Читать книгу If My Father Loved Me - Rosie Thomas - Страница 5

They had put him in a small room off the main ward. There he was, lying on his back, his head propped on pillows. I saw that his profile had become a sharper, bonier version of the one I knew, as if layers of fat and muscle had been scraped away from his skull. His nose looked bigger and his skin was pale and shiny, stretched tight over the bones.

I hesitated at the door but he opened his eyes and turned his head to look straight at me. ‘Hello, Sade. Sorry about this. Damned nuisance.’

I smiled at him. ‘Hello, Dad.’

All night and as I drove out of London I had been dreading this moment. I had been afraid of how he would look and of what we would say to each other with the spectre of death in the room. Now that I was actually here I saw that he was hooked up to wires and tubes ran into his arms. He looked ill, but still not so different from his usual self, and my fear was not in speaking of painful matters, but that he might go away before we had a chance to talk at all.

There was a red plastic chair in the cramped space beside his bed. I sat down and took one of his hands, lacing my fingers with his. We had so rarely touched each other. Somewhere deep inside my head I could feel the pressure of tears, but I knew I wasn’t going to cry. ‘How do you feel?’

He ran his tongue over his lips. ‘Rough as a bear’s back.’

‘What happened?’

‘Chest pain. I rang Jean Andrews and she came right over.’

I knew Mrs Andrews. She was Ted’s neighbour. It would have been Mrs Andrews who came here with him in the ambulance. He was wearing his own pyjamas, and his glasses and a paperback book were lying on his bedside locker, so she must have packed his bag for him, too. She was probably the last of the line of Ted’s girlfriends, or ‘aunties’ as I was taught to call them when I was little, although I don’t believe Jean really performed any services for my father beyond looking out for him and bringing him the newspaper.

‘Why didn’t you call me?’

He moistened his lips again. There was a covered jug and a plastic beaker on the locker, so I poured some water and held the beaker for him while he drank a mouthful. Afterwards I took his hand once more.

‘Thanks. I thought I’d see the quack first, let him take a shufti. Might all have been a false alarm.’

The vocabulary made my neck stiffen, just a little, as it always did.

Ted had served in the RAF during the war. He was not a pilot but an aircraftsman, working on the maintenance of Spitfires that flew in the Battle of Britain, although he didn’t like to be too specific about his exact rank and responsibility. When on the back foot he still reached for words like prang and crate and willco, as if this threadbare old slang could lend him some extra strength or status.

He lived increasingly in the past, like many old people, although the difference with Ted was that the geography of that other country was largely imaginary. But the boundaries between truth and illusion didn’t really matter all that much, I thought. Not any longer.

My fingers tightened on his. ‘I’m here now,’ I said.

‘How’s my cutie? And Jack?’

When she was a little girl Ted always called Lola his cutie. He was delighted to have a granddaughter, although he protested that it made him feel old. ‘She’s going to be a heartbreaker,’ he used to say. ‘Just look at those bright eyes.’

I should have made sure he saw more of his grandchildren on ordinary days, not just the set-piece ones armoured with conventions and pressured by expectations. I should have tried to forget my own growing up and let the next generation make amends for our failures.

‘Lola’s just fine. She’s going to come in and see you later, or maybe tomorrow. And Jack’s okay, although he doesn’t like school that much.’

‘Neither did I when I was his age. I used to sit next to a boy called Peter Dobson. He would shake his pen deliberately to make blots all over my work, and he and his chums used to lie in wait for me after school and pull my books out and run off with my comics.’

‘I don’t think things have changed for the better.’

I realised that there were pins and needles in my arm and my wrist ached with the tension of lightly holding his hand. I shifted my position and he asked, ‘Are you comfortable?’

‘Yes. Are you?’

He sighed, restlessly shifting his thin legs under the covers. ‘Not very.’

A nurse came in. He was young, dressed in a white jacket and trousers. He glanced at the whiteboard over the bed and I followed his eyes. A note in bright blue magic marker, scrawled over the previous occupant’s smeared-out details, declared that this was Edwin Thompson, ‘Ted’. ‘Hello, Teddy-boy,’ the nurse said, examining the bags that leaked fluids into my father’s arm. ‘My name’s Mike. How are you feeling? Not so good?’

‘I feel as you would expect, having had a heart attack last night,’ Ted answered. I smiled. Ted didn’t take to being patronised, even in his hospital bed.

‘And who is this young lady?’

‘I’m his daughter.’

‘Well, now then, I need to do your dad’s obs and then the doctors are coming round. Could I ask you to pop up and wait in the visitors’ room? You can come back as soon as rounds are over.’

‘I’d like to talk to his doctor.’

‘Of course. Not a problem.’

I walked up the ward, past bedridden old men, to sit and wait in a small side room.

A long hour later, the same nurse put his head round the door. ‘Doctor will see you now, in Sister’s office.’

As I passed I saw Ted lying on his back in the same position. His eyes were closed and I thought he must have fallen asleep.

The consultant cardiologist was a woman, younger than me. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but Ted had talked about the quack and finding out what he had to say. That was Ted all over: proper jobs, like this one, were done by men.

The doctor held out her hand, with a professionally sympathetic smile. ‘Susan Bennett,’ she said and we shook hands.

I sat down in the chair she indicated.

I remembered the shadow that had slid into the restaurant last night and found myself repeating over and over in my head, don’t, please don’t say it, just let him get better …

Susan Bennett explained that it had been a serious attack, bigger than they had at first suspected. A large proportion of the heart muscle had been affected.

I listened carefully, intending to work out later what was really being said, but I understood quickly there was no need to try to read between the words. Dr Bennett gave me the unvarnished truth. There was no likelihood of long-term recovery, she said, given the damage that had already occurred. The question was when rather than if the end would come, and how to manage the intervening time.

‘I see,’ I murmured. The voice in my head had stopped. All I could hear was a roaring silence.

I realised that Dr Bennett was asking me a question. She wanted to know, if there were to be another huge heart attack, how I felt about an attempt to resuscitate my father. Did I want them to try, or should they let him go in peace?

‘I … I would like to think about it. And perhaps to talk to him about it. What usually happens in these cases?’

What am I supposed to say, I wondered? No, please just stand aside, don’t bother to help him? Or, I absolutely insist that your technicians come running to his bedside with their brutal paddles and try to shock him back into the world?

‘Every case is different,’ she said gently. ‘I’m sorry to have to give you bad news.’

‘Does he know?’

‘We haven’t told him what I have just told you, if that is what you are asking.’

‘He’s over eighty,’ I said, as if his age somehow made the news slightly less bad. What I actually meant was to deplore the total of years that he and I had allowed to pass, until we had unwittingly reached this last minute where his doctor was telling me that Ted was going to die soon.

She nodded anyway. ‘If there is anyone else, any other members of the family, it might be a good idea if they came in to see him soon.’

‘How long is it likely to be?’

‘I don’t know,’ Susan Bennett said. I liked her for not pretending omniscience. ‘We’ll do what we can to keep him comfortable.’

I walked slowly back to his bedside. I noticed the shiny floors with a faint skim of dust, and the chipped cream paint of the bed ends. Ted’s eyes flickered open as soon as I sat down in the red chair. He wasn’t asleep – he had been waiting for me.

‘Did you hear what that nurse called me? Teddy-boy,’ he muttered in disgust.

‘I know.’ We both smiled. I leaned over his hand as I took hold of it again, studying the map of raised sinews and brown blotches. Please don’t die, I wanted to beg him. As if it were his choice.

‘What did the doctor say?’

‘That you have had a heart attack. They’re monitoring you and waiting to see what will happen over the next few days.’

‘Yes?’

‘She sounded optimistic.’

But my tongue felt as though it was sticking to the roof of my mouth. Coward, coward, coward. I shouldn’t be lying to him, but my father and I were not used to talking to each other about matters like love, or guilt, or disappointment. Was I supposed to start now, going straight to dealing with impending death? And how was I going to say it? You are going to die. And so I want to tell you that I love you, even though I haven’t said so in forty years, and that love is in spite of everything, not because of it?

I bit my lower lip until distracting pain flooded round my mouth.

Ted only nodded, lying wearily against his pillows. He was looking away from me, out of the window at the grey angle of building and the narrow slice of cloudy sky that was the only view from his bed.

If he asks anything else, I resolved, I will tell him the truth. If he wants to know whether he is dying, he will ask me. Then we can hold each other. I will put my arms round him and help him and look after him, whatever is coming.

I waited, trying to work out the words that I would use and listening with half an ear to the sound of trolleys moving on the ward. A nurse walked past the door with a pile of linen in her arms and I watched her black-stockinged ankles receding.

The silence stretched between us. I rubbed the skin on the back of Ted’s hand with the ball of my thumb, noticing how loose and papery it felt. He didn’t say anything, but the muscles of his chin and throat worked a little, as if he wished that he could. As the minutes passed I began to long for talk, even if it didn’t mean much, or anything at all, just so long as there was some exchange between us.

The last few times we had seen each other, Ted reminisced about the war and about the make-do years that followed it when he was first married to my mother. He talked a lot about the glory days of the Fifties too, when he was discovering that he could follow his nose into a career that allowed him to meet rich women and powerful men. He spoke of the old days with a longing for his lost kingdoms, although oddly enough he never romanticised his gift itself. (He was always matter-of-fact about the mystery of creating perfumes. ‘It’s chemistry, memory and money,’ he used to say. ‘And mostly money.’)

I thought now that maybe I could reach out to him by talking about the past, even though it was such a quagmire. I tried harder, flipping through the scenes in my mind’s eye, searching for some neutral time that I could offer up. ‘Do you remember that day when you took me in to the Phebus labs? I must have been six or seven, I should think.’

‘Old Man Phebus,’ Ted said quietly.

I can’t remember why Ted took me to work with him on that particular morning. Maybe my mother was ill, or had to go somewhere where she couldn’t take me. Outside school hours she and I were usually at home, occupied with our quiet routines that were put aside as soon as Ted came in. We were happy enough on our own together, Faye and I, yet even when I was very young I understood that hers was a make-do contentment. It was only when Ted was there that I saw her smile properly. For people in shops, occasional encounters with neighbours, even for me, there was a tucked-in version bleached by melancholy. Because I didn’t know anything different I thought that was how it was for all families. Fathers went out and eventually came back, redolent of the outside world, and mothers and children waited like patient shells to close themselves round this life-giving kernel.

That day Ted and I travelled to work by bus, and I sat close up against my father in the blue, smoky fug on the top deck. It was exciting to ride so high above the streets, and to be able to look straight in through smeary windows and see cramped offices and the rumpled secrets of half-curtained bedsits. Phebus Fragrances occupied a small warehouse building off Kingsland Road, in Dalston, on the fringe of the East End. It seemed very far from our house in a north London suburb. There was a bomb-site to one side of the warehouse, and summer had turned the piled rubble lush with the blue-purple wands of buddleia and the red-purple of willowherb. It must have been the school holidays because there were children out playing on the open space. I held my father’s hand as we walked from the bus stop and felt sorry for them because they weren’t going to work as I was.

Anthony Phebus was Ted’s earliest mentor in the perfume business. Ted always called him the Old Man. Ted had started working for him not long after I was born, as a bookkeeper and general office administrator, although of course he didn’t actually have any bookkeeping skills or relevant office experience. In the years after the war he did a variety of jobs, from van-driving to working as a garage hand, but when I was born he decided that it was time to move up in the world. He applied for the job with Mr Phebus and impressed the old man so much with his apparent expertise with figures that he was offered the position on the spot. I knew this part of the story well, because Ted liked to tell it with a wink.

‘I learned on the job.’ He smiled. ‘Always the best way. You don’t know what you’re going to be able to do until you have to do it, and when you have to it’s surprising what you can do.’

In any case, Ted Thompson didn’t stay long with the ledgers and file cabinets in the outer office. Anthony Phebus’s business was as a commercial fragrance supplier. If a perfume house wanted to design a new scent, or if a manufacturer of face powder or shampoo needed a fragrance to set off a new product, they commissioned Mr Phebus to develop one for them. In his laboratory, with a tiny staff and minimal investment, the old man would mix and sniff and frown and adjust and finally come up with a formula that he would sell to the manufacturer. Sometimes he made up the perfume oil itself, juggling with money and loans to buy in enough raw materials just as he played with the balance of ingredients in his latest creation. Cosmetics manufacturers knew that he would give them what they wanted. Quite soon after joining the company Ted was helping him to do it. Phebus Fragrances was a long way down the scale from Chanel or Guerlain, but the old man did enough business to survive.

When we arrived Mr Phebus was at his desk in an untidy cubbyhole of an office, but he stood up straight away and came round to shake my hand. I was frightened of his eyebrows. They were white and jutted straight out from his forehead like a pair of bristly hearth brushes.

‘And so, Miss Sadie, you work hard and make my fortune for me today?’

I looked up at Ted for confirmation and he gave me a wink, followed by his wide smile.

The ‘lab,’ as Mr Phebus and Ted always referred to it, was a windowless room lined from floor to ceiling with ex-WD metal shelves. On the shelves, drawn up in precise rows, were hundreds and hundreds of brown glass screw-top bottles. Each bottle was labelled or numbered in the old man’s neat, foreign-looking script. In the centre of the room was a plain wood table with another clutch of bottles ranged on it in a semicircle, a line of notepads and pens, a pair of scales and some jars of what looked to me like flat white pencils. There was a sink with a dripping tap and some bright overhead lights.

‘This is where we make our magic, eh?’ Mr Phebus laughed. ‘Where your good father learns to make dreams for beautiful women.’

I didn’t like the reference to beautiful women or their dreams, not in relation to my father. The only women he should have anything to do with were Mum and me. I kept my mouth shut in a firm line and waited.

‘Sit down here, miss,’ Mr Phebus said and I slid into a seat. As well as having alarming eyebrows, I thought he talked in a funny way, as though ‘s’s and ‘th’s were ‘z’s. When I was older I learned that the old man had been an analytic chemist in Warsaw, but he had come to London with his wife before the war. He started work with a cosmetics house and he turned himself from a chemist into a perfumer by sheer hard work.

‘Your father, Mr Ted here, he has what we call a nose,’ Mr Phebus grandly announced.

I remember looking at my father’s face and realising it was a handsome one compared with Mr Phebus’s, and feeling proud of my father’s youth and good looks. But his nose seemed relatively unremarkable. ‘So have I,’ I retorted, pressing the end of mine and squashing it.

‘We shall see,’ the old man said. I thought he was not very observant if he couldn’t see it already.

The three of us sat down at the plain wood table and Ted gave me my own jar of the flat white pencils. Now I could see that they were in fact strips of thick blotting paper, the same size as the spills my mother used for lighting the gas. Mr Phebus was humming and setting a line of the little glass bottles between us. He unscrewed the top of one with a flourish and told me to take my blotter. I glanced at Ted and he pointed to the white paper strip. Mr Phebus already had one and as I watched he slid the tip of it gently into the liquid in the bottle.

‘Now you,’ he said. I copied him exactly as he lifted the blotter to his nose and breathed in. His eyebrows twitched and I looked again at Ted, wanting to laugh. My father pressed his forefinger against one nostril and winked again. I sniffed hard at my dipper, as Mr Phebus had done. A dense, sweet cloud instantly filled my nose and rushed up through the secret insides of my face until it seemed to squeeze its fingers round my brain. I coughed and closed my eyes, and as I let my hand fall the scent’s power receded, although I could still feel the pressure of it above my cheeks and the stinging shock in the tender membranes of my nose.

‘What is that?’ I whispered.

Mr Phebus said, ‘That is lavender. It will be one of the top notes of the scent we are working on today.’

‘Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly.’ I had heard the song on Listen with Mother and I was pleased to make this unexpected connection. But Mr Phebus held up his hand and frowned. We were working. The lab was no place for rhymes or any kind of inattention. He unscrewed another bottle and we went through the same process, dipping and smelling. This one was nasty as well as strong. The stink was sharp, like cats or the brown-tiled lavatories at my school, and I screwed up my face in disgust.

‘Cassia,’ Mr Phebus said. ‘Very important. You must remember that not all perfume essences smell sweet and pretty. We often use these sensual animal stinks like musk and civet for our base notes, to anchor the structure. Men and women are animals too, you know, and we all respond in the same way.’

I frowned at him, battling my incomprehension.

The door opened and a woman with her hair swept up on the top of her head looked in at us. ‘Phone call for Mr Thompson,’ she said.

I shivered on my wooden seat with pleasure at the importance of this. We didn’t have a telephone at home. Ted sprang up and went out, not remembering to look round at me. Mr Phebus went on unscrewing bottles and motioning to me to dip and sniff. Some of the smells were like flowers pressed and squeezed to make them powerful instead of sweet and gentle, others were surprising, reminding me of orange peel, or Christmas, or the sea at Whitstable where we had spent a summer holiday. By the time my father came back there were ten used white dippers on the table in front of me. I was beginning to feel bored and slightly queasy.

‘Now, miss,’ Mr Phebus said, pulling at the thistly tuft of one eyebrow. ‘Pay no attention to your father. Can you remember which one was lavender?’

Ten dippers with their tips discoloured or turned translucent by the oils now lay on the table in front of me. I stared at what was left of the evidence and then reluctantly I picked up several in turn and sniffed at them again. My head felt muzzy and too full of potent fumes. The dippers smelled less strongly now; their separate characters and the names Mr Phebus had given them had become hopelessly confused. I took a wild guess. ‘That one?’

‘No, that one is jasmine.’

Ted laughed and sat down again on the wooden chair beside mine. He tilted it back on two legs with his arms folded, in the exact way my mother told me not to do at home. My eyes were stinging. I felt that I had let him down.

‘Don’t worry, you can learn the difference if you try hard enough,’ Mr Phebus said. ‘I managed it. I spent many years of hard work, memorising thousands of notes, which is what we call the different basic scents and that is only the very beginning of what a perfumer must know. He must have other skills too, and most of all he must have imagination that lifts him from being a mere technician into an artist of fragrance.

‘I am an artist, in my small way, but only of the fourth or maybe third degree. But your father here’ – he paused for effect, with his eyebrows pointing at me – ‘he is, at once, a natural. He smells a note only once and he remembers it. And he knows, because the artistry is in his heart and in his mind, he knows what he will add and what he will withhold to coax from these bottles, these not romantic little jars, the dreams of women.’

Women and their dreams, again. I was torn between pride in my father and a new discomfort that rubbed at the margins of my understanding. I didn’t like the feeling of insecurity that came with it.

‘Of course, he still has very much to learn. Many years of practice.’

Ted laughed out loud delightedly. ‘Better get on with it, then.’ He was always enthusiastic in those days. He rubbed his hands and smacked his lips, full of raw appetite for life. I didn’t recognise his hunger then for what it was, but I already knew that my mother entirely lacked what Ted possessed. I loved her, of course, and I took for granted her devotion to me, but she wasn’t thrilling in the way my father was. She was always there and I never noticed her constancy until she wasn’t any longer. One morning she was at home and that same afternoon she was never coming back. That’s how sudden her death was from the brain haemorrhage. Afterwards, when I thought about her, I would remember her quietness and restraint. She used to brush my hair and tie ribbons in it, looking down or away instead of into our joint reflections in the mirror of her kidney-shaped dressing table. She wore plain jerseys and calf-length colourless skirts that hid her pretty legs. It was as if even before she left us altogether she occupied only the corners of her own life. Whereas Ted joyfully overflowed out of his, and ran in a hot current through hers and mine as well.

Mr Phebus said, ‘Let’s have Black Opal three and four, then.’

Ted brought some bottles from the shelves and they drew their notepads and jars of blotters towards them. The two of them began nosing and muttering together, and I half listened while unfamiliar words washed over my head. They talked about heart and base notes and aldehydes and sparkle and synthesis, and the names of natural essences and the chemical polysyllables of synthetics rolled off their tongues. I didn’t remember tongue-twisting phenylethylene or galaxolide, but the mysterious-sounding beauty of naturals – vetiver and musk and mimosa – did stay with me.

They were still with me now as I sat by my father’s bed and held his dry hand. Only the names, not the scents. I failed Mr Phebus’s first test and I knew I was not an artist like Ted.

I was talking too much, I realised. It would be tiring for him. ‘Do you remember?’

‘How old were you?’ he asked, restlessly moving his legs and frowning with the effort of recollection.

‘Six, or seven.’

‘Back in ’56, then.’

I was pleased that he knew the year of my birth. I wouldn’t have placed a bet on it. ‘Yes.’

‘We were working on contract for Coty.’ His hand moved a little in my grasp, as if he were trying to reach for something, and then fell back again. ‘I don’t remember the day. It must have been boring for you.’

We’re so polite to each other, I thought. We are like a rough sea swirling under a thin skin of ice.

While the old man and my father continued with their sniffing and scribbling I began to fidget and rock on my chair. I made a wigwam of dippers and then, with a hasty movement to stop it collapsing, I knocked over a bottle. The bottle rolled across the table and stopped in front of Ted.

He raised his head, his forehead corrugated with irritation and his eyes cold. It was a look I had seen often enough. ‘Why don’t you go out and sit by Miss Mathers?’

Miss Mathers was the woman with piled-up hair. I had seen them laughing together and heard Ted call her Babs, but I understood that she was Miss Mathers to me. I stood up obediently.

Miss Mathers gave me some pencils and some sheets of paper to draw on, then went back to her typing. She rolled letterheads and pale-pink and green flimsies sandwiched with carbon paper into her black-and-gold typewriter and busily stabbed the keys. Once or twice she answered the telephone in a sing-song voice: ‘Phebus Fraygrances.’

At twelve thirty Ted and I went out. After the dimness inside the warehouse the sunshine was so bright it made me blink. We strolled down Kingsland Road to a pub and I sat on a bench in the sun whileTed went inside. My excitement flooded back with the novelty of all this and I swung my legs so my white socks flashed. Ted brought out lemonade and a cheese sandwich for me, and a pint of beer and a ham-and-pickle sandwich for him. He took a long swallow of the beer and rubbed the froth from his clipped moustache. Then he slid a packet of Players from his pocket and lit one. He blew out the smoke in a long plume and sighed with pleasure. ‘Not a word to a soul,’ he said to me, pressing his lips with the side of his index finger. ‘No good for the old nose, booze and fags, are they?’

I was awed to be part of this conspiracy. The old man and Miss Mathers would have had to torture me before I would have breathed a word about my father’s lunchtime habits.

The afternoon of that day was the same, except that the hours seemed longer than the morning’s. My father and the old man were shut up in the lab together and Miss Mathers largely ignored me. I drew some desultory pictures on my sheets of paper and looked at shiny brochures with pictures of women and tins of talcum powder in them. Yet as Ted and I finally rode home in the bus, along Holloway Road and up to the Archway, I felt utterly triumphant. The new words I had learned still rang in my head: mimosa, musk, amber. Mr Phebus had given me a folded ten-shilling note when Ted took me into his office to say goodbye. But the best of it was the new footing I felt that I was on with Ted himself.

Before now, he had gone out in the mornings and come back again at night with the newspaper, a kiss for my mother and a joke for me. He brought different sounds and smells and a new atmosphere into the house with him, but I had no picture in my mind of where he had been. Quite often he was away at night too, or for days at a stretch, on business for Mr Phebus.

But after today, I felt that I was a part of his other world. There had been beer on his breath as we walked back to the warehouse after the pub, and he had put pennies into a chewing gum machine on a wall. We were both chewing one of the little white pillows as we walked diagonally across the bomb-site to the warehouse door. I had heard him joking with Miss Mathers, although I didn’t like the soft teasing sound that crept into his voice when he spoke to her. At Miss Mathers’s suggestion, I had carried their pot of tea into the lab at four o’clock. Ted and Mr Phebus were both in their shirtsleeves with scratched notes and discarded dippers spread everywhere, and I understood that they were too preoccupied to glance at me. I accepted my lack of importance with proper humility.

The impression of that day stayed with me for years. It defined my notion of work, as the utterly exotic somehow hemmed in by the tedious progress of hours. At the end of it, as Ted and I marched up the garden path to the house where my mother was waiting for us, I kept my thrilling new awareness locked inside me.

My father was an artist of the first degree. He was a nose.

The house that night seemed colourless and smaller and overfamiliar and my mother even quieter than usual. ‘What did you do?’ she asked, as she brushed my hair. The sheets on my bed were smoothed down and I knew without looking that my hot-water bottle with the rabbit cover was in its proper place.

‘Drew some pictures,’ I answered evasively. I didn’t want to share the experience, even with her.

‘That’s nice.’

I didn’t ask about her day’s absence. Maybe she had been to see the doctor about her headaches. Sometimes they made her eyes red and swollen so she had to lie down on the double bed, a small shape hunched up on the green candlewick cover with her back turned to the door.

‘It wasn’t boring,’ I told Ted now. ‘I loved it.’

‘He was a good perfumer, the old man, a craftsman. I learned everything I needed to know from him. No business sense, though. None at all.’

I had to lean closer to catch his words. His voice seemed to be fading to an echo of itself and his eyes were gradually falling shut. I thought he might be drifting into sleep and I had to stop myself from grasping his hand and shaking it hard to keep him with me. I watched the shallow rise and fall of his chest under his pyjama jacket.

Then his eyes snapped open again and he struggled to sit upright. ‘It stinks in here,’ he complained. His nostrils flared and deep lines pulled the corners of his mouth downwards. I sniffed the air and caught a whiff of vomit and a faint fecal undertone. If even I could smell it, the ward must indeed stink to Ted’s sensitive nose.

I sandwiched his hand between my two. ‘We need something stronger to block it out. I’ve got an idea. Shall I go out and buy some perfume to spray round?’ I could hear the cheeriness in my voice cracking and shivering like the sea ice, with grief welling up from beneath. ‘What would you like? Joy? Vent Vert? Or one of your own? How about Black Opal or Iridescent?’

‘I’ve smelled enough perfume for one lifetime,’ Ted said irritably.

I bent my head and waited. And then, when I finally stole a glance at his face, I saw that this time he really had fallen asleep.

I went down to the hospital visitors’ car park, where I could use my mobile phone, and called Lola to relay the news.

‘Oh God, Mum, I’m sorry. Poor Grandad. I’d better ring in and cancel my shift,’ she said at once. Lola worked in a bar during university holidays. At least she’s at home, I told myself, not up in Manchester as she was all term-time. We agreed that she would collect Jack from school in her car and they would come straight up to the hospital.

‘Drive carefully,’ I warned her. ‘Of course I will.’

Next I telephoned Penny at the Works, as we call the book bindery and small print shop we jointly own. Penny and I have been business partners for twelve years. I have always loved the physical weight and dimensions of fine books, the texture of paper, and the variety and intricate grace of typefaces, and Penny possesses the rare combination of design flair and business acuity. We work well together and although there are no great riches in what we do, we make an adequate living out of our leather bindings and hand-set printing.

‘Don’t worry,’ Penny told me. ‘Don’t even think about anything here, I’ll handle it. And I’m here if you need me, okay?’

Next I spoke to Caz. Caz has been my friend since we lived in adjacent rooms in a decrepit student house thirty years ago. We were married in the same year, and she and Graham had their two boys in quick succession, not long after Tony and I had Lola. We have shared the quotidian details of our lives ever since, to the extent that if I think of myself as having an extended family, Caz and Graham and their children are it.

‘What can I do?’ Caz said, as soon as I told her the news. If there is ever a favour to be done for someone else, an empty slot in a rota or a spare pair of hands required, Caz is always the first to volunteer.

‘Will you have Jack, if I have to stay over at the hospital? If Lola can’t hold the fort, that is?’

Jack didn’t currently get on all that well with Dan and Matthew, Caz’s boys, but in this emergency he would have to make the best of it.

‘Of course,’ she assured me. ‘Anything else? What about some shopping? Or listen, I’ve got a chicken, I can roast it and bring it over …’

Caz and I both use food as shorthand for love. With Mel and me it’s more a matter of romance and theatre.

Caz was saying, ‘It’s very sudden. He wasn’t ill before, was he?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It is very sudden.’ I don’t think that even Caz, whom I have known for all these years, has ever really noticed how little I actually talk about my father or about the past.

‘I’ll be thinking of you, darling,’ she said in her warm voice. ‘Call me as soon as there’s any news.’

Finally I dialled Mel’s office direct line. After I had told her what had happened she said, ‘That’s quite strange, isn’t it? The way we were talking about him last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you want me to come up and keep you company?’ It was a generous offer. Mel worked for a big headhunting company and I could guess at the rapid mental diary reshuffling she must be doing, although there wasn’t the faintest hint of it in her tone.

‘No. But thank you.’

‘Sadie?’

‘Yes?’

‘You can’t change or even affect what’s going to happen, you know. You just have to accept this, for him and for yourself.’

Mel understood me well and my need to control what went on around me. She knew that it was disturbing for me to feel powerless, as I did most of the time where Jack was concerned, although she didn’t know what had made me this way.

‘I know,’ I murmured.

After she had rung off I sat down on the low wall of the car park. The morning was grey under a monochrome sky, with none of the luminous quality of the evening before. Cars rolled through the entrance and circled past me, looking for slots. A young man in a Peugeot skidded into an empty place and leaped out, clicking the remote locking as he sprinted towards the hospital doors. His wife must be in labour, I thought. I watched an old couple extricate themselves with difficulty from their Honda. The wife took a pair of sticks from behind the passenger seat and gave them to her husband, waiting with exaggerated patience while he shuffled himself into the ‘go’ position. They set off on the journey towards the doors together, without having exchanged a word. A big Asian family filed past, followed by a white girl who looked younger than Lola pushing a baby in a buggy. All these people had their different reasons for coming here, to this place of crisis, and all of them brought with them the weight of their anxiety or the bubble of hope. Ted was dying, but so were other people behind the stained concrete façade, and at the same time others were struggling with pain or dreaming of recovery, and babies were fighting their way out into the light. Being part of this random community made me feel less isolated and the walls that contained my feelings seemed to grow thinner, as if they might rupture and I might be able to give way to grief.

A florist’s van drew up and the driver began unloading cellophane-wrapped bunches of flowers finished with puffs of gaudy ribbon. The last item to appear was a wicker basket with a huge hoop handle and a ruff of paper enclosing a mass of pink and white carnations. The sight made me smile and remember the day Lola was born. She was handed to me wrapped in a blanket, and I looked down into her fathomless black eyes and felt a stirring of love I had never known before.

Ted was living at that time with an auntie called Elaine. It was Elaine who sent flowers and a card (‘It’s a Beautiful Baby Girl!’) signed in both their names, with a line that read, ‘Your Dad’s up to his eyes, nothing new!’

When the driver came back from delivering the flowers he leaned against the back doors of the van and lit a cigarette. He saw me watching him and called out, ‘Just taking five, eh?’

‘Why not?’ I called back meaninglessly.

But suddenly the sky seemed to lighten and the diesel-heavy air of the car park softened and sighed in my ears. I could feel the gritty surface of the wall under my fingertips and hear the swish of traffic out on the dual carriageway. The stitching on the leather strap of my handbag was coming undone and I stared down at the tiny frayed ends of thread and the puckered edges of the stitch punctures. Real time and place blurred and swam almost out of my reach. It was one of those rare moments of extreme physical and mental awareness, when even the smallest incident seems to contain infinite richness and a profound meaning that only narrowly evades capture. I was wide awake, but I felt the altered dimensions of a dream world beckoning me. I swung my feet up on to the wall and rested my head on my bent knees. Behind my eyelids, in this quietness, I could talk to Ted and he to me. The dialogue had always been running back and forth between us, in this other place, the old skeins of angry words and bitter words tangled with the words of love and faith, which were the ones I wanted to hear and speak now.

We failed each other, I said, I you and you me, but it was not a failure on such a scale that we are apart now, today of all days.

I was still sitting there, caught up in my inner conversation, when the driver climbed back into his seat. He tooted his horn at me as he rolled away and at once I jerked back into ordinary awareness. I should be sitting at my father’s bedside instead of hovering out here with my mind freewheeling in space. I hurried across the car park and in through the revolving doors, past the coffee shop and gift stall, and took the lift up to the ward. In the airless, medical-scented atmosphere I already felt as if I had been at the hospital for days.

Ted was still asleep. His mouth had fallen open and his breath clicked faintly in his throat. I took my seat once more beside him but didn’t try to hold his hand in case I disturbed him.

The hours passed slowly. The nurse who looked in from time to time explained that he was connected up to monitors that were watched over at the nurses’ station. He was stable, he said, at present.

At the distant end of the afternoon Lola appeared. In this stuffy room my daughter looked supernaturally beautiful and healthy, with her bright eyes and polished skin, as if all the threats of mortality had been airbrushed out of her face. I clung briefly to her, breathing in her sweet and perfectly familiar smell. Jack sidled in in her wake. He edged round the bed and, after a quick glance at Ted, leaned his forehead against the window and stared out. I hugged him too and he submitted briefly, although I could still feel the tense curve of his body arching away from me.

‘Have you had something to eat?’ I asked him.

‘Yeah. Lo fixed me a sandwich. I ate it in the car.’

The red chair was the only one. Lola went out to the main ward and borrowed another. She handed me a bag of apples and took a framed photograph out of her nylon rucksack. It was of herself and Jack and me, taken on last year’s summer holiday in Devon, the one that usually stood on the dresser in our kitchen. For once we were all smiling, looking straight into the camera, and now I noticed that each of us had a variation of Ted’s strong features overprinted on our own. She placed the picture on Ted’s locker, angled so that he could see it when he woke up. ‘I thought he might like it,’ she said, ‘if he wakes up when we aren’t here.’

The love implicit in the simple gesture touched me and I felt sorry that I hadn’t thought of it myself. ‘A very good idea.’

‘We’re all he’s got,’ she said matter-of-factly and this was the truth. There was no wife, not even an auntie, now, if you didn’t count Jean Andrews. I didn’t know who Ted’s friends were, if there were any remaining.

‘How is he?’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jack’s head half turn at Lola’s question. He wanted to hear but didn’t want me to see him listening.

‘Holding his own,’ I said. I was afraid that even though he seemed to sleep, he might hear what we were saying. I would tell them Dr Bennett’s verdict later, out of Ted’s earshot.

Lola nodded. ‘Go and get a cup of tea, Mum and eat some fruit. I’ll be here.’

‘Do you want to come with me, Jack?’

‘No,’ he said.

I carried a polystyrene cup of tea out into the car park and sat in my place on the wall, sipping the tea and eating an apple. The traffic was heavier now, with after-work visitors arriving and a short line of cars waiting for a free slot built up at the entrance. I tried to recapture some of the comfort of my earlier unspoken dialogue with Ted, or even the sense that with the dying and the newborn and the passers-through we were part of a generous community, but there was nothing. I felt lonely and sad for him, and disappointed in myself.

But there’s still time, I thought. I can still reach him.

‘He woke up,’ Lola said when I reached the ward again.

‘Yes?’

‘We chatted for a bit, Jack, didn’t we?’

‘Yeah. He asked Lo about uni and me about school. He was okay. Then he just sort of shut his eyes and went to sleep again. He didn’t see the photo, though.’

This was a long speech for Jack. Hope began sliding through my veins. Outside on the main ward there were relatives gathered round the beds of the old men, two nurses were pushing a trolley loaded with pill bottles and checking lists of medication, and a woman in a green overall was offering tea and biscuits. It wasn’t over. In a week, maybe, Ted would be sitting up too and choosing a biscuit from the Tupperware drum. In another week or two I could be driving him home. I would bring him back to my house and slowly, slowly, we would learn a new language for each other. I could tell him that he had made me suffer when I was too young to deserve such treatment and he could explain to me what had made him do it. We would listen to each other and make sense of the unintelligible, and then slowly stitch up the weave of forgiveness.

Anything was possible. Everything was possible.

The three of us settled round his bed. On one side Lola stroked his hand and talked to him about her house-share friends at university, young people he had never heard of let alone met. She talked easily and I knew that Ted would like the sound of her voice with its regular gurgles of laughter. Jack flitted around the room. He leaned on the windowsill for long minutes and watched the birds coming to roost among the huge metal cylinders on the hospital roof, then turned away to pick with his thumbnail at a leprous patch of paint on the bed end. I sat still and watched the rise and fall of Ted’s chest. It already felt like routine to be sitting here. Was it only yesterday at this time that I had been walking through the shimmering evening to meet Mel?

Time passed slowly. The ward quietened as the visitors drifted away. I was half expecting it, but no one came to tell us it was time to leave. A new nurse, just arrived on night duty, came in to introduce herself and to change one of the packs of fluid that drained into Ted’s arm.

‘How is he?’ I asked softly, thinking of the monitors at the nursing station.

‘There’s no change.’

That meant there was no deterioration. I smiled my leaping gratitude at her.

At nine o’clock I told Lola and Jack that they should go home. It was over an hour’s drive and Jack had school in the morning.

‘Aren’t you coming?’ Jack asked.

‘I’ll stay here a little longer. Lola will see you into bed.’ I glanced at her over his head and she nodded. ‘Or if you’d rather, you can go to Caz and Graham’s.’

‘No,’ Jack said at once.

Lola bent over and kissed her grandfather’s forehead, then touched her fingertips to his lips. ‘See you later, Grandad,’ she whispered.

Jack touched the small steeple of bedclothes over his feet and snatched his hand back. ‘Bye,’ he mumbled. He followed his sister to the door and then hovered, torn between the impulse to rush back to Ted’s side and the need to keep his own distance from me and his sister. Sometimes Jack was so transparent I thought I could read his hurt and put everything right for him so easily; at others I was afraid I hardly knew him. ‘Bye,’ he said again. Lola was leading and he followed her.

‘Drive carefully,’ I warned automatically. ‘I love you both.’

‘Yes, Mum.’

I sat down yet again. An hour dragged by and Ted rolled his head on the pillows and feebly shifted his legs. The Night Sister suddenly appeared with the first nurse. They moved rapidly around him, checking his fluids, and the tubes and wires that led into him, and calling him by his name.

‘What’s happened? What’s wrong?’ My voice was sharp and loud.

‘There are some new signs. The doctor’s coming.’

I was squeezed out of my place at his side. Ted’s eyes were wide open now and I could see how much it hurt him to breathe.

‘Dad? Dad, I’m here … I …’

I couldn’t finish what I was saying because the doctor arrived and I was edged further away to make room for him. I stood obediently outside the room with my arms wrapped round my chest. The old men were mostly asleep although pools of light lapped one or two of the beds. I waited until the doctor came out again. He was wearing a dark-blue shirt under his white coat and a name tag that read Dr Raj Srinivasar. I saw all this in a split second. He indicated that we should step a little distance away.

‘Doctor?’

‘I’m sorry. The undamaged portion of your father’s heart muscle has been working very hard since the attack and we have been helping him as far as possible with drugs to stimulate the heart’s natural rhythm. But I am afraid even this is gradually failing him now. I think Dr Bennett explained?’

I bent my head. ‘Yes.’

It had been human but utterly vain to hope, of course. I wanted the doctor to go away and take the nurses with him, and leave the two of us together. Dr Srinivasar knew this, because when I had composed my face and turned back to Ted he was lying quietly, alone again, under a dim light. I closed the door of the little room and took my place in the chair once more. I thought there were fewer wires clipped to him now and the levels of liquid in the bags hanging over his head didn’t change.

He was awake and he didn’t look as if he was in pain. Keeping him comfortable, Dr Bennett called it. Ted licked his lips and his neck muscles worked as if to squeeze words out of his ruined heart. ‘You’ve been a good girl,’ he whispered.

Automatically, defensively, keeping my long-learned distance I muttered, ‘Not really.’

I wasn’t ready for Ted’s praise and in my unpreparedness I couldn’t have assured him in return that he had been a good father.

I would have snatched my answer back if only I could, but Ted surprised me. He let his head fall further back against the pillows and laughed. It was a small coughing echo of his old laugh, but still there was no mistaking it. He said one more thing after that, on a long breath. I thought it was ‘my girl’.

As the minutes ebbed and I waited I knew that now it was too late for us to make our spoken allowances to each other. He lay with his eyes closed and the rise and fall of his chest grew shallower until I could no longer see it. I pressed my face against his cheek. Tears began to run out of my eyes and into the sheet. I put my arm under his shoulder as if I were going to lift him up and held him close against me. If I could have lifted him properly and carried him across the divide before laying him down again to rest, I would have done it. As I wept I told him, the angry words and the bitter words threading with the words of love, that I loved him and I hated the childhood he had given me, and I would always love him. He didn’t answer and I didn’t expect him to. I knew that he was dead.

I sat with him for a little while; then there seemed no point in staying when Ted himself had gone. I took the framed photograph off the locker and tucked it under his arm where he could hold it close to his heart. Then I kissed him on the forehead and touched his lips with my fingers, as Lola had done. I closed the door of the room very quietly.

Dr Srinivasar and the Night Sister were waiting for me.

‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor said. He shook my hand, very formally.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

The Sister put her arm round my shoulders and led me into the empty visitors’ room. ‘Would you like to sit in peace for a while? Let me bring you a cup of tea?’

I shook my head. ‘No, thank you, Sister.’

‘There is a chapel in the hospital.’

I shook my head again. Ted had never been very godly and I took after him.

There was only one place I wanted to be and that was at home. We established that I would come back to complete the formalities relating to the death and I thanked her for everything that had been done for my father. I went out once more to the car park, now deserted under a heavy dark sky, climbed into my car and drove back dry-eyed to London.

Lola was waiting up for me. I told her that Ted Thompson was dead, then we sat down and cried for him together.