‘Well,’ I said, with a sigh, ‘I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do then.’
‘Don’t worry, Max – everything will be fine.’
I looked at him in surprise. I was definitely seeing some new sides of my father this week. It was not like him to be reassuring.
‘You seem very … calm, considering what you’ve been through today,’ I said.
‘Well, what can you do?’ he said. ‘Some things, Max … some things just aren’t meant to be. It’s more than forty years since I last saw Roger. It’s fifty years since we did the things I wrote about in that memoir. I’ve survived without him all that time. Sure, I was pretty cut up when we managed to miss each other again today. A dreadful sense of history repeating itself, as you can imagine. But then … Well, I walked back to the tea room – the one I’d gone to first of all, down by the ornamental lake. And I sat there for a while, and drank a beer, and thought – if he comes, he comes, and if he doesn’t, he doesn’t. And he didn’t. It was a beautiful afternoon. It’s much warmer in Melbourne than it is here. I sat there, and I drank my beer, and I listened to all the exotic bird noises, and I looked at the palm trees and the date trees … I had a lovely time, actually. They have a magnificent bald cypress there, just by the ornamental lake. A Mexican bald cypress. In fact I wrote a poem about it. “Taxodiaceae”, I called it. Here – have a look.’
He handed me his black moleskin notebook and I attempted to read the little eight-line poem he had written in there this afternoon. Trying to decipher his handwriting was bad enough: as for the poem itself, as usual I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.
‘Great,’ I said, handing the notebook back, and struggled to think of something else to say. ‘You should really get these poems of yours published.’
‘Oh, I’m just an amateur, I know that.’
‘Did Roger leave any messages on your phone?’ I asked, still hoping to salvage something from today’s debacle.
‘I’ve no idea,’ my father said. ‘I don’t know how to retrieve messages, and I don’t really want to hear them if he did.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘After all these years, you have no … curiosity?’
‘Max,’ my father said, leaning forward and resting his hands on mine. Another unprecedented gesture. ‘You did an amazing thing for me today. I’ll never forget that. Not because I really wanted to see Roger again, but because it shows that you accept me. You accept me for what I am.’
‘Better late than never,’ I said, with a quiet, regretful laugh.
‘What do you think of my apartment?’ my father asked, after a short pause (during which he withdrew his hands from mine).
‘Well, it’s … OK, I suppose. Needs a bit of work doing on it, maybe, to make it more homely.’
‘Hideous, isn’t it? I’m going to give notice.’
‘And move? Where to?’
‘I think it’s about time I came home, really. That flat in Lichfield’s just going to waste, after all. It would make far more sense for me to live there. If you get worried about me again – or I get worried about you, for that matter – it makes life much easier if I’m three hours’ drive up the motorway, doesn’t it? Rather than a twenty-four-hour flight.’
And yes, I agreed: it would make far more sense if he lived in Lichfield, rather than Sydney. So we spent the rest of the evening talking about that: not about Roger Anstruther, or the Chinese woman and her daughter. Instead I told my father about Miss Erith and how she had called him a miserable sod for going away and not telling her when he was going to come back, and how friendly she was with Dr Hameed, and how she had railed against the takeover of England by the big corporations. And he agreed that it would be nice to see her again. And somehow, I’m not quite sure how – talking about his original move to Lichfield, I suppose, as a reaction to my mother’s death – we ended up talking about my mother. Talking about my mother, after all these years! Before tonight, I don’t think either of us had mentioned her name to the other, since her funeral. And now, for the first time, I saw my father’s eyes fill with tears, real tears, as he started talking about their years of married life together, what a lousy husband he felt he had been, what a shitty time he had given her, what a useless hand she had been dealt by God or fate or whatever it was – dying at the age of forty-six, when all she’d known up to that point was the joylessness of being married to a man consumed with self-hatred, a man who had no idea how to relate to her, or even to his son, a man who knew nothing but how to bottle up his emotions and repress his desires …
My father only started to compose himself again when he realized that the waiter was standing over us.
‘Gentlemen,’ said the waiter, ‘in a few minutes you will have to leave. We are closing.’
‘Fair enough,’ I answered.
‘Before then … perhaps two more amaretti?’
When he brought the drinks, my father and I clinked glasses again, and drank a toast in memory of my mother.
‘She meant everything to me,’ I said. ‘I never told her that, you know. I should have done. I hope she understood, somehow or other, just how much I loved her.’
I looked across at Dad, wondering if he was going to say something similar. Had he loved her too? Surely he must have done, in his own way, to have stayed with her all that time. But he said nothing: just smiled back at me sadly.
The waiter had begun to stack chairs on the tables around us. We were both tired and ready for bed.
‘Well, anyway – let’s look to the future. At the very least, we should do something about Mum’s gravestone. All it says is “Barbara Sim, 1939–1985”. We really ought to come up with something better than that.’
‘You’re right,’ my father said. ‘That’s the first thing we’ll do.’
I had a moment of inspiration. ‘I know – what about those lines from
