Chapter 51
FIFTY-ONE
ANNA
The little bus laboured up the hill. So far on the fifteen-minute journey it had made several ascents, but this was the steepest yet.
I turned to look out of the window, hoping to see green valleys falling away beneath me, but everything was blanketed in grey mist, visibility reduced to just a few feet so all I could see was the edge of the road and a bit of stone wall with a few blurry shapes beyond it that might or might not have been sheep.
But my phone told me I was nearing my destination and, sure enough, after a final effort the bus jolted to a stop and the driver’s voice crackled over the tannoy, ‘Merthyr Adwen.’
I’d arrived at my destination – the place where Gray grew up. I wondered how its name might have sounded in his voice – whether the Welsh accent he’d almost totally erased would have re-emerged, and he’d have sounded like the bus driver.
Hoisting my bag over my shoulder, and not forgetting my umbrella, I got out.
Wind immediately whipped rain against my face, flattening my jeans against my legs and making me realise that the umbrella would be worse than useless.
My hands already turning numb from the cold, I huddled under the bus shelter and checked the map on my phone.
If Gray had been with me, we wouldn’t have needed a map. He would have known the route from memory, perhaps taking my hand and leading me onwards, our arms swinging in unison. He’d have said, ‘Come on, slow coach – let’s get out of this pissing rain.’
How I wished he was there with me. I felt an almost physical yearning for him: his vitality, his laughter, the warmth of his hand in mine. But if he was alive, I wouldn’t be here. It was only his death that had led me to this place, and now I must do what I had to do alone.
Over the sound of the rain hammering on the roof of the bus shelter, I could almost hear his voice. Not the Welsh-accented one I’d speculated about, but his usual, familiar tone: the voice I’d heard almost every day of my life for more than twenty years.
It’s okay, Anna. You’ve got this.
Without hesitating any longer, I stepped out into the rain.
It was only a five-minute walk, but my waterproof jacket was already streaming with moisture by the time I reached the row of modest red-brick houses.
There were about a dozen of them, with small, bare gardens in front of them.
I could see Christmas lights sparkling in a few of the windows; the curtains were drawn over others, although it had only just begun to get dark.
I could hear the yapping of a small dog, a baby crying – and music.
The music surprised me, in this humble, rather forlorn place. It was the notes of a flute, drifting clearly into the thick twilight like a promise of brightness and hope. I followed the sound, and it led me to one of the doors – number seven. I raised a cold hand and pressed the doorbell.
The music stopped immediately, and a few moments later the door opened.
A woman stood there, smiling tentatively. She was about twenty-five years older than me, dressed in leggings and a knitted jumper with a reindeer’s face on the front. Her grey hair hung in a plait over one shoulder. Her eyes were the rich brown of espresso coffee.
‘Louisa.’ I said the name that was also my daughter’s.
‘Anna.’ The smile remained cautious. ‘Please, come in.’
The door opened directly into the front room, a small space, but tidy and warm. There was a sofa, a dining table with two chairs, a television and a music stand, the silver flute lying on top of it, incongruously beautiful.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked. ‘You must be cold.’
‘Thank you.’
She gestured to the sofa, and I took off my coat and sat down, hearing the hum of a kettle and the clink of china from the nearby kitchen.
I tried to imagine Gray living in this house, but failed.
Louisa returned a few minutes later, a mug in each hand. She put them down on the table then hurried out again, coming back with a pint bottle of milk and a sugar bowl. I said yes, please to milk and no, thank you to sugar, and she handed one of the mugs to me.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘It’s a long way.’
I shrugged. ‘Thank you for having me.’
Then we both said together, ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ and smiled in unison, the tension seeming to lift a little.
‘It’s supposed to be the worst thing in the world, losing a child.’ Louisa’s accent was hard to identify – not the lilting Welsh I’d heard since getting off the train, but something else that could have placed her almost anywhere. ‘But really, I lost him years ago.’
I nodded, willing her to go on.
Her shoulders seemed to slacken with something like relief. She looked down at the surface of her tea but didn’t drink any of it, and then she began.
‘I was a terrible mother. I can see that now, but at the time… I was a mess. I was ill, but I didn’t know it then. I thought the world was against me. I was alone, after Dylan left. Nigel was all I had, and I needed him, but at the same time I pushed him away.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
As tactfully as I could, I explained what Seren Chamberlain had told me, leaving out the bit about bringing dodgy men home from the pub.
‘I can remember very little of it now,’ Louisa told me.
‘After Nigel left – after I cut contact with him – I had a breakdown. It was after that that I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, although my therapist prefers to call it emotionally unstable personality disorder… I was lucky – I got help. It took a while, but I did. In the past I’d probably have been locked up in some asylum. ’
‘But you’re – you’ve recovered now?’
‘As much as anyone with this condition can be said to have,’ she replied sadly. ‘I still have therapy – talking therapies, cognitive behavioural therapy, the lot. It helps. Music helps, and walking in the hills. But not medication. If it did, I’d rattle when I walked.’
‘I’m glad,’ I told her. ‘I’m glad you’re well, and here. But you never saw Gray – Nigel – again?’
She shook her head.
‘He did think of you, you know. Our daughter is named after you. We call her Lulu.’
Louisa put down her empty mug and brushed away a tear. ‘I’m glad of that. After what happened, I thought he would never want to have anything to do with me again. But it turned out that wasn’t the case.’
I felt a jolt of shock. ‘Really?’
She reached over to the table again and took up a large brown envelope. It was the kind that lawyers use, with a gusset and a loop of string to hold the flap closed, and I could see that it was full to bulging point.
‘He wrote to me,’ she said. ‘For twenty years, he wrote a card on my birthday, and on his birthday and at Christmas. He wrote when he met you, and when you got married and when your children were born. He didn’t want to see me, but he was thinking of me, all this time.’
‘That must have been…’ I began, but I couldn’t frame the words for how it would have made Louisa feel.
‘I tried, you know,’ she said. ‘I tried to get in touch with him. Or Seren Chamberlain did. It was after your Louisa was born, after I… I’d been in hospital.
We thought then that he might be willing to see me.
Seren got her boy, Joel, to look on Nigel’s Facebook and he located your house from the posts Nigel had put on there. And Joel went and saw Nigel there.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry for how he reacted. That must have hurt.’
She nodded slowly. I could see in her face the pain that rejection had caused.
‘Nigel never mentioned it in his letters to me,’ she went on. ‘But they kept coming. I knew I had to accept that that was all he would give me – all I deserved to have of my son.’
‘No one deserves to be rejected by their child like that.’ My words surprised me with their fierceness. ‘It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t well.’
‘And then I was well again.’ She spoke slowly, almost meditatively. ‘But fifteen years later, it was Nigel who was sick. He wrote to me then as well. He told me what was happening. But he still didn’t want to see me. I never got to say goodbye.’
‘I’m sorry, Louisa.’ I put my hand over hers. ‘So sorry for the loss of your son.’
She looked down, then back up at me, and she smiled.
‘There was one last letter, though,’ she said. ‘Nigel wrote it before he passed away, and I received it afterwards. I think you should read it.’
She lifted her hand from under mine, slowly and carefully as if I was a sleeping child she didn’t want to wake.
Then she lifted the brown envelope and tipped its contents into her lap.
It was packed so tightly she had to shake it to release the envelopes inside, and there were so many of them that they overflowed her lap and cascaded to the floor.
Many of them were worn and smudged with finger marks, I noticed with a stab of pain, as if they had been opened and reread many, many times.
But one was still new and pristine: a plain white DL envelope with the address here in Merthyr Adwen written on it in Gray’s familiar hand.
The letter wasn’t handwritten, though – it was typed and had been printed out. The single sheet of paper fluttered as Louisa handed it to me, because her hand was trembling.
Dear Mam
By the time you read this, it will all be over. I have asked our neighbour, a friend who I trust, to post it for me once I am gone, and by the time you read it, it will be too late for me to unmake the decision I made all those years ago.
At the time, it felt like it was the only decision I could have made. I didn’t want to be Nigel any more: the boy with the chaotic home life, the charity case at school, the one who had only one friend. I wanted to be someone else, and I suppose now I am.
But not for much longer. In a few days I will leave the home I have made with Anna and go to the place where I will die.
I’ll leave behind everything I wanted when I turned my back on you – my family, my house, my career.
It is a long time since I heard anyone call me Nigel, and soon I will hear someone call me Gray, the name I chose, for the final time.
Death has a way of focusing the mind, that’s for sure.
When I first told Anna I had no mother – that you had died when I was barely out of my teens – it felt like the only way for me to move past my old life.
But when I met Joel on the Underground that time and he told me about his illness, I knew that there was something else I could do.
I could create an anchor – a link to the past that could be broken only when one of us died.
I assumed it would be Joel, but things don’t always work out how you expect.
Now, though, I find myself looking back at those decisions and wondering why.
What was the point? I could have explained to Anna, when I knew you were recovering, why I had lied to her, and she would have understood.
I might have been afraid to let you into my children’s lives at first, but that could have changed.
I could have played the piano again, shared that with my Barney, who I think will be a fine musician one day.
I could have had a family that wasn’t built on a lie.
It’s too late now for any of that. If Anna finds you, show her this letter and let her decide what to do: to let our children continue to believe the falsehood I told, or to reveal to them who their father really was and where he came from.
I am sorry. I will always be your son.
Nigel
As I looked down at the page, a tear dropped from my eye, staining and wrinkling the paper.
‘I’m sorry.’ Hastily, I thrust it back towards Louisa.
But she said, ‘I’ve cried on it enough myself, Anna. A few more tears won’t make any difference.’
I sniffed and half-laughed, taking the letter back and gazing again at the lines of type, so hard they blurred before my eyes.
‘Take your time,’ she went on. ‘Have another cup of tea.’
She poured more tea into my mug, then stood up and returned to her music stand. A few moments later, the first notes of music drifted into the humble room, falling as softly and gently into the silence as my tears were dropping down on to the page.