the door and tell this man I’m out. You don’t know when I’ll be back. Right?’
I opened the front door. There was a man in a pale fawn coat with leather buttons that looked like shiny walnuts. ‘Is your daddy in?’
I looked him in the eye. ‘No.’
‘When will he be back?’
‘I don’t know.’
The man stared at me so hard that it made me uncomfortable. But this wasn’t the first time I had had to do something like this for Ted. I prided myself on being good at it. I made my face a moon of innocence.
‘Right. Will you give him a message for me?’ The man took out his wallet and selected a card, then wrote a few words on the back. ‘Here you are. Don’t forget, will you?’
I tried to read what he had written as I went back up the stairs. But Ted was on the landing, waiting.
He held out his hand. ‘Well done, Princess.’ He pocketed the card with barely a glance. ‘Don’t want people knowing where we are every hour of the day, do we?’
Once he had made sure that his visitor had really gone he went out himself, whistling. I had homework to do, and after that there was the television for company, and if I needed anything I could always run up the road to Mrs Maloney. But I could never fall asleep until Ted came home again. I lay on my bed, watching the ceiling and waiting until I heard his Ford Consul drawing up outside.
Next I heard his key in the lock, then low voices in the hallway. Sometimes on these late nights there would be a woman’s giggle. Only then, when I knew that after all he hadn’t disappeared for good and left me behind, did I close my eyes. If there was a woman, I pulled the bedclothes over my head and clamped my ears shut.
I screwed the lid back on the bottle and reached to replace it on the shelf. Then I remembered that I was here to sort out his belongings and dropped it into a rubbish sack instead. I still didn’t like his cologne. Maybe it represented the way he wanted to be, or perhaps with his love of secrecy he just relished putting up another smokescreen. But to me it still smelled like a lie.
I cleared the bathroom cupboard of his smoker’s toothpaste and indigestion tablets and corn plasters. I worked methodically, telling myself that these were only inanimate things, the inevitable remnants we would all leave behind, which would be cleared away for us, some day, in our turn. By our children and their children if we were lucky, by strangers if we were not.
Next I went back to the bedroom. I took his jackets and suits off their hangers and piled them up, thinking that maybe they would do for Oxfam. The cuffs were frayed and the trousers bagged, but they were all dry-cleaned and brushed. Ted had grown seedier in old age – he didn’t bother to eat properly, preferring to smoke and nip at glasses of whisky, and he didn’t get his hair cut regularly enough or trim the tufts in his nose and ears – but he was always a dapper dresser. I folded up his thick white silk evening scarf and put it aside, thinking that Lola might like to have it.
The shoes were lined up in a row on the wardrobe floor. The leather was split with deep lateral creases but they were well polished. I turned one pair over and studied the worn-down heels and touched the oval holes in the leather soles. I could see the pattern of his tread, and now that I listened I could hear his footfalls in the silence of the house. But I couldn’t read the man any more clearly than I had ever done.
In the drawers of the tallboy there were socks and pants, and a coil of ties and paisley cravats. I put aside his RAF tie, frayed at the edges where he had tied the knot so many hundreds of times, and consigned the rest to the disposal pile.
I was up to my wrists in his old clothes now and the scent of him was everywhere, but I told myself it was just a job to be done. I kept at it and the pile of black rubbish sacks mounted up on the landing.
The bottom drawer of the tallboy was deeper than the rest. I opened it and saw that it was half full of papers. Reluctantly I knelt down and began to sift through them.
Most of the papers were old bills, but there was an address book with a brown leather cover, and an old-fashioned thumb index with black and red letters and numerals. I flipped through the pages, recognising one or two of the names, dimly remembering some of the others.
There was nothing hidden here. Ted was as inscrutable as he always had been.
In a creased manila envelope I found a handful of photographs. There was one of my mother and me, in the back garden of the old house. I was perhaps four years old, scowling under the brim of a sunhat and wearing a dress with a smocked front that I hated. Faye was characteristically looking into the distance away from the camera, as if she wished herself elsewhere. I had seen this picture before and almost all the others in the envelope, including one of Ted looking rakish and handsome in front of an MG. Somebody else’s MG, although he managed a proprietorial air. There were also four or five photographs of women.
One of them caught my attention. She had a plump face with a round dimpled chin and her hair was arranged in a lacquered fringe in front and drawn up at the sides with combs. The lipsticked margins of her smile spread fractionally beyond the true contours of her lips, giving her a slapdash, come-and-get-me look. She had eyes that slanted upwards and this oriental aspect was emphasised by a thick line of black eyeliner that flicked up beyond the edges of her eyelids.
Auntie Viv.
Viv wasn’t the first of Ted’s girlfriends to be presented to me after my mother died. I could remember Auntie Joyce before her and possibly Auntie Kath as well. But she was one of the longer-lasting aunties and she was memorable because she was friendlier to me than any of the others.
I sat down on the green candlewick cover of Ted’s bed. I was Jack’s age again.
My father called upstairs to me. ‘Sadie? Sadie, come down here and say hello.’
I came out of my bedroom. I had been reading The Whiteoaks of Jalna and wishing that Renny Whiteoak would come and take me away from Dorset Avenue, Hendon. There was a woman standing beside Ted in the hallway.
‘Sadie, this is Auntie Viv.’
I didn’t want any more aunts. I wanted my father at home, sitting with just me in the evenings to watch Hancock’s Half Hour or maybe even helping me with my French homework. I wanted my mother back as well, of course, but even I, with my talent for wishing for what I was never going to get, knew that there was no point in dwelling on this one.
‘Hello, love.’ Auntie Viv grinned up at me. She was wearing a tight skirt with a fan of creases over the thighs, and high heels that tilted her forward and made her bum stick out. I noticed her teased helmet of silvery blonde hair.
‘Hello,’ I muttered.
Auntie Viv made me sit beside her on the sofa. Ted brought out the gin bottle and the best glasses with diamonds and stars incised on them.
‘Give her a little one,’ Viv suggested and, to my amazement, Ted poured me a small glass of sweet Martini.
‘Cheers, love,’ Viv said, and took a gulp of her gin and tonic. She scissored her fingers – red varnished nails, lots of rings – in my hair. ‘Hasn’t she got lovely hair? Is it natural?’
I thought this was a stupid question. I was twelve. As if I would be able to choose to have my hair permed or dyed or even set. And if I had, as if I would
