Page 29 of Maybe
This I didn’t especially need to hear, but Isaac was on a roll.
“I worry about her a lot. Everything she does now is kind of displacement activity. She’s… I think she had a drinking problem.”
“Yeah?” I said politely.At least she’s still breathing in and out.
“Yes,” Isaac continued. “There wasn’t much love lost between them over the last few years. But still, they functioned as a couple. Sort of. They’d been together for a long time. Twenty-seven years, according to her.”
Sudden heat flared in my chest. Isaac’s lips pressed shut as he realised what he’d said. I might have preferred the social sciences at school, but the maths in that statement was pretty straightforward, even for me. I’d never known for how long my dad had been making nice with Isaac’s mum before we discovered them. When I was younger, I’d convinced myself that maybe Isaac was an accidental pregnancy following an unwise lapse of judgement, and things had escalated from there. Latterly, I’d told myself I didn’t care either way.
Seems I still cared quite a lot. And it had been going so well. Shame Isaac hadn’t shut up approximately two sentences earlier.“Apparently so,” I answered, tightly.
“Look, Ez. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like…”
“How did you mean it then, golden boy?”
“I don’t know. I just… always assumed you knew.”
I pushed my chair back and threw some coins on the table. “I didn’t.” Too much, way too much reminiscing for one day. “I’ve got to go.”
They’d been together for a long time.
Isaac hadn’t asked me if I grieved too. To be fair, if I’d hung around a bit longer, he might have done, because he was decent.
They’d been together for a long time.
Grief and I were on an intimate footing. It had trailed after me ever since my life had been rent into two halves at four minutes past two on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, on a busy high street in front of a tourist café.
Sir Henry Fitz-Henry’s (I can only assume my grandmother was still under the influence of the laughing gas) accomplishments ranged far and wide, from performing a quadruple bypass on a former president of France, to saving the life—twice—of the Sultan of Brunei. His own father, my grandfather, had helped perform the UK’s first heart transplant.
But his competence as a father? Not so much. Don’t get me wrong—he’d funded my expensive boarding school, not that he ever found time to visit me there. Mum and I rattled around an amazing house out in Richmond, with views extending out over the famous Royal Park and with a path down to the Thames. We even had our own private mooring. Once, he’d taught me how to fish off it. Around age ten or eleven, I spent a glorious afternoon in his company fiddling around with hooks and maggots and discovering fish hearts only possessed two chambers compared to our four. One summer had been spent on safari in Namibia; he even joined us for the first half, until President Pohamba spirited him off to Windhoek in his private jet to perform miracles on an elderly member of his close family. The only surprise was Sir Henry didn’t walk on water to get there.
Occasionally, he even came home to spend an evening with me and mum, although, more often than not and especially during the week, he stayed at the mansion flat in Chiswick. When he wasn’t flying to all four corners of the globe to deliver a lecture, or promote his books, or advise the World Health Organisation on avoiding an excess of cardiac deaths from a frightening new strain of tsetse fly in remote parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Sir Henry’s movements were set in stone. He could be located saving lives in the operating theatres of St Peter’s Hospital on Mondays and Tuesdays, terrifying young students at the attached medical school on alternate Wednesdays, and laying his healing hands on wealthy private patients from dawn ‘til dusk on Thursdays and Fridays
That fateful day was a Tuesday, and Africa was coping without my father’s expertise. Instead, continuing a family dynasty built by his own distinguished father, the great man was charming a Harley Street waiting room crammed with awestruck and well-heeled patients. I had a dental appointment nearby, for an adjustment to my braces and possibly a toothfilling too, a highlight in the middle of a dull week at school. Over my father’s snatched breakfast, my mum hinted it might be nice if he could squeeze us in for a quick lunch, seeing as we were in town anyhow. But an important online meeting at one, with the Health Secretary, put paid to that. A quick five-minute surprise visit would have to suffice.
My mum wasn’t my dad’s diary secretary; she hadn’t worked since they’d married. In my father’s books, running a home, his social calendar, and bringing up a child didn’t count. But she knew his busy schedule down to the last minute, seeing as our lives revolved around it. “If we time it to arrive at around two, we’ll catch him before he starts his afternoon clinic.”
At age thirteen, I was far too cool to be excited about visiting my father at his place of work. So, I dragged my heels, acting like I wasn’t fussed either way.
I recall my mum glanced at her elegant watch, then up at the leaden sky before flashing me a bright smile, the last I ever had from her. “We’re a couple of minutes early, darling. And it’s about to tip down. Let’s wander over the road and have a look around that antique shop for five minutes.”
Words enthusing no thirteen-year-old ever, though a marginal improvement on a rain shower. “Yeah, sure.”
When I was younger, before I went away to school, we often popped into his Harley Street clinic. He wasn’t as famous then. The nurses used to fuss and marvel over how much I’d grown, as if growing was extraordinary, and find me nice biscuits. Janice, his pretty PA, wasn’t half as snotty then as she was now and gossiped with my mum. In between patient appointments, I’d be allowed in his office. He’d let me sit on his lap and listen to his heart with his big red stethoscope while my mum and Janice coordinated diaries. He’d show me umpteen scans of hearts too wonky to work properly and explain how he'd fix them. Then we’d study the old black-and-white photos lining the walls of mygrandfather and his myriad accomplishments. Before we left, my dad would ruffle my hair and kiss the top of my head, and I’d breath in his hospital smell of aftershave mixed with the special soap he used to disinfect his hands. He’d promise he’d be home before bedtime.
And then he’d break that promise, because heart operations didn’t keep to a strict timetable, as he was so fond of reminding my mum, irritably, down the end of the phone line while his dinner turned to charcoal in the warming oven.
I remember the antiques shop was dry but dull. Full of delicate china tea sets like my grandma kept in a big wooden dresser, collecting dust. The old-fashioned fabric shop next door wasn’t very interesting either, not for a thirteen-year-old boy obsessed with Fortnite and finessing the opening guitar riff to "Sweet Child O’ Mine" so that I could, one day, play the whole thing as well as Slash. Which meant we were soon back out on the narrow pavement, hugging the glass front of a café adjacent to the fabric shop to stay dry, and avoiding a group of Japanese tourists taking photos of each other gurning next to a bright red pillar box.
“Not much longer.” I remember my mum perusing the pastries through the glass. “I wonder what’s holding him up? Ooh, Ezra, don’t those strawberry-and-cream ones look nice.”
The rows of fancy cakes had reminded my stomach we still hadn’t had our lunch. A boy, a few years younger than me, sat in the café scoffing a brownie, chocolate crumbs smeared around his mouth like a horseshoe moustache. His mum and dad had their backs to us; with one hand, his mum pushed a sleeping toddler to and fro in a pushchair. Her other hand rested around the man’s shoulders; they were sitting very close and cuddling. I remember thinkingyuck.Thank God my mum and dad didn’t do that in public. Nor in private, for that matter. A pair of sturdyfeet belonging to another toddler, with patent red shoes and frilly white socks, dangled from the man’s lap.
The boy’s prep school uniform was even more hideous than mine: a ghastly light grey blazer with a pink velvet trim, the whole ensemble topped by a straw boater, as if he’d stepped out of the last century. Although the cakes looked decent enough, any envy for the brownie immediately evaporated. And, now my dentist trip was out of the way, as soon as we said hi to dad, Mum was treating me to pad thai at Wagamama’s. Far superior to cakes in a crappyoldetea shoppefull of tourists.
As the kid swallowed down his last mouthful, his mum passed him a napkin. The boy’s dad pushed his chair back and stood, reaching for his suit jacket. His eyes drifted up to the window and met mine. Then he froze. We both did.
If I could have picked a moment when time stood still, with the sole objective of razing my world to the ground before merrily cantering forwards again, no way would I have chosen that one.
