Chapter Thirty-Six
‘Let’s walk,’ said Henry, already getting to his feet and reaching for his stick before I could reply. ‘This may take some time, and I think the fresh air will do us both good.’
We rode the lift down to the ground floor in silence while I replayed every single conversation Henry and I had ever had in my head. I was searching for missed clues or dropped hints that this man had known my mother and effectively spent months fooling me into believing a lie.
I wanted to be angry with him. I was angry with him. But there was a new level of sadness in his eyes, as though I’d ripped off a vital protective layer and left him exposed and vulnerable to the power of his memories. He looked like a man facing a firing squad.
There were double doors that led out to the home’s expansive grounds and Henry went through them, leaning a little on his stick.
‘Are you up to this?’ I asked, meaning the walk. The ground was still damp from the rain, and the grass was certain to be slippery.
‘Probably not,’ he said, deliberately misreading me. We stepped off the paved walkway and onto the damp lawn.
The rain had cleared the air. It felt fresh and cleansing and Henry breathed it in deeply, as though stockpiling its restorative powers.
‘Before I say anything, and before you ask the many questions you have every right to do, it’s important you know the one thing I have never misled you about is my fondness for you, Ellie.
Your friendship has been a highlight I never expected to find this late in my life and if I have damaged that, if I have made you mistrust me, then it will be the second biggest regret in my life. ’
It was a question that begged to be asked.
‘What is the first?’
‘Breaking your mother’s heart,’ he said simply.
I swallowed uncomfortably.
‘I told you the story some weeks ago about how Bee and I had met?’
I nodded, still struggling to superimpose my mother into every story of Bee that Henry had shared with me. He gave a long sigh and his eyes grew nostalgic, and I could almost feel the past tugging him back through the years.
‘There were many reasons why Bee and I should never have met.’
‘Because you were older than her?’ I’d already done the maths and knew he must have been almost twelve years her senior.
Henry inclined his head. ‘Yes. There was that too. But that wasn’t what I meant.
I wasn’t supposed to be on the road where I found Bee with a punctured bicycle tyre that day.
I was running late for a meeting with the man who was going to employ me for the summer.
But I’d taken a wrong turn on the unfamiliar roads and was lost. Like I said, it was fate, pure chance that I was on the wrong road, at the wrong time, and came upon the one woman I was always meant to find. ’
There was something in his story that reminded me very much of how Rhys and I had met. Fate had a way of intervening in the most peculiar ways when it wanted two people’s paths to cross.
‘As you know, Bee flagged me down and within minutes of meeting her, I realised I wasn’t lost anymore. I was exactly where I was always meant to be.
‘There have been some very difficult moments in my life, Ellie. But falling in love with your mother was one of the easiest things I have ever done.’ He turned to me, and there was something different in his face.
It was as though the years were melting away and I was now seeing the handsome man my mother had met on a deserted country road on a sunny summer morning.
‘Of course, she should never have agreed to get in a car with a total stranger, but she did.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s just the way she was.’
It was absolutely not the way she was when she’d belonged to me and not him, but I was already sucked into his story now. I needed to hear what had happened to them.
‘She directed me to the place where I was meeting my new employer. But before hopping out of my car she pressed a folded square of paper into my hand with her address on it. “So you can drop my bike off later”.’ He tutted softly.
‘So foolish to give a man you don’t know your home address, but that was your mother.
She always looked for the best in everyone. She only saw the good, never the bad.’
Not for the first time I wondered if he had actually muddled up the Elizabeth Harker I knew with someone else. If it hadn’t been for the irrefutable evidence of the photograph, I truly wouldn’t have believed we were talking about the same person.
‘After I was done with my meeting, I drove to her home, that piece of paper clutched in my hand.’ His smile emerged. ‘I still have it, you know. The ink is faded, you can hardly read it now, but I’ve carried it with me forever, along with your mother’s memory.
‘She was waiting for me. She’d packed a picnic lunch for us.’
Mum always hated picnics. She claimed there were too many flies and ants. Apparently, she hadn’t always thought that way.
‘I think I fell in love with her on that very first day,’ Henry said, his eyes looking a little misty. ‘She was a whirlwind of fun, laughter, and joy. A unique and remarkable gift of a person.’
‘If everything was so perfect, why did you break up?’
Henry had steered us across the immaculate lawns towards a rose garden. We passed beneath an arbour into a secret garden of fragrance and exotic blooms. There were several benches set around a small bubbling fountain.
‘Shall we sit?’ he asked, sounding suddenly tired, and if I hadn’t been so absorbed in his tale, I might have noticed sooner that he was now leaning more heavily on his stick.
We sat at opposite ends of one of the benches.
‘I told you there were a great many reasons why I should never have allowed myself to fall in love with Bee. But the greatest is that when I met her, I wasn’t a free man.’
‘You were already married?’ I didn’t bother disguising my shock.
‘No. Nor was I engaged, but I had known Caroline for almost all my life. Her family and mine were very close. We’d been nudged towards each other by them for years, and we’d eventually settled into a kind of understanding.
I’d never proposed, but there was an expectation that was where we were heading. ’
‘So you led my mother on?’ I couldn’t keep the icy disapproval from my voice.
Henry’s eyes flared wide. ‘Absolutely not. I told your mother about Caroline on that very first date. I told her that my life had somehow been heading in the wrong direction, but that I didn’t know how to find my way back.
‘“If you give me the summer, I’ll show you the way,” she told me. “Neither you nor Caroline should be with someone who doesn’t love you the way you both deserve to be loved.”’
Give me the summer. Wasn’t that exactly what Rhys had asked of me? The similarities between our two stories were astonishing.
And I was so lost in their love story now, I stopped wondering who the woman was that Henry was describing. I liked her spirit, her unstoppable enthusiasm to grasp happiness wherever you could.
‘Long before the summer was over, I knew I was going to break things off with Caroline as soon as she returned from her travels. She’d gone away for the summer, touring with a friend across Europe and beyond.
No one had mobiles in those days, and even if we had, I owed it to Caroline to tell her face to face that I’d met someone else. ’
‘You were going to choose Bee?’ Somehow it was easier to keep referring to her like that, rather than calling her Mum.
‘I was. Absolutely and emphatically. She was all I ever wanted. That’s as true now as it was then.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘At the end of the best summer of my life, I told your mother I was going back to Devon. I wanted to be there when Caroline got home and to break things off as kindly and gently as I could.’
I looked down and saw that his hands were clenched in his lap, the knuckles showing white through the thin skin.
‘There was an accident on the way back from the airport. Caroline’s taxi was hit by a huge lorry. Her friend died on impact.’ He swallowed several times before he was able to continue. ‘Caroline’s back was broken, along with virtually every bone in her lower body.’
Suddenly it wasn’t just Henry who was finding it difficult to swallow.
‘I spent that night and the next by her bedside, and we almost lost her three times.
No one was certain if she was going to wake up.
But she did. She squeezed my fingers that were wrapped around hers and opened her eyes, and the first words she said to me were: “Thank God you are here. I only came back for you.”
‘She was paralysed from the waist down, and we knew then that she would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. How could I abandon her?’
There were tears streaming down his face and mine too. I was crying for a woman I never knew, and a man who’d been placed in an impossible situation, and lastly for another woman whose heart was going to get broken.
‘What did Bee say when you told her what had happened to Caroline?’ I asked.
I’d never seen anyone tortured by guilt the way Henry looked as he turned to me then in the peaceful rose garden.
‘I never told her.’
I knew my eyes were saucers of disbelief, but I couldn’t help it.
‘Why on earth not?’
Henry took his time answering, as though the words were scurrying creatures that kept getting away from him.
‘I made a judgement call. I wanted your mother to forget all about me, to go on with her life and meet someone new, and I foolishly believed the best and easiest way to achieve that was to tell her that I’d made a mistake; that Caroline was the person I wanted to spend my life with.
I thought Bee would recover quicker and less painfully if I severed everything between us, and that hate would be an easier emotion for her to live with than love. ’
‘You destroyed her with that,’ I said, fighting my mother’s corner because she no longer could and hadn’t been given the chance to when it could have changed everything.
‘I made a terrible mistake. I thought I was doing what was best for everyone. But it’s a decision I will regret until the day I die.’
I fell silent, my eyes unseeing as I tried to imagine the devastation of losing the man you loved, of feeling that you’d been betrayed by the person you trusted most in the world. Pieces of my mother, the parts I’d never really understood, were now beginning to make sense.
‘She must have been heartbroken. She’d been alone, and she’d been—’ The truth hurtled towards me out of nowhere, like a train I hadn’t seen approaching while I stood on the tracks.
‘When was this? What year did this happen?’ My words were like bullets fired from a gun.
And there it was on Henry’s face; the moment he had been steering this story towards. I didn’t need to hear the date. I already knew it.
‘Oh my God.’
He nodded slowly, a world of uncertainty in his eyes.
‘You’re my father, aren’t you?’