Rosie Thomas - If My Father Loved Me

‘I’m going to head inside,’ Penny said. ‘Evelyn’s going out and she wants me to give Cassie her tea and put her to bed.’

‘See you tomorrow,’ I said.

I made the pulls for the second and third volumes, using just the right pressure this time, then discarded the type and set up Lord Curzon . I loved the quiet in the bindery on evenings like this. Behind me, the tall window that looked out over the canal darkened and the pale struts of the gasometer supports briefly glowed like the skeleton of a spaceship.

If I was thinking about anything as I worked it was Penny. We had met as art students at Camberwell and had learned the principles of bookbinding together. We hadn’t a clue how to do the job, even when the course was finished, but we both went on to work in other binderies. I found a job as a very junior assistant to Arthur Bromyard, one of the great artist-bookbinders, while Penny went into a busy and aggressive trade bindery where most of the other workers were men. She was bullied there and responded by becoming even more superficially prickly and defensive than she had been at Camberwell. We stayed friends, just about, but she was scathing about what she regarded as my sheltered and arty-farty existence under Mr Bromyard’s gentle tutelage, and I thought she was wasting her talents banging out dozens of legal buckram-bound law reports day after day and standing up to the taunts of brutal men who didn’t understand her manners or motives.

I blocked in the rest of the title and the author’s name and the volume number on each of the three books, then laid out the results on the bench to examine them. The first pull had indeed been a bit too heavy. I took my little ivory-handled penknife out of my drawer and scraped very gently at the gold to loosen the excess. The penknife had once belonged to the Old Man, Anthony Phebus, who had given it to Ted. Years later Ted had handed it on to me, asking offhandedly if I could find a use for it, and I had discovered that it was good for just this purpose. I blew the dust away and rubbed my blocking lightly with a duster. Perfect, even though I had to pass the verdict myself. Within the constraints of time and resources, of course.

I found a paste tray and a roller, and briskly applied PVA glue to the boards. Once the books were glued into their finished covers I could go home. The sky against the window was completely black now.

Half an hour later I was placing the bound volumes in the old wooden press, neatly interleaving them with paper so the moisture in the glue didn’t cause any cockling, when the door opened again. I began turning the screw to tighten the pressure and looked to see who it was. I could hear running feet, but I couldn’t see anyone.

A second later Cassie burst round the corner of Andy’s bench. ‘Sadie! Sadie!’ she shouted.

Cassie was nearly three, the daughter of Penny’s partner Evelyn and a musician from Grenada. It was a year since the lovely but distracted Evelyn had left Jerry and brought herself and Cassie to live at Penny’s.

I had never seen Penny happier than she was with Evelyn. In fact, I didn’t think I had even seen Penny happy at all before, although there had been a series of women, even in her miserable days at the blokey bindery.

‘ What are you doing here?’ I demanded.

‘Seeing you,’ Cassie yelled triumphantly.

I swung her off the floor and she sat astride my hip. She was wearing a zip-up fleece over Tellytubby pyjamas and smelled of warmth and soap. ‘Why?’

‘Because you are silly.’

I reached for my duster and dropped it over my head and face. ‘How about now?’

This was greeted with hoots of laughter. She twitched the duster off my face and rubbed her boneless button nose against mine.

I cleared a space on my bench and gently sat her down. I didn’t really like seeing Cassie in the bindery. There were too many instruments of harm in here, too many long-bladed knives and mallets and jars of glue and size. The sight of her anywhere near the big old hand-operated guillotine with its grinning, curved metal blade made sweat break out down my spine and in the hollows of my hands. I blew a raspberry against the back of her plump, pale-brown neck and told her to sit still.

I never worried about my own two when they were small the way I feared for Cassie. It was only when I got older and Lola and Jack didn’t need and certainly didn’t welcome my physical protection that I started to.

But Evelyn didn’t worry about Cassie either. She let her play on the bindery floor, where she chewed strips of discarded goatskin and banged her head on the iron legs of the guillotine. ‘Let her play, Sadie,’ she would say with a shrug.

Penny came in with a tea towel over her shoulder.

‘Pen …’ I began.

She held up her hands. ‘I know, I know. But she wanted to come and see you on her own. You’re here and I was watching her all the way.’

Penny was incapable of refusing Cassie anything. She loved the child with an absorbed, half-unbelieving passion. I loved her too; the familiar weight of a baby in my arms, the softness and tenacity and scent of her. I missed my own children’s infant selves – Lola was already overtaking me in the adult pecking order and Jack was angular and rejecting – and Cassie filled some of the space they had left empty. So she moved between the three of us women, bathed in the constant light of our adoration.

‘I’m just finishing,’ I capitulated. ‘Do you want to stay here with me, Cass, and then I’ll carry you up to bed?’

‘No bed.’

‘Yes bed.’

‘No.’

‘Yesyesyesyesyesyesyes yessss .’

‘We’ll see,’ she suddenly bargained and I could hear her mother’s sweet cajoling voice. Evelyn seemed other-worldly, but she always got exactly what she wanted.

After I had checked that Curzon was properly positioned and all the machines and lights were switched off, I hoisted Cassie into my arms again, locked up and followed Penny up the path to the back door of the house.

The ground-floor rooms interconnected and together they functioned as kitchen, living area and bindery office. There were books everywhere, and newspapers, heaped up on battered but good-looking furniture. Penny’s rooms had always looked the same, in whichever of her houses, but since Evelyn’s arrival there had been some changes. She had feng shui’d the place as soon as she moved in, shifting the position of the table, lining up chairs and introducing frondy plants and scented candles. It was funny to see her Hello! magazines alongside Penny’s London Review of Books .

Penny was sitting at the computer making up invoices. This was usually my job.

‘I’ll do those tomorrow.’

I put Cassie down and she immediately ran away and hid.

‘Sade, will you tell me why you’re rejecting all offers of help and sympathy?’

I played for time. ‘Am I?’

I felt fraudulent, that was why. I had hardly cried yet for Ted and I couldn’t map even the outlines of what his loss meant to me. What could I look for from my friends, when I couldn’t locate my own grief? All I felt was numb, and exhausted to realise that my relationship with my father wasn’t going to end with the mere fact of his death. It was going to go on and on, for ever, the old disabling argument between love and bitterness.

Penny sighed. ‘Never mind,’ she said gently.

‘Shall I put her into bed?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. Tell her I’ll come up in a minute.’

I found Cassie behind the sofa, her usual hiding place. She let me carry her upstairs to her bedroom, on the second floor next to Penny’s and Evelyn’s. It was at the back of the house, and looked out over the bindery and the gaunt ribs of the gasometers. I drew the curtains, dark-blue ones with gold stars, and turned on the man-in-the-moon nightlight.