I was seventeen and my father asked me to read a form to him, and I read it, and then he asked me a question about the second paragraph that showed he had not understood it, and I explained, and he asked another, and then something happened in the room that neither of us acknowledged for the next eleven years.
He could read his own language perfectly well. He read the newspaper in it every morning, in the way that men of his generation read the newspaper, commentating quietly to nobody. It had never occurred to me to ask what he did with the English correspondence: the bank, the insurance, the school circulars, the forms from the building society. The answer was that he carried them and asked.
I do not know how many people he asked over thirty years. His brother, for the complicated things. A colleague at the office, whose discretion he had clearly assessed at some point. Me, from about the age of fourteen, without ever saying, this is what this is for.
I want to write down what I did wrong, because it was not the reading. It was that in the eight or nine subsequent years, every time he brought me a paper, I made a performance of it. Not mocking; nothing so obvious. I did the thing that a clever young man does, which is to read the paragraph aloud in an unhurried voice, translate it slightly upward, add an unnecessary piece of commentary about the fine print, and hand it back. I was being helpful and I was also, in a small way that I did not admit even to myself, taking the opportunity to be the educated one.
He never once complained. He said thank you every time, in a slightly formal way, and then he did the thing that I understand now — he would go over the sentence on his own afterwards, with a pen, and I have since seen a bank form of his with a word copied out in the margin in his handwriting four times, as practice.
What I think about now is the arithmetic of it. Thirty years of a professional life in an office where the language of the room was not the language of the man. Thirty years of small dependencies that his colleagues could have used and, as far as I know, never did. And a house in which his son was proud of his English in a way that was, in the most ordinary sense, his father's product, because who do you think paid for the school.
He is dead now and I would like to report that I apologised. I did not. What I did, in the last few years, was better and worse: I stopped explaining and just read the form, gave him the two things he needed to know, and left the room. He noticed, I am sure. He never said a word either way, and that mutual silence is now, to me, the shape of the relationship we actually had.
When my own son started reading letters to me — because my eyes have gone the way eyes do and the print on these things has become absurd — I caught myself doing the same unnatural, slightly formal thank-you. And I understood that my father was not embarrassed in front of me. He had made a decision about what a father is allowed to be in front of his child, and he had held it for twenty years, and I had mistaken it for something smaller.
A conversation, quietly.
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