The Changs have dispersed by the time we pay the bill-George and Harold into the kitchen, the children and Doris to the flat upstairs. Only Joyce remains to welcome the first of the evening rush.
When we leave she pushes a brown paper bag into my mother’s hands that I know contains something to help my mum with all the things that are wrong in her broken world.
“My gift to you,” Joyce says.
What did Rose see in me? She could have had the pick of any lipless wonder in her firm’s office. Why did she choose me?
Because I’m a nice guy. That doesn’t sound like much-it sounds like the kind of thing that women say they want, just before they go off with the spunky hunk in his Maserati. But Rose wanted a nice guy. And she picked me.
It’s true. I was a nice guy. I always fell in love with the women I slept with, even when love was neither requested nor appropriate. I could never fuck around without feeling. A lot of the things that young men do without thinking were beyond me. Because I had listened to too many Sinatra records. Because I always wanted a trip to the moon on gossamer wings rather than a quick lay. Because I was looking for the one.
She saw something in me. Something that was worthy of love.
But niceness is finite. It’s like money and youth. It ebbs away when you are not looking. It leaks out of you. Look at me now. I’m nowhere near as nice as I used to be.
I don’t want to give up on life and love and all the rest of it, but I can’t help myself. It’s because life and love and all the rest of it have given me a good hiding. Life has made me feel like death warmed over.
I’ve lost my faith and I don’t know how I can ever get it back. Because I still miss someone. And because I will always miss her.
Is that okay, Rose? Is it okay to miss you?
9
I T IS THE DEAD PART OF THE AFTERNOON but the private members’ club is still full of soft-looking men and hard-looking women lingering over their drinks and talking about projects that will probably never happen.
Just like my father.
If you ask me, my dad’s new love is a project that will never get the green light. My old man and his girlfriend-something tells me they are going to be languishing in development hell. Just a hunch.
“You’ll come to the wedding, I hope,” he says.
I look at him, hiding behind a still mineral water in his Soho club, nervously hunting in the free bowl of Twiglets. I can’t quite tell if he is trying to provoke me or if he is completely insane.
“Whose wedding is that?”
“My wedding. My wedding to Lena.”
“Oh, did you get a divorce?”
“Not yet.”
“Did you even get a divorce lawyer?”
“Not yet.”
“Then maybe it’s a little premature to start playing ‘Here Comes the Bride’ and chucking around confetti, don’t you think? Maybe it’s a little early to start sending out the embossed invitations and ordering the cake.”
He leans forward, trying to keep this between the two of us.
“I’m just attempting to make you see that this is serious,” he says. “You act as though it’s laughable.”
“You’re mutton dressed up as ram, Dad. That’s not funny?”
“What would be funny would be if I wanted a woman my own age. But why would I want someone that looks like me?”
“Like your wife, you mean?”
“I love your mother, Alfie. Always did, always will. And I intend to take care of her.”
“All heart, aren’t you?”
“But passion dies. It does. You don’t believe me because you never got the chance to find out.”
“That’s right.”
“And I’m sorry about that, Alfie, I truly am. I loved Rose. You know that.”
It’s true. My dad loved Rose. He broke down at the funeral. Right at the end. He just fell to pieces.
“Passion fades away, Alfie. It turns into something else. Friendship. Affection. Habit. That’s enough for some people. And for other people, it will never be enough.”
I call for the bill, sick of talking to him, but he insists on paying. What a big shot.
When we are out on the street he puts a conciliatory hand on my shoulder and, although I make no move to touch him in return, I can’t help but love him. He will always be my father. I can’t imagine ever replacing him with a better model. I am stuck with him.
“I just want one more chance for happiness,” he says. “Is that so wrong?”
I watch him move off through the narrow streets of Soho, a good thirty years older than most of the people here, all sipping their designer coffee and eyeing each other up and letting the afternoon drift by, all these youngish people with time to waste, and I feel a surge of enormous pity for my father.
One more chance, I think.
Doesn’t he know? Doesn’t he get it? Doesn’t my father understand anything?
You get one shot at happiness.
The funeral was all wrong.
I had been to funerals before, but they were not like this, nothing like it. The funerals of my three dead grandparents were nothing like the day we buried Rose.
Too young. Not just her. The mourners were too young. In their twenties, most of them, friends from school and the old neighborhood, mates from university and the shop. Many of them looked as though they were going to a funeral for the first time. They had probably never even buried a grandparent. One or two of them might have lost a goldfish or a hamster. And they were in shock. They didn’t even own black ties-that’s how absurdly young they were. They didn’t know what to wear, how to act, what to say. It was all too soon. Too soon. I knew how they felt.
I was in the front car with Rose’s mother and father and I couldn’t find the words to comfort them because there were no words. It was worse than that. There was no bond. We were already strangers, we were already slipping from each other’s lives. The bond between us was in the car ahead of us, in a pine coffin covered with three wreaths of red roses. One from Rose’s parents, one from me, one from my mum and dad. Separate wreaths for separate grief.
The cortege reached the small church on top of a little hill. Below us the fields of rural Essex were covered in yellow. Fields of rape. A terrible name. Why can’t they call it something else? Because I still can’t look at those yellow fields of April without thinking of the day we buried Rose.
A vicar who had never known Rose talked about her qualities. He had tried his best, this vicar, he had talked to friends and family and me, so he spoke of her humor and her warmth and her love of life. But it was only when Josh climbed the steps to the plinth that I felt as if it meant anything.
“The words of Canon Henry Scott Holland,” he said. “ ‘Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.’ ”
I held myself together because it was worse for Rose’s parents, this quiet man and his kind wife who had been so proud of their lawyer daughter, this decent man and woman who I had spent Christmases with and who I would probably never see again. I held myself together because it would have been shaming to place my loss above their loss. They were doing the worst thing in the world. They were burying a child.
“ ‘Call me by my old familiar name,’ ” Josh said. “ ‘Speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone, wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.’ ”
There was none of the comfort that you clutch at when you bury someone at the end of their life. Josh did his best. But this black day had arrived fifty years too soon. Nature had been violated. And although I tried to make sense of the words I was hearing, although I tried to tell myself that it was worse for her parents, all I could think was one selfish thought-I want my wife.