John Gapper - A Fatal Debt

We went back into the kitchen. My father was unusually cheerful, I remember, slicing more cake for me and asking me what had gone on at school, while Jane hardly said anything. After a while, she got up and said she ought to get back to the office, and my father showed her out. Then my brother came home and we watched television before my father said he was going to fetch my mother from Paddington station.

“I’ll take Ben with me,” he said, “and Guy can mind the store.”

My father had bought a Rover and he let me sit in the front, which he hadn’t done before. The seats were leather, and I smelled them as we drove, the wipers squeaking on the windscreen in the drizzle. I watched the colored segments of the dashboard display until we got to Paddington and waited across the road from the entrance to the station, where my parents had arranged to meet. The radio was on and he leaned over to turn it down.

“Listen, Benny, will you do one thing for me?” he said.

“What, Dad?”

“You know Jane, who you just met? Don’t mention her to Mum, will you? I think it’s better kept between us.”

I looked at him, not quite understanding what he meant, and I saw his awkwardness, the pleading expression on his face that I hadn’t known before. It was an adult face, different from a child’s, with its folds of flesh, its pockmarks, its stubble and sweat. I thought of him as huge-impossible to knock off course from sheer bulk-but he seemed vulnerable in that moment. I was pleased to be taken into his confidence, for my agreement to be needed. It seemed like a small thing not to reveal the presence of another woman in our home.

“Okay, Dad,” I said.

My mother came out of the station just after that, and she ran across the road, in the gap behind a bus. She put her head through the rolled-down passenger-side window when she saw me and laughed with the relief of being reunited. She was only a few years older than I am now. She’d been born in Virginia, although she’d lived all of her adult life in London after meeting my father as a student in the 1970s. The British are supposed to be genteel and Americans boors, but she disproved it. She’d taken up British habits-gardening, visiting seaside towns-but not the rudeness.

“How are you, boys?” she said gaily.

“We’ve just about coped without you,” my father said.

“You haven’t missed having a woman about the house, then?”

“What do you say, Benny?” my father asked me, a warning look in his eyes.

“It’s been fine,” I mumbled.

He drove us home, with my mother insisting on me sitting in the front while she chatted happily from the backseat. She’d been to visit a friend in Oxford for a couple of days. We stopped to pick up fish and chips on Chiswick High Street as we neared home-a reward for good behavior, my father called it.

For a time I forgot it, basking in the glow of my intimacy with my father-the fact that he relied on me for something that mattered to him. Jane was filed away in my mind until a few months later, when my parents’ arguments, which had been occasional and brief, became loud and vituperative. From my bedroom, I heard terrible threats and recriminations being exchanged.

My brother, three years older than I, was contemptuous of my frailty and taunted me for crying in the middle of one volcanic eruption. Half-fascinated and half-scared himself, he passed on gossip from his forays halfway down the stairs to overhear what my parents were shouting about. Some woman called Jane, he reported.

I was tempted to flaunt my knowledge of her, but something told me not to. It would have revealed that I’d kept a secret, not only from him but also from my mother. As my father’s affair progressed to its inevitable conclusion-my parents calling us down to give us a stilted explanation, my father leaving with a suitcase and hugging us in the hallway-the ball of my guilt and complicity swelled inside me.

My mother hid her distress from us after he’d gone, except once. One day, when I was sixteen and the postdivorce arrangements for weekends, birthdays, and Christmases had become routine, I found her in our living room. She was looking at a photo of us four together, my father with his arms around us.

“I wish I’d realized, Ben. I could’ve done something,” she said.

My heart twisted again. She wasn’t crying: I think her tears had long been shed.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said, my teenage self unable to conjure up more.

From that moment on, I had an uneasy sense around my father of being trapped together in our deception, him not knowing whether I had blurted out the truth to her. It was too difficult for either of us to acknowledge, so our secret was buried with her.

Ten years later, my mother had died of cancer while I was at medical school in London. It was the catalyst for me to depart for New York, escaping my father’s guilt-ridden bonhomie and Jane’s relief that she no longer had to compete. Jane sat a couple of rows back at the service, while my father occupied a front pew with my brother and me, and edged up to stand beside him only at the gravesite. It hadn’t made her presence there any less painful.

I bumped into Jane on the way out of the hospital, in the store that sold newspapers, sweets, and shiny helium balloons bearing cheerful messages for the patients. She was squatting with her back to me to pick up a magazine, and the white strap of her bra was pressed up against her cream blouse in a way that provoked in me desire mixed with hostility. That wasn’t, I’d come to realize in adulthood, a contradiction. I kissed her airily on the cheek, barely grazing her skin, and told her that my father looked well.

“Have you got time for a cup of coffee, at least?” she said, as if it were typical of me to be rushing off.

Look, I’ve just flown across the bloody Atlantic to see him , I thought, but I kept it to myself and nodded. We found a seat in the hospital’s atrium, holding two cups of foamed milk sprinkled with brown powder. The space was lit from above by a cloudy sky.

“How are you?” she said. “We haven’t seen you for ages . I hope you told Roger he’ll have to change his diet. You know what he’s like.”

“I sure do,” I said, matching her smile despite the tug of rivalry I still felt when she talked of my father proprietarily. We remained in temporary harmony while I explained what had happened to his heart in terms she grasped, and she looked appreciative.

Our detente didn’t last. “When will we see Rebecca again?” she said, licking the foam with her tongue. “I think she’s great, Ben. Don’t you let her go.”

“I’m afraid we’re taking a break,” I said stiffly.

“Oh, Ben . Why? She’s such a lovely girl.”

That was Jane. No sensitivity, no sense that there were things she shouldn’t push. I hadn’t paid for a psych to probe into my guilty secrets-I just wanted to be left alone. I felt a prickle of sweat and longed to be out of there, no longer held to emotional account.

“Yes, she is. You’re right, Jane. It’s all my fault,” I said, standing up.

My heart was starting to race with all my long-held resentment against her. It didn’t take much to trigger it, and I knew that I had to finish our conversation before I said something I’d regret. As I did so, I looked up and saw a black Audi that I recognized halting outside the entrance. It shouldn’t have been there, but I was glad it had flouted the rules.

“I’ve got to go. I’m getting a lift,” I said to her upturned face. “I’ll call later to see how Dad is. Take care.”

I hurried across the atrium before Jane could stop me, the doors at the entrance sliding obediently open to let me escape.