It was the only object in that house that was not, in some way, for somebody else. He cleaned it on Sundays. He had four photographs of it.
He told my mother he had gone off it.
When I was nine and needed proper shoes for a new school, he sold the only good suit he owned.
Four months later he wore a borrowed jacket to his own brother’s funeral and nobody in that family said a word about it, including him.
He never told me either of those things.
I found out about the suit from an aunt, about eleven years later, at a funeral, in a car park.
She told it in four sentences, warmly, as a nice story about what a good man my father is — to a twenty-year-old standing there holding a set of car keys, who said oh, right and then had to go and sit in the car for about eleven minutes.
She had no idea she was telling me anything. To her it was a thing everybody knew.
That is who my father has always been.
He gives things away quietly and then does not mention them again for forty years.
