‘Michael,’ she said, ‘we did our best, but it was as if you’d gone into hiding. First I tried to get hold of you, then Graham tried to get hold of you. You never answered letters, you never picked up the phone. What could we do? And whenever I spoke to your mother, she just said that you’d gone a bit strange, and I got the impression that you didn’t see each other much any more.’
I said: ‘You’ve been seeing my mother?’
‘Now and again. Not as often as I’d like.’
‘Well, how often is that?’
‘I hardly see her at all at home,’ said Joan, sighing. ‘It’s silly really, with us living so close. But of course, I was with her a couple of days ago. We both were.’
‘Both of you? How come?’
‘She was down at my parents’ house for Christmas. You know that perfectly well, Michael, and don’t try to pretend otherwise. You were invited, as usual, but of course you wouldn’t come.’
Needless to say, I’d heard nothing of this. ‘What reason did she give?’
‘She didn’t.’ Joan turned to me, her gaze a gentle accusation. ‘Look, I know why you haven’t wanted to see me. It’s to do with what happened in Sheffield, isn’t it? But that was ages ago, Michael. We can both forget about that now.’
I could see that Joan wanted only to console and reassure me, and it wasn’t her fault if her presence in the hospital was having the opposite effect: confronted by this impossible, freakish development, I felt more disorientated than ever. She hadn’t aged at all in the last eight years: the same round, trusting, open face; the slight plumpness which she none the less carried so lightly; the hidden, toothy innocence which was liable to reveal itself in a sudden smile. I had missed all of these things.
‘Did something go wrong between you, Michael?’ she said. ‘You’ve changed, you know. You look so much older. I hope you don’t mind me saying that, but it’s true. I hardly recognized you. I wasn’t even going to say hello at first: I wasn’t sure it was you. Did something go wrong between you? I was so sorry to hear about your father. I know how close you were to him. I was going to write you a letter or something. It must have been awful for you. It wasn’t anything to do with him, was it, Michael? Is that what went wrong?’
∗
Joan had hit upon the truth, and there was no getting away from it: I did look older. Patrick had noticed it too. Perhaps I had been flattering myself the night Fiona first came to visit me, when I had stared at my own reflection in the kitchen window and tried to imagine how it would have appeared to her. Or maybe the events of the last twenty-four hours had taken a dreadful toll. Whatever the reason, when I looked at myself in the mirror of the men’s washroom later that night, I could scarcely believe what I saw. It was the face which had once been revealed to me in a nightmare more than thirty years ago: the face of an old man, ravaged with age and grooved like an ancient carving with the traces of pain.
∗
It was about two o’clock in the morning when the nurse came into the Relatives’ Room to wake me up. I was in the middle of a deep sleep. She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t ask why she had come. I just followed her down the corridor. As we approached the ward she did make some remark, but I can’t remember what it was. She hesitated before opening the door and said: ‘You were fast asleep, weren’t you?’
And, when I didn’t answer: ‘Shall I get you a cup of coffee?’
And, when I didn’t answer: ‘Strong and black?’
Then she pushed open the door and led me into the cinema. It was very quiet in there. The rest of the audience seemed to be asleep. I followed the bobbing light of her torch and took a seat towards the front of the stalls. Then she left.
The image on the screen hadn’t changed. There was still this woman, Fiona, lying there surrounded by tubes and gadgets and drips. She was staring straight ahead, motionless. And sitting next to her was Michael, her lover or friend or whatever he liked to call himself. He was holding her hand. Neither of them said anything for a long time.
Then he said: ‘I suppose now you’re going to die on me.’
He said this very quietly. In fact I’m not sure that he said it at all. It seems a strange thing to say, in any case.
There was another long silence. I began to get a bit fidgety in my seat. I hoped this wasn’t going to be too boring. I don’t like death-bed scenes, as a rule.
Then he said: ‘Can you hear me?’
Another pause.
Then he said: ‘I suppose thank you is the most important thing I’ve got to say. You were so kind to me.’ There was some fairly sentimental stuff after this. His voice was shaking and he started to get incoherent. There was a lot I couldn’t understand, and then he started alluding to some secret he’d been keeping from her, some story to do with a Chinese restaurant he’d never explained to her properly.
He said: ‘It isn’t too late to tell you now, is it? You’re still interested?’
Personally, I don’t think she could hear him by this stage. That’s my theory. But he carried on anyway. He was the persistent sort.
He said: ‘It was a Friday night. We’d booked a table for two, for eight o’clock. Mum had come down about five. I thought she seemed a bit edgy, for some reason. I mean, she’d just had a long drive and everything, but it was more than that. So I asked her if there was anything the matter, and she said yes, she’d got something to tell me, some news, and she wasn’t sure how I was going to take it. I asked her what it was and she said it was probably best to wait till we got to the restaurant. So that’s what we did.
‘Well, you know how busy the Mandarin gets, especially on a Friday night. It was pretty full. The food was a long time coming but she insisted on waiting for the main courses before saying whatever it was she had to say. She was getting very nervous. I was getting nervous, too. Finally she took a breath and told me that there was something I had to know about my father. Something she’d been meaning to tell me ever since he died, but had never had the nerve because she knew how much I worshipped him – how he’d always been my favourite, out of the two of them. Of course I denied this at the time, but it was true. He used to write me these letters when I was little. Made-up letters, full of all these silly jokes. They were the first letters I ever got. My mother would never have done anything like that. So, yes, it was true: he was my favourite. Always had been.
‘And then she started telling me about how they’d met, how they’d both belonged to the same badminton club, and how he’d courted her for months and kept asking her to marry him and she’d kept refusing. I knew most of this already. But what I didn’t know was the reason she finally accepted, which was that she was pregnant. Pregnant by another man. She was three or four months pregnant by then and she asked him if he would marry her and help her to bring the baby up and he said yes he would.
‘So I said: Are you telling me that the person I called my father all those years wasn’t my father at all? That he had nothing to do with me?
‘And she said: Yes.
‘So I said: Who knew about this? Did everybody know? Did his parents know? Is that why they never wanted to speak to us?
‘And she said: Yes, everybody knew, and yes, that was why his parents had never wanted to speak to us.
‘We’d both stopped eating by now, as you might have guessed. My mother was crying. I was beginning to raise my voice. I don’t know why I was starting to feel angry: maybe it was just because anger was so much easier to deal with than the emotions I should have been feeling. Anyway, I asked her, in that case, could she possibly see her way clear to telling me who my real father was, if it wasn’t too much to ask. And she said his name was Jim Fenchurch, and she’d met him twice, once at her mother’s house in Northfield and once again about ten years later. He was a salesman. She’d been on her own in her mother’s house and he’d come round to sell her a vacuum cleaner and after a while they’d gone upstairs and that was when it had happened.’