Kate could tell her mother had carefully arranged her features before entering the room. It was to no avail: at the sight of her husband, Mum began to weep.
As she hung over him, dripping tears onto his pyjama top, he patted her with his oddly straight hand. He couldn’t quite turn his neck to take her in properly. Kate felt as if he was leaving them bit by bit, his solidity ebbing with each small physical change.
Collecting herself, Mum stared about the room. ‘What the feck have you done in here, Kate?’
‘Party,’ said Dad. He’d run out of sentences, apparently. Solo words were all he had left.
A paper dragon, its concertina folds the brightest of yellows, cavorted across the wall opposite Dad’s bed. Chinese paper lanterns, their tassels still in the heatwave hospital atmosphere, hung above his head, and on the bed Kate had strewn fringed shawls blazing with lush embroidered flowers.
‘And what are you wearing?’ Mum took a step back from her daughter. ‘Is it a Chinese thing?’
‘It’s called a cheongsam.’ Kate twirled, not easy to do in the form fitting crossover satin dress. A size too small, she’d paid over the odds for the display purposes only outfit in the window of the tiny Chinese emporium that sat miraculously between a dry cleaner’s and an estate agent in this beige suburb. ‘As we couldn’t make it to Jia Tang’s party, we’re having one of our own.’
Kate could tell Mum was doing her best to be annoyed, but she couldn’t manage it. ‘Him and his Yulan House,’ she tutted.
‘Wife,’ was all Dad said as Mum sat, rending tissue after tissue, spouting nuggets of gossip. Dad hadn’t given a toss about the woman next door’s exploits when he was healthy; Kate assumed Dad gave even less of a toss now that he was sick. It helped Mum, though, so they all listened dutifully to her rhetoric.
The debate about whether or not Mum should stay the night raged until late. Aunty Marjorie prevailed, finally, and took Mum by the arm.
Bending over her husband to say goodnight – not goodbye, never goodbye when he was in a hospital bed – Mum recoiled when Dad said, ‘All that lives must die.’
‘Oh Jesus, he’s going!’ cried Mum. ‘Kate, he’s going!’
‘It’s a quote, Mum. From Hamlet. It’s just Dad being Dad.’
After Mum had gone, when the room was quiet again, Kate said, ‘I know what you mean, Dad.’
This is ordinary, he was saying. This is just part of life.
The festive colours of the decorations glowed as the night crept on, as beyond the windows turned to black pricked with points of artificial light. Still in her cheongsam, even though it was uncomfortable, Kate appreciated the antiseptic NHS room’s attempt to be cosy and beautiful.
The email from Jia Tang had made her cry. ‘We hold your father in our hearts. He is a good man.’ Kate believed Dad had smiled when she said, ‘She’s not wrong, Pops.’
When Charlie called she didn’t pick up. His message sounded confused, like somebody trying to put furniture together without instructions. ‘But . . . you were going to China today . . . so what did . . . I mean . . .?’
Charlie had been against the trip. And he’d been right. It had been an act of hubris, and the gods had cut Dad down. Kate wouldn’t be able to bear any reproach; it would break her and Kate needed to run a little longer on the scant petrol in her tank.
Did I wilfully ignore how frail Dad’s become in case it jeopardised the trip? Kate retraced the past couple of weeks. She’d kept checking with her father to ensure he was still keen to make their epic journey.
Perhaps I gave him no choice. Dad, after all, was ill not stupid; he knew the expense and effort Kate had gone to.
Or maybe he was acting. That was the most painful option, Dad pretending to be more vigorous, less depleted than he really was rather than disappoint his only child. Desperate to hear his voice, she took Julian’s call outside in the cold.
‘So. What’s happening?’
‘The same. No real change.’
‘Should I come? I can if you like.’
If just once Julian would forgo the if you like, she’d beg him to get there as soon as possible. The three words, so ambiguous, forced her to say, as usual, ‘No, stay put. I’m OK.’
‘It’s probably another false alarm.’
‘Probably.’ It wasn’t. Cancer had cried wolf so often Kate knew the difference. She was impatient to get back inside to where Dad made barely a dent in the bed. The thread was sagging.
‘By the way, it was pretty tough at the bank.’
‘Sorry, darling. I forgot to ask: did they extend the loan?’
‘Not exactly.’ Julian sighed and Kate imagined him dragging his hand heavily down his features. ‘By which I mean they laughed me out of the room. I’ve put a fortune through that bank but the minute I ask for a little wiggle room . . .’
‘We have plan B.’
‘Hmm.’
‘We talked about this.’ Ames Partners in Property was springing leaks faster than Julian could plug them up. ‘We have to act fast, darling.’ Raising money on the Party Games shops was the obvious next move, but Julian’s reluctance to admit that his wife was now the breadwinner held them back. This change in their circumstances had altered Julian profoundly. No longer a My way or the highway chap, he deferred to Kate with a wary mindfulness, as if he was the ringmaster and she a lion who’d somehow wangled the whip into her paws. It was, Kate knew, the only reason he hadn’t insisted they put the house on the market to save the company. He would never admit it, but they were living in it because she, the boss, wanted them to.
For Kate, Julian’s crisis was another example of the rises and dips of the marital see-saw: she conceded that it was easy to see it that way when you were up in the air and not down in the mud. She longed for them to be a partnership, to be in harmony. She longed for him to turn up at the hospital, without asking if he was needed there.
Had Julian believed her when Kate said she’d willingly sell the house if they had to? For now, she appreciated her private front door and a garden on terra firma.
‘Let’s not talk about this now,’ said Julian. The ice in his whisky on the rocks clinked as he upended the glass. ‘Concentrate on your dad. Call me if anything changes.’
Her hand was on his. There was no such thing as time any more, just an endless now.
‘Love,’ said Dad about midnight, setting Kate’s heart racing in case it was a farewell.
He slept a little. Mainly he kept his eyes on his daughter.
Whether he could hear she didn’t know. ‘How about we remember ten brilliant things we did together?’ She got as far as two; when she recalled how he’d saved the day at her fifth birthday party by insisting she received the Action Man she wanted instead of the Princess Barbie Mum had chosen, she found herself crying. ‘Silly old me,’ she grumbled. ‘Crying is Mum’s job.’
Cups of tea. A form filled in and signed. Murmured voices beyond the door. An hour. Another hour. Just the two of them, suspended in space.
‘He’s a tough nut,’ whispered a nurse, dressed just as Kate had been at Mumsy’s party. Poor Mumsy, her beauty blighted by a stroke, she now favoured coquettish veiled hats, and continued to throw small dinners for a hundred people.
Another nurse, an older lady and one of those natural healers whose presence was balm, stole in, smiling when she saw the lanterns. Touching Dad’s forehead, she frowned and took up his papery wrist.
‘It’s close, dear,’ she said.
Kate wanted to say, ‘No,’ in every language she could muster. She wanted to semaphore to whoever was in charge of the universe that she couldn’t do without her dad just yet, thank you very much.
‘You can cry, dear.’ The nurse’s hand on Kate’s shoulder, so capable and compassionate, unleashed something.
Tears dribbled onto the thin bedcover, so neatly folded back. Kate kissed Dad’s cheek, and drank him in. Beneath the pharmaceutical top notes he still smelled of himself.
He was falling a
way from her.
‘Daddy.’ Kate never called him that. Don’t go. She mustn’t say that. He’d told her that the hardest part of this whole undertaking was knowing he must leave her. Kate must put him first, just as he’d done with her since she was born.
The nurse left them together.
The thread snapped.
Out in the car park, in the dirty pool of yellow light around a street lamp, Kate jabbed at her mobile, her fingers fat and clumsy.
Every time she thought she’d finished crying, she began again.
Sniffing, she composed herself as she heard the sound of a phone ringing in a distant room.
‘Hello? Kate?’
‘He’s . . .’
‘I’ll be there before you know it.’
Charlie found her in the visitors’ lounge, a room that resembled a dull chapel, with low padded seats and dried flower arrangements, static and dead, on every polished surface.
‘I can’t stop crying!’ Kate despaired of herself, as Charlie folded her to his shoulder, her head against the niche she remembered from long ago.
She still fitted.
The insomniac hospital never went quite to sleep. Now the streets around it woke up, the first buses chugging past, lit up against the still-dark dawn.
On a bench, legs stuck out in front of them, sat Kate and Charlie, drinking foul coffee.
‘Julian should be here by now.’ The troops had been rallied. Julian was on his way to the hospital. Becca was bundling up Flo for the drive to her parents’ house, where Aunty Marjorie was preparing for them all. There was talk of quiche.
‘He was almost a dad to me,’ said Charlie.
‘I know. He liked that. He was so chuffed when you stopped work to go back to your book.’
‘That chat he had with Becca about letting me write probably saved my marriage.’
‘He had a chat with Becca?’ Kate hadn’t known. ‘Is that Julian?’ Kate sat up, then slumped again. ‘Nope.’
‘That was a genius touch, decorating the room. If John can’t go to China, then China must come to John!’
‘That reminds me. I must let Jia Tang know.’ Kate had already had to say ‘He’s gone’ five times over to the family. The list of people to inform grew each time she thought of it. She might delegate: Julian would do it if she asked him. ‘And, God, the funeral . . .’
‘Plenty of time for that,’ said Charlie.
But time was relentless. Kate was already hours into the new post-Dad era.
A clock chimed five as her phone cheeped to remind Kate it was time for Dad’s first tablet of the day. She thought of his watch, still on the table beside his empty bed. It had been weeks since he’d been able to wear it. It chafed his skin, he said.
‘Charlie,’ said Kate, ‘was I selfish? Did I ask too much of him?’
Catching on immediately, Charlie said, ‘No. Planning the trip to China kept him alive, I think.’ He twisted to face her miserable profile, laying his arm along the back of the bench. ‘Gave him something to live for. You did the right thing.’
‘Mum thought it was a stupid idea. So did Aunty Marjorie. He was sick, Charlie, and there I was, pushing and pulling him to get him to the airport.’
‘The only person whose approval you need is your dad’s. And he understood what you were doing.’
‘He did,’ said Kate. ‘Dad got me.’ Past tense already.
‘You were trying to make his lifelong dream come true. You almost bloody did it.’
‘Until Dad went and spoiled it. Self-centred sod.’ Kate tried to laugh but her face buckled and she was a child again. A child who wanted her daddy.
‘Come here.’ Charlie’s arms went tight around her. She felt his tears in her hair.
Struggling against his arms, Kate brought her face up, close to his. ‘Thank you, Charlie,’ she whispered. Some people make things better just by being there.
‘Shush, it’s OK.’ Charlie closed his eyes and chastely kissed her on the forehead, through her matted fringe.
His lips stayed there. He breathed against her.
At the same moment, they curved in to each other, as if obeying a high pitched instruction inaudible to other human ears.
Charlie’s mouth travelled down her face, imparting tiny kisses as it went.
Kate’s mouth was ready when he reached it. She parted her lips and felt Charlie inhabit her, familiar and exotic.
A car horn sounded harshly and they sprang apart, as if scalded.
‘First of all, thank you everybody for coming today. It’s a real honour to give the eulogy for my father.’
The pulpit was higher up than Kate had anticipated. Nearly ten years ago she’d knelt at this altar and the same priest now coughing behind her had blessed her marriage. Kate adjusted the microphone and ignored the sombre bulk of the coffin, laden with flowers, in the corner of her vision.
‘I know Dad would be grateful to you for coming.’ And don’t think I didn’t notice the disapproving looks at my red coat. Kate and Dad had discussed this: ‘I’ve always liked you in bright colours,’ he’d said.
The family pew was divided. The older half head to toe in black; Becca, Charlie and Flo in rainbow plumage. At the end of the bench sat Julian in grey.
‘As you know, Dad was born only three streets away from here.’
That struck Kate in a way it hadn’t when she’d rehearsed. A man with his head full of the Orient had travelled only a few hundred yards.
‘He was a quiet man.’
He couldn’t get a word in edgeways.
‘But he loved to talk about the things that mattered to him.’
Kate paused, grasping for the next thought. Her sleep patterns were haywire. Bereavement had made her physically ill, blocked up and shivering, as if she had a cold. There was the occasional miraculous hour when she would freewheel, absorbed in some task, but then the smell of a jacket or the pitch of a stranger’s laugh would remind her and she would plummet to the basement again, mired in grief.
‘Many of you are aware of Dad’s chief passion.’
Heads nodded fondly.
‘He never tired of raising funds for Yulan House. Later, if you come back to the house with us, I’ll play you the beautiful video message the children sent.’
I won’t watch, though.
It was too much to ask. The children’s sweetly expressed sympathy was unbearable.
Watching television or listening to the news on the radio were just two of the ordinary activities that had become endurance tasks; Kate felt that her father’s death should be in the headlines. Other people going about their humdrum days astonished and affronted her. How could they all just carry on as if nothing had happened?
‘Dad was a devoted family man, a good friend and neighbour, a loving son and an upstanding member of his community.’
Mum had insisted on that bit. Dad couldn’t stand the neighbours and ‘upstanding’ was the sort of pompous language that made him itch. The gospel quote below his name in the order of service was also a Mum touch. Kate had lobbied for Shakespeare but Mum had stood firm: no husband of hers was going into the ground a heathen.
She didn’t let him have his way about going to China and now she won’t let him have his way about his own funeral.
The red nosed priest’s pious way with a prayer used to make Dad giggle. Kate was grateful her father wouldn’t have to endure the funeral tea: quiche as far as the eye could see.
‘Dad would be deeply moved by the way you’ve all reached out to comfort us at this terrible time.’
Terrible time.
Such platitudes. It described it, yes, but barely scratched the surface. Mum was tight lipped. She wouldn’t talk about him, and said helplessly Don’t cry, love whenever Kate was overcome.
At those moments, Kate was grateful for Becca. Her cousin’s own mourning was, inevitably, over-egged but Becca’s taste for high drama meant she was at ease with Kate’s deep emotion. She allowed Kate to talk incessantly about the man
they’d lost, one minute nostalgic, the next weeping, before returning to baffled anger that such tragedy was permitted to happen.
‘Come and stay,’ Becca had wheedled. ‘I want to look after you.’
‘I’d love to.’ That was true. ‘But I’m too busy with work and the funeral and everything.’ That wasn’t. She couldn’t stay at Becca’s house because of Charlie. Because of that kiss.
‘Mum has asked me to personally thank all the family for their kindness. They’re all here today. My husband, Julian. Aunty Marjorie and Uncle Hugh. Becca. And we mustn’t forget Flo. And Charlie.’
The metallic yowl of feedback ripped through the church. Kate jumped. She couldn’t remember what came next.
We kissed.
Uninvited, the memory barged in and made itself comfortable.
‘Um . . .’ Kate dug into her small shoulder bag, looking for her notes as she remembered the warmth of Charlie’s lips against her own. The pleasing clash of their faces.
‘Err . . .’ Kate blinked away the unbidden sensual memory. Out of place, wildly inappropriate, it stopped her in her tracks. She took a deep breath, desperate to compose herself when the folded paper leaped into her hand. ‘Ah. Here we are. Sorry. Bear with me.’
In the ten days since she lost her dad – only ten? – Julian had been carefully kind to Kate, wary of her as if she was a fragile, valued object. Kate didn’t like to admit it but the calamity had shone such a searing light on her life that she could be in no doubt about her priorities.
Julian was a distinct and clear entity, on his own, near the edge of her mind. Surely, as her husband, he should be centre-front. He should loom large.
Kate matched Julian’s reserve with her own. There were no cross words, no confrontations but the no man’s land between them had grown darker and wider.
Bereavement could tear couples apart: that hadn’t happened. But neither had it brought them closer. Instead they’d retreated into caricatures of themselves.
Desperately unfolding the piece of paper, Kate wondered at its blankness. It wasn’t her notes, it was the envelope Charlie had handed back to her. Somebody in the congregation cleared their throat as she stared at the untidy handwritten Kate.
These Days of Ours Page 13
