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Rachel glanced up at her father in surprise. His voice broke as he spoke, and she saw now that there were tears in his eyes. ‘Oh, Dad,’ she said, going to him and placing an arm around hisshoulders. ‘Please don’t cry, you silly bugger. It’s not that bad. It’s fine. Whatever money he’s spending on her, I can assure she will be paying for it, somehow or other.’
‘I know. I know. But still. When I think of how he treated you. How bad he made you feel. How he lied to you about everything. And now he’s out and about, gallivanting with another woman. It just sickens me, Rachel. It really sickens me.’
Rachel gazed at him. He appeared overwrought, his eyes blinking against unspilled tears. ‘Dad?’
‘Oh. It’s fine. It’s all fine. Let’s talk about something else. Tell me exciting things. Tell me about the business. How’s it going?’
Rachel wanted to push back into the previous conversation. There was a sub-text, a backstory, something behind her father’s extreme emotional reaction, but she knew it would be a waste of time to pursue it. So she replied with news about the latest sales figures, about a special commission that had come in that morning via her website for a woman who was married to an Oscar-winning film star and she chopped and stirred and drank more wine and then at 8 p.m. the intercom buzzed and Paige arrived bearing a small bottle of tequila and a cactus. Then came the three goldsmiths, bearing four-packs of beer and a small chocolate cake. She watched her father as the evening unfolded, the sweet pleasure that always suffused him when in the company of younger people. For a while Rachel could believe that she’d completely imagined the early moments of the evening, the sadness behind his eyes, the diminished form of him, the brittle anger, the sense that he was sick in some way. For a while she could believe that she wasn’t missing something vital.
‘I’m thinking of putting the house on the market.’
It was a month later, mid-May, the best part of the year. Her father was taking her for lunch. He said he’d heard of a new place that he wanted to try.A nice little pizzeria. Rachel’s father didn’t do nice little pizzerias. He did brasseries and restaurants where people kept your water glass topped up and butter came in interesting shapes on silver dishes. Here the butter came in oily foil wrappers and the sound system played Italian pop music.
Rachel jolted at her father’s announcement. ‘What?’
‘Yes. The house. It’s so big, just for me. I suppose I’d always held on to it imagining …’ He tailed off but Rachel knew what he was implying. He’d imagined it filled with grandchildren. ‘Anyway. It’s too big and I could do with freeing up some capital.’
Rachel shook her head slightly. As far as she was aware her father had loads of cash in the bank. ‘What for?’
‘Well, for living. I mean, I have another twenty good years. Possibly another ten bad years after that. They’ll need to be paid for.’
‘But—’ She stopped. She wanted to say, ‘But, Dad, you’ve got loads of money,’ yet that sounded crass. She had no idea, really, about her father’s finances. He didn’t talk about them. He just displayed them in the way in which he lived his life. And he had, she noticed, stopped displaying his finances in quite the same way lately: the sparkling wine, the supermarket flowers, the nice little pizzeria. ‘Well, whatever you need to do, Dad. But I think if you held out for a few months you might get a much better price for it. The property market is—’
Her father interjected, his face serious, his hands clasped together. ‘No. I can’t wait around for the property market. It’s fine.If I lose a few thousand so be it. I just … It’s time, Rachel. It’s time for me to face the fact that I’ll be old soon. I’ll need to think about things like stairs.’
‘Oh come on, Dad. You’re only sixty-four!’
‘Yes. Now I am. But I need to be ahead of the curve. Get my affairs in order. Get some more money in the bank and buy a place that will be manageable when –if– I’m infirm. Give you less to do, less to worry about and think about. I need to downsize. Simplify. I need to be ready.’
Rachel stared across the table at her father and felt a sickening thud of dread hit the base of her gut. ‘Oh my God. Dad. Are you ill? Is that what this is? Are you ill? Is that why you’ve lost so much weight? Please, Dad, please be honest with me.’ Her heart raced painfully as she waited for her father’s reply.
He shook his head. ‘No. No, darling. I promise you. I am not ill. I am perfectly healthy. I just need to be prepared. Prepared for anything.’
‘Do you swear?’
‘I do. I swear. On your life, Rachel. On your life.’
The house went on the market the following week. Her father had clearly been doing more than thinking about it when he took her out for pizza. The first viewing was conducted within hours of it going on the estate agent’s books and an offer was placed and accepted before May was over. In early June he put down a deposit on a one-bedroom semi-retirement flat in a glamorous block near Regent’s Park and for the next few weeks Rachel spent all her spare time at the house, helping her father to start boxing things up.
Her father’s house was huge, but very neat and organised. Since her mother died, her father had had a lady who cleaned and kept house for him, so there were no nasty secrets hiding behind cupboard doors or under beds, just reams of neatly folded laundry, stored in size order and ready to slot straight into boxes, folders of paperwork labelled and kept in chronological order, family mementoes already boxed and sealed and in the loft. The only room that lacked order was her father’s study, a tiny snug room overlooking the garden where he’d tended to spend most of his time since retiring from full-time work. Here he watched TV on his laptop and lit gas fires in the winter and brought his meals to eat. The back of his office chair was always slung with layers of discarded jackets and ties and cardigans. There were always a few pairs of shoes under the desk and abandoned coffee cups here and there with the screwed-up paper wrappings from his favourite sweets from Marks & Spencer inside. It was what he called his ‘old man cave’, a place where he felt safe and happy doing nothing. The cleaner wasn’t allowed in here and neither, really, was Rachel, but she’d run out of parcel tape and hoped she might find some secreted somewhere.
She pulled drawers in and out, feeling around inside them with her hands. She moved his paperwork about and studied the bookshelves. And then her eye was caught by a sheaf of bank statements protruding from one of the shelves, almost to the point of sliding off completely, so she picked them off the shelf and looked for a spot on her father’s desk to place them, and as she put them down, she did a double take. There were numbers on the bank account that made no sense. Two payments made into a bank account with a strange, abbreviated name: PMX Acc.dx, one threeweeks ago for £100,000, and another just three days ago for £250,000. She flicked through the papers quickly to get to the final balance: £12,200. Immediately she went through her father’s drawers again, looking for earlier statements. She found an unopened statement in amongst a pile of junk mail, and she ripped it open. Another two payments, these from April. One for £150,000. Another for £100,000. She got out her phone and ran a Google search for PMX Acc.dx but it brought up nothing. Then she ran a search for just PMX and it brought up so many results, from specialist school software companies to punk music websites and social media marketing companies, that she didn’t know what to look at first.
Her father was in the garden shed, clearing it out entirely as he would no longer have a garden when he left this place. She gathered the papers together and headed out. ‘Dad?’ She tapped lightly on the wall of the shed.
He turned and beamed at her. ‘Yes, darling!’
‘Erm, can I talk to you? About something sensitive?’
‘Oh.’ Her father put down a box of tomato seedlings held in his hands. ‘Yes. Of course.’
He followed her towards the garden table and they sat opposite each other.
‘Dad,’ she said. ‘What is PMX?’
‘PMX? That’s what ladies get? Isn’t it?’ He flushed as he said this, as if he were eight years old and being asked in front of his class.
‘No. No, that’s PMS. PMX. It’s on your bank statements. Look.’ She spread the statements out on the table between them.‘It’s a company and you’ve paid them six hundred thousand pounds over the past three months.’
