Page 49 of Always Alchemy

I smile, and she shrieks. ‘I think that meansagain,’ I say drily.

‘Look at you!’ he exclaims when he’s finished with the raspberries. He takes her hand, and she wraps her fingers around it. ‘Such a pretty girl. Just like her mummy. She’s so like you at that age,’ he says to me. ‘Apart from the eyes, it’s almost uncanny. You were so blonde.’

He’s mentioned this many, many times over the past year and a half, but it’s never hurt like it does now. Rosalie has Rafe’s beautiful dark eyes, but her hair is still white blonde. It’s a striking, and gorgeous, combination.

‘Let’s get you in the swing, shall we?’ he asks her, trotting briskly over to the baby swings. He lowers her in, feeding her legs through the gaps and encouraging her to grip the plastic bar at the front before pulling the swing gentlytowards him and letting it go with a dramaticwhooshsound. Rosalie squeaks with delight.

I study him as he swings her. He looks in pretty good shape, even if he’s clearly lost weight. While Mum and he had what I would call a Nineteen Fifties relationship, they’re affluent enough to have had a lot of help. So Dad hasn’t been left as that clichéd man of a certain age who can barely microwave his dinner and has no idea how to operate a washing machine. He’s well looked after.

His original reaction to Mum serving him with divorce papers will have surprised no one who knows him, least of all us and Mum. He was a coldly seething mass of righteous fury, I suspect in equal parts because he finds the idea of dissolving a sacred union to be a terrible sin and because he has been put in a situation over which he has no control.

Things have calmed down somewhat since then. From what I’ve heard, he spoke to a few friends in both religious and financial circles who basically told him he had no choice but to go along with Mum’s wishes. Dad will always see himself as married to Mum in the eyes of God, a view he’s entitled to, because it has absolutely no bearing on Mum’s ability to move on and even remarry, if she ever wanted to.

I’m shipping her and Charles Hunterveryhard.

The good, if slightly weird, thing is that I don’t think Dad’s daily life has actually changed that much since Mum moved out. Work and church are still his entire life. He’s got a few years to go till full retirement, thank goodness, and he goes to Mass every bloody day. So while he’s lost his life partner, he’s retained the trappings of his life.

Even if he’s about to lose another of his absolute favourites things in it.

I know this is such an awful thing to say, but sometimesDad’s faith feels like dementia. I don’t say that to diminish the validity of his beliefs or to suggest that they’re in any way delusional, only to observe that, like dementia, his faith is a rabbit hole down which he tends to disappear, leaving all of his loved ones behind.

It’s a place in which none of us can reach him.

And, like dementia (from what I understand of it, anyway), it gives us cruelly perfect glimpses of the person he was, the person we loved, before this affliction ravaged him and made him often incomprehensible and sometimes unrecognisable.

Since that awful day that Dad walked in on Rafe stark bollock naked in his (Dad’s) kitchen and he and I had to sit down and have a really big, really scary talk, I’ve had a pretty straightforward and intentionally strict approach to my relationship with him:

Meet him where he is.

Understand what he is and is not capable of giving me as a father.

Erect firm boundaries to protect myself and, now, my family.

That’s it.

It’s made for a superficial, politely strained relationship—until Rosalie came along and dazzled us all and built some bridges, forged some common ground, between us, at least. But I’ve been okay with that. I chose it, and I made peace with the sacrifices it involved, because it was an imperfectly harmless compromise.

I’ve even allowed myself to grieve for the relationship we will never have.

I don’t know if it’s Rosalie that’s ramped mymama beartendencies up to ninety, but when I am complicit in arelationship from which my brother and now his unborn son are excluded, I cannot fucking stand for it any longer.

Watching how sweet, how adoring, he is with Rosalie, hurts in so many ways.

It hurts because, to use my dementia analogy again, this feels like a lucid moment, a snapshot of the father I idolised when I was a little girl.

It hurts because holding space for that conflict between Dad’s profound flaws and his equally profound capacity for love and tenderness is as exhausting as it is agonising.

It hurts because I know that the action I have to take will cause him more heartache than possibly anything else I could do.

Finally, it hurts because I can already imagine how beautiful, how innocent and perfect and magical, my nephew will be, and I can’t fathom how Dad could deny him what he gives so freely to Rosalie.

I don’t bringup anything heavy until Dad and Rosalie have finished their session on the swings and he and I are sitting on a bench watching her potter. She falls over a couple of times, but the rubber flooring means she’s back up again, smiling and laughing, in moments.

My daughter’s very innocence—her sense of wonder, her readiness to laugh at all manner of things—is the most enchanting thing in my life. Maybe in my father’s, too. Their relationship is so beautiful. So uncomplicated.

But it makes me wonder if what looks like unconditional love is actually contingent on a very rigid set of conditions. He loved me like that once, and he loves me still, but he doesn’t approve of me. Perhaps the free pass to my dad’s loveis only eligible until you’re old enough to start having opinions of your own.

Exhibit A: me.

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