‘Had he been there in the first place?’
‘Oh yes. The man serving behind the counter described him to me.’
‘But you haven’t seen Roger for forty years.’
My father smiled. ‘I know. But it was Roger he was describing. Some things you don’t forget.’
‘So then what happened?’
‘So then I …’ My father was about to launch into a further narration, but seemed to have lost the will. ‘Oh, Max,’ he said. ‘Do you really need to know? What about another drink?’
We ordered two more amaretti from the waiter: at which point I realized that the Chinese woman and her daughter were no longer sitting at their table.
‘Oh, no – they’ve gone,’ I said, my heart sinking. I’d been so distracted by my father’s story, I hadn’t even noticed they were leaving.
‘Who’ve gone?’
‘The woman and her daughter. The ones I wanted to speak to.’
‘Didn’t you manage to speak to them?’
‘No.’
‘I assumed you’d spoken to them already.’
‘I was just about to speak to them when you turned up. And now they’ve gone.’
I was distraught. I stood up from the table to get a better look around me and spotted them about a hundred yards away, walking back towards Circular Quay, hand in hand. For a moment I actually contemplated running after them. I had come all the way from London to speak to this woman, after all. In fact I would probably have left the terrace there and then and started sprinting off in pursuit if it hadn’t been for my father’s restraining hand on my arm.
‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘You can talk to them tomorrow.’
‘What do you mean, tomorrow?’ I said, angry with him now. ‘They’ve gone, do you hear me? They’ve gone and there’s absolutely no way of finding them again, unless I come back here in a month’s time.’
‘You can talk to them tomorrow,’ my father repeated. ‘I know where they’ll be.’
Our second round of amaretti arrived. The waiter told us that these were on the house. We thanked him, and my father continued: ‘If you mean the woman and the little girl who were sitting in the corner of the terrace there –’ (I nodded, breathless with the fear that he was about to tease me with some sort of false hope) ‘– I overheard them talking when I arrived. The girl was asking if she could go swimming tomorrow, and her mother said that she could if the weather was nice, and the girl said she wanted to go to Fairlight Beach.’
‘Fairlight Beach? Where’s that?’
‘Fairlight’s a little suburb over towards Manly. There’s a sheltered beach there with a natural swimming pool. So that’s where they’ll be tomorrow, by the sound of it.’
‘If the weather’s nice.’
‘If the weather’s nice.’
‘What’s the weather forecast?’
‘Rain,’ said my father, sipping his amaretto. ‘But they usually get it wrong.’
‘Did they say what time they were going?’
‘No,’ said my father. ‘I suppose you’ll have to get there pretty early if you want to be sure of seeing them.’
I contemplated this possibility. My flight back to London was leaving at about ten o’clock the following night, and I had no definite plans for the rest of the day. The thought of spending hours and hours sitting on some beach looking out for the Chinese woman and her daughter was slightly daunting, however. But what choice did I have? My need to speak to her had become all-consuming, now – even if it meant only exchanging a few words. The thought of going back to London without making some kind of connection with her was insupportable.
‘Well,’ I said, with a sigh, ‘I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do then.’
‘Don’t worry, Max – everything will be fine.’
I looked at him in surprise. I was definitely seeing some new sides of my father this week. It was not like him to be reassuring.
‘You seem very … calm, considering what you’ve been through today,’ I said.
‘Well, what can you do?’ he said. ‘Some things, Max … some things just aren’t meant to be. It’s more than forty years since I last saw Roger. It’s fifty years since we did the things I wrote about in that memoir. I’ve survived without him all that time. Sure, I was pretty cut up when we managed to miss each other again today. A dreadful sense of history repeating itself, as you can imagine. But then … Well, I walked back to the tea room – the one I’d gone to first of all, down by the ornamental lake. And I sat there for a while, and drank a beer, and thought – if he comes, he comes, and if he doesn’t, he doesn’t. And he didn’t. It was a beautiful afternoon. It’s much warmer in Melbourne than it is here. I sat there, and I drank my beer, and I listened to all the exotic bird noises, and I looked at the palm trees and the date trees … I had a lovely time, actually. They have a magnificent bald cypress there, just by the ornamental lake. A Mexican bald cypress. In fact I wrote a poem about it. “Taxodiaceae”, I called it. Here – have a look.’
He handed me his black moleskin notebook and I attempted to read the little eight-line poem he had written in there this afternoon. Trying to decipher his handwriting was bad enough: as for the poem itself, as usual I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.
‘Great,’ I said, handing the notebook back, and struggled to think of something else to say. ‘You should really get these poems of yours published.’
‘Oh, I’m just an amateur, I know that.’
‘Did Roger leave any messages on your phone?’ I asked, still hoping to salvage something from today’s debacle.
‘I’ve no idea,’ my father said. ‘I don’t know how to retrieve messages, and I don’t really want to hear them if he did.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘After all these years, you have no … curiosity?’
‘Max,’ my father said, leaning forward and resting his hands on mine. Another unprecedented gesture. ‘You did an amazing thing for me today. I’ll never forget that. Not because I really wanted to see Roger again, but because it shows that you accept me. You accept me for what I am.’
‘Better late than never,’ I said, with a quiet, regretful laugh.
‘What do you think of my apartment?’ my father asked, after a short pause (during which he withdrew his hands from mine).
‘Well, it’s … OK, I suppose. Needs a bit of work doing on it, maybe, to make it more homely.’
‘Hideous, isn’t it? I’m going to give notice.’
‘And move? Where to?’
‘I think it’s about time I came home, really. That flat in Lichfield’s just going to waste, after all. It would make far more sense for me to live there. If you get worried about me again – or I get worried about you, for that matter – it makes life much easier if I’m three hours’ drive up the motorway, doesn’t it? Rather than a twenty-four-hour flight.’
And yes, I agreed: it would make far more sense if he lived in Lichfield, rather than Sydney. So we spent the rest of the evening talking about that: not about Roger Anstruther, or the Chinese woman and her daughter. Instead I told my father about Miss Erith and how she had called him a miserable sod for going away and not telling her when he was going to come back, and how friendly she was with Dr Hameed, and how she had railed against the takeover of England by the big corporations. And he agreed that it would be nice to see her again. And somehow, I’m not quite sure how – talking about his original move to Lichfield, I suppose, as a reaction to my mother’s death – we ended up talking about my mother. Talking about my mother, after all these years! Before tonight, I don’t think either of us had mentioned her name to the other, since her funeral. And now, for the first time, I saw my father’s eyes fill with tears, real tears, as he started talking about their years of married life together, what a lousy husband he felt he had been, what a shitty time he had given her, what a useless hand she had been dealt by God or fate or whatever it was – dying at the age of forty-six, when all she’d known up to that point was the joylessness of being married to a man consumed with self-hatred, a man who had no idea how to relate to her, or even to his son, a man who knew nothing but how to bottle up his emotions and repress his desires …