some immoral support. Much more fun.’
She’d come to the funeral with me, and cried till her eyes were red, while I remained stone-faced throughout. Everyone who didn’t know me had thought she was Anthony’s daughter. ‘He was nice, your dad,’ she said now, turning her coffee cup around in her hands. ‘Remember when Tim Fleming broke my heart?’
Tim Fleming had been seventeen to our thirteen, louche, long-haired and leather-jacketed. Going out with him was just asking for trouble, which was exactly what Eve wanted, and got. I grinned. ‘Who could forget?’
‘Your father gave me that look of his – you know’ – she put her head on one side and fixed me with a beady eye; it was an absurd exaggeration of his most quizzical expression but strangely accurate – ‘and said: “Pretty girl like you, you’re wasted on a git like that.” It was so funny, a word like that being said in that incredibly posh accent of his: I just burst out laughing. And that’s what I told him myself when I saw him next, remember? “I’m wasted on a git like you!”’
I remembered Eve striding up to Tim Fleming outside the kebab shop, where he was mooching around that Saturday lunchtime with the rest of his friends, and shouting the words out, her blonde hair flying like a banner. She’d seemed so bright and defiant, and I was so proud of her. Hers was not the image of my father I most often remembered, though.
She read my father’s letter, frowning in concentration, then read it again. ‘Weird,’ she said at last and handed it back to me. ‘A box in an attic, eh? Do you think your mother’s corpse is in it, mouldering away? Perhaps she never died in France at all.’ She made a Gothic face at me. The eyeliner beneath her left eye had smudged. I itched to reach over and wipe it away, not out of any lesbian urge but purely for the sake of tidiness.
‘Oh, she went back to France, all right.’
As soon as I left to go to university, as if abnegated of all responsibility for me, my mother had sold her share of the house back to my father for some astronomical sum (I had not realized they were even in contact) and gone back to France. I visited her there twice before she died; and each time she was as distant and polite as a passing acquaintance. Each time I sensed dark shadows gliding beneath the composed exterior, and knew that if those shadows were to surface they would emerge with monstrous teeth and the power to destroy. It was probably a relief to both of us that I decided not to visit again.
Eve put a consoling hand on my arm. ‘How are you feeling about it all?’
‘I don’t know.’ It was true.
‘Oh, come on, Iz. It’s me: emotional trainwreck Eve. You don’t have to stay buttoned-up with me.’
‘To be honest, it was a bit of a shock to hear he was dead. The last time I saw him on TV he looked fine. But the money from selling the house will come in handy.’
For a moment she looked appalled. Then she gave me the bright, forced smile you might give a three-year-old that’s just inadvertently (or not) stamped on a frog. ‘You’re probably still feeling a bit numb, from the shock of it all. Some people grasp the enormity of a death at once; it just takes longer with others. The grief will kick in later.’
‘Honestly, Eve, I don’t think so. He walked out of my life when I was fourteen. This wretched letter is the first time he’s been in contact since. How are you supposed to feel about a father who did that to you? No matter how rich he is.’
My father might have ended up as a rich man, but he hadn’t started out that way. Archaeology isn’t an occupation known for making fortunes. He had a genuine passion for the ancient past, having spurned the modern world as a thoroughly bad lot, which was not an entirely surprising attitude for a young man coming of age immediately after the Second World War, with all the horrors and inhumanities that liberation had revealed. When he met my mother on
She’d come to the funeral with me, and cried till her eyes were red, while I remained stone-faced throughout. Everyone who didn’t know me had thought she was Anthony’s daughter. ‘He was nice, your dad,’ she said now, turning her coffee cup around in her hands. ‘Remember when Tim Fleming broke my heart?’
Tim Fleming had been seventeen to our thirteen, louche, long-haired and leather-jacketed. Going out with him was just asking for trouble, which was exactly what Eve wanted, and got. I grinned. ‘Who could forget?’
‘Your father gave me that look of his – you know’ – she put her head on one side and fixed me with a beady eye; it was an absurd exaggeration of his most quizzical expression but strangely accurate – ‘and said: “Pretty girl like you, you’re wasted on a git like that.” It was so funny, a word like that being said in that incredibly posh accent of his: I just burst out laughing. And that’s what I told him myself when I saw him next, remember? “I’m wasted on a git like you!”’
I remembered Eve striding up to Tim Fleming outside the kebab shop, where he was mooching around that Saturday lunchtime with the rest of his friends, and shouting the words out, her blonde hair flying like a banner. She’d seemed so bright and defiant, and I was so proud of her. Hers was not the image of my father I most often remembered, though.
She read my father’s letter, frowning in concentration, then read it again. ‘Weird,’ she said at last and handed it back to me. ‘A box in an attic, eh? Do you think your mother’s corpse is in it, mouldering away? Perhaps she never died in France at all.’ She made a Gothic face at me. The eyeliner beneath her left eye had smudged. I itched to reach over and wipe it away, not out of any lesbian urge but purely for the sake of tidiness.
‘Oh, she went back to France, all right.’
As soon as I left to go to university, as if abnegated of all responsibility for me, my mother had sold her share of the house back to my father for some astronomical sum (I had not realized they were even in contact) and gone back to France. I visited her there twice before she died; and each time she was as distant and polite as a passing acquaintance. Each time I sensed dark shadows gliding beneath the composed exterior, and knew that if those shadows were to surface they would emerge with monstrous teeth and the power to destroy. It was probably a relief to both of us that I decided not to visit again.
Eve put a consoling hand on my arm. ‘How are you feeling about it all?’
‘I don’t know.’ It was true.
‘Oh, come on, Iz. It’s me: emotional trainwreck Eve. You don’t have to stay buttoned-up with me.’
‘To be honest, it was a bit of a shock to hear he was dead. The last time I saw him on TV he looked fine. But the money from selling the house will come in handy.’
For a moment she looked appalled. Then she gave me the bright, forced smile you might give a three-year-old that’s just inadvertently (or not) stamped on a frog. ‘You’re probably still feeling a bit numb, from the shock of it all. Some people grasp the enormity of a death at once; it just takes longer with others. The grief will kick in later.’
‘Honestly, Eve, I don’t think so. He walked out of my life when I was fourteen. This wretched letter is the first time he’s been in contact since. How are you supposed to feel about a father who did that to you? No matter how rich he is.’
My father might have ended up as a rich man, but he hadn’t started out that way. Archaeology isn’t an occupation known for making fortunes. He had a genuine passion for the ancient past, having spurned the modern world as a thoroughly bad lot, which was not an entirely surprising attitude for a young man coming of age immediately after the Second World War, with all the horrors and inhumanities that liberation had revealed. When he met my mother on