Free The Right Man by Nigel Planer Page A

seaside town — and
when asked by his friend, ‘How’s your wife?’ he had replied in an apologetic
sing-song voice, ‘Disappointed.’ They’d both laughed and at ten years old I
hadn’t been able to understand why. I was clutching some comics that my father’s
friend had given us to keep us amused while they talked. I decided to save my
comics until I got home and so I read Tony’s to him instead. When we were
leaving, my father’s friend asked for the comics back. They had been a loan,
not a gift, so I never got to read them. That was a day of learning about
disappointment. I must have been cross with Dad for not explaining to me about
the comics. The thing that irritated me most of all now about his posthumous
letter was that he’d assumed, correctly, that there would only be me there to
sort out, and hence had only bothered to address his remarks to me. My mother
wouldn’t touch it and Tony, he was right, was not really up to it, although
there had been some improvement in his condition in the last couple of years.
He was actually managing to hold down a job now, working for the Hammer-smith
and Fulham parks department.
    Looking
through my father’s drawers, cupboards and filing cabinet now was another
disappointment. I could find no dark secrets which had been nursed by him over
the years. No encoded secret agents’ telephone numbers, no hidden stash of
porn. In fact, the only evidence of a sex life at all, whether shared with my
mother or otherwise, was a packet of Durex which I found filed in a buff
envelope folder neatly under ‘D’. Well, they would be, wouldn’t they? They were
some years past their sell-by date but that was fair enough, I suppose. He had
had a prostate op in 1989. Going through his drawers and finding the Durex
stirred a memory of myself and Tony — we must have been eleven and nine at the
time — first finding Durex in his bedside table and counting them, then
returning a week later and counting them again and giggling. The game lasted
several months, kept alive more by Tony, who has always had an over-fascination
with sex. One problem was that occasionally my father bought a new packet and we
couldn’t be sure whether he had put the remainder of the old into it or thrown
them away. This mucked up our counting system. But even with this setback, we
calculated that Mum and Dad must have been having sex about once or at most
twice a month. ‘If you can call it sex with your father’, as my mother would
say.
    I
wondered now whether he had known about our boyish game and this is what had
prompted him to keep his Durex in his filing cabinet in the study instead of
his bedside table. This must have made spontaneous lovemaking impossible, since
the study is a flight and a half of stairs away. Maybe he took to decanting the
Durex singly or in twos from the study each month. Certainly Tony and I never
found this squirrel’s store under ‘D’. We were never allowed in the study on
our own.
    Feeling
like an eleven-year-old again, I looked through the other entries in the ‘D’
section of his filing cabinet for some clue. There was ‘Dunstan’s’, the school
at which he had taught for twenty years before my mother had encouraged him to
be more ambitious and take on the headship of a posher school in Devon, where
he had lasted one year before being made redundant, something from which
neither he nor the rest of my family had ever fully recovered. There were
various other names, friends, newspaper cuttings, none as full as the Dunstan’s
file. The Durex nestled in their buff envelope folder all to themselves. There
was, I suppose, one mystery, also in ‘D’: an empty file which had the
unexplained title of Doris. Doris and the Durex. Sounded like an educational
film about AIDS.
    I
carried on checking through his bank statements. All seemed predictably in
order. But as my eye went down the columns of figures, my mind ranged over the
possible connections between the Durex and