‘How?’
‘The clue was on the last postcard he sent you. I found it in Lichfield.’
‘He’s still writing to me?’
‘Yes. He’s never stopped writing. I’ve got about two hundred postcards from him upstairs, in my suitcase.’
My father scratched his head.
‘He wants to see me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you speak to him?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did he sound?’
‘He sounded … keen to see you.’
‘He’s living in Melbourne now?’
I shook my head. ‘Adelaide. We chose Melbourne because it was a good halfway point.’
My father picked up the ticket again and looked at the time of the flight, although he didn’t seem to be taking any of the details in.
‘So it sounds like this is all arranged.’
‘If you want to go through with it.’
‘Where are we supposed to be meeting?’
‘In the tea rooms of the Botanical Gardens,’ I said, ‘at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.’
He put the ticket down and picked up his knife and fork and resumed work on the duck, his brow furrowed in thought. For a long time after that he said no more on the subject. My father, I’m beginning to realize, has a genius for silence.
That night, all the same, it was obvious that he was highly agitated. I handed over the bundles of postcards and when I went to bed I left him sitting at the kitchen table, reading through them methodically. At three o’clock in the morning, still jet-lagged, I woke up and saw that there was a light coming from beneath his bedroom door. I could hear the creak of the floorboards as he paced up and down. I suspect that neither of us slept for the rest of the night.
I was the first one to use the kitchen the next morning. While I was in there making coffee at about seven o’clock, my father came in and said abruptly: ‘You didn’t get me a return ticket.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I didn’t know how long you’d want to stay. I thought that kind of depended on how things panned out. You’ll have to buy the return half yourself.’
‘I can’t afford to buy a plane ticket from Melbourne to Sydney.’
‘I’ll reimburse you.’
When I said this, he did something … well, he did something that I found quite extraordinary. If you were lucky enough to have had a reasonably normal relationship with your own parents, you might find it hard to understand just how extraordinary it was, to me. First of all, he said, ‘Thank you, Max.’ Then he said, ‘You didn’t have to do this for me, you know.’ But that’s not the strange thing. The strange thing was that, while he was saying it, he came over to me as I was pouring boiling water on to the coffee grains in my mug, and he put his hand on my shoulder. He touched me.
I was forty-eight years old. It was the first time I could remember him ever doing anything like that. I turned round and our eyes met, very briefly. But the moment was too uncomfortable, for both of us, so we soon looked away.
‘What are you going to do with yourself, today?’ he asked me.
‘No great plans,’ I said. ‘Except that tonight I have to go to this restaurant. I’m hoping to meet somebody there myself.’
I told him that it was the same restaurant where we’d failed to have dinner together at the end of my last visit. And I also told him a little bit about the Chinese woman and her daughter.
‘You know this woman?’ he asked, as I handed him a mug of instant coffee.
‘No, not exactly. But …’ (this felt like a bizarre thing to be saying, but I ploughed ahead) ‘… but in a way, it does feel that we know each other. That I’ve known her a long time.’
‘I see,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘Is she married? Does she have a boyfriend?’
‘I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure that she’s a single mother.’
‘And tonight you’re going to talk to her, is that the idea?’
‘That’s the idea.’
‘Well, good luck,’ he said.
‘And you, Dad,’ I said. ‘It’s a big day for both of us.’
We clinked our mugs together and drank to the success of our prospective encounters.
