Rosie Thomas - If My Father Loved Me

Tony and I sold our house, and I bought a much smaller one with my half of the money and Stanley came to live in it with us. For a few months I was shockingly happy, even in the face of my children’s discomfort and Tony’s misery. But then, slowly and inevitably, things began to go wrong. Stanley did less carpentry and spent more time in the pub. Then he went off with a travelling production of The Rocky Horror Show and met Dinah, who was playing Janet.

I was afraid that I would die without him, but I also thought that to be abandoned was no more than I deserved.

It’s not a very original story and I’m not proud of this portion of my life. I’m sorry for what I did and regret that I can’t put it right, not for Jack and Lola, or Tony either. Remembering the hurt I caused by abandoning my family makes me recoil and wish I could slam shut the doors of recollection. I can’t, of course, and I think about the damage every day.

But even so, and with the benefit of experience, what I really think – now that Mel has asked me – is that you can compromise in love as in all other things. If you have to, that is. But it’s much better not. If you give up your independence to share your life with someone, it should be a state of existence that improves on being single.

Sometimes, not all the time of course, but sometimes, when you’re sitting down to breakfast opposite each other or getting into a car together or just lying quietly in each other’s arms, you should catch your breath and think, being with this person here and now is what lends reason to and makes logic of everything else in the world.

I thought this, for just long enough, about being with Stanley.

If you don’t have these times that snag your breath and make you smile with happiness, and if all you are doing instead is rubbing along, wrapping up the packages of irritation and disappointment and sliding them out of sight, then you would be better off alone.

‘Is it enough to share your life with someone you like well enough, but don’t love?’ I repeated.

Mel nodded.

‘No, it’s not enough,’ I said.

‘Of course it isn’t,’ she agreed.

Mel and I knew that we were fortunate, because we’d often discussed it. We had evenings like this one. We could do our work, eat out, book holidays, see friends, choose films, argue about politics, cook meals, laugh and talk a lot. Once in a while drink too much. True love in addition would have been magnificent, but I knew that I didn’t want to sacrifice any of the above just to settle for a compromise, for a merely pale and ersatz version of love.

I also thought that maybe Mel herself thought a little differently from me. With Adrian and his predecessors she had devoted more time to the pursuit of passion than I ever did. But then, Mel didn’t have children to consume her energy, draining it with their needs and the exhausting negotiations of parent–child love.

Mel’s own cheerful explanation for her persistence would have been that she was still looking for a man to replace her daddy. Whereas I had run so far and so fast from mine that by now I had shaken off all male bonds altogether. Except for Jack, of course.

Mel’s thoughts must have been travelling along a path parallel to mine. And, as often happened, they moved faster. ‘Tell me about your father. I don’t think you ever have, not properly. What was he like? Do you look like him?’

‘Not really. Our eyes and hands are the same shape.’

Her questions made me shiver.

I had been thinking about him as I walked through the opalescent evening. I could feel his shadow here in the restaurant. There was no reason for this tonight of all nights, other than premonition, but he was already in my mind.

‘Go on.’

I told her, reluctantly, that my father was a perfumer, and a con artist.

Mel fixed all her formidable attention on me. Her black eyes held mine and I knew that if I chose to say more she would listen intently. If I should happen to need advice or a reliable insight, those would be forthcoming too. But all my instincts told me – as they always tell me – to hold my tongue and to keep my history to myself. ‘You would like him, all women do. He was a perfumer’s “nose”,’ I added.

Stay there, stay away, I wanted to warn him. The shadow was lengthening as he came closer.

‘Go on,’ Mel repeated. She was ready to be fascinated.

With only the one obvious exception, myself, women did find Ted Thompson utterly magnetic. He was a good-looking man, for one thing, with the looks of a Forties movie star. He loved being told that he resembled Spencer Tracy.

‘Do you hear that, Sadie?’ he would say and laugh. ‘Your old man? What do you think?’

‘I can’t see it,’ I’d mutter. ‘You just look like my dad.’ That was what I wanted him to be, just my dad.

The real basis for his success with women, though, was his interest in them. He had a stagy trick of cupping his target’s upturned face in his hands and then breathing in the warmth of it as if the skin’s scent were the most direct route to knowing its owner. He would close his eyes for a moment, frowning in concentration, then murmur, ‘I could create such a perfume for you. The top notes sweet and floral to reflect your beauty but with the firmest base, cedarwood with earth and metal tones, for your great strength.’

Or some such nonsense, anyway.

‘His job was to mix essences, the building blocks of scent, to create perfume. He told me it was like painting a picture, making the broad brushstrokes that give the first impression and then filling in the details, the light and shade, to create the fragrance that lingers in the memory.’

As I talked I was thinking about the words from my childhood, ambergris and musk and vetiver. Not the scents or essences themselves because I didn’t inherit Ted’s nose and could barely have distinguished one from another, but the pure sounds of the words with their velvety textures. I recalled them the way other children might remember television programmes or ice-cream flavours, and I was back to being ten years old again. I could hear the click of heels on the unloved parquet of our hallway and the scrape of unpruned garden branches in the wind, working like fingernails at the glass of the front room’s bay window.

‘Why did I never know that? It sounds highly exotic.’

‘Yes.’

It was exotic, in its way, Ted’s world. But you couldn’t describe my growing up on the edge of it as anything of the kind.

‘What about the other thing? The con artist bit?’

‘That’s a manner of speaking. Perfume is nothing more than a promise in a bottle, Ted used to say. It exists to create an illusion.’

My discomfort was growing. I didn’t want to talk to Mel about my father. We had reached an unspoken truce long ago, the old illusionist and me, and chatting about him and his life’s work, even to Mel, was outside the terms of the agreement.

‘I thought smell was the truest of the senses.’

‘Smell may be. But perfume, on the other hand, is meant to disguise and flatter, and lead the senses astray.’

‘I have just realised something. You never wear it, do you?’

‘No,’ I said.

Mel always moved in a cloud of scent. She changed her allegiances but the emphasis was constant. Ted wore cologne. He had created one for himself and he used it liberally. I never thought it suited him. It was too salty and citrusy, too fresh and clean and outdoor, and when I was a child the discrepancy between the man I knew and the way he smelled was always troubling. The scent rose in my head now, like the first warning of a migraine.

‘Why?’

‘I prefer the smell of skin,’ I smiled. I remembered the way Lola and Jack used to smell when they were babies.