his short curly hair. It was the only gesture that gave away his nerves. He looked off in the other direction to the distant hills.
‘Because your mother never wanted me to. It was important to her that you never knew.’
We sat for moments in quiet silence. Then I said, ‘Why?’
He said, ‘I don’t know. Honest to God, I don’t.’
I wiped my face with his hanky. ‘So what I want to know is how much of what you’ve told me is true? How did you meet? It obviously wasn’t a smooch at the youth club?’
Dad sort of yawned and didn’t speak for a minute. There was an inner struggle going on: loyalty to my mother opposing my demands. But there was only one relationship that had any hope of continuing, so eventually he caved in.
‘She seemed to come out of nowhere. Literally. I mean, I never thought that anything like that would happen to me. It was in the spring of ’78. I was on my way back from a job in St Albans. That night we had terrible torrential rain. It was dark. The rain was clogging the windscreen. I didn’t see her. One minute it was all rain and empty lanes, the next, there was this girl in the beam of my headlights. I swerved off to the side to avoid hitting her and when I got out she was on the road. My wing mirror had clipped her. She was dazed, I think. Just sitting there like that, in that way she had, looking up at me, doing her best to look brave. It was as if she was expecting to see someone she knew. She had thrown herself across the pram awkwardly, blocking my path to it and it was on its side. I don’t think she’d realised that. And I could hear crying. As I reached the pram she tried to push me away. But she was weak and it didn’t take much to get round her and right the pram. And there you were, more or less okay, thank God. Apart from a light scratch on your head.
‘Your mother was bleeding from a cut on her side. I wanted to take you both to the nearest hospital. To be honest, I was concerned that Rosamund might have internal injuries and I didn’t want any comeback on the insurance. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She got hysterical and was about ready to leg it up the road. So I stopped insisting on a visit to
A & E and told her I was taking her home – no arguments. After some persuasion she agreed. The pram wasn’t fit for purpose anyway.
‘The address that she gave was some sort of hostel.’ He broke off and shook his head, seeing it again. ‘The conditions in there. Oh Mercedes, you should have seen it: damp on the walls and mould on the inside of your cot. The paint was flaking off and there were bits of plaster all over the carpet. And she was so young and thin. Of course, she was beautiful too. I think I’d been smitten from the first moment I’d seen her in the middle of the road. That black hair; a bit Elizabeth Taylor. I couldn’t leave her in that dump, I just couldn’t. So I brought you both home.
‘Of course, she was resistant at first. But I think she was so weak that she gave in. I remember that she spent a long time looking at me. Staring at my hair and something over my head. I told her she could have the spare room for a bit and that she looked like she could do with a good feed. That’s when she agreed. I wouldn’t wonder if she might have been half starved. It was hard back then. You didn’t get the sort of help you do these days. And for a baby you were small too.
‘She didn’t have many belongings: a couple of skirts and jumpers and some baby clothes.’ He frowned sadly at the memory. ‘It wasn’t meant to be a long-term affair. For the first few months she kept talking about moving on. She’d been running from something. And don’t ask me what that was – she never spoke about it. Even after we were married. It took me about a year to convince her she could trust me. I think she did in the end. Eventually, months turned into a year and we got around to tying the