Other scenes began to appear, in which my father and I were together, thirty-five or more years ago – just glimpses of his face, a few gestures, a word or two, like sequences of film reconstituted from some discontinuous frames and scraps of soundtrack. He appeared to be disappointed that I was leaving. He had been disappointed, that was true, but I couldn’t trust what I was remembering. Had his voice really fallen in the way I seemed to hear it falling? Had that turn of his head, as he left the room, really been so slow, or did the apparent sadness of that movement belong more to the moment in which it was being remembered than to the moment in which it had happened? Was I even remembering what I thought I was remembering, or were these fragments in fact a composite of episodes that had been about something quite different? What had my father really thought of my leaving him? In later years, when he had seemed so pleased for my success, had his disappointment persisted, unexpressed? I didn’t think so, but now, with both parents gone, there was no way of knowing.
Hours were consumed by such maundering, and by anger with Sam and with myself. I detested the person I had been, even though I could no longer apprehend him clearly. At the same time I resented feeling guilty for the actions of a man who today had little more to do with me than Sam Williams did.
Last thing at night, it was often Sam that I was thinking about. Sometimes I chose to think of him, as a sort of puzzle, as a relief from thinking about what I had done. More often he appeared uninvited, usually inside the house and looking at me with fury, or slouching at the table as if he owned the place, or striding towards the open-top BMW, brandishing a wrench like a tomahawk. Sitting in the garden, reading the paper, I would suddenly become nervous and lose my concentration, because I suddenly felt as if he were up on the roof, watching. The effect of this sensation was so marked, on one occasion, that Aileen asked me if I was OK. ‘Just a bit dizzy for a second,’ I replied, which sufficed; I suspect she thought I was angling for some sympathy. Sometimes when the phone rang I’d feel my pulse accelerate in an instant and it might take minutes for me to calm down. It was never Sam. It could never be Sam, I told myself, because he couldn’t possibly reappear after what he’d done; and then I corrected myself – what I meant was that no reasonable person could return after doing such a thing. Sam was not a reasonable person.
Even when I was asleep I couldn’t get away from him. One night I dreamed that Aileen had found that he was living in a room upstairs, a room that we hadn’t known existed. In another dream Sam and I were walking through a town during a power cut; candles and oil lamps were burning in the houses that we passed; the streets were empty – no one was walking except us, and no one was driving; we didn’t talk, and after what felt like hours of walking in silence, I understood that I was going to be punished, perhaps executed, if not by Sam then by the person he was taking me to. From that nightmare I came awake yelling, so loudly that I woke Aileen. She was in our bedroom and I was in the guest room, on the other side of the landing. That had been the arrangement since the evening of the revelation. This wasn’t necessarily going to be a permanent banishment – for now she wanted to sleep alone, but she would tell me when the time was right for me to come back, if that day were to come. Previously we’d always both gone to bed at more or less the same time; now Aileen frequently said goodnight a little earlier than our usual hour; and I watched more late-night films on TV than had been my habit. Looked at more films, I should say, rather than watched. Often, when I eventually went to my room, the light would be on in our bedroom. Sometimes I’d knock and Aileen would be sitting up in bed, reading, or at least holding a book. We’d have a brief talk. ‘We’ll be OK,’ she said to me one night. ‘But I can’t pretend that we can go back to being exactly as we were before.’ She accepted a kiss on the forehead, the first kiss of reconciliation, then I left.
The following morning, a couple of minutes after she’d left the house, I looked out through the window on the landing and saw her sitting in her car, staring through the windscreen as if the reason for going out had been entirely forgotten; she wiped an eye before driving off. That evening she barely spoke while we were eating. ‘What’s on your mind?’ I asked her. ‘What do you think is on my mind?’ she replied. The silence coagulated around us. After a minute I asked: ‘Do you want to talk?’ She looked at me as though I were sitting behind glass, like a prisoner in a visiting room. ‘Talking is not going to make a blind bit of difference,’ she answered.
19
I contacted Mr Innes the following day. Tracing Sam might take some time, I thought, but before the week was out he’d been run to ground. The Hendys had spoken to him recently, but had no idea where he was. However, I had known, approximately, the location of the house with the music room that Sam had helped to build, and that was a sufficient toehold for Mr Innes and his team. I was given to understand that an employee of the local council’s department for planning permissions had been helpful in finding the house in question, and once the house had been found the search for Sam was a fairly straightforward procedure: everyone who had worked on the music room was spoken to, and it was discovered that one of the builders had talked to Sam recently, about a job that was coming up soon. He had a phone number for him, which wasn’t the number I’d been using. Sam was called, on a pretext plausible enough to extract from him the address at which he was working: he was building a kitchen in a house in High Park Road, Farnham, and would be there for the rest of the week.
As I drove into Farnham, I was asking myself what I hoped to achieve. I must get him to understand the consequences of his actions, I said to myself. And perhaps, once he had learned that a satisfactory amount of wreckage had been created, there would no longer be any point in continuing with the pretence, and he would explain why he had decided to persecute me. I imagined a confession, an apology, but I imagined them in the abstract, rather than coming from Sam. The trip would be futile, at best, I knew a moment later. There would be a huge argument. Something might be said that would make the situation even worse than it was. I was doing this because I had to have the last word, but it was never possible to have the last word, I argued against myself. Turning into High Park Road, I was so preoccupied that I barely avoided a collision with an oncoming car.
Outside the house, a wiry fair-haired young man was throwing lengths of skirting board into a skip. ‘I’m looking for Mr Williams,’ I said to him, half hoping to hear that Sam was no longer there, but before the young man could reply I saw Sam through the open door, hammering at a wall. His hair was longer than it had been before, and he’d grown a moustache and goatee beard that didn’t suit him at all. ‘Jack!’ the blond lad called out, and Sam turned. He saw me, and was gratifyingly displeased. Slowly he wiped his hands on his overalls; he moved some tools from one part of the work area to another; again he wiped his hands; he spoke to one of his workmates; and at last he came out of the building, walking with his face downturned and rolling his shoulders exaggeratedly, as if shoving his way through an invisible crowd.
‘Hello, Jack,’ I said.
He squinted at me, with a thin grimace of a smile. ‘There’s another Sam on site,’ he said. ‘I’m Jack, to avoid confusion. Because Jack is my middle name, remember? And I look like Jack White, apparently.’ He explained who Jack White was.
‘We have to talk,’ I told him.
‘If you insist,’ he said, blithely.
‘I do,’ I answered. The look I gave him – a baleful scowl, I hoped – had no apparent impact.
He glanced at his watch and said: ‘I can give you fifteen minutes,’ as if he were a man of influence and I’d come to ask him for a favour. ‘There’s a park behind there,’ he said, pointing to the houses opposite. We said not a word to each other as we walked to the park. I felt like a man on his way to a duel, but Sam’s attitude was one of bored compliance: he strolled along on the opposite side of the road, inspecting the houses just to give his eyes something to do while he accompanied me on this time-wasting chore.
/> Once through the gate we were at the foot of a grassy hill. We walked up the slope, and I turned to him and said: ‘I want to know what you were thinking of when you sent that note to Aileen. What did you imagine would be the outcome? She is extremely upset. She’s the one innocent party in this – the only person who’s done nothing wrong. And now you’ve made her unhappy. Desperately unhappy.’
‘Could have been worse, though,’ he said.
‘Could it?’
‘Very easily. If I’d put at the end: “Oh, by the way, I’m the bloke who did the roof.” That really would have dumped you in the shit, wouldn’t it?’
‘As opposed to where I am now?’
‘Would have been a lot worse, I’d say. Lot more explaining to do. But I thought: he’s got enough on his plate as it is. One step at a time. No point going straight in at full volume. That’s what I was thinking.’
‘So you were doing me a favour?’
‘Well, yeah,’ he said, as if this were self-evident.
‘I should be grateful that you dumped me in it anonymously?’
‘I’ve saved you a bit of extra bother,’ he said. ‘But if you like, I could tell her. If you want everything above board, just say the word.’
‘Christ Almighty,’ I muttered, clasping my brow. ‘You really are an idiot.’
This brought him to a halt. ‘Say again?’ he requested, peering at me as you might frown, half-smiling, at a child that’s just used an insulting phrase that you suspect it doesn’t understand.
‘She knows it was from you.’
‘You told her?’
‘No, Sam, I didn’t tell her. I didn’t have to tell her. She worked it out.’
His expression wasn’t exactly that of a man nonplussed; it was more extreme than that – rather as though a nerve below a tooth had suddenly throbbed.
There was some satisfaction in observing this effect. ‘She’s not a fool, you know,’ I went on. ‘She’s come across two unusual young men recently: the one who was working in the house; and the one who sent her this letter. Did you think it wouldn’t occur to her that there was a connection?’
He started walking again. For a few seconds he appeared to be giving the idea some thought, then with a shrug of the eyebrows he let it go. He could have been a man with a bizarre type of amnesia, so abrupt was the transition. As he strode up the hill beside me, he was looking around the park, smiling at the sunlit greenery, at the children on the swings and at their minders, apparently without a care.
‘This has become the worst time of her life, thanks to you,’ I told him.
‘Thanks to you, strictly speaking,’ he replied. ‘You’re the one who—’
‘Yes, I don’t have to be reminded. I shouldn’t have done what I did. I’m not pretending otherwise. But the fact is, she would never have known about it if it weren’t for your note.’
‘If it wasn’t for me, you mean. If I didn’t exist. What you’re saying is, I don’t have any right to know my father. That’s what it comes down to.’
‘I’m saying you should not have written that note, and I want to know why you did it. It was malicious. Nothing good could possibly have come of it. Why do you think I would want to have anything to do with someone who could do a thing like that?’
‘Dumb question. I don’t. And you didn’t want anything to do with me anyway.’
‘OK. Let’s put it another way. What was to be gained by making my wife unhappy?’ I stood in front of him to ask this, forcing him to stop. He appeared, at last, to give some thought to Aileen.
Unable to look me in the eye, he rubbed his neck roughly before answering. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you might have a point.’ He kicked a plastic bottle out of the grass. ‘Sorry, OK?’ he said, but it was as though he were apologising for a trivial absent-minded oversight. ‘Are we carrying on?’ he asked, indicating the crest of the hill, having checked the time. Apparently the subject of Aileen’s distress was now closed.
‘So now we’re quits, are we? Is that how you see it?’ I demanded.
Folding his arms, he studied the sky above my head, then gave me a stalemated look. ‘What else do you want me to say? There’s nothing I can say. I’m sorry. I apologise. It wasn’t the smartest move. But it’s done now. Nothing I can do about that.’
‘I’d like you to explain,’ I persisted. ‘You’ve admitted you were lying—’
‘I what?’ he shouted, his face a mask of incredulity.
‘You ran off. There was no reason to do that, if you weren’t lying. So I want to know what was the reason for it all. Just to mess up my life? Was that all it was?’
Breathing deeply, he stared towards a huge fallen tree trunk that lay about twenty yards from where we were standing; I was being asked to observe how he strove to master his emotions. ‘Let’s walk,’ he said, which seemed to signify that there was, after all, more to say. In a voice that was taut with the stress of self-restraint, he asked: ‘You really can’t understand that I had a good reason?’
‘For writing that note? No, I can’t. None at all.’
‘For clearing off, I meant.’
‘There’s only one way of reading it,’ I told him. He shook his head in disappointment, but said nothing. ‘What’s done is done, as you say,’ I continued. ‘But now that it’s done, why don’t you just come out and say it? Then we can try to put it behind us.’
‘Say what?’
‘That it was a story. A pretence. A fixation. Whatever word you prefer.’
His gaze roamed over my face, as if scrutinising his own reflection. ‘I can’t,’ he said, almost in a whisper, and for a moment I thought he was saying that he lacked the courage to confess. But then he stated: ‘I haven’t been lying.’ To me the phrase sounded like words that he’d trained himself to believe.
We were at the remnant of the oak, and there he stopped and looked down at me, frowning at my obtuseness. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You’re my father. That’s a fact. You don’t want to know. OK. That’s another fact. So why should I do a fucking test?’ His voice was still low, but his teeth were bared; holding a hand open between our faces, he chopped the other hand into it. ‘So the test comes out positive – and if the test works like you say it does, it would have been positive, no question about it. So it comes out positive – what then? All of a sudden your attitude changes? I don’t think so. You don’t want a son, that’s obvious. Or you don’t want me as a son. “I’ll see you’re provided for,” that’s what you said. That’s what you said. Your exact words. I’ll never forget them. It’s so fucking insulting – don’t you get it? Can’t you comprehend? I don’t want paying off. That’s not what I wanted. But things are what they are. You don’t want to know me, and I sure as fuck don’t want to know you any more. So here’s the deal: you leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone. OK? That’ll suit me just fine. Give me the contract and I’ll sign it.’
It took me a few seconds to compose myself: I could barely think straight after this drivel, and I was, I admit, scared of him too. There was nobody within sight of us, and his hands were trembling as if he needed to strike at something to get the tension out of them. Then I said: ‘It would have suited me too, but you didn’t leave us alone, did you? That’s the point. You sent that damned note.’
‘I was angry,’ he said. ‘I was fucking furious.’
‘Not all that furious, I’d say. You took your time about it, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah, well, revenge better cold and all that,’ he replied after a pause, with unbearable nonchalance.
‘Revenge?’ I replied. ‘I had doubts about the story you were giving me, completely reasonable doubts, and you’re telling me that revenge was called for? Put yourself in my shoes, for a minute, if you can manage such a thing. If you were in my position, wouldn’t you wonder what was going on? Of course you would.’
‘I wouldn’t be in your position,’ he answered.
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘What it means is tha
t I would never have done what you did.’
All I could think of saying was: ‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’
He twisted his face into a caricature of consternation. ‘What am I talking about?’ he replied, mimicking my voice. ‘What am I talking about? I’m talking about my mother, you dick.’ There followed a tirade on my betrayal not only of Aileen but also of Sarah, who, according to Sam, had been fool enough to trust my promises and had been repaid for her naivety by being heartlessly cast aside.
The reality had been completely unlike his version of it, I told him: there had been no promises, from either of us, and each had rejected the other. And it was astonishing that he should have the nerve to lecture me on the subject of my relationships with women, after the things he’d told me about himself.
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