Anyway, he’d not only found out Mum’s whereabouts but was asking what had become of me, his daughter. After all this time, nearly half a century! I think Mum had even persuaded herself that he was dead, just through sticking to that story for so long, no matter how I pressed her for the truth (with other people, as far as I know, she never even discussed him). She fell out dreadfully over the whole business with Uncle Ray, who in the first flush of excitement had responded to the stranger, giving him Mum’s new married name and her telephone number. She and Ray didn’t speak for months, until my stepfather and Ray’s wife engineered a reconciliation.
I begged Mum to tell me what exactly my father had said to her: I was more interested in this fact of my parents’ contact than in any implications it had for me.
— Oh, I don’t know, Stella. We only spoke for a few minutes. The usual.
— What d’you mean, the usual? It can’t have been usual!
— I mean, just the usual sort of things that people say.
— How did he sound? Did you recognise his voice right away?
— Of course I did, I’m not senile. He wanted to know what you were doing and I told him. He’s going to ask Ray to pass his email whatsit on to you, so you can be in touch with him if you really want to.
I longed to have overheard how she reacted when she realised it was him: raw perhaps, for once, and startled, implicated. After all, she hadn’t put the phone down on him. Was she alone in the house when he called? She was. Had she asked him about his life, what it had been? That was none of her business, she said.
— But what was it like? How did you feel, when you knew it was him?
— I was trying to think of a way to get rid of him.
In the end I took my cue from Mum: I decided I wasn’t eager to see my father. And of course I might have met him anyway, when I had driving lessons so long ago from a man with the same name. I still remembered how we had liked each other and how proud he had been of my driving. I was wary of spoiling it now: either finding out my instructor wasn’t my father after all, or, if he was, then muddling the decent clarity of our old contact with new overlays of guilt and effort. Ray gave me the email address, but I never did anything about getting in touch.
In the wake of the little drama of my father’s turning up, my mother was peculiar: cross and flattening, impatient with my stepfather if he was slow or forgot things. I felt sorry for Gerry, flinching under her brisk regime where everything personal and emotional had to be tidied out of sight — just when he might have liked to open up more expansively. He was still physically fit and energetic in his seventies and he was allowing himself new luxuries of feeling: listening to classical music, cooking, growing passionate over the birds visiting his garden. It felt for a while as if he and I were allied together against Mum and her lack of imagination, or her refusal of it. I made a point then of often taking Ester round to see them, because she and Gerry got on so well; he could occupy himself with her for hours, involving himself seriously in her games. He found something painfully poignant, I think, in her sweet looks and contained, fastidious manners: she was his bossy princess, he was her dedicated retainer. He asked me once, while we were watching her on the swing that he’d put up for her, how Sheila could bear to see her when she came visiting from Brazil.
— I’d have thought it would have been better for her to make a clean break, he said. — Never to set eyes on the child.
Defensive, I assumed that he was criticising our whole arrangement (my mother had predicted disaster when we first took Ester on). I was ready to be brash: no, why should she mind, so long as Ester was happy? When I realised he was genuinely interested, I told him what Sheila had said when we talked about it once: that she was surprised how far she was able to choose not to feel regretful. — Obviously she’s sad sometimes, for a while. But it surprises her, how most of the time it is all right. She says she’s come to the conclusion that the biology — the blood and genes and stuff — only means as much as you choose it to. You either confer that power, emotionally, on the genetic connection, or you don’t. Likewise, you could confer the power on someone who isn’t genetically related to you.
Then Gerry and I realised that we could be talking about ourselves, and my relation to him, so we were both uncomfortable and changed the subject.
It is fun and sinful, shopping with Madeleine. It’s supposed to be Christmas shopping even though it’s only late October; we have congratulated ourselves on our resourceful forward thinking. But the truth is that at least half of what we spend is on ourselves, on clothes and shoes and bits of jewellery. I don’t often shop so impulsively these days, spending so much at once: it feels like being drunk (actually we probably are slightly drunk, having shared a bottle of wine at lunch), caught up in heady anticipations, believing we can renew ourselves and be different by changing our clothes. All day I am greedily interested in owning things. I’m paying cash but Madeleine’s putting all her purchases on her credit card; I’m anxious about debt because of those long years when I had no money to spare, but she reassures me that she can pay it all off later. And after all it’s only a technicality, where the spending comes from: owning the money doesn’t make it more or less virtuous. The power of the bright flood of things in the shops is overwhelming, dazzling — and a triumph of taste, because there’s much more nice stuff to go around now than there used to be. It’s as if some ancient knot of material difficulty has come unfastened all at once, old puritan certainties have slipped away; but a residue of that grit makes me uncomfortable. (And Mac doesn’t like credit cards. He’s always on the side of manufacturing: he says we should be making things to sell, not buying things with money we don’t have.)
Madeleine is using her mother’s car and gives me a lift back to the flat afterwards. Alone there, surrounded by my carrier bags, I embark on an anxious session of trying the clothes I’ve bought, pulling them on with abandon, discarding them crumpled and inside out on the bed. When it’s over I feel guilty and cheated and I have to run a bath because I’m sticky with sweat. I’m not sure now whether anything I’ve bought really suits me; I’m afraid in case I’ve lost my good judgement, or don’t know any longer how I want to appear. Last summer when I was looking through clothes on a rail in a shop I saw a young girl’s glance slide over me, embarrassed by my mistake in thinking those fashions could be meant for anyone my age. I’m relieved that I’ve arranged to go round to Luke and Janine’s for supper; I don’t want to stay in the flat alone with my purchases. I put on one of the new blouses, gauzy and flowery, over new leggings, then I take these off again and put on my old jeans and a white shirt. I’ve bought presents for Luke and Janine — a jumper for him and a bag for her — and I decide not to keep them for Christmas but to give them away now, like an expiation.
Luke and Janine are both junior-school teachers. They’re buying a tiny terraced house on a steep street in Totterdown, which was where I brought Luke to live with my Auntie Jean when he was a new baby. Jean and Frank are still around the corner; Jean probably sees Luke as often as I do. It was a working-class district then; now it’s alternative middle-class as well, with lots of young families, some of the houses painted in bright colours as if it was the Mediterranean. Luke and Janine grow vegetables in the back garden and Luke wants to install solar panels on the roof; he’s good at all those practical kinds of things. They are pleased but bemused by my presents. Janine says that she has a bag already, but that she will save the new one until she needs it. I don’t explain to her that if you’re like Madeleine you don’t have just one handbag at a time but a whole cupboard full of different ones to choose from, to go with different outfits.