Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

My nan, always delighted to see new faces, welcomes Yumi with open arms. With Sinatra’s A Swingin’ Affair! in the background-for me, Frank’s finest album, although of course traditionalists would always nominate Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!-they sit chatting while I unpack the shopping.

Yumi tells my nan that she really has to see the temples of Kyoto and the snow on Mount Fuji and the cherry blossoms of a Japanese spring. My nan agrees that all these things will go straight to the top of her agenda.

“Lovely teeth,” says my nan when Yumi goes to the bathroom. “Must be all that rice. Where did you say she’s from again, dear? Is it China?”

“Japan, Nan.”

“Everybody speaks English these days,” says my grandmother.

Yumi is a gracious guest, gamely eating the ginger nuts she is plied with by my nan and tapping her foot along to A Swingin’ Affair!

“Ah,” she says. “Old music.”

“Like a bit of Sinatra, do you, sweetheart?” asks my nan.

These casual endearments are one of the loveliest things about my grandmother. Even total strangers get called the sweetest names under the sun. Sweetheart and dear, darling and love. My nan says these words to everyone she meets.

In Yumi’s case, it feels like only what she deserves.

As the year starts to run out, my mother goes back into her garden.

I would have thought that the garden was dead in November, but my mother happily tells me that there’s lots to do.

“You don’t know a thing about gardens, do you?” she laughs. “At this time of year you have to finish planting your tulips and all your other spring bulbs. You have to clean and store all your flower pots and seed trays. And you have to get ready for your roses. Remove the weeds, add lots of compost and fertilizer, plant your roses.” My mother smiles at me. “Do you know how much work that is, getting ready for your roses?”

Sometimes I come home and find she’s not alone out there. I can hear smatterings of Cantonese mixed up with the English and I know that Joyce Chang and her grandchildren are in the garden with my mother, Joyce and my mum side by side on their hands and knees, laughing about something as they sink their fingers into the dirt while William and Diana solemnly sweep up the last of the dead leaves with brooms that are bigger than they are.

“Good time to make ground for new vegetable plot,” Joyce tells me. “How’s the job?”

“What?”

“How’s new teaching job? Good money? Teachers treated very badly in this country. No respect for teachers here. In China, teacher equal to father.”

I look at my mother accusingly but she is busy with her soil. How much is she telling this woman?

“It’s going okay, thanks.”

“Teaching not well paid but steady,” Joyce informs me. “World always need teachers. Hard work, though. Teaching not money for old string.” She digs her gnarled hands into the dirt. “Have to help mother.”

Is she talking about me or her or both of us?

“November,” Joyce says. “Best month for vegetable plot.”

“Joyce is going to help me make a vegetable garden,” my mum says. “Isn’t that wonderful, darling?”

My mother does something that I would have bet was impossible with my old man gone. She carries on getting ready for the roses. And I know she wants the same for me.

“I’m glad to see you getting out a bit more, darling,” my mum tells me.

Joyce nods agreement, fixing me with her shrewd, beady stare. “Need to put your hair down. Not too old in the tooth.”

I shake my head. “You mean let my hair down. And I’m not too long in the tooth.”

“You know exactly what I mean, mister.”

That’s true enough.

S ATURDAY NIGHT WE GO DANCING. I try to get out of it, but Yumi insists that Saturday night is for dancing, so we go to this little club in Soho where the music is not as bad as I expect it to be and where the atmosphere is not as fashionable as I fear it will be. And it’s great. It’s not like when I was twenty. Nobody is trying to look cool or tough. Nobody cares what you dress like or dance like. So we just leap about and bounce around and have a laugh, and soon Yumi is trying to sit down and rehydrate with a little bottle of Evian while I want to keep on dancing.

Late at night we go to a conveyor belt sushi restaurant on Brewer Street. You sit at a long round bar, small plates of sushi trundle past your eyes and you help yourself to whatever takes your fancy. It turns out to be the place where Gen works and he comes over to say hello. For some reason he doesn’t seem surprised to see Yumi with me.

Then Gen goes back to work and Yumi tells me that Japanese people do not usually like these kinds of places because the fish is not as fresh as when it’s made to order. But it tastes pretty good to me, and we demolish a pile of different-colored plates bearing two pieces of tuna, salmon, eel, egg or prawn.

Back at her flat we make love-slowly, sleepily, relaxed with each other now-and when we wake up around noon the next day, we take a walk to the very top of Primrose Hill where it’s one of those shining winter days and we can see the whole of London spread out before us.

“So beautiful,” Yumi says.

“Yes,” I say, looking at her face. “So beautiful.”

Monday morning, after my mother has gone off to dish up the burgers, beans and tacos at Nelson Mandela High, my father comes to the house.

I am sort of glad to see him. I miss him. Just miss having him around. Miss the way it used to be. But I can see that his timing is an act of supreme cowardice and that makes me despise him. I sit on the stairs as he fills a couple of suitcases. Files, books, clothes. Videos, documents, stacks of CDs.

Taking them, leaving us.

The CD on top of a pile waiting to be packed is called Dancing in the Street-43 Motown Dance Classics, a window to a world of youth and optimism and perfect grooves that seems out of place and out of time.

“So how’s the new book coming along?” I ask him. “Getting it done, are you?”

He doesn’t look at me, just carries on trying to close a Samsonite that is far too full. He’s going to struggle to get that into the SLK’s boot. I don’t offer to help him.

“The book will be fine.”

“Good stuff.”

“You think this is easy for me. But it’s not. I miss my home. You can’t imagine how much I miss it.”

“What about us?”

“What do you think? Of course I miss you. Both of you.”

“What I don’t understand is how you explain it to yourself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Leaving, I mean. You inflict all this pain on Mum, and I don’t understand how you live with it. You must justify it to yourself. But I don’t know how.”

“Lena’s a special girl. Hardly a girl. A special young woman.”

“But what if she’s not, Dad? What if she’s just another girl who happens to be really pretty? Does that mean you got it wrong? That all of this was a mistake? Will it still be worth it?”

“She’s far more than a pretty face. Do you really think that I would turn my world upside down for a pretty face?”

“Absolutely.”

“Anyway,” he says, getting the Samsonite to shut at last. “It was a relief to finally get it out in the open.”

“Your nasty little knob?”

“My relationship with Lena. I was sick of sneaking around. It couldn’t have gone on like that forever.”

“So Lena is-what?-your mistress?”

“God. No. Lena is certainly not my mistress.”

“But you must give her money? You slip her a few quid, don’t you?”

“Well, yes. Not that it’s got anything to do with you.”

“For exclusive rights.”