They are silent.
‘When can I meet him then?’ he says eventually.
‘When you grow some balls and come down to visit,’ she says, without malice aforethought, as Davy would have put it.
She pictures her father in his crumpled pyjamas, cupping the phone and casting furtive glances at the study door, surrounded by tartan with stag heads poking out from the walls like surprised intruders, as if he’s living some Highland fling as envisaged by Disney, except Una Simmons has the key to this particular hunting lodge. Una Simmons, their very own Macbeth of Moray, who finds ways in which his daughters – well, this daughter – cannot fit into their busy schedule, reasons why there isn’t room for them to stay at Christmas.
‘Spoken to Ellie?’ he says at last, a shot back across her bows.
‘No, Dad, I haven’t spoken to Ellie. Better go now, it’s late. You hop back into bed with Mein Führer.’ And she puts the phone down.
The feeling in their house had been that Margaret Thatcher was to blame, not just for record unemployment (‘fifteen per cent of the workforce,’ her father said, shaking his head, always behind a newspaper), but for the miners, of course, and for Murdoch breaking the print unions (a soreness close to her father’s heart), and also, in some nebulous way, what had happened in the Bradshaw family. It was all bad, Thatcher and motherlessness. Her father’s sadness, in abeyance while her mother’s forceful nature lit and burned the house, became their whole microclimate after she died. It was global – despair about themselves and the world. He sighed deeply at the news; he sighed at the Guardian and switched to the newly-launched Independent (‘It is, are you?’), but tutted even at that; he sighed at old photographs.
Ellie and Manon listened to Kate Bush in their bedroom – well, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, to be precise (‘Don’t Give Up’) and cried copiously.
The situation continued for a good five years, during which he said he was ‘raising the girls’, though he seemed mostly to be behind a newspaper, harrumphing. He switched back to the Guardian in a further state of disillusionment and became merely grumpy, muttering about the redesign of its masthead (dual font ITC Garamond Italic next to Helvetica Black! What were they thinking?). This seemed an improvement. He went back to writing at the Fenland Citizen, where he was editor (the staff having managed quite well during his Grief-Stricken Years) – book and film reviews mostly, or the odd travel piece when it was a one-nighter to Dublin or some such and the girls could be left alone.
Come 1997, their father began taking an interest in himself. He bought his first new items of clothing since the Seventies – a polo shirt and some chinos. He had a haircut, without being told. He began to whistle in the bathroom, to smile, and crack jokes. The root of all this did not emerge for many months and turned out not to be an organic process of healing but a woman called Una Simmons, who worked with him on the paper and wrote a household advice column called Simmons Solves. On the night of the general election, they travelled together to the printing presses in High Wycombe, ostensibly to make sure the correct front page went off stone, and the rest, as they say, was a Labour landslide. Things could only get better, so the song went, and they certainly did – for Manon’s father at least. And that was more or less when Manon lost him.
She puts the phone on the floor, plumps her pillow and reaches across for the dial on the radio.
Wednesday
Miriam
‘No need to clean my study, can you tell Rosa? It’s got all my campaign stuff – paperwork, which I don’t want shuffled about,’ Ian says.
‘Yes, of course. Where are you going?’ asks Miriam. She is arranging lilies in a vase – great brutes from the Tesco Express around the corner. She doesn’t even like them, their dull dark leaves and vulgar blooms, but something about buying them spoke of a reconnect with the land of the living, thanks to Julie from Hendon. Anyway, they brought scent to a winter house.
‘For a quick run,’ he says. ‘You seem brighter.’ He is tying the laces on his trainers, toe on the cream upholstered kitchen chair.
‘Can you get your foot off that?’ she says.
‘Yes, sorry.’
She hasn’t told him about Julie, of course. Julie would be taken as further evidence of her madness. But with a single visit, Julie has made things bearable.
‘I was thinking of going back to the practice, actually,’ she says, plumping the stems in a bid to make them fall about naturally in the vase, but they are rigid as scaffolding.
‘Good idea. Would do you good to be out and about. Occupy your mind.’
‘Stop me thinking about Edith, you mean?’
‘Thinking about her doesn’t find her.’