Our Fathers

by Rebecca Wait

  Tommy said, “I hope you don’t mind . . .” Then he stopped, looking around the narrow hallway as though surprised to find himself there. It must seem even smaller to him now, Malcolm thought—the adult Tommy took up so much more space than the child.

  Tommy put his hands in his pockets and rolled his shoulders back. Then he began again. “I know it’s weird, just turning up here. I should have called, or written a letter, or . . . emailed or something.” He gave a short laugh that didn’t sound like a laugh. “Of course, I don’t have your email. Not your phone number, either. Couldn’t find it.”

  “I don’t have email,” Malcolm said, thinking how strange it was to hear a man’s deep voice coming from Tommy, coming out from behind a man’s face—John’s face. Tommy’s accent was unexpected too. It was unplaceable, not quite Scottish, not quite English, carrying only the faintest inflection of his past. “Never really caught up with all that,” Malcolm added, realizing he’d been silent for too long. “Heather was better at it. She had her own email account, her own laptop.” He stopped, aware that now he was only talking to fill up the space around his discomfort.

  “Where is Heather?” Tommy said, looking past Malcolm towards the kitchen, as though she might actually be waiting there. And Malcolm realized with a lurch like rising sickness that Tommy knew nothing, knew absolutely nothing, that they had been cut off from one another so completely that Tommy might as well have been laid beneath the earth all these years, to now suddenly reappear, to come back from the dead and stand calmly in Malcolm’s hallway, brushing off the dirt and asking about Heather.

  No way to soften it, not for either of them. “She died,” Malcolm said. “Almost six years ago now.” The words weren’t so worn around the edges that they didn’t hurt him. He had made a final attempt, after Heather’s death, to contact Tommy, but found that the only number he had, which was for Tommy’s cousin Henry, no longer worked. He had been too bound up in his own grief to feel much dismay at the time. Anyway, he had given Tommy up long ago.

  “A stroke,” he told Tommy now. “Two, in fact. Both bad. She survived a few years after the first, but then she had another.” Then he added, because Tommy was staring at him without speaking, “She was still herself though. Right up to the end.”

  “But—she must have been young,” Tommy said, and Malcolm was surprised to see him stricken like this. Because what had Heather been to Tommy in the end?

  “Aye,” Malcolm said. “Too young.”

  Tommy was silent.

  Malcolm remembered himself and said, “Come on into the kitchen. You’ll have a cup of tea?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “Put your bag down there for now,” Malcolm said, nodding towards the boot rack by the door, and Tommy did as he was told before following Malcolm through to the small kitchen.

  How long would he be staying? Malcolm wondered, trying not to feel panicked. He’d have to stay two nights, at least; there wasn’t a ferry back to the mainland until Friday. The spare room was in a state—full of dust, with books and clutter piled up to the ceiling. Malcolm tried to think what Heather would do. Nothing could ever fluster his wife. She would tell him to take it one step at a time and make the lad some tea. So while Tommy sat at the table, Malcolm steadied himself with the familiar routine of filling the kettle, getting out mugs and the tea bags, fetching the milk from the fridge. He was grateful for the noise as the old kettle came to the boil; impossible to have any kind of conversation over the top of that.

  He risked a glance at Tommy. He was sitting quietly, both hands placed in front of him on the table, as though he were a child making a conscious effort to keep still. But his eyes slid around the room, coming back to rest on his hands only when he seemed to sense Malcolm was looking. Malcolm wondered if the place appeared different to him. He cast his mind back, but couldn’t recall whether it had changed since Tommy had left. Probably not. He and Heather had never really gone in for—what was it you called them?—home improvements. They’d always had plenty of other things to be getting on with. The room must look old fashioned to Tommy, dated and drab, with its ancient gas stove and the cheap laminate, which had chipped off the counter in places. Malcolm wasn’t used to seeing his own home through the eyes of an outsider.

  “How do you take your tea?” he said.

  “Just milk. Please.”

  Malcolm brought the mugs over and sat across from Tommy. His nephew, his mind threw out.

  He said, “I was so sorry to hear about Jill. It was a terrible loss.”

  “I was a long way away,” Tommy said. There was a silence, and just when Malcolm thought Tommy wasn’t going to say anything else, he added, “I got back in time, though. Just in time. Saw her before she died.”

  Malcolm nodded. “We were sad not to be able to make it down for the funeral,” he said. “Heather wasn’t well enough.”

  “It’s fine.”

  The funeral would have been their first opportunity to see Tommy in years. Heather had so badly wanted to go. They’d eventually got through to Henry on the house phone, who’d come back from Canada for the final stages of his mother’s illness. He said he’d ask Tommy to ring them back, but for whatever reason, Tommy never had, and their letters had gone unanswered.

  “Poor, poor bairn,” Heather had said, almost in tears, when they first learned the finality of Jill’s diagnosis. “Hasn’t he lost enough people already? And poor Jill. She’s still so young.” Of course they didn’t know then that Heather herself would die at the same age.

  Malcolm wondered if there was anything they could talk about besides death. But what was there to say? You couldn’t ask someone why they’d come, could you, when it was your own family? No, you could not, Heather’s voice told him firmly. Leave it to Tommy to explain when he’s ready.

  “How’s Henry?” Malcolm said after a moment, relieved to have thought of a new topic.

  Tommy shrugged. “He’s fine. We don’t speak much.” Then, apparently feeling he had to offer more, he added, “He’s married now. They live in Vancouver. Two kids.”

  “That’s nice,” Malcolm said, trying to recall Henry’s face.

  Tommy nodded and once more lapsed into silence. This time, Malcolm could not think how to break it.

  But at last, Tommy said, “How’s the croft doing?”

  Malcolm wondered where the shame came from, sudden and acute, as though Tommy would care that the croft was gone, as though he would have come back for that. He said, “I had to sell the tenancy. When Heather got ill. It was too hard to manage, and it wasn’t making us enough money. Not any money at all, really. And I needed to be with her.”

  Tommy said, his voice low, “I’m sorry about Heather. I really am.”

  Malcolm nodded. Six years, and he was still no good at knowing what to do with consolation. There was no consolation.

  “And you?” he said, stirring himself, thinking of the questions Heather would ask. “Are you married?”

  Tommy shook his head, and seemed almost about to smile, before thinking better of it. “No. Not me.” A pause, then he added, “I was with someone. Her name was Caroline.”

  “Oh no,” Malcolm said. “She didn’t . . . ?”

  And now Tommy really did smile, a strange upwards pull of his mouth that Malcolm didn’t recognize. “No, she didn’t die. We broke up.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Malcolm said, hearing the formal note that had crept into his voice. But he felt foolish for assuming relationships only ever ended in death. “Any children?”

  “No.” There was no smile now.

  Malcolm watched Tommy across the table, but Tommy volunteered nothing further, just sat there with his hands around his mug, as though nothing had happened, as though he was still eleven years old and had never left, had just been sitting here quietly all this time while Malcolm went about his business and failed to notice him.
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  “Where are you living these days?” Malcolm said.

  “London.”

  “How long you been there?”

  “While now,” Tommy said. He paused, then added, “I’ve been here and there. Tried Edinburgh for a while. Manchester. Even Lisbon.” He squinted, as though seeing the brightness again. “Never did get used to the sun.”

  “I’ve never been to Portugal,” Malcolm said.

  “Have you ever left Scotland?”

  Malcolm looked at Tommy, but his face gave nothing away.

  “No,” Malcolm said. “I never have. Furthest I’ve been is Edinburgh.”

  Tommy nodded.

  “We were planning a trip to Spain,” Malcolm said. “Me and Heather. Not to lie on a beach or anything. Heather wanted to see Barcelona. The—” he couldn’t for the life of him remember the name, though it had sounded beautiful, the way it had unfolded and dropped off Heather’s tongue—“cathedral. And all the rest. We were all set to book the hotel, but then Heather had the stroke. Her first one.”

  Someone else might have said they were sorry again, but Tommy made no comment, and Malcolm was grateful.

  There was a pause, then Malcolm said, “Did you stay overnight in Oban?”

  “Yes. I got the train up to Glasgow yesterday, then on to Oban last night. I wanted to be in good time for the ferry.” He hesitated, then said with a sudden stiffness that made his words sound rehearsed, “I’m sorry to drop in on you like this. I was wondering if I could stay for a while. A week, perhaps. If I’m not in your way.”

  “Of course, Tommy,” Malcolm said, hiding his anxiety beneath a heartiness that sounded false, even to himself. “That would be nice.”

  “Only if it’s O.K.,” Tommy said, not looking at him.

  “Of course,” Malcolm said again. “This is your home.”

  Not exactly the right thing to say. Tommy looked at him, and Malcolm, returning the look, thought, All right, I know.

  “Let’s sort out your room,” he said. “Then I’ll get started on tea.”

  He led Tommy up the narrow staircase and they stopped outside the first door. It was an old crofter’s cottage, modernized in the sixties and pretty much left alone since then. It retained its low, beamed ceilings, fireplace and latched doors, as well as its draughts. There were only three rooms upstairs, barely crammed in under the sloping roof: the tiny spare room at the top of the stairs, then Malcolm and Heather’s bedroom, and then the bathroom at the end of the short corridor. The spare room had been Tommy’s room once, though Malcolm hadn’t thought of it that way for many years now. He and Heather used to hear Tommy through the wall during those few years he lived with them, shouting in his sleep. Tommy never remembered his dreams after Heather woke him. Said he didn’t, anyway. He’d wet the bed too, not every night, but often, certainly, right up until he left the island. He’d be furious in his shame while Heather soothed him, telling him in her sensible way that it didn’t matter, that sheets could be changed, pyjamas could be changed, wasn’t that what washing machines were for? It wasn’t the end of the world, was it? Heather had said Tommy’s bad dreams would stop as he got older and the past got further away, but Malcolm thought differently (he had identified the bodies; he had nightmares of his own).

  Reaching out to open the door now, Malcolm wondered how much of this Tommy remembered. The room looked even more of a mess than he’d feared. It had been a long time since they’d given up thinking Tommy might come back to see them, and of course they’d never had children of their own. They’d kept the single bed, mainly because it had seemed too much bother to get rid of, but it hadn’t been made up for years, and now the mattress was hidden under stacks of books and old magazines. Boxes covered the floor, packed with things they didn’t want but had never got round to throwing out: a broken radio he had once thought he might fix, the Dairy Diaries Heather’s sister used to send her each Christmas that Heather kept afterwards for the recipes (which she never used), an old train set from Malcolm’s childhood that he felt oddly sentimental about, travel brochures that Heather had held on to because she said she liked to look at the pictures. All the detritus that came from living so long in one place.

  There were a few boxes of Heather’s things too: her clothes and some of her jewellery that Malcolm had kept, plus an unfinished bottle of scent; he still crept in here from time to time to hold this bottle guiltily to his nose, overwhelmed by the sense of his wife’s simultaneous presence and absence. He could never have thrown it all away, but he had felt more recently that it was strange to keep everything in its usual place in their bedroom, her dresses and shoes still in the wardrobe, her hairspray and moisturizing cream on the dresser. Perhaps, he thought, it wasn’t “healthy”, that word people seemed so keen to use these days. That had been the view of Fiona McKenzie, at any rate—a kind woman, but someone who always thought she knew best. Packing it up into the spare room had seemed like a good compromise.

  The whole room smelled musty and airless—old, Malcolm thought. Like him, he supposed. He was sixty-two, and felt older.

  “I’ll have to clear a few things out,” he said, and then almost laughed at the understatement.

  “I don’t mind the mess,” Tommy said.

  “We can put some of it in the shed. Not too damp this time of year, and I can cover it with the tarpaulin.”

  For the next half hour, they worked silently together, carrying boxes and carrier bags downstairs and outside in the dark to the small shed by the back door. Stealthily, while Tommy was outside, Malcolm transferred several of the Heather boxes, including the one with the scent, into his own bedroom, placing them carefully at the bottom of the wardrobe.

  By the time most of the floor was clear and the bed was bare, both men were sneezing. Malcolm went over to the bed and knelt on the mattress to wrench open the sash window above it—it was stiff, the wood warped, and it took him a few hefts to get it open. The night came into the room, bringing with it the damp of rain.

  “Get some air in here,” he said. “Sorry about the dust.” He looked around again. “Needs a good vacuum.”

  “I’ll do it,” Tommy said.

  “Right, O.K.,” Malcolm said. He fetched the vacuum cleaner from the airing cupboard and while Tommy was occupied with that, went in search of fresh sheets for the bed, and the spare duvet and pillows he knew Heather had kept somewhere. Finally he tracked it all down, crammed into the top of the cupboard in their bedroom. He’d been afraid everything would have a faintly mildewed smell, but Heather had packed it all away carefully, the duvet and pillows folded into a large plastic bag. The woman had been a wonder.

  Tommy had turned off the vacuum cleaner and was leaning on it, surveying his handiwork, when Malcolm returned to the spare room. “Not so bad now,” Tommy said.

  “No. It’s much better,” Malcolm said. He remembered Tommy as a child then, dusting for Heather or doing the washing up, always wanting his work to be noticed. Malcolm looked around the room again, feeling faintly ridiculous to be making a show of it. “Almost unrecognizable.”

  Tommy unplugged the vacuum cleaner and wound up the cord while Malcolm took the bedding over to the bed. But when Malcolm began to spread out the sheet, Tommy said, “I’ll do it,” and came over as if to take the sheet from him.

  “It’s all right. Leave it to me.”

  “No, it’s fine. I’ll make it up.”

  Malcolm stepped back, surprised at Tommy’s insistence. He wondered if Tommy was remembering how many times Malcolm or Heather had remade this bed for him as a child, and hoped it wasn’t that.

  Taking the vacuum cleaner downstairs, he spotted Tommy’s rucksack in the hall, lying by the boot rack. When Malcolm picked it up, it felt very light. Hadn’t Tommy brought anything with him apart from the clothes he stood up in? They seemed inadequate enough.

  Back in the spare room, Tommy was kneeling b
y the bed, tucking the sheet carefully under the corners of the mattress.

  “I brought your bag,” Malcolm said unnecessarily, putting it down just inside the door and feeling as though he’d overstepped the mark, had somehow invaded Tommy’s privacy.

  “Thanks,” Tommy said.

  There was a short silence.

  “Bathroom’s just along the hall,” Malcolm said.

  “I know. I remember.”

  “Of course.” There was another pause, then Malcolm said, “Well, I’ll go and see about tea. Come down whenever you’re ready. No rush.”

  He left the room, closing the door gently behind him.

  In the kitchen, Malcolm surveyed the contents of his fridge. He was still so shocked by Tommy’s arrival that it took him a while to get his thoughts in order. He’d been going to heat up the remains of the chicken pie he’d made a couple of days ago, but there weren’t really enough leftovers for two. He had potatoes, he thought, with sudden inspiration: with a baked potato each and some vegetables, the pie would stretch. From upstairs, he heard the clatter and churn of the water pipes as the shower started up, and was grateful to know Tommy wouldn’t reappear for a while.

  The meal was almost ready and the table laid by the time Tommy came in. His hair was damp from the shower, but he was wearing the same red checked shirt, jersey and jeans as before. Tommy hovered awkwardly at the door for a few moments, until Malcolm said, “Have a seat.” It occurred to him then that he ought to offer Tommy a drink, but not being much of a drinker himself, he only had a bottle of whisky and some very old sherry from before Heather died. The whisky, he supposed, would have to do, but when he made the offer, couched in apology that there was no beer or wine, Tommy swiftly declined.

  Malcolm busied himself putting food on the plates, saying, “It’s not much—just leftovers. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?” he added, the idea only just coming to him.