Page 224 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

‘Be reasonable!’
When I put the phone down I felt weird. I wasn’t going to enjoy
a day off in New York now. All I could think of was that I’d let
my dad down. I was thirty-five and I still felt it as keenly as I had
when I was a kid. So I called him back and my mum answered.
‘He doesn’t want to talk to you.’
All that Saturday I couldn’t get my mum’s words out of my head.
By the evening I was completely distracted and wasn’t thinking
about my meeting on Monday at all. This is silly, I said to myself. I
went back to my hotel, packed my bag and got a cab to the airport.
On the way I called my meeting off and arranged to do it by video
conferencing and called Aisha to tell her I was heading home.
‘I’m going straight to my parents when the plane touches down.’
‘Come back and see the kids. They’ve missed you.’
‘I’ve missed them, too, but I just have to be there.’
I couldn’t explain it any better than that. I got a night flight and
arrived back at Heathrow around lunchtime on Sunday. I called
my mum.
‘Tell Dad I’m on my way.’
When I walked in, he had this big smile on his face because,
basically, he’d won. He came up to me and put his arms around
me.
‘Don’t ever let me down again.’ I couldn’t quite tell if he was
joking.
Needless to say, from then until the day he died I never missed
a Sunday with my father. Even if we went on holiday, I would fly
back early so that I could be there.
As the months passed, these Sundays became a bit of a family
ritual: I would turn up with the girls, my brothers and sisters
would arrive with their kids and partners and it became a lot of
fun. My relationship with all my family was brilliant, and we
became as close as we’d been when we were kids, closer probably
because I’d left home when the younger ones were so little.

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