by Claire Dyer
‘Not at all,’ Mr Edwards says, switching the kettle off and putting the spoon he’s holding back in a drawer, ‘you must go. We can do this another time. I’m not going anywhere for a while!’ He smiles at Boyd as he says this, his eyes a sparkly blue in the creased skin of his face.
‘Thank you. I’ll show myself out.’
Boyd reaches out a hand. Mr Edwards takes it in both of his. ‘I do hope everything is all right, Mr Harrison,’ he says. ‘Take care of yourself, won’t you?’
If Boyd hadn’t been itching to leave, these few words may have led him to wonder what it may have been like to have had a father figure in his life, someone who would regularly hold his hand in theirs and say, ‘Take care of yourself, won’t you?’ but he’s walking quickly from the house. He fumbles in his pocket for the car key and, unlocking the door, hurls himself behind the wheel. As soon as the phone connects, he dials the office. ‘It’s me,’ he says. ‘I’m on my way. What’s happened?’
And Trixie tells him that Honey has fallen down the step into the cellar, that she blacked out for a moment but came to soon after and that she’s sitting down with her right foot up on a chair in front of her, drinking a cup of tea. ‘We think it might be broken,’ Trixie says. ‘Her ankle that is. I think you may need to take her to A&E.’
‘Guildford or Frimley?’ he asks her.
‘I don’t know which is best. I’ll check the traffic and let you know when you get here. OK?’
‘OK, and …’ Boyd is finding it difficult to swallow, it seems like his heart has lodged itself in his throat, ‘… thank you, Trixie. Thank you for everything.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ she says. ‘It’s the least I can do.’
* * *
Honey looks unfeasibly young when Boyd eventually crashes through the door to the office. He has abandoned his car at an angle in the service yard out back; anyone watching might think he is some sort of criminal leaving it for a quick getaway.
‘What have you done?’ He thinks he’s most probably shouting but he’s scared, and his fear is making him shout.
‘I’m OK,’ she says, smiling wanly up at him.
She doesn’t look OK at all; her ankle is swollen and must be very painful.
‘Come on, let’s get you to hospital. That needs an x-ray. Trixie?’ He turns to Trixie who’s sitting on the edge of her seat, gazing intently at the screen of her computer.
She looks up at him. ‘Yes?’ she says.
‘What news on the traffic?’
‘It’ll be quicker to go to Guildford by the looks of it. There are roadworks the other way.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Would you …’ she asks.
‘What?’ He’s shouting again.
‘… have time to answer a few work questions?’
‘No, of course not,’ he snaps. Then adds, ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to snap. I’ll ring you from the hospital when I’ve got Honey sorted.’
Trixie makes a strange snorting noise but Boyd’s too preoccupied to pay much attention to her, or the noise.
‘Come on,’ he says more gently now, helping Honey up on to her good foot. ‘Is it very sore? Did you bump your head? Can you put any weight on it?’ The questions come thick and fast and he doesn’t give her any time to answer them. Instead she rests her weight up against him and together they shuffle from the office and back out to the car.
Trixie follows them to the door and, as she makes to close it after them, Honey turns to her and says something about the prediction coming true but Boyd doesn’t hear her properly as a lorry is reversing into the yard, beeping as it does so.
But he does hear Trixie say, ‘Don’t be silly. Of course it’s not that. It was just an accident.’
And then the door to the office closes and he helps Honey into the car.
‘Try not to go to sleep,’ he says. ‘Don’t they say that after a bump to the head?’
‘I don’t know whether I bumped my head or not,’ Honey replies, leaning back against the headrest and closing her eyes.
‘Don’t!’ He is shouting again. ‘I’ll put the radio on. Listen to that, it’ll help you stay awake.’
‘God, it hurts,’ Honey says, gingerly lifting her right knee.
‘Put the chair back as far as it’ll go so you can stretch out a bit. OK?’
‘OK.’
He tries to keep the conversation going on the journey, but it’s hard because he has to concentrate on the traffic and his mind is whirring ahead to what might happen when they get there. He’ll have to drop her off and then leave her as he parks the car. How long will they have to wait? Will it need to be put in plaster? What does all this mean? When should he tell Vita? Should he tell Vita?
The DJ is wittering on about the number of shopping days left before Christmas when Boyd looks over at Honey as they are held at some traffic lights. She has her eyes closed.
He hates to disturb her. She looks pale and drawn. And frightened too. She looks how she looks when she wakes from her dream, the one where she cries out and struggles against him as if he’s trying to smother her. She has, he’s noticed, been more jumpy of late, always looking out of the office window, checking over her shoulder if they’re walking anywhere. He’d thought by now that she would have started to be more relaxed with him but, if anything, she’s getting more and more anxious.
Eventually they get to the hospital and he helps her in and leaves her leaning up against the reception desk as he goes to park. It takes ages to find a space and, as every moment passes, he becomes more and more frantic.
When he does finally return to A&E, she’s nowhere to be seen. He asks at reception but they’re not sure if she’s been called or not. Best to wait and see, he’s told.
He checks his phone. Thank God, she’s texted. ‘Gone for X-ray. Will keep you posted.’
So, he decides to go to the X-ray department to find her. He follows the maze of corridors, passing doors to wards and volunteers driving the infirm around on mobility buggies. There is an air of preoccupation and incipient drama everywhere. He should call Trixie, and Vita, but right now all he can think about is finding Honey.
He asks at another desk and is told that yes, she’s being seen and should be out soon and so finally he lets himself breathe properly and sits on a hard red plastic chair to wait for her.
And that’s where he is when he hears his name.
‘Boyd? What on earth are you doing here?’
‘Mum?’
Sitting in a wheelchair in front of him is his mother. She’s dressed in a jade two-piece, has her make-up on and her nails are painted. She reminds Boyd of the Queen.
Suddenly he’s exhausted. He doesn’t want to have to explain why he’s here. He certainly doesn’t want this to be the first time Honey and his mother meet.
So instead of answering her, he asks, ‘Why are you here? Is everything OK?’
‘Just routine,’ she answers and, looking over her shoulder, sends what he thinks is a warning look to the nurse who’s pushing her along. ‘Isn’t it?’ she says, addressing the nurse.
The nurse smiles at Boyd and nods. ‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘Just routine. Is this your son then?’ she asks, placing a hand on Belle’s shoulder.
‘Yes,’ Belle says. ‘This is Boyd.’
There is an awkward silence and then Belle says, ‘Well, best be getting on I guess. Time and tests wait for no man. I’ll see you soon, no doubt, Boyd.’
She doesn’t bother to wait to hear the reasons why he’s there but instead she raises a hand and waves imperiously as she gets wheeled away. How, Boyd wonders, has it come to this? We used to be close. Well, we had a kind of closeness anyway; we were mother and son, but now can only be like this with one another. It’s a crying shame, a fucking crying shame.
But he knows why it is so. After all, hadn’t he done the one thing she’d expressly asked him not to?
* * *
It was September, a warm day. He was eighteen, impatient and angry.
He’d done his A-levels and was waiting to go to university but knew that before he did, he had to try and find his father. He’d always known his father’s name; after all it was on his birth certificate: Percy Harrison.
The name Percy had always conjured up the image of a man who was slightly fat, with thinning hair and a meticulous way of moving. Boyd had absolutely no idea how his mother could have fallen pregnant by this kind of a man.
He’d had many theories about their affair over the years. Maybe it had been one between two like-minded people separated by circumstances, you know the wrong place/wrong time kind of thing, and that the years of silence that had followed had been heart-breaking for both of them. Or maybe Percy’s wife had once been Belle’s friend but she’d become ill in some awful way and so Percy and Belle had decided that the only honourable thing to do was for Belle and her baby to disappear to reduce the amount of harm done. Or, perhaps Percy had taken advantage of a lonely and desperate Belle at a neighbourhood party: a fumble in the coat cupboard that went too far, that could, in different circumstances and at a different time, have been considered rape.
Whatever happened, Belle remained tight-lipped about it throughout Boyd’s childhood. She’d said, ‘I made a promise that I’d never let you contact him; we’re not supposed to have anything to do with him. It was part of the bargain.’ She didn’t tell him what the rest of the bargain had been.
But Boyd had lost patience with this. He wanted to confront the man, seek some kind of connection. He’d spent too many years fatherless and was, to all intents and purposes, to remain so despite his mother’s spate of marriages. Not one of these marriages had given him a father.
And so he looked Percy up. It wasn’t difficult to find him. He went to the library and sourced local newspaper coverage from where his mother had been living at the time and found articles about Percy: he’d won a marrow-growing competition in 1972, had championed a pedestrian crossing outside the Post Office in 1979. In one article they gave his address as Sussex Gardens and so Boyd had started his search there.
And, it seemed, Percy hadn’t moved house, not in all the years that had followed. Instead he’d stayed in the bay-fronted semi he’d been living in when Belle and he had done whatever it was they had done to produce Boyd. And so it was that on a warm September evening Boyd stood on the pavement opposite, watching as his father mowed his front lawn.
The man didn’t bear any resemblance to the picture Boyd had carried around for so long in his head. Instead, in front of him was a tall, well-built man. He had a mop of dark hair which he kept brushing out of his eyes with one hand as the other kept the mower steady on its journey up and down the lawn. This man wore a loose, white shirt and faded jeans, his skin a kind of burnished gold in the setting sun.
Boyd watched his father as the occasional car trundled up and down the suburban street. Boyd didn’t think about his mother, and his childhood faded to no more than a sepia tinge of days punctuated by school, meat paste sandwiches and reading in bed. This moment was all that mattered. This was going to be the day that defined him. He would be a man with a father, a man who knew where he came from and where he was going to.
He stepped off the pavement and crossed the road. As he approached the end of his father’s drive, he paused, but then Percy looked up and caught sight of him. Instinctively Boyd raised a hand in greeting. Percy frowned and, bending down, switched the mower off. The silence in the street was deafening. Behind him stood the house, impenetrable, a sun setting in each of its windows. The two men walked towards one another.
‘Can I help you?’ his father said.
‘I …’ The words died in Boyd’s throat.
‘I know who you are,’ Percy said, running a hand through his hair and keeping it there as if to shield his eyes from the sun.
‘You do?’
‘Of course I do. Your mother insists on sending me pictures.’
‘She does?
‘Yes.’
Boyd couldn’t fathom what his father might be thinking. His face was half-hidden by his hand but his body language was wary, as if he was poised for flight.
‘Although,’ Percy continued, ‘it’s against the terms of our agreement.’
Boyd was starting to feel foolish. He shouldn’t have come. Maybe his mother had been right and it was best to let things lie. And he’d promised her. Countless times he’d promised her not to go in search of his father, and yet here he was standing at the end of his father’s drive wishing he was anywhere else on the earth but there.
‘She hasn’t told you then?’
‘No.’
Percy had dropped his hand by now and had put both in the pockets of his jeans. Boyd could hear the rattle of a few coins, maybe a set of keys, as Percy turned and looked briefly and somewhat furtively over his shoulder at the house behind him.
When he turned back to face Boyd he said, ‘The deal was that if I gave you my name and allowed her to change hers to Harrison by deed poll, she’d not make any other claim on me. The most important things for her, apparently, were for the three of us to have the same name and for you to have the box on your birth certificate filled in. I gave her some money too, at the time. Money I could scarcely afford, I’ll have you know.’
Two things struck Boyd about what his father had just said. Firstly, the way he’d said the word ‘apparently’ had been snide and somewhat cruel and, secondly, Boyd had come to the realisation that Percy’s other family still had no idea that he existed.
‘They still don’t know, do they?’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘The people in there.’ Boyd pointed at the house.
‘No, and they must never find out.’
‘You must be so ashamed of me.’
Percy took a step towards Boyd at this point and took one hand out of his pocket and stretched it out as if to touch Boyd on the arm. ‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘It’s just I’ve never dared get close to you. I have too much to lose.’
If Boyd expected an apology to follow, he was disappointed. In his heart he’d heard his father say, ‘I’m sorry, son. I’m sorry I can’t be the father you deserve. It’s a fucking tragedy but that’s the way life is. I’d do anything for it to be other than the way it is.’
No, Percy didn’t say this. Instead the front door of the house behind him opened and a girl of around twenty stood on the doorstep and called out, ‘Dad? Mum says tea’ll be in five minutes.’
The girl was tall, slender and dark-haired. She was, Boyd later realised, his half-sister and he didn’t even know her name.
Percy had dropped his hand and turned to face his daughter. ‘Tell her I’ll be in soon,’ he said. ‘Just finishing up out here.’
‘Go,’ he said, looking back at Boyd. ‘Just go. It’s for the best, believe me. Your mother and I have an agreement and this isn’t part of it.’
As he finished this sentence Percy’s mouth moved silently as if the words, ‘I’m sorry,’ were making their way involuntarily out of it. But still he didn’t say them and, as Boyd began to walk away, he heard the girl say, ‘Who was that Dad?’ and his father reply, ‘Just someone asking for directions, that’s all.’
The consequences of this meeting on the driveway on that evening in September were cataclysmic. Percy must have told Belle of Boyd’s visit because after saying, ‘You broke your promise,’ to Boyd, Belle didn’t speak to him for three months and has never really forgiven him for it since.
And so Boyd started university effectively motherless and fatherless and he drank too much and slept with any girl who would sleep with him and he did barely any work and he ate bad food and did no exercise. Before losing William, it was the lowest point of his life and, even now, sitting on a hard plastic chair in a hospital corridor waiting for Honey to reappear with the whoosh of the wheels of his mother’s wheelchair still ringing in his ears, the weight of this rejection sits in his chest as though someone has buried a cannonball there.
But even so, Boyd h
as always tried to be the better man. He knows that honour and love lie in the small acts of kindness between people and so he’s tried, both with Vita and with Honey to be a good man, to put them first and him second. He built Vita’s studio for her, he waited for as long as he could for her to recover from William’s death and, although it shames him, he’d truly believed that leaving was the kinder thing to do. And he loves Honey; for all her frailties and for all she hasn’t told him, he loves her the best way he can. And, he’s also, over the years, tried to be a good son to his mother. Yes, he may not love her, not in the way he should, but yet he tries; he is loyal and steadfast and forgiving. These are the qualities Boyd believes in and which, he hopes, he demonstrates in the small moments, in the day to day. Even so, there is something, some unresolved question hovering around his heart. He doesn’t know what it is, but it’s there, like smoke or cloud cover.
‘Mr Harrison?’ A nurse is standing in front of him.
‘That’s me. How is she? How’s Honey?’ he asks.
‘She’s fine. Follow me and we’ll get her discharged. It’s going to take a while for her to get used to the crutches.’
The nurse smiles at Boyd as she says this and Boyd stands and makes his way down the corridor after her.
Vita
‘Oh, what are you doing here?’ I’m surprised to find Trixie in the house when I get home.
‘Waiting for Boyd,’ she replies.
‘I didn’t know you still had a key.’
‘I keep it in the office, just in case.’
‘Oh, I see.’
Having her here is a painful reminder of when she used to come round after William died; her presence now though is different, less comforting. She had been sitting down, reading, a mug of tea on the table in front of her, but now she’s standing, as though poised for a fight.