Aphrodite’s Hat. Salley Vickers

you’ve come to see her, anyway,’ he said at last.

      ‘I’d’ve come sooner if you’d asked.’

      ‘Yes,’ Charlie said. ‘I know. I should have asked you before.’ It was a kind of acknowledgement between the two of them.

      ‘Better late than never,’ said his father. Through the darkness Charlie could just make out that he was grinning. ‘Shall we go in my car?’

      ‘I don’t have one. I came by bus.’

      Walking through the hospital corridors, which smelled of nothing normal, Charlie looked at his father for the first time. Broad shoulders, middle height, hair once dark, now mostly grey, a face which might have been handsome once but had settled into hangdog, jeans, donkey jacket, with a sprinkling of dandruff about the shoulders, visible white vest, plaid wool shirt, brown suede shoes, wrong shade for the rest of what he was wearing. A model of unexceptional ordinariness. Except that he was the father he had never had – and at the same time he was not. He was quite another father. A stranger.

      ‘I bought her a present,’ Charlie’s new father said, producing a box from his pocket. ‘Roses chocolates. Too late for Christmas, but she used to like Roses. Mind you, she liked hard centres best, Jen, but I thought in the circumstances soft centres might go down better.’

      Charlie did not say that his mother was past eating anything, even soft centres. Nor did he consciously form the thought, but in the region of his mind, which as yet had formed no words, he became aware that he was in charge of these two beings, his parents. An access of violent tenderness waylaid him and he touched his father’s arm. ‘She’ll be glad you remembered.’

      ‘Think so?’ The blue eyes were horribly beseeching. A hurt child’s eyes. ‘Bit late for Christmas but …’

      ‘I’m sure so,’ Charlie said, untruthfully. He was not at all sure how his mother would take this. It had been an impulse to follow up the address he had found in his gran’s oak bureau when he cleared it after she died. It was written on a corner of torn-off card, which, from the faint trace of glitter, and the suggestion of a robin’s breast, looked as if it had been sent one Christmas. He had guessed at once whom the card had come from.

      They were approaching his mother’s ward, which, in deference to her condition, was shared by only two other patients. ‘Both on their way out’ as his stepfather had observed. Ivor, Charlie guessed, was counting his wife’s definitely numbered days to the time he could settle down to widowerhood and a story of suffering nobly borne.

      Charlie’s mother’s was the first bed in the ward and, as was customary now, she was behind drawn curtains, as if she was rehearsing what it would be like to have the curtains drawn for good.

      ‘Mum?’

      ‘What? Oh, it’s you. You’re back, then.’

      ‘Mum, I’ve brought a visitor.’

      Across the face, once pretty, now bleached by years of discontent and disappointment, and further diminished by drugs and pain, flashed a sudden enlivening angry interest. ‘Who is it?’

      Charlie’s father stepped forward, jolting the bedside cupboard so that the jug of water on it rocked perilously. ‘It’s me, Jen.’

      ‘Mind that jug. Who’s “me”, when you’re at home?’

      But she knew. And Charlie knew that she knew. And in that instant he knew that he had done something remarkable. Unquestionably, unmistakably, his mother was pleased. Relief rushed in on him, warming him like a double Scotch on an empty stomach.

      ‘It’s Jeff, Jen.’

      ‘My God!’

      ‘No, your Jeff!’ For a moment, there was something that Charlie saw in his father’s face. Charm.

      ‘I don’t believe it!’

      ‘All right if I sit down, Jen?’

      ‘Sit here.’ Charlie’s father sat on the bed where she had gestured and Charlie saw that his mother’s face had grown not pale but pink. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said again. ‘How did you get here?’

      ‘Him.’ Charlie’s father nodded towards their son. ‘He found me. Wrote to me. Said you were ill and …’

      ‘I’m dying, you know that, don’t you?’

      Charlie, who had had strict instructions from his stepfather to keep this news from his mother, felt a further rush of absolving relief.

      ‘It’s why I came, Jen.’

      ‘He tell you that?’ Charlie’s mother gestured towards him.

      ‘No. I guessed. You don’t mind me coming?’

      ‘’Course I don’t, you daft ‘appeth.’

      Charlie said, ‘I’m going for a smoke and a wander. I’ll be back in a bit.’

      He walked down the corridor, where he met the duty sister. ‘Mum’s got another visitor,’ he explained. He didn’t want anyone spoiling anything by blundering in with a change of her bag, or whatever.

      ‘That’s nice. Who is it?’

      ‘A relative. They’ve not seen each other in a while.’

      ‘Ah, nice,’ the sister said, vaguely benign. ‘It’s one of the good things about the Christmas season. People get together again who mightn’t otherwise.’

      She had a point, Charlie granted, staring at the hospital Christmas tree. It was still decked, though it was twelfth night, still bearing brightly wrapped faux presents. His gran would have said it was the Devil’s luck not to have that all down by now. Or was it the last day they could safely be up before the bad fairies dropped out of the greenery to work their harm? What was it happened today? He’d forgotten. His gran would surely have told him.

      He went outside for a smoke and looked at the saucepan in the night sky. We Three Kings of Orientar, he remembered suddenly. On their camels following the star. Bringing gifts, gold, frankincense and … he couldn’t remember the last one.

      When he returned to the ward, his father was still sitting on the bed holding his sleeping mother’s hand. She looked peaceful. Myrrh, he suddenly remembered. That was the other one. Myrrh. They put it on dead bodies, his teacher had told them at school. Death had its good side. Because his mother was dying, he’d found his father. But when she was dead and gone he would have to live with the find. Be careful what you look for, you might find it, his gran had sometimes said.

      The box of Roses chocolates, like a small wayside altar, stood unopened beside the jug of water on the bedside cupboard.

      Noting Charlie’s glance, his father said, ‘She says she’ll have one later.’

      ‘D’you want to go?’

      ‘Better had. Pat’ll be … But I’ll come again, if …?’

      ‘Yeah, sure.’

      ‘I’ll bring Pat. That’s if …’

      ‘Yeah, sure.’

      ‘Perhaps I won’t. She didn’t mind, did she, Jen, that I came?’

      A lifetime of minding. Minding for her as well as for himself. Minding her taunts, her viciousness. Minding her accusations. Minding her furious campaigns against his life, and, almost worse – for there was no way he could help or stop her – her own. Excusing her fits of temper, her cruelty, her unpredictable hysteria because she had suffered this shocking injustice. Was it simply that she’d made a mistake? Sent away a man who loved her and then regretted it? Could she so not acknowledge the enormity of what she had done that she had hidden behind this bogus story, this piece of twisted, pointless, self-justifying confabulation? Or was she just an out and out liar? How could he tell now? He’d had to make a life without his father, and soon he would be making it without his mother. And who