My father's voice

When I was 14 I was first mistaken, by my voice, for my father.

Every 3 or 4 years we would travel to Portugal to visit with family of my mother’s. We loved them - my father loved them especially - treasured them each very much. The father, my godmother, their children - 4 boys, one older than the next - his brothers, her mother, and his mother. One wore strong shoes and woollen skirts. One wore his hair neatly combed. One played Patience and kept a cigarette burning in her elegant apartment. One wore a back-brace for many years and always beat me a football. One was a bit of a playboy who took us out to their seaside flat, and a nightclub. One competed in the Paris to Dakar rally. My mother’s aunt had married a Portuguese man who was in the port business with her family. Her son’s wife was my godmother, and her name was Conceicao - con, say, sow, with the syllables shortened when you say it through: co’-se-sow. It is the most beautiful name I know. It’s the slash of a sword parting the mist. It’s the sway of ships returning to harbour from over the seven seas. It’s gone in an instant. She sat and smoked in a Louis XVI armchair with embroidered yellow upholstery, and she was the most elegant lady I had ever seen.

We had just arrived at the house. The house in Portugal is not a house – it is a palace. It has a staircase descending into the weekday rooms and kitchen that the family used. It has an entirely separate lounge with a fireplace, and an adjacent kitchen with a long stone table, which were only used for Christmas dinner. At the end of the hallway is a lounge lined with bookshelves, with divans around a fireplace, which I only ever went in once. It even has a chapel in the middle of the house which I discovered one day after having visited the house at least twice before: I opened a door on the upstairs landing and walked into the choir gallery and looked down into a chapel – complete with a bank of votive candles, pews, and an altar and a crucifix. I know that my godmother got married in this chapel, and at Christmas we had midnight mass there. The house has blushing pink exterior walls, and square-cut granite stones packed tightly together to pave the driveway and the courtyards. There is a fountain at the end of the driveway, beneath an ancient tree, with leaves, and nuts.

We had just arrived at the house. I think I called down the staircase from the upstairs landing. I think I was looking for everyone – I said “Hello” - or probably Conceicao called hello from downstairs and I replied, and she said, in her lovely voice that curled around the L, “Alan!” – and I said no, it’s me, Tom.

Post-script:
Recently my father sent me a letter that he received on my behalf in 1987 (at about the same time as the story about me saying Hello in my father’s voice) - the 12th of April - from my godmother. It is a small, cream-coloured piece of paper, folded in the middle. At the top right, in a narrow Blackletter is the sending address: Quinta da Fonteireira, Bellas. Fonteireira is the house with the Christmas kitchen and the chapel and the embroidered chair and the apartment with the ashtray and the cards arranged neatly on the green felt-covered table. And Bellas is the town that in previous centuries was subject to the Quinta.
The letter begins: “Dear Tom, I am sorry to only write now,...” Her children had been ill: Antonio had an emergency appendectomy on the 23rd of March, and Fred had a spontaneous pneumothorax on the 25th - my birthday. She hopes this excuses her, and I wish I could say to her that of course it does. She prayed for me on my birthday, and thanked God for me being such a good boy, and sends love to my mother, my father, and my sister.

The letter is signed with an oval C, running on to a quick line representing the crisply cut vowels that follow.