The Family Upstairs(29)
I wanted desperately to talk to him about everything that was happening, the upending up of my world, but I was scared that it would be like pulling a scab off his last remaining hold on his own sense of significance. He seemed so vulnerable, so broken. I saw him one lunchtime in early summer, clutching his mohair cap and his jacket, checking the contents of his wallet at the front door. We’d finished lessons for the day and I was bored.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked.
‘To my club,’ he replied.
Ah, his club. A set of smoky rooms in a side street off Piccadilly. I’d been there once before when my mother was out and our babysitter had failed to materialise. Rather than be stuck at home with two small, dull children to entertain, he’d put us into the back of a black cab and taken us to his club. Lucy and I had sat in a corner with lemonades and peanuts while my father sat smoking cigars and drinking whiskey with men I’d never seen before. I’d been enchanted by it, had wished never to leave, had prayed that our babysitters would fail to turn up for evermore.
‘Can I come?’
He looked at me blankly, as though I’d asked him a hard maths question.
‘Please. I’ll be quiet. I won’t talk.’
He glanced up the staircase as though the solution to his conundrum might be about to appear on the landing. ‘You finished school?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fine.’
He waited while I put on my jacket; then we walked out on to the street together and he hailed a taxi.
In the club he found nobody he knew and while we waited for our drinks to be delivered he looked at me and said, ‘So, how are you?’
‘Confused,’ I began.
‘Confused?’
‘Yes. About how our lives are turning out.’ I held my breath. This was exactly the sort of impudent approach that would have had my father grimacing at me in the past, turning his gaze to my mother and asking her darkly if she thought this sort of behaviour was acceptable, was this the sort of child they were bringing up.
But he looked at me with watery blue eyes and said, simply, ‘Yes.’
His gaze left mine immediately.
‘Are you confused too?’
‘No, son, no. I’m not confused. I know exactly what’s going on.’
I couldn’t tell if he meant that he knew what was going on and was in control of it, or that he knew what was going on but could do nothing to stop it.
‘So – what?’ I said. ‘What is it?’
Our drinks arrived: a lemonade on a white paper coaster for me, a whiskey and water for my dad. He hadn’t answered my question and I thought maybe he wouldn’t. But then he sighed. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘sometimes in life you get to a fork in the road. Your mother and I, we got to a fork in the road. She wanted to go one way, I wanted to go another. She won.’
My brow shot up. ‘You mean Mummy wants all the people in the house? She actually wants them?’
‘Wants them?’ he asked grimly, as though my question was somehow ridiculous when it clearly wasn’t.
‘Does she want to live with all these people?’
‘Christ, I don’t know. I don’t know what your mother wants any more. And here, take my advice. Never marry a woman. They might look good, but they destroy you.’
None of this was making any sense at all. What did marrying women – something I had no earthly intention of ever doing, but also something about which I thought there was no other option; if you didn’t marry a woman then who would you marry? – have to do with the people upstairs?
I stared at him, willing him to say something clear and enlightening. But my father didn’t have the emotional intelligence or, indeed, since his stroke, the vocabulary to be clear or enlightening. He pulled a cigar from the pocket of his jacket and spent some time preparing it to be smoked. ‘Are you not keen on them, then?’ he said eventually.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’m not. Will they ever go?’
‘Well, if I had anything to do with it …’
‘But it’s your house. Surely you have everything to do with it.’
I caught my breath, worried I’d pushed him too far.
But he just sighed. ‘You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?’
His obtuseness was killing me. I wanted to scream. I said, ‘Can’t you just tell them to go? Tell them we want our house back. That we want to go to school again. That we don’t want them here any more?’
‘No,’ said my father. ‘No. I can’t.’
‘But why?’
My voice had risen an octave and I could see my father recoil.
‘I told you,’ he snapped. ‘It’s your mother. She needs them. She needs him.’
‘Him?’ I said. ‘David?’
‘Yes. David. Apparently he makes her feel better about her pointless existence. Apparently he gives her life “meaning”. Now,’ he growled, opening up a newspaper, ‘you said you wouldn’t talk. How about you stick to your word?’
21
Miller Roe stands outside the house on Cheyne Walk, staring at his phone. He looks even more rumpled than he’d looked that morning in the café on West End Lane. He straightens when he sees Libby and Dido approach and he smiles.