The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

there: I used words like cold, sparsely furnished and eerie, but somehow that’s not enough. There’s another word I could have used, of course. Perhaps rather an over-dramatic word. Dead. Does that seem over the top to you? Well, never mind – it may be a little blunt, but still, this is exactly what my father’s flat felt like: like a place that belonged to someone who had died a long time ago.

After I’d been in there for about two minutes, I couldn’t wait to get out.

There were two bedrooms. One contained a single bed (with mattress but no linen), while the other – much smaller – was dominated by a desk and a large self-assembly bookcase made of artificial wood. Thick dust everywhere – that goes without saying. There were about a dozen books on the shelves – all the ones my father hadn’t wanted to take to Australia with him – and a few papers and items of stationery in the desk drawers. The precious ring binder was sitting on the third shelf of the bookcase and was easy to find. It was pale blue and on the spine my father had stuck on a label which said Two Duets: A Verse Cycle and a Memoir. You could tell that he had stuck the label down with double-sided sellotape, because the paper had faded and now you could clearly see the two strips of sellotape coming through underneath.

I plucked down the ring binder and carried it through with me into the kitchen. Here there was a French window leading out on to a little balcony and, with a bit of effort, I managed to turn the latchkey and push it open. It was good to get out into the fresh air. From up on this balcony I could see traffic circling endlessly, purposelessly on the orbital road and, beyond that, rural Staffordshire stretched out towards the horizon in grey waves of gentle, unremarkable countryside. A light but persistent drizzle had started to fall. I could see the A5192 ribboning away into the distance, and suddenly felt a strong desire to be driving on that road, back towards the motorway, just me and Emma again, heading north, on my way to Kendal, where this evening (God, this was such a wonderful prospect, until now I had barely allowed myself to contemplate it) I would actually be seeing Caroline and Lucy again, for the first time in months. Perhaps the most important evening of my life, in some ways. Certainly a chance to prove – once and for all – that I was not going to repeat my father’s mistakes; that I was capable of having a relationship with my daughter based on something more than mutual toleration and the prolonged accident of sharing the same living space. I was not (I intoned the words to myself, in silence but fervently) going to end up like this. My memorial was not going to be an empty, unloved, unlived-in apartment on the forgotten outskirts of a Midlands city.

Full of resolve, now, I went back into the kitchen, locked the French window, took one more pitying look around the sitting room as I passed through it, and then left the flat for good, locking the door behind me. I felt a strange, irrational flood of relief, as if I’d just had a narrow escape from the jaws of some fate so imprisoning and nightmarish that it couldn’t even be defined.

‘Mumtaz and I were just trying to decide where we should go to lunch,’ Miss Erith said, as I rejoined them and took a welcome sip of my still-warm tea. ‘We can’t just go to any old place, you see. I don’t know what he thinks about it, but it’s a date, as far as I’m concerned, and a girl expects to be taken somewhere special.’ She glanced at the blue ring binder on my lap. ‘So – did you find what you were looking for?’

‘Yep. I think these are some of Dad’s poems and things. Apparently he’s lost the other copy and now this is the only one.’ I glanced through the pages, and saw that there were two sections: one in verse, the other in prose. ‘Don’t know why it’s so important. I suppose I’d better hang on to it. Weird title,’ I added, looking at the first page. ‘Two Duets.’

‘Hm, I see,’ said Miss Erith. ‘Half of Eliot.’

‘Half of Eliot?’

‘T. S. Eliot. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?’

‘Of course I have,’ I said, defensively. Then added, just to make sure I was thinking of the right person: ‘He wrote the lyrics for Cats, didn’t he?’

‘His most famous poems are the Four Quartets,’ she said. ‘Have you never read them?’

I shook my head. ‘What are they about?’

She laughed. ‘You’d have to read them to find that out! Oh, they’re about time, and memory, and things like that. And they’re all themed around the four elements – air, earth, fire and water. Your father was a great admirer of Eliot’s. We used to argue about him all the time. Not my cup of tea, you see. Not my thing at all. He was an anti-Semite, apart from anything else, and you can’t forgive something like that, can you? At least I can’t. But that sort of thing wouldn’t have bothered your father. He’s got no interest in politics, has he?’

‘Well …’ I had never really thought about this, I must say. And besides, I wasn’t very interested in politics either. ‘We never really talk about stuff like that. Our relationship is sort of based on … other things.’

Miss Erith was closing her eyes, now. I wondered at first whether she was about to nod off, but it seemed that this was an attempt at recollection instead.

‘The point is,’ she said, ‘that I’m an old lefty, and always will be. Ever since I started reading George Orwell and E. P. Thompson and people like that. Whereas your father had no political awareness at all. That’s why it’s probably a good thing that we never went on our trip together, because we were going into it for completely different reasons.’

‘You were planning a trip?’ I asked politely, hoping this wasn’t going to trigger a long reminiscence.

‘There was a book called Narrowboat. Quite a famous book in its day. Rolt was the author’s name – Tom Rolt. I’ve still got it on the bookshelf over there. He and his wife bought this narrowboat back in the thirties and lived on it for a few months, going up and down the canals. Then he wrote all about it and he published this book in the 1940s and the amazing thing about it is that it mentions my father’s shop: because I grew up on the canals, you know, and my father used to have a shop at Weston, where all the barges used to stop every day. He sold everything: every kind of rope and line you could think of, every kind of food, all sorts of tobacco, and then lamps, crockery, saucepans, clothes – you name it. And shelves and shelves of sweets for the children, of course. Such an Aladdin’s cave, it was! And the boats used to be stopping all the time, we got to know all the canal folk – it was a whole world, a different world, a secret world, with its own codes and rules. Just a tiny little shop, the front room of a thatched cottage in a row of other cottages, and I must have served behind the counter from when I was about eight or nine years old. Dad would have been amazed to know his shop was mentioned in this famous book but of course he didn’t read books like that – or any sort of book, really – so he never knew anything about it. And I didn’t find out until years later. I left home when I was sixteen, you see, to be with this man – a bargeman he was, naturally – and a year later I’d had my first baby and we left the canals and started living not far from here, in Tamworth, but we never got married – that was a bit of a scandal, I can tell you – and a couple of years later we had another baby and then this man left me. Well, I booted him out, if you must know, because he was a dead loss, really, never got a job or anything, used to spend all his time down at the pub or chasing other women – after a while I decided he was more trouble than he was worth. So there I was, in the early 1950s, living all by myself in a poky little flat with two small children, and the only thing I could do to stop myself from going crazy was to start reading. Of course I’d hardly had any education to speak of, but the Workers’ Educational Association was very strong, in those days, and I used to go to lectures and meetings and all sorts of things. And