back from the restaurant, so we had to wait until the morning, over breakfast, to resume our argument about his flat in Lichfield.
Actually ‘argument’ is too strong a word for the kind of confrontations I have with my father. So is ‘confrontations’, for that matter. My father and I have never raised our voices to each other. If either of us disagrees with the other, or takes offence, we simply retreat into wounded silence – a silence which has been known to last, in some instances, for several years. This method has always worked for us, after a fashion, although I know that other people find it peculiar. Caroline, for instance, was forever taking me to task on this subject. ‘Why do you and your father never talk to each other properly?’ she used to ask me. ‘When was the last time you had a real conversation with him?’ I would remind her that this was an easy thing for her to say. She didn’t know what a difficult man my father was. In fact she barely knew him at all, having only met him once, the time we took Lucy out to Australia when she was about two. (My father had not come back to England for my wedding, or for the birth of his only granddaughter.) As it happened, both he and Caroline were aspiring writers – although my father’s preferred form of expression has always been poetry, if you please – so she’d been hoping that this shared interest would provide some common ground; but even she had to concede, after a few days, that he was not the easiest person to understand or talk to. All the same, it remained a bone of contention between me and Caroline, during the next few years, that my relationship with my father was so badly damaged. I was an only child, and my mother had died when I was twenty-four, so he was really all that I had in the way of family. And when Caroline finally left me, her parting gift (if you can call it that) was this trip to Australia, which she paid for without telling me anything about it: the first I knew being an email from Expedia one day just before Christmas, reminding me to apply for an online tourist visa. She had booked me on a flight which left Heathrow exactly six months to the day after her departure – sensing, perhaps, that I would not be ready for the journey before then, and that this was the earliest I could expect to have climbed out of the trough of depression to which she knew she was condemning me. And in this respect, her calculation (the word seems appropriate, somehow) proved to be accurate. Just goes to show, I suppose, that after all those years she really did know me inside out.
Well, Caroline, it was a charming thought. Cheer up your abandoned husband by sending him off to see his estranged father for three weeks and get them talking to each other again. The trouble is, it takes more than a bit of goodwill and a cut-price air fare to engineer a miracle like that. The next morning, as we ate our last breakfast together in near-silence, I realized that my father and I were as distant as we’d ever been. If the Chinese woman and her daughter were at one end of the scale of human intimacy, we were right at the other. In fact we were almost off the scale. Looking back, there were any number of things we could have bonded over. The fact that our partners had a habit of walking out on us, for instance. Since moving to Australia more than twenty years ago, my father had drifted in and out of any number of half-hearted relationships: I had only met one of the women involved, and she had given up on him five or six years ago. Since then he had been living with a retired pharmacist in the suburb of Mosman, but they’d split up just a few weeks earlier, and he’d now been obliged to find a new apartment, which at the moment was barely decorated or furnished. So we could have talked about that sort of thing; but we didn’t. Instead, we returned to the subject of his flat in Lichfield. He’d bought this flat back in the mid-1980s, just after Mum died – in response to some unspoken impulse, I imagine, to return to the city of his birth – and I’d always assumed that he’d sold it again before moving to Australia. But apparently not. Apparently it had been sitting empty for the last twenty years. Now, I realize that most sons would have got angry with their fathers when they learned that a potentially valuable family property had been allowed to sit empty for twenty years, falling into disrepair. But all I said was, ‘That seems a bit of a waste.’ And all he said was, ‘Yes, I should probably do something about it.’ Then he asked if I would go and look at the flat when I went back to England. I thought he meant that he wanted me to start the process of putting it on the market, and I began telling him that it wasn’t a good time to try selling property in the UK right now, the credit crunch was starting to bite, people were losing their jobs and their savings, everyone was in a state of financial uncertainty, and house prices were falling every month. To which my father answered that he had no intention of selling the flat. He said that he just wanted me to go there and look for a blue ring binder on one of the bookshelves, with the words
In the taxi on the way to the airport, I didn’t think about my father. I found myself thinking about the Chinese woman and her daughter, and what a shame it was that they’d left the restaurant before I’d had the chance to speak to them. All was not entirely lost, it’s true, because I had managed to corner the waiter after I came back upstairs, and he told me something about them, something that was potentially useful. He didn’t know who they were, or where they came from, but he did know this: that they came to the restaurant regularly, on the second Saturday evening of every month, without fail; and that they were always alone: they never brought a man with them. And for some reason – although I know it sounds crazy – I was comforted by both of these things. That restaurant may have been 10,000 miles from where I lived, but the world is a small place, these days, and getting smaller all the time, and at least I knew that, whenever I wanted to, I could always get on a plane, and fly to Sydney, and go to that restaurant on the second Saturday of any month, and there they’d be, playing cards and laughing together. Waiting for me. (I know that sounds fanciful, but that was how I’d already started to think of it.) And, what’s more, they would be alone. There was no one else, no rival for their attentions. I’d guessed as much, actually, from the way they behaved towards each other. There was no room for another person in that relationship. The presence of a man would have polluted it. Unless, of course, that man happened to be me.
OK, so I was letting my imagination run away with me. I was surrendering to fantasies. But maybe that in itself was a good sign. For six months now I had barely spoken to anybody. I had been off work for nearly all of that time, and had spent most of it alone at home, mainly in bed, occasionally in front of the television or the computer. As for human contact, I’d lost all appetite for it. Mankind has, as you may have noticed, become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid talking to each other, and I’d been taking full advantage of the most recent ones. I would always send a text message rather than speak to someone on the phone. Rather than meeting with any of my friends, I would post cheerful, ironically worded status updates on Facebook, to show them all what a busy life I was leading. And presumably people had been enjoying them, because I’d got more than seventy friends on Facebook now, most of them complete strangers. But actual, face-to-face, let’s-meet-for-a-coffee-and-catch-up sort of contact? I seemed to have forgotten what that was all about. Forgotten, at least, until the Chinese woman and her daughter had reminded me. It may sound like a strange thing to say, but their closeness, their intimacy had been the first thing I’d seen in six months which had given me hope. Had made me feel, even, that my luck might be about to turn.
And then, that very next day at the airport, something else happened that gave me exactly the same feeling. I was standing in the queue, waiting to check in, and hoping that I would be checked in at a particular desk, which was being staffed by a friendly-looking woman, a brunette with hazel eyes and an unforced smile. I wanted it to be her because she looked like the kind of person who might – just might – offer you an upgrade if you asked nicely enough. Anyway, I didn’t get her. Instead I found myself dealing with a grey-haired, overtanned guy of about my own age, or perhaps even older, who had no interest in making small talk and rarely looked up from his work to make eye-contact. It seemed pretty clear that I was on a hiding to nothing here. But I couldn’t stop myself from trying, all the same.
‘Busy flight?’ I heard myself ask.
