‘How?’
She frowned. ‘Well, unless you have his phone number, which you don’t, I think there’s only one way of doing it.’
We looked him up. Jeremy Rothschild. He was actually quite well known – I wasn’t wrong when I thought he’d looked familiar. He was a radio presenter, listened to by millions every morning – I’d heard his voice in Dad’s house for years.
His wife was an actress. I recognised her face, too.
We composed a letter. On the envelope I wrote the BBC correspondence address I’d heard a hundred times on children’s BBC: Television Centre, Wood Lane, London W12 7RJ.
There was no way he’d get back to me.
Three days later, Jill burst into my bedroom and hissed, ‘Fuck, Jeremy Rothschild’s on the phone.’
‘What? What did he say?’
‘He’s on the line now! Downstairs! Fucking get out of bed!’
‘Emily,’ he said, in a pleasant, untroubled voice, but I don’t think either of us believed he was having a relaxing afternoon.
‘Hello,’ I said. And – a self-betrayal – ‘Um, sorry.’
‘Don’t be. The last few weeks must have been hellish for you.’
I wasn’t expecting that. For a moment, my eyes filled with tears, but Jill poked me until I agreed, carefully, that it had not been an easy time.
‘I can barely imagine,’ he sighed. ‘The situation is complicated at both ends, but I’m sure it’s a lot worse for you. Anyway, let me try and explain my end of it, so we can work out what to do next.’
‘OK,’ I said, and I turned on speaker phone and sat under a blanket with Jill while he talked.
Chapter Thirty-Four
My mother died in childbirth: a postpartum haemorrhage was spotted too late, and within days of becoming a father Dad was widowed. Granny, my mother’s mother, often came down from London to help, but she was an MP and could never stay long.
I have a couple of still-life memories of my early years. Both of them are on a beach, somewhere near our little Dorset home. In one memory I am rockpooling with Dad: he shows me a beadlet anemone and I am delighted. In the other it’s raining and we are sitting in the pouch of a shallow cave. As we watch turnstones searching for food among the beach pebbles, Dad sings about being rescued and saved. His voice is soft, achingly sad.
Many years later, Granny told me he was singing a sea shanty. She said my mother had been buried at sea, as was her wish, but Dad had not been able to bear the idea of leaving her out there alone. So the two of us used to drive down to keep Mum company whenever he wasn’t working. The little girl and her grief-shattered father, walking up and down in the pulling tides of loss.
Dad was a parish priest. It was all he’d ever wanted to do – he’d had a proper calling, I believe – but he left his parish to train as a Royal Marines chaplain when I was four. I have vague memories of arguments between him and Granny. She’d tried to stop him, she later told me, because he’d made no provision for me during deployment. Not because he didn’t care, but because linear thinking was no longer available to him. The arguments were wasted, though; apparently nothing she said would sway him. I think the siren song of danger was the only prospect substantial enough to dilute his grief and loneliness. That, or perhaps the belief that he might be nearer to my mother at sea.
After training he took a chaplaincy post with the 45 Commando in Arbroath, near Aberdeen, and we moved into spartan family quarters. I was nearly six and I hated it, but I made do. Dad was still Dad, after all. He picked me up from school and took me to the coast, where we’d poke around in rocks and swim in icy water. We grew potatoes in our tiny garden, we went camping in the Grampians. He sang to me, and looked after me when I was ill.