When You Are Mine(28)

‘Too much sun,’ I add. ‘He should be wearing a hat.’

A man with a grey cloud of hair forces his way between shoulders. Another face from my childhood – Dr Carmichael, our family GP, who gave me every injection and inoculation and prescription.

He pushes Daragh to one side and puts his ear to my father’s chest, asking for quiet. His hands are wrinkled and blotchy, but still steady.

‘OK, let’s get him inside.’

Daragh and Clifton take his arms. He protests, threatening to ‘deck both of you’. Eventually, they let him walk unassisted across the rose garden and up the steps to the French doors. He waves to guests as he goes, shaking hands and blowing kisses.

‘Won’t be long. Don’t drink all the bloody bubbles before I get back.’

Constance is suddenly next to me.

‘This is your fault.’

‘What?’

‘Why didn’t you say you were coming … give us some warning?’

‘You spent weeks badgering me.’

‘Yes, but I didn’t think …’

We go to the library, where a couch is cleared of cushions and his white coat is removed. Dr Carmichael tells everybody to leave.

‘Not Philomena.’ Daddy tries to take my hand, but I step away.

The room has an upright piano littered with musical scores, old portraits on the walls, shelves lined with books, and a fireplace with an enormous grate. Above the mantelpiece, the propellor from an old-fashioned biplane has been polished and put on display.

Constance doesn’t know what to do with herself. She lights a cigarette. Dr Carmichael tells her to put it out. She looks at him angrily, but her shiny forehead refuses to buckle.

‘Where are his pills?’ asks the doctor.

‘I’ll get them,’ says Constance.

‘What pills?’ I ask.

Dr Carmichael is taking his pulse and temperature and listening more closely to his heart. He is firing off questions about chest pains and dizziness and nausea.

‘What pills?’ I ask again.

The doctor is about to speak, but Daddy stops him. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Stop saying that,’ I snap.

Constance returns, clutching a small brown glass bottle. Dr Carmichael shakes two pills into my father’s hand, and I fill a water glass, but Constance takes the jug from me, using her hip to nudge me aside. I’m the visitor. She’s the queen.

The pills are swallowed. Colour returns to his cheeks.

‘Let me look at you,’ he says, motioning me closer. ‘You’re the spitting image of your mum. Did I ever tell you the story about—’

Before he can finish, the library door bangs open and Finbar charges into the room as though he’s rescuing a hostage. Daragh and Clifton are trying to hold him back.

Finbar is the youngest and tallest of my uncles, with a shaved and oiled scalp and a bushranger beard.

‘Where is he?’ he bellows.

‘I’m ’ere, Fin,’ says my father. ‘Keep your pants on.’

Finbar isn’t satisfied until he has hugged my father and taken an inventory. Daddy humours him and then tells everyone to get out and ‘leave me alone with my daughter’.

Finbar does a cartoon double-take when he recognises me. A moment later, I’m hoisted off the ground and crushed in his arms, smelling his aftershave and breath mints and something metallic like Brasso.

My feet are scrabbling on the floor. Why do these men keep picking me up like a ragdoll?

‘Put me down.’

‘You’ll have to arrest me first.’

‘I can arrange that.’

Daddy looks at my uncles and sighs tiredly. ‘There’s a free bar outside – what are you tossers doing ’ere?’





13


I am alone with my father for the first time since I was seventeen. He pours himself a drink from a varnished wooden cabinet with rows of elegantly shaped bottles. Single malts mainly with descriptors that sound like fairy tale dwarfs. Creamy. Peaty. Grassy. Woody. Smoky.

‘Should you be drinking?’ I ask.

‘It’s my birthday.’

He swallows and pours another. His pale face is puffy and strangely weather-beaten, with wrinkles that branch out from his eyes like tiny river deltas on a flood plain. He has always been a strong man, hardened by exercise and ambition, with a deep rumbling voice that makes everyone around him sound like they’re inhaling helium.

‘So, what’s new?’ he asks.

‘Is that the best you can do?’

‘I’m glad you came.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘I’m getting old.’

‘Is there something wrong with your heart?’

‘You broke it. Now it’s fixed.’

‘Don’t you dare guilt me.’

The harshness in my voice seems to shock him. I take a seat on the sofa. He wants to sit next to me, but I point to a different chair.

‘How is your mum?’ he asks.

‘Hating you is keeping her young.’

He smiles wryly. ‘I have angina. Sounds like Angelina, doesn’t it? I had a girlfriend called Angelina – lovely she was. I used to take her to the pictures at the Hackney Empire. Double-bill. Back row. She had really soft—’