Chapter Forty-Six
FORTY-SIX
William
JANUARY 2017
Dear Fiona,
I hope this letter finds you well and happy. The depth of my sadness at writing to my daughter with no knowledge of where to send this note is shameful.
How did it come to this?
How did I become this man, the kind of father who could be so neglectful?
I have questioned myself many times over the years. Did I make the best decisions? Did I properly care for the women I love? Will I leave this world knowing that I did everything I could?
I know now that the answer to all of these questions is no. It can’t be when I am writing this letter to my daughter, whom I haven’t seen for eight years, to tell her she is losing her mother when she has already lost her father.
I see now that in trying to solve one problem, I created another, and I can only hope it is not too late to fix that. If you are reading this letter, I’m afraid it means it will be up to you to fix it without my help.
I’m not sure, as I look back on the time between us arriving as a family in Bath and your decision to leave, where the fault line appeared, where it cracked, spreading in all directions like a piece of intricate lace. But the point is, I never stopped it. I could have hit the brakes before we went over the edge, but I didn’t, and I want to explain why—not because I think it absolves me, but in the hope that you will come to understand the impossible decision I had to make.
I think I knew for a long time that I wasn’t well. It seems ludicrous to admit that now. All that wasted time when I could have acted, and I didn’t. Raw fear is the only explanation I have. There can only be so many headaches, so many dizzy spells before you can no longer deny what is beating down on you. But I would recover, months would pass. I convinced myself, surprisingly easily, that was the last of it. Don’t waste the doctor’s time, don’t give your mother anything else to worry about. This was the precise moment when cowardice crept into the room, encouraged by my fleeting symptoms, like the sun blazing, then fading behind clouds on a windy day.
Self-diagnosis is a dangerous thing, but I read enough to make an educated guess. Some ministrokes can be so mild they are barely registered. They can pass in an hour, almost undetected. The big one, if it is coming for me, should, according to the experts, have come by now. If you are reading this, then perhaps it’s come for me at last.
I’m glad I’m able to write this first. I need you to understand not just the practicalities but also the one fact we never shouted loudly enough. You are so very loved, my darling girl. And it was always so. That awful night, when your mother said what she did, we were already losing her, I just didn’t know it. There was a stranger at our table for dinner that evening but I was too stupid, perhaps too scared, to confront her and act.
In the years after you returned to London, I started to see the signs that your beautiful, talented mother was not herself. But I write this with the benefit of hindsight, when I was already in the thick of hiding my own deficiencies.
When she was well, she cared for me, sometimes at the expense of you. And when I knew she wasn’t well, I followed her example, I closed ranks around her, again at the expense of you. What a truly awful thing to have to admit. But now is the time for honesty. I always imagined you would return when the rejection had lost its sting. Or perhaps when I could no longer keep her secret from the world. I hoped for a knock on the door. A surprise phone call. Is it completely crass to say I hoped the fact I was paying for your school fees showed you I cared? I worry now that it merely showed I could afford to.
I didn’t come for you, Fiona, because I was afraid to face the potential consequences. I was afraid to show you how I was diminishing and afraid to expose your mother.
Only now I have no choice. Your mother is losing herself. The very fabric of her life is unraveling around her. She is beginning to doubt herself and everyone else. The one solitary thing she never stitched together well enough is, ironically, life itself, or at least her memory of it. I’ve watched it come loose, worried that the harder I try to pull it back together, the more it unravels. How long until I am afraid to look at it at all? What horrors might it still have to show me?
It is my final wish, and I know it would be hers, too, that she stays in the apartment. Her life has always been vivid, so full of color and texture and energy. The end of it can’t be a sanitized box with smooth, clean edges, where the days bleed into the nights. Don’t let her be packed off somewhere she’ll never be able to see the sunlight. These are the thoughts that haunt me in my darkest moments.
I have signed the apartment over to you. Legally, you now own it. Even as I write this letter, I believe Meredith is incapable of managing her own affairs without help. That help will need to come from you now, Fiona. Can you find it in your heart to do that for me and for her, please?
I cannot for one second imagine a world in which Meredith wakes and I am not lying there beside her. If the tables were turned the loneliness would take me in no time. She deserves so much more—and so do you. Take the chance to discover her all over again—and let her enjoy you for however long you both have left together. It is too late for you and me, but not for you and her.
With all my love,
Dad