Long Time No See

by Hannah Lowe

  But you could call me Ida, Hermione had said. That’s what they call me around here.

  Dolores told him to wait there. She would pick him up and take him to see his mother in half an hour.

  I’ve imagined this scenario many times – Dolores and my father pulling up outside the big white house on a corner in Liguanea, a wealthy neighbourhood far from the ghettoes and slums, an old man standing up on the veranda, a book and a pair of glasses in this hand. ‘Uncle Walwyn,’ Dolores ran up the steps of the house. ‘You never guess who this is?’ Pointing to where my father stood on the drive. ‘It’s Ralph! Auntie’s son, all the way from England!’

  ‘Ralph?’ The old man seemed to search for the name in his memory. ‘Ah, yes, Ralph. Of course.’ He spoke with an American accent. He came down the steps, his hands held out to my father. He was well dressed in a shirt and blazer, shiny shoes. They shook hands. ‘Good to meet you, Ralph. At last. I’m Walwyn Pennyfeather. I’m afraid Ida, um, your mother, is at the hairdresser’s, but she’ll be back soon enough. Come and have a drink. All the way from England, huh?’

  They sat in the shade of the tall potted palms. Dolores brought lemonade. Mr Pennyfeather told my father about his businesses in New York and Jamaica. He had started out with one dry cleaners and now owned twenty. The two men liked each other, chatting away until a cab pulled up and Hermione climbed out. The boy caught her eye straight away, standing and coming down the steps to meet her at the end of the drive. She was in her sixties now, but still a good-looking woman. Well dressed as ever in a pink suit, her handbag clutched to her chest. Her mouth was fixed in a stern line.

  ‘Ma,’ he said, going towards her. ‘I came to find you.’ He didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘Shhhhh,’ she said quietly, glancing up to the house. No greeting, no welcome hug. She looked shocked. ‘You tell him you’re my son?’

  My father was confused, following the line of her eyes to where Mr Pennyfeather stood. ‘Yes,’ he said, feeling flustered. ‘Dolores told him. We’ve just been –’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ she interrupted him, then whispered, ‘I didn’t tell him I had a son. I tell him I have a nephew in England. But not a son, not a son.’

  My father hadn’t known what to do or say, had remained rooted to the spot while Hermione went to greet her husband, to lie or say nothing or perhaps tell him the truth. My father stayed for an awkward half-hour – Hermione refusing to meet his eye, Mr Pennyfeather nervously joking – before taking a cab back to the hotel.

  One night, years later, I heard my father on the phone to Dolores.

  ‘I never understood it,’ he said into the receiver. ‘I still don’t. Why didn’t my mother tell him she had a son? Why did she lie about me?’ Silence as he listened to Dolores’s words. ‘Maybe. Maybe. But so much time had passed,’ he said. ‘It still hurts me, you know. It still hurts.’

  ♣

  The day before they left Kingston, Ray the Pilot had driven them to Yallahs, and they’d found the shop where my father said it would be. It looked run down – the stained awning had sagged, the gratings at the windows had come loose. An old man shuffled out, squinting at the car. He was thin and stooped with white hair. It was my grandfather. James Lowe. Lowe Shu-On.

  My father climbed out of the car and they stood talking, the old man pointing back to the shop, my father handing him something. A minute later he climbed back in, his father already back inside.

  ‘We not staying?’ Ray asked.

  ‘No,’ my father said.

  ‘That was your dad?’

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ my father said.

  ‘What did you give him?’

  ‘What I had in my pocket – a hundred dollars.’ My father glanced back at the shop. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’

  Four years later, in 1969, the Salvation Army knocked on the front door of Ashgrove Road, asking for my father. They had come to tell him his father was dead. The same year, Dolores phoned. Hermione was dead too.

  ♦

  My father had never forgotten his parents, then. I wonder if he thought of them in the last days of his life, as he called out for Jamaican food, his mind journeying back across time and space to his childhood in the shop. My mother had always assumed that the visit from the Salvation Army was part of a generic service – providing news from abroad, keeping families connected – but I always wondered how they would have known to come to our door. Later, I phoned the Salvation Army to check. A lady told me that my father must have used their family tracing service. ‘He’d have had to have been looking for his father in 1968,’ she said. ‘He must have sent us a request.’

  ♠

  He died peacefully at home, my mother told people on the phone in the days that followed, a platitude that was only half true. My father wasn’t at peace. The winter sun streaming through the front-room windows hid nothing. His face in death was anguished and confused, his brow deeply furrowed, his white hair standing on end, framing his face on the pillow, exaggerating the look of shock. He’d had twelve days between prognosis and a death which caught him off guard and unprepared.

  ‘At least he’s shaved,’ my mother said as we stood over him. ‘Do you think I should put him in some decent clothes?’ He was still in his old pyjamas.

  ‘I don’t suppose it matters,’ I said. ‘No one’s going to see him. Are they?’

  ‘Well, no,’ she said. ‘Oh, I don’t know. He looks a bit dishevelled.’ She leant down and brushed back his hair with her hand. In the end we left him as he was.

  ‘I’d better phone Ken in Jamaica,’ she said wearily.

  At lunchtime the doctor came and signed his death certificate. Cause of death: Carcinomatosis. Cancer, disseminated. An hour later the undertakers arrived to take the body away. Afterwards I sat alone in the room where he had died – everything quiet, the single bed unmade, the pillow indented with the shape of his head. The air still held the power of his illness – the cancer that might have moved slowly three years before, but which in its finale was quick and ferocious. The light was still too bright, and there was a smell – faintly medical but also sweet, the ghost-scent of his sweat and talcum-powdered skin.

  We had discussed already the business of the funeral. The crematorium and the Humanist funeral official had been contacted, and both could accommodate us the Friday of that week – only three days after my father’s death, but it meant my half-sister would be able to attend the funeral. The official agreed to come to our house the next day to discuss the eulogy.

  ‘He definitely wouldn’t have wanted a church service?’ Gloria asked, when my mother came off the phone.

  ‘Oh no,’ my mother said. ‘He’d curse me if I did that. He’d turn in his grave.’ She laughed half-heartedly. ‘If he had one.’

  I thought of that book, The Case Against God, my father’s bible. I understood why people believed in heaven, the afterlife, reincarnation. The alternative was too sad. It was hard to believe in nothing. If only my father had believed in something, I could have believed in something too. I would have taken comfort there.

  Upstairs, I lay on the bed of the attic room. On the floor, my rucksack, half full of clean clothes. He hadn’t lived the week after all. I pulled the covers up to my chin. My regret was visceral, a surge and swell in my chest that pushed the tears out from my eyes. The moment I realised my father was going to die was the moment I wanted to ask him everything, to hear his story from his own mouth, to talk in a way we’d never talked. His death severed my connection to Jamaica, to China, to his secret life in London – all the history I’d never know, the chance to say yes, Dad, your story is important; yes, your life has been meaningful. Yet, wanting this, I was simultaneously repelled by it. Only time would have shifted the pattern of our relationship, the distance and silence so well entrenched. But time was what we didn’t have.

  I’ve never cried as I did that week, a ragged tissue clutched permanently in my hand, walking through the house sobbing,
crying into the washing-up bowl, at the bathroom mirror, as I sat on the side of my father’s bed. Perhaps I’d wanted him to hear me. I wanted those tears to say ‘I’m sorry. I should have stayed last week when you asked me.’ ‘I’m sorry. I should have talked to you.’ ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Over and over until that incantation spoke for twenty years of slips and blunders – for sitting, surly and grudging, on those endless drives, so curt in my responses he gave up trying; for lying about him to the other little ballerinas; for saying I wouldn’t kiss him again – how could I have known my childish stubbornness would so solidly fix the distance between us?

  A memory came back to me. Winter. Five years past. Before the cancer. My father in hospital for a prostate operation. I had gone to see him alone. It was night-time, black beyond the high windows of the ward, a dull lamp shining above the courtyard door. Sitting up between the sheets, he asked me for a cigarette.

  ‘No way, Dad,’ I said, annoyed already.

  ‘Oh go on, Han,’ he pleaded. ‘I know you’ve got some.’

  ‘No! I haven’t.’ I had. They were tucked in my bag. ‘And even if I did, you can’t smoke in here.’

  He looked forlorn. ‘Half the blokes in here keep sneaking off to smoke,’ he said. ‘You can hide in the courtyard. I’ve had one today already, but everyone’s run out.’ He sounded like a naughty schoolboy, confessing his crimes.

  ‘Oh, Dad.’ I was exasperated. ‘I’m not giving you a cigarette and that’s that.’

  Walking away down the empty corridor, his voice called out behind me. ‘Han!’

  I turned to see him standing in his dressing gown, his hand around the drip he was still attached to. Bright lights on the green walls, the prints of silver birds. His face looked hopeful. He reached out the other hand.

  ‘Please, Han, go on, please,’ he pleaded.

  ‘No, Dad! Go back to bed.’ I walked on, but when I turned again, he was there ten feet behind me, shuffling in his slippers.

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  ‘No!’

  And I walked on, up the stairs, into the bright reception, through the swinging doors where the night air swept over my face. I rooted around in my bag for my cigarettes, lit up, exhaled deeply.

  Lying there, I added that to my list of regrets. I should have given him that cigarette. What difference would it have made?

  ♥

  In the evening, Sylvester knocked on the door, asking for my mother. I sent him through to the kitchen and went back upstairs. When I came down an hour later, she was at the table, looking upset.

  ‘Has Sylvester gone?’ I asked her. I thought he’d come to pay his respects.

  ‘Yes, that bastard’s gone,’ she said, staring out into the garden.

  ‘Why’s he a bastard?’

  ‘Because he just helped himself to dad’s guillotine,’ she said. ‘While I was making tea he just went into the shed, came out with it, said he was taking it with him. He’d put it in a plastic bag.’

  ‘How did he know Dad had it?’ I said. ‘I thought all that stuff was secret.’

  ‘Not that secret,’ she said.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop him, Mum?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she sighed. ‘I don’t even know where your dad got it from. It’s no use to me or to you, is it? But it just seems so disrespectful to come and take it today. Most of those blokes were never your dad’s friends. All they ever wanted was his money, or his way of making it.’

  ♣

  Gloria stayed for the week in our spare room. It was only the second time I’d met her. She was nearly forty years older than me. Small, with close-cropped hair. She wore stylish tailored clothes and lots of gold jewellery. My father had seen her only a handful of times since he left when she was a baby. But when I was eight or so, there were suddenly more phone calls, more letters. A package arrived with a US postmark, and two portraits of her daughters appeared on the wall on our hall. Dionne and Marlene, posed in soft focus – one in a pink jumper, one in blue – both grown-up by then, living and studying in New York. I used to stare at their photographs, marvelling that I was their eight-year-old auntie. A few years later, Dionne studied in London. My father was delighted to meet her, and so was I. She was pretty and glamorous. We used to drive across town to her flat in Baker Street to visit. She would throw her arms around my father at the door, saying, ‘Hi, Grandpa!’ in her thick Southern accent.

  Her whole family came for her graduation – Gloria and her husband, Marlene, and, most surprisingly, Kathleen, my father’s first wife, an old black lady I glimpsed for a second at the graduation ceremony.

  ‘I never knew him as “Dad”,’ Gloria said, sitting in our living room that evening. It was just the two of us. ‘I didn’t really think of him as “Dad”. I called my stepfather “Dad”. But these last years, we spoke on the phone once a month at least. I guess I felt closer to him.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you talked so often,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘He used to phone in the middle of the night. You know, with time differences and all. He said he couldn’t sleep. I think he was lonely. He used to say he was lonely. His health was bad. He sounded sad.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said again. ‘I didn’t know that. Poor Dad.’ I wondered whether my mother knew about those phone calls.

  ‘Well, I’m glad I can be here and see you all – my stepmother, who is younger than me. My white sister and brother.’ She laughed.

  ‘Yep, it’s strange, isn’t it?’ I took a sip of my tea. I was thinking. I wanted to say something, but didn’t know how to put it. ‘I don’t always feel white, exactly,’ I blurted out.

  She looked quizzically at me. ‘Don’t tell me you feel black?’ she said, her eyebrows raised.

  ‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘Not that, exactly.’

  ‘Well, even if you do feel it,’ she said, ‘it’s one thing to feel it, and another to be it, let me tell you.’

  I felt embarrassed. She was right.

  ♦

  The night before the funeral, my mother handed me a stack of photographs of my father.

  ‘I thought it would be nice to pin them to a board in the hall for tomorrow,’ she said. ‘You know, to show his different sides.’ She was cheerful. I don’t think the fact of my father’s death had hit her yet. She didn’t know how much she’d come to miss him.

  I sifted through the pile. There was a photograph of my father as a young man with baby Gloria between his hands; another with baby Tom; a black and white shot in a nightclub, my father in a black silk shirt, a coil of smoke rising from the cigarette perched in a cut-glass ashtray; photos where he swings my small body out over the lawn, or with Sam, a toddler, sat beside him in a dishevelled bed – my father in his vest, his glasses on, the newspaper open wide. It is early morning, likely he is just back from a game; or at the dinner table on Christmas Day, his arm dangling around my mother; or in his armchair smiling at Bobby, his grandson, playing his drum; or bent over a saucepan in the kitchen, or in the garden, loading up the bonfire in his anorak and wellingtons; and then the frail old man who loved his dog, holding Chloe on his lap, his nose pressed deep into her fur.

  I made a collage using drawing pins. My father’s many sides. I thought about it. Aren’t all of us like this, versions of ourselves, each one different, performed for family, friends, neighbours, the people we work with – and variegated even more by their perceptions and prejudices? Perhaps what marked my father as different were the shifting and secret spheres he moved in, all the things we didn’t know. But would we want to know them, if we could?

  I remembered a version of my father, told to me by Tom, that I didn’t like and didn’t want to know. In the last weeks of his degree at Durham, my father phoned Tom to say he was in Newcastle with Ray the Pilot, and why didn’t Tom catch the train over and come for a drink? My father took him to a seedy card-club-cum-brothel on a dingy side-street, where worn-looking prostitutes vied for the punters’ winnings. Ray and my father kept
cajoling Tom to go with one of these women, an offer my poor half-brother didn’t take up, enduring their taunts and the half-hearted come-ons of a woman twice his age, who stroked his cheek and sat in his lap. Telling me this, Tom laughed at my father’s crudeness, the smuttiness of it all. But I hated hearing that version of my father. He is a bully, a chauvinist, a man with too much cash. Once I’d seen that side of him, I couldn’t help myself for asking more. Was my father a good father to Tom? Why had he and Elsie split up? ‘There was lipstick on his collar, I suppose you’d say,’ my half-brother said. ‘He cheated. He was hardly there, and then he was gone.’

  ♠

  The morning before the funeral we received a letter from my father’s old Jamaican comrade, Thomas Reid, some of which would be read out at the funeral. He was in his eighties by then, living in England too, still writing books about the politics and history of Jamaica. Upstairs in my room, I read through what he’d written. It was his version of my father:

  Ralph cannot have been more than seventeen when I first met this idealistic and conscientious young man from St Thomas … We were among pioneers in the great task of persuading our fellow Jamaicans that we were not preordained to perpetual inferiority but were a nation capable of administering to our own affairs. We have been friends and comrades for these many years. No doubt we have both been disappointed that our dreams for our homeland’s future have not been more fully realised. I was delighted to renew his acquaintance in England and to learn he had found happiness here.

  The versions of my father kept multiplying, even after his death. Many years later, I arranged to meet his old friend Mac, outside the Tube in Islington. He wore a suede jacket, a gold cross around his neck. He’s got a bob or two, that Mac, my mother told me. He’s not stupid. She was very fond of him. I knew he had a big house out in Essex somewhere, a house in Spain we had stayed in.

  ‘I can’t stay for long, luvvie,’ he said as we hurried through the grey mush of snow to a pub on Upper Street, puffing on his cigarette. ‘I’ve got places to be.’