The Memory Garden (40 page)

‘Well, I have missed you,’ Jake said, amused and just slightly petulant. ‘At least I still have a dramatic effect on you.’ He made a theatrical gesture.

‘Good,’ she said vaguely, feeling some answer was called for, then hastily added, ‘Tell me about the book. When did you get the idea?’

‘It was down to Sophie, actually,’ he said, sitting back in the chair. ‘She’s a smart girl. She’d been having lunch with a publisher who had bemoaned the fact that publishing had been taken over by the
Da Vinci Code
phenomenon, and saying what a pity it was that there wasn’t a British author capable of that kind of thriller-writing. Anyway, this bloke had turned down
Painting for Pleasure
but wanted to see more of my work and Sophie suddenly had an idea. She suggested I try out a synopsis. I had to concentrate on storytelling, she said, and just write the thing. I was a bit unsure about it to start with, I have to say, but then I picked up a copy of the Dan Brown on the way home and decided I could do better. So I bit the bullet and had a go.
Et voilà!
’

‘Well, I hope you achieve even half of Dan Brown’s sales,’ Mel said jokingly, and he laughed, too, but there was a look in his eyes that made her think she had touched a nerve. Once ambitious for literary fame, he was now after the bestseller lists.

‘There have been one or two bitchy comments at the college, but, hell. If this first book works out, I won’t be hanging around there, I can tell you.’

‘Mmm, that was going to be my next question,’ Mel said.

‘How’s your own writing going?’ For once Jake sounded genuinely interested in her successes and breathed, ‘Oh, well done,’ when she told him she had only one chapter left to write.

He lifted the champagne out of the bucket and refreshed their glasses with an elegant flourish, then leaned back in his chair and looked at Mel meaningfully. ‘God, it is good to see you again.’ He raked his fingers through his hair, shaking his head slightly. She saw him catch his reflection for a microsecond in a mirror on the wall.
‘It’s lovely seeing you,’ Mel told him lightly. He was as charming and energising as ever, and she felt warmed by his attention. But it was as though passing time had laid a patina of objectivity between them, like a plate of thin glass separating her from her feelings about him. What an odd thought, but there wasn’t time to analyse it now.
‘How are the girls?’ she asked. ‘And Helen?’
Did she imagine the moment’s hesitation before he answered?
‘Great, the girls are just great. Anna’s started horse-riding. I have to take her down to Surrey every Saturday to watch her trot round in circles . She’s so grown up. And Freya does ballet now.’
‘And Helen?’
‘Ah yes, well, you haven’t heard about the wonderful Igor, have you?’
‘Igor? Is this the boyfriend?’
‘Certainly is. Straight off the Russian Steppes. Or Moscow, anyway.’
‘How did she meet him?’

‘At a kids’ party, can you believe it. He has a little girl, too.’
He looked a little sad suddenly, and Mel said, ‘Are you jealous, Jake? That Helen has someone, I mean?’
‘I don’t know. It’s just – odd . Seeing her with another man.’
But you’ve had other women, she thought. How must that have been for her?
‘And the girls like him?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes.’ And now he did sound wan.
‘And what about you?’ she said. ‘Do you . . . have anyone?’
‘No, since you ask,’ he said, examining his fingernails. Then he looked right at her. ‘I haven’t, not really, since you.’
How many one-night stands did the words ‘not really’ encompass, she wondered. But she felt flattered all the same.
‘You’re a hard act to follow, Melanie Pentreath.’ She laughed and waited for him to ask the same question of her, but he didn’t and she felt unaccountably annoyed. Didn’t he expect her to attract anyone else?
‘I . . . did meet someone. In Cornwall . But it didn’t work out,’ she said hurriedly.
‘You’re . . . not together now?’ he asked, leaning forwards and staring at her intently.
‘No.’
His sigh , as he sat back in his chair again, sounded satisfied. He appeared to expand, relax. ‘Another?’ His fingers closed around the neck of the bottle.
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘My head’s spinning already.’
‘Something to eat, then?’
‘No, Jake, thanks. I ought to get home now.’
When they stepped outside, it was still raining slightly. He waited as she put up her umbrella, then said, ‘I’ll walk you home.’
‘No, really, Jake, I’ll be fine.’
‘It’ll be no trouble.’
‘Jake . . .’ His shoulders slumped slightly.
‘It’s been lovely seeing you,’ she said, holding the umbrella over both of them, watching a raindrop wend its way down his cheek. He reached out and pushed back a lock of her hair, his eyes scanning her face. He looked hopeful, vulnerable, and part of her very much wanted to let him lean forward and kiss her. To feel safe again. But it felt wrong. There was too much to clear out of the way first, and she didn’t know where to start. What she was determined about was that they didn’t end up jumping into bed together merely because they were both lonely and had had too much to drink, getting stuck once more in a groove of failed expectations.
‘Can I see you again?’ he asked , shy as a boy. ‘Like this, I mean – I know I’ll see you at work tomorrow.’
She laughed. ‘I expect so.’ He brushed her cheek quickly with warm lips and was gone. She watched him striding away between the puddles to the tube station. His trousers, she noticed, strangely touched by the fact, were just slightly too short.
She walked home slowly, trying to puzzle out her feelings. Was she still attracted to Jake? Yes, emphatically yes. So why did she feel herself holding back? Was it because of Patrick? She supposed it was. She still felt dull, dead inside, like a garden in December.

On Friday, her father rang to say that he had booked a table at a French restaurant in Covent Garden for their dinner the following Tuesday.

It was exactly the sort of place he would choose, Mel observed as she put down the phone. Authentic French food cooked by an authentic French chef and served by authentic French staff. No doubt, during the evening, there would be heated discussion with the authentic French
patron
– in her father’s atrocious French, of course – about some aspect of the menu. She cringed inwardly.

How rare it was ever to be able to see her father on her own ground and to talk to him honestly about things that mattered to her. But what she wanted to say were deep concerns of the heart, and the irony was that while her father was an expert at all aspects of the physical organ, he steered clear of its emotional associations.

Emerging from Leicester Square tube at 7.30 p.m. on Tuesday evening, she made her way slowly up to the restaurant, wandering into bookshops on the way. Her mind was not on books, however. She was going over the lines she planned to say.

‘Dad, why did you leave Mum on her own with three small children all those years ago?’ That was one she had tried asking in various ways from time to time. And the answer had always been? A cold one. As though the end of their marriage was like a company demerger.

‘Your mother and I found we didn’t suit each other, it’s as simple as that. We had grown up together, but we both changed, came to have different aims in life.’

Which in her father’s case had not included the burden of day-to-day responsibility for three children. It was interesting that he and Stella had never had children – and not, Mel was sure, since Stella had in genteel fashion hinted to her once, because they had not been able to. It was the intimacy, the constant barrage on his emotional equilibrium, the messiness of children from which, in the end, he had probably fled.

If she and William and Chrissie were with him and any of them started bickering, pinching one another or calling each other names, their father would simply walk away. It was so different from the way their mother would deal with their squabbles, by jollying them along, joining in the argument, helping them work their way through their differences.

Five to eight. She put down the book of Egon Schiele nudes she had been flicking through without really taking in the extraordinary power of the drawings, and hurried out of the shop. It was raining again, and she had to dodge into the road to elude the umbrellas of the early-evening crowds around the theatres. She walked quickly up Upper St Martin’s Lane, reaching the restaurant exactly at eight.

As she pushed open the door she could see that her father, predictably punctual, was already seated in one of the best tables near the window. There was something rather grand, patrician, about him, she thought, with an unexpected rush of admiration. His long body gave him the false effect of height when he was sitting, an effect exaggerated by his large face with its high forehead and the wing of thick grey hair that belied his seventy years.

He was wearing a formal evening suit and Mel was relieved that she had chosen her black jersey dress to wear with a soft silver scarf and had taken the trouble to pin up her hair.

‘Hello, Dad.’ He looked up quickly over the top of his glasses, then unhooked the spectacles from his ears and stood up in an awkward movement that caused the magazine he was reading – it was
The Economist
, she could see – to shoot to the floor.

‘Mel, dear, you look beautiful.’

It was his vulnerability that stabbed her. She hadn’t seen him for – what – eight or nine months, and he seemed less steady somehow. He kissed her quickly on the cheek, patting her shoulder, then sat down carefully. Yet by the way he nodded curtly at the waitress who rescued his magazine and ordered Mel a gin-and-tonic, she saw that none of his presence, his authority, was gone.

‘I will have
les escargots
,’ he said to the waitress imperiously when she came again later to take their order. ‘
Soupe à l’oignon
for my daughter here, and then
Suprème de Poulette
, and I’ll have the
Bar Cuit à la Vapeur Tartare d’Huitre
, if you please.’

He frowned over the wine list, deciding on a Bordeaux, and sat back in his chair to answer Mel’s question about his business in London. It turned out to be a conference at which he was merely an observer, since he had now been retired from surgery for several years.

‘And what have you been up to? he asked in turn. ‘Gather you’ve been in Cornwall. Didn’t look up Gillian in Bodmin, did you?’

‘No, I suppose I ought to have done.’ Gillian was her father’s elderly cousin, and Mel felt a rush of remorse, having completely forgotten the woman’s existence, though Bodmin was the other side of the county from Lamorna. ‘I was writing, in fact. And gardening. Helping restore an old garden.’ She wondered what it looked like now. Had Patrick continued the work without her? Would the leaves be turning now, the beech trees scattering nuts across the grass and the blackberries ripe? And how was Carrie, and Matt and Irina and Lana? She felt sad that she had forgotten them so easily, so wrapped up had she been in her own problems.

‘So I heard from Chrissie yesterday,’ her father went on. ‘She said you hadn’t been at all well lately. I’m most sorry to hear that – though you look all right to me. Between you and me, your sister does over-dramatise.’

‘What else did she say?’ asked Mel, narrowing her eyes.

Their first courses arrived at this point and her father became taken up with fussing with the snail scoops and summoning the bread-basket.

‘So, how are you now?’ he said, peering at her before sticking his special fork into the largest snail and bathing his rubbery prize in garlic butter. ‘Come to think of it, you do look a little, well, peaky. Mmm, this is really very good. How is the soup?’

‘Everything’s fine, Dad,’ Mel said shortly, and allowed him to think that she had answered both questions with the word. But this time, to her surprise, he didn’t let the matter slip by.

‘Chrissie said it was to do with a man,’ he went on, glaring at her sharply over his spectacles before returning his attention to his dinner. He trapped the second shell and worried at its occupant with his fork. ‘That’s a pity. You haven’t had much luck on that front recently, I think.’

He chewed slowly, looking straight at her for a moment, and she felt like the snail, prodded, trapped and chewed up. She froze, wondering what to say next. Did he really expect her to confide in him?

‘Don’t let them all go by.’ What was he mumbling? She watched as he caught the next shell, then he put down his fork and, taking off his spectacles, rubbed the lenses furiously with his napkin. ‘Mustn’t let my example ruin things for you,’ he said, gazing at the results, his eyes small and pale, defenceless without them. 'I worry you know. That it has.'

Mel stared down into her bowl. The soaking lumps of bread looked unappetising now, the smell of onion and garlic was making her stomach turn.
‘Is that what you believe?’ she said thickly, looking up. ‘That because you left, I expect men to leave, that I let them leave? It’s not my fault that things don’t work out, you know.’
Isn’t it
? A voice in her head hammered out. Her father’s voice.
‘Cod psychology.’ Her father shook his head, then his voice softened. ‘Still, I’m not too much of a fuddy-duddy to know these things can have an effect.’ He snared the last snail, put it quickly in his mouth, chewed, swallowed and then dabbed at his mouth with the edge of his napkin.
‘Why did it not work out with Mum, Dad?’ she burst out. ‘I’ve never really understood. Was it because of . . . us?’ She thought of Jake, suddenly, leaving Anna and Freya. ‘Did having children change things with Mum?’
Her father appeared to think about this and said finally, ‘It came down to passion, it’s as simple as that. I loved your mother very much, but then I saw Stella and I knew she was the real thing. I’ve never wanted anyone else since.’ He looked at her and his pale-blue eyes glowed with unusual intensity. ‘I had to have her. I knew it meant leaving you all, I knew it would hurt you, hurt your mother, but at the time I couldn’t do anything else.
It was a lover’s pure selfishness, I realised that later. Everything else receded in the light of Stella and me. “The world well lost for love”, isn’t that what the great lovers say?’
It was the longest speech and the most revealing he had ever made to her. His words struck her right in the heart.
‘And so you had Stella,’ said Mel, pushing her soup away. ‘You had her and you lost us. And Mum.’
‘I did lose you, I saw that very soon.’ The waitress came to take away their plates, looking disapprovingly at Mel’s rejection of the food.
‘I felt guilty for a long, long time. I didn’t want to have any more children, and fortunately , Stella felt that way, too. But now, I think she regrets it. Well, we make choices, don’t we? And we have to live with them. But that’s what I mean about you.’
‘What, Dad? What do you mean?’
‘That you must make your own decisions, paddle your own canoe , as they say. Don’t let what I did affect you. I’m an old buffer now who’s made a lot of mistakes and undoubtedly caused pain. But I won’t have you blaming me for your own choices , I can tell you. None of that therapy rubbish. You’re responsible for your own decisions in life.’
‘Well thanks, Dad, that’s nice to know.’ Mel’s voice cracked. ‘But strangely, it’s not that easy. Maybe you’re right. You’ve taught me that men leave and that’s what I’ve found in life. Men. Leave. End of story. Why’s it my fault?’
His eyes glittered. He shoved his napkin on the table. ‘That’s rubbish,’ he said. ‘Look at Chrissie. She’s all right with that Rob chap, who’s nice enough. Will’s happy with Sandra. You’ve got to take your chance – and don’t go expecting perfection. You won’t find it. Choose someone you really love and stick at ’em.’
‘Like you and Mum?’ Mel said in a small tight voice.
‘Like Stella and me,’ he corrected.
What did that mean for her? Jake or Patrick? Patrick or Jake?
The waitress brought their main courses and for a while, they ate in silence, Mel suddenly hungry, anxious to fill herself with hot, comforting food.
Her father asked her about her book, and her teaching, talked about an art exhibition he and Stella had visited in Birmingham, described a recent outing to London Zoo with Chrissie’s children. He sounded a doting grandfather and there when she, too, had children – if that were ever to happen.
Later, outside the restaurant, as they parted – he to return to his hotel in Bloomsbury and she to the tube home – he hugged her and kissed her forehead, and again she was aware of his physical unsteadiness.
‘My little Melanie,’ he said, and patted her arm. ‘Always my little Melanie.’
‘Oh Dad,’ she said, sighing, her anger at his lack of tact this evening tempered by compassion. ‘Wait, there’s a cab. I can’t have you walking all that way at this hour.’ The taxi stopped and, after some grumbling about being treated like an old man , he climbed in. She shut the door and waved as it moved off into the dark, leaving her standing alone.