“I don’t know,” he said.
“I’m going to get a coffee cake. Why don’t I get us two? And some Earl Grey.” His eyes looked past me and over my shoulder, widening slightly in awe.
“Goodness gracious.”
“What?”
“Don’t look now, but three of the Mitford sisters have just arrived.” I felt a thud of disappointment and hated myself for it. I knew what I had to do in these situations—Gwen and I had spoken about it a number of times. But I didn’t want to play along with an imagining today. I didn’t want to spend this precious time with my dad in a sad reversed parent-child dynamic in which I knew what was real and he didn’t. I wanted the vital, exacting Dad who could tell me about Picasso’s French chateau and exactly what cakes we should order from his favourite bakery. The charming, silly Dad who’d order chips and put one on his shoulder—a daft gag for weary waiting staff. The Dad who’d draw maps on paper tablecloths. The Dad who’d catch the waiter’s attention at the end of the meal and use his finger to mime writing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him do that.
“Really?”
“Yes!” he said, with gleeful mischief. “Right, have a look now.” I dutifully turned around to see three women who looked nothing alike, other than they all had grey hair, standing at the counter and examining the cakes through the glass.
“Ah yes,” I said meekly.
“Nancy, Diana and Unity. There they are.”
“There they are,” I repeated. “Right. Tea?”
“Nancy must be over from France. I would so love to talk to her. Wonder what she’d make of a Non-U like me.”
“Mr. Dean?” We both turned around. A man stood by our table—forty-something, soft-faced with masses of thick brown hair and round tortoiseshell glasses. “It’s Arthur Lunn. I was one of your pupils, years ago. At St. Michael’s.” Dad stared at him blankly. “There’s no reason why you’d remember me. You gave me extra help when I was applying to Oxford. I’m pretty sure it’s the only reason I got in.”
“So lovely to meet you,” I said. “I’m his daughter, Nina.” Dad was visibly distracted by the three women at the counter. “What Oxford college did you go to?”
“Magdalen. I was miserable for most of it, but still, it’s probably the happiest my mum has ever been, the day I got my acceptance letter, so I have a lot to thank you for, Mr. Dean.”
“Call him Bill,” I said. Dad snapped his head back round to us briefly.
“Yes, Bill’s fine,” he said.
“Bill. Feels weirdly overfamiliar to call your teacher by their first name, even as a forty-four-year-old man.”
“Yes, it’s strange that,” I said, grasping at platitudes.
“I was going to try and get hold of you, actually, to let you know there’s a Facebook group in your honour, where lots of your old students talk about you and share stories and memories of you as a teacher. Some really nice old photos as well from results days. I’ll have to tell them that I saw you.”
Dad continued to study the three women.
“Dad,” I said gently, trying to get his attention. He focused on us.
“Did you ever read Love in a Cold Climate?” he asked.
Arthur politely tried to hide his bafflement. “No, I don’t think I did.”
“You must.”
“What are you doing now?” I said, my small talk trying to paint over the cracks of Dad’s conversational logic.
“I’m a lawyer,” he said. “Which is probably a waste of an English degree. But I think maybe every job is a waste of an English degree.”
“Yes,” I said. “I think you’re right.” I was desperate to explain to him that Dad was ill—I was desperate for his long-held memories of Mr. Dean inspiring and encouraging him not to be replaced by this disconnected man who could barely say hello.
“Well, I’d better go, I’m here with my family.” He pointed over to a woman at a table, getting ready to leave with two preadolescent boys in navy puffa jackets who had their dad’s abundance of brown hair. “It was so lovely to see you again. I think about you every time I start a new book. You always told us that literature belongs to everyone and that we should never feel intimidated by it. I say that to my two boys now they’re just starting to love reading.”
Dad smiled at him and said nothing.
“Thank you so much for coming over,” I said.
As I watched Arthur and his family leave, I realized he must have been in the photo that I found in the box of Dad’s documents at home—the one of the smiling boy with his parents on graduation day at Magdalen College. I wanted to run after him and explain what was going on. But Dad was too disorientated to leave in the café on his own, and I was worried he would try to speak to the three tribute act Mitford sisters he was so entranced by. So instead I watched Arthur and his family walk out of the bakery and along the road until they disappeared. And Dad and I talked about nothing but the Mitford sisters sighting all the way home.
Mum answered the door in yet another workout ensemble of purple flowery leggings and a grey vest top with a matching zip-up hoodie. On the back of it was an outline of a Buddha in metal studs.
“Hello, lovey,” she said to Dad, kissing him on the cheek. “How was the exhibition?”
“Wonderful,” he said.
Mum placed a precise, glossy-lipped kiss on my face.
“We both saw The Dream for the first time, which I think might be my favourite of his paintings,” I said. “The colours were incredible in the flesh.”
“Yes, and we only bloody spotted three of the Mitford sisters! Diana, Nancy and Unity,” Dad said, while sitting on the stairs to take off his shoes. “Wanted to eavesdrop to see if they were talking politics.”
“Aren’t they all—” Mum started. I glanced at her, reminding her of our agreement. “Right. That’s exciting.”
“And we went to that Hungarian bakery Dad loves,” I said, trying to subtly switch topical gears. “Ate some coffee cake.”
“Sounds like you had the time of Riley,” Mum said.
“Life,” Dad replied, holding on to the bannister as he stood up.
“Sorry?”
“Living the life of Riley,” he said. “Or having the time of your life. You can’t have the time of Riley.”
Mum hated being corrected—I inherited this trait from her.
“Yes, all right, Bill,” she said.
“Do you want a cup of tea, Dad?”
“Yes please, Bean,” he said, walking into the living room.
“Gwen’s here,” Mum said when he’d shut the door.
We went into the kitchen. Gwen was sitting at the table, reading through her notepad with a pen poised in one hand and a mug of tea in the other. She looked up and gave me a reassuringly wide smile.
“Nina, how are you?”
“I’m good, thank you, how are you?”
“Very well. I was just catching up with your mum.”
“I was telling Gwen about how he’s still getting up in the middle of the night.”
“Which is very normal at this stage,” Gwen said. “His internal clock will be altered and his sense of time will be all over the place which, as you can imagine, is very confusing. He won’t understand why it’s dark outside when it’s the middle of the night, because he feels like it’s the morning and he’s just woken up.”
“Yes, which is why he bangs about downstairs every night at three a.m.,” Mum said.
“As long as he’s staying in the house,” I said. “Although I appreciate that must be very annoying for you, Mum.”
She nodded gratefully. I’d learnt through Dad’s illness that so often all she needed was acknowledgement of the difficulties she was facing.
“Are there any other new behaviours that you’d like to talk to me about?” Gwen aske
d. “How are the imaginings?”
“They’re about the same,” Mum said. “Most of the time he’s just in a different time, thinking he’s still working or that his mum’s still alive. Occasionally they’re more far-fetched.”
“I think it’s because of all his reading,” I said. “He’s spent his life immersing himself in other worlds—conjuring images from what he’s read on the page. I’m sure that must have given him a wealth of stories for his mind to draw on.”
“Absolutely,” Gwen said. “And as we’ve discussed before, if going along with it has a calming effect, then you should absolutely go along with it.”
“The only problem is,” Mum said, going to the side table in the kitchen where the phone and a pile of notebooks sat, “he’s started marking.” She opened her page-a-day diary, which was covered in Dad’s handwriting, crosses and ticks.
“I’ve had an idea,” I said, putting my handbag on the table and pulling out some old workbooks. “I found a few projects from my old pupils when I taught English. I think I could easily find some more. So we can give them to him to mark.” I looked at Mum, who was clearly uncomfortable at the thought of using props to placate Dad’s imaginings, but wanted to seem calm and cooperative in front of Gwen.
“Great idea,” Gwen said, finishing the last of her tea. “No harm in trying.”
* * *
—
“How’s everything else been?” I asked Mum once Gwen had left.
“Oh, same old same old. Gloria and I did Pilatus this morning,” she said.
“Pilates,” I corrected. Why did I have to correct her? Would I have done the same to Katherine or Lola? What was it about mothers that lowered a woman’s irritation threshold by a metre just from speaking?
“Yes, that’s what I said, Pilatus.”
“And how was it?”
“It was fine—I mean, I do wonder how much good it does, lying on our backs splaying our legs around every which way with a lashing strap. How are you, darling?” she said. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot.”
“I’m okay,” I said.
“No word, I gather?”
“Nope, no word, but there we go,” I said, aggressively stoic. “How’s Gloria?”
“She’s fine, she’s worried about you too. It’s just so strange for our generation. In my day—if you said you were going to be somewhere, you were going to be somewhere. You’d say, ‘I’ll meet you outside Woolworths at seven,’ and if you weren’t outside Woolworths at seven, you’d leave the other person standing in the cold. And it was unthinkable to do that to someone. I blame all this constant communication, everything has become too casual. When we were young, there were no mobiles, no social media, no MyFace,” she said. I couldn’t be bothered to correct her. “So you had to stick to a plan and stand by your word. Where’s the sense of honour gone?”
“Why were you going on a date to Woolworths?”
“Fine—you don’t want to listen to me.”
“No, I do, I do.”
“All I mean is—I think there is a lack of duty to each other now.”
“But love shouldn’t be about duty, Mum,” I said, splashing milk into a cup of tea to make it an exact shade of tawny brown.
She gave a theatrically knowing laugh. “A lot of love is about duty, Nina.” Dad shouted from the living room, asking if I could bring him a glass of water as well as tea. Mum smiled in acknowledgement of his unwitting comic timing. “Thank you for today.”
“My pleasure,” I said. “We had a great time.”
“Do you want to stay for dinner? I’ve learnt how to make low-carb tagliatelle just from a celeriac and a potato peeler, it’s amazing, you won’t believe it.”
“I’d love to, but I’ve got a thing tonight.”
“A date?” she asked excitedly.
“No, Mum, not a date.”
“I’m only teasing. We do a singles night at church, you should come. We need some more heads. They’re dropping like flies at the moment.”
“You’re doing a lot at church recently,” I said, taking the tea with one hand and a glass of water with the other.
“I’m applying to be social secretary.”
“Do you even believe in God?”
“You don’t have to believe in God to have a good time,” she said as we walked into the living room. Dad looked up from his book.
“You certainly don’t!” he boomed. I handed him his mug and he pulled himself up in the chair by his elbows.
“Right, I better go,” I said, putting a hand on Dad’s shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “I’ve got a question for you both.”
“Go on,” Mum said.
“What is the most annoying song you think you’ve ever heard?”
They both looked into the middle distance and searched through their invisible Rolodexes.
“Anything by the Steve Miller Band,” Mum said.
“No, not abrasive enough, I need something more universally annoying. Something that would make you prefer to have your ears hacked off with a blunt knife than listen to it.”
“Little orphan fella,” Dad said, taking a slurp of his tea.
“Oliver?” I asked. He put the mug down and returned his eyes to the book. “Do you mean the musical Oliver!?”
“Little friend of yours. Ginger hair, very shrill. We should have thrown him in a freezing-cold lake, quite frankly, he’s never coming here again.”
“Friend of mine?”
“Annie!” Mum said suddenly. “He means Annie. Remember we took you to a production of it one Christmas when you were little and your dad hated the songs so much he left in the first half-hour and waited for us in the foyer with the newspaper.” Mum was laughing as she recalled the memory, Dad was happily no longer listening.
“Genius,” I said. “Thank you.”
* * *
—
Alma was already at her door when I went upstairs to pick her up at eight. We had organized it the previous week—I told her I’d take her out for dinner wherever she liked, we’d just have to make sure we were out until just before eleven. She answered the door wearing a plum-tinted lipstick and amber perfume.
“You look lovely,” I said.
“I don’t think I have been taken out on a date for about twenty years, Nina,” she said as she held on to the bannister and walked down the stairs to my flat.
“Right, hold on one minute.” I went into the living room where Joe had set up his enormous, cumbersome sound system the day before. I put the Annie soundtrack into the CD drive and turned on the setting that would play the album on a loop, exactly as Joe had instructed me to. The bombastic opening strings and drum of “Tomorrow” reverberated around the room, then the singing began. Nasal, high-pitched wailing and a wobbly vibrato poured out of the towering speakers like a sonic flood. The bones of the flat shuddered from the volume. I winced as I returned to my front door and locked it on my way out.
“What is that noise?” Alma said as we descended the stairs to leave the building.
“It’s the Annie soundtrack. It’s a 1980s musical.”
“It doesn’t even sound like singing!”
“I know, it’s perfect, isn’t it?”
“Perfect,” she said with a mischievous smile.
She chose a Lebanese restaurant in Green Lanes. Over a long, languid feast—sumac-scattered salads, richly spiced dips, lentils and lamb, soft, pillowy pittas, lemony broad beans and delicate rosewater pudding—we talked about family, love, her grandchildren, my parents, Lebanon, London, cooking and eating. I paid the bill and got us a taxi back home just before eleven o’clock and when I opened the door into the hallway, I could hear the jolting orchestra and piercing, jeering chorus of “It’s the Hard Knock Life.” Angelo’s front door was ajar and when he heard us arrive he bolted out of his flat we
aring a white vest and grey tracksuit bottoms. His hair seemed more flyaway and his toffee eyes more bulging than usual.
“What is this?” he said, gesturing up at my flat.
“Hello, Angelo.”
“Have you been out all night?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said.
“Yes you have, I’ve just seen you come in.”
“No, we just popped outside. This is Alma, she’s your other neighbour.”
“When I knock on the door, there is no answer.”
“That’s because you don’t answer yours whenever I knock, so I thought that was the rule between us now.”
“Goodnight, dear!” Alma said as she climbed the stairs.
“Goodnight, Alma! Thank you for a lovely evening. The music will be off in—” I checked my watch, 10:56—“four minutes.”
“Okay, my dear,” she said.
“You cannot make noise like this.”
“Why not? It’s just as loud as the noise you make.”
“You don’t even want to listen to this,” he said. “You just play it to make me angry.”
“I do want to listen to it, it’s my favourite album.” The infantile cries of “Dumb Dog” were tumbling down the stairs. “Look, Angelo. I always wanted to be polite to you, I wanted us to get on. I didn’t want to be mates or anything, but I think it’s important to be civil with your neighbours. I tried to be reasonable, I was very patient. But you fucked it, mate. You completely and utterly fucked it.”
“I play my music because I have no one below me. You have someone below you.”
“You have someone above you. Then another person on top of that. And whether you like it or not, all three separate households are paying a ridiculous amount of money to live in a carved-up home that was once designed for one family.”
“What does this mean?”
“It means we are technically all sharing a house, so we have to be as considerate to each other as possible. And if we can’t do that then we should leave London.”
He shook his head. “If you play that sound again, I call the police.”
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