If My Father Loved Me. Rosie Thomas

But the boundaries between truth and illusion didn’t really matter all that much, I thought. Not any longer.

      My fingers tightened on his. ‘I’m here now,’ I said.

      ‘How’s my cutie? And Jack?’

      When she was a little girl Ted always called Lola his cutie. He was delighted to have a granddaughter, although he protested that it made him feel old. ‘She’s going to be a heartbreaker,’ he used to say. ‘Just look at those bright eyes.’

      I should have made sure he saw more of his grandchildren on ordinary days, not just the set-piece ones armoured with conventions and pressured by expectations. I should have tried to forget my own growing up and let the next generation make amends for our failures.

      ‘Lola’s just fine. She’s going to come in and see you later, or maybe tomorrow. And Jack’s okay, although he doesn’t like school that much.’

      ‘Neither did I when I was his age. I used to sit next to a boy called Peter Dobson. He would shake his pen deliberately to make blots all over my work, and he and his chums used to lie in wait for me after school and pull my books out and run off with my comics.’

      ‘I don’t think things have changed for the better.’

      I realised that there were pins and needles in my arm and my wrist ached with the tension of lightly holding his hand. I shifted my position and he asked, ‘Are you comfortable?’

      ‘Yes. Are you?’

      He sighed, restlessly shifting his thin legs under the covers. ‘Not very.’

      A nurse came in. He was young, dressed in a white jacket and trousers. He glanced at the whiteboard over the bed and I followed his eyes. A note in bright blue magic marker, scrawled over the previous occupant’s smeared-out details, declared that this was Edwin Thompson, ‘Ted’. ‘Hello, Teddy-boy,’ the nurse said, examining the bags that leaked fluids into my father’s arm. ‘My name’s Mike. How are you feeling? Not so good?’

      ‘I feel as you would expect, having had a heart attack last night,’ Ted answered. I smiled. Ted didn’t take to being patronised, even in his hospital bed.

      ‘And who is this young lady?’

      ‘I’m his daughter.’

      ‘Well, now then, I need to do your dad’s obs and then the doctors are coming round. Could I ask you to pop up and wait in the visitors’ room? You can come back as soon as rounds are over.’

      ‘I’d like to talk to his doctor.’

      ‘Of course. Not a problem.’

      I walked up the ward, past bedridden old men, to sit and wait in a small side room.

      A long hour later, the same nurse put his head round the door. ‘Doctor will see you now, in Sister’s office.’

      As I passed I saw Ted lying on his back in the same position. His eyes were closed and I thought he must have fallen asleep.

      The consultant cardiologist was a woman, younger than me. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but Ted had talked about the quack and finding out what he had to say. That was Ted all over: proper jobs, like this one, were done by men.

      The doctor held out her hand, with a professionally sympathetic smile. ‘Susan Bennett,’ she said and we shook hands.

      I sat down in the chair she indicated.

      I remembered the shadow that had slid into the restaurant last night and found myself repeating over and over in my head, don’t, please don’t say it, just let him get better …

      Susan Bennett explained that it had been a serious attack, bigger than they had at first suspected. A large proportion of the heart muscle had been affected.

      I listened carefully, intending to work out later what was really being said, but I understood quickly there was no need to try to read between the words. Dr Bennett gave me the unvarnished truth. There was no likelihood of long-term recovery, she said, given the damage that had already occurred. The question was when rather than if the end would come, and how to manage the intervening time.

      ‘I see,’ I murmured. The voice in my head had stopped. All I could hear was a roaring silence.

      I realised that Dr Bennett was asking me a question. She wanted to know, if there were to be another huge heart attack, how I felt about an attempt to resuscitate my father. Did I want them to try, or should they let him go in peace?

      ‘I … I would like to think about it. And perhaps to talk to him about it. What usually happens in these cases?’

      What am I supposed to say, I wondered? No, please just stand aside, don’t bother to help him? Or, I absolutely insist that your technicians come running to his bedside with their brutal paddles and try to shock him back into the world?

      ‘Every case is different,’ she said gently. ‘I’m sorry to have to give you bad news.’

      ‘Does he know?’

      ‘We haven’t told him what I have just told you, if that is what you are asking.’

      ‘He’s over eighty,’ I said, as if his age somehow made the news slightly less bad. What I actually meant was to deplore the total of years that he and I had allowed to pass, until we had unwittingly reached this last minute where his doctor was telling me that Ted was going to die soon.

      She nodded anyway. ‘If there is anyone else, any other members of the family, it might be a good idea if they came in to see him soon.’

      ‘How long is it likely to be?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ Susan Bennett said. I liked her for not pretending omniscience. ‘We’ll do what we can to keep him comfortable.’

      I walked slowly back to his bedside. I noticed the shiny floors with a faint skim of dust, and the chipped cream paint of the bed ends. Ted’s eyes flickered open as soon as I sat down in the red chair. He wasn’t asleep – he had been waiting for me.

      ‘Did you hear what that nurse called me? Teddy-boy,’ he muttered in disgust.

      ‘I know.’ We both smiled. I leaned over his hand as I took hold of it again, studying the map of raised sinews and brown blotches. Please don’t die, I wanted to beg him. As if it were his choice.

      ‘What did the doctor say?’

      ‘That you have had a heart attack. They’re monitoring you and waiting to see what will happen over the next few days.’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘She sounded optimistic.’

      But my tongue felt as though it was sticking to the roof of my mouth. Coward, coward, coward. I shouldn’t be lying to him, but my father and I were not used to talking to each other about matters like love, or guilt, or disappointment. Was I supposed to start now, going straight to dealing with impending death? And how was I going to say it? You are going to die. And so I want to tell you that I love you, even though I haven’t said so in forty years, and that love is in spite of everything, not because of it?

      I bit my lower lip until distracting pain flooded round my mouth.

      Ted only nodded, lying wearily against his pillows. He was looking away from me, out of the window at the grey angle of building and the narrow slice of cloudy sky that was the only view from his bed.

      If he asks anything else, I resolved, I will tell him the truth. If he wants to know whether he is dying, he will ask me. Then we can hold each other. I will put my arms round him and help him and look after him, whatever is coming.

      I waited, trying to work out the words that I would use and listening with half an ear to the sound of trolleys moving on the ward. A nurse walked past the door with a pile of linen in her arms and I watched her black-stockinged ankles receding.

      The silence stretched between