A Rural Affair

bed,’ she’d explained. Things Dad really wouldn’t have a clue about.

So yes, we’d had a bit of a support network. But so subtle and considerate you’d hardly know it was there, like a cobweb. When some busybody in the village had suggested Social Services look at the state of our bathroom, which at that point not only had a whisky optic on the wall so Dad could top up his glass in the bath, but also some guppies of mine living in the tub, Barbara and Gran had pointed out, metaphorically rolling up their sleeves, that it was summer, and Peter and Poppy swam in the river every day, so what was the problem? The busybody backed off and the fish stayed a couple more weeks until Dad, half-cut, accidentally pulled the plug out. I remember being distraught and Dad couldn’t have been more sorry; but then, he was always sorry after he’d been drinking heavily. I make the distinction heavily, because Dad always drank, it was just that sometimes he drank a bit more than usual. If truth be told, he was probably always faintly sloshed after midday, but so amiable and jolly no one really minded. He never got to the abusive or slurring, embarrassing stage, because when he got too tight he simply fell asleep wherever he happened to be. He’d wake up flat on his back in the garden, or on a sofa, or beside one of his mares in a stable. Then he’d blink a bit, look faintly surprised at his surroundings and say, ‘Right. Must crack on.’

These days I doubt I’d have been allowed to stay with him, I thought, as we walked the filly back to her stable. Yet would Dad have parked me with Gran while he went cycling in Majorca? Or, OK, hunting in Ireland? No, he would not. If he went to Ireland I went too, whilst the lad down the road did the horses. The one and only time I didn’t accompany him was when someone tipped the school off that I was about to have my annual day’s holiday at the Newmarket sales. Dad, rebuked by my teacher, had sheepishly gone alone. He’d been very late picking me up. I remember waiting on the school steps, getting nervous. Then panicky. Dusk had gathered. No mobile, of course, and my mouth had lost all its moisture. I had him dead in a ditch. I started to cry, which turned into hysterics. By the time Dad arrived, I was shaking with sobs, and even though he was beside me, holding me, I couldn’t stop. Wave after wave broke over me, all to do with a terrible sense of loss. Because despite Dad being so brilliant, and despite the fantastic support of Gran and Barbara, I’d lost my mother. And I didn’t have siblings. It would be too convenient to hope I’d come out of that unscathed. I was left with an impenetrable fear of being alone.

The only time I felt like that again, that terrible rising panic, just the tip of it even, was when I put down the phone to Ben on the stairs in Clapham. When he told me he’d met someone in New York. I’d recognized the signs. Felt them bubbling within me, as, with a trembling hand, I’d put the brush back in my nail varnish. And it had scared the living daylights out of me. I’d acted fast.

Gran was long dead now, though, and the support network had dwindled with her. Now it was my father who was very much alone. Not that it bothered him. Left to his own devices he went his own sweet, shambolic way. I tried not to show my despair as we left the filly in her immaculate stable, crossed the yard and went through the peeling back door, which Dad had to shoulder-barge twice, and into the kitchen. Raddled blue lino curled on the floor, bare in patches, and the Formica surfaces – what you could see of them for empty tins, cartons of cigarettes and plastic milk bottles – were chipped and pitted. Plates on the side by the sink looked suspiciously clean but then Dad put them down to be licked by the dogs, picked them up later, and later still – I swear this is true though he pooh-poohs it – absent-mindedly put them away thinking they were clean. Even if things were washed, pans and oven trays were always black and crusty. All with what my dad – who, incidentally, barely had a day’s illness in his life – would call an acceptable level of filth.

Upstairs the place smelled of ripe bachelor; downstairs of stale smoke, dogs and saddle soap. The sitting room – I poked my nose in – was, as ever, a homage to the Racing Times and Sporting Life, pagodas of which tottered in every corner. I sighed and shut the door. It was probably no more chaotic than usual, but what had seemed normal when I was growing up looked abnormal the more time I spent away from it. I went to the loo, which I won’t tell you about, but then, to be fair, it got a lot of use. When Dad realized pulling the chain in the upstairs bathroom caused plaster to cascade into the sitting room, he’d done the only sensible thing and put it out of action. Three years ago. I came back and put the kettle on, quietly pleased I’d put my cleaning things in the back of the car. Dad reached for his whisky.

‘You look better, love,’ he remarked, eyeing me narrowly. ‘Much improved. I’m relieved.’ He moved Horse and Hound from a chair and sat down, rolling a cigarette on his knee. Mitch, his Jack Russell, jumped up on his other one, whilst Blanche the beagle scavenged under the table. Elvis crooned softly in the background.

‘I am better. Completely.’

Dad raised his eyebrows.

‘Well, no, OK,’ I conceded. ‘Maybe not. It’s not that simple, is it? I’m still a widow and I’ve still got fatherless children. But that terrible feeling of blundering around in a fog has gone.’ I sat down opposite him, still in my coat for warmth. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see my way out of that and I panicked. Then later, I think I just gave up. Like people do in