The day I met my father

I had lunch with my father last week. A fairly normal, run-of-the-mill event for most sons or daughters. But in my case there was a certain pertinence: it was the first time I had ever met him.

It was an encounter which mirrors the recent storyline of James Nesbitt's character, Adam, in Cold Feet. And here I was, sitting opposite a man I barely knew. My father, a stranger. Like Adam's father, he had left when I had barely moved on from washable nappies.

I am 37; he is 67. Meeting him properly for the first time, a hundred questions stampeded through my mind. Why did he leave? Why did he never appear to make contact? And how on earth were we to try to catch up on 37 years - school, university, marriage, careers - in the space of an hour and a half ?

When I walked into the restaurant, I knew immediately it was him. He looked older than I'd imagined. The only images I'd had of him were crinkly, yellowing photos from the late 1960s. He was taller than me and looked annoyingly fit (his passion is horses). His Barbour jacket was well worn, his shoes spotless. This was my father.

Face-to-face, the questions I had prepared to ask him evaporated. A cliché, I know, but words truly failed me. Here was a man, charming, elegant, witty, affluent - and all too human. Not the ogre, the "callous bastard", I had conjured up in my youthful mind in place of anything tangible.

He is Irish, and the meeting took place in a country house hotel in the Irish Midlands. We ordered Guinness and pork chops. For the first few minutes, we talked about mundane things: the weather, the Six Nations' results, his upcoming trip to the Cheltenham races.

To anyone observing us, the conversation was relaxed, informal. We might have been a boss and his younger underling catching a few pints at lunchtime. But beneath the surface, I wondered if he felt as terrified, as gripped by a knot in the stomach, as I did. When the food arrived, I felt nauseous.

The lunch had been arranged after I had telephoned him out of the blue. I had reached a certain age, was thinking about starting a family, and was beginning to wonder about my own father. My mother was very supportive; she knew that it was something I had to do. Dialling that number, it sounds all too predictable to say that my hands shook, but they did. Suddenly, after a few rings, there was this voice, smooth, educated. My dad. If he was surprised at the approach, he didn't show it; instead, the date was arranged. I put the phone down.

Tentatively over lunch we wandered into unknown territory. I didn't feel I could stand up in the crowded restaurant and shout: "Why did you never bother with me?" But both of us knew the unanswered questions and accusations hung all around us like bad deodorant.

The story begins in London in the mid-Sixties. Like many of their peers at the time, my mother and father had come to the capital from the west of Ireland. From what I can gather, the climate at the time was too alien, too fast and furious, for a relationship bred in rural Ireland to survive. After a short while, my father returned home, my mother remaining in London where she worked as a writer and artist, later remarrying an Englishman. My father also remarried but neither of my parents had any more children.

So I was brought up an only child here, in London and in Essex. But always at the back of my mind was this distant, anonymous figure: my real father. The man who was not there when I scored my first rugby try aged 10, never there to drop me at school for the beginning of term, not there when I graduated from Oxford, not there when I married my wife, Newby, the beauty director of a glossy magazine. Never knew that my first novel was in the top 10 at WH Smith.

I had written to him once while at university. The reply was (at least to my post-pubescent mind at the time) guarded and a touch grudging. From then till that phone call, no contact.

So why did I want to meet him now? If you speak to any son of an absent father (and, God knows, there are enough of them in Britain today), you will hear the same thing: that there is a void, a desire to lay claim to a relationship that is crucial in any young man's life.

If there is one scar from never knowing him, it is fair to say that I have always hankered after a male bond that is unbreakable: it is no surprise that all of my best friends are strong women; as for my male mates (and I love them dearly), I know I've lost some because it was too easy for them to take advantage. Some took money and abused my trust, but that's life.

Over lunch, I found myself examining him like a laboratory specimen. His hands, the greying hair, the facial features and mannerisms that, I had been told by family friends, were identical to mine.

If I sound somewhat unemotional about meeting him for the first time, the truth is that I was. There was no surge of anger or relief, no need for tears. The very real hurt and longing I felt as a child and teenager have been diluted with age. I could not recapture something I had never had, and to try to do so would have been futile, if not self-destructive.

So we talked. And as we did, a whole, unchartered life opened up before me. A grandfather was a school master at a boys' boarding school, and he had once been in the "old IRA". It took me a minute to come to terms with this.

"The IRA?" I spluttered. "Yes, but it was very different then," my father replied. "This was Ireland in the 1920s. It was more like a guerrilla war. Everyone was Republican then."

And so it went on. A cousin high up in the Dublin literary scene, relatives involved in all aspects of Irish political life. As I learned about these faceless people, I felt strangely comforted: there was a family out there, a club of which I was not a member but to which, by birth, I belonged.

And I found myself, against all expectations, laughing at the stories. He told me: "Just after your mother and I separated, I had a big win at the races. Myself and a few friends drove back to London, drunk as skunks, and I crashed the car into a postbox outside the Ritz, where we were staying. If it hadn't been for the hotel staff, we'd have been thrown in jail."

Yes, it was skirting around the issues, but neither of us objected to that. The closest we came to the Big Question (why no contact?) was when he said: "I did try to contact you but your mother ... she was very hurt and didn't encourage it."

We both nodded at each other, before he carried on a story about a well-known priest having an affair, and the conversation went back to bar banter and rugby. As we parted in the car park, we didn't shake hands. We stood rigidly and promised each other to keep in touch. I felt no desire to hug him. To do so would have seemed jejune at the very least.

But I liked him and I feel better for at least now knowing him, although in truth I still don't. What I do know is that when I have children, I could never leave them. Maybe it's a different era, different mores. Maybe, although we are father and son, we are different people. But that, perhaps, is a topic for another afternoon of Guinness and pork chops.

Paul Palmer is the author of Balance of Power, published by Coronet.