Well, some things good, some things less-so. My father rang last night to let me know that he and C, his new wife, have had an offer accepted on a house they like. The house is on the market for £380,000 (the same as C’s house in Kent, in fact), and their offer was £350,000, which was accepted by the (probably very sensible) owner in less than an hour. O joy, o thrills, o delight complete – this, he tells me, in a tone of benevolent generosity which clearly, in his view, warranted much grovelling on part of recalcitrant daughter (insert King Lear quote here), means that, while he does want the money back, of course, he probably won’t have to ‘push me too hard’ for it, for now. Oddly, I don’t feel quite the degree of gratitude that this announcement was supposed to bring forth, probably because it changes nothing. Whether he pushes me hard or not, we still haven’t got it, and when he went on to tell me that he now has a cash buyer on the horizon, interested in his house at £295,000, perhaps it is not surprising to hear that I felt a renewed sense of ‘it’s not fair!’ness that he wants it back at all, bearing in mind his statement not so many weeks back that it was ‘gone’. Of course, a budget of £600,000 is really not enough… Excuse me while my bitterness seeps out there – it happens from time to time. (How do you think we got all those stains on the carpet?)

Anyway, there you go. Such is life, or something. Blue Witch asked in the comments on my last post whether or not I thought this might precipitate an irreconcilable breakdown in our relationship, and I have been thinking about that quite a bit in the last few days. Thing is, I just don’t know. I feel at the moment that we have already reached that point, at least in some ways – I note, with a sort of wry amusement tinged with a fear that I only seem to feel when confronted with the withdrawal of a parental affection about which I am ambivalent at the best of times (so why the fear, I ask myself, but I don’t seem to be able to answer that one), that he is now calling me by my full name, rather than the shortening he has used for years. I don’t know if he even knows he is doing it. He is also now ‘Dad’ in cards, it seems, rather than the ‘Pa’ he has been since I was about ten. Again, not sure if it’s conscious, but it seems to me… significant. I think the thing is that whether or not our relationship breaks down completely is, to a large extent, up to him at this point. I can only do what we can reasonably manage; paying him the £13,000 isn’t really an option, although of course we could work something out for paying him back monthly, I suppose. But the only way that we’re going to come through this is if he learns that he can’t just say anything to me and expect me to take it, and if he learns to treat me at least to some degree as an adult. And I can’t see that happening, any more than I can imagine his conversations losing some of the slightly cringey ‘Isn’t C wonderful? She painted an entire wall, all on her own! She’s so versatile, and talented’ness which has peppered our phonecalls since he met her. Not that I mind that he thinks that, you understand; far from it – I wanted him to meet someone new, to have a life of his own. But when it’s tempered by the fact that he seems to have nothing good to say of my mother, that’s rather different. ‘C prepared a picnic for us. Of course, your mother would never have done that; she was always too disorganised’, and so on. It makes my blood boil. If we’re going to get picky about it, there is no question that my mother was a more unusual woman than C. For ‘unusual’, read ‘talented’. I really don’t want to be the person who thinks that, but the achievements for which C receives such praise are as nothing to my mother’s accomplishments, which didn’t get much praise during her lifetime, and now appear to have disappeared completely from his memory, and while C is astonishing for, say, being able to do simultaneous equations (which, admittedly, must involve a form of witchcraft far surpassing my own talents in that area), the completion of my PhD garnered me a perfunctory ‘well fancy that’ sort of response. I dunno. It’s all so achingly predictable, innit? I sound like a jealous teenager, and I am so angry with him for putting me in that role, for bringing out all this crap, and for his total failure to see that anything he ever does might be, say, questionable.

So. Have we a future together? Frankly, the jury is out on that one. And they’re taking a long lunch. On expenses.