by Francis King
When he grumbled about that to her, she said: ‘Well, you could always get an umbrella.’
‘Yes, I could always do that.’
‘There’s a sale at Habitat. Perhaps they have one. I’ll have a look next time I’m passing that way.’
She found the umbrella, he paid for it.
‘I feel so old this morning.’
They were sitting at breakfast in the kitchen, she dressed for work and he, as so often, in pyjamas and dressing gown. ‘ Old? You certainly don’t look it.’
‘I’m twenty-seven today.’
‘Today? Why on earth didn’t you tell me? We could have had a little party. At all events let me take you out to dinner.’
‘Sweet of you. But some friends have arranged something for me. Nothing grand. Just a few people round for drinks and a buffet supper.’
It did not offend him that he had not been invited. He preferred it that she kept her two existences – her one with him, her other of work and friends – in rigorous parallel, never allowing the lines to waver, much less converge.
‘I must think what to give you as a present.’
‘Oh, no, please! You give me so much already.’
He shook his head. ‘I’ll think of something.’
Later, sitting out in the only corner of the garden where there was now any shade, he tried to do that. A digital camera? A briefcase to replace her scuffed one? Something for her to wear from Harvey Nicks? Then he decided that, no, he would give her some money. Money was always what people really preferred. Fifty? He stared up into the branches above him. No, no, make it a hundred. Later, he bought a Monet card of water lilies at Givenchy – rather hackneyed, he thought, but never mind – and placed two fifty pounds notes inside it.
When she returned from work, he had the envelope ready. She looked tired, he thought. There were shiny, bruise-like shadows under her eyes, and the eyes themselves were dull.
She opened the envelope. Then she looked up. The eyes suddenly caught fire. ‘Oh, you are a darling! How can I thank you?’
‘Buy something you want.’
She laughed. ‘I wouldn’t buy something I didn’t want.’
‘Are you in a hurry for your party?’
‘Not really. But I want to have a shower before I change.’
‘I have some champagne in the fridge.’
‘Oh, I can always find time for champagne.’
After he had poured out the champagne and raised his glass to her, he said: ‘A busy day?’
She sighed. ‘Yes. And so many people complaining and snapping and being disagreeable. The elderly are the worst.’
‘Beware of the elderly!’
‘Was that tactless of me? Sorry.’
He shook his head. ‘Being old is a battle. So, inevitably, we dinosaurs come out spoiling for a fight.’
There was a silence. She sipped at her glass, then gulped at it. She held it out, tipped it to one side as though she were about to empty its contents on to the floor, and then leaned forward. ‘May I ask you something?’ All at once, she looked taut and pale.
‘Of course. Anything’
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t. Perhaps it will spoil things.’
‘Don’t be silly. Go ahead.’
She pondered, licked her lower lip. Then she raised her head and stared at him. ‘ The thing I want to know …’ She stopped, frowning, as though she had forgotten what the thing was.
‘Yes? What do you want to know?’’
‘Well … Is it true what my mother told me?’
‘What did she tell you?’
‘That – that you’re my father?’
He burst into laughter. ‘Oh, did she tell you that?’ He shook his head. ‘ No, I’m afraid it’s just not true. I’ve no idea who was your father but it certainly wasn’t me. Yes, of course, we were lovers during most of my time in Bucharest. But I couldn’t have been your father. It was physically impossible.’
‘You mean you never …?’
‘Oh, we went to bed! Often. But …’ He shrugged, picked up his glass. ‘Well, I just wasn’t capable of fathering a child – anyone’s child.’
When he had given her the explanation, she put both hands over her mouth and stared at him. Then her whole body was convulsed with a paroxysm of weeping. ‘I always believed … always … always …’
He got up, bent over and put an arm round her heaving shoulders. ‘What does it matter? I think of you as my daughter. That’s what matters. My dream daughter. My adopted daughter.’
The weeping stopped as suddenly as it had begun. She smiled through her tears. She looked up at him. ‘Do you mean that? Really mean that?’
‘Of course. Of course I do! Your arrival in my life has meant so much to me. Before that, there were often times when I thought that it was pointless to plod on and on. The long, dusty road had begun to have so few pleasures for me. But now …’ He laughed. ‘But now I’m perfectly happy to continue along it in your company.’ He extended a hand to his glass and then raised it. ‘To Ana. To my adopted daughter. To our life together. All happiness, dear Ana.’
He raised the glass to his lips.
From then he would often introduce her to guests or to people met by chance when he and she were out to together: ‘I don’t think you’ve ever met my adopted daughter Ana, have you?’ Some of those people failed to realise that he was being jocular.
She rarely spoke of that other life in which he had no part. He wondered if she spoke to the people in that other life about her life with him. He doubted it. There were occasional references to her colleagues at work – the two women doctors, always so busy and nervy, the one male one, always so lethargic, the practice nurse whose husband had mysteriously killed himself, a fellow receptionist from Uganda, the patients, most of whom she found tiresome in one way or another. There was a cousin, who lived with her partner and a large brood of children – he could never work out how many – in a house out in Teddington. And then there was Henry. ‘My friend’ – that was how she usually referred to him. ‘ Tonight I’ll be out with my friend.’ ‘My friend wants me to go to a disco with him.’ ‘ My friend has lent me the latest Ruth Rendell.’
Just to hear her say ‘My friend’ irritated him. Why couldn’t she just refer to him by his name?
Once he said: ‘I’d like to meet your friend some day’
She shook her head: ‘ Oh, I don’t think you’d have anything in common. What would be the point?’
‘As you wish.’
That July there was a heat wave. He entered the basement kitchen to fetch some ice for his first Martini of the evening and there she was in only brassiere and knickers, ironing a flimsy, pale-yellow dress. She had told him that she and ‘ my friend’ were going out to dinner. She was in no way disconcerted at his seeing her so scantily clothed. She smiled up to him: ‘Gosh, it’s hot today, isn’t it? Even this kitchen is hot. Usually it’s the one cool room in the house.’ She licked a forefinger and briefly touched the base of the iron. He forced himself not to look too closely at her. He jerked at the ice-tray.
‘Shall I do that for you?’ she asked
‘Oh, not I can manage. Thank you.’
When he decided to go to bed at his usual hour of eleven, she still had not returned. He double-locked the front door and put the chain across. She had her key to the basement door. He wondered, with a vague, nagging unease, what she and ‘my friend’ were doing. He continued to wonder as he lay out, covered only by a sheet, and tried to will himself to sleep. He thought of those nipples, briefly glimpsed but vividly remembered as they pushed up through the brassiere, and of those long, bare, oh so beautiful legs. For the first time he was not merely taking pleasure in her youth and her attractiveness, but also longing, with an urgency oddly not unlike the pressure of his bladder that now so often aroused him from sleep, to possess those two things.
Because of the heat, he had left his bedroom door wide open. But for that and his preternatural alertness that night, he
would not, a usually heavy sleeper, have heard the sound of the basement door being opened and a brief titter followed by only four audible words (‘ Whoops! I nearly tripped’) in a voice not hers. She had brought him back.
He stared up at the ceiling, the back of his hand to his clammy forehead. Then, with a groan, he raised himself and swung his legs out of the bed. The two Nitrazepam tablets, fetched from his dressing-table drawer, felt oddly cold in his sweating palm. Even with repeated gulps of luke-warm water from the glass by his bedside he had difficulty in swallowing them.
He was sitting in the kitchen, The Times open on the table beside him. She dashed in.
‘I’m late, late, late! Why didn’t you wake me?’
He looked up, smiled. He gave no answer. Then he said: ‘You came home at some unearthly hour.’
‘Yes, my friend insisted on dinner at a restaurant way out towards Acton, and then the service was unbelievably slow.’
‘I heard your friend.’
Standing, she had been pouring out coffee from the hastily snatched coffee pot into a cup. The pouring stopped. ‘Heard him?’
‘Both of you.’ He raised his eyebrows in quizzical interrogation.
‘Yes, he came in for a moment or two. He wanted me to lend him that DVD of Chinatown.’
‘I see.’
He knew that she knew that he did not believe her.
‘It was rather a boring evening, I’m afraid. He’s not exactly a ball of fire.’
‘I’d love to meet him. See what he’s like. You know, sometimes I almost feel jealous of him.’
She gave a nervous laugh. ‘ He’s nothing much. Civil servants tend to be boring. But he’s kind. And he puts up with all my faults and demands.’
‘Ah, well.’
She gulped at the coffee, then set down the cup. The clink of cup on saucer seemed to him abnormally loud. He almost expected one or other or both to shatter in the collision.
‘Well – see you this evening. I won’t be late!’
Then she had gone.
He picked up his cup, tucked The Times under his arm, and padded up the stairs and out into the garden. The sun had reached only a far triangle of it. Good! He settled himself in one of the deck chairs, the cup on the ground beside him and The Times across his chest. He shut his eyes. He could sleep now. That was what he most wanted. It must be the lingering effect of the pills. He no longer felt any unease, any suppressed rage, any desire to have it out with her. He even felt happy.
It was another year, another summer.
He was lying out, full length, on one of the two deckchairs in the garden and watched her as she walked towards him with the two glasses of Pimm’s, frosted with ice, that she had just made for them in the kitchen. He had taught her how to do it. Amazingly she had never heard of a Pimm’s, much less known how to make one, until then.
‘Thanks.’
She had stooped over him as she handed him the glass. The flimsy cotton dress, low-cut in front, had fallen away briefly to reveal one of her breasts.
He sipped and stared up at the sky, blue with trails of white cloud scurrying across it.
‘What a day! What a summer!’
‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘ For me – a bonus.’
Again he sipped. Then he shut his eyes. His hip had ceased to ache, he felt totally relaxed. Oddly magnified he could hear the throbbing song of a bird in the tree above him. He could also hear the regular lisp of falling water.
He opened his eyes and swivelled his head to look at her. ‘You were right about the fountain. It’s wonderful just to sit here and listen to it.’
‘And what about the paving?’
‘Yes, you were right about that too. This is now the sort of garden that wins prizes.’
She rested her head against the back of her chair and sighed. She looked up at the house. ‘ I’ve come to love this house. A dream house. I can hardly believe something like this exists in the heart of London. So beautiful, so quiet. And yet the High Street is only a few minutes away.’
‘Last night I had a thought. I’ve pondered what should happen to the house when I’ve gone. I love it too. I was born here, you know. My wife died here. I used to think that it should go to my niece. But she’d only sell it. She and that American financier of hers have that huge house in Hampstead. He could buy a house like this with what he earns in a single year. Anyway, what do they ever do for me? I’m lucky if I see them once a month. So – so …’ He paused. ‘ I want you to have it. A dream house for a dream daughter.’
‘Me?’
‘Well, you are my adopted daughter. And I know you’d cherish it – as I want it to go on being cherished.’
She leapt up from her chair and stooped over him. ‘Oh, you darling! You darling, you darling! Do you really mean this?’
He nodded his head. ‘But I have one condition.’
‘Yes?’
‘I want you to stay with me till – well, till it’s all over.’
‘Well, of course! Of course!’
She kissed him on one cheek and then other.
‘Of course!’ she repeated.
He was to give a lecture on ‘ Eastern Europe and the EU’ to a society at his old Oxford college.
‘I wished I didn’t have to go. It’s an effort. It’s a bore.’
‘Then don’t go. Cancel.’
‘Oh, I can’t do that. Not now.’
‘I could ring up for you. Say that you’re ill. How about that? I’m a good liar.’
‘No. I must keep my word.
‘Are they paying you?’
‘No. Just expenses.’
‘Well, there you are!’
During the dinner that followed his lecture, he was suddenly assailed by the desire to be once more back at home. With Ana. Why not? He wanted to hear only her quiet voice, instead of this Babel of voices of people asking him what he thought of this, that and the other or putting forth their own strident views. He wanted just to look at her. He wanted to know that she was sleeping only a short distance away from him. He was supposed to be spending the night in the college, but the bus from Gloucester Green would take him to Notting Hill Gate in not much over an hour. He got up from the table as soon as he decently could. He had a dentist’s appointment the following morning, he lied. He had come to the conclusion that he would rather go to bed late than get up early. He thought he’d go back now.
As he walked towards the house, he saw, with an upsurge of joy, that, though it was now almost one o’clock, the light showed behind the curtains of her bedroom window. He would be able to exchange a few words with her before he went to sleep. But then the thought came to him like a sudden upsurge of bile at the back of the throat: Perhaps Henry was with her? He put his key in the door and entered. From downstairs, he heard the sound of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1 blaring overloud from the CD player that he had given her for a recent birthday. Some time before he had told her that he wanted to educate her in classical music. He had even persuaded her to accompany him to concerts at the Wigmore Hall. She would hardly be playing that sort of music if Henry were down there, he thought. He stood for a while listening to what, amplified to this degree, sounded like a demonic battering.
The door to her bedroom, at the bottom of the stairs, was open and, from here at their top, he could see her, standing on a small step-ladder that she had placed against the vast Victorian breakfront wardrobe that had once been his mother’s. Ana had often said that it was far too large for the room, making it seem cramped. He had agreed with her. But he was sentimental about it. He did not know where else he could put it and he did not want to get rid of it.
He all but called her name. But instead he remained motionless at the top of the stairs and watched her. She was reaching up. She was either placing or replacing something behind one of the two elaborately carved finials surmounting the wardrobe. He continued to watch her as she clambered down the ladder, folded it and rested against the wall beside her. It was only then that he
called out: ‘Ana! Are you there?’
‘You’re back!’ she cried out. ‘I thought you said—’
‘I decided not to stay the night. I saw that you had the light on.’
‘Yes, I was listening to this wonderful music.’
‘Far too loud!’
‘I never heard you come in.’
She turned off the music. She asked him about the lecture and the dinner that followed it, she perched on the edge of her bed and he in the one armchair in the room. At one moment she leaned forward to pick up an open pen on the desk beside her and replaced its cap. She continued to hold the pen as they talked.
He did not ask her what she had been doing with the stepladder. Without knowing why, he did not wish to reveal to her his puzzlement and unease.
When she had gone to work, he went down to the basement.
This was something that he would now often do. Suddenly, as though seized by a raging fever, he would succumb to a restlessness that made him wander aimlessly from one room to another, fling himself down on to a deckchair in the garden and then jump up a few seconds later, venture out to buy something for which there was no immediate demand, or toss about on top of the bed hurriedly made by Ana before her departure. Then he would finally give way to the clamorous need so long resisted. He would creep down the stairs, as though she were still in the house and must not suspect what he was doing, and, with accelerating heart, would enter her room.
Perhaps because, unlike him, she so rarely opened the window, he would then be at once assailed by her smell. He would breathe it in deeply, dizzied by it. After that he would start on what he thought of as a quest, though he could not have defined what was its object. He would pick up her lipstick, open it and stare down at it for seconds on end. He would pull out drawers and inspect their contents, even though he now knew exactly what they would contain. She was in the habit of throwing her dirty clothes on to the floor of either one half or the other of the breakfront wardrobe. With a sudden access of breathlessness he would stoop and forage. Then he would bury his face in the object, greedily inhaling its odour.