“Also, I can’t help but notice that I’ve ended this long and—I freely admit—unfortunately rambling speech about my difficult relationship with David Blackwood by questioning, yet again, whether the problem was me all along.

“I’m like my father, I think, in several ways. But that isn’t one of them. He would never once ask that question. It would be straightforward to him: ‘Oliver, you need to pull your socks up and stop making excuses.’ I suppose that’s another irony, that a man so obsessed with personal responsibility was so insistent on everything being somebody else’s fault. Even the halibut. But then I suppose he saw no contradiction in that. Don’t do as I do, do as I say and so on.

“And in a way…didn’t it work? Because perhaps the end of all this is that I like who I am. I like that I am, at last, the sort of person who can tell his father to go fuck himself and also the kind of person who can accept that perhaps I should have said it earlier or not said it at all. My father was a man of certainties, but I think I am happy being a man of questions.

“So often, I think, when a person dies—when a complicated person dies, even when an unambiguously awful person dies, not that I believe there are any truly unambiguously awful people—it’s for those of us left behind to pick over ourselves and ask, ‘Am I this way in spite of this person or because of them?’ And so often the answer is simply yes.

“I am sorry that my father is dead. I am sorry that we will never get to finish the conversation that began when I told him to go fuck himself. I will miss him, as I know we all will. But for all that I will miss him, for all that I loved him and for all that I believed, without question, that he loved me, I still find myself standing in front of you now and this is the only thing I feel able to say with confidence. The only thing I know to be true and fair about someone who is no longer able to speak for himself: David Blackwood was a complicated man.

“Now, assuming there is still time, I rather mean-spiritly assigned Christopher to read ‘If.’ It was Dad’s favourite poem because of fucking course it was.”

Stepping away from the lectern, Oliver walked slightly unsteadily back to his seat. Then he put his head in his hands and, very quietly, started to cry. I wrapped my arms around him and drew him close while Christopher took his place.

“‘If you can keep your head,’” he began with palpable resentment, “‘when all about you are losing theirs…’”

Chapter 33

"MOTHER IS NEVER GOING TO forgive me,” said Oliver.