“This is your father.”

I’m at Claridge’s hotel in London. I’m not sure who has brought me there: not Mum. She may already be dead.

I’m led into a room through a dark wood door by a woman I don’t know. Her pale blonde hair is pulled tight over her round head. It makes me think of the moon.

The hotel room has a white shag rug. (Which seems unlikely, in Claridge’s.) I sit on it, fiddling with the toys Nurse has brought for me. My nerves strain to pick up information. The corner of a coffee table is so close I can almost feel its point against the skin of my cheek. On the far side of the coffee table, on a sofa, sits a man with long fingers holding a long brown cigar. Cigar smoke must have hazed the room, but my memory has cleared it. Every detail is as sharp as the corner of that table.

My father’s knees make peaks under the dust-coloured twill of his trousers. His shoes curve elegantly around his feet, the colour of the hard round chestnuts I pick up in the park. Fine socks cover the knobbly bones of his ankles like shiny skin. I think I can even see the bones on the corners of his shoulders sticking up under his white turtleneck.

He has a wide mouth and an open face that looks soft, as if the bones are made of sponge. With his long arms, he reminds me of a monkey at the zoo. I can imagine him hanging from branches, except that he seems so dignified and important. There are other people in the room, and they wait for him to speak and laugh at his jokes. He’s talking with them, but I feel him watching me.

I’m not sure what to do. I don’t know how you’re supposed to behave when you meet your father. So I play warily until it’s time to go. When I leave, I have no sense that I will ever see this imposing, disconnected father again.

This man I met at the age of four was John Huston, the husband my mother had left. She didn’t want me to grow up in the Huston world. But he was a man who pulled everything into orbit around him.

Mum, with great force of will, had put a small sea between them; now that she was gone, he pulled me in.

Times recommends

• McDonald’s: the world’s local restaurant
• Help me to be a mum: a foyer to fulfilment
• A life online: God likes a laugh