‘And school?’ I said. ‘Have you made lots of new friends?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘A few.’
I waited for her to continue, but instead there was an electronic tinkle from somewhere inside her handbag. She took out a BlackBerry and glanced at the screen. Her face lit up, she laughed out loud and immediately began tapping something on to the keyboard. I poured myself some more wine and dipped a chunk of bread into the saucer of olive oil while she attended to this.
‘Is that your mother’s BlackBerry?’ I asked, when it looked as though she had finished.
‘No. I’ve had one for ages.’
‘Oh. Who was it?’ I asked, gesturing at the little screen.
‘Just someone I know.’
A silence fell between us, and I felt a mounting sense of frustration. Was this what it had come to, my relationship with my own daughter? Was this all she had to say to me? For God’s sake, we had lived together for twelve years: lived together in conditions of absolute intimacy. I had changed her nappies, I had bathed her. I had played with her, read to her, and sometimes, when she got scared in the middle of the night, she had climbed into my bed and snuggled up against me. And now – after living apart for little more than six months – we were behaving towards each other almost as if we were strangers. How was this possible?
I didn’t know. All I knew was that I was not going to give up on this evening, not just yet. I would get her to start having a conversation with me if it was the last thing that I did.
‘It must seem very different,’ I began, ‘living –’
At which point my own mobile phone started playing its little melody, announcing that a text message had arrived. I picked up the phone and held it at arm’s length (my eyesight is going, and I have to do things like this nowadays). The message was from Lindsay.
‘Read it if you want,’ said Lucy. ‘I don’t mind.’
I opened the message, which said:Hi there, you must be at sea by now hope its all going well get in touch when you can L
It wasn’t the most effusive message in the world, but I’d been waiting for some contact – any contact – with Lindsay for a day and a half now, so I read it with a relief which I couldn’t disguise. I put the phone back on the table almost immediately with a kind of mock-nonchalance, but this didn’t fool Lucy for a second.
‘Nice message?’ she asked.
‘It was from Lindsay,’ I said. Lucy’s eyes showed that she wasn’t satisfied with this answer, so I added: ‘Business colleague of mine.’
She nodded. ‘I see.’ Then, biting off the top inch of a breadstick, she asked: ‘I’m never sure about that name – is it a man’s name, or a woman’s?’
‘I think it can be both,’ I said. ‘In this case, it’s a woman.’
‘Aren’t you going to reply?’ she asked.
She picked up her BlackBerry, and I picked up my phone.
‘This won’t take a minute,’ I promised.
‘No worries.’
Actually it took much longer than a minute. I’m not very quick at sending text messages, and I wasn’t sure what to say. Eventually I settled on:Not got as far as the ferry yet. Still in Kendal, taking lovely daughter out to dinner. Really sorry my progress has been so rubbish – don’t give up on me!
By the time I had sent this, Lucy seemed to have sent and received about four messages. We both put our phones down, slightly reluctantly, and smiled at each other.
‘So,’ I said, ‘it must feel very different –’
The waiter arrived with our food. Our table was pretty small and it took him a while to find space for everything. Then there was the palaver of grinding the black pepper and sprinkling the cheese, all of which he turned into quite a performance. By the time he had finished, another message from Lindsay had come through. I read it before starting to eat:Max, enjoy the ride and dont worry about progress or lack of it, always remember its only a bit of fun x
I smiled to myself as I put down the phone, and Lucy noticed that I was smiling, but she didn’t say anything. Before trying my first mouthful of risotto, I took the opportunity to ask a question.
‘You do a lot of texting, don’t you, Luce?’ I began.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I maybe send about twenty or thirty a day.’
‘Well, that seems like a lot to me. An awful lot. What does it mean when somebody puts a kiss at the end of a text message?’
She began to look mildly interested.
‘Is this from your business colleague again?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Let me see.’
I passed her the phone and, after reading the message, she handed it back to me.
‘Hard to say,’ she admitted. ‘Depends on what kind of person she is, really.’
‘Is there no real … etiquette to this sort of thing?’
I was pleased with this question, I must say. I was pretty sure that I’d hit on a topic we could bond over, at last. If Lucy was texting at the rate of about twenty or thirty messages a day, she ought to be able to talk about it for hours.
‘Well, there isn’t really, like, an etiquette,’ she answered. I was disappointed to hear that her tone of voice sounded bored, even disdainful. ‘You know, it’s just a little kiss at the end of a message. It probably doesn’t mean anything. In fact, how am I even having this conversation with my own dad? This is too … sad for words. This is lame, Dad. It’s a kiss, that’s all. Take it any way you want.’
She fell silent and picked at her lasagne.
‘OK, I’m sorry, love,’ I said, after a short, unhappy interval. ‘I was just trying to find something to chat about, that’s all.’
‘That’s all right. I’m sorry too. I didn’t want to sound mean.’ She sipped her Diet Coke. ‘Why didn’t Mum come out with us tonight, anyway? Are you two not even talking to each other?’
‘Of course we’re talking to each other. I don’t know why she didn’t want to come. I think she said she had something on.’
‘Oh, yeah. Tuesday night. That’s writers’ night.’
‘Writers’ night?’
‘She goes to this writing group. They write stories and stuff and read them out to each other.’
Great. So right at this very moment Caroline was wowing an enraptured audience with the hilarious story of Max, Lucy and the nettle pit. She’d probably just got to the bit where I had no idea why the grass was green. I could already hear their smug, appreciative laughter, as clearly as if they were right here in the restaurant with us.
‘She’s serious about this writing business, then, is she?’ I asked.
‘I think so. The thing is …’ She smiled, now, in a way that was almost conspiratorial. ‘You see, there’s this bloke who goes to the writers’ group as well, and I’m beginning to think that she –’
Beginning to think that she what? I could guess, but would never know for certain, because at that moment her BlackBerry started tinkling again.
‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘I have to look at this.’
The message made her scream with laughter, whatever it was.
‘It’s from Ariana,’ she told me, as if this explained everything. ‘She’s photoshopped this picture – look.’
She showed me the screen, which had a picture on it of a perfectly ordinary-looking girl.
‘Very good,’ I said, handing it back. What else was I supposed to say?
‘No, but she’s put Monica’s head on to Jess’s body.’
‘Ah, OK. That’s clever.’
Lucy started writing her reply, and in the meantime, I took out my phone and began tapping out another message to Lindsay. It was probably for the best that I never got around to sending it. What stopped me? It was the look on the face of a woman sitting at the table next to ours. I don’t know quite how to describe the look. All I know is that she took in the scene that she saw at our table – a weary middle-aged father taking his daughter out for dinner, the two of them sitting opposite each other, nothing to say, one of them sending a text, the other one playing with her BlackBerry – and she responded with a toe-curling mixture of amusement and sympathy, all contained in one expressive glance. And in that instant an image came into my mind, again: the Chinese woman and her daughter, sitting opposite each other at that restaurant in Sydney harbour, laughing together and playing cards. The connection between them. The pleasure in each other’s company. The love and closeness. All the things that Lucy and I never seemed to have. All the things that I had never been taught how to create between us, by my sad fuck-up of a father.