A Family Man

by Amanda Brookfield

  ‘Louise, her friend, got a letter. She’s met someone else, broken off all contact.’

  Dennis whistled quietly, shaking his head. ‘You poor bugger, Matt, I’m sorry. And Josh too.’ He shook his head again, more gravely.

  ‘I just wish she had told me that she was so unhappy. Then we might have …’

  ‘Your mother didn’t tell me she was ill for ages, almost a year in fact.’

  ‘Are you saying unhappiness and illness are the same thing?’

  ‘Not the same, but similar maybe, yes. That is, they both eat away at you, and can make their victims selfish.’

  ‘Well, Kath has certainly been that,’ muttered Matt. He pushed his knife and fork together on his empty plate, lining up the faded bone handles until they were perfectly parallel. Once he had started eating he had been surprisingly hungry, even for the soft, tasteless vegetables.

  ‘A little more?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ He watched in silence as his father scooped out the remains of the pie from the metal dish. ‘You could almost say history is repeating itself. Father and son left to their own devices —’

  ‘No you couldn’t.’ Dennis paused, gravy dripping off the spoon, the light of something like belligerence inflaming his usually placid face. ‘Your mother left involuntarily; and managed to do so at an age when the main things required to keep you in line were shouting at from touchlines and a bollocking for failing exams. Whereas Joshua is barely out of nappies and your dear wife has buggered off to have a good time. The two situations hardly warrant comparison.’ He swung the spoonful of pie over Matt’s plate, shaking it hard to disengage the pastry.

  ‘Thanks, Dad, nicely put.’ Matt pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘I don’t think I want any more after all.’

  ‘Look, Matt, I didn’t mean to —’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Matt interrupted quickly, too weary to point out that it was his father who had raised the comparison between the two situations in the first place. ‘You’re right. It’s all very different. Except now, for the first time, I’m beginning to appreciate some of what you went through – coping alone, cooking all those meals.’ He managed a smile. ‘Josh is going to turn into a fish-finger if I’m not careful.’

  Dennis laughed, a shade too heartily, Matt sensed, clearly accepting the bid to lighten the mood rather than truly feeling it. ‘Hoppit will certainly enjoy this,’ was all he said, whistling for his dog and setting Matt’s plate down on the quarry-tiled floor. ‘You get your head down. I’ll clear up.’

  Back upstairs, Matt undressed and checked on Joshua before returning to his own room. As he climbed into bed the old springs sank and squeaked under his weight. Minimising such noises had proved a considerable challenge when making love, he remembered, feeling a well of fondness at the memory and then quickly checking himself. It was hard to be sure about anything any more, what he and Kath had ever felt for each other, whether even the good times had been a sham.

  Before turning out the light he reached into his bag for the brown envelope of photos. Kath, the actress, her hair sweeping low across one eye, the chin tilted down, coy but inviting. They were more recent than he had first supposed, he realised, holding the images up to the bulb above his head for a closer look. Maybe only a year old. Kath’s hair was in a longer style, but she was always doing different things with her hair. Matt scowled, bristling with fresh curiosity, wondering whether he was staring at a vital clue in the puzzle of her betrayal.

  ‘Daddy?’

  Matt slipped the envelope back into his bag and hurried over to where Joshua was standing, dazed with sleepiness, in the doorway separating their two rooms. ‘Do you want to come into Daddy’s bed tonight?’

  Joshua nodded, rubbing his eyes against the glare of the light. ‘Come on, then, as a treat.’

  Though Joshua fell asleep in seconds, Matt lay awake in the dark for a long while, hugging the small frame next to him with guilty love, knowing full well that such a gesture of fatherly comfort derived as much from his own needs as the compulsion to offer solace to his son.

  9

  Hurrying downstairs the next morning at the shamefully late hour of half past eleven, Matt found the ground floor of the cottage empty. Propped between the kettle and a box of cornflakes was a note, saying, ‘Gone to feed ducks’. He smiled to himself as he filled the kettle, luxuriating in this small let-up in an otherwise brutal two weeks, the first sense that, in terms of caring for his son at least, he was not handling the ordeal entirely alone.

  Faced with no immediate demands on his time, the grogginess induced by twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep redoubled. He spooned cereal into his mouth like an automaton, feeling quite hungover with fatigue. Half an hour later, revived a little by food and caffeine, he fetched his phone, which he had left charging overnight, and dialled the code that accessed any messages on his machine at home. There was only one, from Oliver Parkin, delivered in the usual abrupt style that communicated his entrenched distrust of technology of any kind.

  Wondering how things are going. Stephen says taking next week as well is fine. Give me a call anyway – I’d like to meet for lunch on Monday if possible. Oh, and that woman Beth Durant has been trying to get hold of you.

  After hanging up, Matt stood staring into space for a few minutes, aware that in his other, previous existence, such a message – the latter half at least – might have prompted something akin to excitement. Whereas now, Beth Durant, the challenge of interviewing celebrities, all the loves and ambitions of his career, hovered as uncertainly as the memories of his marriage. Given the sea change in his circumstances, a total of three weeks in which to reassemble his life felt like the blink of an eye. The thought of even broaching the subject of revising the terms of his contract filled him with dread, as did the prospect of a life that involved juggling the role of fulltime parent with the need to pay bills. The early surge of conviction at how he would cope, expressed to Louise two weeks and a lifetime before, had faded fast, pounded out of being by the realisation of the enormity of such a task, the sheer relentlessness of being solely responsible for a small child. Not even a sudden upturn in his finances would solve anything, Matt realised grimly, slipping out of the side of the house and slamming the door behind him. For even if he could have afforded the services of a full-time nanny it was already unthinkable that he should compound Joshua’s loss by reverting to being as absent as he had in the past, slotting some stranger in place of Kath.

  Matt walked along the main street of the village, his hands deep in the pockets of his jacket, the collar pulled up to keep the worst of the chill off his neck. Although the day was clear and bright, the sky fired with a brave gold button of a sun, a bitter wind was cutting down from some northern hinterland, whipping the empty black boughs of the trees into a frenzy. He headed left towards the pond, keeping his head bent so that all his eyes had to contend with was the unexacting challenge of the smooth tarmac pavement, a subconscious part of him searching for a similar blankness with which to line his mind.

  They were standing with their backs to him, at the very edge of the water. Seeing them side by side like that, with Joshua barely reaching his grandfather’s knee, each in wellingtons, one pair tiny and bright yellow, the other large and black, Matt was struck by the poignancy of the companionship of so young a life and one that spanned almost seven decades. The silvery tufts of his father’s hair, roughly edged round the bald pinkness in the middle, were sticking up in the breeze, while Joshua’s unruly mop was being blasted all over the place, flying in his eyes and mouth as he turned and offered up some comment about ducks or life in general.

  ‘Hey, there.’ Matt broke into a run, taking his hands out of his pockets to wave. He had to shout twice before they turned. At which point he noticed that his father’s good sense with regard to footwear did not extend to the rest of their attire. Dennis was wearing only his cardigan while Joshua, looking pinched, his lips violet with cold, had on nothing but a sweat-shirt, a grub
by, almost too-small old favourite he had worn to the party the day before. ‘Jesus, Dad, didn’t you think to put a coat on him? It’s bloody freezing.’

  ‘And good morning to you too. Don’t fuss, he’s fine, aren’t you, lad?’

  ‘We had some bread but it’s gone,’ explained Joshua solemnly, extending two empty palms to emphasise the point.

  ‘Mostly in here,’ chuckled Dennis, giving his grandson a friendly poke in the stomach. ‘I told him it was stale and horrible but he wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘Thanks for looking after him,’ said Matt, a little sheepishly, unsettled by the realisation that he would never have thought to utter the rebuke about coats had Kath had been around; that when it came to the tedious basics of their son’s welfare he had relied on her completely. In fact, he mused, offering his hand to Josh for the walk back, he would have been far more likely to have taken the line his father had, to have waited for Kath’s predictable scolding and then told her not to fuss. Parenting wasn’t about hormones at all, he reflected bitterly, squeezing Josh’s small hand in his in the hope of pressing out some of the icy cold, it was about who was there to take the flak of responsibility, to suffer all the push and pull of wonder and worry that went alongside. With Kath around he had been a part-time father, he realised, not just doing the job in spurts, but feeling it in spurts too.

  They ate lunch in a local pub, not the big dark-beamed hostelry opposite the memorial cross, but in a much smaller thatched cottage of a place behind the church, where – as Dennis was fond of pointing out – a pork pie and a pint could be enjoyed without rubbing elbows with day- trippers and eager Americans on the trawl for nuggets of Local Colour. Joshua, who did not like pork pies, was given a basket of chips arid a glass of orange juice. He sat perched high on a bar stool, looking nervous and thrilled in equal measure, clinging on to the edge of the bar-top, but beating off every attempt of Matt’s to offer an arm of support. Hoppit, meanwhile, clearly at home in his surroundings and exhausted from a long forage among the undergrowth at the farther end of the pond, sat curled up in the corner of the bar next to the spitting log fire.

  Shortly after they got home Dennis fell asleep, stretched out in his big leather armchair with his arms folded across his chest, his mouth slack and gormless, his head tipped to one side. Matt, who had been contemplating the awesome possibility of inviting his father to help him out in London for a few weeks, decided that a flexible young teenager with some common sense and a penchant for chewing gum as opposed to real ale was still a better prospect after all. Taking a packet of biscuits for emergencies and leaving a note of his own, scribbled over the morning’s communiqué about ducks, he bundled dog and boy into the car and drove out of the village and into the moors.

  Alone he would have been more adventurous. He was in the mood to walk for miles, to strike out into the wilderness, to be drenched by rain, hijacked by snowdrifts and lost till dawn. But if Matt had learned anything in the last four years it was to set his recreational sights on targets that could be achieved without the calamity of a miserable child. With this in mind, and deliberately avoiding a once treasured spot where he had walked many times with Kath, he pulled into a large lay-by advertising the start of a footpath. Even so, it was not the easiest of excursions. Hoppit strayed badly and had to be put on the lead, while Joshua, after a promising start of galloping sprints and war cries with an imaginary sword, began to complain so vociferously that Matt swung him on to his shoulders to postpone the necessity of turning back. With his energies thus rapidly depleted, it was barely half an hour before he collapsed gratefully on to a capsized tree trunk, sliding Joshua down alongside. He produced the biscuits, to the considerable appreciation of both his companions, particularly the dog, who got most of Joshua’s share as well. By the time the packet was empty, it was getting dark. Re-energised by the food, Joshua insisted on taking sole charge of Hoppit’s lead for the walk back, even when the animal’s exuberance was in danger of dragging him on his stomach along the ground. Rather respecting his determination in the matter, Matt kept a close watch behind, narrowing his stride to match his son’s and resisting the urge to yell warnings at every tug and stumble. Instead, he began to look about him properly for the first time, noting with a swell of pleasure that the drama of early evening was in full swing, transforming the vivid greens and browns of daylight to black and silvery grey. A small bird of prey, with spiky tips to its wings and a hook of a beak, swooped and hovered barely twenty feet above the path, sizing up some invisible target before jetting off, its silhouette quickly merging into the darkness overhead.

  ‘Eagle,’ said Joshua breathlessly, pointing after it and yanking the lead so hard that Hoppit was forced into startled submission.

  ‘Yes, an eagle,’ replied Matt, believing suddenly that it could have been, that the walk for all its tameness had been an adventure of sorts after all.

  * * *

  Supper that night – shepherd’s pie out of tinfoil basins and two green mountains of frozen peas – was easier, partly because the day had wrought a sense of companionship and partly because instead of facing each other at the table they ate in front of the television, with their plates balanced on their laps. The conversation was consequently more drawn out and punctuated by the gentle comic relief of a Morecambe and Wise classic.

  ‘So who’ve you got that’s any help in all this?’ ventured Dennis, pressing peas into the prongs of his fork. ‘Graham, I suppose.’

  ‘Graham’s moved to New York. We’re on e-mail terms only. In fact, I haven’t told him yet.’

  There was a pause, while Angela Rippon and her two hosts performed a routine in top hats.

  ‘So who’s helping you out?’

  ‘The parents I met yesterday afternoon were very kind – and there’s Louise, of course, Kath’s friend – she’s very keen to be supportive.’

  Matt tried to sound positive while inside he was confronted by a fresh sense of his own isolation. In latter years he had never really spoken properly to anyone except Kath. The thought prompted the recollection of a distant hazy era when life had seemed an endless merry-go-round of doing things with other people, of multiple friendships and shared escapades.

  When had it all stopped? he wondered miserably, raising a heaped forkful of food to his mouth before setting it down again uneaten.

  On the TV Eric and Ernie were side by side in bed, wearing loud checked pajamas and sparring like a couple of old queens. In the chair next to him his father chuckled quietly, nodding his head in appreciation. His job was to blame, Matt decided wretchedly, knowing deep down that it was almost certainly more than that, that somewhere along the line he appeared to have stopped noticing things, started backing out of life instead of participating in it.

  ‘What about Kath’s parents?’ barked Dennis suddenly. ‘Have they been any help?’

  ‘No more than usual.’ It had never been any secret that his in-laws were of the insufferable variety, a view fortunately held by Kath as much as by Matt himself. ‘Gillian’s phoned a couple of times, worried sick, she claims, suddenly full of concern for her dear daughter when she’s spent the best part of the last twenty years criticising everything she’s ever done.

  Pretending to be anxious about Josh when they only ever saw him as a bother before. It’s bloody obvious they think it’s all my fault, which it probably is,’ he concluded darkly, shovelling in the last of his mash and using a large swig of beer to wash it down.

  Dennis left his chair and began gathering up their plates and empty cans. Behind him the closing credits of Morecambe and Wise were followed by the cheery crumpled face of Michael Parkinson, promising a programme of old favourites. How wonderful to be able to live off work completed years before, thought Matt enviously, feeling a fresh bout of panic at having to pick up the reins of his own career – the treadmill of deadlines, of being only as good as the most recent set of words above a by- line.

  * * *

  ‘I’ll have none of that talk,’
retorted Dennis, handing him the plates and ushering him into the kitchen. ‘For one thing it gets you nowhere. And for another it’s not true. None of these situations is ever one person’s fault. It’s bloody, the whole business, and you’re dealing with it as best you can. Now, then.’ He rubbed his hands together as if to dismiss the subject. ‘I’m having tea and a Mars bar. Do you want the same?’

  ‘I certainly do.’ Matt dropped the plates into the cracked sink and quickly set about the washing up, using brisk circular motions with a brush bereft of all but a small cluster of bristles. He still had a week in which to sort himself out, he reminded himself. He would manage somehow. He turned, wanting to say as much to his father, to express some gratitude for his support. But Dennis was already half out of the kitchen, a mug in each hand and bars of confectionery sticking out of the saggy side pockets of his cardigan.

  10

  ‘In my experience few things are irretrievable,’ said Oliver Parkin, peering over the top of his spectacles at the wine menu. ‘Molly and I have had the most terrible rifts, World War Three stuff, I can tell you, but we always relent in the end. It gets so tiring apart from anything else, maintaining a stand about something when it’s so much easier – so much nicer all round – to kiss and make up. How long had you and Katherine been together? Eight years? Nine?’

  ‘Just six actually,’ Matt corrected him before sitting back and allowing the torrent of well-intentioned assurances to continue. They were wedged at a table in one of Oliver’s pet eating haunts in Soho, surrounded by packed tables of business executives and West End shoppers. He had agreed to the lunch with some reluctance, in truth wanting no such intrusions into his final week of leave, but recognising that it would be an opportunity to mention his hopes of an altered contract, an arrangement that he knew would have no hope of success without his boss’s full backing.