Chapter 38
THIRTY-EIGHT
ANNA
It was four days after Lulu and I opened Gray’s box in the attic, and I was sitting in his study, a glass of wine by my side and a pile of papers next to me.
Apart from Gray’s music certificates, the box hadn’t yielded much in the way of secrets. Below the envelope containing them, Lulu and I had found another holding six old school year-group photographs.
‘Oh my God,’ Lulu had shrieked when I handed them over to her. ‘Which one’s Dad?’
Then we’d heard Barney’s voice calling from below, ‘What about Dad?’
‘Come up here, Barn,’ Lulu said. ‘Come see what me and Mum’ve found.’
My son scrambled up the ladder and joined us in the loft, flopping down on the floor next to his sister. He was wearing board shorts and a Queens Park Rangers shirt, and he smelled like he’d been playing football.
‘Sheesh, Barney, you stink,’ she said. ‘Look at these.’
Heads together, the two of them peered down at the first of the photographs.
Looking at it upside down, I could see that the year printed at the bottom was 1990.
There were three rows of boys in the picture, the middle ones standing, the front ones seated and the back row presumably standing on a bench.
There were perhaps thirty of them in total, all identically dressed in grey trousers, maroon blazers and maroon-and-gold striped ties.
They must all have been about the same age as Barney.
‘Is that Dad there, in the middle row behind the teacher?’ Barney asked.
‘No way!’ Lulu argued. ‘He’s wearing glasses, and Dad never did, did he, Mum?’
I remembered Gray complaining, just a few months back, that it was getting hard to read PDFs on his phone. I’ll need spectacles like an old man, Anna, he’d said. He’d never need them now. He’d never be an old man.
‘He wore contact lenses,’ I said. ‘But he would’ve worn glasses back then, probably. Could that be him, there on the end of the front row?’
‘Fuck off!’ Barney said. ‘Sorry, Mum. I mean, that’s never Dad.’
But I wasn’t so sure. I leaned in closer: the boy whose face had caught my eye was one of the smaller ones – one of the late developers.
He was sitting a little distance away from the child to his left, as if the photographer had told him to budge up but he’d ignored the instruction.
The blazer he was wearing was unbuttoned, unlike the others, and I could see inches of white cuff showing below its sleeves.
There was a similar gap between his trouser hems and his shoes, revealing an expanse of grey socks.
There was something – something about the angle of his head, the way his chin was tucked down almost into his chest, his eyes peering upwards to look into the camera, that was Gray. It was the same tilt I saw whenever I looked at the framed photograph on the mantelpiece from our wedding.
It was a look that betrayed whatever lay beneath Gray’s confidence. A look that said, I’m not sure I should be here.
‘You know what, Mum, you might be right.’ Lulu turned the photograph around and handed it to me. ‘Let’s see the next one.’
‘There he is again, second row,’ Barney said, pointing his finger at the photo. ‘He’s taller now. He looks more like Dad this time.’
There was a boy standing behind him, resting his hand on his shoulder – the only one in the second row doing so.
Lulu and Barney had reached the last of the pictures now, charting the progress of the boy who might have been Gray into a young man, beginning to be handsome, who we all agreed was by far the most likely candidate.
‘So what else is there in that box?’ Barney asked.
I pulled out another envelope. ‘School reports.’
‘Gimme.’ Lulu grabbed them, pulling one out and reading at random. ‘“If Nigel wishes to pursue his geography studies to A-level, he will need to pay some attention to his coursework.” Poor Dad.’
For a moment, her face was alight with laughter. I knew she was imagining that when Gray came home from work, she’d tease him about it, ripping the piss, telling him he didn’t have a leg to stand on next time he reminded her to do her homework, maybe even saying, ‘Pot, black, kettle. Nigel.’
Then I saw her realise that she would never be able to do that.
The smile vanished from her face as if it had never been there – as if she’d forgotten how to smile and would never remember again.
You will, my darling, I promised her silently, as our eyes met in shared anguish.
It might not feel that way now, but you will.
She stood up, wiping her eyes with the cuff of her jumper and dusting off the seat of her jeans. ‘Mind if I take one of those photos, Mum?’
‘Of course not. Do you want one too, Barney?’
‘Uh… yeah. Guess so. Is there anything for lunch, Mum?’
Now, I was reading through the school reports again. St Gwbert’s, it appeared, had been a selective, fee-paying school and held its pupils to high standards – standards that, in the years from his acceptance into the first form through to his departure in the sixth, Nigel Graham had not always met.
Nigel’s grasp of trigonometry is tenuous at best, I read.
If Nigel showed as much interest in the official curriculum as he does in his hobby of photography, we might find he has some promise.
I find it challenging to find anything to say about a boy who has failed to turn up to a single rugby coaching session all term.
Only the comments on his music were effusive. Nigel had shown rare sensitivity, maturity beyond his years, eagerness to learn that made him a joy to teach.
And from his head of year: Nigel’s attendance record continues to be patchy, and his punctuality is nothing short of diabolical.
But it was the comments from the head teacher – one Bryn Rhys-Gwynn – that interested me the most.
If Nigel is to retain his scholarship place, he had written on not one or two but four reports, he will need to show the same application to his academic studies as he does to his music.
So Gray had been granted a free place at an elite private school – presumably on the basis of his musical talent. But he hadn’t continued to earn it; in the classroom and on the sports field, he’d been a right slacker – when he bothered turning up at all.
So why hadn’t they kicked him out? They’d have been well within their rights to do so. Was his gift for music such that they’d put up with laziness and non-attendance in other areas? Maybe it was – but maybe there was more to it than that.
None of it made sense. None of it seemed to bear any relation to the Gray I had known – a driven, ambitious, focused man.
But then the Gray I had known would never have gone near a piano.
The Gray I had known bore almost no trace of the Welsh accent the child in the photographs must surely have had.
The Gray I had known had had an affair for almost a year without me finding out, so it should not have come as such a shocking, gut-wrenching surprise to me that I didn’t know him anything like as well as I’d thought.
On Gray’s computer, I typed the school’s name into Google. Its website came up straight away and I clicked twice, first to open the site and then to choose the English- rather than the Welsh-language version.
Mr Rhys-Gwynn, I discovered, had now departed; the current head was the more prosaically named Evan Davies.
Taking another gulp of wine, I picked up my phone and dialled the number, with its unfamiliar 01792 dialling code.
A woman’s voice answered after a few rings, giving the name of the school followed by a crisp, ‘How may I help you?’
‘My name’s Anna Graham. My late husband was a pupil at St Gwbert’s’ – I tried to pronounce it the same way she had, Goo-bert’s – ‘back in the nineties, and I was hoping to find out some more about his time at the school.’
‘Your late husband?’ The woman’s voice was pleasant but without warmth. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs…?’
‘Graham,’ I repeated. ‘My husband’s name was Nigel Graham.’
‘Nigel Graham,’ she repeated. ‘And what information was it you were hoping for, Mrs Graham?’
‘I… just… I don’t know. I suppose some sort of insight from someone who might have known him when he was there, to learn more about what his childhood was like.’
‘We’re talking about thirty years ago, Mrs Graham. I’ve worked here twenty myself and I don’t think there’s anyone on the staff who’s been here longer than I have.’
‘I know. It’s a long time ago. But perhaps written records? Or something on the computer system?’
She clicked her tongue, and I could picture her shaking her head.
‘I’m very sorry, but I don’t think we’ll be able to assist you.
If there are any extant records of Mr Graham’s time here, which is unlikely, we’d be bound by data protection legislation and unable to release them.
We are a school. We take safeguarding seriously. ’
Like safeguarding a child who not only hadn’t been one for thirty years but had died three months ago was even a thing, I thought with a flash of anger.
‘But he’s dead. And he was my husband.’
‘I’m very sorry for your loss. But we won’t be able to help.’
She paused for a second, leaving space for me to thank her. When I didn’t do that, she hung up.
Frustrated, I turned back to the photographs.
Once again, I turned to the one from 1991, in which the boy I was sure was Gray was standing in front of his taller, dark-haired friend, whose hand on Gray’s shoulder looked almost protective.
At least he had had one person looking out for him, amid all the skipped lessons and disappointing grades.
But who were you? I asked the photograph, only realising afterwards that I could have been addressing the dark-haired boy or the one in front of him – the one who became my husband.