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he East End and Bow, but then suddenly the driver changed direction, heading not for the street where Oliver had grown up and where his parents lived, but to Plaistow, the posh part of the area, coming to a halt outside the largest of a terrace of four-storey late Georgian houses.
‘Come on.’ His mother’s hand tugged on his arm.
‘What have you brought me here for?’ Oliver demanded as he joined her on the pavement.
‘Have you gone deaf or what? Like I told you, your dad’s at his last prayers and he wants to see you before he dies.’
His dad? Oliver looked from the house to his mother. This house wasn’t the one where he had grown up; it belonged to the man his mother had worked for, for as long as he could remember.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ his mother told him sharply. ‘You’ve got enough brains to know that Tom Charters couldn’t have fathered you. Thick as two short planks, he is, and always has been. Now get a move on. I’ll never forgive meself if we’re too late. Bin asking for you all night, he has.’
Was his father…? Oliver swallowed the saliva that was threatening to block his throat. ‘Does he know? Dad? I mean, Tom?’
‘I don’t know and I don’t care. Now get a move on.’
They were inside the house, his mother’s face shadowed with tension as a uniformed nurse came rustling down the stairs to meet them.
‘Not gone yet, has he?’ His mother had never been one to coat her words with honey.
‘No,’ the nurse confirmed, standing aside to let them go up. Oliver followed his mother, who merely nodded her head when the nurse called after her, ‘I’ll wait down here until you need me.’
The stairs were steep and they had to climb two flights of them. His mother reached the top without a change in her breathing, but he was out of breath, Oliver acknowledged. He was also desperate for a cigarette. If he’d ever thought of discussing with his mother the issue of exactly who his father was he hadn’t imagined her doing so in such a matter-of-fact, almost impatient and nonapologetic manner. There’d been gossip when he’d been a kid, hints and that from members of his family, but somehow he’d assumed that if his mother was aware of the gossip, she would be humiliated and embarrassed by it.
As his mother opened the bedroom door, Oliver could hear the laboured rattling breathing of the man lying propped up in the bed.
‘It’s me, Phil,’ his mother announced matter-of-factly.
A long thin hand, veined and fleshless, reached out across the bedclothes. His mother reached for it and held it.
‘Have you brought him, Eileen?’ The words were rasped and spaced out between what were obviously agonised breaths.
‘Yes, he’s here. Oliver, come over here so that your dad can see you properly.’
Reluctantly yet at the same time compelled by an urge he couldn’t resist, Oliver approached the bed.
‘You’ll have to hold his hand,’ his mother told him quietly, ‘he’s going fast, and he probably won’t be able to see you.’
Oliver’s first instinct was to refuse. The man he’d always thought of as his father had never shown him any physical affection, being more inclined to cuff him than hug him, but it still felt wrong to clasp in his own hand the hand of another ‘father’. But again, though, something stronger than that instinct drove him.
One part of Oliver’s brain somehow registered how similar to his own the other hand was, and similar too, the shape of the sunken eyes and the bold nose.
‘Oliver.’ The voice of the man in the bed, like the clasp of his hand, was stronger than Oliver had expected.
‘Your dad’s seen them photographs you bin taking that’s bin in all them fancy magazines, Vogue and that lot,’ his mother told him.
‘He’s a fine boy, Eileen. A fine son.’ Tears filmed the sunken eyes. ‘A son any man could be proud of, and I am proud of you, Oliver. Always have been, always, right from the minute your mother told me about you. Should have been here with me; would have been if things had been different.’ His voice had started to fade, the words spaced out more slowly, and dying away with every strained-for breath. His grip on Oliver’s hand slackened.
Oliver looked at his mother and then his father took a deep shuddering breath and called out, ‘Eileen…’
‘I’m here, Phil…I’m here.’
As she spoke Oliver could hear the breath rattling in his throat. He raised himself up off his pillows and then with a final gasp sank back on them.
His mother was still holding his hand, tears sliding down her face.
‘He’s left you everything,’ Oliver’s mother told him three hours later. They were sitting in the kitchen of the house where she had worked for so many years. The doctor had been and gone, and so had the undertaker, and now they were alone.
‘Thought the world of you, he did, right from the first minute you was born.’
