Chapter Ten London Tuesday 28 September 2004
Chapter Ten
London
On Saturday mornings, Olivia would visit her father.
She would stop off at the corner of Glebe Road, in the little convenience store, and buy a newspaper and two bacon rolls.
She would go around the back, knock on the door, and she and Charlie would sit at the kitchen table, eat the rolls and drink giant mugs of tea, and catch up on their news.
She would stay for a couple of hours and leave just before lunch.
They would hug in the doorway and Charlie would tell her to ‘be good’, and she would tell him not to have another bacon roll until the following Saturday, as he had to keep an eye on his health.
Today, though, she was going to her father’s on a Tuesday evening, as it was his birthday.
Charlie Sackville’s flat in Pimlico was on the ground floor of a three-storey low building, flanked by a brick wall with separate gateways; an ex-council property Charlie had bought with a mortgage back in the mid-eighties as part of the government’s Right to Buy scheme.
As he was often to be found, her father was out the back this evening, in the little covered yard, working on something at his bench, a cigarette sizzling in a seashell ashtray at one corner.
‘Happy birthday, Dad!’ Olivia waved with one hand, held up a gift bag with the other. ‘What are you making?’ she asked him, walking over to the bench. Charlie was wearing his old blue jeans with the scuffed knees. A navy V-neck jumper. His beloved, old blue and yellow Gola trainers.
‘A skateboard deck,’ he said, running his hand over the board’s smooth flank.
His sandy blond hair was sticking up, as usual.
Charlie’s hair had been doing its own thing all his life.
‘I’m making it for one of the teenagers next door.
They’ve got the wheels, I’m doing the board, then I’ll put the two together for them, do the grip tape, and all that. ’
‘And then spend the rest of the year trying not to get run over by them on the front path,’ said his daughter.
Charlie smiled. Gillian, her godmother, always said that he and Olivia had the same smile, that his daughter was a mini female version of him. ‘Two peas in a pod,’ Gillian always said. ‘Two blond, blue-eyed peas.’
Charlie had been a carpenter since he was a teenager.
At fifteen, he had asked his mother if he could go to art school, and she had apparently roared with laughter and answered, ‘No.’ Art school was for rich people, she’d told him; he better catch on to himself and learn a trade.
So, he’d become a carpenter’s apprentice when he left school and still worked, crafting bars and cabinetry for pubs, had done for twenty years.
And in his spare time he enjoyed taking on small projects for members of the local community, like a skateboard for the neighbours, or a shelving unit or picture frame for a drop-in centre.
Charlie was a man of few words, with a daughter full of them. He was a man who could make anything with the right tools and the right wood.
‘It looks really good,’ said Olivia, about the skateboard.
‘Yes, I’m pleased with it,’ Charlie replied with obvious satisfaction. He stood back a little, studied the board from a different angle. ‘Are we keeping you up?’ he asked, as he caught Olivia suppressing a yawn.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit tired. Been burning the candle at both ends.
’ And she had a deadline tomorrow morning for a film review that she had to do when she got back to King’s Cross tonight.
Still, that was no problem; they wouldn’t be out late.
‘And it’s a bit chilly out here.’ She gave an involuntary shiver.
‘Shall we go in? What time is Gillian coming?’
‘About half past.’ Her godmother was taking Charlie and Olivia out for his birthday treat that evening – a behind-the-scenes visit to the Gielgud Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, to admire the craftmanship of a wooden set for an upcoming production of The Merchant of Venice, designed by leading set designer – and Gillian’s old mate from university – Maxwell Holt.
‘She said we’re walking there. For the exercise.
Not that I need any more after the day I’ve had. ’
Charlie stifled a contented yawn; his days were long and physical. He covered the work bench with a familiar piece of old green tarpaulin, and father and daughter went inside.
‘Would you like a drink? Lemon squash?’
‘Yes, please, Dad.’
Charlie wandered into the kitchen. Olivia remained in the sitting room, looking around at all the trinkets and the photos, like she always did.
There were photographs everywhere: on the mantelpiece of the fake coal gas fire, on top of the television, on occasional tables between the floral chenille three-piece suite.
Photographs with thick gilt frames: Olivia as a baby, a toddler, a teenager.
Olivia in her graduation gown in three different iterations: smiling at the camera in the professional close-up shot; outside Canterbury Cathedral with her dad looking combed-down and trussed up in a suit; throwing the mortar board in the air with Annabel and Stella, their faces a blur of laughter.
Her parents’ wedding photo. There they were, coming out of the church door, same height, same smile, doused in confetti and gratitude for one another.
A picture of Charlie standing next to a cabinet he’d made for a pub, sleeves rolled up, cigarette dangling from one hand.
And Ann Sackville perched on a stool at the local working men’s club, singing her beloved country and western songs, for, yes, shy Ann had been a singer occasionally, and she’d been paid for it, too – a little pin money, when word got out.
Charlie told his daughter that her shyness disappeared when she sat up on that stool and her voice rang out clear and true.
He said she had sung while doing the ironing and when mopping the floor.
She had even sung a little in the hospital, at the end, just to keep the nurses’ spirits up.
‘Want a custard cream, Livvy Mivvie?’ Dad called from the kitchen.
‘Yes, please!’ Lemon squash and a custard cream biscuit, that was what Olivia had always had. She sat in one of the armchairs, everything facing the television, and fingered the doily on the arm she had once used as a lacey bed cover for her Sindy doll.
‘You still like them?’
‘Of course, Dad.’
‘Thought you might just be eating posh biscuits these days,’ he said, coming out from the kitchen with a plate and a glass. His mop of hair was smoothed down a little, from the tap. ‘The ones from Prince Charles’ shop.’
‘Oh, stop it, Dad!’ He was always teasing her about turning out posh. ‘Here’s your present.’
He sat on the armchair opposite. Olivia reached forward and gave him the gift bag. He pulled out the present in the racing car wrapping paper and opened it.
‘What is it?’ Charlie held the garment aloft. Red and navy stripes. Pure new wool. Tassels that dangled all the way to the floor.
‘It’s a scarf, Dad. You say your neck gets cold.’
‘Well, it does. Thank you, Liv.’
He folded the scarf back up and placed it on the arm of the chair.
Olivia’s heart sank. She had gone wrong again.
Her gift was too long, too preppy, too Oxford and Cambridge.
He wasn’t going to wear it; he had his tatty old West Ham scarf he wore in winter.
She was buying things for her taste, not his.
‘I’m pleased you like it, Dad,’ she muttered, and he smiled brightly at her, put his hand in his hair and messed it up again.
‘It’s really great,’ he said, and she worried a little about them growing apart.
The university-educated daughter who spoke in a different voice now.
Who worked in the media, wanted to become a writer one day, and who had ideals and ambitions.
Her carpenter father, whose front room and outlook never changed, who still grieved for his wife and kept everything the same for her: the furniture, the photographs, the brown bone china horse, the print of the dog looking up at the boy that hung on the wall above the television.
Olivia barely remembered her mother, her recollections dream-like, shot into fragments.
A face, close to hers on Christmas morning, as she sat by the tree opening a Tiny Tears doll.
The softness of a blouse against her cheek.
A laugh on a summer’s afternoon in the garden, for it was the sound of her mother that had seemingly stayed with her the most. On starting primary school, the songs they sang in assembly, cross-legged in class rows across the wooden floor – ‘Lord of the Dance’, and ‘He’s Got the Whole World in his Hands’ – surprised Olivia by being strangely and comfortingly familiar.
She had asked her father about them, and he told Olivia her mother had sung those songs softly to her daughter when she had put her to bed.
There was a knock at the window, behind the nets that still hung there. A cheerful face. Short, charcoal-grey hair, a little flicky over the ears. Tortoiseshell cats-eye glasses. Bright lively eyes.
‘There she is!’
Charlie let Gillian in. She was a tall woman with broad shoulders, wearing jeans tucked into knee-high boots, an acorn-coloured cape and a big grin. She had her tapestry carpet bag over her shoulder.
‘No sign of spring yet, then,’ she announced, as the cold air from outside was shut out again by the closing of the front door. ‘It’s brassic out there tonight.’