Rosie Thomas - If My Father Loved Me

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.

The room was light and bare, with tall, plain windows. Rows of wooden seats faced a pair of non-committal flower arrangements on either side of a secular-looking lectern. The atmosphere was subdued, naturally enough, but also utilitarian. The light-wood coffin under a purple drape was utilitarian too, which was inappropriate for Ted, whose life had been many things but never that. And at the same time as I was thinking about the crematorium chapel and the flowers, and the coffin I had selected with the undertakers’ discreet guidance, I was also reflecting that Ted wouldn’t have cared what arrangements were made for his funeral. Or would have affected not to.

‘I haven’t got to sit through it, have I?’ I could hear him snort in the half-irritable, half-jovial way that he adopted in his later years. ‘Just do the necessary and make sure all and sundry get a drink at the end of it.’

I also wondered how abnormal it was to be standing at a funeral and thinking like this. But then our life together, Ted’s and mine, hadn’t been usual. Mel’s family had been normal, or Caz’s, or Graham’s. Not ours.

Mel was sitting a few seats behind me. She had never met Ted, but she insisted that she wanted to come, out of respect and to keep me company. Caz and Graham were with her. They had met him a handful of times, at my wedding and the children’s birthday parties, and the occasional Christmas celebration in the intervening years.

‘I liked your dad. Of course I’m coming to his funeral,’ Caz declared.

Ted had liked her, too. I remember him flirting with her at my wedding reception. He had probably cornered her in some alcove, before cupping her round face between his two hands and breathing in the scent of her skin as if she were some exotic flower. ‘I could create such a perfume for you,’ he would have murmured in her ear. This routine worked like a charm with a surprisingly wide range of women. Not with Caz, of course, although it would have been a matter of pride for him to have a go. But with plenty of others. More than I could or would want to remember.

Lola and I sat on either side of Jack in the front row of seats. Lola was wearing black trousers and a tight red jersey that made her glow like a damask rose in the colourless desert of the chapel.

Rosa damascena , from which the essential perfume oil attar of roses is distilled. In Bulgaria, principally. I was surprised by how much I remembered about Ted’s craft.

Lola blotted her tears with a folded Kleenex and glanced down at the two black feathered wings of mascara printed on the tissue. Jack sat upright and stared straight ahead of him, dressed in a tidied-up version of his school uniform.

When I broke the news to him, on the morning after Ted’s death, he said, ‘I see.’ And after a moment’s thought, ‘It’s very final, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Although he’s still here in a way, because we remember him and because we’ll go on talking about him as long as we are alive.’

Jack gave me one of his withering looks, as if he saw right through this threadbare platitude, but he didn’t pass any comment.

Apart from the six of us, the other mourners were Ted’s two first cousins on his mother’s side, who had come down from Manchester. There was no other family left. Then there was a handful of Ted’s neighbours, led by the large and forthright Jean Andrews, and the landlord and a couple of regulars from the pub Ted used to go to. I had never met any of these people before, but they filed up to me at the chapel door, and shook my hand and told me how sorry they were. A great character, your dad, they said. Thank you, I murmured. And yes, he was.

There was also an old woman wearing a ratty fox fur over a shapeless bag of a coat and a crumpled black felt hat with a bunch of silk-and-wire lilies of the valley pinned to one side. Muguet , Ted called the flower. It was one of his favourites. The yield of natural oil from the blooms was minimal, and so the fragrance was usually artificially created.

The woman in the black hat had nodded coolly to me as she walked in, but she didn’t introduce herself or offer condolences. I assumed she was one of those eccentrics who like to see a decent send-off, regardless of whether or not they actually knew the dear departed.