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This is how it ends.
*
A few weeks ago I took my father to a bookshop in Marylebone to see the display in the window. For a long time he stood on the curb and stared at it with the expression of someone who cannot work out what they’re looking at.
He is the Instagram poet, Fergus Russell. He has one million followers.
The book, which occupied the window by itself, is the anthology of his most liked poems. Reading an early review, my mother said, ‘Finally, Fergus, you’ve got your definite article.’ He said there should be a verb form of the adjective forthcoming. ‘For when an anthology that’s been forthcoming for fifty-one years forthcomes.’
It began to rain while we were still outside the shop, harder and harder, but my father seemed not to notice. When I saw that water, overspilling the gutter, was running over the tops of his shoes, I made him come inside with me so I could find the manager.
They shook hands and my father asked if he could sign a small number of copies but it was fine if they would rather he didn’t. He offered to show his driver’s licence to prove he really was Fergus Russell. The manager patted his pockets for a pen and said it was fine; there was a picture of him on the back cover. He told my father it was their fastest seller since the bottom fell out of the adult colouring-book market.
A week after publication, my father’s editor had called and said, according to early data, on its first day it moved 334 units – unheard of in poetry – and that was just in bookshops in central London.
Winsome put on a dinner for him at Belgravia. Everyone came back. It was the first time we had all been together since Patrick and I had separated. Our family treated us like we had just got engaged. Ingrid said we should make the most of it and set up a registry at Peter Jones.
As the others were sitting down, Winsome sent me into Rowland’s study to get something. The door of an immense armoire behind his desk was ajar. Stacked inside were dozens of copies of my father’s book, some unwrapped, others still in the plastic and paper bags of bookshops in central London. I opened other cupboards. They were full of the same thing. I closed them quietly and left the room, despising Rowland for buying 334 copies of my father’s book as a private joke against him.
Back in the dining room, Rowland was berating Oliver for the profligate amount of gravy on his plate. Hearing him, I realised it could only be from kindness that my uncle would have driven the Twatmobile from bookshop to bookshop, cleaning them out of stock, hating to spend money so much that his shower soap is a theoretical construct. As I edged behind his chair Rowland turned to my father on his other side and said loudly that as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t poetry unless it rhymed so there was one sale he could bloody well forget. I patted his shoulder. He ignored me.
I didn’t tell anyone, except Patrick later, about what I’d seen. Once the book began selling in the thousands, I knew it couldn’t only be to Rowland any more.
It took my father half an hour to sign the window copies and the pile on the front table. The manager put Autographed First Edition stickers on their covers before stacking them back, then took his phone out to take a photo. As he arranged the shot, my father stepped to the side. The manager signalled for him to move back. ‘Oh right, right,’ my father said. ‘With me in it,’ then, sheepishly, ‘Could you also get one of me and my daughter?’
Afterwards, we walked down Marylebone High Street towards Oxford Street, sharing my father’s umbrella. He asked me if I had any plans and when I said I didn’t, he told me he would like to buy me an ice cream. Because the sight of an adult eating ice cream in public has always filled me with inexplicable grief and still does, I said I would let him as long as the event could take place inside.
Further down, we found a café and sat in the window. The waiter came and put metal bowls of gelato in front of us and left again. My father said, ‘This is one of the ice creams I couldn’t pay for myself when you were growing up’ and then moved on to the topic of what it had been like to see his own book in a shop because I couldn’t reply.
He said at the end, ‘Of course, it will be your turn next. Your book in a shop window.’
My ice cream had melted and dripped off the spoon when I picked it up. I made a track through the puddle with my finger and said, ‘The Collected Funny Food Columns of Martha Russell Friel.’
My father said I was very funny, and wrong on that score.
‘Why did you stay with her?’ I hadn’t meant to ask but while he was signing, I had stood and read the poems again. They were all about my mother. I didn’t understand how his passion for her, woven into each line, had survived their marriage. Her stifling of him, The Leavings. ‘Or,’ I said, ‘why did you always come back?’