“Seventeen, I think,” he said. “Yes, she must have been just seventeen. I tried to teach her to drive on that trip.”
“You started young.”
“Yes… well.” He seemed embarrassed. “You weren’t actually planned, as such. More of a surprise.”
“Oh thanks,” I replied somewhat sarcastically. “Were you married?” I asked.
“Not when that picture was taken, no.”
“How about when I was born?” I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know.
“Oh yes,” he said with certainty. “We were by then.”
Strangely, I was relieved that I was legitimate and not a bastard. But did it really matter? Yes, I decided, it did. It meant that there had been commitment between my parents, maybe even love. They cared, or, at least, they had then.
“Why did you leave?” I asked him. It was the big question.
He didn’t answer immediately but sat quiet, still looking at me.
“Shame, I suppose,” he said eventually. “After your mother died, I couldn’t cope with having a baby and no wife. So I ran away.”
“Where to?” I asked.
“Australia,” he said. “Eventually. First I signed onto a Liberian-registered cargo ship in the Liverpool docks. I went all over the world for a while. I got off one day in Melbourne and just stayed there.”
“So why come back now?”
“It seemed like a good idea,” he said.
It wasn’t.
“What did you expect?” I asked. “Did you think I would just welcome you with open arms after all this time? I thought you were dead.” I looked at him. “I think it might be better for me if you were.”
He looked back at me with doleful eyes. Perhaps I had been a bit hard.
“Well,” I said, “it would definitely have been better if you hadn’t come back.”
“But I wanted to see you,” he said.
“Why?” I demanded loudly. “You haven’t wanted to for the last thirty-seven years.”
“Thirty-six,” he said.
I threw my hands up in frustration. “That’s even worse,” I said. “It means you deserted me when I was a year old. How could a father do that?” I was getting angry again. So far my own life had not been blessed with children, but it was not from a lack of longing.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I wasn’t sure it was enough.
“So what made you want to see me now?” I said. “You can’t just have decided suddenly after all this time.” He sat there in front of me in silence. “You didn’t even know that your own father was dead. And what about your mother? You haven’t asked me about her.”
“It was only you I wanted to see,” he said.
“But why now?” I asked him again.
“I’ve been thinking about it for some time,” he said.
“Don’t try and tell me you had a fit of conscience after all these years,” I scoffed at him with an ironic laugh.
“Edward,” he said somewhat sternly, “it doesn’t befit you to be so caustic.”
The laughter died in my throat. “You have no right to tell me how to behave,” I replied with equal sternness. “You forfeited that right when you walked away.” He looked down like a scalded cat. “So what do you want?” I asked him. “I’ve got no money.”
His head came up again quickly. “I don’t want your money,” he said.
“What, then?” I asked. “Don’t expect me to give you any love.”
“Are you happy?” he asked suddenly.
“Deliriously,” I lied. “I leap out of bed each morning with joy in my heart, delighting at the miracle of a new day.”
“Are you married?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, giving no more details. “Are you?”
“No,” he replied. “Not anymore. But I have been. Twice-three times, if you count your mother.”
I thought I probably would count my mother.
“Widowed twice and divorced once,” he said with a wry smile. “In that order.”
“Children?” I asked. “Other than me.”
“Two,” he said. “Both girls.”
I had sisters. Half sisters anyway
“How old are they?”
“Both in their twenties now, late twenties, I suppose. I haven’t seen them for, oh, fifteen years.”
“You seem to have made a habit of deserting your children.”
“Yes,” he said wistfully. “It appears I have.”
“Why didn’t you leave me alone and go and find them?”
“But I know where they are,” he said. “They won’t see me, not the other way round. They blame me for their mother’s death.”
“Did she die in a car crash too?” I said with a touch of cruelty in my voice.
“No,” he said slowly. “Maureen killed herself.” He paused, and I sat still watching him. “I was made bankrupt, and she swallowed enough tablets to kill a horse. I came home from the court to find bailiffs sitting in the driveway and my wife lying dead in the house.”
His life was like a soap opera, I thought. Disaster and sorrow had been a constant companion.
“Why were you made bankrupt?” I asked.
“Gambling debts,” he said.
“Gambling debts!” I was astounded. “And you the son of a bookmaker.”
“It was being a bookie that got me into trouble,” he said. “Obviously, I hadn’t learned enough standing at my father’s side. I was a bad bookie.”
“I thought gambling debts couldn’t be enforced in a court.”
“Maybe not technically, but I had borrowed against everything and I couldn’t afford the repayments. Lost the lot. Every single thing, including the girls, who went off to live with their aunt. I never saw them again.”
“Are you still bankrupt?” I asked.
“Oh no,” he said. “That was years ago. I’ve been doing fine recently.”
“As what?” I said.
“Business,” he said unhelpfully. “My business.”
One of the bar staff in a white shirt and black trousers came over to us.
“Sorry, we’re closing,” he said. “Can you drink up, please?”
I looked at my watch. It was well past six o’clock already. I stood up and drank down the last of my beer.
“Can we go somewhere to continue talking?” my father asked.
I thought about Sophie. I had promised I would go and see her straight after the races.
“I have to go to my wife,” I said.
“Can’t she wait?” he implored. “Call her. Or I could come with you.”
“No,” I said rather too quickly.
“Why not?” he persisted. “She’s my daughter-in-law.”
“No,” I said decisively. “I need time to get used to this first.”
“OK,” he said. “But call her and say you’ve been held up and will be home later.”
I thought again about Sophie, my wife. She wasn’t at home. She would be sitting in front of the television in her room watching the news as she always did at six o’clock. I knew she would be there because she wasn’t allowed not to be.
Sophie’s room was locked, from the outside.
Sophie Talbot had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act of 1983 and detained for the past five months in secure accommodation. It wasn’t actually a prison; it was a hospital, a low-risk mental hospital, but it was a prison to her. And this wasn’t the first time. In all, my wife had spent more than half the previous ten years in one mental institution or another. And, in spite of their care and treatment, her condition had progressively deteriorated. What the future held was anyone’s guess.
“How about a pub somewhere?” my father said, interrupting my thoughts.
I needed to be at the hospital by nine at the latest. I looked at my watch.
“I have about an hour maximum,” I said. “Then I’ll have to go.”
“Fine,” he said.
“Do you have a car?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “Came on the train from Waterloo.”
“Where are you staying?” I asked.
“Some seedy little hotel in Sussex Gardens,” he said.“Guesthouse, really. Near Paddington Station.”
“Right,” I said deciding. “I’ll drive you somewhere for a drink, then I’ll drop you at the railway station in Maidenhead and you can get the train back to London.”