‘Depends on whose baby it is.’
‘It’s worked for Kelly, hasn’t it?’ he said, ignoring this. I’d known Kelly since my first week of secondary school; so had my dad, because we were inseparable from the off, always in and out of each other’s flats. Now she had one daughter, Mol, aged four, and had recently shared with me, not without some shock in her voice, her discovery that she was in the very early stages of a second pregnancy. She wasn’t the only one – most of the friends that I had held on to from school or university were baby-producing, marrying, house-buying pragmatists. I said nothing.
My dad cleared his throat. ‘When I thought I was going to – you know – die – I just, all I wanted was to know you were going to have a good life when I was gone.’
‘But you’re not gone. So I can carry on having a shit life!’
‘Rosie, be serious. I know it hasn’t always been easy for you. But I want to say – that I think you’d be an excellent mum.’
I couldn’t say anything for a moment. ‘Dad,’ I said, my voice husky. ‘Don’t.’
He fell silent, and we said nothing for a few moments. I turned and turned a pebble in my palm. ‘How can you say it would be the making of me?’ I said suddenly. ‘What was I doing the last three decades?’
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘You sort of did. You don’t get to say that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I fucked this up, didn’t I?’
It was late afternoon, and a wind was coming over the sea, whipping small waves of white foam. Autumn was somewhere near. I thought of London, of what was there and what was missing. ‘You didn’t, Daddy,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’
4
On the last day, about an hour before Joe and I were due to go back to London, Dad and I were sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for the morning coffee to be ready. Joe was still asleep and Claire had gone for a run. I’d slept badly, tossing and turning, my mind uneasy. It was the fresh air, I told myself. People always say they sleep better when they get out of a city, but I found the cleaner air and the endless sound of water almost psychically disturbing, because I couldn’t hide my habits of thought from them in the same way I could from the stupor of London’s fumes and flashing lights. My selfhood lurked in London’s layers, hidden under the millions. Here, by the sea, I felt naked.
Dad’s face was pale and tense. His lips pressed tight together as if he was trying not to breathe. He reached down to the bench he was sitting on and brought up two books, placing them on the scarred table Claire had sourced years back from a local flea market. The books sat between us, a pair of innocuous paperbacks.
‘Have you ever read these?’ he said. ‘Ever read them in your degree?’
‘What?’
He pushed them towards me, and reluctantly I picked them up. The first one was called Wax Heart, and the second was Green Rabbit. The covers were dated but imaginative, the fonts simple but the pictures elaborate. Wax Heart had a giant heart on the front, made from an old-fashioned woodcut. The heart had been divided like the twelve signs of the zodiac, but instead of the usual symbols – the goat, the crab, the bull – there were seemingly traditional feminine pursuits; a saucepan, a needle, a ball of wool, a pressed flower, all in that heavy Elizabethan black ink. Green Rabbit was wilder, a freehand, masterfully dashed-off single green ink line drawing of a rabbit’s outline, except if you looked at it again, the rabbit could also have been a silhouette of a woman. They were both written by a woman called Constance Holden.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I focused on the Victorians.’
‘She’s a very good writer, actually. Was.’
‘Is she dead?’
‘I don’t know. You’ve really never read them?’
‘No, Dad,’ I said with exasperation. ‘Why are you asking me?’
‘You should read them,’ he said. ‘They were very popular when they came out.’
I wondered if this was the beginning of senility; the non sequiturs of conversation, the sudden retrieval of the past’s objects, lifting water from the well of your own life and finding no one wants to look inside the bucket.
‘The covers are beautiful,’ I said, leafing through the pages of Green Rabbit. They were faded on their edges, the type small and dated. ‘But why have you got them?’
He didn’t say anything. I looked up. ‘Are you just trying to get rid of them? You haven’t read them, have you?’
‘Your mum—’ he began, then stopped. He took a breath.
I was alert now, my fingers gripped hard on the yielding paperback. ‘What? What about my mum?’
The air between us thickened. My dad pointed at the name on the cover. ‘Your mother knew Constance Holden,’ he said.
‘Dad, I don’t understand.’
He looked away from me, through the kitchen window towards the sea. ‘I should have just come out with this years ago,’ he said.
I could feel my heart thump harder. ‘What should you have just come out with years ago?’
He looked back at me. ‘Before I met your mother,’ he said, his fingers twisting to a fist, ‘she and Constance – they were together.’
I stared at him. ‘My mum?’ I placed my hand on the top of Wax Heart. ‘My mum was with this woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘My mum was a lesbian?’
‘I don’t know, Rosie. She might have been. For a time, they were inseparable. I mean – we had you, so I can’t . . . qualify it.’
‘So she was bisexual?’
‘I guess that’s what you might call it.’ My dad looked like he wanted to curl up in a ball and never unfold himself.
I took a deep breath, clutching Green Rabbit like a talisman. ‘Wow,’ I said.
‘I need some air,’ said my dad, exhaling heavily. ‘Let’s take the coffee outside.’
*
So there we were, side by side on the pebbles again. I still hadn’t let go of the book, but now I laid it on the top of my thigh. The tide lapped a few feet away, and this time a crab moved mechanically along the edge, its front pincers raised. I looked at the sky, an unshifting haze of cloud. My head was pounding, but all I wanted was more. ‘Why are you telling me this now?’ I said. My father didn’t reply, just stared out at the flat grey line of the horizon. ‘Dad? You’re not . . . ill, are you?’
‘No, no. I’m fine. I just – I don’t know. It’s been on my mind. You. Your mum.’
He made it sound like he’d been worrying about Arsenal’s performance in the league, but I knew, on the very rare occasions when he was expansive like this, that the best thing was to let him find his way. ‘It was when Joe talked to me,’ he said. ‘I just thought, this isn’t right, you know? You not knowing anything about her, and thinking about becoming a mum yourself.’
Without any warning, tears sprang into my eyes. Sometimes it would come at me, how much he tried, how ill-equipped he was, but how he had done everything for me. How much I meant to him, how powerfully bound to him I could sometimes feel. I said nothing and wiped my eyes.