Chapter 11
ELEVEN
ORLA
I am normally an early riser – I have been all my life. But right now I am laid low with a foul cold, so after I had given the cats their breakfast I came back to bed with a cup of lemon-and-ginger tea, and went to sleep without writing my Morning Pages as usual.
While I was asleep – although clearly not deeply, because the sound half-woke me – there was a knock at my front door.
It was nothing: perhaps a parcel, and I am expecting nothing urgent.
Perhaps a political canvasser, getting an early bid in ahead of the election everyone expects later this year.
I ignored it and allowed myself to drift back to sleep.
But that knock awakened something in my sleeping mind – more lucid than a dream and surprisingly vivid given how long ago it took place. Perhaps I recorded it at the time, somewhere in one of my Morning Pages journals, although I can’t remember doing so.
It happened on another morning, early summer, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years ago.
I had a cold then too, which is perhaps why the memory came back to me so clearly – I’m rarely ill and almost never put myself to bed during the day like this.
But on that occasion, I remember, I didn’t ignore the summons of the door knocker and go back to sleep.
I put on my dressing gown and went downstairs.
A young man was standing outside. Perhaps thirty and strikingly handsome, with the combination of near-black hair and blue eyes I often saw growing up in Ireland but rarely do here.
He seemed as surprised to see me as I was to see him.
I’m sorry to bother you, he said, with a lilt in his voice that was not Irish but Welsh. Does Nigel live here?
I said, No. It’s just myself and my daughter, and she’s away.
Which I suppose is the last thing a lone woman should say to a strange man on her doorstep, but he seemed unthreatening enough.
In one of the other houses on the square, then, perhaps? He was perfectly polite, but he had the air of someone who wasn’t giving up easily. Nigel Graham?
Nigel? Well, that was a surprise – so much so it took me a moment to figure out who he meant.
The Grahams are three doors down, I told him. At number eight.
He thanked me and apologised again for disturbing me and I returned once more to my bed and my self-pity.
But now I found I couldn’t sleep. I lay there, upright on my pillows to relieve my stuffy head, listening to the last of the birdsong in the square outside as the sun climbed higher into the sky with the promise of another beautiful day.
I could also hear a knock on the door of number eight, and a few seconds later the strange young man’s voice saying, Please don’t slam the door in my face, followed by Gray’s reluctant reply: I guess you’d better come in.
Then there was silence for perhaps twenty minutes. I was about to attempt sleep again when I heard the click of the Grahams’ door opening.
I can remember their conversation so clearly, as if I heard it yesterday rather than all those years ago. Gray telling the other man he bore him no ill will, but telling him – ordering him, almost – not to contact him again. The stranger saying he understood and agreed.
Then he said something like, We just thought you would want to know. I won’t pass on the address if you don’t want me to.
And Gray replying, a hint of desperation in his voice, Please don’t.
Then there was a moment’s silence; some instinct told me they might have been embracing. And then I heard the door close again and the other man’s footsteps passing below my open window and fading away as he walked around the square and away towards the main road.
Of course – it must have been almost sixteen years ago: June 2008, because Anna was away visiting her parents with newborn Lulu.
How peculiar that I should recall it now, though, and so clearly.
Or perhaps it is not so peculiar after all, because now Anna has told me their tragic news, that Gray is terminally ill.
And that encounter, with its hints of Gray’s past – never mind a first name I’d never have guessed, although I have always half-assumed couldn’t actually be Gray – has made me uneasy.
There was something Gray wanted to escape. Something he wanted to hide from. And I find myself wondering – almost fearing – whether his death will bring his secret to light.