The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

Fairlight Beach

21

When I saw the Chinese woman and her daughter playing cards together at their restaurant table, the water and the lights of Sydney harbour shimmering behind them, I knew that it would not be long now, not long at all, before I found what I’d been looking for.

It was 11 April 2009: the second Saturday of the month.

I arrived at the restaurant at seven o’clock, and they arrived three-quarters of an hour later. They did not seem to have changed since I’d last seen them, on Valentine’s Day. They were just the same. I think the little girl might even have been wearing the same dress. And everything they did together at their table was just the same, as well. First of all they ate a big meal together – a surprisingly big meal, four courses each in fact – and then the waiter cleared all their plates and dishes away and brought some hot chocolate for the little girl and some coffee for her mother and then the Chinese woman took out her pack of cards and they started to play. Once again, I couldn’t tell exactly what game they were playing. It wasn’t a proper grown-up card game, but then again it wasn’t a childish one like snap, either. Whatever it was, they found it entirely absorbing. Once the game had started, they seemed to exist in a little cocoon of intimacy, oblivious to the presence of the other diners. The restaurant terrace was not quite as busy as it had been last time: partly because last time had been Valentine’s Day, of course, but also because Sydney had a noticeably cooler and more autumnal feel to it, already, and a lot of people had chosen to eat inside. I was even getting a little chilly myself, but still, I was glad that the Chinese woman and her daughter had chosen to stay out on the terrace, because it meant I could see them again just how I remembered them, with the water and the lights of Sydney harbour shimmering in the background. I tried to watch them unobtrusively, just the occasional glance in their direction, not staring openly or anything like that. I didn’t want to make them feel uncomfortable.

At first I was simply glad to see them. I was happy to savour the overwhelming sense of rightness, and calm, that came over me when I first saw them walk on to the restaurant terrace. After all, even though the waiter had assured me, not so long ago, that they came to this restaurant regularly on the second Saturday of every month, I’d still not quite been able to bring myself to believe that they would be here tonight. So my first reaction had been one of relief, pure and simple. This was rapidly succeeded, all the same, by a growing sense of anxiety. The fact was that, even after thinking about it for hours, I’d still not been able to come up with an appropriate way of introducing myself to them. Coming out with a tired old line like, ‘Excuse me, but haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ would get me nowhere. If I said that the prospect of meeting them had been one of my main incentives for flying all the way over from London, on the other hand, it would probably freak them out. Was there anything I could tell them that might steer a middle ground between these two approaches? Perhaps if I were to tell them the truth: that I had first seen them at this restaurant two months ago, and ever since then they had become, for me, a sort of totem, a symbol of everything that a real relationship between two human beings should be, at a time when people seemed to be losing the ability to connect with one another, even as technology created more and more ways in which it ought to be possible … Well, I was going to get bogged down if I pursued that line of argument too far, but still, I reckoned that – with a bit of luck, if the right words managed to come to me somehow – this might just about be a feasible way of tackling it. And I had better hurry up, if I wanted any chance of speaking to them this evening. It was getting late, and the little girl was beginning to look tired, and any minute now they would probably be leaving. Already their card game seemed to be over and they were talking and laughing together again, having a friendly little quarrel about something or other while the Chinese woman looked around to see where the waiter was, presumably to ask for the bill.

So – this was it. My heart pounding, I was just on the point of rising out of my seat and walking over to their table when something stopped me. Someone, I should say. For just at that moment, quite unexpectedly, my father walked out on to the restaurant terrace, and came over to my table.

Yes, my father. The last person I was expecting to see, at that moment. He was supposed to be in Melbourne with Roger Anstruther.

All right, I admit that I’ve left out some important parts of the story. It’s probably time to do a little back-tracking.

It was Saturday afternoon when I finally woke up in the hospital ward in Aberdeen. I woke up to find that there were two people sitting by my bedside: Trevor Paige and Lindsay Ashworth. They had come to bring me home.

The next day, Trevor and I travelled back to London together, by train. Lindsay drove down in the Prius. On the train to London, Trevor told me the news about Guest Toothbrushes: they had been forced into liquidation on Thursday morning, after the bank had refused to extend their lines of credit any further. The announcement had been made round about the time I was skirting the edges of Dundee, but nobody from the firm had been able to make contact with me. All ten members of staff had been made redundant, and the project to launch the new range at the British Dental Trade Association fair had, of course, been aborted. All Lindsay’s plans had come to nothing.

Back in Watford, it took me a few days to recover from my journey. I spent most of the next week in bed. Plenty of people came to visit me, I must say. Not just Trevor and Lindsay, but even Alan Guest himself, which I thought was a nice touch. He seemed to feel quite guilty about the way my part in the campaign had turned out, almost as if it was his personal responsibility. I told him that he should have no worries on that score. Poppy came to see me twice, bringing her uncle with her the second time. And at the weekend, things got even better, when I was lucky enough to witness a true miracle in the form of a visit from Caroline and Lucy. They didn’t stay the night, or anything like that, but even so: it was the first time they had been down to Watford since our separation, and Caroline promised me that it wouldn’t be the last.

As soon as I felt well enough, I contacted my old employers and made another appointment to see Helen, the Occupational Health Officer. I told her that I had reconsidered my position at the department store, and if there was any possibility that my old job might still be open, I would like to start working there again. Helen seemed taken aback by this request, and told me that she would have to consult with the personnel department, and would contact me again within a few days. She kept her word. They had already taken on another After-Sales Customer Liaison Officer, she said, but she would email me a list of the vacancies currently available in other parts of the store, and she assured me that any application I might make for one of these posts would be looked upon favourably. The list arrived, and after some deliberation, I applied for a job in soft furnishings. I’m pleased to say that I got the job, and agreed to start work there on Monday, 20 April.

In the meantime I’d made a resolution, and now realized that I didn’t have long to carry it out. One morning I sat down at the kitchen table with the plastic bin liner full of Roger Anstruther’s picture postcards. I tipped them all on to the table and began sorting through them. I wanted to put them in chronological order, first of all. It wasn’t easy, because not all of them were dated, and of those which were undated, many had postmarks which were now illegible. A certain amount of guesswork was involved. After a few hours, however, I had made enough progress to be able to sketch out a rough map of his itinerary over the last few years. Since January 2006 he had travelled down from Southern China, through Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia, and had then spent almost a year on the island of Palau, about 600 miles west of the Philippines. This was about as remote a spot as anyone could possibly find, and the thought that Roger might have settled there, at least for the time being, made my scheme look even more fantastic and impractical than it had seemed in the first place. My plan was …Well, have you guessed it by now? Of course. My plan was to effect some sort of reconciliation between Roger Anstruther and my father. To contact Roger, in the first instance, and suggest that he and my father meet again: meet in person, that is – not by email, or over the telephone. However, now that I considered the geographical distance between them, this idea began to appear ridiculous. They were in the same hemisphere, admittedly, but that was about it. And yet …The more I thought about my plan, the more it started to feel, not like an idle fantasy, but a necessity. My father’s and Roger’s story had to end this way. In my very bones I felt that there was something more than chance operating here – that their reunion was also their destiny, and that bringing it about was the task that I had been born to perform. Does that sound to you as though I had not fully recovered my wits, after the disastrous end to my journey? Well then, just consider this. There were still a couple of dozen unsorted postcards in the bin liner, at this point, and when I took them out I discovered that although most of them seemed to date from the early 1990s, there was one that was much more recent. It bore a picture of the waterfront at Adelaide, and it was dated … January 2009.

Roger was in Australia, now. He and my father were living less than a thousand miles apart. Breathlessly, I read and reread the message on the back of the postcard.

Got tired of living in the back of beyond at last, he had written. Have started yearning for some Western comforts again. Also occurred to me – though this is a morbid thought – that I should start looking for somewhere to end my days. So, here I am, for the next few months at least. My boarding house marked with an arrow – must have had a nice view of the bay, in days gone by, but all the new condo’s seem to have put paid to that …

Now, tell me – does that not seem like destiny to you?

Often, as I’d come to realize over the last few weeks, the internet is something that puts up barriers between people as much as it connects them. But there are also times when it can be an uncomplicated blessing. In a matter of hours, I had used Google Earth to locate the stretch of Adelaide waterfront on Roger’s postcard, identified his boarding house, established its name and address, and sent an email to the owners asking if they had anyone staying there by his name. Their reply arrived the next morning, and it was just the one I’d been hoping for.

So I had already found Roger Anstruther.

I flew out to Australia on 4 April. It was going to be a short trip this time, little more than a week: not even long enough to get over my jet lag properly. I couldn’t really afford it, either – not without getting even further into debt. But it had to be done. At first I didn’t plan to tell my father that I was coming. I thought it would be better to surprise him. Then I realized that this was a silly thing to do – people didn’t just fly across to the other side of the world, at considerable expense, on the off chance of seeing their fathers: supposing he had gone away somewhere? Supposing he had decided to take a couple of weeks’ holiday? So, the night before I was due to fly, I tried phoning him, and I couldn’t get through. There was no reply from his home number, and no reply from his mobile. Then I started to panic. Maybe something had happened to him. Maybe he was lying dead on the kitchen floor of his new apartment. Now I would have to fly out to see him.

Naturally, when I turned up at his apartment thirty-six hours later, and rang the doorbell, he came and answered it in a couple of seconds.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said.

‘I’ve come to see you. Why didn’t you answer the phone?’

‘Have you been calling? There’s something wrong with it. I’ve managed to mute the ring tone, I don’t know how. Now I can’t hear it when somebody calls me.’

‘What about your mobile?’

‘The battery ran down and I can’t find the charger. You didn’t fly all the way out here because of that, did you?’

I was still standing on the doorstep.

‘Can I come in?’

I think my father was genuinely touched that I had taken the trouble to come out here again so soon after my last visit. Touched and astounded. For most of the week we didn’t do anything special, but there was an easiness and even (dare I say this?) a closeness between us that was new to both of us. I gave him back the precious blue ring binder that I had retrieved from Lichfield and told him that I had read his memoir The Rising Sun, but apart from that we didn’t discuss it. Not for a while, at any rate. Nor did I mention, at first, that more than half of the space in my suitcase was occupied by layer upon layer of Roger Anstruther’s postcards. Instead, I bided my time, and we passed the first days of my visit in various low-key domestic ways. My father had been in this apartment for three months now but it still wasn’t furnished properly, so we spent some time going round furniture stores buying chairs and cupboards and a spare bed. Also he had this television that was about twenty years old and barely worked, so one day we went out and got him a nice new flat-screen TV and a DVD player. He complained about this and said that he had nothing to play all his old VHS tapes on now and the remote controls were too small and he was bound to lose them, but basically I think he was pleased, not just about the TV but about everything. We were already having a much better time than the last time I’d visited.

Friday night came around and I still hadn’t told him what I had planned for the next day. We ordered a Chinese takeaway and opened a nice bottle of New Zealand Shiraz and then, while he was cutting up the quarter of crispy duck and taking the little pancakes out from their cellophane wrapper, I went into the next room and when I came back I said to him:

‘Dad, I’ve got something for you.’

I put a Qantas ticket on the table between us.

‘What’s that?’ he said.

I said, ‘It’s a plane ticket.’

He picked it up and looked at it.

‘This is a ticket for Melbourne,’ he said.

‘That’s right.’

‘For tomorrow.’

‘Yes, for tomorrow.’

He put it down again.

‘Well, what’s going on?’

‘You’re going to Melbourne tomorrow,’ I said.

‘Why would I want to go to Melbourne?’

‘Because … Because someone will be there tomorrow who I think you ought to see.’

He looked at me without comprehension. I realized that I had made it sound like I wanted him to consult a specialist doctor or something.

‘Well – who?’

‘Roger,’ I said.

‘Roger?’

‘Roger Anstruther.’

My father stopped cutting up the duck into small, flaky pieces, and sat down at the table.

‘You’ve been in touch with Roger? How?’

‘I tracked him down.’

‘How?’

‘The clue was on the last postcard he sent you. I found it in Lichfield.’

‘He’s still writing to me?’

‘Yes. He’s never stopped writing. I’ve got about two hundred postcards from him upstairs, in my suitcase.’

My father scratched his head.

‘He wants to see me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did he sound?’

‘He sounded … keen to see you.’

‘He’s living in Melbourne now?’

I shook my head. ‘Adelaide. We chose Melbourne because it was a good halfway point.’

My father picked up the ticket again and looked at the time of the flight, although he didn’t seem to be taking any of the details in.

‘So it sounds like this is all arranged.’

‘If you want to go through with it.’

‘Where are we supposed to be meeting?’

‘In the tea rooms of the Botanical Gardens,’ I said, ‘at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.’

He put the ticket down and picked up his knife and fork and resumed work on the duck, his brow furrowed in thought. For a long time after that he said no more on the subject. My father, I’m beginning to realize, has a genius for silence.

That night, all the same, it was obvious that he was highly agitated. I handed over the bundles of postcards and when I went to bed I left him sitting at the kitchen table, reading through them methodically. At three o’clock in the morning, still jet-lagged, I woke up and saw that there was a light coming from beneath his bedroom door. I could hear the creak of the floorboards as he paced up and down. I suspect that neither of us slept for the rest of the night.

I was the first one to use the kitchen the next morning. While I was in there making coffee at about seven o’clock, my father came in and said abruptly: ‘You didn’t get me a return ticket.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I didn’t know how long you’d want to stay. I thought that kind of depended on how things panned out. You’ll have to buy the return half yourself.’

‘I can’t afford to buy a plane ticket from Melbourne to Sydney.’

‘I’ll reimburse you.’

When I said this, he did something … well, he did something that I found quite extraordinary. If you were lucky enough to have had a reasonably normal relationship with your own parents, you might find it hard to understand just how extraordinary it was, to me. First of all, he said, ‘Thank you, Max.’ Then he said, ‘You didn’t have to do this for me, you know.’ But that’s not the strange thing. The strange thing was that, while he was saying it, he came over to me as I was pouring boiling water on to the coffee grains in my mug, and he put his hand on my shoulder. He touched me.

I was forty-eight years old. It was the first time I could remember him ever doing anything like that. I turned round and our eyes met, very briefly. But the moment was too uncomfortable, for both of us, so we soon looked away.

‘What are you going to do with yourself, today?’ he asked me.

‘No great plans,’ I said. ‘Except that tonight I have to go to this restaurant. I’m hoping to meet somebody there myself.’

I told him that it was the same restaurant where we’d failed to have dinner together at the end of my last visit. And I also told him a little bit about the Chinese woman and her daughter.

‘You know this woman?’ he asked, as I handed him a mug of instant coffee.

‘No, not exactly. But …’ (this felt like a bizarre thing to be saying, but I ploughed ahead) ‘… but in a way, it does feel that we know each other. That I’ve known her a long time.’

‘I see,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘Is she married? Does she have a boyfriend?’

‘I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure that she’s a single mother.’

‘And tonight you’re going to talk to her, is that the idea?’

‘That’s the idea.’

‘Well, good luck,’ he said.

‘And you, Dad,’ I said. ‘It’s a big day for both of us.’

We clinked our mugs together and drank to the success of our prospective encounters.

About half an hour later, just before he left, I reminded my father that I’d found the charger for his mobile phone and I’d charged it fully and left it on top of the bookcase in the living room.

‘Don’t forget to take it, will you!’ I called, while he was in his bedroom, cramming a few things into an overnight bag.

‘Don’t worry,’ he called back. ‘I’ve already got it. I’ve got it right here.’

And, stupidly, I believed him.

And now here he was: back in Sydney, little more than twelve hours later, taking his seat opposite me on the restaurant terrace while the water and the lights of Sydney harbour shimmered behind us. Apart from the Chinese woman and her daughter, we were the only people left out here. A cool breeze was blowing in off the water. It ruffled my father’s hair and as it did so I thought that he was lucky still to have a full head of hair at his age. Thinking about this, I ran a hand through my own hair, which was almost entirely grey now, but – like my father’s – still full and thick, and I reflected that I had probably inherited his hair and I should be grateful for that because there were a lot of men my age who were already practically bald. I looked at my father while I was thinking these thoughts and realized that I was like him in many ways – the colour of my eyes, the line of my chin, the way we both liked to swirl our drinks around in our glasses before we drank them – and for the first time, this knowledge felt welcome, a good thing, and it gave me a warm feeling in the pit of my stomach: like a kind of homecoming.

‘I was hoping that I’d find you here,’ he said. ‘Have you finished eating? Will you join me in a drink? Because, believe me, I feel like a drink.’

I told him that I would certainly join him in a drink, so he called the waiter over and asked for two large amarettos (except that he called them ‘amaretti’).

‘So, how did it go?’ I asked, although I could see already that something must have gone wrong. ‘How did it go with Roger? Did you manage to recognize him, after all these years?’

The waiter brought our drinks over (that was another thing I liked about this restaurant – fantastic service) and then went to the other table to settle up the bill with the Chinese woman and her daughter.

My father swirled his amaretto around in the glass before taking a hefty sip.

‘Whose idea was it that we should meet in the tea rooms at the Botanical Gardens?’ he asked. ‘Was that your idea, or Roger’s?’

‘That was my idea,’ I said. ‘Why, was there something wrong with it? Don’t tell me they were closed for renovation, or something.’

‘No. No, there was nothing wrong with the idea, really. Those gardens are beautiful. I’m just surprised you were the one to choose them, because I didn’t think you’d ever been to Melbourne.’

‘I haven’t,’ I admitted. ‘Actually, I’ve got a Facebook friend who lives in Melbourne, so I asked him to suggest somewhere. So I suppose it was actually his idea, not mine.’

‘Ah. All right then. Well, that’s fine.’

I could sense that it wasn’t fine. That something about it wasn’t fine at all.

‘But … ?’ I prompted.

‘Well …’ My father took another sip, while he thought carefully about his words. ‘Well, it was a lovely idea, Max, but there’s just one problem.’

‘Yes?’

He leaned forward, and said: ‘There are two different tea rooms at the Botanical Gardens in Melbourne.’

I had been just about to take a sip of amaretto. I lowered the glass slowly.

‘What?’

‘There are two different tea rooms. At opposite ends of the gardens. One is up at the main entrance, opposite the big war memorial, the other one is down by the ornamental lake. I went to the one down by the lake.’

‘And Roger … ?’ I said, although I was barely able to speak.

‘Well, it seems he went to the other one.’

The full absurdity, the full horror of it was dawning on me.

‘You missed each other?’

My father nodded.

‘But … I gave him your mobile number. And I put his number into your phone. Didn’t he try to call you?’

‘Yes. Fourteen times. As I found out when I got home. Here.’

He took his mobile out of his jacket pocket and showed me the little message on the screen which said: ‘14 missed calls’.

‘So why didn’t you answer?’

‘I didn’t have my phone with me.’

‘You didn’t have your phone with you? Dad – you … idiot. I asked you whether you had your phone. And you said that you did. I asked you that this morning.’

‘I thought I’d got it with me, but I hadn’t. I had this instead.’

He took something out of his other jacket pocket, and laid it on the table between us. It was the remote control for his new flat-screen TV.

‘You’ve got to admit,’ he said, positioning it next to his mobile on the table, ‘they do look similar.’

It was true. They did.

‘So … So what happened?’

‘Well, I got to the tea room at about ten to three, and I sat there for about half an hour or so, and then it occurred to me that Roger was late, so I checked my phone to see if he’d maybe called and I hadn’t heard it, and that was when I realized that I’d brought the remote control with me by mistake. Well, I didn’t panic, because at that point, as far as I knew, there was only one tea room at the Botanical Gardens, and I was sitting in it. So I waited there for another twenty minutes, and then a girl came over to clear my tea things away, and I said to her, “Incidentally, if you told someone that you were going to meet them at the tea room of the Botanical Gardens, is this where you would come?”, and she smiled at me and said, “Of course it is,” but then just as she was leaving she turned round and said, “Oh – unless you meant the other one, of course.”’

We both swirled our amaretti around in our glasses and took another drink. Both glasses were almost empty.

‘So then I knew exactly what had happened. And I asked the girl how long it would take to walk from one place to the other and she said about ten or fifteen minutes (she could see that I wasn’t exactly in the first flush of youth), and I asked her whether there was more than one path and she said that there were several different paths. So I thought that surely Roger would realize what had happened as well, and it would be best to stay put for a little while. So I stayed there for another fifteen minutes and then I started to panic, because probably I could have asked the people in my tea room to phone the people in the other tea room and ask if they could see if there was anyone like Roger there, but anyway, I didn’t think of that, I just got up and left my table and walked round to the other tea room. Which actually took me more like twenty-five minutes, because I can’t walk so fast these days and I kept getting lost. In any case, when I got there – Roger had gone.’

‘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 …

My father only started to compose himself again when he realized that the waiter was standing over us.

‘Gentlemen,’ said the waiter, ‘in a few minutes you will have to leave. We are closing.’

‘Fair enough,’ I answered.

‘Before then … perhaps two more amaretti?’

When he brought the drinks, my father and I clinked glasses again, and drank a toast in memory of my mother.

‘She meant everything to me,’ I said. ‘I never told her that, you know. I should have done. I hope she understood, somehow or other, just how much I loved her.’

I looked across at Dad, wondering if he was going to say something similar. Had he loved her too? Surely he must have done, in his own way, to have stayed with her all that time. But he said nothing: just smiled back at me sadly.

The waiter had begun to stack chairs on the tables around us. We were both tired and ready for bed.

‘Well, anyway – let’s look to the future. At the very least, we should do something about Mum’s gravestone. All it says is “Barbara Sim, 1939–1985”. We really ought to come up with something better than that.’

‘You’re right,’ my father said. ‘That’s the first thing we’ll do.’

I had a moment of inspiration. ‘I know – what about those lines from Four Quartets? Those really nice ones, about time past being contained in time present.’

My father considered this. ‘Not bad. Not bad at all.’

But I could tell that he wasn’t convinced.

‘Have you got a better idea?’

‘Not really. But the trouble is, your mother couldn’t stand poetry. She would have hated to have T. S. Eliot on her gravestone.’

‘All right, then. What did she like?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. She liked Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard …’

‘OK, let’s go with Cliff. A few lines from one of his songs.’

‘“Living Doll” …’ mused my father, and shook his head. ‘Not very appropriate for a gravestone, really.’

‘What about “Devil Woman”? Maybe not.’

‘“Congratulations”? I don’t think so.’

‘“We’re all going on a summer holiday”?’

‘No, those don’t work as epitaphs. None of them.’

Our eyes met again, and suddenly we burst out laughing: then continued to swirl the two glasses of amaretto around in our hands before drinking them down to the last drop.