A Ghost at the Door Read Free

them arguing. She was the widow of his
father’s business partner, recently buried, and now she wanted her share, for the children. Johnnie explained that he had a family of his own, that their business was in cash, no records, no
formal partnership agreement. Anyway, he had added, her husband had spent months dying and had contributed nothing. At that point Harry had quietly locked his bedroom door and buried his head in a
book. He knew how the conversation would end. It was a lesson he was to see repeated more than once during the next few years.
    And yet . . . And yet, despite it all, despite the unreliability, the rows with his mother and the times he simply disappeared from their lives, his father had offered moments that Harry had
cherished. Like the Christmas Day when Harry had woken to find the streets covered in snow. He’d been so excited until he found his mother in tears. The Aga had broken down, the fire gone
out, their day destroyed. Harry remembered her being almost fearful of his father’s reaction, yet Johnnie hadn’t even raised his voice. He’d hauled an old wooden sledge from the
attic, placed Harry on top wrapped in his overcoat and favourite football scarf, and they had walked through the park to the Dorchester Hotel for their dinner, his father pulling Harry all the
while. The snow had fallen around them every step of the way, laying down memories that would last a lifetime but that would never quite manage to swallow up the darker moments.
    Harry had never been able to get to grips with how his father earned his living – the term ‘financial adviser’ covered so much ground. The family had covered a fair amount of
ground, too, spent their holidays in Val d’Isère, Cannes, Antigua and Australia, and Harry’s life had lacked for nothing in a material sense. His father had taught him to drive
in the South of France in a green, three-litre, 1924 Bentley with a leather strap across its bonnet and a wicker hamper in the boot. He’d been barely sixteen when he’d first sat behind
that wheel, another sparkling father–son moment that, as so often, Johnnie had soon contrived to ruin. It was on that same trip that Harry had slept with his first woman – something
else his father had arranged. Yet, for Harry, in hindsight, it was too much. Surely that moment of all moments should have been a private matter, not something for his father’s holiday album
or banter in the yacht club. Anyway, Harry suspected that his father had screwed the girl, too, but it was the 1980s and the word ‘excess’ seemed to have been banned from the
language.
    Other women had always been a feature of his father’s world. After his mother had died, alone in her large bed in her empty house in Holland Park, one woman in particular had, for a while,
become a part of Johnnie’s life. Harry thought for a while she had driven them apart. It was about the time that Harry had applied for a place at Cambridge – he had no intention of
following in his father’s footsteps to the other place, Oxford, as Johnnie had tried to insist upon. The son could be stubborn, too. So, when the crested letter of acceptance had arrived, his
father stared at him across the kitchen and said Harry was now on his own, that the fountain of money would be switched off, that he had to learn to stand on his own feet – ‘just as I
did’. A barrier was built between them. At first Harry blamed the new woman, but she eventually disappeared, was replaced, but nothing changed. His father still spent vacations in exotic
places but no longer with his son. Harry paid his way through college by working nights at McDonald’s and weekends at a call centre. Communication with his father diminished. In his final
year at Cambridge, Harry waited for his father to call him. He waited six months. Then he deleted Johnnie’s number from his contact list.
    ‘Tell me about your father,’ Jemma had said. Harry didn’t even want to tell