Chapter 34
THIRTY-FOUR
ANNA
‘Where were you?’ My voice came out angry and shrill.
‘I was at Aisha’s. I told you, Mum. We were talking. We were messing about on TikTok. I lost track of the time – her mum and dad were in bed and it was too late to ask for a lift home. I knew you’d go off on one if I stayed over and you wouldn’t want me getting a bus home so I got an Uber.’
I looked at my daughter. Her skin was peachy and glowing, but there were violet shadows under her eyes – partly tiredness and partly last night’s make-up.
She was still wearing yesterday’s clothes and, when I’d pressed her body against mine in a hug that was almost frantically tight, I’d noticed that she smelled different from usual – a hint of sourness, a fragrance that wasn’t hers.
I’d woken up at nine that morning with a pounding head. The house was silent. I’d overslept. As soon as I moved, Augustus jumped up off my pillow and began yowling for his breakfast.
‘Has no one fed you?’ I muttered in confusion. ‘Hold on.’
I pressed my throbbing head into my hands, trying to recall the night before.
Barney had been staying over at a friend’s place.
Lulu had been out. Loneliness descending on me like a weight, I’d made myself a vast, ice-cold dry martini and then another, then opened a bottle of wine – and then another.
I’d longed to cry, but tears wouldn’t come, so I’d found an old DVD Gray had filmed of the children when they were small and put it on to watch, hoping it would jerk me out of my numb inertia.
But it hadn’t – all it had done was remind me how happy we had been, how innocently oblivious of what was going to happen to us.
It was too much to bear. The way I’d felt then – so full of joy and hope and confidence – was too different from how I felt now, lonely and resigned and bitter.
And it told me nothing about what Gray’s life had been before those days, when he stood with his camera filming Lulu chasing a bumble bee in the garden, me pushing Barney on a swing in the park, tiny Augustus furiously attacking his own tail.
There were no answers there, on those silver discs of memories.
There had been nothing on the computer in Gray’s study.
But there might be some elsewhere in the house.
There was some stuff of Gray’s, up in the loft in storage boxes.
His emails might have post-dated him meeting me, but those boxes didn’t. I could go up there and investigate.
I’d gone upstairs with my bottle and glass, determined to make a start. But I must have got sidetracked, and sat down on the bed and gone to sleep. Or blacked out.
‘Just a second,’ I told the still protesting Augustus. ‘Let me check on Lulu, then I’ll give you breakfast.’
But when I eased my daughter’s bedroom door open, expecting to see her sprawled on the bed deeply asleep, the room was empty.
She wouldn’t have got up without seeing to the cat – he wouldn’t have let her.
I snatched my phone from my bedside table, finding that the battery had given out at some point during the night.
I connected it to the charger, feeling sweat breaking out on my palms as I tried again and again to bring it to life.
Then I saw five missed calls from Lulu at just after three in the morning.
It was only when I saw the text message from Orla telling me that she was safe in a spare bed over at number five that my panic turned to rage.
Lulu hadn’t been with Aisha last night. She was lying – I knew it and she must know I knew. But I wasn’t blameless. My phone had died, and I hadn’t seen her calls. She was home now, and safe – but what if she’d been in trouble and needed me?
‘TikTok or no TikTok,’ I said firmly, ‘you can’t be getting cabs home at three in the morning. It’s not safe. You shouldn’t have left Aisha’s place at that hour – you know that. You can’t have an eleven-thirty curfew on weekends if you’re not going to be responsible about sticking to it.’
Lulu bit her lip. ‘I know, Mum. I’m sorry. I just didn’t think.’
I pressed my hand to my throbbing head. I was handling this all wrong, but I didn’t know what else to do. ‘Next time, you need to think. Set an alarm on your phone for when it’s time to come home, phone me and I’ll collect you.’
She nodded meekly, and I could see her hoping that that might be the end of it.
‘I’m going to have to ground you,’ I went on. ‘No going out during the week for two weeks, or on weekends for the rest of the month. And after that, you’ll be in by ten again. Once I’ve seen you sticking to it, we’ll have a rethink. Okay?’
‘Okay.’ Something flickered over her face – relief, I realised. Relief that I hadn’t challenged her on her lie, hadn’t threatened to ring Aisha’s parents and ask whether she’d actually been there at all? Or something else – relief that she’d be prevented from doing whatever it was she’d been doing?
‘And you’ll buy Orla a decent bunch of flowers out of your allowance,’ I told her.
‘I’d have done that anyway,’ she replied sharply.
That at least was true. Lulu had always been thoughtful. Her impulsive generosity reminded me of her father – her father, who she’d lost. Her grief must be terrible, but she wasn’t talking to me about it, perhaps because she wanted to protect me from the intensity of her feelings.
‘Sweetie.’ I reached across the sofa and put my arm round her. ‘This has been a horrible time for all of us. You know you can talk to me about stuff – if you’re worried about something, if there are things going on in your life you need help with.’
‘I know, Mum.’ She snuggled her head briefly into my shoulder.
‘Just because Dad died, it doesn’t mean there can’t be other things to deal with that are difficult as well.’
‘I know. Thanks, Mum.’ She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jumper. Then she whispered, ‘I miss him.’
‘I miss him too.’ But it was also more complicated than that now. I missed the Gray I thought I’d known.
‘There aren’t even that many photos of him.
’ Lulu glanced up at the television, where the DVD I’d played the night before was still paused on a frame of three-year-old Barney at the top of a slide, his sister waiting at the bottom to catch him.
‘Because he was always behind the camera, not in front of it.’
‘You know,’ I said, ‘there’s a box of Dad’s old stuff up in the loft.
When we moved in here, I brought loads of crap with me – clothes and photos and books and letters.
All sorts. But he just had the one box. When we were doing up the house I went through my old things and got rid of a lot of them, but Dad never wanted to do that.
And it didn’t take up much room so I just left it.
We could have a look through it, if you like.
There might be photos of him from when he was a little boy. School reports, stuff like that.’
Please say you’ll do this with me.
Lulu’s face turned to me, hopeful and eager. ‘Yes. Let’s do it. But, Mum…’
‘What, darling?’
‘Before we go up there, I’d really, really like a shower and eggy crumpets. You know, like you used to make sometimes when we were poorly?’
‘Eggy crumpets.’ My alcohol-soured stomach let out a massive rumble. ‘You know, that’s exactly what I feel like too.’
‘I haven’t been up here since I was, like, six,’ Lulu murmured, looking round at the boarded-out loft. ‘It’s like Narnia.’
I knew what she meant, even though magical lands don’t usually feature cans of paint stacked along the walls, Christmas decorations packed away in their boxes and crates of children’s old clothes and toys.
‘Oh my God,’ Lulu breathed. ‘Is that Cobbles?’
‘It certainly is.’ I pulled back the sheet, revealing the battered dapple-grey painted coat of her old rocking horse. One of the cheek straps on his bridle was broken and his mane and tail were yellowing and tangled, but his eyes were still bright, the worn leather of his saddle still glossy.
Lulu knelt down in front of him. ‘Hello, you. Ah, Mum! I can’t believe he’s still here. I can’t believe I’d forgotten all about him.’
‘When we redid your bedroom, we talked about passing him down to your cousins for them to play with, but you weren’t having it,’ I said.
‘You thought he was too babyish to have in your new room, and Barney never really played with him, but you wouldn’t let us donate him to the charity shop. So we put him up here.’
Lulu’s eyes were bright with tears. ‘Poor Cobbles. Do you think he’s lonely up here? Do you think he thinks I don’t love him any more?’
Shit. What do I tell her about the emotional life of an old toy horse?
‘I think he’s enjoying a well-deserved retirement,’ I hazarded. ‘Maybe one day, if you ever have a daughter, we can take him off to some specialist toy restorer and get him spruced up again, and it’ll be like a total new lease of life for him.’
‘Like on The Repair Shop. Remember, Mum, Dad was obsessed with that show during lockdown.’
‘Him and half the country,’ I said. ‘But yes, just like that. He’ll be quite safe here until you need him again.’
Or until I decided I could no longer stay in the house on my own. But there was no point in raising that prospect now, not when Lulu needed so badly to feel that her home and her memories would be here forever.
But she seemed satisfied with my fudged promise. ‘Now where’s that box of Dad’s stuff you were talking about?’
‘I hope it’s here somewhere. It’s possible he chucked it out at some point, but I don’t think so.’
I squatted down in front of the low cupboards that had been fitted beneath the eaves and eased open a door.
Inside were four cardboard boxes, their sides still unfaded and the tape that sealed them fresh.
On two of their lids, in Gray’s sloping capitals, ‘DVDs’ had been written with a Sharpie; the others were labelled ‘Videos’.
I burst out laughing. ‘Your bloody father.’
‘What?’ Lulu asked.
‘We had a massive row about these a few years ago. I don’t know if you remember, the bookshelves in the front room were absolutely stuffed with the things.
Old movies, DVDs, box sets – he never watched them.
He said they’d be worth a fortune if he put them on eBay, but I knew that was nonsense, and anyway he’d never get around to doing that either. ’
‘So he put them up here?’
‘He told me he’d taken them to the charity shop. In fact he swore blind he had. But he stashed them up here instead, the bugger.’
‘Poor Dad. I think you were mean, making him get rid of things he wanted to keep.’
I sighed. ‘Maybe I was. But he got his way, didn’t he? And now it’ll be my job to get rid of them at some point.’
‘But not now?’ Lulu asked anxiously.
‘Not now. Don’t worry.’ I closed the door and opened the next one along. ‘Here we go.’
The box I’d pulled out looked quite different from the others.
Its greige cardboard was faded and caked with dust – a reminder of the time, which felt as if it had lasted years, when the house was a building site and everything in our lives had been dusty.
The tape that had once sealed it was dried out and peeling away.
The long-dead corpse of a spider slipped out from beneath one of its flaps, making me and Lulu recoil.
‘I hope there aren’t more of those in there,’ she said with a shiver.
‘There won’t be,’ I promised, although I was far from sure. ‘Do you want to take this downstairs or look through it now?’
Lulu hesitated. ‘Let’s open it here.’
The desiccated tape pulled away quite easily from the top and sides of the box, and I eased open the flaps. Inside, I could see the back cover of a book, dark blue but faded around the edges, as if it had spent hours in bright sunlight. The borders of the pages were yellowed and curling.
Lulu lifted it out and read the title on the front cover. ‘Sixty Famous Solos. Classical Piano Sheet Music. That can’t have been Dad’s. Dad hated classical music.’
But beneath it were more books of sheet music – more than a dozen of them. Chopin’s Complete Preludes, Nocturnes and Waltzes. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Ultimate Piano Solos. Classical Piano Masterpieces for Intermediate Players.
I pulled the books out of the box, mystified.
Beneath them was a brown A4 envelope with ‘Nigel Graham’ written on it in faded handwriting I didn’t recognise.
I opened the flap and peered inside, then extracted a sheaf of stiff paper.
There were eight sheets of it, in slightly different colours and printed in slightly different typefaces, but all bore the same logo in the top right: that of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, and each certified that Nigel Graham had passed his practical examination, from grades one through to eight.
I sifted through the pile, once and then again, studying each certificate as if there’d be some anomaly there – some other boy’s name, some obvious alteration that had been made. The text seemed to swim in front of my eyes, but when I blinked it was still there, still the same.
Gray. The man who’d ask me to turn the radio off if he walked into the kitchen when I was listening to Classic FM.
The man who’d feigned an attack of the flu when a client had invited him to the opera.
The man who’d come reluctantly to church when we spent Christmas with my parents, but would only mouth the words to the hymns.
And yet, between the ages of ten and eighteen, he’d been not just musically capable, but apparently gifted.
‘Mum,’ Lulu asked slowly. ‘Why did Dad never call himself Nigel?’
‘I’m not sure. When I first met him, he told me his name was Gray. That’s what everyone called him. I guess he thought it was a naff name and he’d rather be called something a bit cooler.’
‘And why did he – I mean, he always said he hated classical music. When I tried to learn the violin in primary school he’d leave the house if I was practising.’
It was true. I remembered Gray’s expression – almost agonised – when Lulu had brought a borrowed violin home from school. Can she not? he’d demanded.
‘It did sound a bit like a cat being tortured, to be fair,’ I teased.
Lulu giggled. ‘I know, right? But Dad – he passed all those exams. He must’ve been seriously good at the piano.’
‘Maybe he lost interest,’ I said. ‘People do, like you not being into ballet any more.’
But my daughter’s face told me she was unconvinced – and she wasn’t the only one.
This wasn’t about some certificates packed away in a box and forgotten.
It wasn’t about a name changed in early adulthood.
It was about the erasure of a whole childhood – a whole past. Whoever Nigel Graham had been, he didn’t seem like he was anything to do with Gray – the man I’d fallen in love with and married.
The father of my children. The husband I’d lost so recently.
What else was there about him that I didn’t know?