in a clean, light building that squatted amid the other Victorian buildings like a spaceship.
“Hello, mate. Come in,” he said as I tapped on the door and put my head round.
He’d picked up this mockney use of “mate” for his friends and colleagues in the past year or two, as if to compensate with demotic familiarity for his wealth and success. In his late career, he was paid outrageous amounts by companies that wanted to curb their tax bills and needed his slippery yet watertight legal advice on how to launder money through small Caribbean islands. He reached across with a pale hand and shook mine as I sat down by him, the plastic tag on his wrist shaking with the movement. I cast a professional eye over him. His face was wan and his thinning gray hair was askew, but he didn’t seem to be in pain.
“Hold on, I want to see your chart,” I said, reaching to the end of the bed where it sat in a frame. My instinct had been right. He’d had a mild myocardial infarction, and they’d run blood tests before putting a catheter into an artery in his groin and clearing a blockage near his heart with a stent. He was on Plavix, aspirin, and a beta-blocker. They would release him soon.
“You’re going to live,” I said.
“I reckon so, if I’ve got any blood left. They kept taking more of it. Bunch of vampires, I reckon.”
“They have to do serial blood tests to check for enzymes. It shows whether the heart muscle is damaged.” I could feel myself straining to prove my medical expertise, but it didn’t impress him.
“They seem to know what they’re doing. I like my doctor, I’ve got to say. She knows her stuff, put the fear of God into me about exercise and what I have to eat. Very capable. Reminds me of your Rebecca.”
“Well, you should listen to her,” I said, ignoring the mention of Rebecca. Both he and Jane appeared to regard her as some kind of savior, but what business was it of theirs? I’d thought my mother was a good wife, but my father hadn’t agreed with that. “It was a close call. I was worried about you, Dad.”
He looked at me as if unsure of how to treat my expression of emotion, so used was he to our avoidance of intimacy, and cleared his throat. “All’s well that ends well, eh? You got here fast.”
“I was lucky with the flight,” I said, avoiding his eyes. “Where’s Jane?”
“She was here this morning and then she took Lizzie to school. She usually goes by bus these days. Quite the young woman.”
Lizzie was my stepsister, a sixteen-year-old who seemed
“They grow up fast, don’t they?” I said.
“They sure do.”
The immediate crisis over, we had relapsed into talking to each other like strangers in a pub. I was starting to feel duped that I’d overreacted by flying in so quickly when he could clearly do without me. It was an old feeling- that I was naive to care for him.
It’s easy to lie, and it’s simple to betray the person you most love. I found that out when I was twelve years old, and the man who taught me was Roger Cowper.
He must have started his affair with Jane when I was eleven, I once calculated. Perhaps it was at my birthday party, to which she came one afternoon to drop off some files from the office. There was a clown performing in our garden, and my mother made Jane tea. Then they came out and stood by the kitchen together, looking along the garden and smiling at the clown’s antics and at each other.
A few months later, I came home from school early one afternoon with a cold that had worsened during the day. It was a windy fall, and the horse chestnut trees had strewn half-open spiky green capsules across the pavement, a field of conkers waiting to be found by children coming home. That afternoon there was only me, running between trees and stamping on the harvest to prize loose the glossy brown seeds.
When I came into the house, letting myself in with the key my parents had given me, I banged the door shut and went through to the kitchen to scavenge for some cake. I came out again into the living room and heard a noise on the landing, then my father’s footsteps and another set of feet behind his. Jane’s face was flushed, I remember, but I wasn’t old enough to appreciate what I’d stumbled upon.
It was strange to find my father home at that time: he told me that he’d had a case in west London. I remember her being awkward, not knowing how to talk to a child in the way that most adults I knew-my parents and my friends’ parents-did. She had an alien quality about her, which I know only with hindsight was sexual.
We went back into the kitchen. My father was unusually cheerful, I remember, slicing more cake for me and asking me what had gone on at school, while Jane hardly said anything. After a while, she got up and said she ought to get back to the office, and my father showed her out. Then my brother came home and we watched television before my father said he was going to fetch my mother from Paddington station.
“I’ll take Ben with me,” he said, “and Guy can mind the store.”
My father had bought a Rover and he let me sit in the front, which he hadn’t done before. The seats were leather, and I smelled them as we drove, the wipers squeaking on the windscreen in the drizzle. I watched the colored segments of the dashboard display until we got to Paddington and waited across the road from the entrance to the station, where my parents had arranged to meet. The radio was on and he leaned over to turn it down.
“Listen, Benny, will you do one thing for me?” he said.
“What, Dad?”
“You know Jane, who you just met? Don’t mention her to Mum, will you? I think it’s better kept between us.”
I looked at him, not quite understanding what he meant, and I saw his awkwardness, the pleading expression on his face that I hadn’t known before. It was an adult face, different from a child’s, with its folds of flesh, its pockmarks, its stubble and sweat. I thought of him as huge-impossible to knock off course from sheer bulk-but he seemed vulnerable in that moment. I was pleased to be taken into his confidence, for my agreement to be needed. It seemed like a small thing not to reveal the presence of another woman in our home.
“Okay, Dad,” I said.
My mother came out of the station just after that, and she ran across the road, in the gap behind a bus. She put her head through the rolled-down passenger-side window when she saw me and laughed with the relief of being reunited. She was only a few years older than I am now. She’d been born in Virginia, although she’d lived all of her adult life in London after meeting my father as a student in the 1970s. The British are supposed to be genteel and Americans boors, but she disproved it. She’d taken up British habits-gardening, visiting seaside towns-but not the rudeness.
“How are you, boys?” she said gaily.
“We’ve just about coped without you,” my father said.
“You haven’t missed having a woman about the house, then?”
“What do you say, Benny?” my father asked me, a warning look in his eyes.
“It’s been fine,” I mumbled.
He drove us home, with my mother insisting on me sitting in the front while she chatted happily from the backseat. She’d been to visit a friend in Oxford for a couple of days. We stopped to pick up fish and chips on Chiswick High Street as we neared home-a reward for good behavior, my father called it.
For a time I forgot it, basking in the glow of my intimacy with my father-the fact that he relied on me for something that mattered to him. Jane was filed away in my mind until a few months later, when my parents’ arguments, which had been occasional and brief, became loud and vituperative. From my bedroom, I heard terrible threats and recriminations being exchanged.
My brother, three years older than I, was contemptuous of my frailty and taunted me for crying in the middle of one volcanic eruption. Half-fascinated and half-scared himself, he passed on gossip from his forays halfway down the stairs to overhear what my parents were shouting about. Some woman called Jane, he reported.
I was tempted to flaunt my knowledge of her, but something told me not to. It would have revealed that I’d kept a secret, not only from him but also from my mother. As my father’s affair progressed to its inevitable conclusion-my parents calling us down to give us a stilted explanation, my father leaving with a suitcase and hugging us in the hallway-the ball of my guilt and complicity swelled inside me.
My mother hid her distress from us after he’d gone, except once. One day, when I was sixteen and the postdivorce arrangements for weekends, birthdays, and Christmases had become routine, I found her in our living room. She was looking at a photo of us four together, my father with his arms around us.
“I wish I’d realized, Ben. I could’ve done something,” she said.
My heart twisted again. She wasn’t crying: I think her tears had long been shed.
