peeling bole of a plane tree, arms wrapped around each other, faces pressed together. Harriet passed them, came to a bench next to an overflowing litter bin. She sat down on the bench and dead brown leaves scuttled like insects around her feet.
She sat on the bench for a long time, without moving. She didn’t even think of going back to the station and the conclusion of the London train. The boy and girl drifted by, white faces turning to peer at her in the dusk, frightened of being spied on. Harriet waited until they were out of sight, then stood up and shook herself. She was cold, and swung her arms to warm her fingers as she headed for the sound of traffic on the main road.
In the centre of a parade of shops she came to an Indian restaurant. It was opening as everything else closed up, and Harriet peered past the menu, mounted in an arched wooden frame and set off with plush drapes, into an interior of white cloths and twinkly lights. She was hungry as well as cold.
The restaurant was completely empty. A waiter in a white jacket came forward, beaming at her, and they went through a pantomime of deciding which table would suit her best. She chose one beside a green-lit tank of morose tropical fish, and ordered a bottle of wine to go with her food, because there were no halves.
Harriet couldn’t remember ever having sat down alone to dinner in a restaurant. It seemed appropriate that she should do it here, where she had felt her isolation so strongly. Her awareness of it was just as strong, but it seemed to matter less now. She thought about Leo, and the hundreds of dinners they had shared. Her memories were affectionate, but Leo himself seemed a long way off. She didn’t wish that he was here with her, or that she would be going back to him.
The smiling waiter brought her lamb pasanda, paratha and saag ghosht, and poured out the wine for her.
‘You are living near here?’ He had a very dark face, and a gipsyish gap between his top teeth. Harriet smiled back.
‘No. I’ve come from London.’
‘Nice place,’ he told her. She wasn’t sure whether he meant here or there, but it didn’t matter. She suddenly felt comfortable, wedged between the fishtank and the tablecloth that looked purple and green under the multicoloured lights.
She ate everything, and drank most of the wine because she was thirsty and because the food was so spicy it made it seem innocuous. Afterwards, while she was drinking a cup of watery coffee, some other customers filtered in. A young couple stared covertly at her, and two businessmen talked in loud voices. The feeling of being at home vanished at once. She called for the bill and hurriedly paid it. Her waiter shook her hand as she left. ‘Come back again.’
‘Perhaps.’
Outside she took a deep breath. She knew that she was rather drunk, but perhaps that would be a help. Without needing to consult her map, she retraced her steps to Simon’s house.
It took a long time for him to answer the door. Harriet’s knuckles were bruised with knocking. At last the door creaked open and he loomed in front of her. When it was too late she thought of running away, like the children.
‘I’ve come to ask,’ she said, ‘whether I could borrow The Nine Tailors.’
She thought she saw relief in his face. She didn’t know if it was because she had come back or for the harmless idiocy of her question.
‘I told you, that one doesn’t have Harriet in it. You could begin with Busman’s Honeymoon, if you like.’
‘If you think that’s a good idea.’
He stood aside, to allow her to come in again. In the kitchen, Harriet saw that the remains of two boiled eggs had been added to the mess on the table. Simon reached into a cupboard and held up a bottle of whisky, two-thirds empty. She nodded gratefully at it. ‘Yes, please.’
‘I haven’t seen those books in years. It might take me a while to find yours in all this.’ The slight, comprehensive gesture again.
‘There’s no hurry.’ Harriet laced her fingers round the sticky glass, took a gulp of the whisky. ‘Simon, there’s something I want to ask you.’
Simon. She had avoided calling him anything, before. The whisky hit her stomach. Now or never.
‘I know you don’t like questions, I’m sorry. Is there any possibility that you might be my father?’
Simon drank, looking at her over the rim of the glass. His face was creased.
‘That was really what you came to find out.’
‘Yes.’
‘There isn’t any possibility at all. I wish I could say something different. I wish I really were your father.’
As soon as she heard it, she knew that it had been a ridiculous quest. If he had been, even if only perhaps, Kath would have found a way to tell her. Harriet had longed for the idea of him, denying every likelihood, to fill a void. The voice was her own, inside her, nothing to do with Leo because the history of it went back much further than her brief marriage. Simon couldn’t fill it. Nor should she ask him to. Harriet stood up. She moved with exaggerated, half-drunken care, around the table to Simon’s side. She put her arm around his shoulder and rested her cheek against the top of his head. Tears ran out of her eyes and down her cheeks.
‘I wish, as well. I hoped, all the time.’
‘Come and sit here.’ He took hold of her arm and guided her so that she half-leaned, half-sat on the table, where he could see her face. With his other hand he poured himself another drink.
‘I’ve got some catching up to do.’
Harriet rubbed her face with the palms of her hands, raggedly exhaling like a child recovering from a crying fit, and then smiling woefully. ‘I needed Dutch courage. Didn’t do me much good.’
‘Cry if you feel like it, Harriet. I do.’
‘Here, by yourself?’ The image pierced her with sadness.
‘Where else? Listen, I’ll tell you about Kath and me. I loved her, you guessed that. I would watch her across the street. She used to come and visit me, tell me about her adventures, and I’d look at her sitting there, where you are. I’d have done more, of course, if I could. I only touched her once. Put my hand here.’ Stiffly, watching the hand with its brown blotches and twisted cords as if it belonged to someone else, he touched Harriet’s waist. ‘She was so shiny, her eyes and skin. She was surprised. Not offended, or saucy, just surprised. I took my hand away. That’s all. That doesn’t get you a daughter thirty years later, does it?’
Harriet shook her head.
‘Let’s finish the whisky,’ Simon concluded.
‘That isn’t all the story. Kath’s only a tiny bit of it.’ With relief, Harriet forgot her own concerns. It was Simon himself who drew her now, the more sharply because he was free of the miasma of her clumsy hopes and expectations. The neon strip light suspended over his kitchen table cast harsh shadows, focussing them in their postures of almost-intimacy.
‘You’re not my father. It doesn’t matter, I never even wanted one until Kath told me about you. But the fact that you aren’t doesn’t take you or me away, does it, now that we’re both here? Perhaps we can be friends.’
In her own ears, it sounded brash. A facile solution. But he had said, I wish I were your father.
‘I don’t have any excuse for asking. Except that I’ve drunk a bottle of wine and a double scotch. Why do you cry, Simon?’
‘Why not?’ The evasiveness, she was discovering, was characteristic. She felt suddenly tired, and Simon perceived it.
‘What are the responsibilities of friendship? You’ll have to remind me.’
Harriet considered. ‘To talk. And to listen. Very important, that.’
‘I can listen. Most competently.’
‘I’d