Lara flew over to her dad. ‘Dad, what did you do? How’s your foot?’ She leaned down and hugged him.
He clung onto her as though he was sucking her energy into his tired old body. He grabbed her hand and shouted to me, ‘My daughter! My daughter! Beautiful! Beautiful! L—, L—’ His fingers were drumming on the arm of the chair with frustration.
‘Lara, Dad.’
Lara kept twitching her lips as though there was so much to say and so little certainty of being able to express it in a way that her dad would be able to process. Her face was mottled with emotions; sadness, love and tenderness all shifting like shadows across her features.
Lara beckoned me over. ‘This is Maggie. She’s married to Nico.’
His brow furrowed. ‘Nico, Nico, Nico…’
Lara paused. Her dad looked as though he was going through the mental process of sieving a muddy puddle, anxiously trying to find a shiny coin in its murky depths.
‘You know, my husband’s brother.’
He shook his head. ‘Your husband. Are you married? When did you get married? Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I did tell you. You came to the wedding, Dad. Remember? We got married in the Majestic, you know, that big hotel in the centre of Brighton?’
I would have liked to slink away. I didn’t want this lovely old man with the smile so like Sandro’s to be humiliated in front of a stranger, to have the holes in the honeycomb of his memory laid bare. Or for Lara’s private anguish to be played out in front of me.
‘You remember Massimo, don’t you, Dad?’ Lara asked, her voice getting more and more distressed.
He started ripping a tissue into tiny pieces. ‘Massimo, Massimo, Massimo…’ It was like watching one of those grab machines in an amusement arcade, swinging wildly, flexing its claws but just failing to snatch the iPod. Then suddenly, he tried to get up, grappling for the stick at the side of his chair. ‘Massimo! Massimo!’ He was yelling, with Lara trying to calm him. A nurse came running.
‘Mr Dalton, careful, come on now, sit down, remember you’ve hurt your foot.’
Eventually, they got him back into his chair. He was so agitated it was uncomfortable to watch.
Lara sat next to him and patted his hand. ‘I’ll bring Massimo with me next time. He’s a very good man. He looks after us all.’
Her dad worried at the cuffs of his shirt.
The nurse mouthed, ‘Not too long now, he needs to rest.’
I leaned towards Lara. ‘I’ll let you have a chat. I’ll wait outside. No rush at all.’ I did a small wave and said, ‘Mr Dalton, I’m going now, but I hope I’ll see you again. Look after your foot.’
He looked at me as though I’d just appeared. Then with a great big grin, he said, ‘Ta-tah. Come again with Shirley. It’s good for my wife to have some company till I get home.’
Lara’s head slumped towards her chest. She started to pick her way through an explanation of who she was.
I went out to sit in the car.
Lara appeared about twenty minutes later, red-eyed and subdued.
I left her alone with her thoughts as the Fiesta rattled along.
Halfway home she said, ‘I’ve got to go and visit Dad more often. He’s gone downhill so quickly. I wish Massimo could find more time to take me.’
There was an obvious solution. I organised my words to leave ‘duh’ off the end of my question.
‘Shall I teach you to drive?’
18
LARA
As we left the nursing home I felt as though little bits of my heart were snapping off until I’d be left with a shrivelled walnut capable of only the most basic emotions. Dad, the man who’d made me the centre of his universe after my mother died, probably wouldn’t know who I was in a few years’ time.
Massimo’s promise to take me straight after Easter never materialised. To my shame, I’d let six months pass since I’d seen him at New Year. Six months that I hadn’t felt that craggy hand on mine, hadn’t seen the fog clouding his brain slowly disperse as my face became familiar again.
I slumped into the seat, puzzling over what had triggered Dad’s agitation when I’d mentioned Massimo. Maybe it was simple frustration. God knows how awful it must be to peer into the dark chambers of your mind in the hope of walking into the one holding the illuminating answer to something as simple as remembering who your children were.
I still wanted to believe Massimo had chosen that particular nursing home for the right reasons. He’d brushed away my concerns about the expense. ‘If it was my mother, I’d expect her to get the best treatment. Your dad is no different and, luckily, we can afford it.’ At the time, I was so grateful when he insisted on the top neurologists and the best residential care: ‘It is a bit far away, but you don’t want him vegetating in some state-run dump where they’ll just stick him in front of the telly.’
I’d squashed my reservations about how far away it was under his promises that we’d work it out, that he’d make sure I saw him as often as I wanted to. But, in reality, ‘a bit far away’ meant that yet another person had disappeared from my life. I didn’t even want to tally up how seldom we’d visited overall in the last twelve months. Part of the nursing staff’s training must be presenting a smooth and neutral face for relatives who only turn up when there’s a crisis to be solved, leaving them to make excuses to the residents about why their sons and daughters don’t visit. It was better Dad’s memory would fail without ever knowing the truth.
As Maggie drove along, kind enough not to talk while I gathered myself, a scene played on a continuous loop in my head. Massimo, ten years ago, driving me from Brighton to Oxford at the crack of dawn every Monday for my client meetings. Me telling him that I wanted to learn to drive, that it was ridiculous him slogging round the M25 then hanging around working on his laptop in a hotel bar waiting to take me home again. And, in the meantime, I’d take the train.
But he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I’m not having you risking your life on these busy motorways. I’d be so worried about you with all the lorries thundering past. The roads are different now – when I learnt to drive, there was so much less traffic. It’s not safe.’
How flattered I was that this charming man – who could have had his pick of the girls in the office – would get up at 5.30 a.m. to chauffeur me about. ‘You’re just like my dad, wanting to keep me wrapped up in cotton wool.’
He sounded hurt. ‘What’s wrong with wanting to keep the woman I love safe? Besides, we get time together to chat, just you and me. There’s no one I’d rather be with. Of course, if you’d prefer to hang round train stations on your own in the dark, I’ll get my secretary to book some tickets.’