She stood at the lights wheezing and marking time, and when they changed she passed quickly across the road, stumbling on the corner. She was gasping for breath as she ran. Antique shops in Victorian village style, and some of the buildings were older still. There was a pub garlanded in flowers. A bright blue house, she passed it swiftly, noting how clean it was. Polished windows. It was wrong to say the city was grimy. There were parts that surprised you; they were kept so clean. Here she was, avoiding a man with his hand outstretched, and finally she found the door and pushed it open. She arrived in a breathy state of panic, thinking that she must usher on lunch and be sure to catch the train. Across the restaurant she saw her father sitting — slouched — and stood there for a moment, paralysed by guilt. She was stock still and weighted down with it. It held her, until she saw his head turn, and found him not so sad and old from a different angle.
Her father had never really liked Liam. When she called him up and explained it all, he was sanguine. He was restrained and didn’t say, ‘I always disliked that untrustworthy man.’ That might have been the truth, but her father never said these sorts of things. He almost never said what he thought. He was an inscrutable man. It wasn’t that he was dishonest; he just hated to hurt anyone’s feelings by presenting them with something so unwieldy as the truth. So he dissembled, constantly, and no one had really known him except Rosa’s mother. Well, and Rosa knew him a little, though he rarely told her the truth either. It was an indication of how things had turned that he had been so honest recently. Rosa knew she was like him. She was ruder than her father, but she still had bouts of politeness, moments of insane performance, more stressful than an argument. It was like clamping a brace onto yourself, it left you with a sense of pressure, a dull ache.
He had once taken Liam down to the pub and they had, according to Liam, talked about the history of the railway and its effects on tourism in Bristol. They had also discussed the origins of dog racing. Liam had said it was all most informative. But they were never good friends. They shook hands readily; on special occasions they extended themselves to a mutual slap on the back. They gave each other suitable books at Christmas. It never quite sparked. Liam was a practised adept, good at putting people at their ease. He spilled words into pauses as if he was following instructions. Rosa’s father was silent for much of the time, shy and undemonstrative, except when he disagreed really violently with someone. Still it was clear to Rosa that they didn’t enjoy talking to each other. With Rosa’s mother, Liam was gracious and respectfully flirtatious. That was wily, though at the time it was most likely well intentioned. Perhaps sincere. He had always kissed her mother when they met, warmly, with conviction. It seemed so at the time.
Rosa’s father was tall and thin, with gaunt cheeks and large pale eyes. He had looked old for decades, perhaps because of his predisposition to overwork and smoking. One side of his family had been Flemish, some of them merchant seamen who arrived in Britain in the seventeenth century. They settled in Bristol, but little was known about them. There were odd relics: some fine pipes, a seaman’s trunk which Rosa’s father said his great-great-grandfather found floating in the harbour at Bristol. Rosa never believed him. The men of that famly went to sea; the women stayed on land. Neither sex had written memoirs or poems, and they had receded like the tide across the mudflats. Rosa’s father tried to be active, to play up to his nautical heritage, but he was hardly robust. He swam a little, and he played occasional games of tennis. In the autumn he sometimes liked to roam through the forests along the Avon Gorge, whistling out of tune. But really he was natively sedentary: he was a historian, he taught for a while at the university, and he had his own private archive of dusty books, their pages spotted with age. The shelves of his study were layered with ancient manuscripts in rolls, file cards, folders, neat boxes, drafts of his writings. For years he had written about local history and the Arthurian legends. Once her parents had a fight and Rosa’s mother told him to sell his books, his manuscripts in coils. ‘A waste of a life,’ she said. Then she was pale and penitent for a week. Perhaps as a result, his great work on the Round Table remained unfinished. For a while Rosa entertained a fear that it would be left for her to edit after his death. Now she thought Sarah could do it — Sarah with her scholarly air and round glasses, who taught him Spanish when he was trying to rebuild his life, as his friends had told him to — her father who took advice better than Rosa and was determined to salvage something. He met Sarah and Rosa hardly wanted to imagine the rest. Sarah was scented; she smelt of floral perfumes and she wore Omega workshop prints and sandals. That made it hard to love her. She told stories about everyday things, pleasing, convivial stories that Rosa might have liked, had her mood been better. But why, she thought, panting at the door, why the hell am I thinking about Sarah?
She was eager to see him, though she knew why he had come. The thought of him caused her a mixed sense of love and pain. Or a sense that she was causing him pain. As she said hello he stood and kissed her. He had been hopeful for a while and now he was searching and intent. It was clear that he had come to berate her. He had come there in an old pair of cords and a worn jacket, with a blue shirt that made him look paler than usual. She saw his hair was passing from grey into a more brittle whiteness. It was like fluff, or as if spring blossom had drifted onto his head. His eyes were tired, darting glances around the room. He kept fiddling with his knife. In short, her father seemed on edge. They sat under the wings of a fan, which beat a circular progress above their heads. For a while Rosa couldn’t talk, and then she got her breath back and her father said:
‘How are you? What are you doing at the moment?’
She had the menu in her hand. She understood his point. Because it was only in doing that you could prove your commitment to being. Being, alone, was insufficient. Being was a state of idle passivity — anyone could ‘be’. To ‘do’ was the thing. We do, therefore we are. And onwards, she thought, turning to her father.