One Minute to Midnight

CHAPTER Twenty-two



New Year’s Eve, 2011

Malvern



Resolutions:

1. If I get the chance, make things right with Dad



2.

3.

4.

5.

AFTER THE FIRST one, I can’t think of anything else to write. At the moment, it doesn’t seem right to write anything else.

The journey goes as smoothly as a transatlantic flight possibly can: as long as I live, I will never say anything bad about British Airways ever again. The staff are sympathetic, they get us seats in Business Class so we can try to get some sleep, and they help us rush through immigration at Heathrow, they ensure that our bags are first onto the carousel so that we can get out of the airport as quickly as possible. We’re in the car a little after nine in the evening. Dom lets me drive while he rings my mum for an update.

‘Okay, okay,’ he says, so I know Dad’s not dead yet. ‘We should be there in … I don’t know … a couple of hours. Maybe less. You know how Nic drives.’ I smile at him, he squeezes my leg. ‘We’ll see you there. Are you okay, Elizabeth? Good. Good.’ He hangs up.

‘We’re going to Malvern,’ he tells me. ‘They haven’t been able to move him yet.’

‘What did she say?’

‘The operation went okay, but he’s still in critical condition.’ He squeezes my leg again. ‘I’m sorry, Nic. Apparently it was a massive coronary, his heart has been badly damaged.’

‘So, he’s going to die?’ I ask, my voice sounding suddenly small.

‘I don’t know, Nic. But you should …’

‘Prepare myself?’ That’s what they say, isn’t it? Prepare yourself. How do you do that, exactly? How is it that you prepare for loss? I’ve not done it before. Last time, I didn’t get the opportunity.’

Keeping one hand on the wheel, I rub my eyes one at a time. I am beyond exhausted, I’ve crossed over into a weird kind of auto-pilot state. I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be driving, but what else is there to do? Dom is just as knackered. Business class or no, neither of us slept much on the plane. I just need to get there. I open the window a little, allowing the freezing night air into the car, and press down harder on the accelerator.

Talking will help me stay awake, but I don’t want to talk about the things I need to talk about. I don’t want to talk about Dad and I don’t want to talk about us, so instead we talk practicalities. We talk about where we should stay while Dad’s in hospital, about when Dominic needs to go back to work, about whether he’ll leave the car with me and take the train back to London, about whether we should leave the dogs with Matt and Liz for the time being. It’s soothing, real life, but there are only so many practicalities we can discuss when everything’s up in the air like this, and the conversation peters out just past Oxford.

Dom roots around in the glove compartment and under the seat in search of something to listen to. Miraculously, he finds Let it Bleed, and we listen to that all the way to Malvern.

We make good time: it’s about ten to eleven when we get to the hospital. I leave Dom to sort out parking and run into the building, where of course I have to wait ten minutes before anyone will tell me anything. The receptionist has a lengthy discussion with someone on the phone: from her end of the conversation I gather the problem is that ordinarily they would prefer that visitors not visit critically ill patients in the middle of the night. But it appears that in this case they are prepared to make an exception. This fact alone tells me how serious things are: they are giving a man one last chance to see his daughter. Eventually, I’m directed to the appropriate waiting room, where I find Charles sitting alone, his head bowed almost to his chest, nodding gently as he falls asleep. I sit next to him and touch him gently on the arm, causing him to jerk awake with a start.

‘Oh, Nic, sweetheart.’ He wraps his arms around me and hugs me tight. ‘Your mum’s in with him now. He’s awake. You go on in and say hello.’

Dad is in a private room just across the hall. The room is in darkness, but there is enough light from the hallway for me to make out Dad’s figure on the bed and my mother’s in a chair on the opposite side of the room. She gets up when she sees me and walks around the bed silently, she takes my hands in hers and gives me a kiss. From the bed, there is a faint coughing sound, Dad is trying to prop himself up a bit further against the pillows.

I let go of Mum’s hands and go to his side. Even in this faint light I can see that his face is grey, there’s a touch of blue around his lips. I bend down to kiss him.

‘Hello, love,’ he says in a faint croak. ‘I’m sorry you cut your holiday short. You shouldn’t have, you know. I’m feeling a lot better.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ I say, sitting down next to him and taking his hand in mine. It’s like ice, and this makes me want to cry. His hands were always warm when I was a child, he was always warm. Mum said he was like a hot water bottle. I really don’t want to cry now, though, it’ll seem to him as though I’m admitting defeat, so I swallow hard and try to smile.

‘Are you really feeling better, Dad? Are you in a lot of pain?’

‘Not too bad, not too bad,’ he says, but I can tell that’s a lie, everything in his demeanour, the way he’s holding himself, rigid, his left arm across his chest, suggests that he’s suffering.

‘I’ll leave you two to have a chat then,’ Mum says. ‘I’ll go and get us a cup of tea.’

After she leaves we lapse into silence. A few minutes pass, then he says: ‘She’s been really kind, your mum. Very kind.’

‘Good, that’s good.’ I have no idea what to say to him now.

‘Did you have a nice time in New York?’ he asks.

‘Yes, it was … very nice.’

‘Good. Did you see Alex?’

‘I did, yes.’

‘That’s good.’ Dad doesn’t know about the Alex and Dom incident, I’ve never told him.

‘And Julian? How’s he doing?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Julian. He’s all right, is he?’

‘You mean Aidan, Dad.’

‘No, Julian. The Symonds boy. The homosexual.’

‘Dad …’

‘He did well for himself, didn’t he? Photography. You’ve both done so well.’

Mum comes in and hands me a cup of tea. Dad says, ‘We were just talking about Julian.’

‘Oh, yes. Such a terrible thing,’ Mum says.

‘What’s that?’ he looks confused, now so does she.

‘Where’s Uncle Chris, Dad?’ I ask, trying to steer the conversation back to safety, or at the very least to the present day. ‘Is he not here with you?’

‘No, he’s not here.’

‘He is, Jack, he just went to the twenty-four-hour shop to get himself a sandwich,’ Mum says.

‘Oh, yes.’

We fall back into silence and after a few minutes Dad falls asleep snoring gently. Outside in the hall I can hear people laughing and chatting, wishing each other a happy new year. I look at my watch; it’s a few minutes after midnight.

‘He’s confused,’ I whisper to Mum. ‘He thinks Julian’s still alive.’

‘It’s not all that surprising, darling. He’s just had a very serious operation. He’s been under general anaesthetic, it’s traumatic. Some people aren’t quite all there when they wake up. You know … well, you know that he’s not out of the woods, don’t you?’

‘I know.’

‘The surgeon spoke to your uncle Chris, he did say that the damage was severe. With your dad’s general health not being all that good …’

‘I know. Has he been all right with you, Mum?’

‘Yes, he’s been fine. Very polite, actually. He apologised for a lot of things. It was rather sad, really. I do wish he’d found someone else to spend his life with.’

‘I should have spent more time with him,’ I say. ‘Made more of an effort.’

‘Oh, Nic, you tried very hard. He was impossible, he made it impossible to be around him. You shouldn’t feel bad.’

But I do, I can’t help it. It’s all just such a waste.

Mum picks up the chair that she was sitting on and brings it around the bed so that she is now sitting at my side.

‘Did you get to do anything fun in New York?’ she asks me. ‘Did you see any of your friends?’

‘I saw everyone,’ I say, smiling at her, but the tears are running down my face now.

‘Everyone?’

‘Karl and Alex and Aidan.’ Mum puts her arm around my shoulders and pulls me to her.

‘And how was that?’

‘It was good. I don’t know. I felt like … I felt different when I was there, when I was with them again.’

‘You felt like your old self again.’ How does she know?

‘Yeah, I did. How did you know that?’ ‘I’m your mother,’ she says, squeezing my hand. ‘I know everything. And anyway, you and I … we’re not all that different. We’ve made some of the same mistakes.’ She looks over at my father. She can’t possibly be comparing him with Dom, surely? ‘I’m not saying that Dom’s anything like your dad,’ she says, reading my mind. ‘It’s just that he wasn’t the right man for me. And … well …’

‘You think Dom isn’t the right man for me, either?’

‘I don’t know, love. Sometimes I wonder. I think … maybe he was right for you in a certain place and time. Just not for ever.’

A nurse comes in and tells us it’s probably best if we leave now, let Dad get some proper rest. Mum gets up and leaves the room, I lean over and give Dad’s arm a gentle, squeeze, but as I’m leaving the room, he calls me back in a sibilant whisper.

‘Nicole, please …’

‘You need to rest, Dad. Go to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘Just a few minutes,’ he says.

The nurse shakes her head, but I say, ‘Okay, just a few minutes,’ and she doesn’t stop me. I sit back down at his bedside. I take his hand again.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t see you married,’ he says

‘It doesn’t matter, Dad, it really wasn’t a big deal.’

‘Don’t say that …’

‘No, honestly. It was just a registry office job …’ I am sorry that he wasn’t there to see me married, but it’s hardly the greatest of his offences. I would rather have had him there when I got into Oxford, or when I graduated from college, or ringing me up the day I got a BAFTA.

‘I missed so much,’ he says.

‘I know you did, Dad.’ I don’t want to upset him, but there’s a part of me that knows that if I don’t talk to him about it now, I never will. ‘I just don’t know why you missed it all. I know that you couldn’t bear to be around Mum, I understand that. I just don’t know why you didn’t want to be around me.’

‘I’m not sure I know myself,’ he says. ‘I think I was ashamed, and when I was with you, I felt that shame most keenly. It’s no excuse …’

It really isn’t, but there’s no point saying that now.

‘I regret so much, Nicole. I regret so much.’

‘It’s okay, Dad,’ I say, squeezing his hand, ‘we’ll just have to do better in future, won’t we? We’ll have to spend more time together.’

‘That’s right, that’s right.’ He lapses into silence again, and I’m about to get to my feet to leave when he looks up at me with an expression of concern on his face and says: ‘He died, didn’t he?’

‘Sorry, Dad?’

‘Your friend Julian. He died. You wrote to me, and I didn’t reply.’

I bite down hard on my lip. ‘He was killed a few years ago.’

‘You wrote to me and I wanted to write back, I just didn’t know what to say.’

‘It’s okay, Dad.’

‘Are you all right, Nicole?’

‘I should go, Dad. You need to sleep.’

A look of fear crosses his face, just for a second, and he grips my hand a little harder. ‘You go back out into the world, my girl,’ he says. ‘Don’t live a life that’s less than it should be. Don’t do what I did.’ He coughs again, for a long time this time, he’s fighting to catch his breath.

‘Dad …’ I say, but he shushes me with a wave of his hand.

‘Remember,’ he says with half a smile, ‘it’s always later than you think.’ He squeezes my hand. ‘You should go, love. I’ll sleep now.’

I step out of the darkness into the bright corridor, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, casting everyone – Dom, my mum and Uncle Chris, who are sitting in a row on the chairs against the wall – with a sickly yellow pallor. Charles is sitting by himself a little way off; I have a sudden flashback to New Year’s Eve twenty years ago, when I saw him in the waiting room after Dad hit Mum.

‘Okay, Nic?’ Dom asks, and Chris comes over to give me a kiss hello, but as he does so I can hear the monitor in Dad’s room change its tune, switching from regular beeps to one long flat tone.

A nurse appears from nowhere, turns on the light in the room and presses a button. It isn’t like ER. Handsome doctors don’t come sprinting into the room, no one yells for a crash cart. A doctor does arrive quickly, though, and they do shock him, once, twice, a third time. They give him shots of adrenalin, someone does CPR. I’m standing outside the room, Uncle Chris has his arm around my shoulders, Dom is holding my hand. I don’t know how long we stand there, but eventually the nurse comes out and tells me to come into the room and say goodbye. It’s too late, of course, because he’s already dead, but Chris and I go to his bedside anyway. Chris gives Dad’s hand a squeeze and I give him a kiss on the forehead, and then we return once more to the waiting room, because apparently there are forms to sign.

A little after three in the morning, we’re back in the car. Uncle Chris suggested we go back to Dad’s place, we could get some sleep there before heading back to London, but the thought of going to that sad, empty little house is too much for me to bear. Dom says he’s okay to drive. He tells me to lie down and get some sleep in the back of the car, but I’m worried he’ll fall asleep if I do, so I sit up front with him. We find ourselves making small talk again, only this time the small talk is even less cheerful: funeral arrangements, clearing out Dad’s house, that sort of thing.

Dawn is breaking by the time we get home to Wimbledon. Exhaustion has given way to a kind of delirium, we are both feeling weirdly cheerful, a pale shaft of winter sunlight seems to fall on our house and ours alone, I am beyond delighted to be home. Dom says he’ll make us a cup of tea, but by the time he brings it upstairs I am already in bed and drifting off to sleep. He slips into bed beside me, spooning his body around mine.

‘I love you, Nic,’ he says.

‘I love you too.’

When I wake up, he’s no longer beside me. I roll over and check my phone, which is on the bedside table. It’s just after two o’clock in the afternoon, and I have one missed call. It’s from Aidan, received in the early hours of this morning. Around midnight his time. He hasn’t left a message.

I get up and get straight into the shower, I stand there for ages, my eyes closed, leaning with my forehead against the sand-coloured tiles, warm water washing over me. My father is gone. I’ll never see him again. I can count the number of times I have seen him over the past fifteen years on my fingers and toes, and now that number will never get any higher. I will never run out of fingers and toes.

Since Julian died, I’ve seen Aidan three times: on the day that I found out, at the funeral and then again yesterday. Yesterday? Was that really yesterday? It seems like a lifetime ago. Three times. Not enough for one hand, let alone a full set of fingers and toes. It isn’t enough. Tears mingle with soapy water as I wash my hair. I know what I have to do, and it makes my heart ache.

I pull on a pair of tracksuit bottoms, an old fleece and a pair of thick socks and I go downstairs to talk to Dom. He’s not in his study, he’s not in the kitchen. I look out of the window. The car is gone. Suddenly, I feel panicky. Where is he? Has he left? I ring his mobile, it goes straight to voicemail. I’m about to run upstairs and check to see what he’s packed and what he’s left behind when it strikes me that he’s probably just gone to the shops to get milk and a newspaper. It’s possible, after all, that our local newsagent is shut on New Year’s Day.

I sit at the kitchen table, feeling tearful and unhappy, drinking fennel tea. I loathe herbal tea, but at times like this you need a hot drink, and there is nothing else available. After what seems like for ever, but is actually just half an hour, the car pulls up. Dom gets out, he goes around the back of the car, opens the boot and lets the dogs out.

I run to the back door and fling it open, welcoming an overexcited Mick and Marianne into my arms.

‘I thought you’d want to see them when you woke up,’ Dom says as I start to cry again, ‘so I drove down to Matt’s to fetch them.’ He’s also bought tea and milk and bread, as well as the most delicious cheese in the world from the farm shop down the road from Matt’s place. We sit down at the kitchen table and eat cheese and pickle sandwiches accompanied by enormous mugs of builder’s tea. Having run around the house and garden several times to make sure everything is as it should be, the dogs have settled, Marianne is in her favourite spot, dozing in a shaft of sunshine up against the radiator in the hallway, Mick is sleeping on my feet. The thought of leaving this makes me fearful.

Dom reads my mind.

‘Once everything’s sorted out,’ he says, taking a swig of his tea, ‘once the funeral’s over and you’ve got everything straight with your dad’s affairs, you should go. Go to Libya, go to New York, do what you need to do.’

‘I don’t want to leave you,’ I say, my voice small and strangled.

‘You do. You just think you don’t right now at this moment, because you’ve just lost your dad and you need to be somewhere safe. It’ll be like it was before. But after a while, in three months or six months or twelve, you’ll start pulling away, when all this safety becomes too boring for you, and we’ll have to go through this all over again. I don’t want to go through this again.’ His voice is small, too, small and sad. The ache in me, the ache I felt earlier when I was standing in the shower, it grows larger, it swallows up my heart. He gets up, walks around the kitchen table and pulls a chair up next to mine. We put our arms around each other.

‘We’ll get the dogs a passport,’ he murmurs into my neck, ‘if you decide that you’re going to live in New York. We’ll share custody. You can have them for six months and I’ll have them for six months. Or something. We’ll work something out. We’ll be in each other’s lives. We’ll always be in each other’s lives.’

‘Promise?’ I ask.

‘I promise.’

At dusk, I take the dogs out to the common. The pair of them race ahead of me, bouncing up and down with the sheer joy of being back out on their favourite walk. I try to picture myself walking along a New York sidewalk with the pair of them attached to leads. I can’t quite imagine it. I try to picture myself working at Zeitgeist Productions, in the building at the corner of Lexington and East 71st, sitting at a desk just metres away from Aidan’s, or camping out on the sofa in Alex’s tiny flat. I try to picture myself single again, unmarried.

It’s exciting to me but it’s frightening too, not just because it’s a leap into the unknown, not just because I’m thinking of abandoning one life for another. It’s frightening because I wonder if Dominic is right. He told me, back in New York, that I had to choose between him and my ghosts. Am I choosing ghosts? Maybe I am, and maybe that way sadness lies, but I have to give that life another try. I have to see if I can do it again, if I can do it better this time. I have to see if I can be me again without Julian.

I turn back as darkness falls, clenching and unclenching my hands, which are freezing even in gloves and shoved into pockets. The wind is getting up, it’s time to go home, to get back to the warmth, but I don’t. Instead I sit down on a bench at the side of the pathway. The dogs wander around for a bit, confused, then they settle at my feet. There is a slip of a moon in the sky, just a sliver of ivory in the black. I can’t see any stars.

He seems to come out of nowhere, out of the dark like a phantom.

‘You can’t be here,’ I say.

‘I spoke to Alex,’ he says, ‘I got the first flight I could.’

‘But, you can’t be here,’ I say again. ‘Dominic …’

‘He’s the one who told me where to find you.’

Aidan sits down next to me on the bench and puts his arms around me. ‘I’m sorry about your dad,’ he says, pulling me into his chest.

‘How long are you here for?’ I ask him.

‘Just until tomorrow. I have to get back to work.’

‘Does the job offer still stand?’

‘It does.’

‘I want to come to New York,’ I tell him, ‘I want to try again. Work, Alex, everything.’

‘Me?’

‘Well, I don’t know about you …’ I say, laughing, and then he kisses me, and I don’t feel the cold any more.

I want to stay there, on the bench, in the darkness, holding him, but I know that I can’t, that it’s cruel, to stay here with him when Dom’s waiting for me inside, knowing I’m out here with Aidan. So I kiss him one last time and get to my feet, the dogs taking their cue and scrambling up, and I say goodbye.

‘I’ll see you again soon,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll see you in New York.’

‘I’ll be waiting for you.’

And this time, I know he will.