Contrite, she said, ‘Delicious dessert. Really good food. This place is better than I remember it,’ because her father was paying and it seemed ungrateful to complain. ‘Nice chocolate sauce. Delicious.’
Her father said: ‘We are meant to be industrious. And our industry should make us happy.’
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA said everyone together. The whole restaurant was laughing. It was only Rosa and her father who were sitting pensively at their small table.
Later Rosa allowed her father to pay for her lunch. He had known all along, and only grumbled briefly. Embarrassed, she said she would buy him lunch next time. They stood outside the door of the restaurant, and he eyed her bags. ‘Off on holiday?’ he said, arching his brows and, Rosa imagined, thinking of the money he had just spent.
‘No, I told you, I have to go to see a friend. Just for a couple of nights. I’ll apply for jobs while I’m away. Then I’ll be back and busy, don’t you worry,’ she said. ‘But, Dad, are you sure you’re OK? I never really asked.’
Her father’s face was pale in the sunlight. But his eyes were still bright blue. He fixed her with them and said:
‘I told you Rosa, my days are very structured. I read a lot. Most importantly, I feel I have improved in some things since September. My Spanish is slightly better, even with my ancient brain. My bridge is much improved. I am fitter, if more deaf.’
He was like a character in Gogol, his jacket almost worn through at the sleeves. He was carrying folded papers in a shabby satchel. Now he was talking about the virtues of planning, about how important it was to plan a life.
‘You have to have a scheme,’ he said.
‘I do,’ she said. ‘Rather, I am in the process of developing one.’
‘Well, there’s the telephone,’ he said. ‘Give me a call soon. Don’t leave it another month.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course I won’t.’
They stood in silence for a while. Then he said, ‘Nothing is more important than happiness. Nothing is worth being unhappy about.’
A bus went past. The wind blew in their faces. Her father’s faded jacket flapped at the corners. Rosa was still thinking about the money and her unanswered question. She had it phrased. I wondered, could you lend me a small amount of money? I’ll pay you back almost immediately. Just to tide me over for a few weeks. Instead she said: ‘I understand that. But there’s the theory and the practice. It’s hard for the two to coalesce.’
Coalesce? she thought.
He turned to go, and she said, ‘Father?’
‘Yes, Rosa?’ He turned back towards her, holding his satchel with both hands. That was the moment! Just a hundred or so, though she knew that made little difference. Still she stood there, trying to say something. A thousand, and I will have a job by the end of the month! Just a thousand! He was expectant, troubled, waiting for a confession. He had come for lunch, hoping to rally her spirits. His story about having a friend to see — she wasn’t sure she believed it. Her father didn’t really have any friends. He had paid for a ticket, a lunch, the trip had cost him a couple of hundred. She had his stapled article in the pocket of her coat. She thought of him sitting on the train, holding a book to his face, his legs under a plastic table. If she divulged all, he would go home sad. She had caused him pain already. Now to ask him for money!
‘Have a good journey home. Thanks so much again for lunch,’ she said.
‘My pleasure,’ he said, and walked away quickly, not turning back.
She said goodbye to his retreating form and headed towards Notting Hill. She was thinking of him going to the station, his jacket flapping in the wind. She imagined him holding out his ticket to the guard, his face blank. It was clear she had no sense of proportion. But she was crying hot tears as she walked along. She was moving as fast as she could, rubbing her face. It was nearly too late, she was suddenly aware just how late it was. With her head down, she walked on. Her train was leaving soon, so she turned the corner and found a bus. It was a fine bus, which took her past the park, where she saw the trees in their autumn severity, thin and sinewy, and underneath she saw the lower lines of bushes and the meandering silver string of the river. With her nose against the glass, she noticed joggers on the path below, and the straight-backed forms of cyclists, turning circles with their feet. There was a queue of cars at Hyde Park Corner, jammed up at the lights, waiting. The traffic shifted slowly. The bus turned left at Marble Arch, and moved up towards Marylebone.
Hunched into her coat, she tried to stay calm. It was absurd to be so mournful about her father, who was a grown man with a lover and a sense of a benevolent deity to console him. Her father was religious, she thought. He had found his church and locked the door behind him. It was how he coped, in the end, with the death of his wife. His belief rendered things palatable, perhaps. When he went home, he thought of God and a celestial palace. He went to church on Sundays with Sarah on his arm. This should make her pity him less. It was of little importance if he was right or wrong. What matter if he boiled off into oblivion, so long as he was happy while he lived? He was right in that. Of course it didn’t matter, and the only thing to do was keep your head up, keep on going. Jung said that for psychotherapeutic purposes it was best if a person believed that death was not the end. For the sake of mental well-being, it was the most relaxing state to be in. You wouldn’t know until it was too late either way, so why not chance it? Still she couldn’t. And she thought of Tolstoy with his life crisis, at fifty or so he suddenly wondered what the point of it all was, and she had always thought he had left it late, but there he was trembling under the sentence, horribly frightened, in such torment he thought he would hang himself, and he resolved it by thinking himself into faith. He looked out at the peasants tilling the fields and worshipping a just God, and he rendered himself religious. Rendered himself, through a willed process of reasoning — it seemed impossible!