gone alone. He’d been very late picking me up. I remember waiting on the school steps, getting nervous. Then panicky. Dusk had gathered. No mobile, of course, and my mouth had lost all its moisture. I had him dead in a ditch. I started to cry, which turned into hysterics. By the time Dad arrived, I was shaking with sobs, and even though he was beside me, holding me, I couldn’t stop. Wave after wave broke over me, all to do with a terrible sense of loss. Because despite Dad being so brilliant, and despite the fantastic support of Gran and Barbara, I’d lost my mother. And I didn’t have siblings. It would be too convenient to hope I’d come out of that unscathed. I was left with an impenetrable fear of being alone.
The only time I felt like that again, that terrible rising panic, just the tip of it even, was when I put down the phone to Ben on the stairs in Clapham. When he told me he’d met someone in New York. I’d recognized the signs. Felt them bubbling within me, as, with a trembling hand, I’d put the brush back in my nail varnish. And it had scared the living daylights out of me. I’d acted fast.
Gran was long dead now, though, and the support network had dwindled with her. Now it was my father who was very much alone. Not that it bothered him. Left to his own devices he went his own sweet, shambolic way. I tried not to show my despair as we left the filly in her immaculate stable, crossed the yard and went through the peeling back door, which Dad had to shoulder-barge twice, and into the kitchen. Raddled blue lino curled on the floor, bare in patches, and the Formica surfaces – what you could see of them for empty tins, cartons of cigarettes and plastic milk bottles – were chipped and pitted. Plates on the side by the sink looked suspiciously clean but then Dad put them down to be licked by the dogs, picked them up later, and later still – I swear this is true though he pooh-poohs it – absent-mindedly put them away thinking they were clean. Even if things were washed, pans and oven trays were always black and crusty. All with what my dad – who, incidentally, barely had a day’s illness in his life – would call an acceptable level of filth.
Upstairs the place smelled of ripe bachelor; downstairs of stale smoke, dogs and saddle soap. The sitting room – I poked my nose in – was, as ever, a homage to the Racing Times and Sporting Life, pagodas of which tottered in every corner. I sighed and shut the door. It was probably no more chaotic than usual, but what had seemed normal when I was growing up looked abnormal the more time I spent away from it. I went to the loo, which I won’t tell you about, but then, to be fair, it got a lot of use. When Dad realized pulling the chain in the upstairs bathroom caused plaster to cascade into the sitting room, he’d done the only sensible thing and put it out of action. Three years ago. I came back and put the kettle on, quietly pleased I’d put my cleaning things in the back of the car. Dad reached for his whisky.
‘You look better, love,’ he remarked, eyeing me narrowly. ‘Much improved. I’m relieved.’ He moved Horse and Hound from a chair and sat down, rolling a cigarette on his knee. Mitch, his Jack Russell, jumped up on his other one, whilst Blanche the beagle scavenged under the table. Elvis crooned softly in the background.
‘I am better. Completely.’
Dad raised his eyebrows.
‘Well, no, OK,’ I conceded. ‘Maybe not. It’s not that simple, is it? I’m still a widow and I’ve still got fatherless children. But that terrible feeling of blundering around in a fog has gone.’ I sat down opposite him, still in my coat for warmth. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see my way out of that and I panicked. Then later, I think I just gave up. Like people do in the snow eventually.’ I wrinkled my brow. ‘It’s weird, Dad, but when he died, I felt pretty abandoned, I can tell you, even though we didn’t have the happiest of marriages. Even though I didn’t really love him. I’d even got to the furious how-dare-he-leave-me stage; quite normal, according to my doctor. But