Jerking at the gearstick, I revved the engine and the car leapt forward. The parcel shuddered, held its point of balance for a moment, then toppled sideways, leaving the page edges uppermost. They looked vulnerable, less powerful. That pleased me.
I relaxed a little, slowed to negotiate another narrow bend and began to ponder just what I would say to Flora when I came face to face with her. The road was beginning to climb now, up through an avenue of oaks and beeches merging on either side into gladed woodland. Through the trees to the west, a light airiness hung above the dip of the valley, the hills beyond curving the horizon. Despite all my misgivings, it was hard to resist the serenity.
Was it for such a sense of peace that my father had initially come; once in a while, and armed with fishing rods and a box of assorted flies? I remember – I must have been about ten at the time – his setting out the bright screws of fur and feather on the dining-room table and challenging me, with that great chortle of his, to recite their names. His favourite was his own design: the ‘Golden Retriever’, he called it. He swore he’d enticed more trout with that one fly than with any conventional nymph or dun.
In those days, he would return on a Sunday evening smelling of damp leaves and moss; bearing his pungent catch in an old wicker shopping basket scrounged from the cupboard under the stairs. Mother would squeal at him to ‘leave those filthy Wellingtons outside’, and wrinkle her nose as he plonked his booty on the draining board.
‘Come on, Carrie,’ he would say to me. ‘You wash and I’ll fillet.’ And so I would hold the slippery ovals under the cold tap and, with numb fingers, brush away the mud and grass; and watch as, wielding the brown-handled kitchen knife I was forbidden on pain of direst retribution to touch, he deftly cut away the fins and sliced along the belly of each scaly creature, stripping out the skeleton with practised ease.
Then my mother, having banished Father upstairs to ‘make yourself presentable for goodness sake, dear’, would arrange the speckled bodies in rows under the grill and whip up a delicate butter and herb sauce to pour over them.
The taste – once anticipated with so much relish – was now nothing but a soured memory.
To start with, I only noticed that Father was returning almost, and sometimes entirely, empty-handed from his increasingly frequent fishing weekends; and that my mother turned away, her expression curiously blank, when he apologised awkwardly for the poor catch. Perhaps, I thought, she had looked forward to our trout suppers more than she had ever given reason to suppose.
Then one Friday evening, as he was about to set off and I went to shut the garage doors, I realised his rods were still leaning up against the wall at the back. I ran after him down the drive and, skipping sideways parallel with the moving car, banged on the window. ‘You’ve forgotten your rods,’ I puffed. I teased him triumphantly: ‘You won’t get much fishing done without them.’
His smile, as he pulled the car to a halt, was strange; faraway. ‘Oh, of course!’ He fetched the bundle of canes and stowed them in the boot. He seemed to hesitate before going back to collect the battered red tin box in which he stored the rest of his tackle.
‘Happy now?’ he said. He patted me on the head before sliding his long legs under the steering wheel and driving off.
I knew then that something wasn’t right.
All my mother said, when she saw bewilderment written loud on my face, was, ‘Her name is Flora.’ We never spoke of her again.
There were times when I was crying out to do so, but somehow I knew that to ask for explanations would endanger some sort of balance that held my world precariously in place.
It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the meaning of Mother’s cryptic announcement; by the time of that revelationary Friday, I was already into my teens – just. In the early days, I spent long hours wondering. I found myself hoping Flora didn’t look like the bewigged and powdered Madame de Pompadour of my school history books; Nell Gwyn, I decided, presented a far more acceptable image of my father’s mistress. On the other hand, Flora must surely be some sort of witch, pointed hat and all, to have lured my father into her lair. I should have liked to speculate with my friends, but the taboo that hung over the subject at home extended to an unspoken prohibition on it being mentioned outside. My fantasies remained secret ones and, undernourished, eventually withered. And, with them, my curiosity.
About Flora herself, that is. My father’s betrayal and my mother’s acceptance of it continued to puzzle my pubescent mind. It was not the stuff of which the romantic novels, into which I escaped to revive my faith in the happy-ever-after, were made. But eventually even those queries succumbed to the practical routine of Father’s regular weekend absences.
For the benefit of the neighbours, he made a point of ostentatiously packing his fishing gear in the car each summer Friday, and on his return nodded comments over the fence about the state of the water. The close season was more problematic. But, each year, something was dreamed up. One winter, he was – Mother would explain as she nodded her way along the Avenue – ‘helping a friend do up a country cottage’; the next, he was ‘tutoring an OU course’. If the Mackenzies or our then neighbours, the Brandons or the Williamses, whispered cynicism among themselves, they were careful not to do so in my hearing.
For my part, I surmounted the difficulty by teasing my peers with the notion that his weekends were spent on top secret government assignments. ‘You mean he’s a spy,’ gasped Penny Kingsley, reliably gullible. Pouring scorn on my giggling claims distracted the others from probing the reality.
At home each Friday evening, after Mother and I had cleared away our supper for two, she would pick up her embroidery and dictate a shopping list for the following morning. Curled up in Father’s big Minty chair, I would, every now and again at Mother’s behest, disentangle my legs from its depths and scurry out to the kitchen to check the stock of some item. (As I grew older, such sorties took on a more self-consciously languid air – but the ritual was maintained right up to the time I went away to university.)
Next day in town and before embarking on the supermarket marathon – traditionally reserved for Saturdays, for unspecified reasons which it never occurred to me to query – we often treated ourselves to coffee in the department store in East Street; and afterwards, wandering back down the escalators, inevitably detoured into the Fashion section. My mother loved clothes and always dressed beautifully. But I was always more comfortable helping choose a skirt or an Hermès silk scarf for her than struggling to find a compromise between my penchant for tatty jeans and T-shirts and her desire to see me dressed in ‘something elegant for a change’.
Oddly enough, it was on these occasions, delving among the clothes rails, when the feminine alliance should have been closest, that I most missed my father’s presence. I found myself longing for his endorsement of my desire – my need, even – to make my choice independently. I could have done with his support as Mother picked out some excruciatingly dull jumper and held it up against me, murmuring how well the colour suited me. But then guilt at my ingratitude would roll in and I would squeeze her arm as she proffered a cheque at the till, thanking her profusely for the latest disappointing addition to my already overfull wardrobe.
They were cosy, though, those weekends, without Father’s ambiguous presence hanging over us. Increasingly, of course, I spent time on my own pursuits: the usual teenage things – discos, parties, or simply browsing the streets and record shops. Mother insisted that it wouldn’t be fair to expect me to stay in and keep her company.
‘I’ve got more than enough to keep me busy,’ she reassured me as she set about spring-cleaning each room in turn or, tying an apron round