I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day - Milly Johnson Page 0,51

man, totally work-focused. He was gruff and rough, his manner brusque and he’d been warped and damaged by being rejected for another man, but he never missed an opportunity to boast about his son. ‘Oh that lad of mine has got us into Waitrose, I knew he would’; ‘I told him, I said, our Jack’s the man to talk to about that, he’d know’; ‘Jack’ll take this place to heights I’m not clever enough to do’.

Mary took in a fortifying breath. She was about to overstep the mark and, again, she’d probably get shot down for it, but what did she really have to lose now?

‘I can tell you without any doubt, Jack, that your dad loved you very much and he was so proud of you. And just in case you’re wondering how I know that, it’s because he told me he did.’

Jack’s hand stilled on the glass he was drying. ‘Did he? When?’

‘Loads of times. He’d put the phone down after talking to you and sort of smile as he said, “That was my lad on the phone.” ’

She could go further, decided she should.

‘He once said to me: “I’m proud of our Jack, Mary. You mark my words, he’ll take this company to new heights,” and he was pleased as punch when you got the Waitrose order. He once told me he’d sent you away to school because he wanted you to have the best education he could afford, as there was no point in having money if you couldn’t spend it on those you loved.’

She saw Jack swallow before he asked her, ‘He said that? Really?’

‘I wouldn’t lie for effect, Jack,’ a nip in her voice. ‘I remember taking tea in for him one time when he’d just come off the phone to someone. He was smiling and he turned to me and said, “If only I’d known I had it in me to have a son like our Jack, I’d not have waited so long and I’d have had a dozen of ’em.” ’ She imitated Reg’s broad Yorkshire accent as she said it. ‘And I said to him, “You should tell him that, Mr Butterly. He’d be chuffed to bits.” ’

She looked up at Jack to see that he was waiting for her to continue, so she did.

‘…And he said, “I’m not that sort of bloke, Mary. He knows anyway without me having to say it.” ’

The expression on Jack’s face as those words sank into him told Mary that Jack hadn’t had the slightest inkling that ‘he knew anyway’. He looked rocked to the core and she had an overwhelming urge to reach out and touch him, hoping to transmit somehow by proxy the love Reg had for his son, and which she had witnessed. She didn’t but she told him instead something her own dad had said about the set-up at Butterly’s when she’d spoken to him about it.

‘Some people, especially in that generation, found it hard to say how they felt, as if it was a weakness. I got the feeling that old Bill Butterly wasn’t exactly a loving, hands-on father and maybe your dad never learned from him how to articulate his feelings. Maybe, just maybe he wanted it to get back to you what he was thinking without having to speak the words himself. Maybe that’s why he told me, because he could only manage to say what he felt in an indirect way, because a direct way was just too difficult for him…’

Mary’s words tailed off because Jack looked felled, and that wasn’t the effect she’d hoped to have on him. She went into a momentary panic, cross at herself, expected him to say, ‘Yes, thank you, Mary’, in that same dismissive way he’d used when she’d told him he should be making vegan scones. Then, barely above a whisper, he said, ‘I wish I’d known.’

‘I did try to—’ She stopped herself, poured the water out of the bowl, silently cursing herself for heading towards a conversation that she didn’t want to stray into.

‘Try to what?’

‘Nothing.’

‘It isn’t nothing.’

‘Okay then, I did try to tell you once but you shut me down.’

Jack looked somewhere between dumbstruck and horrified. ‘When? When did I do that?’

‘When you came back to work after your father had died. I knew what you were going through, I knew that you could never have prepared for the impact and I stopped you in the corridor one day to tell you what your dad said to me about you. I