Page 57 of Copper Script
“Ouch.No, I truly wanted to serve.I believe in service, and I believe there ought to be law and justice, and someone has to make that happen.I thought the police was the answer to everything that felt wrong.But also, yes.I knew very well my father would be furious, and indeed he was.He never spoke to me again.”
“Actually never spoke?”
“I last saw him at my sister’s wedding.I said hello, and he turned and walked away.He died earlier this year.I told Sarah that I would come to see him if he wanted me to, but he refused.He didn’t want to set eyes on me.”
Joel put his fork down and reached across the table, covering Aaron’s hand with his own.“I’m so sorry.I really am.”
Aaron wanted to cap Joel’s hand with his own, or to turn his and interlace their fingers, but he was very conscious of the public place.“It’s nothing.Or, at least, it’s done.He wasn’t a bad man.”
“He sounds bloody awful.”
“No, truly.He never expressed a regret about taking me on.He gave us everything he could.When I was seven or so, a group of bigger boys was bullying me, and he came out and gave them what for, then laid into their fathers too when they came round.Absolutely furious, defending me to the hilt.My father looking out for me.I felt so safe in that moment.”He sighed.“And then he shouted, ‘Don’t you touch my wife’s boy,’ so there we were.”
“Defeat from the jaws of victory.”Joel kept his hand on Aaron’s a moment longer, then pulled it away, leaving Aaron’s skin bereft.“If not bloody awful, at least bloody difficult?”
“Definitely that.My mother said that he only knew how to love in the abstract.He loved ‘the people’ or ‘the workers’, and he loved the idea of taking on a fallen woman and her child.And he worked damned hard for us all, did his best, and sacrificed a great deal.There’s plenty who consider him something close to a saint, although they’re largely people who didn’t know him.”
“Ha.”
“But they knew what he did, and what you do is surely what counts, in the end,” Aaron said.“And I don’t expect any saints are easy to live with.It’s asking a lot of anyone to do so much and be cheerful about it.”
“Then he perhaps should have done less, better,” Joel said tartly.“Or stuck to labour disputes rather than raising children.I don’t have a great deal of time for grown men who can’t manage their own moods.”
“You’re not without a temper yourself,” Aaron felt compelled to observe.
“Oh, I am—I mentioned this, I think?—a stroppy bitch, but I try not to ask other people to soothe my feelings for me.I also don’t look after orphaned children or fight for workers’ rights, so perhaps I’ve no room to criticise those who do.I’m quite prepared to agree your father was a better person than me.But he sounds like a prick.”
Terry Fowler had loomed very large through Aaron’s life: a hero to some, a bogeyman to others, a constant presence for good or ill.Everyone had strong opinions on him; Aaron did himself.‘Prick’ was a welcome deflation.
“Maybe a bit of one,” he said, and couldn’t help a smile, and Joel smiled back.
“You call him father,” Joel went on after a comfortable moment broken only by a last attack on the skeleton of the fish.“Not stepfather?”
“He insisted on Father.I wanted to change that at one point but Sarah was about six then, and got very upset at me not being her real brother.So I left it.And I didn’t change my name for the same reason when my grandmother suggested I should—not that I greatly wanted to be a Napier-Fox either, and Lord knows the rest of the family would have objected.Fowler is my name now, however I got it.”
“Do you know your, uh, original father?”
“Never met him.He knew my mother was pregnant when the family paid him off, but he never sought us out.And he was forty-eight when he married a nineteen-year-old, so I’ve no great desire to make his acquaintance.I really don’t know what I’d say to him.”
“Was there something you wanted to say to your father?”
That hit home.Aaron stared at the wreckage of the fish between them.“I would have liked to thank him.To tell him I really was, am, grateful.I think if I could have done that, it would be easier to remember him for what he did well instead of dwelling on what he failed at.But he didn’t want to see me.I had gone over to the enemy and that was that.”
“Not a man for compromise.I suppose saints aren’t.And now they, the Met, want you to work on unions,” Joel said.“Does your boss know who your father was?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Is the idea that you’ll be excessively keen to stamp out union activity because of him?”
“No.No, I don’t think they can think that.”
Joel put his fork down.“Aaron.For want of a better way to put it, what the bloody hell?Without knowing how the Met or CID normally conducts itself—”
“It’s not normal,” Aaron said, although his mind flickered to Helen Challice weeping in a dark room, sobbing,It’s again and again every day and I can’t bear it,into his shoulder.“Or at least, it’s extremely hostile.”
Joel was searching his face, light eyes flickering.“If I were to ask you if this is related to the other thing we talked about—”
“Best not.”
