Its embarrassing for you to be dating someone your own age, Dad! my youngest son declared, his words echoing through the corridor as if spoken into a well of fog.
Being a single man of sixty in England is a peculiar thing, especially when the frost of age seems to settle overnight, and your sons have long moved out, eating their roast dinners elsewhere. Their lives spun off into their own peculiar orbits, while I was left in this rambling terraced house just off a sleepy road in Norwich. The silence crept in through the gaps in the sash windows, turning the evenings heavy with loneliness. My sons would never quite see it. Their calls had always been sporadic, but when Margaret drifted quietly into my lifea companion Id hoped might share these cracked mugs of tea with me until memory failed us bothsuddenly they became attentive, huddled in discomfort at my affection for someone not their mother.
My youngest son, Arthur, was always a puzzle to mea brash fellow but soft all the same, the sort girls used to pass surreptitious notes to in school corridors. He collected hearts as easily as one might collect bottle caps, flitting between them until finally, he stitched his life together with respectable marriage and two children. Still, there are secrets he tucks under the carpettwo more children somewhere, wrapped tightly in silence, unspoken for the sake of his standing. He cannot bear for anyone to know, certainly not his mates at the pub. To him, my own happiness at sixty is just as mortifying.
Youre old, hed mutter, his cheeks flushing a damp English rose. Its not right, carrying on with women at your age. You ought to spend your time with your grandchildrenpick them up from the primary school gates rather than making a fool of yourself. Leave Margaret, Dad, for goodness sake.
He pressed me, demanding I choose: his familyand that of his brother, Henrywith all their chubby faces and sticky hands, or this new woman who watched Midsomer Murders with me by the yellow lamp. Arthur was unbending as an iron churchyard gate, and Henry, usually unruffled, now followed his brothers lead. The phone sits silent these days; their voices dont echo down the lines any longer.
Now, some evenings, when the railway clock ticks too loudly and Margarets hand is warm in mine, I feel a creeping treachery. Have I traded my own children for this thin slice of contentment? Margaret keeps my laugh from gathering dust, but sometimes even her kindness cannot plug the cold draft left by my familys absence. It would be grand, in the simplest sense of the word, to have the whole lotsons and grandchildrenaround the battered dining table, steam curling from the shepherds pie, laughter bouncing off the wallpaper. But I know that wont happen. Even before Margaret, they rarely crossed the threshold.
Dreamlike, the streets swirl beyond my windowchimneys bending impossibly, hedgerows curling like question marks. Somewhere out there, my sons live lives I cannot quite remember the shape of, while Margaret pours another cup of tea and the world hums outside, blurred at the edges.
