‘Super. I’m driving down tomorrow morning, I suppose I can take you along without too much trouble, so long as you don’t bring all your worldly goods with you, that is. And don’t worry yourself about Oxford. It’s only the icing on the cake.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I mean it’s just an extra.’
‘Oh, absolutely. Thanks for the offer, by the way, but I think I’ll take the train down. See you at dinner.’
I made myself some coffee in the kitchen and browsed through those Sunday papers that weren’t draped over my mother’s tent-like bulk on the sitting-room sofa. I wore a tired smirk. What did you expect? I thought. Outside, the sky was already beginning to turn shadowy mackerel. How soon would it get dark? I decided to leave for London straightway, while there was still time.
I suppose I really ought to explain.
The thing is that I am a member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority … the child of an unbroken home. I have carried this albatross since the age of eleven, when I started at grammar school. Not a day would pass without somebody I knew turning out to be adopted or illegitimate, or to have mothers who were about to hare off with some bloke, or to have dead fathers and shabby stepfathers. What busy lives they led. How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty.
Once, last year, when we were all sixth-forming round the school coffee-bar (everyone else had to be in class), I was bor-ingly reproached by a friend for ‘actually hating’ my father, who wasn’t villainous or despotic, after all, merely dismiss-ible. My friend quietly pointed out that he ‘had no feelings of hatred’ for his father, although he (the father) apparently spent most days with one fist down his wife’s throat and the other up the au pair’s bum. Precisely, I thought. I tipped my chair back against the wall and replied (somewhat high-mind-edly, having that week read a selection of D. H. Lawrence’s essays):
‘Not at all, Pete, you miss the point. Hatred is the only emotionally educated reaction to a sterile family environment. It’s a destructive and … painful emotion, perhaps, but I think I must not deny it if I am to keep my family alive in my imagination and my viscera, if not in my heart.’
Cor, I thought, and so did they. Pete looked at me now with moody respect, like a sceptic at a successful séance – which, of course, was exactly how I looked; there it was, morally intelligible at last.
Not that there aren’t, in my view, plenty of urgent reasons for hating him; it’s just that he constitutes such a puny objective correlative, never does anything glamorously unpleasant. And, good Lord, in this day and age a kid has to have something to get worked up about, skimpy though his material may be. So the emotion that walks like a burglar through our house trying all the doors has found mine the only one unlocked, indeed wide open: for there are no valuables inside.
Now I kneel, take from the bed the largest stack of papers, and fan it out on the floor.
It’s strange; although my father is probably the most fully documented character in my files, he doesn’t merit a note-pad to himself, let alone a folder. Mother, of course, has her own portfolio, and my brothers and sisters each have the usual quarto booklet (excepting the rather inconsequential Saman-tha, who gets only a 3p Smith’s Memorandum). Why nothing for my father? Is this a way of getting back at him ?
At the top left-hand corner of every page in which he features, I write ‘F’.
My father has in all sired six children. I used to suspect that he had had so many just to show the catholicity of his tastes, to bolster his image as tolerant patriarch, to inform the world that his loins were rich in sons. There are in fact four boys, and he has given us progressively trendy names: Mark (twenty-six), Charles himself (pushing twenty), Sebastian (fifteen) and Valentine (nine). As against two girls. I sometimes wish I had been born female, if only to rectify this bias.