I looked out of the kitchen window at the small back garden. The grass needed cutting, I noted absently, and the pale spires of ant colonies towered amid the green. In one corner of the garden, where they would get the most light, were the skeletal forms of the azaleas, my father’s pride and joy, cherished for years — Christ, decades. But at this time of year they were as barren and stark as at midwinter.
I looked down at the sink. Clean dishes, looking dusty, were racked up, and there was a stink of staleness from the drain. I turned on the taps and tipped the mold out of the cup into the drainer. The cold tea poured away, and green bacterial spots slid silently, but there was still plenty of scum clinging to the cup. I looked for washing-up liquid, but couldn’t see any, even in the small, crammed cupboard under the sink. I pulled the cup out of the water again and looked into it, feeling foolish, futile, ensnared.
Peter was standing in the kitchen door. “I’ll bring over some Fairy Liquid if you like.”
“Fuck it,” I snarled. I stepped on the pedal of the bin in the cupboard and threw in the dirty cup. But the bin was half full and stank, too, of what might have been rotten fruit. I got to my knees and began to root in the cupboard, pulling aside cardboard boxes and yellowed plastic bags.
“What are you looking for?”
“Bin liners. The whole damn place is a mess.” Everything seemed old, even the cans and plastic dispensers of cleaning stuff in the cupboard, old and dirty and crusted and half used up but never thrown out. My searching was getting more violent; I was scattering stuff around the floor.
“Take it easy,” Peter said. “Give yourself a minute.”
He was right, of course. I forced myself to back up.
He had left this, my father had, this little set of dirty dishes. He’d never come back to finish the tea. He’d just stopped, his life cutting off at that moment, like a film breaking. Now I had to tidy this stuff away, a chore I used to loathe as a kid: He never would clean up after himself. But when it was done, there would be no more, no more dirty cups and greasy crockery, not ever. And as I worked my way through the house, room by room, I would be fixing messes that he would never make again.
I said, “It’s as if he’s dying, a little bit more. Just by me doing this.”
“You had a sister. She was older than us, wasn’t she?”
“Gina, yes. She came over for the funeral. But she went back to America. We’re going to sell the house; we share it fifty-fifty, according to Dad’s will—”
“America?”
“Florida.” My maternal grandfather had been a GI, an Italian American, stationed briefly in Liverpool some time before the war. You might say my mother was a premature war baby, conceived during that stay. After the war the GI had not fulfilled his promise to come back to England. I told Peter all this. “But there was a happy ending,” I said. “My grandfather got back in touch sometime in the fifties.”
“Guilt?”
“I suppose. He was never a true father. But he sent money over, and took Mum and Gina over to the States a few times, when Gina was small. Then we inherited some property in Florida, left to my mother by a cousin she’d met over there. Gina went to work over there, took the house, raised a family. She works in PR — I’m sorry, it’s a complicated story—”
“Family stories are like that.”
“Episodic. No neat narrative structure.”
“That makes you uncomfortable.”
It was a perceptive remark I wouldn’t have expected from the Peter I’d known. “I suppose it does. It’s all kind of a tangle. Like a spider’s web. I felt as if I got myself out of it, by building a life in London. Now I have to get tangled up again.” And I resented it, I realized, even as I tried to finish these few last chores for my father.
Peter asked, “Do you have kids of your own?”
I shook my head. It occurred to me I hadn’t asked Peter a single question about himself, his life since school, his circumstances now. “How about you?”
“I never married,” he said simply. “I was a policeman — did you know that?”
I grinned; I couldn’t help it. Peter the school dork, a copper?
Evidently he was used to the reaction. “I did well. Became a detective constable. I retired early …”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Other things to do.” I would find out later what those “other things” were. “Look, let me help. Go see to the rest of the house. I’ll sort this out — I can fill a bin liner for you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“It’s okay. I’d like to do it for Jack. If I find anything personal I’ll just leave it.”
“You’re very thoughtful.”
He shrugged. “You’d do the same for me.”
I wasn’t sure if that was remotely true, and I felt another layer of guilt pile up on already complicated strata. But I didn’t say any more.
I started upstairs. Behind me I heard a dim bleeping, the baby-bird sound of Peter’s cell phone calling for attention.
My father’s bedroom.
The bed was unmade, the sheets crumpled, a dent in the pillow where his head had lain. There was a waist-high basket nearly full of dirty clothes. On the small bedside cupboard, where an electric lamp was alight, a paperback book lay facedown. It was a biography of Churchill. It was all as if my father had left it a moment ago, but that moment had somehow been frozen, and was now receding relentlessly into the past, a fading still image on a broken video.
I turned off the lamp, closed the book. I poked about the room listlessly, unsure what to do.
The dressing table before the window had always been my mother’s domain. Even now the rows of family photographs — my graduation, smiling American grandkids — looked just as when I’d last seen them, perhaps as she’d left them. The dust was thicker behind the photographs, as if Dad had barely touched this corner since she’d gone. There was some mail scattered on the surface, a few bills, a postcard from Rome.
Cancer had taken my mother. She had always been a young mother, just nineteen when I was born. She still seemed young when she died, right to the end of her life.
On his last night my father had emptied his pockets here, never to fill them again. I threw a grimy handkerchief into the laundry bag. I found a little change and some bills, which I absently pocketed — the coins felt heavy and cold through the fabric of my pocket — and his wallet, slim and containing a single credit card, which I also took.
The dresser had two small drawers. In one was a bundle of mail in opened envelopes, from my sister, my mother, my younger self. I pushed the letters back into the drawer, a task for later. In the other drawer were a few checkbook stubs, a couple of bank account passbooks, and bank statements and credit card bills, held neatly together with treasury tags. I swept all this stuff up and crammed it into my jacket pocket. I knew I was being a coward in my priorities: closing down his financial affairs was something I could do on remote control, easily, without leaving my comfort zone.
Suits hung in the wardrobe. I riffled through them, evoking a smell of dust and camphor. They were cut to Dad’s barrel-shaped frame and would never have fit me, even if they hadn’t been old, worn at cuffs and shoulders, and indefinably old-mannish in their style. He had always folded his shirts and set them one on top of another in the shallow drawers of the wardrobe, and there they were now. Shoes, of patent leather and suede, lay jumbled up on top of each other in the bottom of the wardrobe: he had been wearing his slippers when they took him to the hospital. There were more drawers full of underwear, sweaters, ties, tiepins and cufflinks, even a few elastic armbands.