“What are you talking about?”
“How long are you going to stay here with Lena?”
“Until we can find somewhere better.”
“She’s-what?-twenty-three?”
“Twenty-five,” says my father. “Nearly.”
“Younger than me.”
“She’s very mature for her age.”
“I bet.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I slump onto the leather sofa. My father hates leather sofas. Or he used to.
“Why couldn’t you have just slept with her?” I ask, although I am very afraid that he is going to start giving me the details of their Olympian sex life. Please. Anything but that. “Isn’t that what’s meant to happen? I can understand why you’re attracted to her. I can even sort of see why she would be attracted by you. An older, successful man. All that. But you’re not meant to set up home together. This is madness, Dad.”
My old man starts to pace up and down. The flat’s living room is easily the biggest room in the place but it’s still not very big. He takes a few steps and then he has to turn around. He is wringing his hands. I feel a jab of pity for the poor old bastard. He is not cut out for this game. He can’t play it as ruthlessly as it needs to be played.
“These things have a momentum of their own. I tried to keep it under control, I really did. For a while there I felt like the luckiest man alive. I had the perfect wife and the perfect mistress.”
“Your perfect wife wants to throttle you.”
“But it doesn’t last,” he says, ignoring me. “That time doesn’t last. It moves on. You can’t have it all. And you have to decide.” He turns to me, pleading for understanding. “Isn’t that what every man wants? A wife and a lover? We want stability, support, a quiet life. But we also want romance, excitement, passion. Why should it be wrong to want the best of both worlds?”
“Because it’s too much. You want too much. You ruin other people’s lives by wanting too much.”
“I can’t help falling in love. I didn’t plan for it to work out this way, Alfie.”
“Love,” I say. “Give me a break. Don’t call it love.”
“What else should I call it?” he says, suddenly angry. “Look, I’m sorry about your mother, Alfie. I really am. It’s terrible the way she found out. But the heart wants what the heart wants.”
“Dad,” I say. “Listen to me. Lena is a great girl. But she dances when she eats. She still dances when she eats, okay? Haven’t you noticed that? She bops around when she’s listening to the radio, even if she’s eating her breakfast. She’s a child.”
“She looks cute when she does that.”
“Come on. She’s young enough to be your daughter.”
“Age has nothing to do with it.”
“You’d love Lena if she was your age, would you? If she was almost sixty? I don’t believe you. And she wouldn’t want you if you were some kid of twenty-three living on a student loan and working in a burger joint.”
“Twenty-five,” he says. “Nearly.”
“You can work it out with Mum. Apologize. Ask her to forgive you. We all make mistakes. You can’t end a marriage because some au pair wags her tail at you.”
“I can’t do that. I’ve left your mother. And I’ve done it for love. Sorry, Alfie. But I have my principles.”
I feel like hitting him.
“You’ve insulted love,” I say, thinking of my mother’s garden. “You’ve spat in its face, you ridiculous old man. You have someone in your life who has stuck by you for years, who supported you when you had nothing, and you do this to her. Don’t talk to me about principles, okay? Don’t paint yourself as some kind of romantic hero. You’re not. And you didn’t leave. You ran away.”
He stops pacing.
“I’m sorry, Alfie. But I think I’ve done the right thing.”
“Oh, you think you did the right thing, do you? You think that getting caught with your swimming trunks around your ankles in front of absolutely everyone you know was a smart move, do you? Well, Dad, that’s open to debate.”
“Leaving. I did the right thing by leaving.” He gives me a strange look. “Did you know that your mother was expecting you when we got married?”
“I worked it out. It didn’t take a mathematical genius. There’s five months between your wedding and the day I was born.”
“She was pregnant. That’s why we got married. I loved her and everything. But we got married because-that’s what you did back then. It’s not like now. And do you know what they all told me? My family, my friends, my in-laws? They all told me: you’ve had your fun. And I said nothing. But I always thought: that was it? That was my fun?”
“You think the party’s just beginning, do you?”
“Look, I want to live with the person I want to sleep with. Is that so wrong? You’re a man. You should try to understand. They say that if you want to stay with them you don’t want to fuck them and if you want to fuck them then you don’t want to stay with them. But I know now that’s not true. Because I want it all from Lena.”
“But it’s not real. You’ve been listening to too many old records. This is not a Smokey Robinson song, Dad. This is real life.”
My father looks at me with something approaching pity.
“Don’t tell me about real life, Alfie,” he says quietly, and I know exactly what he is about to say next so I get up to go. I try to leave quickly because I don’t want to hear it, I am heading toward the door of his rented flat before he can even get the words out.
“You’re still in love with someone who’s dead,” my father tells me.
Love didn’t make me a better person. Just the opposite. Love made me indifferent to the rest of the world. Love narrowed my horizons down to a pair of blue eyes, to a goofy smile, to one young woman.
Shortly after Rose and I had begun, I was on a plane flying back to Hong Kong. I had just spent a week with my parents, my first trip home since leaving London, a trip that had been arranged long before I met Rose. It was too late to cancel so I went to see my mother and father and grandmother but there was no pleasure in it for me; my heart was somewhere else. I wanted to get it over with, to get out of London, to get back to Hong Kong, to get back to her, to get back to Rose.
But there was a problem on the plane. A serious problem. A man-this middle-aged executive sitting across the aisle from me-suddenly became short of breath. He gasped for air, he made strange croaking noises, he looked like he was choking to death. At first I assumed that he had overdone the complimentary drinks. But then, as the stewardesses crouched by his side and the pilot asked if there was a doctor on board, it soon became clear that he was sick, very sick.
They laid him in the aisle, stretched out on the floor, right beside me, close enough to touch his terrified face, and two young doctors knelt by his side, pulling his shirt open, talking to him like priests beside a death bed.
We couldn’t fly to Hong Kong. The man needed a hospital and so our flight diverted to Copenhagen where a medical crew was waiting to take him off the plane. And all the passengers were very understanding about the diversion, of course they were, even when they learned that we would have to wait for hours at Copenhagen Airport until we could get another crew. Our pilot explained that our crew could no longer take us to Hong Kong because, with the diversion, they would exceed their permitted hours in the air. So we had to wait. For hours.
Everybody was very understanding. Everybody except me.
I hated that sick man. I didn’t want to divert to Copenhagen so that he could get medical treatment. I wanted the pilot to stick him in with the suitcases and let him take his chances. It was worse than indifference. I felt a rage toward him that I could hardly contain. I didn’t care if he lived or died. It meant nothing to me. I just wanted him out of the way so that I could get back to Hong Kong, back to my girl, back to my life, back to the best thing that had ever happened to me.