or for the harmless idiocy of her question.
‘I told you, that one doesn’t have Harriet in it. You could begin with Busman’s Honeymoon, if you like.’
‘If you think that’s a good idea.’
He stood aside, to allow her to come in again. In the kitchen, Harriet saw that the remains of two boiled eggs had been added to the mess on the table. Simon reached into a cupboard and held up a bottle of whisky, two-thirds empty. She nodded gratefully at it. ‘Yes, please.’
‘I haven’t seen those books in years. It might take me a while to find yours in all this.’ The slight, comprehensive gesture again.
‘There’s no hurry.’ Harriet laced her fingers round the sticky glass, took a gulp of the whisky. ‘Simon, there’s something I want to ask you.’
Simon. She had avoided calling him anything, before. The whisky hit her stomach. Now or never.
‘I know you don’t like questions, I’m sorry. Is there any possibility that you might be my father?’
Simon drank, looking at her over the rim of the glass. His face was creased.
‘That was really what you came to find out.’
‘Yes.’
‘There isn’t any possibility at all. I wish I could say something different. I wish I really were your father.’
As soon as she heard it, she knew that it had been a ridiculous quest. If he had been, even if only perhaps, Kath would have found a way to tell her. Harriet had longed for the idea of him, denying every likelihood, to fill a void. The voice was her own, inside her, nothing to do with Leo because the history of it went back much further than her brief marriage. Simon couldn’t fill it. Nor should she ask him to. Harriet stood up. She moved with exaggerated, half-drunken care, around the table to Simon’s side. She put her arm around his shoulder and rested her cheek against the top of his head. Tears ran out of her eyes and down her cheeks.
‘I wish, as well. I hoped, all the time.’
‘Come and sit here.’ He took hold of her arm and guided her so that she half-leaned, half-sat on the table, where he could see her face. With his other hand he poured himself another drink.
‘I’ve got some catching up to do.’
Harriet rubbed her face with the palms of her hands, raggedly exhaling like a child recovering from a crying fit, and then smiling woefully. ‘I needed Dutch courage. Didn’t do me much good.’
‘Cry if you feel like it, Harriet. I do.’
‘Here, by yourself?’ The image pierced her with sadness.
‘Where else? Listen, I’ll tell you about Kath and me. I loved her, you guessed that. I would watch her across the street. She used to come and visit me, tell me about her adventures, and I’d look at her sitting there, where you are. I’d have done more, of course, if I could. I only touched her once. Put my hand here.’ Stiffly, watching the hand with its brown blotches and twisted cords as if it belonged to someone else, he touched Harriet’s waist. ‘She was so shiny, her eyes and skin. She was surprised. Not offended, or saucy, just surprised. I took my hand away. That’s all. That doesn’t get you a daughter thirty years later, does it?’
Harriet shook her head.
‘Let’s finish the whisky,’ Simon concluded.
‘That isn’t all the story. Kath’s only a tiny bit of it.’ With relief, Harriet forgot her own concerns. It was Simon himself who drew her now, the more sharply because he was free of the miasma of her clumsy hopes and expectations. The neon strip light suspended over his kitchen table cast harsh shadows, focussing them in their postures of almost-intimacy.
‘You’re not my father. It doesn’t matter, I never even wanted one until Kath told me about you. But the fact that you aren’t doesn’t take you or me away, does it, now that we’re both here? Perhaps we can be friends.’
In her own ears, it sounded brash. A facile solution. But he had said, I wish I were your father.
‘I don’t have any excuse for asking. Except that I’ve drunk a bottle of wine and a double scotch. Why do you cry, Simon?’
‘Why not?’ The evasiveness, she was discovering, was characteristic. She felt suddenly tired, and Simon perceived it.
‘What are the responsibilities of friendship? You’ll have to remind me.’
Harriet considered. ‘To talk. And to listen. Very important, that.’
‘I can listen. Most competently.’
‘I’d rather you talked. I have, far too much. Go on.’ Harriet picked up the bottle, pushed it towards him. ‘Talk to me.’
‘What a very odd girl you are. Nothing like your mother. What do you want to know?’
She smiled at him, then. ‘I want to know what sort of father you might have been, if you had turned out to be him.’
‘A disappointing one, I imagine. This is what I do, look. I repair things.’ He held up a small brown rectangle, nibbled with cut-outs and coloured wires and brightened with drops of silver. From amongst the dirty plates and greasy papers he picked up an instrument that looked like a tiny poker at the end of a flex. A curl of silvery wire lay next to it. ‘Resin-core solder,’ he told her. An acrid smell momentarily overpowered the kitchen’s other odours and a tiny silver tear fell on to the circuit board. ‘This is part of a transistor radio. Hardly worth repairing. It would be cheaper to go and buy another. The Japs overtook me long ago.’ He picked up another small, disassembled mechanism. ‘Quartz alarm clock. Same thing, but I like clocks.’
‘The one in the hall?’ Harriet had noticed it in the dim light. It was a grandfather clock with a handsome moon-face, incongruous in the dingy surroundings.
Simon’s expression changed. ‘Come and look at it.’
She followed him into the narrow space. Simon stroked the smoothly patinated case, then opened the door so that she could look inside. She gazed at the cylindrical weights on their chains. The ticking sounded thunderous in the silent hall.
‘I rebuilt the mechanism,’ Simon said. Harriet thought about the springs and coiled wires behind the painted face. ‘If you’re interested,’ he added abruptly, ‘you can come in here.’
He opened a door to the front room of the house. The kitchen was neatly ordered by comparison. In here was what seemed to be the forlorn detritus of many years. Harriet blinked at the skeletons of chairs, their legs and arms tangled with coiled wire, a bicycle frame, a standard lamp with the scorched shade hanging broken-necked. Cardboard boxes were piled high, sagging and spilling over between broken picture frames, rusty tins, a roll of carpet, a backless television set. Against the far wall, with a tin bath propped against it, stood a lathe with its ankles immersed in a small sea of silvery metal curls. There was a smell of oil, and damp, and persistent cold.
In the middle of the room, in a clearing, was a rough wooden workbench. It was scattered with tools, drills and files and screwdrivers curled with woodshavings, reels of solder, and used tobacco tins
