by David Park
If the sex was largely unsatisfactory he knows, as always, it’s a question of diminishing returns and that, after the initial flurry of passion, into the too quickly opening void must pour inevitably the knowledge of other still unfulfilled needs. Stanfield considers it one of life’s most bitter little cruelties but decides that perhaps it is the trick that brings the deceived back to the banquet again and again. There was something else as well, something unexpectedly and inescapably ugly in his head when it should’ve been filled with nothing but release, and that was an image of snow, but snow tainted and stained by his print. He closes the glass and glances at her sleeping. She has one arm thrown back across the pillow above her head. Just as the first time he looked at her like this he is struck by the paleness of her skin, almost subsumed by the whiteness of the pillow. He feels tired, not physically, but by the wearisome predictability of the day ahead, so he goes back to the bed and, trying not to disturb her, snuggles into her penumbral heat. He falls into a soft, comforting sleep but a little while later is wakened by some kind of alarm, then is slowly aware that there’s someone else in the apartment and talking to him. For a second he thinks it’s Kristal but as he glances towards her she turns on her side and pulls the quilt over her shoulder and anyway, as he blinks and squints at the rising light that fills the room, he knows that it’s not her voice. And then he suddenly understands that it’s his daughter speaking to him from the other room but as he stumbles myopically towards the voice he senses that there’s something not quite right about it and as he slumps back heavily on the bed he realises that it’s the answering machine.
‘What is it?’ Kristal asks, squirming her white shoulders coldly above the snow line of the quilt.
But now he’s oblivious to her and abruptly tells her to be quiet as he struggles to hear his daughter’s final words. He sits with his back taut and straight, straining to hear the voice he hasn’t heard in five years and feeling distant from it, struggling to read its timbre and tone, trying to hear the meaning in the spaces between words, trying in vain to see the expression on her face. He feels Kristal’s hand on the small of his back but it means nothing to him as the message clunks dead.
‘What is it?’ she asks. But he doesn’t reply at first because the narrowed focus of his thoughts doesn’t allow him to register anything beyond his own confusion and the growing sense of fear he feels spreading in the pit of his stomach. It’s the fear that freezes him to the bed, the knowledge that things are swaying in a kind of balance and he’s helpless to know what way they might finally come to a halt. She’s sitting behind him now and he feels the warmth of her breath on his neck as she presses her hands on his shoulders.
‘It’s an important message,’ he says, still motionless and staring at the open doorway.
‘Bad news?’
‘I don’t know.’ For some reason he thinks of all the months when Emma was a child, when she was going through her wake-in-the-middle-of-the-night phase and she would come into their room and somehow manage to tunnel into the space between her sleeping parents, a space that was increasingly wide, then sleep in that neutral sphere, that no man’s land in the cold war between two stalled armies.
Without his having to tell her, she knows she has to go and she drifts past him like a pale ghost. He’s glad because he knows he can’t listen to the message while she’s still in the apartment, can’t have his daughter and his indiscretion in the same room, and before he listens to it he tries to piece together what he remembers, desperate to read the omens so that he can prepare himself accordingly. He goes to the kitchen and pours two coffees, all the time glancing at the red light on the answering machine. When she joins him her hair is wet, plastered to her head in a way that makes her face thinner. She wears no make-up and her face is primed like a white page, waiting for the story of the day to be written on it.
‘Sorry,’ he says, without knowing exactly what he’s sorry for and confused when she asks him. ‘I don’t know. For hurrying you, for not making a proper breakfast.’
‘That’s OK,’ she says, using the palms of both hands to push the tails of her hair behind her ears. He knows she senses something’s wrong. ‘Will I see you again?’
‘I hope so,’ he says neutrally and then offers to call for a taxi but she tells him that she will walk a little, for the exercise, and then call one. He sits at the kitchen bar as she puts on her coat and knots the silk scarf loosely at her neck but all the time his eyes flick to the red light. She turns to go but then stops and looks at him. ‘I didn’t please you?’
‘You pleased me very much.’
She continues to stare at him, uncertain in her own mind, and unsure whether it’s to reassure her, or hurry her on her way, he stands up and coming to her kisses her lightly on both cheeks. He briefly feels the wetness of her hair upon his skin and he can’t tell himself whether he will see her again. In the law of diminishing returns there is always a time to cut your losses, a time to move on, and whether it was her stay, or the voice of his daughter on the phone, he doesn’t know but it feels as if the apartment is smaller now, not so resonant with its former arching emptiness.
Even after she’s gone he doesn’t go immediately to the phone but instead sits on the chair opposite it and drains the last warmth from the cup of coffee. Somewhere inside the welter of chips and circuitry rests the voice of his daughter, a voice he wasn’t sure he would ever hear again. The red light seems to steadily magnify in brightness until it feels that if he is to stretch out his hand he might get burned. He goes to the window and looks down on the river but there is no answer reflected in the grey dullness of its surface and so he has no option but to turn and walk uncertainly to the phone.
Beckett drops him off outside the cafe and he tells him he’ll phone when he needs him to return. He can tell that his driver is curious as to why he should have chosen such a place to eat, so out of keeping with his normal haunts. By way of explanation he says, ‘Meeting an old friend. Their choice.’ As he watches Beckett drive further up the main street to park he wonders why she stipulated this place and not her home, which is only five minutes away. His nervousness has made him early and he’s unsure whether to go in or wait outside. It’s a little country parlour, one down from a restaurant and one up from a cafe. He can tell just by looking at its prim exterior that it’s a solid little place where the menu will not divert from the home-baked, home-cooked, homespun respectability so beloved by this provincial backwater. He knows already that there will be vegetable soup and wheaten bread, Irish stew and in a slight recognition of the outer world possibly lasagne or quiche.
There’s no sign of her and he knows it’s a possibility that she’ll have changed her mind and won’t show but he decides to wait inside and try to stake a claim on somewhere they might be able to talk. What it is they will talk about is unclear to him and although he prepares various scenarios in his head, none of them manages to convince. Inside everything is as he anticipated but even more so and with a hint of a smile he thinks of the London restaurants he frequents. As he sits at one of the white-clothed tables with its doilies and country-cottage chairs, he thinks it’s the very worst place for this meeting. He tries to understand why his daughter should choose to live in this forsaken part of the world with which she is linked only through a deceased grandmother, why she should throw away the expensive and cultured start she was given in life to teach in some school he’s never heard of and live in a one-street town where at the glass-covered counter they sell tray bakes and homemade shortbread.
He orders a coffee from the waitress and tells her he’s waiting for someone, and then reruns the phone message in his head that by now he knows by heart. ‘This is Emma,’ it began and he knows that no matter how many times he replays it he will never hear her use the word father or any affectionate variation of it. And no matter how many times he tries to analyse it he can find no other tone except a perfunctory neutrality in her speech and her expression of a need to see him. He tries to
strip the words of the distortion and awkwardness always involved in speaking to a machine, the sudden gauche expression that inevitably affects the speaker, but is still unable to deconstruct any meaning beyond the literal. She needs to meet him – the word ‘needs’, however, comes out bereft of any emotional resonance and instead carries the dull inflection of a business request – there are some things she needs to talk about, but no clue as to what these might be and no personal reference to him, no ‘hope you are well’, or ‘looking forward to meeting you’. He wonders for a moment if it’s about money but discards this as an unlikely motivation, not just because her mother’s will left her financially comfortable but because his daughter somewhere along the way has acquired an unhealthy indifference to money.
Feeling a little self-conscious he is aware of the curious stares of the other customers he assumes are regulars and senses their sad interest in the small-town drama of an unfamiliar man in a suit drinking a cup of coffee and waiting for someone. He tries not to meet their eyes and the inappropriateness of the setting for the meeting begins to irk him. He tells himself that it’s confirmation of his belief that there has always been something contrary about his daughter, a wilful disregard for the prerequisites of etiquette, and he feels a sudden resentment that he has come to this, sitting waiting in a tiny cubby-hole that makes him increasingly imagine he’s taken residence inside a doll’s house. For a moment he wants to think of Kristal but he banishes the images she so readily furnishes because it feels distasteful to place her in proximity to his daughter and he wishes she hadn’t been in his bed when Emma’s voice echoed in the silence of the apartment. He wonders if a voice, even a disembodied voice, somehow carries the power of intuitive vision and wonders, too, how women always know unfaithfulness. Despite all his best efforts, despite every discretion and without anything ever being said by her in the later years, he always understood that Martine knew every time. How was it done? Lipstick on the collar? A crude cliche that masked the ability to divine the intangible with the springy, willowy rod of her heart however deeply he believed his indiscretion was buried.
She’s five minutes late and every time the door opens and its bell rings he feels the beat of his heart. He forces himself to admit that they’re not meeting at her home because she doesn’t want him to enter her world, that it’s still closed to him in the same way that her whole life is. So he counsels himself, advising himself to moderate his expectations, to hold himself in balance, but the coffee tastes bitter – he needs something much stronger. Outside a sudden squall of rain has started to fall and new arrivals take the opportunity to dramatise themselves with shakes of their shoulders and puffed-out cheeks. The audience shake their heads in silent sympathy and postpone their departures for a few more minutes. She isn’t coming, he knows she isn’t coming, but as he tries to catch the waitress’s eyes to pay his bill, the door opens and a young woman enters with her head bowed from the rain and he knows it’s his daughter. She looks up and pushes the wetness from the side of her hair with her fingertips and there’s none of the uncertainty he’d worried himself with, thinking that her decision to remove herself from his life would somehow change her physically as well. He stands up and raises his hand and for the briefest of moments thinks he must look like he’s standing in court promising to tell the truth and he drops it to his side as soon as she sees him. But she’s not the same. It’s not just the swelling globe of a new world that orbits her old self but there are subtle changes in her face that mark her as older and, in some way he can’t quite perceive, not exactly as he remembered. And then with a sharp pierce of sadness he remembers that she’s married now and has adopted a different family, so perhaps what is unfamiliar to him is the patina produced by the tight embrace of those she newly loves.
There is a table between them and he doesn’t know how best to greet her beyond the conviction that he won’t try to impose anything but the problem is solved almost immediately by her simple expression of the word ‘Hi’ and the quickness of the way she takes her seat. So far she hasn’t held his eyes and instead flusters about herself, opening the buttons of her coat and smoothing her hair that still wears a light sheen of damp.
‘It’s started to rain,’ she says as she looks about her. ‘Really coming down.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t be out in the rain,’ he says, placing both hands on his empty cup. He offers it as an expression of concern.
‘Why, what do you think’s going to happen?’ Her voice is quick and sharp-edged.
‘Nothing,’ he retreats. ‘How far pregnant are you?’ And every word that comes out of his mouth feels treacherous, liable to betray him by leading in the opposite direction to the one in which he wants to go. He knows his question sounds abrupt, too personal too quickly.
‘Eight months,’ she says, looking only at the menu she’s lifted. ‘Have you ordered yet?’
‘Just a coffee – I was waiting for you.’ It’s started badly and once again he silently curses the surroundings and then he understands that she’s chosen them deliberately, chosen them to put him on unfavourable ground, to drain away the possibility of dramatics of speech. And so he has to try and speak to his only child within the hopelessly narrow constraints of the mundane. It feels as if she’s put him in a straitjacket, that everything’s loaded against him.
‘Hello, Emma, how’re you keeping?’ the woman who is obviously the owner asks and it hurts to see the natural, instinctive smile with which his daughter greets a woman who is a stranger to him.
‘Not so bad, thanks. Legs are a bit heavy, that’s all.’
‘Let Alan do all the work – you keep your feet up, girl,’ the woman says and then she looks at him but Emma makes no effort to introduce them and he is forced to offer only a brief smile. ‘Would you like to order?’
‘Just a bowl of soup,’ Emma says and then looks at him for his order.
‘I’ll have the same.’ Then after the woman has gone, ‘Would it have hurt so much to tell her I’m your father?’ He can’t help himself, he can’t play this game where they are supposed to pretend that what is happening is normal.
‘Please don’t start,’ she says in a whispered voice and looking at him properly for the first time as she leans across the table. ‘I don’t want any trouble.’
‘I’m sorry.’ But he feels her words are those of someone trying to placate an attacker. Does she think of him as someone whose purpose is to give her trouble?
‘This isn’t the place,’ she insists.
‘So why did we come here?’
‘Because I like it here and it’ll serve its purpose.’
He knows he has to be more careful or she’ll leave and already he sees the signs that she’s having second thoughts as her eyes flicker round the other tables and her hands straighten the cutlery on the table. He feels like a climber exposed on the narrowest of ridges where a second’s carelessness might send him spinning to disaster so he asks, ‘How have you been?’
‘Good.’
‘Good,’ he replies, noticing for the first time in his life that she has her mother’s eyes.
‘And you?’ she asks. There are still little beads of water trembling in the thickness of her hair.
‘Not so bad.’ For a second he has the crazy idea of inventing some serious illness in the hope of generating the possibility of sympathy but instead he asks about her pregnancy and she tells him that it’s been fine and just when for the first fleeting moment it feels as if they’re having a conversation, the waitress arrives with the soup and she lapses into silence.
‘So you’re going to be a mother?’ he offers and in that moment how much he would give to hear her say, ‘And you’re going to be a grandfather,’ but instead she merely stares at the bowl of vegetable soup then stirs it slowly with her spoon. ‘And Alan, how is he?’ It’s the first time he has ever spoken the name of her husband and the word sounds inexplicably strange. She tells him he’s fine and blows gently on the spoonful of soup. He breaks the b
rittle freshness of the roll on his side plate and some of the crumbs fritter on to the white tablecloth. ‘What does he do?’ he asks.
‘He’s a teacher.’
‘In the same school?’
‘Yes. He teaches geography.’
Geography. He thinks of cartographers, of maps, tries to see what direction he now should take. The soup is overheated and overdosed with barley. He stares at her eyes again. Is it his imagination or have the intervening years of absence propelled her to this likeness to her mother, a likeness that he has obtusely failed to recognise in the past? He stares, too, at her wedding ring – a thin, plain band of gold. A functional ring devoid of decoration or the need to proclaim anything other than to herself.
‘I’d like to meet him.’ She doesn’t answer and he has a sudden urge to reach his hand across the table and touch her hair, to express the surge of affection he hadn’t expected to feel. But there is no map and he flounders lost and blind in some unknown terrain where even the bright stars of instinct are hidden from sight. ‘I suppose he thinks I’ve got two horns and a tail.’
‘He knows about you, if that’s what you mean,’ she says coldly and without embarrassment.
Her words make him flinch and it feels as if a hand has just unveiled what their circumspect politeness had left discreetly covered and the pain of knowing that nothing has changed collides with the shock of knowing, perhaps for the first time, how much she means to him.
‘Emma,’ he says, setting the spoon down and resting both hands on the table.