Chapter 30
THIRTY
ANNA
When I sat down at Gray’s computer after saying goodbye to Orla that afternoon, I felt a horrible sense of guilt.
It was as if I was expecting to hear his footsteps on the landing outside and then his voice saying, What the hell are you doing on there, Anna?
as I spun guiltily around in the chair, too late to shut down the computer.
I knew that wouldn’t happen, but I noticed that my palms were sweating as I logged into his operating system. That presented no difficulty: his password, B@rn￡y followed by the six digits of Lulu’s birthday, was secure enough but easy for me to remember. He’d shared it with me a few years back.
YMCA, Orla had said. Why had he chosen to donate to them?
He’d never been a churchgoer, never shown a particular interest in the upliftment of young people.
Perhaps I would find some evidence that he had donated to them before – one of his many direct debits, or an email newsletter he had signed up to.
His personal and work email accounts had been open on the screen, both with several thousand unread messages.
Before his last day at Flick London, Gray had set his out-of-office message to an innocuous few lines saying that he was no longer with the agency, and that Carl could be contacted in his absence.
I wondered if it had been updated again following his death, but there was no way to find out short of emailing him myself, which I couldn’t bear to do.
I did a simple search for YMCA on both accounts, but found nothing whatsoever.
Then I found myself looking through his calendar to see whether his assignations with Laurel were noted there, made private so I couldn’t see them, but doing that had made me feel so grubby and sad that I pushed back the chair and left the office, closing the door behind me and leaving the computer to put itself to sleep.
It was two weeks before I returned to Gray’s desk.
The days had fallen into a sort of weary rhythm: the children, apparently not disappointed by my decision to cancel the booked holiday to Portugal, were out most of the time – Barney playing cricket with his pals or playing Orla’s piano, Lulu meeting Aisha at the gym to practise the moves she’d learned at her cheerleading camp.
I didn’t choose that – I wanted them here, close to me, safe.
I wanted to be there if they needed to talk or cry.
But what they needed seemed to be the company of their friends, the resumption of normal teenage life after the long weeks of their father’s illness, and there was nothing I could do but respect that.
I slept late most mornings – that is, after waking at three o’clock in a puddle of sweat and lying there, fighting the horrors of a low-level (or, quite often, high-level) hangover for a couple of hours until sleep mercifully reclaimed me.
It was often half past nine or ten o’clock before I made it downstairs, where I’d make myself a piece of toast and Nutella and a coffee, only to discover that both had gone cold while I sat staring blankly out at the garden.
What Orla had said had niggled at my brain relentlessly, unassuaged by the five-hundred-pound donation I’d made to the YMCA from my own phone, just in case that was what Gray had meant after all.
YMCA. Why?
Had they supported Gray somehow after his mother’s death? Was whoever had sent the silver anniversary card connected to the organisation? Did they commemorate membership that way, like Alcoholics Anonymous, I wondered, absent-mindedly going to the fridge and pouring a glass of wine.
The answer had to lie somewhere in Gray’s past. I’d barely scratched the surface of his email account – it was time to delve deeper. I took my wine upstairs, sat down at Gray’s Mac and logged on.
His past – his mother. Almost automatically, I found myself typing her name into the search bar at the top of one of the open windows on his screen. The search returned one result: a PDF file entitled ‘Louisa Graham’.
It was Lulu’s birth certificate. A scan of the pale-yellow, red-printed official form, completed in an almost childishly neat handwriting by the registrar, documenting that Louisa Celeste Graham had been born to Nigel Graham and Anna Christine Graham on the twenty-fourth of May 2008 at Homerton Hospital.
I remembered the conversation we’d had, walking home after the scan appointment that had confirmed we were having a daughter.
‘We can call her Celeste, right?’ I’d asked, giddy with excitement. ‘It’s the best girl’s name ever. Pretty and feminine but also serious. Unusual, but easy to spell. It’s the perfect name. I’ve always thought so.’
Gray reached out and took my hand. ‘Anna. I realise it’s you who’s going to push this baby out of your fanny and everything. Seriously, it’s your choice. But…’
‘But you think naming our daughter after a fictional elephant is a terrible idea?’ I turned to him, ready to die on that hill.
He smiled. ‘Not at all. It’s a nice name. It’s just…’
‘Just what?’
‘I’d really, really, like to name her after my mum. I’m sorry. It just feels like the right thing to do.’
I felt all the excitement drain out of me. How could I argue with that – with the right of a dead grandmother to be memorialised in her son’s firstborn child’s name? With the right of Gray, bereaved when he was barely an adult, to honour his late mother in that way?
‘What was her name?’ I asked.
He told me. My first thought was, It could be worse.
At least it wasn’t Sharon or Tracey. My second was, We can always end up using her middle name.
But when our daughter was born, Gray had cradled her in his arms, gazing down at her with adoring pride, and said, ‘Hello, little Lulu,’ and I’d been so flooded with hormones I thought it was the cutest name ever.
Louisa. I moved the mouse, clicked back on to Gray’s personal email and typed the name into the search bar there.
A full page of results came up: evidently Gray had corresponded with a Louisa Martin at our mortgage brokerage; a Louisa van der Walt at the optician where he bought his contact lenses; and a Louisa Clift who’d organised a surprise birthday party for her partner, a friend of Gray’s.
He’d also received a promotional email from a wine merchant inviting him to a tasting of German wines, one maker being named Louisa; enquired about booking a Villa Louisa for a stag weekend; and bought me a lingerie set called Louisa in black, size 32F.
It was on the second page of the search results that I found what I was looking for. It was an email in his drafts folder with no subject line, with the recipient’s email address louisagraham2903@.
The mouse felt slippery with my sweat as I clicked it. The email was blank. It contained no text at all, just that email address in the ‘To’ field and Gray’s in the ‘From’. It had never been sent, but the date the draft had been saved was the twenty-fifth of May 2008.
The day after Lulu’s birth. Gray had wanted to email his mother, to tell her she had a grandchild named after her. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t for the same reason I hadn’t emailed his work address – because he knew she was not alive to see it.
I searched again, this time copying and pasting the email address, but there were no other emails to or from Gray’s mother, and no more drafts. There had been no point – Gray must have realised that.
I cancelled the search and returned to the main inbox.
In the preceding two weeks, since the last time I’d come up here, more emails had arrived.
The first five pages of them were now all unread, and I wasn’t going to read them.
Instead, I tapped the mouse on the bar that told me I was viewing messages 1 to 50 of 54,671 and selected ‘Oldest’.
The first email he had received was in 2003, around the time that he and I met.
But before that, he must have had another email address – a Yahoo one or a Hotmail one perhaps. I had no way of accessing that – no way of knowing who Gray might have contacted in the years before we met.
No way of knowing who J might have been. No way of reading emails he’d exchanged with his mother before her death. No way of searching for messages to or from the YMCA.
We’d never visited Swansea, where Gray grew up, because he’d said there was no point, nothing left for him there.
He must have loved his mother – he’d insisted on naming our daughter after her.
But as far as I knew he had never laid flowers on her grave or been to the place where her ashes were scattered.
I shut the laptop and left the study, closing the door behind me. The answers weren’t here. They were in the places that had shaped Gray as a child. That’s where I needed to look.