‘Edith,’ I called half-heartedly for nobody’s benefit but my own, moving from room to room, moving further away from the kitchen where I knew she would be based. There were five large rooms facing the back garden. One from Drunken Literary Writer’s time, two from the main original part of the house and then another two from the German beer family. Once I had walked through all of the rooms which were connected by oversized double doors, I stepped out in the hallway and looped my way back round. Across the hallway I could see the massive walnut double doors to my father’s office were open. It was where Famous Literary Writer had penned his famous novel. It was where my father went through endless mounds of paperwork. Sometimes I even wondered if there was anything printed on the paper or if he just liked the feel of it, if it was some nervous disposition that meant he must look at and touch and turn paper.
Father and I have the best relationship. Sometimes our thoughts are so similar it’s almost as if we’re the same person. When people see us they are blown away by our bond, by the respect he holds for me, by the admiration I hold for him. Often he’d take days off work just to pick me up from my apartment and take me off on an adventure. It was the same when I was a child, the only daughter in the family, he spoiled me. Daddy’s girl, everybody called me. He’d phone me during the day just to see how I was, send me flowers and Valentine’s cards so I didn’t feel lonely. He really was a special guy. We really did have a special bond. Sometimes he’d take me to a barley field on a windy day and I’d wear a floaty dress and we’d run around in slow motion and he’d become the tickle monster and try to catch me, chasing me around and around until I’d fall down on the barley which would be all around me, waving back and forth in the breeze. How we’d laugh.
Okay, I lied.
That was probably obvious from the slow-motion barley-field image. I pushed it too much there. In truth, he can barely stand me nor I him. But we do stand each other, just about enough, somewhere on the cusp of standing each other for the sake of world peace.
He must have known I was outside his office but he didn’t look up, just turned another mysterious page. He’d kept those pages far from our grasp all of our lives, so much so that I’d become obsessed about discovering what was on them. When I was ten years old I finally managed to sneak into his office one night when he’d forgotten to lock the door, and when I saw the papers, with my heart pounding manically in my chest, I couldn’t understand a word that was written on them. Law talk. He’s a High Court judge and the older I got the more I came to understand how regarded he was as a leading expert on Irish criminal law. He’d presided over murder and rape trials since his appointment to the High Court twenty years ago. He was a real bag of laughs. His old-school views on many things had been nothing short of controversial; at times, if he hadn’t been my father, I’d have taken to the streets in protest – or maybe that was because he was my father. His parents were academics, his father a university professor, his mother – the floral-dress-wearing old woman in the back garden – was a scientist. Though apart from creating tension in every room she walked into I don’t know exactly what she got up to. Something to do with maggots in soil in certain climates. Father’s a European Universities Debating Champion, graduate of Trinity College Dublin and the Honourable Society of King’s Inns whose motto is ‘Nolumus Mutari’ meaning ‘We Shall Not Be Changed’ and that right there says a lot about him. All I know about my father is what the plaques on his office walls declare to the world. I used to think that everything else about him was a great big mystery that I would someday figure out, that I would unlock a secret and suddenly he would all make sense; and that in the end of his days – he an old man and me a responsible beautiful career woman with a stunning husband, longer legs than I’d ever had before and the world at my feet – we’d try to make up for lost time. Now I realise there is no mystery, he is the way he is, and we dislike each other because there isn’t a part of either of us which can even begin to understand a minuscule part of the other.
I watched him from the doorway in his panelled office, head down, glasses low on his nose reading papers. Walls of books filled the room and the smell of dust, leather and cigar smoke was thick even though he’d stopped smoking ten years ago. I felt a tiny rush of warmth for him, because all of a sudden he looked old. Or at least older. And older people were like babies; something about their demeanour made you love them despite their ignorant selfish personalities. I’d been standing there for a while taking the place in and pondering this sudden feeling of warmth, and it seemed unnatural to just walk away without saying anything so I cleared my throat, then decided to do an awkward knuckle rap on his open door, a manoeuvre which caused the cellophane wrapped around the flowers to rustle loudly. He still didn’t look up. I stepped inside.
I waited patiently. Then impatiently. Then I wanted to throw the flowers at his head. Then I wanted to pick each flower, petal by petal, and flick them in his face. What began as a mild innate happiness to see my father then turned to the usual feelings of frustration and anger. He just made things so difficult all of the time, always a barrier, always uncomfortable.
‘Hi,’ I said and I sounded like a seven-year-old again.
He didn’t look up. Instead he finished reading the page, turned it and finished reading that one too. It may only have been one minute but it felt like five. He finally looked up, took his glasses off and looked down at my bare feet.
‘I brought these flowers for you and Mum. I was looking for a vase.’ It was probably the closest thing to Dirty Dancing’s ‘I carried a watermelon’ that I’d ever said.
Silence. ‘There isn’t one in here.’ In my head I heard him say, You fucking fool, though he would never actually swear, he was one of those people who said “ruddy” which annoyed me to no end.
‘I know that, I just thought I’d say hi while I was on my way.’
‘Are you staying for lunch?’
I tried to figure out how to take that. He either wanted me to stay for lunch or he didn’t. It must have meant something, all his sentences were coded and usually had undertones implicating me of being an imbecile. I searched for the meaning and then for what could be the possible follow-up. Couldn’t figure it out. So I said, ‘Yes.’
‘I will see you at lunch.’
Which meant, Why would you disturb me in my office with a ridiculous ‘hi’ in your bare feet when I am due to see you at lunch any minute from now, you ruddy fool. He put his glasses back on and continued reading his papers. Again I wanted to fling the flowers at his head, one by one, just ping them off his forehead, but out of respect for Edith’s bouquet I turned and walked out of there, my feet making a squeaky sound as they stuck to the floor. When I got to the kitchen I dumped the flowers in the sink, picked at some food, and went back outside. Father was there already greeting his sons. Firm handshakes, deep voices, a few renditions of ‘We are men’; then they gorged on a couple of pheasant legs, clinked pewtered jugs, groped a boob or two, wiped their drooling mouths and burped – or at least I imagined them do that – and then they sat.
‘You didn’t greet Lucy, sweetheart, she was finding a vase for the beautiful flowers she gave us.’ Mum smiled at me again as if I alone was all that was good in the world. She was good at doing that.
‘I saw her in the house.’
‘Oh, that’s lovely,’ Mum said studying me again. ‘Did you find a vase?’
I looked at Edith who was placing bread rolls on the table. ‘Yes, I did. The one in the kitchen beside the bin.’ I smiled at her sweetly, knowing she would understand this to mean I had placed them in the bin, which I hadn’t, but I liked teasing her.
‘Where your dinner is,’ Edith smiled back sweetly and mum looked confused. ‘Wine?’ Edith looked over my head, to everybody else but me.
‘No, I can’t, I’m driving,’ I responded anyway, ‘but Riley’s going to have a glass of the red he brought for Father.’
‘Riley is driving,’ Father said, not addressing