‘How old is he now?’ I asked Irene.
‘Seventy-two.’
I was eleven when he left England, almost twenty-five years ago. He would have been about my age when I was born. Seventy-two didn’t seem so old, I told myself.
‘I thought perhaps you could come and see him,’ Irene suggested.
I leaned my forehead against the wall. ‘I’d like to. Things are busy at the moment. But I’ll see what I can do.’
A heavy accusing silence reigned over the phone line. I felt a pressure building in my head. A hiss of static prompted the temptation to replace the receiver quietly as if we had been disconnected, a notion I dismissed instantly.
‘He is your father, Robert,’ Irene said gently.
‘I know.’
‘He needs you.’
My eyes stung and my chest felt tight, as though I was being constricted by an iron band. ‘No, he doesn’t,’ I said. I coughed, a choking involuntary sardonic laugh. My father needing me. That was almost funny.
Alicia was there when I hung up the phone. ‘What is it?’ She put a hand on my arm, a gesture of concern. As I looked at her I experienced a sudden tidal flow of tenderness mixed with gratitude that she was there. I had never seen her look more beautiful. She was wearing a long nightdress and her hair was mussed from sleep, a crease in her otherwise flawless skin where she’d lain on the edge of the pillow. She was a little pale I thought, and there were faint smudges beneath her eyes.
‘It was Irene.’ I put my arms around her and hugged her tight. I was a head taller than her and she felt slight against me. There was something of the wide-eyed innocent about her even though she was almost thirty. The first time I saw her I thought she’d looked lost, which in fact she had been. Literally. She was studying a street map with a worried frown. That had been three years ago.
She laid her head against my chest. ‘What did she want?’
I breathed in the scent of the shampoo she used and her face cream mingled with the early morning sexiness of her skin. I’m an inch short of six feet, but holding Alicia always made me feel taller somehow. It was the way she sank into me. Surrendered. Her body moulded against mine. ‘My father had a heart attack. He’s in hospital.’
She drew back a little so that she could look at me. ‘Will he be all right?’
‘Apparently.’
Alicia had never met him, or Irene, but she had spoken to both of them on the phone. I’d explained early on in our relationship that I didn’t get on with my dad. She knew the history. ‘I’m sorry.’ She rested her head against me again. She didn’t offer advice, she didn’t question me and she didn’t try to comfort me except by her presence and I loved her for that.
‘Families,’ I said wryly. I smiled and kissed her. ‘Who’d have them?’
As I turned away I glimpsed Alicia’s quick anxious frown and I realised my mistake. She wanted children and I was fairly sure that she was afraid that I didn’t. When she’d moved in with me we’d agreed that if we were still together and felt the same way about each other in a year’s time then we’d get married and start a family. The year had come and gone, but when we talked about it I always found a reason to delay things. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her. I just thought it was a big step.
I went back and kissed her again. She looked surprised. ‘What was that for?’
‘Because I love you.’
She studied me intently. ‘Do you? Really?’
‘Really.’
She kissed me back. ‘God. I love you too. I really do.’
At the weekend, I decided. At the weekend I’d ask her to marry me.
I spoke to Irene on the phone twice over the next forty-eight hours. My father’s condition continued to improve and the doctors were ever more confident that he would make a full recovery providing he made the necessary changes to his lifestyle. Every time I called, Irene asked me when I was going out there. I told her as soon as I could. I decided that since he was out of danger I should wait until he’d regained his strength, besides, there were things that needed my attention at work. She didn’t completely buy it, but she didn’t push the issue. She kept telling me that she would take care of him when he was allowed home. She’d make sure he kept to the doctor’s regime. I thought it was a little strange the way she kept assuring me, almost as if I doubted her, but I put it down to tiredness.
In fact it wasn’t a good time for me to be leaving London. I had started my company when I was still in my mid-twenties, having come out of university with a BA and not much idea of what I wanted to do with my life. All I knew for sure was that I wanted to spend it in the present rather than in the past like my dad. After a few years of intermittent travelling, and having tried banking and marketing, I decided that I didn’t really mind what I did so long as I didn’t have to work for anybody else. I raised some money and bought a run-down flat in North London which I fixed up and sold on for a profit. Since the work had been easy enough and the rewards surprisingly good, I did it again, so next I could afford to do up two places at once. Then I bought a big old house in Chingford that had been let as bedsits and tiny flats with shared bathrooms. With a daunting amount of debt, I set about converting the place into three apartments, each occupying a single floor. I sold two for what it had cost me to buy and renovate the entire building. The third one was pure profit, and London prices were about to take off.
By the time I was thirty I was worth several million on paper, but a year later I was not only broke but badly in debt. I’d invested heavily in an office tower but the main contractor had cut corners on a previous project and one of his recent buildings had been declared unfit. A whole morass of corrupt dealings with suppliers and officials had been exposed by one of the national newspapers, and when the contractor filed for bankruptcy nobody would come within a mile of the half-completed building I part-owned.
In the five years since then I had clawed my company back to profitability. I was more cautious about where I invested and for the most part I followed a strategy of developing a broader range of smaller properties. In another year or two I could begin to relax a little.
My company offices were within walking distance of my house. The day after Irene first called with the news about my father I arrived at work early. Tony Allen was the only one there. I had a small team who all had a stake in the business, and Tony had been with me the longest. He was ambitious and hard-working and was usually at his desk around seven. I’d given up telling him he didn’t need to burn himself out a long time ago.
That morning he didn’t know that I was there. His office door was open and, as I went to the coffee machine, I could hear him talking on the phone. He mentioned the name of a warehouse property that we had been trying to buy in Fulham. We already had plans to turn the building into the kind of trendy offices favoured by advertising agencies and the like who didn’t mind paying high rents. It was a big project and I had taken a lot of convincing, but Tony had been chipping away for a long time. He thought I was too conservative and, though I reminded him that I’d almost gone under once, he told me that was in the past and I shouldn’t let it hold the company back. In the end I’d relented enough to agree to the deal, but a couple of weeks ago Tony had told me the seller had suddenly upped his price by a third and he didn’t think we were going to be able to reach agreement. The last I’d heard the deal was dead in the water. I wondered if something had happened to resurrect it. The way Tony was talking it sounded that way.
Back in my own office I forgot about the Fulham project. I couldn’t stop thinking about my dad. Part of me wanted to fly out to Ithaca but another part looked for excuses not to. I was thinking about Alicia too and my decision to ask her to marry me. I loved her, but I wondered if this was the right time to be making that kind of decision. Half an hour