You have a daddy. One month after the Grey Rat, in the grip of an unexplained emotion, gave her father a name, Maximilian Ophuls was standing at the door of the house in Lower Belgrave Street holding flowers and a stupid doll. “I don’t play with dolls,” India told him solemnly, revealing much about Peggy’s attitude to parenting and taste in children’s toys. “I like bows and arrows and slingshots and excaliburs and guns.” Max looked back at her straight-faced and thrust the doll into her hands. “Here,” he said. “Use her for target practice. It’s no fun if you don’t have a target.” Then he picked her up and hugged her hard and she fell in love with him, just like everybody else. He sat her beside him in the back of a large silver car and told the driver to take them as fast as possible to a posh restaurant by the river. He was sixty-four years old and knew the words to the song, send me a postcard, drop me a line. Will you still need me, will you still feed me. “You’re a very old daddy, aren’t you,” she asked him over ice cream. “Are you going to die soon?” He shook his head very seriously. “No, my plan is never to die,” he said. “You will one day,” she argued. “Maybe,” he said, “maybe when I’m two hundred and sixty-four and too blind to see it coming. But until then, pah! I snap my fingers at Death, I thumb my nose at him, and then I bite my thumb.”
She giggled. “So do I,” she said, but she couldn’t snap her fingers. “Anyway,” she added, “I want to die when I’m two hundred and sixty-four as well.”
By the end of the day he was nuzzling her neck and finding the birds hidden there and she was learning the words to “Alouette” and she was climbing up his shoulders and then somersaulting back and away. When he delivered her back to her mother he looked the Grey Rat in the eye and thanked her, and she knew he had stolen the girl from her, that from now on his daughter would no longer be hers. If I’m his daughter I should have his name, the girl said that night, and Peggy Rhodes didn’t know how to refuse, and India Ophuls was born. What about my mummy, the girl said, tucked up in bed with a night-light sending stars whirling across her ceiling. I want to know about my mummy too. Is she really dead or is she hiding like Daddy was. Peggy Rhodes lost her temper. That woman is dead to everyone now-all right? mmm?-but she was already, ah, ah, dead to me in life. She left her husband and tried to steal your daddy away and-pah!-had his baby and was ready to abandon it and where would you have been if I hadn’t taken you in. She was going to leave you behind, hmm? hmm?, and go back where she came from and she didn’t want the shame of a baby, didn’t want the shame-d’you see?-of you. Then there were, ah, complications and she, hmph, died. What did she die of? Where was she going back to? I won’t answer these questions. But didn’t she like me really? It doesn’t matter. She didn’t choose you. I chose you. But mummy, what was my mummy’s name? I’m your mummy. No, mummy, my real mummy, I mean. I’m your real mummy. Good night.
Then Max disappeared from her life again. “I’m afraid he’s like that, dear,” the Grey Rat told her flatly, “I know he’s your father but you must understand, ahmm, he’s sort of the fly-by-night type,” and when he finally did show up, twice a year, on her birthday and on Christmas morning, there were things he wasn’t saying, things he wouldn’t talk about, and it took her close to a decade to understand the hidden war between the woman she lived with and was growing to hate and the father she barely knew but loved with all her heart, she never understood him until he saved her life. Max never spoke against Peggy, and even when India beseeched him he never betrayed the secrets the Grey Rat did not want revealed, knowing that his ability to see his daughter at all depended on accepting the Grey Rat’s ferocious terms, but for a long time India blamed him for his absences and silences, and her anger with him screwed her up even more than her dislike of the woman she lived with, because he was the lovable one, he was the one she wanted to see every day and laugh at and somersault off and drive with in fast cars and shoot BB pellets into dolls with and embrace and kiss and love. She didn’t understand that the woman she lived with had banished Max again, had denied him all but the most perfunctory access to the increasingly truculent adopted daughter for whom she, Peggy, had such mixed feelings but who represented the bone of contention in her undying quarrel with Max, and who consequently had to be held on to even if her presence was a daily reminder of past shame.
“Yes, your mother is dead,” he told India when she asked him. He had his own reasons for confirming his ex-wife’s untruth. “Yes, it’s just as Margaret said.” Then he said no more.
These were the confusions inside which India Ophuls grew up in the 1970s. She held herself together for a few years, she went hungry for three hundred and sixty-three days of the year and made do with the two days of feasting, but as she neared thirteen she wore the stricken look of a storm-tossed ship heading toward jagged inescapable rocks. When puberty struck, she went dramatically off the rails. There followed a delinquent descent into hell. Hell seemed preferable to the overworld of lying mothers and absent fathers in which she was trapped, and from which, during her ruined adolescence, she consequently tried to escape down all the various self-destructive routes available to her. The downward spiral had been fast, and she had been lucky to survive the smash at the end of it. By the age of fifteen she had been a truant, a liar, a cheat, a dropout, a thief, a teenage runaway, a junkie and even, briefly, a tart plying for trade in the shadow of the giant gas cylinders behind King’s Cross Station. Waking up in her L.A. bedroom to find the woman she loathed looking down at her with eager Olga by her side, she felt her repressed fifteenth year boiling back into her head, like the high tide churning through a breach in a vellard. She fought the memories down but they insisted on rising. She remembered a sweating, febrile room with stains on the walls and a stranger unzipping his pants. She remembered the drugs, the hallucinogens putting reason to sleep and bringing forth monsters, the hard brightness of white powder, the needle’s deadly bliss, the white fedora of the Jamaican pimp. She remembered violence done to her and by her, she remembered retching, and shivering in the heat, and a face in the mirror so pale and blue it made her scream. She remembered slashing her wrists and swallowing pills. She remembered stomach pumps. She remembered a judge’s harsh words for the woman whose name she would never use again, You have been, madam, an abject failure as a parent, and she remembered that it had been Max who saved her, Max who swooped down from the sky like an eagle and scooped her out of the gutter, who told the woman she loathed that he would no longer stand silently by, who asked the judge for judgment and prised that woman’s clutching fingers off his child’s wounded arms and spirited his daughter away to be healed, first at a Swiss clinic high up on what she would always think of as the Magic Mountain, and then by sunshine, palm trees and the cobalt blue of the Pacific. She imagined his last conversation with the woman she hated, You had your chance with her but you’ll never have another one, she heard him saying, and saw in fancy’s eye the bitter features of the Grey Rat contort like Rumplestiltskin’s into a mask of defeat.