If My Father Loved Me

I hadn’t minded before about him being out of the house so much of the time. It was the normal state of affairs, and Faye and I were used to being on our own together. I remember watching and helping her to bake cakes. The first Victoria sponge that was all my own work was decorated with the wobbly word ‘Dad,’ piped in blue icing using a paper bag and a serrated icing nozzle. It was two days before he came home to taste it and the lettering had bled into the sponge beneath.

‘I’m only nipping out for an hour or so,’ Ted said.

I had heard that one before. I wheedled, ‘Don’t go.’

He only winked at me, impatient to be gone. ‘Tell you what, I’ll ask Mrs Maloney to come and sit with you.’

Mrs Maloney was a widow who lived a few doors away. Our north London outer suburban street was on a steep hill and the semi-detached, semi-Tudoresque little houses stood in stepped pairs in their strips of garden. Mrs Maloney’s house was higher up than ours and I hated the thought of her looking down at our roof and the leggy rose bushes that lined the creosoted fence. She had wind, and was smelly and lugubrious. I hated being alone in the house, because of the spectres in the folds of the curtains and the whispers in the empty rooms, but I hated Mrs Maloney even more. She had to be fed tea and biscuits, and she sat in my mother’s chair swallowing belches and asking me nosy questions.

‘Can’t I come with you?’

I remembered the day at Phebus Fragrances so clearly because it was so unusual for Ted to take me anywhere.

‘Not this time, Princess.’

The doorbell rang, a long, shrill sound that meant the caller must be leaning hard on the button. Not all that many people came to visit us, not unexpectedly, and Ted and I glanced at each other in surprise. He went quickly to the bedroom window and looked down, making sure that he was shielded by the nets.

‘Do me a favour, Sadie. Go downstairs and open the door and tell this man I’m out. You don’t know when I’ll be back. Right?’

I opened the front door. There was a man in a pale fawn coat with leather buttons that looked like shiny walnuts. ‘Is your daddy in?’

I looked him in the eye. ‘No.’

‘When will he be back?’

‘I don’t know.’

The man stared at me so hard that it made me uncomfortable. But this wasn’t the first time I had had to do something like this for Ted. I prided myself on being good at it. I made my face a moon of innocence.

‘Right. Will you give him a message for me?’ The man took out his wallet and selected a card, then wrote a few words on the back. ‘Here you are. Don’t forget, will you?’

I tried to read what he had written as I went back up the stairs. But Ted was on the landing, waiting.

He held out his hand. ‘Well done, Princess.’ He pocketed the card with barely a glance. ‘Don’t want people knowing where we are every hour of the day, do we?’

Once he had made sure that his visitor had really gone he went out himself, whistling. I had homework to do, and after that there was the television for company, and if I needed anything I could always run up the road to Mrs Maloney. But I could never fall asleep until Ted came home again. I lay on my bed, watching the ceiling and waiting until I heard his Ford Consul drawing up outside.

Next I heard his key in the lock, then low voices in the hallway. Sometimes on these late nights there would be a woman’s giggle. Only then, when I knew that after all he hadn’t disappeared for good and left me behind, did I close my eyes. If there was a woman, I pulled the bedclothes over my head and clamped my ears shut.

I screwed the lid back on the bottle and reached to replace it on the shelf. Then I remembered that I was here to sort out his belongings and dropped it into a rubbish sack instead. I still didn’t like his cologne. Maybe it represented the way he wanted to be, or perhaps with his love of secrecy he just relished putting up another smokescreen. But to me it still smelled like a lie.

I cleared the bathroom cupboard of his smoker’s toothpaste and indigestion tablets and corn plasters. I worked methodically, telling myself that these were only inanimate things, the inevitable remnants we would all leave behind, which would be cleared away for us, some day, in our turn. By our children and their children if we were lucky, by strangers if we were not.

Next I went back to the bedroom. I took his jackets and suits off their hangers and piled them up, thinking that maybe they would do for Oxfam. The cuffs were frayed and the trousers bagged, but they were all dry-cleaned and brushed. Ted had grown seedier in old age – he didn’t bother to eat properly, preferring to smoke and nip at glasses of whisky, and he didn’t get his hair cut regularly enough or trim the tufts in his nose and ears – but he was always a dapper dresser. I folded up his thick white silk evening scarf and put it aside, thinking that Lola might like to have it.

The shoes were lined up in a row on the wardrobe floor. The leather was split with deep lateral creases but they were well polished. I turned one pair over and studied the worn-down heels and touched the oval holes in the leather soles. I could see the pattern of his tread, and now that I listened I could hear his footfalls in the silence of the house. But I couldn’t read the man any more clearly than I had ever done.

In the drawers of the tallboy there were socks and pants, and a coil of ties and paisley cravats. I put aside his RAF tie, frayed at the edges where he had tied the knot so many hundreds of times, and consigned the rest to the disposal pile.

I was up to my wrists in his old clothes now and the scent of him was everywhere, but I told myself it was just a job to be done. I kept at it and the pile of black rubbish sacks mounted up on the landing.

The bottom drawer of the tallboy was deeper than the rest. I opened it and saw that it was half full of papers. Reluctantly I knelt down and began to sift through them.

Most of the papers were old bills, but there was an address book with a brown leather cover, and an old-fashioned thumb index with black and red letters and numerals. I flipped through the pages, recognising one or two of the names, dimly remembering some of the others.

There was nothing hidden here. Ted was as inscrutable as he always had been.

In a creased manila envelope I found a handful of photographs. There was one of my mother and me, in the back garden of the old house. I was perhaps four years old, scowling under the brim of a sunhat and wearing a dress with a smocked front that I hated. Faye was characteristically looking into the distance away from the camera, as if she wished herself elsewhere. I had seen this picture before and almost all the others in the envelope, including one of Ted looking rakish and handsome in front of an MG. Somebody else’s MG, although he managed a proprietorial air. There were also four or five photographs of women.

One of them caught my attention. She had a plump face with a round dimpled chin and her hair was arranged in a lacquered fringe in front and drawn up at the sides with combs. The lipsticked margins of her smile spread fractionally beyond the true contours of her lips, giving her a slapdash, come-and-get-me look. She had eyes that slanted upwards and this oriental aspect was emphasised by a thick line of black eyeliner that flicked up beyond the edges of her eyelids.

Auntie Viv.

Viv wasn’t the first of Ted’s girlfriends to be presented to me after my mother died. I could remember Auntie Joyce before her and possibly Auntie Kath as well. But she was one of the longer-lasting aunties and she was memorable because she was friendlier to me than any of the others.

I sat down on the green candlewick cover of Ted’s bed. I was Jack’s age again.

My father called upstairs to me. ‘Sadie? Sadie, come down here and say hello.’

I came out of my bedroom. I had been reading The Whiteoaks of Jalna and wishing that Renny Whiteoak would come and take me away from Dorset Avenue, Hendon. There was a woman standing beside Ted in the hallway.

‘Sadie, this is Auntie Viv.’

I didn’t want any more aunts. I wanted my father at home, sitting with just me in the evenings to watch Hancock’s Half Hour or maybe even helping me with my French homework. I wanted my mother back as well, of course, but even I, with my talent for wishing for what I was never going to get, knew that there was no point in dwelling on this one.

‘Hello, love.’ Auntie Viv grinned up at me. She was wearing a tight skirt with a fan of creases over the thighs, and high heels that tilted her forward and made her bum stick out. I noticed her teased helmet of silvery blonde hair.

‘Hello,’ I muttered.

Auntie Viv made me sit beside her on the sofa. Ted brought out the gin bottle and the best glasses with diamonds and stars incised on them.

‘Give her a little one,’ Viv suggested and, to my amazement, Ted poured me a small glass of sweet Martini.

‘Cheers, love,’ Viv said, and took a gulp of her gin and tonic. She scissored her fingers – red varnished nails, lots of rings – in my hair. ‘Hasn’t she got lovely hair? Is it natural?’

I thought this was a stupid question. I was twelve. As if I would be able to choose to have my hair permed or dyed or even set. And if I had, as if I would have chosen my side-parted, no-nonsense short wavy cut that I wore with a pink plastic hairslide in the shape of a ribbon bow. ‘Yes,’ I said stiffly, but I couldn’t help yielding a little to Viv’s admiration. They made an unfamiliar pair of sensations for me, the being admired and the yielding.

‘Auntie Viv’s a ladies’ hairdresser,’ Ted explained. ‘We’re planning a little business venture together. A range of hair-care products, exclusive, of course, but affordable too.’

‘Shampoos, setting lotion, conditioner,’ Viv said dreamily. ‘Your dad’s going to create them for me. My own range.’

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Will they be in Boots?’

Ted gave me one of his cold, quelling looks but Viv nodded. ‘Of course they will. And in all the salons. With my expertise in the field of hairstyling and your dad’s genius as a fragrance artist – he is, you know – we will be creating something every woman will want to buy and experience.’

I was impressed. Ted splashed some more gin into Viv’s glass. They settled down for a business talk, but Viv told me that I should listen in. The ideas of the younger market were always important, she said.

I listened eagerly for a while. Viv had a lot of ideas for names and the shapes of the bottles and packages. She drew sketches in a notebook, tore out the leaves and handed them to Ted and me for our approval. The bottles were waisted and curvy, like Viv herself, and the colours tended to the pink and gold. She wanted to call the shampoo Vivienne.

Ted was more interested in formulations and how to buy in ready-mixed solutions for the various products to which we could then add our own fragrance and superior packaging. ‘It’s the way we’ll make money, mark my words. Basic lines, but given an exclusive touch.’

They both drank a couple more large gins and I drained the sticky dregs of my Martini. ‘Thirsty work,’ Auntie Viv mouthed at me. The drink made me sleepy, and my arms and legs felt like plasticine when I shifted on the sofa. After a while Viv went into the kitchen, wobbling a little on her high heels, and made a plate of Cream Crackers with slices of cheese and a blob of pickle on top. Viv turned on the television. She chatted through the News, mostly gossip about her customers and questions about Ted’s work. She sat close up against him and let one of her shoes swing loose from her nyloned toes. After we had finished eating she leaned her head back against the cushions and closed her eyes. Her hand stroked the nape of my father’s neck.

‘Hop off to bed, now, Sadie,’ Ted said.

I began to protest, made confident by Martini and inclusion, but he fixed me with his icy grey stare.

‘Goodnight, pet,’ Viv murmured. ‘See you soon.’

In the morning she was nowhere to be seen. While I made myself toast and a cup of tea before school I asked Ted, who was silently reading the newspaper, ‘Will Auntie Viv be coming again?’

He looked at me as if I was mad. ‘Yes, of course she will.’ Then he refolded the Daily Express and went on reading.

That was the beginning of quite a good time. Ted was still out of the house a lot, maybe even more than before Viv arrived, but I assumed that when he wasn’t at home with me he was with her. Viv was safe territory, I felt. She brought me her Woman and Woman’s Own every week when she had finished reading them. She played about with devising hairstyles for me and chatted about lipsticks and clothes. One evening she brought a glass bottle with a bulb spray out of her handbag. She sprayed the insides of my wrists and showed me how to rub them together to warm the skin.

‘What do you think?’ Her face was pink with excitement.

I thought the perfume was wonderful. It smelled of cloves and carnations, and it made me think of velvet dresses and candle-light reflected in tall mirrors. Ted stood watching us, one hand slipped into his jacket pocket, one eyebrow raised.

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