Chapter 17 Bonds and Boundaries
Bonds and Boundaries
BELLE
Hyde Park feels like the right place to do this. The sun is shining, it’s a mild enough May day that Rosalie is bare-headed, and it’s Dad’s favourite place to hang with his granddaughter.
Of all the accusations that can be laid at Benedict Scott’s door, lack of devotion to his granddaughter is not one of them. The man is enraptured—just as enraptured, Mum tells me, as he was with me when I was the ripe old age of seventeen months.
Catholics love babies. That much is well known. They love babies unconditionally. They prioritise new life at all times, regardless of the mother’s circumstances.
So tell me this: why the fuck can’t my dad prioritise Dex’s unborn baby son?
After that rough conversation with Mum and Dex at Daphne’s, I’ve been biding my time. I knew what I had to do right then. I knew I couldn’t in all good conscience allow my daughter to grow up knowing the unconditional love of her maternal grandfather when her cousin would never even know the man.
However I cut it, however much I stewed and agonised and cried on my husband’s very broad shoulder, I couldn’t find a way around it.
Obviously, I couldn’t pile on while Mum was in the process of serving Dad with divorce papers. There’s taking affirmative action and there’s being downright cruel.
But I’m piling on now, and the knowledge of that fact has my empty stomach rolling and cramping like nobody’s business as I push Rosalie’s stroller into the almost empty toddler pavement hidden away from the Serpentine lake.
Rafe offered to come with me, obviously.
But this is something I have to do myself.
I owe it to my dad to have this conversation one on one.
If Rafe was here, Dad would get even more defensive.
My loyalties will always lie with my husband and daughter, but I don’t want to hurt or humiliate Dad even more than I need to.
I’m strolling around the perimeter of the playground, Rosalie bundled up in my arms, both of us oohing and ahhing over the prettiness of the pink cherry blossoms flanking the play area, when I spot him.
He gives us a cheery wave as he unlatches the kid-proof gate and lets himself in, and my stomach drops.
He looks so happy to see us, in an uncomplicated way that couldn’t be more at odds with the complexity of my feelings towards this man and towards the awful, inhumane wrong I have to do by him.
He’s in a lightweight jacket, one of his pale yellow V-neck sweaters visible underneath it. He rushes over, arms outstretched.
‘Look, Rosalie,’ I whisper to her, turning my body so she can see him. ‘It’s Grandpa!’
She babbles happily, stretching out her own arms, opening and closing her chubby little hands.
In another future, the toddler version of herself would find that Grandpa was always good for an ice cream in the park.
Her five-year-old self would have the delight of Grandpa “finding” chocolate coins hiding behind her ears more often than not.
And her ten-year-old self would know that only Grandpa would stick with a game of Monopoly right through to the end.
I swallow as he approaches, my heart in my stomach. I cannot believe I’m doing this.
To both of them.
‘Hi, darling,’ he says to me, kissing me on the cheek before immediately grabbing Rosalie from me and throwing her up in the air. She giggles. As soon as he’s got her down, he dips his head and plants a huge, wet, noisy raspberry on the side of her neck.
I smile, and she shrieks. ‘I think that means again,’ I say drily.
‘Look at you!’ he exclaims when he’s finished with the raspberries. He takes her hand, and she wraps her fingers around it. ‘Such a pretty girl. Just like her mummy. She’s so like you at that age,’ he says to me. ‘Apart from the eyes, it’s almost uncanny. You were so blonde.’
He’s mentioned this many, many times over the past year and a half, but it’s never hurt like it does now. Rosalie has Rafe’s beautiful dark eyes, but her hair is still white blonde. It’s a striking, and gorgeous, combination.
‘Let’s get you in the swing, shall we?’ he asks her, trotting briskly over to the baby swings.
He lowers her in, feeding her legs through the gaps and encouraging her to grip the plastic bar at the front before pulling the swing gently towards him and letting it go with a dramatic whoosh sound. Rosalie squeaks with delight.
I study him as he swings her. He looks in pretty good shape, even if he’s clearly lost weight.
While Mum and he had what I would call a Nineteen Fifties relationship, they’re affluent enough to have had a lot of help.
So Dad hasn’t been left as that clichéd man of a certain age who can barely microwave his dinner and has no idea how to operate a washing machine. He’s well looked after.
His original reaction to Mum serving him with divorce papers will have surprised no one who knows him, least of all us and Mum.
He was a coldly seething mass of righteous fury, I suspect in equal parts because he finds the idea of dissolving a sacred union to be a terrible sin and because he has been put in a situation over which he has no control.
Things have calmed down somewhat since then.
From what I’ve heard, he spoke to a few friends in both religious and financial circles who basically told him he had no choice but to go along with Mum’s wishes.
Dad will always see himself as married to Mum in the eyes of God, a view he’s entitled to, because it has absolutely no bearing on Mum’s ability to move on and even remarry, if she ever wanted to.
I’m shipping her and Charles Hunter very hard.
The good, if slightly weird, thing is that I don’t think Dad’s daily life has actually changed that much since Mum moved out.
Work and church are still his entire life.
He’s got a few years to go till full retirement, thank goodness, and he goes to Mass every bloody day.
So while he’s lost his life partner, he’s retained the trappings of his life.
Even if he’s about to lose another of his absolute favourites things in it.
I know this is such an awful thing to say, but sometimes Dad’s faith feels like dementia.
I don’t say that to diminish the validity of his beliefs or to suggest that they’re in any way delusional, only to observe that, like dementia, his faith is a rabbit hole down which he tends to disappear, leaving all of his loved ones behind.
It’s a place in which none of us can reach him.
And, like dementia (from what I understand of it, anyway), it gives us cruelly perfect glimpses of the person he was, the person we loved, before this affliction ravaged him and made him often incomprehensible and sometimes unrecognisable.
Since that awful day that Dad walked in on Rafe stark bollock naked in his (Dad’s) kitchen and he and I had to sit down and have a really big, really scary talk, I’ve had a pretty straightforward and intentionally strict approach to my relationship with him:
Meet him where he is.
Understand what he is and is not capable of giving me as a father.
Erect firm boundaries to protect myself and, now, my family.
That’s it.
It’s made for a superficial, politely strained relationship—until Rosalie came along and dazzled us all and built some bridges, forged some common ground, between us, at least. But I’ve been okay with that.
I chose it, and I made peace with the sacrifices it involved, because it was an imperfectly harmless compromise.
I’ve even allowed myself to grieve for the relationship we will never have.
I don’t know if it’s Rosalie that’s ramped my mama bear tendencies up to ninety, but when I am complicit in a relationship from which my brother and now his unborn son are excluded, I cannot fucking stand for it any longer.
Watching how sweet, how adoring, he is with Rosalie, hurts in so many ways.
It hurts because, to use my dementia analogy again, this feels like a lucid moment, a snapshot of the father I idolised when I was a little girl.
It hurts because holding space for that conflict between Dad’s profound flaws and his equally profound capacity for love and tenderness is as exhausting as it is agonising.
It hurts because I know that the action I have to take will cause him more heartache than possibly anything else I could do.
Finally, it hurts because I can already imagine how beautiful, how innocent and perfect and magical, my nephew will be, and I can’t fathom how Dad could deny him what he gives so freely to Rosalie.
* * *
I don’t bring up anything heavy until Dad and Rosalie have finished their session on the swings and he and I are sitting on a bench watching her potter. She falls over a couple of times, but the rubber flooring means she’s back up again, smiling and laughing, in moments.
My daughter’s very innocence—her sense of wonder, her readiness to laugh at all manner of things—is the most enchanting thing in my life. Maybe in my father’s, too. Their relationship is so beautiful. So uncomplicated.
But it makes me wonder if what looks like unconditional love is actually contingent on a very rigid set of conditions.
He loved me like that once, and he loves me still, but he doesn’t approve of me.
Perhaps the free pass to my dad’s love is only eligible until you’re old enough to start having opinions of your own.
Exhibit A: me.
Exhibit B: Dex.
I start small.
‘How are you getting on?’ I ask innocuously.
‘I’m fine,’ he answers. His tone is just shy of curt, with a defensive edge.
‘You look well.’
‘I am. I’m in training—I’ve been doing a fifteen-mile walk twice a week. There’s a pilgrimage to Walsingham at the end of the month.’
I raise my eyebrows. ‘Impressive.’ That explains the weight loss. Walsingham is a millennium-old Catholic shrine to Our Lady, and it’s got to be a good hundred miles from London.