dobson. He would shake his pen deliberately to make blots all over my work, and he and his chums used to lie in wait for me after school and pull my books out and run off with my comics.’

‘I don’t think things have changed for the better.’

I realised that there were pins and needles in my arm and my wrist ached with the tension of lightly holding his hand. I shifted my position and he asked, ‘Are you comfortable?’

‘Yes. Are you?’

He sighed, restlessly shifting his thin legs under the covers. ‘Not very.’