Once we’re safely outside, I mention a Cheap side coffee shop far out of the orbit of my colleagues, but Dad pulls me down the steps towards the King’s Arms. A pub that Dickens knew, it has sawdust on the floor and a teenage barmaid with white skin and a studded tongue. We sit at a corner table under the portrait of a red-cheeked earl, my father with a double Scotch and a maxi pack of peanuts and me with a bitter lemon. Bitter lemon was always my mum’s drink. First it was a nonalcoholic beverage; only later did it become a state of mind.
“’Ow’s little Emma then?” asks my father. His breath is a powerful mixture of Johnnie Walker and boiled eggs.
“Emily.”
“Aye, Emily. Must be going on seven now.”
“Six. She’ll be six in June, Dad.” He nods decisively, as though six is close enough to seven to make no difference.
“And the little lad? Julie says he has a look of me about him.”
Jesus, there really is no parent so bad or so absent that he can’t get a kick out of his genetic legacy. I stare furiously into my sour fizz. The mere idea that some ribbon of DNA with Joe Reddy printed on it is unfurling inside my darling son! “Actually, Ben looks like me, Dad.”
“Well, we were always alike, you and me, Kathy duck. Both lookers, good with figures, both with a bit of a temper on us, eh?” He snatches a swallow of whisky and throws a handful of peanuts into his mouth. Everything in immoderation, my father; in that at least we are the same.
“Well, aren’t you gonna ask your dad how he’s going on, then? Come all this way to see you.”
The accent is northern, so thick you could cut it like fruitcake, but there is an echo of a lilt from his mother’s native Cork. Did I really used to talk like that? Richard says that when he first met me I sounded like something out of Monty Python. That was when I still said baff for bath; before I learned that class rhymes with arse. Although no one says arse, down here; they say bum or bottom. I say bottom to my children now and each time I falter on its plump, prissy contours. My tongue feels like that barmaid’s: heavy with foreign objects.
I know that Dad wants me to make it easier for him to ask for what he’s come for. But I won’t make it easy. I can still remember him standing outside the Abbey National in Holborn when I’d got my first paycheck and licking his finger to count the tenners I handed him. My own father. If he wants my money let him ask for it.
“Same again?” The barmaid has come over to clear our glasses.
“No.”
“Aye, same for me and get one in for yourself, love.”
Dad smiles and the girl flushes and straightens up in a way I have seen women do before in his presence. He was once a beautiful man, my father—beautiful rather than handsome, and therefore doomed not to ripen but to rot. “Tyrone Power,” my grandmother used to murmur fondly when she saw him, and I, being young and not knowing any old Hollywood stars, assumed that Tyrone Power was the electric effect my father had on people rather than a proper name—an unruly but irresistible force of nature. I look at him now and try to see what others must see: face the shape of a swollen heart, the nose and cheeks stippled with red routes like the delta of some rusty river. Long lashes fringing what my mother claims were the most remarkable blue eyes you ever saw: indigo pools where all that charm and intelligence drowned. A ladies’ man, my first boyfriend called him. “Your dad’s a bit of a one for the ladies, Kath. Should have seen him down the club with that Christine on Saturday night.” How I flushed to hear mention of his sex life so close to mine.
“See what you reckon to this.” My father fumbles under the table and out of his carrier bag produces a black box file and from that several well-thumbed sheets of graph paper. There is a drawing of something snouty and padded with squared-off wings at the side. Pigs might fly? I turn it the other way up.
“What is it?”
“The world’s first biodegradable nappy.”
“But you don’t know anything about nappies.”
“I do now.”
My dad, you should know, has a history in this area. One of the world’s great undiscovered inventors, there is very little that he himself has not discovered. When Julie and I were still small he cooked up moon rocks, powdery lumps of resin that were sold as souvenirs from the Apollo 11 landing off a market stall in Chesterfield. “Just think, madam, your hand is holding the very rock that Neil Armstrong held in his!” They bombed, did the moon rocks, and later, when space travel lost its luster, they had another incarnation as fancy pumice stones for the hard skin of the ladies of Worksop.
Next came a cat flap that prevented pets bringing prey into the house—a good idea, but the cats kept getting garroted in the springback mechanism. Sometimes Dad’s inventions had been invented already, like the blindfold he devised for in-flight passenger naps without having been on an airplane.
“Joe,” said Mum cautiously, “I understand that they have eye shades on planes,” but he refused to let such womanly nitpicking get him down. In our house, Dad was the one for the broad sweep; Mum picked up the bits with a dustpan and brush. On his card, my father describes himself as an entrepreneur.
As I skim through his business plan for Reddy’s biodegradable nappy, he says happily, “I’ve had a lot of interest, you know. Derek Marshall at the Chamber of Commerce says he’s never seen anything quite like it. But I’m a bit stuck for capital, love, and that’s your line of work. What do they call it, adventure capital?”
“Venture capital.”
“That’s the one.”
Dad says we’re not talking big sums this time: seed money, that’s all.
“How much?”
“Just enough to get production up and running.”
“How much?”
“Ten grand plus development costs; then there’s packaging. Say thirteen and a half. I wouldn’t ask, love, only cash flow’s that tight at the minute.”
I’m not aware of my expression having altered, but it must have, because he shifts in his chair in a manner which, in another man, you might take for discomfort. For a moment, I think it must have occurred to him how sick these transactions make me feel. He reaches across the table and places his hand on mine. “Don’t worry, love,” he says. “If you’re pushed I’ll take a check.”
I leave my father at Old Street Station. From there he can get the Northern Line directly to King’s Cross and take a train home. I give him money for the fare—a crazy amount, it’s cheaper to fly to Boston than to go to Doncaster these days—and extra for a cab at the other end. Dad is a bit vague about where he is living at the moment—for which read who he is living with—but he promises me that he will go there directly. I stand outside the station, round the corner by the photo booth. When I look back inside a few minutes later he has engaged a young busker in conversation. Casually, magnanimously, he flicks one of the tenners I have just given him into the boy’s open guitar case, removes his coat, lays it gently over the busker’s sleeping dog and now, oh, dear God, he is going to sing.
“The water is wide, I cannot get o’er,
And neither have I wings to fly.
Give me a boat that will carry two
And both shall row, my love and I.”
It’s his favorite ballad, a Reddy standard along with “Down by the Salley Gardens.” The passing suits, scurrying for the escalator, stop and turn their heads, startled by the beauty of the tenor voice, the thwarted yearning Dad does so well. A woman in a camel coat bends to deposit some coins in the case and my father tips an invisible hat to her.
I can hear my mother’s voice now, an angry descant piercing the sad tune. “He can wrap you round his little finger.”
“No he can’t.”
“Yes he can. Always could. If he’s so bloody marvelous, your father, go to him. Go on, go to him.”
“I don’t want to go to him, Mum.”
“You always were his. Daddy’s girl.”
I plunge back into the noise of the street, buy a copy of the Standard to have so
mething to hold in my hands and head in the direction of the office.
A child’s love for a parent is well-nigh indestructible, but down the years the drip, drip, drip of disillusion can corrode it. The first feeling I remember having for my father was pride, a soaring burst-your-lungs gratitude that he was mine. Better-looking than anyone else’s dad, he was so clever he could do any sum he liked in his head and recite the football results back as soon as they’d been read out on the telly on Saturday afternoon without a single mistake: Sheffield Wednesday, Partick Thistle, Hamilton Academicals. Saturday mornings, Julie and I would be allowed to accompany him to the bookie’s, where we would cling to his hero’s legs. I remember the sense of being small down there in the forest of trousers and the smell of felt hats in from the rain. Years later, at university, I watched the middle-class fathers trudging back and forth from their family saloons carrying tea chests and kettles and china mug sets hanging from pine trees, and I longed for their dull embrace.
One winter, it must have been ’75 or ’76, Dad took us sledding out in the Peak District. Other families had shop-bought sleds: raised off the ground with a lattice of wooden struts to sit on, they had the grandeur of an old-fashioned sleigh ride. Our sled lay flush with the ground; Dad had hammered it together out of split logs and had added metal runners on the underside which he ripped from the lip of an abandoned car door. “Give it a bit of go!” he said, rubbing his hands together.
On the first run, Julie fell off right away and the sled completed the descent by itself. Dad told her not to be such a baby. Now it was my turn, and I clung on, determined to prove that our sled, the sled our dad had made, was as good as anyone’s. But halfway down the hill, it hit a ridge and veered sharply to the right, slicing towards a steep drop fenced off by a low curtain of barbed wire. The metal strips, added to give a bit of go, made the sled unstoppable; it slammed under the fencing and the two front prongs dangled over the drop while I lay at the back, two feet from the edge, tangled in wire. He was panting so hard when he got to me I thought he would die, but he knelt down on the end of the sled to hold it in place and picked the wire thorns out of my anorak, out of my hands, out of my hair. As the last piece of wire was unsnagged, he pulled me clear and the sled shot forward. It was a couple of seconds before we heard it crack on the road beneath. I used to think that I remembered that day so well because he had saved my life; now I think it’s because it was the only time in our years as father and daughter that he did anything to protect me.
But Dad was my first love and I always took his side even when my mother’s hazel eyes disappeared in big raccoon circles and she started wearing those brushed-nylon keep-out nighties and laughing in the wrong places. One day at the VG stores, a man knocked over the pyramid display of Ideal Milk, the little blue-and-white cans went tumbling everywhere, and Mum laughed and laughed until Linda behind the counter had to fetch a glass of water from out back. But daughters don’t want to pick up the signals of their mother’s unhappiness; it might mean their father isn’t perfect.
Years after it became clear that Joseph Aloysius Reddy was an unsuitable crush, I still couldn’t break it off. How much evidence did I need? There was the day he brought the sheets home from the bed he shared with his new girlfriend for Mum to wash. And the night he carried me downstairs, blinking from sleep, to tell the copper standing in the front room that he, Joseph Reddy, had been at home on a date I had to swear I could remember. And I swore.
“She’s got this photographic memory, has our Kathy,” said Dad to the policeman. “Haven’t you, love? Now where’s that lovely smile?”
A father is the template of a man that Nature gives a girl, and if that template is broken or disfigured, well, what then?
Walking through the front door of Edwin Morgan Forster, I am grateful for its cool echoing spaces, for the clip-clop of marble underfoot, for the way the lift welcomes me without protest to its mirrored interior. I prefer not to look at the woman in the reflection: I don’t want her seeing me like this. When the door opens on the thirteenth floor, I have my excuses ready, but Robin Cooper-Clark is standing right there.
“Excellent presentation, Kate,” he says, placing a hand awkwardly on my shoulder. “Absolutely first class. Just need to tie up a couple of loose ends. No hurry. In your own time. No real problems with the family, I trust.”
Hard to imagine what the Head of Investment would say if I told him the truth. The Cooper-Clarks have become friends since Jill and I bonded in horror at some corporate pheasant shoot. Richard and I have been to their place in Sussex several times, but I have never mentioned my father to Robin. I want his respect, not his pity. “No. Everything’s fine.”
“Splendid. Talk later.”
The screen tells me that in the three hours since I last looked, the FTSE is up 50, the Dow is down 100 and the dollar 1 percent. So steadily, and with great deliberation, I make the calculations I need to make to hold my funds on course.
All I knew was that I wasn’t going back there: to the scams, the evasions, the holding your breath in the dark hall.
13
Shopping
JET LAG HAS ITS OWN microclimate: gray, sticky, Singaporean. I move through the stinging February rain with almost tropical lethargy, step out into Long Acre, straight into the path of a courier. Through the visor, I can see eyes full of hatred.
“Yew stew-pid cow,” he spits out. “Cancha fuckin’ look where ya goin’?”
Fourteen minutes to spare before Rod and I have a meeting with consultants in Covent Garden, just off the piazza. Enough time to run into LK Bennett 50% Shoe Sale.
I think I’ve forgotten how to shop for pleasure. No lingering foreplay for me, no harmless flirtation with chenille and silk before getting off with aloof linen or gorgeous cuddly alpaca. These days I shop like a locust: famished, ruinous, hoovering up anything I need and things I definitely won’t need but deserve anyway, because I never have time to go shopping. Grab a pair of fudge pencil heels—good for treading on Guy’s toes—and calf-length caramel-soft boots. As an afterthought, I pick up some black sling-backs patterned with so many punch holes it looks like braille for foot fetishists. Funny how two pairs of shoes feels extravagant but three’s a bargain.
Across the shop, I glimpse a glossy brunette, a triumph of Botox over gravity, swaddled in dove-gray cashmere. She is considering each shoe like a judge at a flower show. Can tell she has time as well as money on her hands. I see a whole day of browsing stretching ahead of her—a prairie of possibility, dotted with skinny lattes and a delicious light lunch. I notice her eyes land on a pair of zebra mules on the size 6 rack. She must be stopped. Execute Charlie’s Angels pirouette and get to them just in time.
“Excuse me, I was picking those up.” Her voice is peevish—as aggrieved as someone that languid will allow herself to be.
“Sorry, I was here first,” I say, jamming toe into zebra.
“No need to be aggressive.” She smiles and trails away, leaving a slipstream of Jo Malone Tuberose. Is she not fragrant? Certainly. Does one not want to strangle her eerily wrinkle-free neck? You bet.
At the till, the assistant pauses when she gets to the zebra mules and turns them over. “These aren’t your size, madam.”
“I know. I’m taking them anyway.”
The credit-card machine chunters busily and then gags. “Sorry, madam, your card has been rejected. I’ll have to make a call.”
“I don’t have time for you to make a call.”
The assistant smirks. “Shall we try another card?”
10:36 A.M. Six minutes, thirty-five seconds late for meeting. Enter room full of suits, trying to hide gleaming carrier bag behind knees. Rod Task looks up from his notes with a shark’s grin. “Ah, when the going gets tough the ladies go shopping. Good of you to join us, Katie.”
12:19 P.M. Four days to go till Emily’s half term but am way too busy to have booked a relaxing break. Paula is off to Morocco for the week. When I tentatively inquired this m
orning if there was any chance of her ever taking a holiday to coincide with ours, she shot me her Joan-of-Arc put-those-matches-down look. So I offered to pay for her flight. Weak, Kate, very weak.
Pretend to be checking fund valuations while making call to travel agent.
How about Florida?
Hyena cackle at the other end of phone. “Fully booked since October, sorry.”
“Disneyland Paris?”
Non. Eurostar apparently groaning with loathsome forward planners. It would be wise to book for Easter now, the agent says; he still has a few spaces left for Easter.
“Have you thought about Centerparcs, Mrs. Shattock?”
Yes, I have thought about Centerparcs: like going to hell in a Tupperware container.
I try Cornwall, Cotswolds and the Canaries. All full. Eventually get through to some firm called Cymru Cottages. Valda says, miraculously, she has a cancellation outside St. Davids. “On the cozy side, mind, but you can’t go wrong with an open fire, can you?”
Am just getting ready to leave for lunch when the postroom lad arrives at my desk looking rather sheepish: he is carrying two bunches of valentine flowers. One—gardenias, lilies, white roses as big as a hand—looks like Grace Kelly’s wedding bouquet; the other consists of garage-forecourt tulips padded out with funeral-director fern. Open the cards. The tulips are from my husband.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Debra Richardson
Don’t be freaked out about nits. Nits are now very middle class. Felix’s school just had Nits Day to “remove the stigma of nits”!
How was your Hammer man in New York?
The only good thing about our situation is that we are Far Too Knackered to Commit Adultery.
Lunch thursday, right? Deb xxxx
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