Lucy met her father in the noble gardens of Gray’s Inn. As they entered, she pointed at the stone beasts on the gate columns. ‘Griffins,’ said her father knowledgably. ‘Protectors of paradise. Don’t they teach you anything about myths these days?’
His suit was crafted to his body immaculately creased and cut. In his own world, thought Lucy he was powerful and successful and wore the uniform of esteemed competence. When they found a bench, he dusted off dry particles of nothing with the back of a hand. Sitting like two lone strays at a matinee, each with their legs crossed, Lucy began the stripping of her father.
‘Dad, none of us are who we think we are.’
Her father, enjoying a tease, replied, ‘And I suppose no one else is who we think they are.
‘No, quite right.’ She cut through the smart cloth of known appearances to the soft epidermis. ‘It’s true of Gran’ – he looked suddenly wary – ‘and it is especially true of you.
Lucy explained to her father how he had been saved from Ravensbruck by Agnes, that he was born of unknown, murdered parents, from an unknown place, that they were buried no one knew where. And she told him Agnes was the mother of a son whom she’d lost, a son who had been found. He listened, entranced and dismayed, fingering the constricting knot of his tie. When Lucy had finished he sat stunned, as though waiting for the lights to come on in a theatre, the only one left in a curved, empty stall.
‘Do you know,’ he said faintly ‘I think she nearly told me once.
‘When?’
‘Years and years ago… before the rot set in… I was fifteen or sixteen and I gave her a mouthful about her silence’ – again he reached for his restricting collar – ‘I said she’d never cared, not even when I’d fallen as a boy and cut my knee.’
‘What did she say?’ asked Lucy
Her father sat upright, the movement of feet scuffing a gleaming shoe. He wiped his dry lips with a handkerchief and said, ‘Nothing, actually at first. But her face crumpled… in a way that 1 have never been able to forget… and just when I thought she was going to tell me something she was gone, into herself…’
‘She didn’t speak?’
He nodded, his face flushed and shining. ‘She said, “Oh Freddie, say anything about me but not that, not that:” He joined his hands in hopeless, abject supplication. ‘God, I have to see her… I have to tell her I’m sorry…’
The gardens of the Inn were due to close, their lunchtime access about to be withdrawn by edict of the Honourable Benchers. Like a stream of obedient refugees, young and old started threading their way towards the ornate gates. Lucy and Freddie followed suit. They walked back the way they had come, changed from who they were when they’d entered.
‘I had always thought, in some obscure way she did not want me.
These were words Lucy could hardly bear to hear. She looked down, fastening her attention on the measured crunching of fine gravel.
‘In one sense, I suppose that is true…
Lucy lowered her head further, her chin discovering a necklace given to her by him on her tenth birthday. She pressed hard against the warm gold chain as he spoke:
‘Isn’t life bloody awful sometimes. She could never have told me when I most wanted to know because I would not have understood. And now that I am old enough to understand she can’t tell me.’
Lucy forced the tiny links into the skin of her neck. He said:
‘I’d give anything to go back to that moment when her face fell, to tell her I didn’t mean it… but that is part of the hell – I did mean it… I did. I just wish I’d never said it. Unfortunately we have to live with what we’ve said, as well as what we’ve done.’
Reaching the gates, Lucy looked up. It seemed her father had aged, but the lines through his skin were yielding, well drawn. He was like a man who’d been well treated by an indulgent parole board. Yes, they would recommend his release; but so many years of imprisonment had passed that the spout within for exhilaration had rusted, clogged. They all watched him in a line, waiting for the bursting forth. He could only smile, shake hands, bow… mutter thanks.
He faced Lucy and said plainly, ‘There’s still enough time left to make a difference, don’t you think?’
‘Yes.’
They walked out into Field Court and the gates of paradise politely closed. Her father kissed her goodbye. Strange, thought Lucy: it was only since she’d told her father about the death of Pascal that intimacy of the kind they each wanted, had been restored between them. Glancing up at a mute griffin, Lucy could have sworn she saw the little beast breathe.