Chapter 18
Rachel
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to call an ambulance? You didn’t hit your head?’
My father slowly swivels his neck from left to right. ‘Fully intact. I told you, it was just a little stumble.’
He’s downplaying it now. But he called me earlier, mortified, to ask if I could pop round and help him up off the floor after he tripped on his way to the bathroom.
I make tea and we sit together by the open fire, because today's been unseasonably chilly. Dad’s house is a time-warp mid-terrace, all terracotta carpets and flower-power curtains, wood-panelled walls and rattan lampshades straight out of the seventies.
To anyone else, aesthetically I’m sure it’s mayhem.
To me, it represents my father, comfort, home.
I feel Dad watching me over the rim of his cup. He certainly seems okay, if a little embarrassed by what happened. He’s in his mid-seventies now, has the white hair and laughter lines to show for it. But his mind and eyes are still diamond-sharp.
‘And how are things with you, my darling?’
He asks me this because he knows. Always does, always has.
It is not easy, of course, explaining the concept of the pill to a man who’s lived through two world wars and once extracted three of his own teeth because he was too impatient to wait for a dentist’s appointment.
But luckily Dad has never not taken me seriously.
Growing up, I could always rely on him to enter make-believe worlds with me, indulge my imagination, patiently help me pick through whatever maze of overthinking I’d got lost in that day, however trivial it was in reality.
After I’ve told him, he stares for a long time into the orange flare of the fire.
‘We were going to start trying for a family next year,’ I say.
‘Stability,’ he says slowly, eventually. ‘That’s what children need.’
He has always felt deeply guilty, I know, that he could not offer me this.
‘I think a lot of Josh. You know that, darling. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t advise you to consider the direction your life might take if one day you’re . . . fifty, and Josh is twenty-nine.’
The first afternoon I ever introduced Dad to Josh, at the Cat and Fiddle, they both somehow seemed to sense they could skip over the small talk, not bother with routine pleasantries.
They just wrapped their hands around their pint glasses and got straight into the miners’ strikes, and Margaret Thatcher, and why Josh had written his first book, and how he’d felt growing up without a father, and the peculiarities of his family tree, and Dad’s own tricky childhood in Lincolnshire.
Which was classic Josh, I’d already learned, after just a month together.
Heart on his sleeve, no pretensions. Years later, Dad told me that, by the end of that first evening, he felt he’d made a friend.
‘You know,’ Dad says thoughtfully, ‘in the end, I did actually grow to respect your mother for leaving. Once some time had passed, I mean.’
Surprised, I lower my cup. He’s never told me that before. But maybe, deep down, I already knew.
‘She was braver than me, you see. Sometimes, staying means holding out for changes that will never come. Accepting something that is irretrievably broken, and losing yourself in the process. Sometimes, the healthier thing is to walk away. Sometimes, you leave with love.’
I stare at him, blinking back a hot rush of tears. ‘Dad. You think I should leave?’
He takes a long time to answer me. ‘I know how much you want to start a family.’
I’ve never made a secret of it: that, to me, a future without kids would be like a picture with no pigment. Not wholly incomplete, but a sense of something missing, always.
I stare into the fire, watching the flames lick and leap. ‘It feels so complicated now. Having kids would feel . . . like a risk.’
Dad nods, then leans forward to take my hand. He smells of spice and vanilla, the same brand of soap bar he has used his whole life. ‘Then the only question you have to answer is: do you want to be a mother more than you want to be with Josh?’