I waited for her to continue, but instead there was an electronic tinkle from somewhere inside her handbag. She took out a BlackBerry and glanced at the screen. Her face lit up, she laughed out loud and immediately began tapping something on to the keyboard. I poured myself some more wine and dipped a chunk of bread into the saucer of olive oil while she attended to this.
‘Is that your mother’s BlackBerry?’ I asked, when it looked as though she had finished.
‘No. I’ve had one for ages.’
‘Oh. Who was it?’ I asked, gesturing at the little screen.
‘Just someone I know.’
A silence fell between us, and I felt a mounting sense of frustration. Was this what it had come to, my relationship with my own daughter? Was this all she had to say to me? For God’s sake, we had lived together for twelve years: lived together in conditions of absolute intimacy. I had changed her nappies, I had bathed her. I had played with her, read to her, and sometimes, when she got scared in the middle of the night, she had climbed into my bed and snuggled up against me. And now – after living apart for little more than six months – we were behaving towards each other almost as if we were strangers. How was this possible?
I didn’t know. All I knew was that I was not going to give up on this evening, not just yet. I would get her to start having a conversation with me if it was the last thing that I did.
‘It must seem very different,’ I began, ‘living –’
At which point my own mobile phone started playing its little melody, announcing that a text message had arrived. I picked up the phone and held it at arm’s length (my eyesight is going, and I have to do things like this nowadays). The message was from Lindsay.
‘Read it if you want,’ said Lucy. ‘I don’t mind.’
I opened the message, which said:
It wasn’t the most effusive message in the world, but I’d been waiting for some contact – any contact – with Lindsay for a day and a half now, so I read it with a relief which I couldn’t disguise. I put the phone back on the table almost immediately with a kind of mock-nonchalance, but this didn’t fool Lucy for a second.
‘Nice message?’ she asked.
‘It was from Lindsay,’ I said. Lucy’s eyes showed that she wasn’t satisfied with this answer, so I added: ‘Business colleague of mine.’
She nodded. ‘I see.’ Then, biting off the top inch of a breadstick, she asked: ‘I’m never sure about that name – is it a man’s name, or a woman’s?’
‘I think it can be both,’ I said. ‘In this case, it’s a woman.’
‘Aren’t you going to reply?’ she asked.
She picked up her BlackBerry, and I picked up my phone.
‘This won’t take a minute,’ I promised.
‘No worries.’
Actually it took much longer than a minute. I’m not very quick at sending text messages, and I wasn’t sure what to say. Eventually I settled on:
By the time I had sent this, Lucy seemed to have sent and received about four messages. We both put our phones down, slightly reluctantly, and smiled at each other.
‘So,’ I said, ‘it must feel very different –’
The waiter arrived with our food. Our table was pretty small and it took him a while to find space for everything. Then there was the palaver of grinding the black pepper and sprinkling the cheese, all of which he turned into quite a performance. By the time he had finished, another message from Lindsay had come through. I read it before starting to eat:
I smiled to myself as I put down the phone, and Lucy noticed that I was smiling, but she didn’t say anything. Before trying my first mouthful of risotto, I took the opportunity to ask a question.
‘You do a lot of texting, don’t you, Luce?’ I began.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I maybe send about twenty or thirty a day.’
‘Well, that seems like a lot to me. An awful lot. What does it mean when somebody puts a kiss at the end of a text message?’
She began to look mildly interested.
‘Is this from your business colleague again?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Let me see.’
I passed her the phone and, after reading the message, she handed it back to me.
‘Hard to say,’ she admitted. ‘Depends on what kind of person she is, really.’
‘Is there no real … etiquette to this sort of thing?’
I was pleased with this question, I must say. I was pretty sure that I’d hit on a topic we could bond over, at last. If Lucy was texting at the rate of about twenty or thirty messages a day, she ought to be able to talk about it for hours.
‘Well, there isn’t really, like, an etiquette,’ she answered. I was disappointed to hear that her tone of voice sounded bored, even disdainful. ‘You know, it’s just a little kiss at the end of a message. It probably doesn’t mean
