‘Nah, I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Really?’ He pauses. He pauses for quite a long time. Anyone seeing him from a distance would think he was looking out over the water, contemplating life. ‘I’m scared, too,’ he says finally. ‘I’m scared all the time.’ Where has this come from? I never said I was scared. And his words come across as purposely flippant, dismissive even. He doesn’t sound scared. ‘I guess we just have to keep on keeping on,’ he adds. ‘Take it one step at a time.’
‘I guess so.’ I look out across the water. I see the dragonfly again, hovering by the flank of a houseboat. It hesitates, then levitates away.
I should be asking him if he really is scared and why – what I can do to help? I should ask him to talk to me, really talk to me. I don’t believe he is as flippant as he sounds. I don’t believe in his dismissiveness, or mine. But we’re not there yet, are we?
Dad stands up, stretches out his shoulders in a giant shrug, turns his face towards mine. ‘Anywhere we can get another ice cream?’ he says. ‘A normal one?’
‘Well,’ I say, looking around me, ‘I think I can spy a Mr Whippy van over there.’
‘Splendid.’
When we get home, Dad walks straight over to The Palladian window and opens it wide.
‘Dad!’ I exclaim. ‘You’ve opened the window! Are you going to let your hair down on to the citizens of Chalk Farm?’
‘No, just getting a little air in,’ he says.
Progress, I think. We are no longer stifling. This is progress. I’m quite unnerved, I realize, at the thought of Dad being scared. I mean, yes, he’s blind. Yes, he gave up on life when the guide dogs were no longer there to help him with day-to-day living. He’s reclusive, elusive, shut down and shut off. But scared. I don’t like the thought of it. People like Philippa are scared. People who are despairing are scared. I’m glad we brushed past the moment, shrugged it off. I’m not ready for such a moment with Dad.
I also think about the other things we talked about. After dinner – a delicious Tuscan stew with ciabatta bread and a leafy green salad – I wait until Dad nods off in his chair for an early-evening nap, then I go to the tall cupboard, reach under the photo album, and get out my paintings.
It’s one of my secrets. I’ve been painting for about fifteen years. Portraits of Dad, mostly, as he sits in his chair, sometimes awake, sometimes sleeping. Sometimes a small smile plays around his lips as he uses his Braille reader. Sometimes he looks like a grumpy child, in repose. I try to capture the essence of him, his personality, his Italian-ness; what makes my dad my dad. I have other pictures I’m working on. Sketches. Line drawings. Faces I’ve copied from magazines. Faces that don’t even exist, only in my mind. I’ve kept my brush-in-water-pot jangles and swishes – lovely sounds I haven’t dared make – to a silent minimum. I haven’t hummed as I’ve worked, or accidentally dropped any lids of paint tubes on to the floor. My painting has been a very hidden pursuit and I feel guilty – for the subterfuge and for the voyeurism, in particular – that I’ve sat painting my father and he’s been totally unaware of it.
I haven’t wanted him to know. Yes, I know he can’t see my efforts, but he would have encouraged me to show someone and I haven’t wanted to. They’re not good enough.
I think that as I look at them again now – twelve or so portraits of Dad, in pencil, or oil paint, or watercolour, and the other sketches and paintings I’ve done. I look at them critically, each and every one. They’re just not good enough.
I put them away again. Under the photo album in the tall cupboard. Some things we don’t mention. Lots of things we keep hidden away. Still, it’s a hobby. And a woman who sits in a flat for years on end doing bugger all needs a hobby.
CHAPTER 11
‘Bloody hell, Dad, this is amazing!’
‘I told you it was beautiful!’
‘Yeah, but this, this … How come I’ve never heard of this place?’
‘Not a lot of people have. It’s one of London’s best kept secrets.’
‘But you remembered it.’
‘Of course I remembered it!’
It’s Wednesday. We nearly didn’t come here today. To St Dunstan in the East. We were all ready to head out the door – me in a chambray sundress that has never seen the light of day; Dad in navy chinos and a black Fred Perry – when Dad said, ‘Why are we doing this, Prue? I don’t want to go out today.’
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘You were looking forward to this – Dunstan in the Whatsit …’
‘I’m not sure I can face it,’ he said, hovering in the doorway and looking anxious. ‘London, the crowds, the whole bloody difficulty of getting anywhere, Prue.’
He’s scared, I thought. He told me he was scared and he is.
‘Well, I think we should try,’ I said perkily. It threw me, seeing him like that. I didn’t like it. But I knew, suddenly, that I wanted to stick to Dad’s list, to see it through, step by step. I knew we had a long way to go. I knew the road was going to be difficult, and stressful, but we were taking those steps, one at a time, and we were talking more, too. Just a little. I felt panicked at the thought of that stopping, of us going back to the way we were.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Let’s go. We’ve got water and we can pick up a few snacks en route, and we can stop any time we like …’ I am trying to jolly him out the door. ‘Let’s go, Dad.’
Dad sighed. ‘It’s just so hard,’ he said, his hand on the door frame as though he were about to pivot himself around and go back to his chair.
‘I know. I know it is. But let’s just go, shall we? See how we feel. Please don’t be scared, Dad.’
I said it. The ‘s’ word. I said it softly and I meant it kindly, to be received with a comprehension that I was being understanding, receptive, cajoling. But did Dad see it as a challenge? A hurdle to overcome? Something in him seemed to shift.
‘OK, we’ll see how we feel,’ he said, letting his hand fall from the door frame. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Good boy,’ I replied.
He was quiet on the walk into Chalk Farm station. He was quiet on the tube. He was quiet on the sunny walk from Tower Hill to St Dunstan in the East, a beautiful courtyard garden flanked with the windowless remains of the tower and spire of a medieval church – destroyed by German bombs in the Second World War. Fairy-tale ivy trails run rampant over the Gothic window arches and blackened white stone edifices. Trees – rising unbidden and unchallenged between paving stones and ancient cobbles, their curious branches winding between the defiant arches and pillars – seek the sun. Peonies crouch in sprawling clusters and count themselves pretty in wild flowerbeds. It is the most secret of secret gardens and it is beautiful.
As we stepped inside, down a series of stone steps, and I gasped at the beauty of the place, Dad clutched at my arm.
‘Is it still the same, Prue?’ he asked me, almost frantic. ‘I need to know it’s the same!’
I described it to him, everything that I could see. Every detail of the blackened walls and the arches and the ivy. Every intricacy of the Gothic windows – proud and resolute and beautiful – as best I could. I told him about the Japanese tourists sitting in the stunning glassless stone frames and taking photos of each other. Of the couple entwined on the grass in one hallowed corner – a tangle of denim and white T-shirts – both reading books but reaching up to kiss each other at intervals. Of another couple, arms wrapped round each other, taking a selfie by the semicircle of benches in the courtyard.
‘A place for lovers,’ Dad says to me now, as we continue to walk slowly around the gardens. ‘The most beautiful place in London.’ He is serene now he knows it’s just the same. He is smiling. ‘The Great Fire of London got it first,’ he adds. ‘In sixteen sixty-six. Then the Nazis, of course. But beauty remains,’ he says. ‘Beauty remains.’
I look over at the face of the pretty girl in the corner reading Iris Murdoch, as she lies in her boyfriend’s arms. His
face when he looks at her. This place is magical, I think. An enchanted space that London keeps as its secret. A dream. It’s for people like her. This girl. Beautiful, youthful, loved by somebody and full of her own dreams, who the universe nods at with a smile and sees to it that they mostly come true.
I see Philippa’s face, in my mind – in that lace-effect photo – so beautiful and now gone from this earth. I fleetingly allow my mother’s face to enter my thoughts – a flimsy, fragile image, sweet and smiling and (mistakenly) lovely, from my very early years – before banishing it. And then there’s my own face. Beauty doesn’t remain if you’ve never had it in the first place, I think. If you’ve never possessed it, you won’t get to see it fade with the years, as life and sunlight gradually take their toll. Women like the one with the radio on Primrose Hill – whose every wrinkle is another day sipping from an oversized glass of pinot grigio in a beer garden or an afternoon on a ‘hot lips’ beach towel in Benidorm, while reading a James Herbert – get to see it fade. I just see my birthmark. Every day. In the mirror.
‘Shall we?’ says Dad. He takes my arm again and we carry on walking. Birds chatter in the trees intertwined with stone. A child laughs as a father places her inside a vacant window arch. I feel entranced but disquieted in this damaged but beautiful place, this relic that stands prettier than ever for its imperfections. It’s clearly having an odd effect on me.
We walk. We walk around and around, and Dad trails his hand over the draping luxuriant ivy and we accidentally disturb a kissing couple half-concealed by foliage on a bench, and the man drops his giant pack of crisps and Dad says, ‘Whoopsie,’ and fumbles to pick them up and everyone laughs, and we walk and I describe everything to Dad and we walk some more. I think that I may never have seen this place, had Dad not shown it to me. And I would not have seen him look the way he does today. He looks almost happy, and I feel the merest glimmer of hope; a tiny shard of light piercing the darkness of our lives, that now we are out here, now we are talking, we could change our lives a little. Get closer. Throw off some of those chains that held us in The Palladian for so long. Will the list be a good thing, after all? I really don’t know, but we’ll see where it takes us, Dad and me. Maybe we could get there.
‘Hello, Bertie.’
Dad and I are standing under the engraved stone architrave of an arch and I am looking up at its intricacies as Dad explains Gothic medieval architecture to me. I freeze. I keep my eyes on the arch. The voice says, ‘Hello, Bertie,’ again.
Alberta – Albert – Bertie. It was a nickname that didn’t take long to conjure up. It was a nickname I had loved. I daren’t look behind me, where the voice is coming from. It sounds so strange to hear it, after all this time.
‘Bertie?’
I still don’t turn around. I am cursing myself for conjuring him up somehow, when I let that Polaroid fall from the photo album. I shouldn’t have looked at it. I shouldn’t have let my eyes fall on his face. I shouldn’t have thought about him since. And remembered how it was.
I daren’t turn around, but I have to.
‘Hello, Kemp.’
Kemp. The boy I knew at school; nicknamed by Third Year consensus after both of Spandau Ballet’s Kemp brothers for his zealous New Romantic phase – frilly shirts, pointy boots, the lot – showcased mostly at school discos, where he danced alone in corners. The man who is a brilliant photographer: landscapes, people, sunsets. Who spent most of his time at school holed up in the dark room of the Art Department. He’s still one of National Geographic’s most in demand. He has a camera on him now, looped from his shoulder in a suede bag.
‘I thought it was you.’
I haven’t seen him for seven years, but he looks almost exactly the same – dusty jeans, work boots, a T-shirt boasting where he’s been on his endless travels – Big Sur, apparently. Dishevelled was always his thing, when I finally became his friend, ten years ago, long after the New Romantic frills of school: scuffed boots and never-tucked-in-shirts and a series of terrible jackets even an Orwellian tramp would refuse, but it suited him. It still does. Today he is proper salt-and-pepper grey, weather-beaten around the edges; his face is craggy and crinkled, above a new and surprising beard, but when it crinkles into a slow smile those lighthouse eyes glow, just like they always did.
‘How are you?’
‘Good, thanks, really good, and you?’
I don’t want to look him in the eye as I don’t want him looking me in the eye. He is still beautiful; I am still ugly. Am I shaking? I hope I’m not shaking.
‘Great, thanks. Just getting a few shots of this place. Isn’t it amazing?’
‘Yes, it is,’ I say. I’ve tried not to think of him for the longest time, but I have. I always have. Kemp is why I can’t listen to one of Bonnie Raitt’s greatest hits. Kemp is why I don’t like looking at houseboats or going to Camden or green scarves. Kemp is why I hide that Polaroid where I can’t see it because if I see it, I’ll remember I loved him. ‘What a surprise.’
‘This place, or bumping into me?’
‘Both,’ I say.
He smiles at me. I am shy. I am knocked sideways. I am suddenly and irretrievably in what is commonly known as a right old state. It is him and he is here. He is just the same. I feel the same, which is terrible. As I am still me. Not pretty. Not right. So far out of his league and romantic interest I’m on another continent, perhaps one of those he has roamed to, camera in hand. In the heat and dust. Far from anyone.
‘Hello, Vince,’ Kemp says to Dad, reaching out his hand for Dad to shake it. ‘Kemp. Nice to see you again.’
‘Likewise,’ says Dad. They met a few times, why wouldn’t they have? Kemp was my friend.
‘We’re on a day out,’ I say. I am definitely trembling, on this fiercely hot morning, in my chambray dress, and hope to hell Kemp doesn’t notice.
‘Great,’ he replies. ‘Beautiful weather for it. It’s nice to see you both. It’s been a while,’ he adds, looking at me in such an open, friendly way I want to bury my face in the ivy and leave it there.
‘Yes, it has.’ I want to avert my eyes, but I can’t help drinking him in; his face, his hair, his biceps in that T-shirt. The chickenpox scar near his left eye I always had to restrain myself from stroking gently with my finger.
‘Sorry I haven’t been in touch.’
‘What?’ It was me who ghosted him, before it was even a thing. Who stopped returning all texts and phone calls. Who turned my face away from him for the safety of my heart. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I add quickly. I can’t read his face. Is he teasing me, because he knows it was me who dropped contact? Or is he just being Kemp, guileless and lovely, and sorry he hasn’t been in touch when it’s me who should be apologizing to him?
‘You’ve been busy,’ I add, which sounds stupid and like I’m accusing him of something, but I just mean I’ve seen his photos in magazines and that I’ve examined the small-print credits for his name and got that feeling, when I’ve seen it.
‘Yeah.’ Kemp laughs. He was always laughing. He had the kind of laugh that lit up his whole face and could go on for an hour, at a joke he’d heard three days before and was attempting to retell you. He pushes a reed of salt-and-pepper hair out of his eyes and tucks it behind his ear. ‘I’m doing OK.’
He’s still wearing those leather bands around his wrists. He’s still got that silver necklace with the tiny half-pearl shell on it. He’s a laid-back man. Handsome, ordinary, extraordinary. Like if the boy next door grew his hair down to his collar and got sexily scruffy and looked you in the eye one day, over the fence, in a way that suggested he not only knew all the dark contents of your soul but was going to have a go at dragging them into the light.
If only.
‘Good,’ I say. ‘Good.’
‘So, how are you keeping, Vince?’ Kemp asks Dad.
‘I’m keeping well,’ says Dad. ‘Prue here is taking me round London for the summer.’
‘Fantastic,’ says Kemp. ‘One of the capital’
s best kept secrets, this place. I can’t believe I haven’t discovered it before.’
‘Don’t tell anyone about it,’ says Dad.
‘Ah,’ says Kemp, with another laugh, ‘better destroy my photos, then.’
Dad laughs too. He always did like Kemp. Not as much as I did, obviously.
The laughter hangs in the air for a while then, inevitably, fades away. We’re left with nothing. Silence and regret – all mine – hang between us like a gossamer hammock. I feel I should break it, but I don’t know what to say. What could I possibly say, after all these years? What should I say that won’t give away how much he meant to me?
The silence goes on far too long.
‘OK, well, nice to see you,’ Kemp says eventually.
‘And you.’ I am brisk, pleasant. I can’t look at him any longer.
‘Really nice to see you,’ he repeats. ‘Bye, Vince.’ He turns, shakes Dad’s hand again, then turns back to me. ‘OK, then.’ He gives a small shrug. Runs one hand through his hair. ‘Bye, Prue.’ And, with a quick smile, Kemp bounds away from us, his camera swinging at his hip, and up the stone steps of St Dunstan in the East and out of my life again.
‘Bye,’ I whisper.
‘Good to see him again, after all this time,’ says Dad. ‘Nice bloke. A good friend of yours, wasn’t he, at the time?’
‘Yes, he was.’
‘No romance, though?’
‘No, Dad, no romance.’
Of course there was no romance. Dad is forgetting who I am.
‘Right, then,’ he says, clapping his hands. ‘Seen enough? Shall we go for a little wander around the area? Maybe head up to Monument?’ He sounds so uncharacteristically chirpy.
‘OK,’ I say. I don’t mind. I’d quite like to walk around a bit more. I’d like to clear my head, but I don’t think I can – not now. All I can see is Kemp. All I can think is Kemp.
We come out of London’s best kept secret and turn on to St Dunstan’s Lane. We head towards St-Mary-at-Hill and Monument Square.
‘Oh, I can see that couple again,’ I say. ‘On the other side of the road. The ones with the crisps.’ They are still kissing. They have their arms round each other’s waist and are kissing in an ungainly, grinning manner as they walk. The sort of kisses people would die for.
Summer in the City Page 8