Allison Pearson - I Don't Know How She Does It

“Venture capital.”

“That’s the one.”

Dad says we’re not talking big sums this time: seed money, that’s all.

“How much?”

“Just enough to get production up and running.”

“How much?”

“Ten grand plus development costs; then there’s packaging. Say thirteen and a half. I wouldn’t ask, love, only cash flow’s that tight at the minute.”

I’m not aware of my expression having altered, but it must have, because he shifts in his chair in a manner which, in another man, you might take for discomfort. For a moment, I think it must have occurred to him how sick these transactions make me feel. He reaches across the table and places his hand on mine. “Don’t worry, love,” he says. “If you’re pushed I’ll take a check.”

I leave my father at Old Street Station. From there he can get the Northern Line directly to King’s Cross and take a train home. I give him money for the fare — a crazy amount, it’s cheaper to fly to Boston than to go to Doncaster these days — and extra for a cab at the other end. Dad is a bit vague about where he is living at the moment — for which read who he is living with — but he promises me that he will go there directly. I stand outside the station, round the corner by the photo booth. When I look back inside a few minutes later he has engaged a young busker in conversation. Casually, magnanimously, he flicks one of the tenners I have just given him into the boy’s open guitar case, removes his coat, lays it gently over the busker’s sleeping dog and now, oh, dear God, he is going to sing.

“The water is wide, I cannot get o’er,

And neither have I wings to fly.

Give me a boat that will carry two

And both shall row, my love and I.”

It’s his favorite ballad, a Reddy standard along with “Down by the Salley Gardens.” The passing suits, scurrying for the escalator, stop and turn their heads, startled by the beauty of the tenor voice, the thwarted yearning Dad does so well. A woman in a camel coat bends to deposit some coins in the case and my father tips an invisible hat to her.

I can hear my mother’s voice now, an angry descant piercing the sad tune. “He can wrap you round his little finger.”

“No he can’t.”

“Yes he can. Always could. If he’s so bloody marvelous, your father, go to him. Go on, go to him.”

“I don’t want to go to him, Mum.”

“You always were his. Daddy’s girl.”

I plunge back into the noise of the street, buy a copy of the Standard to have something to hold in my hands and head in the direction of the office.

A child’s love for a parent is well-nigh indestructible, but down the years the drip, drip, drip of disillusion can corrode it. The first feeling I remember having for my father was pride, a soaring burst-your-lungs gratitude that he was mine. Better-looking than anyone else’s dad, he was so clever he could do any sum he liked in his head and recite the football results back as soon as they’d been read out on the telly on Saturday afternoon without a single mistake: Sheffield Wednesday, Partick Thistle, Hamilton Academicals. Saturday mornings, Julie and I would be allowed to accompany him to the bookie’s, where we would cling to his hero’s legs. I remember the sense of being small down there in the forest of trousers and the smell of felt hats in from the rain. Years later, at university, I watched the middle-class fathers trudging back and forth from their family saloons carrying tea chests and kettles and china mug sets hanging from pine trees, and I longed for their dull embrace.

One winter, it must have been ’75 or ’76, Dad took us sledding out in the Peak District. Other families had shop-bought sleds: raised off the ground with a lattice of wooden struts to sit on, they had the grandeur of an old-fashioned sleigh ride. Our sled lay flush with the ground; Dad had hammered it together out of split logs and had added metal runners on the underside which he ripped from the lip of an abandoned car door. “Give it a bit of go!” he said, rubbing his hands together.

On the first run, Julie fell off right away and the sled completed the descent by itself. Dad told her not to be such a baby. Now it was my turn, and I clung on, determined to prove that our sled, the sled our dad had made, was as good as anyone’s. But halfway down the hill, it hit a ridge and veered sharply to the right, slicing towards a steep drop fenced off by a low curtain of barbed wire. The metal strips, added to give a bit of go, made the sled unstoppable; it slammed under the fencing and the two front prongs dangled over the drop while I lay at the back, two feet from the edge, tangled in wire. He was panting so hard when he got to me I thought he would die, but he knelt down on the end of the sled to hold it in place and picked the wire thorns out of my anorak, out of my hands, out of my hair. As the last piece of wire was unsnagged, he pulled me clear and the sled shot forward. It was a couple of seconds before we heard it crack on the road beneath. I used to think that I remembered that day so well because he had saved my life; now I think it’s because it was the only time in our years as father and daughter that he did anything to protect me.

But Dad was my first love and I always took his side even when my mother’s hazel eyes disappeared in big raccoon circles and she started wearing those brushed-nylon keep-out nighties and laughing in the wrong places. One day at the VG stores, a man knocked over the pyramid display of Ideal Milk, the little blue-and-white cans went tumbling everywhere, and Mum laughed and laughed until Linda behind the counter had to fetch a glass of water from out back. But daughters don’t want to pick up the signals of their mother’s unhappiness; it might mean their father isn’t perfect.

Years after it became clear that Joseph Aloysius Reddy was an unsuitable crush, I still couldn’t break it off. How much evidence did I need? There was the day he brought the sheets home from the bed he shared with his new girlfriend for Mum to wash. And the night he carried me downstairs, blinking from sleep, to tell the copper standing in the front room that he, Joseph Reddy, had been at home on a date I had to swear I could remember. And I swore.

“She’s got this photographic memory, has our Kathy,” said Dad to the policeman. “Haven’t you, love? Now where’s that lovely smile?”

A father is the template of a man that Nature gives a girl, and if that template is broken or disfigured, well, what then?

Walking through the front door of Edwin Morgan Forster, I am grateful for its cool echoing spaces, for the clip-clop of marble underfoot, for the way the lift welcomes me without protest to its mirrored interior. I prefer not to look at the woman in the reflection: I don’t want her seeing me like this. When the door opens on the thirteenth floor, I have my excuses ready, but Robin Cooper-Clark is standing right there.

“Excellent presentation, Kate,” he says, placing a hand awkwardly on my shoulder. “Absolutely first class. Just need to tie up a couple of loose ends. No hurry. In your own time. No real problems with the family, I trust.”

Hard to imagine what the Head of Investment would say if I told him the truth. The Cooper-Clarks have become friends since Jill and I bonded in horror at some corporate pheasant shoot. Richard and I have been to their place in Sussex several times, but I have never mentioned my father to Robin. I want his respect, not his pity. “No. Everything’s fine.”

“Splendid. Talk later.”

The screen tells me that in the three hours since I last looked, the FTSE is up 50, the Dow is down 100 and the dollar 1 percent. So steadily, and with great deliberation, I make the calculations I need to make to hold my funds on course.