Читать книгу If My Father Loved Me - Rosie Thomas - Страница 7

He walked off up the road, very slowly, his bag slouched across his back and the soles of his trainers barely lifting off the pavement. At the corner he paused and looked right and left, but he never glanced over his shoulder to see if I was still standing in the doorway of the house. I watched until he turned left, in the direction of school, and plodded out of my sight. Only then did I go back inside and begin to put together my things for work.

I was shaking with the tension of the morning. It was the third day of the summer term and every morning so far Jack had refused to get out of bed. Then, when I finally hauled him out from under the covers, he refused to get dressed. He didn’t speak, let alone argue; once movement became unavoidable he just did everything very, very slowly.

‘Jack, you have to go to school. Everybody does. It’s a fact of life.’

He shrugged and turned away. While I stood over him, he had got as far as putting on his school shirt and it hung loose over his pyjama bottoms. I could see faint blue veins under the white skin of his chest and his vulnerability made me want to hold him, but I knew if I tried to touch him he would pull away.

‘Jack, we have to talk about this.’

‘Talk,’ he muttered finally, as if the mere suggestion exasperated him.

‘Yes, talk.’ I struggled to be patient and moderate. You could ache for him, for what he was going through, and at the same time irritation made you long to slap him. Hard.

‘Mum.’

‘Yes?’ I said eagerly.

‘Go away if you want me to get dressed.’

‘I’ll make you some toast. Would you like an egg?’

‘No.’

‘Downstairs in five minutes, please.’

Five minutes turned into fifteen. He ate his toast very slowly while I sat waiting.

‘You’re going to be late.’

‘Oh no.’

‘For God’s sake,’ I snapped, ‘what’s the matter with you? What’s wrong with school? If you won’t talk to me or anyone else how can we help you? What’s wrong?’

Jack fumbled with a knife, then dropped it with a clatter. He looked around the kitchen as if surveying his life, and then said out of a pinched mouth, ‘Everything.’

The bleakness of this was unbearable.

I remembered how it felt to be his age, at the mercy of the world and powerless to change anything. I tried to touch his hand but he pulled away as if my fingertips might burn him.

I took a breath. ‘Jack, listen. It just seems like everything, you know. It isn’t so bad. There are lots of things you enjoy and look forward to.’ Although if he had pressed me to name them, I couldn’t have got much beyond seagulls. ‘And you’ve got us, Lola and me, and your dad as well. If we try and work out what’s most wrong, I can help you.’ This sounded feeble, even to my own ears.

There was a small silence. Then he said flatly, ‘You?’

I understood that everything mostly meant his life in this house, with me and without his father.

It wasn’t that he didn’t see Tony: the three and a half weeks since Ted’s death had spanned the school Easter holidays and the two of them had been away together for three days’ fishing in Devon. Lola could have gone too, but she had preferred to stay in London. Once or twice a month Jack went over to Twickenham to spend a night with Tony and his second family, and there were weekday evenings too when he and Lola went out for pizza or a film with him. But that wasn’t the same as having a father who lived in the same house and didn’t have to portion out his time with such meticulous care.

Everything wasn’t school and friends or the lack of them, although I wanted to believe that it was. The trouble was home, and home was mostly me. In the last few weeks and months Jack had gradually stopped communicating, had withdrawn himself from our already dislocated family, but he had never let me hear the roots of his unhappiness as clearly as in that one word, you?

I wished just as much as he did that he had a live-in father. I wished he didn’t have to live with just two women, or that he and Lola were closer in age, or that he had been born one of those children who found it easy to make friends. And I wished that I had been able to break the cycle that began with Ted and me, and rolled on with me and Jack, in the way I had apparently been able to break it for Lola.

The silence extended itself. The need to cry burned behind my eyes, the pressure of years of denied weeping swelling inside my skull, but I didn’t cry and my inability to do so only increased my sense of impotence. Unwitting Jack, my unlucky child, was the focus of this mighty powerlessness. I couldn’t make the world right for him, I couldn’t even make the dealings between us right. Sympathy for him was squeezing my heart so I could barely speak.

‘I’m sorry,’ I managed to say.

He pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Going to school,’ was his only response.

I went with him to the door and watched him until he was out of sight. I longed to run after him, to go with him and shield him through the day, to turn his everything into nothing that mattered and let us both start again, but I couldn’t. It was hard to accept that after all the promises I had made to myself when they were small, about always being close to my children and never letting them down, there was still a breach between Jack and me. Ted was dead and gone but somehow his damned legacy was right here in our house with us.

I was angry as well as impotent. I slammed my hand down on the kitchen table, so hard that the pain jarred through my wrist bones, but nothing changed and my head still hurt with not crying.

I snatched up my bag and went to work. It was too late now to walk, even along the canal. I had to drive, in a 9 a.m. press of buses and oversized trucks, and when I arrived I made a mess of cutting some endpapers out of some special old hand-marbled paper that Penny and I had been saving. I had to throw the ruins away and use a poor substitute. Penny kept her head down over her work and although I could sense Andy and Leo glancing at each other, I didn’t look their way.

When I got home again Lola had already gone out to her bar job. In two days’ time she would be going back to university and she was trying to earn as much money as she could. Jack was sitting in front of the television, still wearing his outdoor jacket and his school tie. He looked grubby and utterly exhausted.

‘How was your day?’ I asked. I was going to make shepherd’s pie for supper, his favourite.

‘All right.’

‘What lessons did you have?’

‘The usual ones.’

He didn’t take his eyes off the screen but I didn’t think he was really watching it. There was wariness in the hunch of his shoulders and his fingers curled tightly over the arms of his chair.

‘What did you do in the lunch break?’

‘Nothing.’

I threw three potatoes in the sink and began peeling. ‘So, it was a pretty uneventful day, then?’ He twisted his shoulders in a shrug. But when I started browning the meat and vegetables, and he assumed my attention was elsewhere, he let his head drop back against the cushions. Then, when I glanced at him again, he had fallen asleep.

We ate dinner together – at least, Jack sat at the table with me, but he had a bird book open beside his plate. I was, temporarily, too tired of the battle to make any protest. He ate ravenously, though, as if he hadn’t seen food since breakfast time.

But the next morning, to my surprise, he put up less resistance to getting up and getting dressed. When the time came to leave, he shouldered his bag and silently trudged away. Maybe he was beginning to accept the inevitable, I thought. Maybe the tide had turned.

That day Colin came into the bindery. He lived with his mother, somewhere on an estate that lay to the east of Penny’s house, and he was a regular visitor. He pushed the door open, marched in and laid a heavy carrier bag on the counter. Penny was working on a big case for a photographer’s portfolio and Leo was trimming boards at the guillotine. Andy was on day release and in any case it was my turn to deal with Colin. We took it roughly in turns, without actually having drawn up a rota.

‘Morning!’ he shouted. He had an oversized head that looked too heavy for his shoulders and his voice always seemed too loud for the space he was in.

‘Hello, Colin. How are you today?’

‘All the better for getting this finished.’ He began hauling a mass of papers out of his bag. Penny and Leo were suddenly completely absorbed in their jobs.

My heart sank. Colin had been writing a book ever since he first came in to see us, and would regularly turn up with fragments of it that he wanted us to discuss. It was going to be a cookery book. He had chosen us, he announced, to be his publishers. Penny and I had often tried to explain to him the difference between binding an interesting collection of personal recipes and publishing a cookery book, but he took no notice. The sample material, in any case, usually consisted of recipes torn from women’s magazines and annotated with drawings and exclamatory scribbles in a variety of coloured inks, so we hadn’t worried too much about the day of reckoning. Now, apparently, it had finally arrived.

‘I have to have the books ready soon, of course. Mum’ll want to give one to all her friends, won’t she?’

A tide of magazine clippings, jottings on lined paper, sketches and headings like ‘A Good BIG Dinner’ blocked out in red felt-tip capitals spilled over the counter. They were accompanied by a nasty smell. Some of the papers were very greasy and I spotted a flaccid curl of bacon rind sticking to the reverse of one of them. I stopped myself from taking a brisk step backwards.

‘Colin, we’re not book publishers. I told you that, didn’t I?’

He gazed around him with an ever fresh air of surprise and bewilderment. ‘Yes, you are. I know you are. Look at all your books.’

‘We just put covers on them. We restore old books, we bind people’s academic theses, we take care of books that have already been published.’

‘Exactly.’ Colin nodded triumphantly. One of the most exhausting aspects of dealing with him was the way he agreed with your disagreement and just went on repeating his demands. ‘So you can put covers on mine. I’ll pay you, you know. I’m not asking for something for nothing, not like all these refugees coming over here and expecting to get given money and big houses. It’s not like that, you know.’

‘I know, Colin. But we aren’t publishers. Putting a cover on … on your manuscript here, that won’t get it into the bookshops like Smith’s in the High Street where people could buy it. That’s a completely different process. You have to … well, you have to have the text edited and all these recipes would have to be tested. Then artists and marketing people would have to look at designs for it, and thousands of copies would have to be printed by a big commercial printers, and then salesmen would have to sell it to booksellers …’ I felt weary myself at the mere thought of all this effort.

‘Exactly.’

‘But we don’t do any of these things, Colin.’ I reached out for his plastic bag and very gently began putting the rancid pages into it. From past experience I knew and feared what was likely to come next.

He watched me for a second or two, then he grabbed the bag from me and began hauling the contents out again. ‘It’s my book.’

‘I know, but I can’t publish it for you because I’m not a publisher.’

‘My book’s important, I’m telling you. It’s taken me a long time, these things take time to do properly.’ His voice was rising. We tussled briefly with the bag, me putting in and him taking out. The bacon rind dropped in a limp ringlet on the counter. ‘I’m not stupid, don’t make that mistake. I’m as good as anyone else and I was born here, not like these blacks and the rest of them.’

Leo’s mother and father came from Trinidad. He went on lining up trimmed law reports as if no one had spoken. True to form, Colin was now shouting. And equally predictably, the phone rang.

Penny went to answer it. ‘Gill and Thompson, Bookbinders. Good morning. Oh, yes. Hello, Quintin.’

Colin was thumping the counter and shouting that we weren’t bookbinders at all, didn’t deserve the name, not when we wouldn’t do a simple job of work for an ordinary person, who had been born here, not like some of them.

Quintin Farrelly was our most lucrative, knowledgeable and exacting customer. He was the owner of the Keats Letters. Penny blocked her free ear with one finger and struggled to hear what he was saying. ‘Yes, yes. Of course we can. Sorry, there’s just a bit of a noise in here.’

‘I’ll tell you what, Colin,’ I said. ‘There’s something we could do for you, if you’d like it.’

He stopped shouting, which was what I had hoped for. ‘What?’

‘Well. Let’s have a look at what Penny’s doing, shall we?’

I took him by the arm and showed him the photographer’s portfolio. It was A2 size, in dark navy-blue cloth with a lining of pale-green linen paper. The man’s name, Neil Maitland, was blind tooled on the lid. Colin examined the job with an aggrieved expression.

‘What do you think of it?’

Penny gave me a grateful thumbs-up. She wedged the handset under her ear and reached for the order book and work diary. ‘Yes, Quintin, I’m sure we can do that for you.’

‘It’s nice,’ Colin admitted, rubbing the green interior with a heavy thumb.

‘We could make you a beautiful case like this, and you can put your recipes and pictures in it, and then your mum can show it to all her friends.’

‘Can I choose the colour?’

‘Of course.’

‘And it would have to have my name on the lid, not this Neil’s.’

‘Of course.’

‘Any colour?’

‘Any colour you like, Colin.’ Including sky blue pink.

He expressed a preference for red. He left his bag of papers with us, stressing that it was to be kept in the safe whenever we were not actually working on it, and promised that he would call in again tomorrow to see how the job was progressing. Penny hung up, after asking after Quintin’s wife and the Farrelly children.

‘Christ on a bike,’ Leo muttered as the three of us raised our eyebrows at each other. ‘Anyone want a coffee?’

Jack was sitting in his armchair again when I got home from work, apparently absorbed in Neighbours. He looked dirtier, if that were possible, and even more exhausted than he had done yesterday. An empty plate blobbed with jam and dusted with toast crumbs rested on the floor beside him. It was Lola’s last night at home. She was ironing, also with her eyes fixed on the television. The forgiving winter gloom that usually hid the worst of our semi-basement kitchen had given way to a watery brightness that announced summer and showed up all the layers of dust as well as the peeling wallpaper. The place needed a spring-clean. The whole house needed a spring-clean and a new stair carpet wouldn’t have done any damage either. I let my bag drop to the floor.

‘Good day, Mum?’ Lola asked.

‘Er, not bad, thanks. What about you?’

She nodded. ‘Yeah.’

‘Jack?’

Just the way that he shrugged his shoulders made me want to yell at him. I took a deep breath and began rummaging in the freezer. It was going to have to be defrost du jour tonight, because I didn’t have the energy to start a meal from scratch.

As soon as Neighbours was over Jack removed himself upstairs. I sat on the sofa and watched the remainder of Channel 4’s News, and when Lola finished her ironing (leaving a pile of Jack’s and mine untouched) she brought over two glasses of red wine and joined me. She kicked off her shoes and curled up so her head lay against my shoulder and I stroked her shiny hair.

‘I’ll miss you,’ I said, as I always did when she was about to go off. I did rely on her, more than I should have done, for companionship but also for the lovely warmth of her life that I enjoyed at second hand – the parties and nights out clubbing that she’d describe in tactfully edited detail the next day, the long phone conversations, the friends who dropped in and lounged around the kitchen, and the certainty that anything was possible that seemed to govern them all.

‘I know, Mum. I’ll miss you too. But I’ll be back for the weekend in a couple of weeks.’

‘So you will. Is there any more of that red? How does he seem to you, the last couple of days?’

‘He’ was always Jack in Lola’s and my conversations.

‘Very quiet.’

‘But he’s been making less fuss about school the last couple of days. I think maybe the worst’s over.’

Lola said, ‘I hope so.’

Jack ate most of the dinner, finishing Lola’s portion even after he had devoured his own second helping, then wiping his plate clean with chunks of bread torn off the loaf.

Lola tried to tease him about his appetite. ‘Hey, bruv. Is school food getting even worse?’

‘I was hungry, okay? What’s wrong with that?’

‘I never said there was anything wrong. Sorry I asked.’

After dinner Jack retreated again and Lola went out to meet some friends. She had left the ironing board folded but hadn’t put it away. I did the obligatory brief two-step with it as if it were a reluctant dancing partner and finally managed to set it horizontally on its metal strut. I took the first of Jack’s school shirts out of the basket and began pressing a sleeve. The steamy smell of clean laundry instantly filled my head. The olfactory nerve is the largest of the twelve cranial nerves; smell is the swiftest as well as the most powerful of the senses. My eyes stung, then filled up with tears and as I bent my head they dripped on to Jack’s shirt, making translucent islands of damp in the white polycotton. I finished the shirt and began another but I was crying so hard I couldn’t see properly. I hadn’t been able to cry for weeks on end and now I was sobbing over the scent of clean laundry just because it reminded me of the way home should smell, of cleanliness and care and therefore security.

‘The ironing? Don’t do the bloody ironing,’ Mel said when I called her.

I sniffed, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. I didn’t properly understand the tears, that was the worst part of it. If I had been thinking of Ted, it would have been different. But in the last month whenever he had come into my head it was with a numbness that cut me off even from the relief of missing and loving him. I thought with dry precision instead about our life apart.

‘Are you there? Sadie?’

‘Yeah, I’m here. Sorry. I really don’t know what this is all about.’ I could hear Mel at the other end lighting up a Marlboro and exhaling.

‘Your dad died. You’re grieving for him.’

I was going to say, I almost did say, ‘It’s not like that.’

Mel had told me how bereft she felt when her adored father died and that wasn’t how it was with me.

‘Do you want me to come round?’ she asked.

‘No. Yes, I do, but it’s late.’

‘Then let’s have dinner tomorrow.’

‘Lola’s going back to Manchester in the morning. I can’t leave Jack.’ I didn’t want to leave Jack, in any case. He needed me, even if he didn’t want me.

‘I’ll come to you. I’ll cook something for the three of us. Don’t be late home, dear.’

Jack didn’t answer when I knocked on his door. I called goodnight and told him to sleep well.

Lola saw Jack and me off in the morning and said goodbye. She would drive herself north later in the day.

Colin came in twice to the bindery, and on the second visit he was aggrieved to discover that we hadn’t even started work on his box.

‘There are twelve other jobs ahead of yours in the line,’ Penny told him, it being her turn.

‘Why isn’t mine as important as theirs?’

‘It’s not a matter of importance, it’s just that you can’t jump the queue. We’re busy here, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ She was brusque, but Colin tended not to notice subtleties like that.

‘Well. I’ve had some more thoughts about how I want it.’

‘Don’t you want to hear our estimate first of what it’s going to cost?’

I was trying to signal to her to go easy, but Colin was grandly insisting that cost didn’t matter to him. His money was as good as anyone else’s. The phone rang and as I was nearest I picked it up. A voice I half recalled asked for Mrs Bailey.

‘Speaking.’ At the same time I was frowning because although Jack and Lola went under Tony’s name, after the divorce I had deliberately reverted to my own. To Ted’s, that is. I had been happy to accept Tony’s when we married, but once I had rejected him I didn’t deserve the shelter of his name, did I? I went back to being just Sadie Thompson again.

‘This is Paul Rainbird, at the school.’

I remembered now that I had spoken to him when I called to say that Jack would be away on the day of the funeral. He was Jack’s head of year.

‘Is something wrong?’ Penny and Colin dwindled, their voices obliterated by the rush of blood in my ears.

‘No, nothing at all. I wanted to ask how Jack is.’

‘Why?’

‘We haven’t seen him for three days. Is he ill?’

‘He’s been at school all week,’ I said stupidly.

‘No, I’m afraid he hasn’t.’

The lack of protest in the mornings, the dirtiness and exhaustion and his appetite in the evenings fell belatedly into place. Wherever he had been going for the last three days, it hadn’t been to school. Dismay at my own obtuseness and sharp anxiety for Jack overtook the usual nagging concern. ‘I’d better come in and see you.’

Mr Rainbird said he would be at school until six that evening. I looked at my watch. Ten to four. Colin was reluctantly shuffling out of the door.

I untied my apron and hung it up, turned off the heating element in the Pragnant and closed the open drawers of type. ‘Jack’s been bunking off,’ I told Penny. ‘I’ve got to go in and see his teacher.’

The school wasn’t far from our house, so it didn’t take me long to drive there. As I parked the car there were streams of children coming out of the gates. I pushed my way in against the current, assaulted by the noise and the display of attitude. Children came in so many shapes, sizes and colours. Some of them stared, most didn’t bother. There were so many different statements being made within the elastic confines of school uniform, so much yelling and kicking and threatening and ganging up. Survival was the prize of the fittest – and you could see which kids were the natural survivors. They were the cool ones and the disciples of the cool ones, and the others who hung around on the fringes and took their cues from them. The rest straggled on in ones and twos, keeping out of the way, trying not to attract too much attention.

Lola had been the coolest of cool. She had achieved this by breaking every school rule and defying me daily about her clothes and her hair, and her attitudes and the hours and the company she kept. But even so, even when she was at her most grungy and rebellious, on some deeper level we had still been allies. When we weren’t fighting, she told me secrets. Not hers, that would have been too incriminating, but her friends’.

‘Isn’t fourteen a bit young?’

‘Mum, you mustn’t breathe a word.’

I took this as her way of alerting me to what she was doing or about to do herself, and no doubt her friends’ mothers did likewise. Lola and I were both women and for all our differences we had the comfort of being the same.

In my mind’s eye now I saw Jack, and he was smaller and paler than all these children, and different. Different even from the wary singles. He was churned around by the alarming tide as it swept him along. I clenched my fists into tight balls in the pockets of my coat, wanting to defend him.

I found my way to the Year Seven office at the end of a green corridor lined with metal lockers.

‘Sit down, Mrs Bailey,’ the teacher said, having stood up to shake my hand. There was just about room in the cubicle for a second chair.

‘Thompson,’ I murmured. ‘I’m divorced from Jack’s father.’

Briefly my eyes met the teacher’s. Mr Rainbird was wearing a blue shirt and slightly shiny black trousers, and his colourless hair was almost long enough to touch his collar. He looked tired. If, without knowing him, I had been forced to guess his occupation I would have said English teacher in a large comprehensive school. We faced each other across the desk piled with exercise books and mark sheets and he nodded, registering my statement, before we both looked away again.

‘Is Jack being bullied?’ I asked.

‘Has he said so?’

‘He hasn’t said anything. I know he’s not happy at school, not the way my daughter Lola was, but I didn’t know it was as bad as this.’

‘I remember Lola.’ Mr Rainbird nodded appreciatively. ‘Although I never taught her. How’s she getting on?’

‘Fine.’

There was some shouting and crashing outside the door, and several sets of feet pelted down the corridor. The teacher seemed not to hear it. I thought he was used to concentrating in the face of many distractions.

‘I don’t think he’s being bullied. Jack doesn’t stand out enough, either in a bad way or a good way. He’s a loner, but that seems to be out of choice. He’s very quiet, very serious. He doesn’t say much in lessons, but he listens. His work is adequate, as you know, although he doesn’t try very hard. He gives the impression of absence. But mostly only mental absence, at least until this week. Has anything changed for him lately, at home?’

‘His grandfather died, at the very end of last term.’

The teacher looked at me. He had a sympathetic, creased, battle-worn face. I thought he must be somewhere in his late forties. How many years of teaching Shakespeare did that mean he had notched up? Twenty-five, probably.

‘Yes, I remember now. Does Jack miss him badly?’

I tried to answer as accurately as I could. ‘Not in the everyday sense, because … well, he didn’t live nearby. But now that he’s gone, yes, I think so. It’s another absence in Jack’s life.’

I realised that I had dashed here in the hope that Mr Rainbird would be able to offer me explanations for the way Jack behaved and a suggestion for how to deal with him. But this was what he was looking for from me. I was his mother and he was only his teacher.

Mr Rainbird was tapping his mouth with the side of his thumb. ‘What about his dad?’

‘Tony remarried and had two more children. They live the other side of London. He sees Jack and Lola as often as he can, but he does have another family and a lot of calls on his time. Jack lacks a male role model.’

It was stuffy in the little room with the door shut and I felt hot.

Mr Rainbird half smiled. ‘Some people would say that’s no bad thing.’

I knew he said it not as a teacher and head of Year Seven, but as himself. I wondered if he was married and whether his wife was the sort who thinks all men are monsters.

I smiled back. ‘In Jack’s case, a father figure would be helpful.’

The root of Jack’s problem was with me, but the root of that problem went back much further. Back beyond Stanley, even Tony. I could do relationships with women, I reckoned, but I got it wrong with men. From Ted onwards. The smile suddenly dried on my mouth. I blinked, afraid of another surge of irrational tears.

‘So, what should we do?’ Mr Rainbird asked. He was looking down at his hands and I knew it was to give me a chance to recompose myself. ‘He can’t afford to go on missing lessons.’

I stared hard at the pile of exercise books until I had my face under control. ‘I’ll go home and talk to him. I’ll try and get to the root of this. And I’ll make sure he comes to school on Monday.’

‘I’ll talk to him too,’ he said. ‘Maybe between us we can work out what the problem is. What do you think he’s doing instead of being at school?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think he’s doing anything. I think he’s … just killing time.’ He was waiting for this to be over, dreaming of when he would be old enough to change something for himself. I remembered how that was.

We both stood up and Mr Rainbird edged round his desk to open the door for me. In the confined space he had to reach past me and his shirtsleeve brushed against my shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Yes, thanks.’ I wondered how distraught I actually looked.

‘We’ll speak again, then.’ He didn’t attempt any empty reassurances and he didn’t make authoritarian demands. I liked him. We shook hands a second time and I retraced my path down the corridor and out to the gates. The school was quiet and empty now, the tide reaching its low ebb.

Jack was sitting in his accustomed place. There was plenty of evidence of toast, cheese, jam and yoghurt having been eaten. It was no wonder that he came home hungry. He would have had almost nothing to eat since breakfast because he went out with only enough money for a bus fare and a phone call home. We both knew that to take any more would only attract muggers. Jason Smith, he once told me, had had forty pounds in his pocket in school one day and made the mistake of mentioning it.

I made myself a cup of tea and swept up some of the food debris. I could feel Jack tensely waiting for me to say something. He had been waiting yesterday too, and the day before, and when I didn’t the relief had allowed him to fall into a doze.

I turned off the television and sat down with my tea. ‘I’ve just been to see Mr Rainbird.’

He flinched, just a little. I waited, but he didn’t volunteer anything.

‘I want you to tell me why you haven’t been to school for three days.’

His face was a crescent of misery. I had been keeping my imagination in check but now it broke loose and galloped away from me. I pictured drug deals, the skinny shifty kids who hung around by the canal, a leering fat man beckoning from a doorway. The images catapulted me out of my chair and I grabbed Jack by the arms and shook him hard. ‘Where’ve you been?’ I yelled. ‘Who have you been with?’

He stared at me. His eyes had rings under them and there was dirt and jam around his mouth.

‘Where? Who?’ I shouted again and my shaking made his head wobble.

‘Nowhere,’ he breathed. ‘Just … nowhere.’

‘You must have been somewhere.’

‘I walked around. Sat on a bench. Then when it was time to come home, I came home.’

‘For three whole days?’

He nodded, mute and despairing.

I sank back on my heels and tried to take stock. I wouldn’t gain anything by allowing anger to balloon out of my fears for him. ‘That must have been horrible. Much worse than going to school. You must have felt lonely.’

If he had let some pervert befriend him, if he had been sniffing glue out of a brown-paper bag, or stealing from Sue’s Superette on the corner, or buying crack or other things that I couldn’t even imagine, would he give me a clue?

He said, ‘I watched the pigeons. They’re filthy. Did you know that there are hardly any sparrows left in London?’

I closed my eyes for a second. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or infuriated. ‘Let’s not talk about birds right now, Jack. Let’s try to work out exactly what it is about going to school that makes you so miserable you’d rather sit alone on a bench all day.’

He appeared to consider the matter. I looked at the way that tufts of hair partly exposed the pink lobe of his ear and the prickle of recent acne along his jawline. In profile he resembled Tony, increasingly so now that his proper face was emerging out of the putty softness of childhood.

‘I dunno.’ The shrug again.

‘Yes, you do. Is someone picking on you? A teacher? Other kids?’

‘Not really. They think I’m sad. But I think they’re even sadder.’

The rock of his unhappiness held glinting seams of mineral disdain. Jack was sharp-witted and he wouldn’t have much time for losers, even though he might currently consider himself to be one.

‘All of them? Everyone? Isn’t there anyone you like or admire?’

‘Mr Rainbird’s okay. Most of the girls are just lame, they’re always sniggering and whispering and fooling about. Some of the boys are all right. People like Wes Gordon and Jason Smith. But they wouldn’t be interested in me. And the rest are dumb.’

This was the most information he had volunteered in about six months, since the end of the maddening old days when he used to respond to every remark or instruction with ‘why?’.

I supposed Wes and Jason would be the cool ones, big, blunt-faced boys surrounded by hangers-on like those I had seen swaggering out of school this afternoon. I couldn’t see Jack in their company any more than he could see himself.

I pushed my luck. ‘Go on.’

His face contracted with irritation and his shoulders hunched up. It was just like watching a hermit crab pull back into its shell.

‘That’s all,’ he snapped. ‘You always want stuff. There’s nothing, all right? I’ll go back to school on Monday if that’s what you want.’

‘I want you to want to go. What I want isn’t important.’

His head lifted then and he stared straight at me. It was a full-on, cold, appraising stare that told me Jack wasn’t my baby any more. ‘Is that so?’ he sneered.

I was still catching my breath when the doorbell rang. Jack turned the television on again and increased the volume.

It was Mel on the doorstep, with two carrier bags and an armful of red parrot tulips. I had forgotten she was coming. She took one look at my face. ‘You’d forgotten I was coming.’

‘No. Well, yeah. I’m sorry. I’ve just been having a set-to with Jack.’

‘Do you want me to go away again?’

‘Depends on what’s in the bags.’

‘Sashimi-grade bluefin tuna. Limes, coriander, crème fraîche, some tiny baby peas and broad beans, a tarte au poire from Sally Clarke’s, a nice piece of Roquefort …’

I opened the door wider. ‘Come right inside.’

Mel breezed into the kitchen. Her polished brightness made the dusty shelves and creased newspapers and sticky floor tiles look even dingier than usual. My spirits lifted by several degrees.

‘Hi, Jackson.’

Jack quite liked Mel. ‘Hi,’ he muttered.

‘I’ve come to cook you and your mum some dinner. However, that’s going to be tricky if I can’t hear myself think.’

‘Oh. Right.’ He prodded at the remote and Buffy went from screeching to mouthing like a goldfish.

Mel busily unpacked fish and cheese. ‘Great. How’s school?’

I tried to signal at her but she missed the gesturing.

‘It’s shit,’ Jack said.

‘So no change there, then.’

I thought I caught the faintest twitch of a smile on his face before it went stiff again. ‘No. None.’ He stood up and eased himself out of the room.

Mel started making a lime and coriander butter. I poured us both a drink and told her what had happened. While I talked I cut the ends off the sappy tulip stalks and stood the stems upright in a glass jug. The orange-red petals were frilled with bright pistachio green. The daub of colour in the underlit room reminded me of Lola’s jersey at the cremation.

‘I’m worried. Really worried,’ I concluded. ‘I never get to the root of anything with Jack. He clams up or walks away or shuts himself in his room. I never know what he’s thinking. What must it have been like for him, wandering around with nowhere to go and nothing to do for three days? Did he talk to the old dossers? I wonder how many weirdos tried to come on to him?’

‘Worrying won’t help,’ Mel said.

‘That’s easier said, believe me. You don’t know what it’s like.’

She had been searching a drawer for some implement but now she slammed it shut. ‘Thanks for telling me.’

‘Shit. Christ. Mel, I’m sorry. I’m a thoughtless cow.’ My face and neck throbbed with shamed heat. Mel didn’t talk about it much any more, but her childlessness was still a wound.

‘Where’s your sharp knife? Oh, it’s all right. I only want to trim the fish.’

‘Sorry,’ I murmured again. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

Mel put the knife down. She came round the worktop and wound her arms round me and I rested my head against hers. The touch was comforting.

‘I think he’ll be all right, Sadie. I’ve got no grounds for saying so, but I still think it. Trust me, I’m a City headhunter.’ It was one of the things she often said, to make me smile.

‘I do trust you. In spite of your utterly high-powered, bewilderingly incomprehensible job.’

‘Good. Remember what Lola was like when we first met?’

‘How could I forget?’

‘Right, then.’ She let go of me. ‘Now, do the veg for me, please.’

I did as I was told, dropping the little peas and fingernail-sized beans into the steamer. ‘Let’s talk about something else,’ I suggested.

‘How about me?’

‘Perfect.’

Mel shimmied the length of the worktop, rapping the knife point on jars and pans. ‘I met someone.’

‘No.’ This wasn’t exactly an infrequent occurrence. I already knew that Adrian’s days were numbered.

She stopped dancing and held up her hand. I had been so preoccupied that it was only now I noticed that her face was as bright as a star. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I really have met someone.’

While she told me about this latest one we finished off the cooking, stepping neatly round each other, tasting and discussing and amending, as we had done many times before. These were the evenings I liked best, the companionable times of making unhurried food in a warm kitchen while the light turned to dark outside. I laid the table with blue-and-yellow plates and put the jug of tulips in the middle. I lit a pair of yellow candles and the glow wiped out all the dust and shabby corners, and shone on Mel’s star face and the flowers, and the photograph of the children and me that Lola had taken up to Ted’s hospital bedside.

Mel flipped the tuna off the griddle. ‘It’s ready.’

I went to the foot of the stairs and called Jack. He appeared almost at once, changed out of his school clothes and with wet hair combed flat from the shower. He sidled to his chair and sat down. Immediately he started wolfing down the fish.

‘Are you hungry?’ Mel asked.

‘Yes.’ He glanced quickly at me. ‘Didn’t get anything to eat at lunchtime.’

‘And why’s that?’

‘I should think Mum told you.’

‘Yeah. Here, have some of these baby beans. So, who did you meet? What amazing things did you do that were worth missing school for?’ Mel leaned forward, pushing her coils of hair back from her face so that she could hear better, her eyes and all her attention focused on him. There was no censure, only friendly interest.

‘No one. Nothing,’ Jack muttered.

‘Really? It sounds deadly boring.’

He nodded and went on eating. By the time the pudding came, he even joined briefly in our conversation. He talked slowly, as if he weren’t quite used to the sound of his own voice, but at least he was speaking.

After we finished and he said goodnight, Mel and I opened another bottle of wine.

‘Thanks, Mel.’

‘Tuna was a bit overcooked.’

‘I meant about Jack. Being so nice to him.’

‘I wasn’t nice, I was ordinary.’ This was true. Mel had a gift for being ordinarily warm and inclusive. Tonight it had just seemed more noticeable than ever.

‘You look very happy,’ I said. ‘This Jasper must be good news.’

‘I am happy. I wish you were.’

I felt some of the protective walls around me shifting, as if Mel’s darts might pierce them. I didn’t like it.

‘What did you mean, when you said your father was a con artist?’

What did I mean? There was the pressure inside me, building up inside my skull, threatening to break through the bones. ‘Ted was a great nose, a fine perfumer, but that wasn’t enough for him.’ I chose the words carefully, biting them off with my tongue and teeth. ‘He always wanted something more. There was so much yearning in him. He wanted to be rich and he never was. He wanted glamour but except for the illusion of perfume his life was humdrum. He thrived on secrecy, that nose-tapping and winking kind that men who think of themselves as men of the world go in for. To do with deals, scams, setting up little businesses. I think he must have lived through his fantasies and the reality was always disappointing. Women ultimately disappointed him. His daughter did, too.’

Mel leaned back in her chair. ‘You are his daughter.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you talk about the relationship as if it involves someone else.’

That was truer than she realised. Somewhere within the numbness around Ted’s death there was raw grief, yet I could only touch the outlines of it. As if the bereavement didn’t belong to me, but to someone I knew. As if I weren’t entitled even to the painful connection of grieving and therefore the potential relief that lay beyond it.

‘Mel, I’m not you. I didn’t grow up in your family.’

‘What about his house?’

‘Still there.’ Locked up, since the day of the cremation, with all his possessions inside it. Brooding, waiting for me.

‘Are you going to go and sort it out?’

‘Yes.’ It came to me now that my reluctance formed part of the numbness. Of course I feared going back to his house and unlocking the memories, but sooner or later I would have to make myself do it.

Mel insisted, ‘I’ll come and help you. I’m sure Graham and Caz will as well.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

I knew I didn’t want anyone else to be there, not even Lola and Jack. It wasn’t just furniture and clothes and memories I had to deal with. It was the way the very scent of the place entered into me and shook my soul.