Early one March morning thirty-something Robert Stanton is woken in London with the news that his widowed father is in hospital with a heart attack. He travels down to the coast to be at his father’s bedside, where he is surprised to find the ward sister is Lisa, a Chinese woman who was his first girlfriend and is now a divorced single parent.
Memories of his childhood mingle with those of his past with Lisa as they watch his father sinking. Lisa tells him frankly about her present life, but Robert gives evasive answers to Lisa’s inquiries about his own. For he has memories of another past which are too painful to disclose, memories of his life with Catherine, a painter he lived with for some time, but who has now been immured in a mental hospital for several years suffering from a suicidal depression for which Robert believes he is partly responsible.
Although he has always been distant from him, when his father dies the next day, Robert is strangely moved. Lisa consoles him and invites him home, where he meets her children – an unusual experience for Robert, who has lived a hermit’s life since the onset of Catherine’s illness.
Going through his father’s things later, Robert discovers a bunch of letters from Doris, a woman whose affair with his father damaged his parents’ marriage while he was still a child, and is astonished to learn the affair has continued in secret down to the present. Realising that Doris doesn’t yet know his father has died, he visits her and tells her.
While Robert arranges the funeral and winds up his father’s affairs, Doris intermittently recounts the story of her relationship with his father, who, he learns, was an undemonstrative hero of the Falklands War. Robert begins to realise how little he knew him, and to appreciate the unsuspected depths to his character. At the same time his own renewed relationship to Lisa is deepening, as her warmth and liveliness begin to free him from the long winter of his self-imposed exile from “the stuff of life”.
But just as it seems he may be able to remake his life with Lisa, he learns on his weekly visit to Catherine that against all odds she is improving under a new drugs regime, and is likely to be released soon into his care.
Must he then surrender all hope of a future with Lisa? At first, he thinks so; and, when he tells her about Catherine, Lisa, feeling hurt and deceived, agrees. Even when she relents and encourages him, still he sees no future for them both. Catherine’s sanity will always be precarious and if she found out about Lisa, she might attempt suicide again. After a last night together, Lisa derives him to the station.
He kisses her goodbye in the car – she can’t stand platform farewells. Then, while he is waiting on the platform, something snaps inside him and he runs back to find her still there, her forehead resting sadly on the steering wheel. After all, he chooses the same path that his father chose before him. The long winter is passing and now, however insecure, it is spring again.
christopher.new@gmail.com July 2012