prediction all those months earlier.
The Thomsens were going nowhere.
I can look back at those years in the house on Cheyne Walk with the Thomsens and see exactly the tipping points, the pivots upon which fate twisted and turned, upon which the storyline warped so hideously. I remember the dinner at the Chelsea Kitchen and seeing my father already losing a power struggle he was too weak to realise had begun. And I remember my mother holding herself back from David, refusing to shine for fear of him desiring her. I remember where it started, but I have no idea how we’d got from that night to the point nine months later when strangers had taken over every corner of our home and my parents had let them.
My father feigned an interest in the various goings-on. He’d potter around the garden with Justin, pretending to be fascinated by his rows of herbs and plants; he’d pour two fingers of whiskey into two big tumblers every night at 7 p.m. and sit with David at the kitchen table and have strained conversations about politics and world affairs, his eyes bulging slightly with the effort of sounding as if he had a clue what he was talking about. (All my father’s opinions were either black or white; things were either right or wrong, good or bad: there was no nuance to his world view. It was embarrassing.) He’d sit in on our classroom lessons in the kitchen sometimes and look terribly impressed by how clever we all were. I could not work out what had happened to my father. It was as though Henry Lamb had vacated the house but left his body behind.
I wanted desperately to talk to him about everything that was happening, the upending up of my world, but I was scared that it would be like pulling a scab off his last remaining hold on his own sense of significance. He seemed so vulnerable, so broken. I saw him one lunchtime in early summer, clutching his mohair cap and his jacket, checking the contents of his wallet at the front door. We’d finished lessons for the day and I was bored.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked.
‘To my club,’ he replied.
Ah, his club. A set of smoky rooms in a side street off Piccadilly. I’d been there once before when my mother was out and our babysitter had failed to materialise. Rather than be stuck at home with two small, dull children to entertain, he’d put us into the back of a black cab and taken us to his club. Lucy and I had sat in a corner with lemonades and peanuts while my father sat smoking cigars and drinking whiskey with men I’d never seen before. I’d been enchanted by it, had wished never to leave, had prayed that our babysitters would fail to turn up for evermore.
‘Can I come?’
He looked at me blankly, as though I’d asked him a hard maths question.
‘Please. I’ll be quiet. I won’t talk.’
He glanced up the staircase as though the solution to his conundrum might be about to appear on the landing. ‘You finished school?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fine.’
He waited while I put on my jacket; then we walked out on to the street together and he hailed a taxi.
In the club he found nobody he knew and while we waited for our drinks to be delivered he looked at me and said, ‘So, how are you?’
‘Confused,’ I began.
‘Confused?’
‘Yes. About how our lives are turning out.’ I held my breath. This was exactly the sort of impudent approach that would have had my father grimacing at me in the past, turning his gaze to my mother and asking her darkly if she thought this sort of behaviour was acceptable, was this the sort of child they were bringing up.
But he looked at me with watery blue eyes and said, simply, ‘Yes.’
His gaze left mine immediately.
‘Are you confused too?’
‘No, son, no. I’m not confused. I know exactly what’s going on.’
I couldn’t tell if he meant that he knew what was going on and was in control of it, or that he knew what was going on but could do nothing to stop it.
‘So – what?’ I said. ‘What is it?’
Our drinks arrived: a lemonade on a white paper coaster for me, a whiskey and water for my dad. He hadn’t answered my question and I thought maybe he wouldn’t. But then he sighed. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘sometimes in life you get to a fork in the road. Your