Rosie Thomas - If My Father Loved Me

‘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.’