These Days of Ours (17 page)

Kate could tell her mother had carefully arranged her features before entering the room. It was to no avail: at the sight of her husband, Mum began to weep.

As she hung over him, dripping tears onto his pyjama top, he patted her with his oddly straight hand. He couldn’t quite turn his neck to take her in properly. Kate felt as if he was
leaving them bit by bit, his solidity ebbing with each small physical change.

Collecting herself, Mum stared about the room. ‘What the feck have you done in here, Kate?’

‘Party,’ said Dad. He’d run out of sentences, apparently. Solo words were all he had left.

A paper dragon, its concertina folds the brightest of yellows, cavorted across the wall opposite Dad’s bed. Chinese paper lanterns, their tassels still in the heatwave hospital atmosphere,
hung above his head, and on the bed Kate had strewn fringed shawls blazing with lush embroidered flowers.

‘And what are you wearing?’ Mum took a step back from her daughter. ‘Is it a Chinese thing?’

‘It’s called a cheongsam.’ Kate twirled, not easy to do in the form fitting crossover satin dress. A size too small, she’d paid over the odds for the display purposes
only outfit in the window of the tiny Chinese emporium that sat miraculously between a dry cleaner’s and an estate agent in this beige suburb. ‘As we couldn’t make it to Jia
Tang’s party, we’re having one of our own.’

Kate could tell Mum was doing her best to be annoyed, but she couldn’t manage it. ‘Him and his Yulan House,’ she tutted.

‘Wife,’ was all Dad said as Mum sat, rending tissue after tissue, spouting nuggets of gossip. Dad hadn’t given a toss about the woman next door’s
exploits when he was healthy; Kate assumed Dad gave even less of a toss now that he was sick. It helped Mum, though, so they all listened dutifully to her rhetoric.

The debate about whether or not Mum should stay the night raged until late. Aunty Marjorie prevailed, finally, and took Mum by the arm.

Bending over her husband to say goodnight – not goodbye, never goodbye when he was in a hospital bed – Mum recoiled when Dad said, ‘All that lives must die.’

‘Oh Jesus, he’s going!’ cried Mum. ‘Kate, he’s going!’

‘It’s a quote, Mum. From
Hamlet
. It’s just Dad being Dad.’

After Mum had gone, when the room was quiet again, Kate said, ‘I know what you mean, Dad.’

This is ordinary
, he was saying.
This is just part of life.

The festive colours of the decorations glowed as the night crept on, as beyond the windows turned to black pricked with points of artificial light. Still in her cheongsam, even
though it was uncomfortable, Kate appreciated the antiseptic NHS room’s attempt to be cosy and beautiful.

The email from Jia Tang had made her cry. ‘We hold your father in our hearts. He is a good man.’ Kate believed Dad had smiled when she said, ‘She’s not wrong,
Pops.’

When Charlie called she didn’t pick up. His message sounded confused, like somebody trying to put furniture together without instructions. ‘But . . . you were going to China today .
. . so what did . . . I mean . . .?’

Charlie had been against the trip. And he’d been right. It had been an act of hubris, and the gods had cut Dad down. Kate wouldn’t be able to bear any reproach; it would break her
and Kate needed to run a little longer on the scant petrol in her tank.

Did I wilfully ignore how frail Dad’s become in case it jeopardised the trip?
Kate retraced the past couple of weeks. She’d kept checking with her father to ensure he was
still keen to make their epic journey.

Perhaps I gave him no choice
. Dad, after all, was ill not stupid; he knew the expense and effort Kate had gone to.

Or maybe he was acting
. That was the most painful option, Dad pretending to be more vigorous, less depleted than he really was rather than disappoint his only child. Desperate to hear his
voice, she took Julian’s call outside in the cold.

‘So. What’s happening?’

‘The same. No real change.’

‘Should I come? I can if you like.’

If just once Julian would forgo the
if you like
, she’d beg him to get there as soon as possible. The three words, so ambiguous, forced her to say, as usual, ‘No, stay put.
I’m OK.’

‘It’s probably another false alarm.’

‘Probably.’ It wasn’t. Cancer had cried wolf so often Kate knew the difference. She was impatient to get back inside to where Dad made barely a dent in the bed. The thread was
sagging.

‘By the way, it was pretty tough at the bank.’

‘Sorry, darling. I forgot to ask: did they extend the loan?’

‘Not exactly.’ Julian sighed and Kate imagined him dragging his hand heavily down his features. ‘By which I mean they laughed me out of the room. I’ve put a fortune
through that bank but the minute I ask for a little wiggle room . . .’

‘We have plan B.’

‘Hmm.’

‘We talked about this.’ Ames Partners in Property was springing leaks faster than Julian could plug them up. ‘We have to act fast, darling.’ Raising money on the Party
Games shops was the obvious next move, but Julian’s reluctance to admit that his wife was now the breadwinner held them back. This change in their circumstances had altered Julian profoundly.
No longer a
My way or the highway
chap, he deferred to Kate with a wary mindfulness, as if he was the ringmaster and she a lion who’d somehow wangled the whip into her paws. It was,
Kate knew, the only reason he hadn’t insisted they put the house on the market to save the company. He would never admit it, but they were living in it because she, the boss, wanted them
to.

For Kate, Julian’s crisis was another example of the rises and dips of the marital see-saw: she conceded that it was easy to see it that way when you were up in the air and not down in the
mud. She longed for them to be a partnership, to be in harmony. She longed for him to turn up at the hospital, without asking if he was needed there.

Had Julian believed her when Kate said she’d willingly sell the house if they had to? For now, she appreciated her private front door and a garden on terra firma.

‘Let’s not talk about this now,’ said Julian. The ice in his whisky on the rocks clinked as he upended the glass. ‘Concentrate on your dad. Call me if anything
changes.’

Her hand was on his. There was no such thing as time any more, just an endless now.

‘Love,’ said Dad about midnight, setting Kate’s heart racing in case it was a farewell.

He slept a little. Mainly he kept his eyes on his daughter.

Whether he could hear she didn’t know. ‘How about we remember ten brilliant things we did together?’ She got as far as two; when she recalled how he’d saved the day at
her fifth birthday party by insisting she received the Action Man she wanted instead of the Princess Barbie Mum had chosen, she found herself crying. ‘Silly old me,’ she grumbled.
‘Crying is Mum’s job.’

Cups of tea. A form filled in and signed. Murmured voices beyond the door. An hour. Another hour. Just the two of them, suspended in space.

‘He’s a tough nut,’ whispered a nurse, dressed just as Kate had been at Mumsy’s party. Poor Mumsy, her beauty blighted by a stroke, she now favoured coquettish veiled
hats, and continued to throw small dinners for a hundred people.

Another nurse, an older lady and one of those natural healers whose presence was balm, stole in, smiling when she saw the lanterns. Touching Dad’s forehead, she frowned and took up his
papery wrist.

‘It’s close, dear,’ she said.

Kate wanted to say, ‘No,’ in every language she could muster. She wanted to semaphore to whoever was in charge of the universe that she couldn’t do without her dad just yet,
thank you very much.

‘You can cry, dear.’ The nurse’s hand on Kate’s shoulder, so capable and compassionate, unleashed something.

Tears dribbled onto the thin bedcover, so neatly folded back. Kate kissed Dad’s cheek, and drank him in. Beneath the pharmaceutical top notes he still smelled of himself.

He was falling away from her.

‘Daddy.’ Kate never called him that.
Don’t go
. She mustn’t say that. He’d told her that the hardest part of this whole undertaking was knowing he must leave
her. Kate must put him first, just as he’d done with her since she was born.

The nurse left them together.

The thread snapped.

Out in the car park, in the dirty pool of yellow light around a street lamp, Kate jabbed at her mobile, her fingers fat and clumsy.

Every time she thought she’d finished crying, she began again.

Sniffing, she composed herself as she heard the sound of a phone ringing in a distant room.

‘Hello? Kate?’

‘He’s . . .’

‘I’ll be there before you know it.’

Charlie found her in the visitors’ lounge, a room that resembled a dull chapel, with low padded seats and dried flower arrangements, static and dead, on every polished
surface.

‘I can’t stop crying!’ Kate despaired of herself, as Charlie folded her to his shoulder, her head against the niche she remembered from long ago.

She still fitted.

The insomniac hospital never went quite to sleep. Now the streets around it woke up, the first buses chugging past, lit up against the still-dark dawn.

On a bench, legs stuck out in front of them, sat Kate and Charlie, drinking foul coffee.

‘Julian should be here by now.’ The troops had been rallied. Julian was on his way to the hospital. Becca was bundling up Flo for the drive to her parents’ house, where Aunty
Marjorie was preparing for them all. There was talk of quiche.

‘He was almost a dad to me,’ said Charlie.

‘I know. He liked that. He was so chuffed when you stopped work to go back to your book.’

‘That chat he had with Becca about letting me write probably saved my marriage.’

‘He had a chat with Becca?’ Kate hadn’t known. ‘Is that Julian?’ Kate sat up, then slumped again. ‘Nope.’

‘That was a genius touch, decorating the room. If John can’t go to China, then China must come to John!’

‘That reminds me. I must let Jia Tang know.’ Kate had already had to say ‘He’s gone’ five times over to the family. The list of people to inform grew each time she
thought of it. She might delegate: Julian would do it if she asked him. ‘And, God, the funeral . . .’

‘Plenty of time for that,’ said Charlie.

But time was relentless. Kate was already hours into the new post-Dad era.

A clock chimed five as her phone cheeped to remind Kate it was time for Dad’s first tablet of the day. She thought of his watch, still on the table beside his empty bed. It had been weeks
since he’d been able to wear it. It chafed his skin, he said.

‘Charlie,’ said Kate, ‘was I selfish? Did I ask too much of him?’

Catching on immediately, Charlie said, ‘No. Planning the trip to China kept him alive, I think.’ He twisted to face her miserable profile, laying his arm along the back of the bench.
‘Gave him something to live for. You did the right thing.’

‘Mum thought it was a stupid idea. So did Aunty Marjorie. He was sick, Charlie, and there I was, pushing and pulling him to get him to the airport.’

‘The only person whose approval you need is your dad’s. And he understood what you were doing.’

‘He did,’ said Kate. ‘Dad got me.’ Past tense already.

‘You were trying to make his lifelong dream come true. You almost bloody did it.’

‘Until Dad went and spoiled it. Self-centred sod.’ Kate tried to laugh but her face buckled and she was a child again. A child who wanted her daddy.

‘Come here.’ Charlie’s arms went tight around her. She felt his tears in her hair.

Struggling against his arms, Kate brought her face up, close to his. ‘Thank you, Charlie,’ she whispered. Some people make things better just by being there.

‘Shush, it’s OK.’ Charlie closed his eyes and chastely kissed her on the forehead, through her matted fringe.

His lips stayed there. He breathed against her.

At the same moment, they curved in to each other, as if obeying a high pitched instruction inaudible to other human ears.

Charlie’s mouth travelled down her face, imparting tiny kisses as it went.

Kate’s mouth was ready when he reached it. She parted her lips and felt Charlie inhabit her, familiar and exotic.

A car horn sounded harshly and they sprang apart, as if scalded.

‘First of all, thank you everybody for coming today. It’s a real honour to give the eulogy for my father.’

The pulpit was higher up than Kate had anticipated. Nearly ten years ago she’d knelt at this altar and the same priest now coughing behind her had blessed her marriage. Kate adjusted the
microphone and ignored the sombre bulk of the coffin, laden with flowers, in the corner of her vision.

‘I know Dad would be grateful to you for coming.’
And don’t think I didn’t notice the disapproving looks at my red coat
. Kate and Dad had discussed this:
‘I’ve always liked you in bright colours,’ he’d said.

The family pew was divided. The older half head to toe in black; Becca, Charlie and Flo in rainbow plumage. At the end of the bench sat Julian in grey.