When You Are Mine(73)

40


My father is out of hospital. When he first arrived home, he could barely climb the front steps. Now he can circumnavigate the garden twice and his shuffle has become a stride. He’s wearing a Panama hat and a loose-fitting cotton shirt, below which is a simple heart monitor strapped to his chest, which relays information to his phone, giving him his heart rate and how far he’s walked.

‘Is there a finish line?’ I ask, as we pass the pond for the second time.

‘An hour of moderate exercise a day.’

‘After that the English Channel?’

‘I was thinking Everest.’

He has lost weight. He blames the hospital food, but I think his brush with his own mortality has made him conscious of his diet. He is also more philosophical. Maybe he’s found God, which would please my mother if nobody else.

When he grows tired, we rest on a rusted swing set, rocking together to the rhythm of groaning springs. We chat about birds and flowers, which is odd because I never regarded him as a nature lover. Again, it might have something to do with his heart attack.

‘Can you accompany me on a trip?’ he asks, as I help him unlace his walking boots on a bench near the sunroom.

‘Are you allowed to go out?’

‘It won’t take long.’

The Range Rover is summoned. I recognise the driver, Tony, who chauffeured Constance to my house when she pleaded with me to attend the birthday party.

Holding the car door, he calls me ‘miss’. I slide onto the back seat, tugging down my shortish skirt. Tony’s eyes don’t stray from the horizon, which could be professionalism or self-preservation. After all, I’m the boss’s daughter.

We drive with the windows open, because Daddy likes to smell the air, which is thick and muggy and hazy with pollen. As we near Woolwich, we join a queue of trucks and cars waiting for the ferry to arrive from the opposite bank. Men in yellow vests direct vehicles into lanes, nudging them nose to tail. The journey across the Thames only takes a few minutes, before the ferry bumps up against the far dock and ramps are lowered.

Fifteen minutes later, Tony parks the Range Rover alongside a construction hoarding on Barking Road. A woman is waiting for us. She’s in her fifties with short-cropped hair and blotchy skin. Crushing out a cigarette, she kisses my father on both cheeks.

‘Sophia, this is my daughter, Philomena.’

‘I remember you,’ she says. ‘You were only this big.’

She holds her hand at waist height.

‘Sophia used to be my secretary,’ says Daddy.

She makes a dismissive sound. ‘I cleaned your office.’

‘You answered the phone.’

‘I told lies for you.’ She puts on a posh voice. ‘Mr McCarthy has just stepped out. Mr McCarthy is in a meeting. Mr McCarthy posted that cheque this morning.’

They both chuckle and look misty-eyed.

‘What is this place?’ I ask, trying to peer through a gap in the hoardings.

‘The old Royal Picture Palace. It was built in 1911,’ says Daddy.

Sophia gives him a set of keys and a padlock clicks open. He unhooks the chain and the wooden door swings inwards. We squeeze between two builder’s skips and pallets of plaster-board wrapped in plastic.

The cinema has an Art Deco facade with colonnades flanking large double doors and a fanlight window made of coloured lead glass. A side door is unlocked and opens on stiff hinges. I peer into the gloom, smelling mildew and decay.

As we step inside, I wonder if the floor can hold our weight, or if it might collapse into the basement. I follow my father, stepping where he steps, until we reach the entrance foyer, where carpets have been ripped up and dumped in piles. Broken light fittings dangle from the ceiling and wires poke from wall sockets. A confectionery counter is covered in crumbling plaster and debris; and the old box office has a shattered glass screen.

‘They used to call it an “electric theatre”,’ says Daddy. ‘People would queue around the block to watch silent movies where somebody played the piano in accompaniment.’

‘You’re not that old.’

‘I was told the stories. My parents, your grandparents, met on the footpath outside. She was a Jewish seamstress from Finchley. My dad was chaperoning his sister, my Auntie Beryl, who was sixteen and considered to be boy-crazy. He came across my mother waiting in the queue and they sat in the same row and watched Frank Sinatra in Some Came Running. A year later they were married.’

I can hear a thickness in his voice.

‘I used to walk past this place on my way to school. And I got my first part-time job working at an ironmonger’s factory which was two streets away.’

‘How long has it been boarded up?’

‘In the nineties they turned the foyer into a bingo hall and later it became a snooker club, but the auditorium has been empty for twenty years.’

‘Who owns it?’

‘I do.’

We enter the main cinema, a cavernous room where the floor slopes down towards a stage with a torn screen. Most of the seats are still in place, but occasional ones are broken or missing like rotting teeth. High above us, the decorative mouldings are stained with mould and pigeons flutter through a hole in the ceiling.

‘What do you want with a cinema?’ I ask.

‘The plan was to build luxury flats, but now I’ve changed my mind.’