Don't You Love Your Daddy? (29 page)

Had Bridie seen past the woman of nearly forty I was to find the vulnerable child I had once been? I thought she had.

‘It was my uncle,’ said another woman, when our nightly ritual of lighting our cigarettes and savouring the first drag took place.

‘It was my Scoutmaster,’ said a man.

But I said nothing.

Neither did a pale-faced man: completely withdrawn, he sat with us each night but seldom spoke.

‘He’s on suicide watch,’ I was told, when I asked why a nurse was seldom far from him. And I wondered what his story was. But deep down I already knew.

I listened to the stories of others but still I said nothing and neither did the man on suicide watch. But as the days slipped by I found my gaze settling on him more and more. What, I wondered, had driven him to such despair that he needed to be watched so closely?

It was several days after Bridie had told her story that, as though by some unspoken command, our fellow smokers rose and left us alone together. Then Jim, as I had learnt his name was, finally spoke. ‘It was my father,’ he said. And my hand stretched out and gently touched his.

He told me of beatings with steel-buckled belts and ham-sized fists, of broken bones and cracked ribs. How as he grew, so had his rage. But, too small to vent his anger on the six-foot drunk who had fathered him, he chose boys of his own age to fight. The school complained to the parents and the beatings increased. At sixteen he ran away, and at seventeen he did what so many troubled boys did: he enlisted in the army.

He was posted to Germany. His need to find love led him into a marriage with a woman who, having gained a rent-free home, rewarded him with first a daughter, then unfaithfulness. He stayed, for he loved his child, but when he was posted back to England, his wife refused to accompany him. He wrote begging her to follow him. His letters came back with ‘not known at this address’ stamped on them. It was then he knew he had lost his daughter.

He went to see his father and to confront the man who had destroyed his childhood. Instead of the six-foot brute he remembered, he found a gaunt old man with the yellow-tinged face and the deep cough of the terminally ill.

Three months later he paid for his father’s funeral, then walked away from the woman who had watched her husband’s brutality without protest. His father’s death had not set him free either. He mourned his lost childhood and the daughter he would never see again. It was then that he had lost the will to live. ‘And you?’ he asked.

‘My father too,’ I answered, and for the first time I told my story. Not all of it then, but little bits at a time until finally he knew the whole.

It was in the telling that I gained my freedom from the past, and his listening that woke something in me and thawed my coldness. It was then that, instead of seeing merely a man, I saw a kindred spirit. We talked into that night and the nights that followed – and the nurses watched us.

Relationships between patients were not encouraged because they knew we were vulnerable. But from our vulnerability grew strength. I was there for six months and I was discharged first. Jim stayed a little longer. I visited him every day, and when he was discharged he came to me.

We had been together for three years, during which I learnt what love was and felt the joy of being able to return it, before I told him there was a place I needed to go back to.

It was a bright summer’s day when I made my journey to the cemetery. My arms were full of gladioli, their bright petals resting against my jumper as I inhaled their light, peppery scent. The white flowers of the mountain ash mingled with the deep green of the yews growing in abundance around the edges of the graveyard. A light summer breeze rustled the leaves, making them cast dancing shadows over the pathways. I could hear Jim’s footsteps as he kept pace with me. I had no need to hear him speak: his presence was enough. My feet took me past the ornate headstones where sightless statues kept watch over those who rested there. I paused at one, where a child’s teddy bear, its colour faded by the elements, lay propped against a white headstone, and shivered at the thought of the unknown parent’s grief.

Continuing around a bend I saw the pond where brown, green and white ducks, their young following, glided contentedly across its surface. Finally we came to the headstone I was looking for. On a nearby bench sat an old man. His lips moved as words unheard by humans left his mouth. His feet, clad in well-polished brown brogues, were set firmly on the ground and a walking-stick was held loosely in his age-spotted hands. The day was warm, and I noticed he was smartly dressed in grey flannel trousers, a navy blue wool jacket and a black tie knotted under his starched white collar. A crisp white handkerchief showed at the edge of his breast pocket and his sparse grey hair was combed neatly back from his face.

For a few seconds I thought he must be someone I knew and that the words I couldn’t hear were directed at me. Then I realized that his eyes were fixed on a fresh grave; one where the headstone had not yet been erected. Without speaking I sat beside him.

He turned his face with its faded blue eyes under creased lids towards me. ‘Just because we can’t see someone it doesn’t mean they’re not here,’ he said.

‘No,’ I replied, thinking of the many times I had believed that.

I felt the warmth of Jim’s arm slide around my shoulders as I looked at that other grave, on which the writing on the headstone had only spread to two lines: ‘Laura East, loving wife and mother’, and the date she had died. A vase, from which the water had long since evaporated, stood in the centre. The brittle brown stalks of the spray of baby’s breath and freesias, the last flowers I had placed there, seemed to reproach me for my long absence. I knelt beside it and stroked the cool purple-streaked stems of the gladioli before laying them on the grave. ‘I searched for her for so long,’ I said. ‘Every day I would wait for her to come back but she never did. Sometimes I saw her in the street, just a glimpse of long fair hair, a curve of a cheek, or a brightly coloured skirt swirling in the breeze. But when I called her name the face turned to me was never hers.’

And again I felt the loneliness of abandonment I had known so very long ago.

I saw out of the corner of my eye the tears on the old man’s face as he talked to his wife. Then a faint smile lifted the corners of his mouth – a memory of the good times had consoled him. As if he had sensed my thoughts, I heard Jim murmur in my ear, ‘Sally, just keep remembering the good times,’ and I smiled up at him with gratitude, for it was thanks to him that I was now able to.

That last time, four years earlier, when I had knelt silently by the grave, the ghost of my childhood had wrapped icy fingers around mine and led me back to a place I wanted to forget – a place where my mother ignored me for days at a time and I was Daddy’s special little girl.

That day I had been unable to separate the good memories from the bad. However hard I tried to see a happy picture in my mind, it was obscured by a sad one. But over the days, weeks and months since then I had learnt how to put the good ones in front.

I sat beside the grave, told her silently that I still missed her, but unlike the old man, I knew she was really gone. The air chilled as the sun faded from the sky and Jim pulled me gently to my feet. ‘Let’s go home, Sally,’ he said. Together we walked back past the pond where, with their heads tucked under their wings, the ducks had turned into floating silken cushions, along the moss-covered paths until we reached the iron gates of the entrance. Still with Jim’s arm around my shoulders, we walked out through them into the noise of traffic.