If My Father Loved Me. Rosie Thomas

mother.

      I could remember her calling me in from the garden – Sadie? Sa-aa-die! – where I was playing some complicated and solitary only-child’s game.

      I was ten when she died. I have so few memories of her and yet this tiny moment was suddenly crisp and rounded out with the sound of a radio playing in a neighbour’s garden, and the suburban scents of dusty shrub borders and cooking. It was exactly as if I were standing there beside the rosebushes again, torn between playing and responding to her call.

      Yes? I answered now, silently and pointlessly, but there was no more. It was strange that Ted himself, who had been so vividly alive and such a forceful presence all my life, should seem absent from these proceedings, while my shadowy mother, dead for more than forty years, was close at hand.

      I wish I had been able to go to my mother’s funeral. I think Ted sent me to a neighbour’s, although I can’t remember the precise circumstances. He excluded me, anyway and later he swept my mother out of our lives and made it as if she had never existed.

      Ted’s coffin had travelled the full distance. The curtains swished shut behind it and we all stood silently while the organ voluntary wheezed to an end.

      Afterwards we walked out into the bright daylight. There was some more handshaking and subdued conversation. The family and neighbours already knew that there was to be a gathering back at Ted’s house, and there was a slow movement towards the handful of parked cars. Polished shoes crunched on the gravel path and two or three people patted Jack on the shoulder as they passed.

      The old woman in the black hat was waiting with the sun showing up the dust on her defiant fox fur. She came towards me with her head tilted expectantly. She had purply-red lipstick, gamely applied to pursed lips, and powdered cheeks. ‘You’ll be his daughter,’ she said. ‘I am Audrey.’

      This meant nothing to me. I had never seen her before. She wasn’t one of the aunties. It occurred to me that it was her snuffle of laughter I had heard when Jack launched himself into his pigeon speech. ‘Thank you for coming,’ I murmured. ‘Would you like to join us for a drink, back at …’

      But Audrey had already turned her attention to Jack. ‘And you’re his grandson. I liked what you said about him. You were quite right, Ted knew about things and it was one of the games he liked to play, not letting you know what he knew and then surprising you when you least expected it. Birds, or whatever it might be.’

      Jack nodded, looking at her and sizing up the unwinking fox eyes and sharp fox faces that hung down over her bosom. I turned away because I had to speak to the undertakers, and when I had finished doing that and was ready to shepherd the last of Ted’s neighbours back to his house, Audrey was nowhere to be seen.

      ‘She went,’ Jack said and shrugged, when I asked him.

      Ted had lived for the last seven years of his life in a red-brick terraced house in a side street within two miles of both the hospital and the crematorium. He liked to joke in his deliberately bluff, I-dare-you-to-be-bothered way about their convenient proximity. On my infrequent visits there I felt that, like all Ted’s places, it was too full of wedges of memory, bits of furniture or ornaments or even kitchen implements, that propped open doors of recollection and so let images back into the daylight that I would have preferred to remain in darkness.

      After the crematorium, the neighbours and pub friends and Ted’s small family reassembled at this lumberhouse of inanimate memory triggers. Everyone came back, except the mysterious Audrey. Mrs Andrews had been in to air the rooms and do some dusting, and as a result the place looked tidier and emptier than it had done when Ted was alive. Caz and I had made an early-morning lightning swoop on Marks & Spencer’s and bought in enough finger-food to fill several trays. She worked her way round the guests with these while Graham and I followed with gin, Scotch or wine. We made it our job to fill and refill glasses as soon as they were half empty. The atmosphere lightened as people ate and drank, and then grew positively jolly. Jean Andrews’s cheeks turned pink and she told the Manchester cousins stories about growing up in Oldham. They tried to find acquaintances in common, without much success from what I could overhear as I passed by with my bottles.

      The noise level rose. The pub landlord told a couple of jokes, on the grounds that they had been favourites of Ted’s, and everyone laughed.

      Jack sat on the stairs and read a book while people trod past him on the way to the bathroom. He glowered when anyone tried to speak to him or congratulate him on his impromptu speech, particularly me. Lola’s tears had dried up. She moved between the groups, with the attention of one or two of the younger pub men fixed on her. She caught my eye once and winked. Caz and Graham still circulated with drink and food, and Mel just circulated. In the narrow room with Ted’s shiny brown furniture and faded curtains she seemed bigger than the rest of us, and Technicolored alongside our dark clothes and muted pastel faces.

      After a while I glanced at my watch. It was well past the lunch hour and I wanted to look in at work before the end of the day because there was some urgent finishing to do. I raised my eyebrows at Graham, who is used to standing in for a husband at times like this.

      When I called Tony to tell him that Ted was gone, he had said how sorry he was, then asked immediately when the funeral was to be.

      ‘Sadie, that’s the one day I can’t come. I’ve got to go to Germany for a big client meeting.’

      I knew he would have come, if he possibly could. Tony is like that. He does the right thing. ‘Don’t worry. Graham and Caz will be there. We’ll organise it together.’

      ‘I know they’ll support you. But I’m truly sorry I can’t be there as well. Ted was my father-in-law for fifteen years.’

      ‘It can’t be helped,’ I said. I too would have liked Tony to be here today, for my own sake as well as Lola’s and Jack’s. But there was no point in regretting his absence now, or at any other time.

      ‘How are you?’

      ‘I’m all right,’ I told him.

      ‘And the kids?’

      ‘They’re here.’

      ‘I’ll talk to them. I’m thinking of you, Sadie.’

      ‘I know. Thanks,’ I said and passed the receiver to Lola.

      When we were first divorced, Jack and Lola both spent plenty of time with their father. We had agreed on unlimited access and it worked well. But in the last five years, since Tony met his new partner and particularly since the birth of their twin girls, the weekend visits have become less regular. This is no one’s intention, it’s just that Tony has less time to spare for children who can already feed and dress themselves. Lola is fairly sanguine about it, but Jack minds.

      Graham glanced around the room, judging the atmosphere. ‘A few words, maybe?’ he suggested to me in a whisper.

      I cleared my throat and stepped into the middle of the room while he rattled a spoon against a plate.

      I had no idea what I was going to say. I don’t remember what I did say, except that it can’t have been very inspiring. Everyone listened politely, anyway. I thanked them again for coming, and lifted my glass that had one and a half mouthfuls of red wine at the bottom of it. Luckily everyone else’s glasses were well charged.

      ‘To Ted.’

      The echo began as a muted, respectful chorus. But the next thing I saw was the faces all around me breaking into smiles and there was a sudden little wave of clapping, and some stamping and cheering. Ted, Ted, Ted. Jack’s white face poked round the hallway door.

      ‘My father,’ I added to the chorus, but under my breath. It wasn’t my unmemorable words that had provoked this, of course. It was Ted himself and I was being made aware of his popularity for perhaps the last time.

      I looked around the room again, searching for a synthesis between my knowledge of him and what all these other cheerful, rational friends and neighbours felt. There was his dented old armchair but even as I stared