Sweet Sorrow(122)

‘Pleasure,’ she said.

Back at the party, George and I exchanged phone numbers with no expectation of using them. ‘We’ll have you to dinner! With your wife!’ I stood at the edge of a crowd and listened to a man in his late forties, long-haired and plump in a ruffled shirt: Ivor, our director. I’d hoped to see Alina too. I imagined that after twenty years she’d have aged into something grand, fierce and spectacular and I liked to think she’d have remembered me as one of her successes. But she was not around and instead, Ivor caught my eye for just a moment, tried to place me – a face in a photo that he couldn’t recall – then continued with the anecdote. A member of the As You Like It company had uncovered the old pub piano, played a broken chord, and now they began to sing ‘It Was a Lover and His Lass’ all harmonies and fruity vibrato, and before the verse had ended, Helen barrelled across the room and grabbed my elbow.

‘Let’s get the fuck out of here!’

‘All right, let me just say goodbye to—’

‘… with a hey and a ho and a hey nonino …’

‘No, now, Charlie, NOW!’

I grabbed my coat and looked for Fran and her family, but it seemed that they’d already gone.





Curtain Call


Last year, my father died. The event that had preoccupied me for so much of my childhood and teenage years finally took place, though thankfully in different circumstances to those I’d once imagined so vividly. A heart attack, almost instant I was told, though I’m not sure that even a quick death is ever quick enough. Who knows?

He was not yet sixty and although it would be comforting to tell a story of complete recovery, depression came and went through all of his last twenty years. But I like to think that the happier times were more frequent and that I – we – got better at anticipating and managing the lows. Largely this was down to his wife, his second wife, Maureen, whom he’d met at work. Serious, teetotal, church-going, Maureen was a kind of negative image of Mum, and I should confess that in my London twenties, I found the atmosphere in their bungalow – a bungalow! – almost unbearably dull and soporific, and so I rarely came to visit and never to stay. The role of surly stepson was custom made for me at that time. This was marriage as early retirement and I could never bear more than an hour or two in the neat, over-heated living room. Maureen was devoted to my father and devotion is dull to be around, but I know they also laughed a great deal and went for walking holidays, ticking off the South Downs Way, Hadrian’s Wall, the South West Coast Path like super-extended delivery rounds. Maureen even developed an interest in jazz, a taste that I could never acquire myself, though I still try from time to time, and as I got older I began to appreciate the relative happiness and stability she brought to Dad’s later life. My father and I didn’t have much in common except a tendency towards gloomy introspection and a sentimental and unspoken belief in love as a remedy, if not a comprehensive cure. The flip side of this for my father was a fear of being lonely, unloved or, worst of all, unlovable but after his second marriage this fear faded away and I like to think that in the years before his heart stopped, suddenly, halfway through his morning round, he was more content than he’d ever been. I like to think that.

Predictably, his death was the catalyst for an excavation of the past, often fraught and painful, results outlined above. But when I thought of my father, it was always that summer I returned to. He was the same age as I am now, and those months seemed to contain both the best and worst of all that passed between us.

One scene is missing, though: the meeting of my father and Fran Fisher.

From the side of the stage I watched them speaking after the final performance, Fran laughing at something my father had said, her hand on his forearm, then dipping her head, ducking almost, at what I imagined was praise. I watched them for some time, pleased that they were getting on so well. I knew that he would love her and hoped that she would see something in him that had yet to rise to the surface in his son: an integrity perhaps, a kindness.

And so I watched. To have joined them would have risked spoiling things, and besides, I’d presumed, with all the hope I’d had in that moment, that there’d be endless opportunities to spend time with them, the two most important people in my life at that point. They spoke once or twice on the phone but never again in person, and I’m startled to realise in this moment that I won’t see either of them again.

Never mind.

Never mind.

This is a love story, though now that it’s over it occurs to me that it’s actually four or five, perhaps more: familial and paternal love; the slow-burning, reviving love of friends; the brief, blinding explosion of first love that can only be looked at directly once it has burnt out. A single word can only carry so many meanings, and maybe there ought to be different words for something so varied and weighty. For the moment, this one word will have to bear all of the above, and married love too.

My wife. Will I ever get used to saying that? When I returned from the party, I found Niamh asleep on the sofa, the reading lamp so close to her head that the room smelt of singed hair. I twisted the light away and she started awake.

‘What? Hello.’

‘It smells of burnt hair in here.’

‘Hm? Yes, that’s my new scent. For the wedding. Cheveux Br?lés.’

‘I like it.’