‘No?’
‘Didn’t do sciences.’
‘Ah,’ the doctor said. ‘Yes, you need to be able to do the maths … Your father’s already been mentioning some VIPs the hotel is hosting in a couple of weeks. Something to aim for is always good. Hollywood types, I expect?’
‘Politicians.’
‘Ah, right … The conference?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, he’s got age on his side.’
‘Has he?’
‘He’s not even middle-aged yet, not really.’
She thought about this. ‘He’s forty-five.’
Dr Haswell lifted his clipboard and tapped it. ‘Yes, exactly.’
She popped another piece of Hubba into her mouth. Her father’s snores stopped and started again. ‘How long does the average man live to?’
‘The average? I forget. In the UK, seventy-seven or seventy-six, maybe.’
‘He’s over halfway then,’ she said.
‘In a sense.’
‘He’s very much in the middle of his ultimate age, in all senses. Fast approaching the final third, in fact.’
‘Well —’
‘Listen, Anthony,’ she said, and watched his brown eyes go wide. It was a good trick. People always forgot they were wearing name badges. It was the same at corporate functions at the Grand. ‘I’m just doing the maths.’
Anthony Haswell grinned and looked away, his eyes tracking back to her with cautious warmth, and there came from inside the room a groan combined with a creak. ‘Welcome,’ her father said, ‘to the not-so-grand hotel.’ You could tell he’d been waiting for a chance to use the line.
Wandering around the Grand in a dark suit and clean white shirt, making mediocre jokes and taking control of minor crises, her father could still look handsome. In here, under bright lights, wearing a tight short-sleeved tunic thing that appeared to be made of paper, he simply looked old. For how long had his eyes looked this grey? When had his ears become fluffy? Pale, pale. She could smell fag smoke on his skin as he beckoned her forward for a kiss. His lips were cold on her cheek.
She thought it best to hold his hand. A big hand, full of rough knuckles and veins, klutzy as a crab. She held it. Holding her dad’s hand felt weird. She slipped from his grip and poured him some water. Her leg was jigging up and down, no reason.
‘So how come you look like a dead person?’ she said.
He sighed and closed his eyes. ‘Frey, you get it from your mother.’
‘What?’
‘Blunt when nervous. A reluctance to beat around the bush.’
‘The only thing.’
‘What is?’
‘It’s the only thing I get from her.’
He coughed and winced. The wince was sizeable but the cough was small, way short of a proper hack, a kind of diet cough that seemed to admit he wasn’t as good at getting stuff out of his throat as he was at throwing stuff in. Last night she’d put a toothbrush in her mouth and cried. She’d felt angry with him, and sorry for him, and then tired and confused, and now she was a bit defiant again, or an aimless combination of everything.
‘Your mother said once, after half a lifetime of accusing me of beating around the bush, and urging me to cut to the chase, that she’d discovered from a fellow Linguistics lecturer, an Australian guy, that it was actually, etymologically speaking, essential to do one before the other.’
‘Huh?’
‘In bird hunts. It was important for participants to first beat around the bushes. Because only then could other participants cut to the chase, which meant to catch the quarry in nets. Something like that, anyway.’
‘Right.’
‘Beating about the bush is of course the more popular variant now.’
‘If I admit that this is gripping, can we talk about your health?’
A seagull squawked outside and they both looked up, with curious choreography, at the room’s tiny window. The sun, not knowing what was appropriate, had risen this morning as usual. The weather couldn’t last. The stinging drizzle and leaping foam would return, people hunkering down into the collars of their coats, that special British wince reserved for walking in the rain. A gold test tube of light extended from the sill to a far corner of the floor. Freya felt a little hot, a little woozy. She crossed and recrossed her legs, blew upward at her hair. A kid rode past the window on a bike, no hands. A blur of wheels, the click-click-click of Spokey Dokeys.
‘So,’ she said. ‘I mean, what’s the situation?’ Information, please. Information.
He shifted a little in the bed. ‘Everyone has off days, Frey. I’m already feeling better. Aspirin, it turns out, is a lifesaver. Aspirin! It can’t be bad if the thing they’re giving me now is aspirin. The procedure —’
‘The operation.’
‘Was a success.’
There was silence for a while. The word ‘success’ seemed to take his thoughts off on a tangent.
She waited a while and then said, ‘Dad?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You know Grandad? Your dad?’
‘Used to,’ he said, smiling weakly again.
‘Am I right in thinking …?’
He hesitated. ‘Heart attacks are very common things, Frey. You’ve got to die of something.’ He scratched his head. ‘Poor choice of words.’
‘Right.’
‘But he was — it was a different situation.’
They sat in silence.
Ordinarily her father could talk at length about any number of subjects. His main complaint over the last few years was her silence, the more refined allegation being that when he asked her about herself — on the way home from school, over breakfast, on the drive to work — she became what he called an elective mute. What he didn’t realise was that after school she was all talked out, and in the mornings she was deliriously tired. They were completely the worst times of day to catch her.
He was particularly obsessed, recently, with the idea that she should go to university. And yet in her eyes he was a living example of the fact university wasn’t everything. He’d never got a degree, but alongside his diving and all those random jobs he used to do, teaching and tutoring and dive-coaching and the extra money from moonlighting as a concierge in that New York hotel, he’d managed to listen to radio programmes about almost everything. He was, for her, a bearer of information: the next exhibition at the Booth Museum, upcoming rates at rival hotels like the Metropole. When he was healthy his blue eyes shone. Those eyes knew things, knew and knew and knew. He could fix a car and unblock a pipe, he could say ‘You’re welcome’ in Swahili and ‘Train station’ in Mandarin, he could recite passages from that Tristram Shandy book her mother had given him in a special edition. He could reel off the first 200 digits of pi. He didn’t seem to see any value in these abilities, but Freya did. She was, though she’d never dream of saying it out loud, impressed by him. And if in life he’d failed to live up to the expectations he’d had of himself, which was what her mother always described as Your Father’s Big Problem, then it seemed to her that those failures related to the real world, not to his education, and therefore fell short of proving that university was worth doing. He’d never actually been to China, or places where they spoke Swahili. He never made it past class six of a language course. You couldn’t always say that he was good at finishing things. Around two-thirds of the way through executing a long-cherished plan he appeared to get massively bored. He’d begin unblocking a pipe on floor four of the Grand — save the hotel some money on a plumber — and then, when an extra hour of work would have completed the job, he’d tire of the task and call a plumber. He’d buy himself some discount jogging gear for Christmas, spend New Year’s morning doing pre-run stretches, and then make himself a coffee and act like the run was done. He never seemed apathetic about a thing until the exact point at which he was apathetic, and then the thing was dead to him forever.