I pull off the platinum wedding ring – it’s already left a small impression in my skin, even though it’s spent such a short time on my finger. I place it on the table by his martini glass.
‘Justin.’ I watch him stare, uncomprehendingly, at the ring. ‘I wish your little boy all the luck, and all the good health, in the world. I wish him the best life anyone could have.’
And then, when I feel I can say more without choking, I add:
‘And you.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
There are cards with cuddly bears, butterflies, balloons and gothic fairies. Cards with cakes, cupcakes and my age in gold or silver foil. Cards for a Special Daughter. Gradually, the themes become more grown up with the passing of time. Always, he’s written the same thing. For April, my daughter, who I think of every day. With all my love.
Out of each one falls a ten-pound note.
I sit cross-legged on Evelyn’s floor. We are going through her ‘treasure trove’ of a storage box, as I call it.
‘I found them among his things when we were moving him into Sunrise. I saw that they were all addressed to your home in Stockport, and they’d all been returned.’
There are cards right up until I turned nineteen, then we moved. Or at least, my mother and Alan moved as I was off to Uni by then. ‘I still can’t get my head around how any person could hate someone so much that they wouldn’t even let him send a birthday card to his only daughter,’ I say to Evelyn. My eyes are blinded with tears. Since learning that Eddy is my father, all I can picture is a tall, lean man sitting alone on a bench in the middle of an art gallery, a man who wears a shirt the colour of bright tomatoes, and how different that is from picturing nobody at all.
‘You just have to remember she loved you, otherwise you will go insane.’
‘It’s not enough.’ I stare at the card that has Look who’s turning 8 on the front, along with a package wrapped in a pink bow. ‘I wonder how he felt when he was posting it, knowing that in a few days it would be sent back.’
‘However he felt, he didn’t give up.’
‘No.’ I smile sadly. ‘You know you mentioned going to my ballet school to get a look at my mother and me . . . ? Well, the other day I remembered those lessons! I think my father took me once. I can vaguely picture him sitting quite out of place amongst all the mums, and I kept turning around to watch him while I was supposed to be dancing. I remember the teacher trying to coax me to pay attention . . . It’s so vivid – not his face, but more a feeling.’ I look off into the distance. ‘I felt proud.’
Now, every day, memories are unlocking themselves like tiny, almost tangible miracles. All I do is grasp at them like snowflakes before they melt. ‘Then I was on the swings at the park, and he was pushing me higher and higher, and I was a tiny bit panic-stricken, yet thinking, My dad won’t let any harm come to me . . .’ I almost can’t continue. ‘Again, I can’t really picture him; I just have a sense of him being there. A sense I’ve always had, I think.’ Frustration beats me down. ‘It’s so little! Two or three damned memories. It’s all I have of him.’
‘Your father loved you,’ Evelyn says, gathering the cards into a neat stack. ‘That is what you have of him. Like a lot of men, he was impulsive. He never saw it in terms of having to lose you in order to gain me. He foolishly saw himself as having everything. Once in a while, we all have that fantasy.’
‘I don’t know why she kept him from me, Evelyn!’ There is no getting over this. ‘Even if she did it for the right reasons, it amounts to dishonesty, doesn’t it? She let me go on believing something bad about him. She never gave me enough information so I could make up my own mind.’
A flash of rage and hate suddenly comes to me, but just as quickly, it dies back. It isn’t hatred; it’s just a profound sense of betrayal. When I was small, that was one thing. But when I got older, I had a right to the truth!
‘I’d be so curious when she said things like, You’re just like him! The way she said it: him. The venom! It was so odd being told you had something in common with someone you didn’t have the first clue about.’
‘I can’t really imagine,’ Evelyn says.
‘I confronted her when I was about fourteen, and she flew into a rage. All I was ever led to believe – he was a shit who left us for somebody else.’
‘I’m so sorry, Alice.’
I think of what Justin said on our first date. ‘I should have tried to find him. I must admit my own wrongdoing in all this. I was an adult. I didn’t need their permission. I should have gone looking for him so I could make up my own mind. Instead, I spent all that wasted energy on crappy relationships that were going nowhere, without realising my father was actually out there, so close by. I was too wrapped up in my own life . . . Then my mother got sick and had treatment, then the cancer came back in her liver, and then shortly after she died, my stepfather died. I was just so caught up . . . Running down to Stockport between working full-time . . .’ I recognise the inadequacy of my excuses.
‘I suppose I just kept thinking they must be right about him. In all these years, he never once tried to find me. I always thought there must be something he could have done to be in my life. I wanted him to move mountains to find me. I was his little girl!’
‘But now you know he did try.’
‘He was my blood, Evelyn.’ As Justin had so keenly reminded me. ‘He was part of me, and yet I never knew which part of me was like him, did I? Because I never got the chance to know. He’d done something wrong, yes. But he paid, didn’t he? His punishment was to never see me grow up.’