Page 18 of A Clean Sweep

M ichael sat by the window of the café. Or rather, the greasy spoon dive where truckers dipped doorstops of bread into underdone eggs, the aroma of frazzled bacon and blackened sausages battling against the underlying stench of sweat and cheap aftershave.

He looked at his watch – a vintage Patek Phillipe – and placed a hand on his trembling left leg.

She was late, only five minutes, but he was sure she wasn’t going to come.

His cup of tea cooled before him, in contrast to the beads of sweat that pooled on his forehead and made his underarms damp and clammy.

He hated this place but couldn’t take the risk of meeting somewhere nicer, more upmarket, where Celeste or one of her friends might stumble upon him. They lived in a tight knit community where one man’s indiscretion was fodder for weeks of breathless speculation and hearsay.

He was on his second cup.Fifteen minutes late now.

She wasn’t coming. He should have known.

After their last meeting, when she’d burst into tears and fled, tattooed drivers looking up from their congealing breakfasts in fascination, he’d very much doubted she would come.

He drained the dregs of his tea and stood up.

At which point the door opened and she walked in.

She looked nervously around her, eyes alighting on Michael, who’d hastily sat down again. Ignoring the stares of the curious workers she made her way over to him.

'I’m so glad you came. I thought … I mean, I was worried … after the last time.'His words tailed off as she slipped into the seat opposite him, shrugging off her pale beige raincoat and folding it neatly behind her.

'I wouldn’t have just stood you up. You know me better than that. I got stuck in traffic, that’s all. I’m sorry.'

A plump waitress with a food-smeared apron materialised, notepad and pen at the ready. He looked tentatively across the table.

'Just a coffee and a round of toast, please,' she responded.

'I’ll have another tea, thanks,' added Michael, waiting until the waitress shuffled back to the kitchen to fetch their meagre order.

She was silent, fiddling with the laminated menu card offering a host of artery-clogging delights.

At the next table a group of men in grimy overalls burst into raucous laughter.

He watched her, taking in her solemn face framed by fine dark blonde hair which fell to her shoulders.

Large grey eyes that had yet to make proper contact with his.

So achingly familiar, yet time and distance meant they really didn’t know each other at all.

And he wasn’t sure how – or if – they could breach the chasm between them.

'So, how have you been?'Great, thought Michael. They’d met up five or six times already and still their conversation was limited to polite small talk. He desperately wanted to know everything about her, her life over the past twenty-six years. What her likes and dislikes were, her hobbies and passions, why her own marriage had fallen apart in much the same way as his own brief liaison all those years ago. History repeating itself, except she had two young children to raise on her own instead of one. He had seen photos of them – two small boys named Edward and George – fair like their mother but with their father’s strong cleft chin and sturdier frame.

Had actually met them once, but hardly in the best of circumstances.

'Fine, I guess. Still struggling to sort out the settlement. He won’t agree to anything until he runs it by his solicitor countless times.

The place I’m renting is tiny but it’s all I can afford at the moment.

It’s so hard on the boys. They’re too young to really understand and keep asking when we’re going home to Daddy. '

Michael felt his gut clench as her eyes filled with tears. She hastily lowered her head and searched for a tissue as the waitress appeared with their order. He waited until she departed before speaking.'You know I want to help you. Please, let me give you some money. It’s the very least …’

She cut him off in mid-sentence, straightening up in her chair with an air of stubbornness and defiance he recognised so well.

She was, indeed, her father’s daughter.'I don’t want your money.

I’ve told you that over and over again. I’m not even sure if I want to see you.

Every time I agree I beat myself up about it.

You left us when I was just a baby, and now you expect to fix everything with a blank cheque and empty platitudes.

All those years of absolutely nothing and now you want to be the perfect Dad.

Well, in my experience there’s no such thing.

I never had a dad growing up, just a mum so bitter and twisted she could barely speak your name.

But you could have tried to keep in touch, if you’d wanted to.

And now my bastard of an ex is inflicting the same pain on my precious boys. It’s just a bloody mess.'

His beautiful, proud and pig-headed Sophie looked momentarily shocked at her own words, probably the longest sentences she’d uttered since they’d started seeing each other six months ago.

It had come as a total shock. He’d had no idea her marriage had broken up, and certainly no clue that she’d fled Scotland with the boys and set up home in the village of Cliffdown just twenty miles away from where he lived.

How could he have known? Aside from the odd card she had rejected all contact with him.

He had no telephone number, no email address.

His ex-wife Margaret loathed him and had gone out of her way to administer a steady drip-drip of poison against him as Sophie grew up.

It was only when she reached her late teens that she’d somehow discovered his address and made contact.

By then she was studying in Edinburgh, sufficient distance between her and her mother to allow this tiny breakthrough in communication.

But only on her terms. She’d made it very plain she didn’t want to see him, yet a tiny part of her clearly couldn’t sever the fragile parental bond entirely.

'I know I could have tried. I should have tried. I’ve tried to explain but it was all so complicated. There wasn’t a day I didn’t think of you, you must believe that. You were my daughter. Only your mother made it so, so difficult and then I met …’

Michael’s voice faltered, diluted by a wave of shame and guilt that had tormented him for almost a quarter of a century.

For the truth of it was, from the first day he met Celeste he had realised two things.

One, that he had met a woman who could make him happy and who considered it her life’s purpose to supporting him and his burgeoning career.

And, two, that she had no interest in knowing anything about his previous marriage or child.

Indeed, she made it perfectly clear from the outset that children played no part in her future plans.

Conveniently, Margaret had fled the country with Sophie shortly after they split, settling in Guernsey where her parents ran a highly successful bijou hotel.

He had been totally smitten by Celeste, who was working as a receptionist for a small law firm near his own offices when they met.

She was the very antithesis of Margaret, who had been as ruthlessly ambitious as he, albeit in the hospitality industry.

She had little time for schmoozing with his banking colleagues, even less time for creating the perfect home.

Her job was her passion, and Michael came a poor second-best. He realised very quickly after they’d wed that they had made a mistake, that what he mistook for love was more like inflated egos combining to make a giant balloon of self-conceit that was destined to pop.

A bit like the failed condom that resulted in Sophie, as Margaret had made it clear she wanted a child but not until her career was on a steady upwards trajectory.

But she didn’t let a little thing like an unplanned pregnancy get in the way, working until the day before Sophie emerged into the world.

Michael could still vividly remember looking at his newborn daughter’s crumpled little face and thinking, 'We made you, but I can’t keep up this pretence anymore.

'Sophie was only six weeks old when he announced he was leaving, Margaret screaming abuse at him while Sophie slept upstairs, blissfully unaware of the tempest that raged below.

'And then you met her. That woman who twisted you around her little finger and whispered in your ear that you shouldn’t have anything to do with me.

Who beguiled you so much you chose to turn your back on your only child.

No, do not interrupt me.'Sophie held up her hand, silver bracelets jangling as she brought it down hard on the table. The impact sent her untouched coffee slopping over the cup, her cold toast leaping from the plate. More curious stares from the other customers, although there were only a handful left after the breakfast rush. 'Yes, you’ve tried to explain but I find it rather difficult to accept that you would just roll over and agree to whatever she wanted. What, was she some kind of enchantress or something? Did she cast a spell on you? What kind of a woman would ask a man to cut all ties with his daughter? A completely selfish cow, that’s who.

And you, what does that make you? A weak and spineless man who put his own self-obsessed lust ahead of his fatherly duties. '