I have no real defining memories of my father, and those that I do have he likely wouldn’t thank me for. He wasn’t much of a presence in the first 10 years of my life, married more to his job and its attendant social life than he was to my mother, and so I remember him only hazily: at weekends, mostly, hidden behind a newspaper, pint nearby, and with a propensity to grouch if his personal space was invaded. When the inevitable finally happened, and he and my mother split up, I recall feeling not shock so much as relief. At last an end to all the arguments, the protracted hostilities. Perhaps now, like so many of my school friends, I would have a weekend father who felt it compulsory to be proactively fun.

But mine never did become a weekend father. He simply, perhaps even conveniently, disappeared from our lives. Because I had never really got to know him, I never much missed him, either. The morning I turned 18, very ready to do my own thing in life, I received a birthday card from him. The message contained a suggestion that we start over. I said no.

I had little cause to think of him again until just recently, when I was, unexpectedly, prompted to do so by others. Last year, I began to write a book in which I charted my sometimes uneasy and initially reluctant path to fatherhood, and many people I spoke to during the course of my research told me that having children themselves had made them reassess their relationships with their own fathers. And so — I’ll admit largely for professional reasons — I wrote him a letter and sent it to his last known address. Two days later, aged 39, I was having lunch with an old man I wouldn’t have recognised had he passed me in the street.

It proved an interesting lunch, the awkwardness of a first date clashing with a common, if hardly shared, history. As he removed his hat, his gloves and coat (it was a crisp January day), I was grateful for the arrival of the waiter and a couple of menus to fill up the silence that was already spreading between us.

For the self-conscious, small talk is a painful thing to negotiate, and I’ve never been very good at it. And so, after learning that he had been married for almost 30 years and had a 22-year-old daughter, my half-sister, I took a fortifying gulp from my glass of wine and steered us towards the meat of the conversation just as our pasta arrived.

I told him I had certain questions. I wanted to know about the breakdown of his marriage to my mother, the reasons for their divorce and his subsequent absence from our lives. Didn’t he miss us? As he talked, the crow’s-feet around his eyes deepened. He said that he didn’t want to tell me anything that may run contrary to what I already knew, aware, as he was, that my mother, who died 10 years ago, was no longer around to contradict it. But what he went on to tell me did indeed contradict much of what I had long regarded as hard fact. No, he counter-claimed, he never did have the assumed affair, but the more time he spent at work, the more my mother became jealous of his life outside ours. He began to feel so loathed at home that he chose rarely to return.

And when my mother endeavoured to make their separation an acrimonious one, and hamper any easy access he hoped to have to his sons, he thought it best for all sides to simply walk away. “The biggest mistake of my life,” he said. I wasn’t quite sure how to react to this. Whose version was I supposed to believe; my mother’s, or my father’s? I know what I felt — that he’d walked away far too easily. But then I’ve already punished him for that. Also, seeing him again, the way he looked at me with such regret, suggested that his decision had been anything but easy. As we prepared to leave, he asked me, with optimism in his voice, where we went from here. It was a good question. I had no idea.

At home, my Spanish wife suggested it would be no bad thing to have a set of grandparents that didn’t live a plane ride away. But I was wary. Outside of a barely tangible bloodline, the man was a stranger to me. We met again, just him and me, a month later for coffee, but this time we couldn’t get past the small talk. When the invitation came to bring my family to meet his, I accepted. His wife was delightful; their daughter, too. The scene we created was a typical and unremarkable one: an extended family enjoying a lively Sunday lunch together. But I couldn’t help but feel we were each treading on eggshells, bound mostly by awkward circumstance, and that we wouldn’t feel properly comfortable with one another with such convenient ease. As if aware of this, he has suggested we go out to lunch alone, just the two of us, and sometime soon. It’s a good idea. What better way to find out whether anything remains between us after such a long gap? Perhaps it will give us an indication of what, if anything, comes next. 

The Reluctant Fathers’ Club by Nick Duerden (Short Books £10.99)

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