The Love of My Life(55)

‘I can barely imagine,’ he sighed. ‘The situation is complicated at both ends, but I’m sure it’s a lot worse for you. Anyway, let me try and explain my end of it, so we can work out what to do next.’

‘OK,’ I said, and I turned on speaker phone and sat under a blanket with Jill while he talked.





Chapter Thirty-Four


My mother died in childbirth: a postpartum haemorrhage was spotted too late, and within days of becoming a father Dad was widowed. Granny, my mother’s mother, often came down from London to help, but she was an MP and could never stay long.

I have a couple of still-life memories of my early years. Both of them are on a beach, somewhere near our little Dorset home. In one memory I am rockpooling with Dad: he shows me a beadlet anemone and I am delighted. In the other it’s raining and we are sitting in the pouch of a shallow cave. As we watch turnstones searching for food among the beach pebbles, Dad sings about being rescued and saved. His voice is soft, achingly sad.

Many years later, Granny told me he was singing a sea shanty. She said my mother had been buried at sea, as was her wish, but Dad had not been able to bear the idea of leaving her out there alone. So the two of us used to drive down to keep Mum company whenever he wasn’t working. The little girl and her grief-shattered father, walking up and down in the pulling tides of loss.

Dad was a parish priest. It was all he’d ever wanted to do – he’d had a proper calling, I believe – but he left his parish to train as a Royal Marines chaplain when I was four. I have vague memories of arguments between him and Granny. She’d tried to stop him, she later told me, because he’d made no provision for me during deployment. Not because he didn’t care, but because linear thinking was no longer available to him. The arguments were wasted, though; apparently nothing she said would sway him. I think the siren song of danger was the only prospect substantial enough to dilute his grief and loneliness. That, or perhaps the belief that he might be nearer to my mother at sea.

After training he took a chaplaincy post with the 45 Commando in Arbroath, near Aberdeen, and we moved into spartan family quarters. I was nearly six and I hated it, but I made do. Dad was still Dad, after all. He picked me up from school and took me to the coast, where we’d poke around in rocks and swim in icy water. We grew potatoes in our tiny garden, we went camping in the Grampians. He sang to me, and looked after me when I was ill.

When I was nine we transferred to a commando in Somerset, and when I was twelve he went with his ‘lads’ to Iraq. I stayed with Granny for the duration of his tour. Another first day at another new school: I was exhausted.

Dad was minister to a bunch of Marines protecting Kurdish refugees on the northern border with Turkey. It was a peaceful deployment, his letters said, until they abruptly stopped. We later learned there’d been a confrontation with a local militia, and a young woman and her child were hurt. Just like my mother, this young woman had died in Dad’s arms.

He was signed off work for three months after that, because the Naval Archdeaconry wanted to look after him. In actual fact, this isolation – the very thing he’d spent so many years trying to avoid – sent him to an alcoholic grave.

There were no dramatic scenes, and he continued to take me to the coast whenever he was sober enough to drive. He continued to cuddle me, to tell me he loved me – he sometimes even made me sandwiches for school. But the drink towed him under rapidly, and he never went back to work. I think he foresaw his end because he managed to buy us a tiny house in Plymouth when I was fourteen. I was lucky – by the time I was fifteen he was capable only of buying alcohol.

The Naval Archdeaconry did their best to help him, but Dad never took the hand they extended. Drink was clearer and easier, and it was available from the shop at the end of the road, rather than a weekly counselling session twelve miles away.

My father was a lonely and humble drunk. He spent most of his time in the front room, watching television, drinking, sleeping. He ate when I fed him. Whenever I tried to do something about it, the drinking got worse, so there were no desperate scenes with hidden bottles. He was just never sober, and I was too frightened to push him over the edge.

The Archdeaconry had to let him go in the end. They’d agreed a recovery roadmap that would ultimately have had him serving his commando in Zaire, but he repeatedly failed to turn up to meetings and ignored their letters. He couldn’t do it.

He died of alcohol-related heart failure a few days before my A-levels started. His training at least bequeathed him the good sense to call an ambulance before he lost consciousness, but he died on the way to hospital. They told me he wouldn’t have known a thing, that he had gone out with a half smile on his face. It made me wonder if he could already see my mother.

By the time I left school, I had only my grandmother. She was a formidable character, but she was eighty.

Jeremy Rothschild was my only long-term hope.





Chapter Thirty-Five


‘David’s married,’ Jeremy said, as if I didn’t already know.

‘My housemate told me. The morning after. If I’d known, I would never have . . . I’d never have . . .’ I stopped.

I thought back to the way David had gone after me, that night. What Jeremy must have thought of me, when he saw us kissing. When he got my letter.

He was silent for a moment. I wondered if he was angry, or embarrassed. Or perhaps resigned? Maybe this wasn’t the first time he’d had to deal with the aftermath of his cousin’s one-night stands.