In My Father's House XII

Till We Two Meet Again

In My Father’s House XII

Till We Two Meet Again

My father could also be an embarrassment. When we took off for Bristol the following Monday morning in my uncle’s grey Austin, he would tell anyone we met the reason he was driving this ‘non-descript’ car – and there were a number of these exchanges before we left Brighton behind: ‘My daughter, you see, insists on being inconspicuous during her re-entry into boarding school life…’ he would disclose with glee…‘they don’t – am I right Jo? – approve of the Bentley.’ Topped with a laugh and a raise of the eyebrow – ‘What we poor fathers are reduced to do for our daughters...!’ By this time, my cheeks would be flaming, and only a hand steadying the hamster cage on the back seat beside me, prevented me from crouching on the floor as invisible as I could make myself.

‘Daddy, do you have to?’

‘What, what have I done? I’m only being friendly. Do you begrudge poor Mrs … a word or two?’

You’re using me as fodder, I’d have liked to have said. But I didn’t have the words to express it, then. I only felt, at that moment, that my private emotions, which derived from excruciating experiences when I’d arrived at the school, were being offered into the public arena without my permission.

But to his mind, I was now part of him, I was his, and if he was going to be inconvenienced, why shouldn’t he dammed well use it to abet social interactions. This being part of him was a glorious thing to feel, while also being confusing, and, occasionally, a danger. When that happened, it prompted me to clash with him to protect myself, hardly aware that that was what I was doing.

‘You stand up to him: he likes that, Miss,’ Griff observed at one point. Others seemed to be of the same impression. And I certainly didn’t always, or not in my memory. As I grew into my teenage years, curiously, I think I was more cow-towed. But then, at ten, fresh from South Africa, I think I felt I had nothing to lose. And perhaps Griff was right, my father did like it, however wild my behaviour was. Because so few people did stand up to him; and many things troubled me, made me fearful, but of him I wasn’t afraid.

I was afraid of going back to school. Though my hand on the hamster’s warm little body, as I tried to calm his erratic breathing and thumping heart, helped me. ‘It’s okay, little thing. We’ll be there soon, you’ll be okay,’ I said over and over like a mantra, while my father in the front drove and dictated into his dictaphone.

We made good time. To my pride I wasn’t sick once, nor even felt it, which I reported to the nameless hamster. We had bought her two days earlier. In a rush. In a pet shop at the end of the Saturday afternoon. When word had come back from Miss Sanderson that she was inclined to make an exception in this case with a trial period for the rest of the term, ‘Providing Joanna upholds her part in the bargain, and we see a notable improvement in her school work.’

Odd to think, I reflected in the silence in the car, that back in Cape Town not so long ago my sister and I had conjured up a hundred names for her imaginary children to be. And now I had something much more important to name, a living little fawn being, with the softest of fur and the pinkest of mouths, no name came to me; or rather so many, yet none seemed right.

Did we stop for a break? We must have. I think I refused to leave hamster, so my father went into the café for his own cup of tea and toasted tea-cake, locking me in the car with the hamster. When he returned he brought crisps and a lemonade for me. The salt came in a twist of waxed blue paper. I showed the hamster how you find it at the bottom of the package and spread it evenly. My father commented, ‘Now Jo, everything in proportion, I don’t want you to be going daft over that thing. Promise?’

I promised. It was easy to promise at that point.

He was driving me straight to the school, then going on to see Uncle Harold and Aunty Norma by himself. I was disappointed at that, I wanted to see my cousin Hilary, who I’d taken to. I wondered if he’s stopped wailing and whether glamorous aunty Norma was any happier. I would have liked to show Norma and Hilary my hamster. And most of all I wanted to delay the moment of being dropped at the school gates. But my father was insistent. He said he had some business talk to have with Uncle Harold.

He was talking to me via the mirror above the dashboard. I screwed up my eyes to him in response. Was it really true, or did he want to talk about me, out of my hearing? To tell them, for example, to not be so lenient to me this term, not so trusting? He shrugged his shoulders, and smiled benevolently. The twinkle in his eye like Father Christmas, but distant. I was losing him now, going, going. The Austin was racing along, gobbling up the miles and he was already plotting what he’d be doing without me.

Suddenly tears unbidden. And hamster couldn’t help, now.

‘Come on, Jo,’ he said, ‘we’ve had such a nice break, haven’t we?’

‘That’s the trouble,’ I wailed. ‘I don’t want to leave you. I just want to stay with you, doing the same things.’

His eyes went from the mirror to the road, and back to me again. I couldn’t believe it, there were tears in his, too.

‘I’ll miss you, Jo. But be a good girl, will you. It won’t be long till Easter.’

Belinda’s arrival coincided with ours, her plaits flapping in the wind, her curls blowing back off her forehead, her brown eyes full of quiet mischief. Seeing her, made the parting with my father a little easier.

There weren’t many people about yet. The school train from Paddington wasn’t due in for another hour. We deposited our cases inside and hurried my hamster to the shed to introduce it to hers. We thought hers was a boy, we weren’t sure, but we made a plan, anyway, to attach the two cages together and leave the doors open so they could ‘make friends’.

Would they mate? This was something we discussed in the Rough Patch, sitting on a low branch of the old Oak. It would be weeks before we belatedly deduced that Belinda’s was a female, too. And by then - since it had become impossible to keep our hamster colony secret for long – I’d offered any number of my jealous form mates a baby hamster for themselves, once the great event arrived. Belinda told me about her ‘queer’ half-term in which, half way through, her parents, with no more explanation than, ‘Your father needs the sun’, had taken off for Monte Carlo, leaving her and her siblings to be looked after by the grandparents. We agreed that parents can be very unreliable. Belinda shrugged: ‘It was okay for me because Granny is my second-favourite person in the world but the boys were disappointed…’

‘Are you pleased to be back?’

‘Are you?’

From the junior school, the bell was ringing for the early arrivals’ lunch. The sky was a uniform grey. There was a light breeze. To any discerning eye the Rough Patch would have looked a forlorn place. Remaining dead leaves blew up and resettled in drifts. Everything was wet, damp, overgrown. Wet Ivy glistened on the old tree trunks. Branches weighted with last year’s dead blossoms were entangled with the branches of other bushes. Some had broken off and lay where they’d fallen across the hillock. The open patches of green were engorged in mud, with occasional long grasses breaking through.

But it was because of this place we’d claimed, a stage full of potential to my imagination, with the thought of our hamsters getting to know one another and Belinda’s friendship, that I could face the second half of the term with more grit, and determination to try to keep to the promises I’d made.

In comparison to what I’d been hearing from Belinda, it seemed I’d had a good half-term. At the thought, my mind flitted to Him right at that moment chatting to Uncle Harold and Aunty Norma, possibly about me. I wobbled.

‘Come on. We better be getting going,’ Belinda said.

We set off from the mound towards the building.

Till we two meet again, then.