I picked out a few randomly, most of them too complex for me to read. The 1970s pop songs that he had written were there, like ‘Tears of Gold’ or ‘Flower Girl’ or ‘Temptation Baby’. The latter two were the only two European hits of his forty-year songwriting career, written for a Swedish female solo artist whose name escaped me now. However, there was one score that was notably simpler. It was written in fountain pen and there were no lyrics scribbled down the side or underneath the staff, as on the other sheets. I noticed at the bottom that it was titled Helen, with love on your birthday. My heart missed a beat. I had never known that he had written her a song.
Unable to resist, I sat down cross-legged with the guitar and tried to play it. I was more than a little rusty, but incredibly some of the notes came back to me. After a few practices, I got the gist of the song. It was melancholy, in a minor chord, but it was unquestioningly a love song. I wondered whether the whole of this room was a shrine to this very song, as though it was the sole reason she kept it as it was. I thought of how much they must have loved each other once. To write such a beautiful song was a testament to the depth of his feelings for her. It struck me that dealing with his abandonment of her must have been the hardest struggle of her life.
At the time, this would not have been obvious. She had been practical about our weekend visits to stay with him and Jill in their messy suburban flat. There were no shouting matches. My father was efficient about paying maintenance. Jill behaved herself. Ostensibly, the split was amicable. But after playing that song, I began to replay the reality.
I was reminded of the many times I had heard my mother being described as a stoic in the months after my father had left.
Indeed, my mother maintained a disciplined structure in her life, mostly. However, she was detached and self-absorbed, beleaguered by migraines, which acted like full stops on the flow of our lives, and on her mothering. Outside of the periods in her darkened bedroom, she resumed business as usual by imposing exhausting academic routines for Jacs and me, stifling us with her criticism and attention. I used to smell her skirt when she was bending over my work, and wished I could cry into it, for no particular reason other than indulging the sadness that lingered inside me. There was never time for hugs. And she was no less hard on herself, by taking on an unmanageable workload that she must have pressed down on top of her inner life, trying to suffocate it perhaps.
I put down the guitar. Strangely, I didn’t feel sad, I felt joyful, that my father had loved my mother so much. In turn, I felt loved by both of them. Their separation had been the tragedy, for my mother at least, and I suddenly wanted to understand my mother’s pain – the pain she had so efficiently hidden from us – as a way of understanding her love for my father.
I turned the lights on as I nipped downstairs and outside onto the small patch of garden to see if John’s lights were on next door. A glow emanated from the equivalent room to my old bedroom on the first floor. This was his study, where he had always worked late into the night on his historical novels.
John wouldn’t mind if I rang the doorbell, I thought, as long as I brought a bottle of red wine with me.
When he opened the door, he pressed his glasses back on his nose with a swift jab. ‘Everything okay?’
‘I wondered if you fancied a break from the bodice ripping for ten minutes?’ I said, waggling the bottle of wine at him.
His face relaxed. ‘A delightful idea, young lady,’ he grinned, opening the door wider for me.
I pretended not to notice the stacks of newspapers and the squalor of the kitchen. Strange crockery covered the work surfaces. It wasn’t clear whether they were clean or dirty. When Sarah was alive, the pastel blue surfaces had sparkled. It was a struggle to hide my shock.
If I had bumped into him in the street, I would have seen a functioning clean-shaven man, in his ironed plaid shirts and artfully threadbare slacks. How different the story was behind closed doors.
Nevertheless, he had cleared a space on the tiny kitchen table, lit a candle, which he placed on an embroidered mat, and brought out a wine glass, a tumbler and a carton of orange juice.
‘I assume you’re not sharing the wine with me?’
‘Orange juice would be lovely, thanks.’
We sat opposite each other on the same plastic chairs Jacs and I had sat on as children, and the chaos around me melted away. How clinical my life had become. How easy it was to feel comfortable in a home that had a heart, however dysfunctional and chaotic.
I had wanted to launch straight in with questions about my parents, but instead we talked for over an hour about books and plays and music. It was like escaping to another world, where my cares were distant to me. My whole body seemed to steam, as though I’d turned the engine off after a long, arduous journey uphill.
‘Your dad thought it was funny you went into the City.’
‘He tells everyone I’m a banker, but I’m not.’
‘He thought you’d go into the arts.’
‘He doesn’t understand anyone who isn’t creative.’
‘Jill wasn’t.’
‘But she facilitated his creativity. She always believed in him,’ I reminded him.
‘Unlike your mother.’
I laughed. ‘She told him he should get a job in Woolworths.’
‘I’d say that was the final nail in the coffin.’
We laughed together and I took a large gulp of juice. ‘John...’ I began.
He put his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands, ready to listen. ‘Yes, Gemma.’
I smiled. I was taken back to when my sister was small, sitting here at this same table, when she would tell her long rambling nonsensical stories to John, who would listen with his whole being, even adding to the story here and there, much to my sister’s delight.
‘Did Mum ever talk to you about Dad leaving?’
‘To Sarah she did.’
‘I found this...’ I said, unfolding the song onto the table.
‘Oh, that,’ he sighed. ‘He played that at her birthday party.’
‘Did she like it?’
‘They snogged in front of everyone afterwards.’
‘Yuck.’
He chuckled. ‘They were so in love back then.’
‘I don’t understand what went so wrong.’
‘Your dad wore his heart on his sleeve and your mum had hers in an iron box.’
I sighed, noticing my ragged out-breath. ‘Mum never once cried after he left. Everyone marvelled at her stoicism.’
At the time, I had been proud of my mother for carrying on, for refusing to cry ‘poor me!’, and secretly proud that I could be as brave too.
‘Do you know about the Stoics of Ancient Greece?’
‘No,’ I smiled, ready for one of John’s special lessons.
‘The Stoics did not advocate the stiff-upper-lip emotional detachment that they were often mistakenly known for – qualities that lots of people seem to admire in your mother – and they certainly did not believe in suppressing or denying difficult emotions. Cultivating the right inner attitude, paying attention to your own mind, was at the heart of all they taught.’
‘So, you’re saying my mother is the antithesis of Stoicism.’
‘Kind of. But when you and Jackie were asleep, she’d come round to see Sarah.’ He paused and looked at me with a sideways glance, possibly wondering how far he could go. ‘I’d leave them to it mostly but believe me, your mother cried buckets.’
I shook my head in disbelief. ‘I never knew.’
‘Sarah would fret about you and Jackie. She said Helen was too hard on you both.’
I blinked rapidly. He’d spoken a truth that I hadn’t consciously acknowledged, not fully, and I flapped my hands around my eyes to stop the tears. ‘I don’t want to cry.’ I never cried.
‘Your mum never wanted to cry either but Sarah forced it out of her.’
‘Sarah was such a wonderful woman. I still miss her Christmas cake.’
John’s eyes watered. ‘I miss her every minute of every day.’