I was sitting on my bed and she stood in front of me. She and Mr Phillipps intended to go first to Sydney and then to a country town about ten hours north. She said she loved him. My mother reached out and held both my hands. She looked into my eyes. She said: ‘Thank you for finding him for me.’ It was as if the whole thing was my idea.
Going through my father’s papers years later, I found the note she left that next day:
Dear Teddy
Have left everything as tidy as possible. Please be everything Richard wants of you. Let him be able to admire your strength, please the boy needs this. Keep your chin up + help Rich. Give Marie the gloves left on the table.
PS: As an afterthought I have taken the sherry decanter.
I’m sure, by this point, you are ahead of me in terms of Mr Phillipps and the private English lessons he’d been giving me every Saturday morning. In retrospect, it seems so terribly obvious: the way Shakespeare led to Pepys and then Pepys led to my own diary, and how Mr Phillipps would take away my diary for ‘marking’, examining these jottings about my life at home, my parents, my mother . . .
The private lessons, of course, were a way of finding out more about my mother; a method of gaining access and knowledge. They were a trail of sugar cubes leading to a trap. What’s strange is that I didn’t work this out at the time. It actually took me years. I still can remember the moment decades later, idly thinking about those lessons, and the sudden flash of revelation: ‘Hey, hang on a minute . . .’
The lessons made me feel special at the time, but Mr Phillipps had been striding eagerly towards my mother, and I was his gangplank.
My mother having left, things turned ever more chaotic. My father spent his nights sobbing with rage. He was drinking without mercy for himself or anyone else. He’d run the shop by day and then return home. Often he’d give me the same speech over dinner: ‘In there, everyone thinks I’m great, everyone thinks I do a wonderful job, but as soon as I get home everyone’s at me.’ Actually, no one was there to be ‘at him’, only me, and I don’t think I minded him so much. Of course, there was also a difference between the apparently much-praised ‘Work Ted’ and the apparently much-maligned ‘Home Ted’. ‘Home Ted’ had, by about 6.30pm, drunk so much he could hardly stand.
I’m sure my father had really loved my mother, despite their strange, sexless marriage. He was certainly sent sprawling by her departure. Gregarious and sometimes ebullient, he also had a shaft of depression and self-pity. He’d never been the man to fulfil her lofty ambitions. For a few months after my mother’s departure he staggered on, but his mood seemed to increasingly darken. Maybe he’d expected her to maintain some contact; perhaps he’d hoped that she’d visit the two of us.
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