It was late spring, if I’m remembering correctly, but that means next to nothing in that region, and the weather was sulky and cold. In the days leading up to my father’s visit it had rained relentlessly, and judging by the view from the small studio apartment I rented near campus, the day I planned to meet him would be no different. I was then a student at the Royal College of Surgeons, an impressive-sounding name for what was, in fact, a third-rate medical school. I was a student there still, at the time of my father’s visit, at least technically, but several weeks earlier I had been caught cheating on an exam, and it was almost certain that I would be expelled.

I had suggested we meet for tea in a shop close to my apartment, which was on the second floor above a bakery. It was a small, careworn little place, but I liked it, and had spent many an afternoon there on my own with a book. I suppose it reminded me of home. It was not until I saw my father in the shop itself that I realized what a poor choice it had been; that he did not approve of it was plain. He was already sitting down, at a table in the corner, in his gray coat and self-consciously knotted scarf, his elbows hovering carefully an inch above the tablecloth, radiating discomfort. We were the shop’s only customers, except for a lone East Asian woman seated by the window, who was holding her teacup in both hands and staring out at the drizzle of rain.

Well, I thought. So much for this.

I had been surprised—stunned, really—to hear from my father that he was en route. He was now, I’d learned, a senior-level dean, and it was this new position, I supposed, that had made him uniquely suited to involve himself in my little problem—or, as was more likely, had made him subject to a rare request from my mother.

And relations between the two of them were not traditional, either. I was my mother’s only child, but not my father’s. I was, as they say, “illegitimate,” a kind of side project he’d embarked upon while he and my mother worked together briefly at the University of Leeds, when all the while he had been married to someone else. By the time I was in medical school I had met him only a handful of times, and only when I was a child. And yet, I thought, as we greeted each other awkwardly, in this stranger’s face, undeniably, were echoes of my own. Would that, I wondered idly, be the fate of my hairline? Would my eyes acquire that hooded, turtle-y look in old age?