Comfort and Joy (17 page)

‘Yes.’

‘And I thought – a bit earlier, when we were all upstairs – that maybe I should meet him.’

‘Felix?’ says Kate, looking astonished.

‘Yes. Felix.’

‘But … but darling,
why
?’ asks Kate.

‘I don’t really know the answer to that, either. To lay something to rest, I suppose. To see where I came from. To show my
children.’

‘You know where you came from,’ Kate snaps. ‘You came from me.’

‘I know, I know. But do you not see? I feel like it would give me – and maybe the children – a sense of … of something that
might eventually be important.’

‘It hasn’t been important for forty-one years,’ Kate says.

‘I know. But still.’

‘Don’t romanticize this, Clara. Don’t be sentimental. You’re not going to fall into each other’s arms in slow motion. The
world isn’t suddenly going to rearrange itself. Scales will not fall from eyes. All will not be explained.’

‘I know that too. But still. I quite fancy the idea. I’m not explaining it very well. But I’d like to do it. I think. I mean,
he
is
my father. Genes have got to count for something, right?’

‘I see,’ says Kate.

‘So, can you help? I haven’t heard from him in years. Where is he, for instance?’

‘Do you have a cigarette?’ says Kate. ‘I used to love smoking in bed.’

‘There was half a packet in the drawer,’ I say, rootling through the bedside table. ‘Here we are. Might be a bit stale. And
… here we go, matches. No ashtray. You can use that empty mug.’

‘How sordid,’ says Kate. ‘Marvellous.’

We sit in silence for a while. There are knots of anxiety in my stomach, which is odd because I didn’t think I cared that
much. About any of this. Any more.

‘Well,’ Kate eventually says. ‘It’s funny you should ask about Felix.’

‘Really? Why?’

‘Because it so happens that I saw him ten days ago.’

‘What?’ I say, sitting bolt upright, like a meerkat. ‘Felix? My father?’

‘Yes,’ says Kate, inhaling. ‘We kept vaguely in touch, you know.’

‘I didn’t, actually.’

‘No. Anyway.’

‘What do you mean, you kept vaguely in touch?’

‘I mean I’ve seen him, what, two or three times over the past decade. If that.’

‘I see.’

‘I wonder if you do.’

‘I see that you didn’t choose to tell me that you were seeing him. I might have liked to clap eyes on him. Or … or him on
me.’

Kate sighs. ‘I’m sorry for all my failures,’ she says. ‘I’ve always tried to protect you.’

‘How do you mean? Protect me from what? You’re making him sound like a psychopath. Or, or a paedophile or something. What?
I really don’t see what’s remotely funny.’

‘He is neither. Anyway. Do you want me to continue?’

‘I suppose so,’ I say, feeling about fourteen years old and quite mutinous.

Kate pauses again and smokes for a bit. It’s very irritating, particularly as she makes it look so elegant. Most people smoke
like navvies (not unattractive in itself, in the right context), but Kate smokes like a film star from the 1940s, and now
I want one.

‘For heaven’s sake, darling. Smoke if you want to, only don’t sit there with that ghastly longing expression.’

‘I gave up years ago.’

‘Don’t be
worthy
. So dull. I smoked throughout my pregnancies. Everyone did. Drank rivers of wine. Ate blue cheese and liver, so nutritious.
And we all produced these absolutely gigantic, bonny children, not the shrimpy little wraiths I see nowadays.’

‘I know, but you can do that thing of smoking five a day. Anyway. Carry on.’

‘Where was I?’

‘Protecting me.’

‘Oh yes. What I mean, Clara, is that I have always tried to protect you from Felix’s
absolute
lack of interest.’

This would be painful to hear if what she was saying wasn’t demonstrably true, and hadn’t been demonstrably true for over
four decades. Nevertheless, the words are not pleasing to my ears or heart.

I don’t say anything for a while.

‘Are we playing Pinter Play?’ Kate says. Pinter Play is a game Kate invented for long car journeys when I was a child. The
aim is to say as little as possible while still just about making sense.

‘Where did you see him? I thought he lived in the middle of a desert.’

‘He does. In a cactus, practically. Like a character from those books you used to love. Richard Scarry. Do you remember? There
was a worm that had an apple house.’

‘Lowly Worm. Maisy loves those books too. Anyway. You were saying?’

‘Where was I?’

‘You saw Felix in the desert.’

‘Ah yes. No, I saw him in Harley Street. Well, Marylebone High Street, to be precise. He’d come from Harley Street and I’d
come from Regent’s Park.’

‘
Harley Street?
’

‘Yes,’ says Kate. She pauses again for a while. ‘Where his physician is.’

‘He’s lived in Mexico for nearly forty years, but his doctor’s in
Harley Street
?’

‘I know, isn’t it odd? Some Professor Thingy. Touching faith in the superiority of English medicine. Or English addresses.
I don’t suppose he nips over every time he has the flu. But he, but, ah …’ She falls silent again.

‘Kate, this is unbearable. I hate playing Pinter Play.’

‘All right,’ Kate says with a sigh. ‘He asked to meet me. I met him. He wanted to eat cheese, so …’

‘What do you mean, cheese?’

‘Darling, don’t shoot the messenger. He loves cheese, Felix. He is absolutely mad about cheese.’

‘Great. That’ll give me something to remember him by: “My father. He loved cheese. Your grandfather? He loved cheese.” Maybe
I could get a tattoo. A heart with a dagger going through it and “Mum” in curly writing, and on the other arm a block of Emmenthal.’

‘Don’t be silly, Clara. The point is, there is no cheese in America,’ Kate continues. ‘It’s the worst place on earth for cheese
lovers. His desert
is
literally a desert when it comes to cheese. All you can get is that ghastly sliced plastic stuff that tastes of worse than
nothing.’

‘Mum, please. Fast forward past the cheese.’

‘So I met him in that cheese place, you know, La Fromagerie. They have a big communal table. We sat down and ate cheese. He
almost swooned with joy.’

‘This is surreal, Kate. It’s doing my head in.’

‘It’s rather a revolting word, isn’t it, “cheese”? But I am reporting events as they unfolded. As I was saying, we ate cheese.
He ate industrial quantities of it, actually – rather gross, though one forgives because of the cheese hiatus. The cheese
exile.’

‘Kate!’

‘Fine, fine. I’m getting to it. He looked pretty peaky. He told me he was unwell. On his last legs, Clara, to be perfectly
straightforward with you. The final stages of some ghastly cancer that nobody knows what to do with. He was saying goodbye.’

‘Oh my God,’ I say.

‘It was rather touching. Do you mind if I have another cigarette?’

‘Help yourself. So, what, he’s going to die?’

‘Yes, darling, I’m afraid he is. Imminently.’

‘Where is he? I’ll have to change the plan …’ I’m thinking aloud now. ‘See him at his bedside. Take him some grapes. Some
cheese
. But not take Maisy, too distressing. I wonder if the boys … It’s sooner than I wanted. Oh God. Where is he? Private or NHS?’

‘He’s back in Mexico.’

‘Great. Fan-fucking-tastic.’

‘Darling, there was nothing anybody could do. He wanted to die at home. Perfectly reasonable of him.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Though of course if one were him one would die at Claridges, with a trolley of cheese at one’s side. I did offer, but he
just laughed rather wildly.’

There is another pause, the longest one yet.

‘Are you angry, Clara?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Are you angry with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘I understand,’ she says, taking my hand. She has worn the same shade of nail polish – Chanel Rouge Bengal – for as long as
I can remember.

‘I … I wanted to fix it, and it can’t be fixed,’ I say. ‘It’s too late.’ The tears come out of the blue and plonk onto my
lap.

‘I know,’ says Kate.

Eventually she says, ‘May I say something?’

‘Be my guest.’

‘It isn’t anything I haven’t said before,’ she says, ‘But I want you to listen carefully. Clara. It’s important. Are you listening?’

‘I’m all ears. I’m made of ears.’

‘Now isn’t the time to be sarcastic.’

‘No. Okay. I’m listening.’

‘Do you want to blow your nose?’

‘What?’

‘I think you should blow your nose. It’s off-putting.’ She climbs out of bed, goes into my bathroom and comes back with a
loo roll. ‘Here. Blow.’

‘Kate! I’m not five years old.’

‘Nevertheless.’

I blow my nose.

‘I put a family together,’ Kate says, turning so that she is looking me straight in the eye. ‘And I made it the best family
I could. I found you the best father – someone I genuinely believed to be the best father in the world. He and I have had
our differences in recent years, but I still believe that to be the case. I stand by my choice. And it was a choice, Clara.
There would never have been any question of me marrying Julian if I hadn’t thought he’d make you a perfect father. And I think
he did. And we loved you, and we loved your sisters, and we all loved each other.’

‘I know all of that.’

‘I know you
know
, darling, but I don’t know if you
feel
it. I suppose it was inevitable that at some point, at some point after you found out about Felix, there would be a part
of you that wondered if you wouldn’t be happier elsewhere.’

‘Kate. I never thought that.’

‘Maybe not happier, but – better understood. There must have been a seed of doubt, I quite see that. It kills me that I planted
it. There was a time, when you were a teenager, when I thought it would grow into some monstrous mutant plant. What I want
to say to you, Clara, and it’s important, is this: in our case, water is thicker than blood. I can only say it subjectively,
because our family is all I know. But I know I’m right.
What matters is love. What remains is love. It doesn’t matter if the love comes from
genes
or elsewhere. And you’re making a mistake if you assume that the former is better or stronger than the latter.’

‘I don’t assume anything,’ I say sadly. ‘I just wanted to meet him once.’

‘But what do you think would have happened? Some bolt of recognition? Some sense that the universe had finally fallen into
place? We don’t live in a soap opera, Clara. It’s not
EastEnders
. What forms us isn’t some ancient heap of
genes
. It’s the way we’re brought up, what we’re taught, everything we experience. And Felix hasn’t offered a single contribution
to any of that. Not one.’

‘Here,’ I say, handing her the loo roll. ‘Blow.’

‘I just can’t bear that you can’t see it,’ Kate says.

We sit there in silence for a bit after that. I understand what Kate is saying – of course I do. And I realize perfectly well
that it
is
absurd to suddenly decide you want to do something like go and meet your father for the first time several decades too late.
Perhaps it was a stupid idea – Kate certainly seems to think so. But what I liked was the possibility of it being a possibility.
Now that the possibility has been removed – for all I know Felix fell off his perch last week – there is, of course, nothing
I want to do more than to meet him. I suppose I could always hop on a plane tomorrow … but no. The deathbed reunion isn’t
what I ever had in mind. I don’t want to slide my hand downwards to close his dead, staring eyes – I was thinking more of
going for a coffee. She’s right: it’s not
EastEnders
. But still. It’s bothersome, all of this.

‘Did you feel like you were carrying out some bold experiment at the time, Kate? You know, like those tabloid headlines about
how men are going to become obsolete? Did you think Felix was just sort of surplus to requirement?’

‘Darling, he
was
surplus. He didn’t particularly want to have anything to do with either of us – certainly not at the time, and not subsequently
either. It made me indignant on both our behalves, and then I thought, “Well, more fool him.” But if you mean, was I conducting
some exercise in matriarchy, then the answer is no. I married Julian. Children need fathers.’

‘Except me.’

‘No, not except you. You aren’t
listening
. Yours was utterly hopeless, so I got you another one. I thought Julian and I would stay together, Clara. He was never meant
to occupy a temporary position.’

This is the difficulty with stepfathers, I think to myself. They come with their own detonators built-in, and as a child you
have absolutely no idea if – or when – the detonator’s going to detonate. So you put all your eggs in that particular basket
– well, your one egg. Your Egg of Self. One egg, one basket, like one man, one vote. You put your egg in the basket called
‘my new daddy’, and you think, ‘Well, there’s my Egg of Self, I don’t know why I made such a fuss about putting it there:
it’s so happy in the basket. Everything’s fine. The egg and the basket are a pretty good match.’ Sometimes this goes on for
ever, in which case everybody is extremely fortunate. But sometimes something comes along and BOOM. Your egg is smashed, tipped
out of its cosy basket through no fault of your own. ‘Where’s my new daddy now?’ you think, lying on the ground, which frankly
isn’t a very nice thing for any child to think.

This is true of ordinary, mummy–daddy relationships too, of course. Nobody likes a break-up. But there’s an extra level of
trust involved, with new daddies. A leap of faith. You think, okay – maybe
you’re
the one. The last one didn’t work out, but maybe you will. I’ll give it a go. Again. And then, boom. Again. This is why,
although Kate’s current husband Max and I get on
perfectly well – I think she’s probably met her match – I’m pleased to finally be old enough not to mind the idea of anything
going wrong between them. I’d mind for Kate, but not for me. His predecessor, Maurice, barely featured on my radar, though
to be fair I don’t think he much featured on Kate’s, either.