The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

anything. In fact, how am I even having this conversation with my own dad? This is too … sad for words. This is lame, Dad. It’s a kiss, that’s all. Take it any way you want.’

She fell silent and picked at her lasagne.

‘OK, I’m sorry, love,’ I said, after a short, unhappy interval. ‘I was just trying to find something to chat about, that’s all.’

‘That’s all right. I’m sorry too. I didn’t want to sound mean.’ She sipped her Diet Coke. ‘Why didn’t Mum come out with us tonight, anyway? Are you two not even talking to each other?’

‘Of course we’re talking to each other. I don’t know why she didn’t want to come. I think she said she had something on.’

‘Oh, yeah. Tuesday night. That’s writers’ night.’

‘Writers’ night?’

‘She goes to this writing group. They write stories and stuff and read them out to each other.’

Great. So right at this very moment Caroline was wowing an enraptured audience with the hilarious story of Max, Lucy and the nettle pit. She’d probably just got to the bit where I had no idea why the grass was green. I could already hear their smug, appreciative laughter, as clearly as if they were right here in the restaurant with us.

‘She’s serious about this writing business, then, is she?’ I asked.

‘I think so. The thing is …’ She smiled, now, in a way that was almost conspiratorial. ‘You see, there’s this bloke who goes to the writers’ group as well, and I’m beginning to think that she –’

Beginning to think that she what? I could guess, but would never know for certain, because at that moment her BlackBerry started tinkling again.

‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘I have to look at this.’

The message made her scream with laughter, whatever it was.

‘It’s from Ariana,’ she told me, as if this explained everything. ‘She’s photoshopped this picture – look.’

She showed me the screen, which had a picture on it of a perfectly ordinary-looking girl.

‘Very good,’ I said, handing it back. What else was I supposed to say?

‘No, but she’s put Monica’s head on to Jess’s body.’

‘Ah, OK. That’s clever.’

Lucy started writing her reply, and in the meantime, I took out my phone and began tapping out another message to Lindsay. It was probably for the best that I never got around to sending it. What stopped me? It was the look on the face of a woman sitting at the table next to ours. I don’t know quite how to describe the look. All I know is that she took in the scene that she saw at our table – a weary middle-aged father taking his daughter out for dinner, the two of them sitting opposite each other, nothing to say, one of them sending a text, the other one playing with her BlackBerry – and she responded with a toe-curling mixture of amusement and sympathy, all contained in one expressive glance. And in that instant an image came into my mind, again: the Chinese woman and her daughter, sitting opposite each other at that restaurant in Sydney harbour, laughing together and playing cards. The connection between them. The pleasure in each other’s company. The love and closeness. All the things that Lucy and I never seemed to have. All the things that I had never been taught how to create between us, by my sad fuck-up of a father.

I sent one more text message that night. Not to Lindsay, though. In fact you’ll never guess who I sent it to – so I’ll tell you. I sent it to Poppy’s uncle, Clive.

I dropped Lucy back home at about 9.30. Caroline wasn’t back yet. Lucy took me inside and made me a cup of coffee and sat talking to me (after a fashion) in the kitchen for half an hour or so. When it became obvious that Caroline was not exactly going to rush home to see me, I decided to call it a day and I got back into the car and drove to my Travelodge, which was about ten minutes out of town.

So much for my family reunion, then.

Back in the hotel room I knew that, although I was tired, I was too agitated to go straight to sleep. There was nothing on TV so I got Clive’s DVD of Deep Water out of my suitcase and slotted it into my laptop. I had a weird notion that watching it might somehow cheer me up. You know that cliche that ‘There’s always someone worse off than yourself’? Well, I figured that, in my case, it would be hard to find that someone right now. But there was always a chance that it might be Donald Crowhurst.

It was a powerful film. Over the last week, before setting out on this journey, I had been reading The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. I was about halfway through, which was pretty good going for me. The book was really detailed and well researched, but the film took you much further into the story, into the atmosphere of it. It opened with images of enormous waves heaving in the wind-tossed night, and immediately you got a sense of how lonely and scared Crowhurst must have been out there, putting himself at the mercy of the elements – it made me feel cold and seasick just looking at it. Then there were shots of the man himself, taken late into his voyage and looking toughened and hardened by it: a cruel-looking moustache on his upper lip, his eyes by now guarded and wary. After a few more of these, accompanied by unnerving, portentous music, we flashed back to a scene which at once gave me a shock of recognition: the approach to the harbour at Plymouth, lined with cheering crowds who had all turned out to witness the homecoming of Francis Chichester following his solo voyage. (A scene I could still remember watching on TV with my mother, one Sunday evening back in the spring of 1967.) Next up, you got introduced to all the major players in the story: Crowhurst himself; his wife and family; his main competitors, Robin Knox-Johnston and Bernard Moitessier; his sponsor, Stanley Best; and – perhaps most memorably of all – his press agent, Rodney Hallworth. Hallworth was described as a ‘Dickensian figure’, and the description certainly seemed to fit this imposing, fleshy presence, with an avuncular manner which barely concealed the clear streak of cynicism and ruthlessness running just beneath the surface. ‘Many people who do great things are often, as personalities, rather dull,’ he was heard to declare, blithely. ‘The press agent’s job is to get hold of the package, which could be as dull as an old tin box, and then you’ve got to dress it up – make it a bit Christmassy – so that it appears attractive.’ Crowhurst, I supposed, was the ‘old tin box’ in this scenario, and it would be Hallworth’s endeavours to exaggerate his qualities, to ‘dress him up’, that would be largely responsible for creating the impossible situation that edged him on towards madness. The film went on to chronicle this process in sympathetic but unsparing detail. You saw the chaos that accompanied his departure from Teignmouth, and how apprehensive he looked, during this time, when caught off his guard by the camera. (It was at this point, I thought – not for the first time – that his resemblance to my father was most pronounced.) And then, as the voyage progressed, the focus gradually began to shift from the challenging practicalities of single-handing to Crowhurst’s diaries, his logbooks, his disturbed scribblings, his disintegrating state of mind. The lingering close-up on his final