Chapter 46
46
All the way home, Tristan pondered what Thea had said about Lorelai’s strange behaviour. He couldn’t just shrug it off. Perhaps it was the recent talk with Charlotte about unearthing information from historic sources that was unsettling him, but he kept turning things over in his head. Sighing, halfway back to his house, he pulled into a side road, turned the car around and headed back to Lower Brambleton. He knew he’d spend the evening worrying if he didn’t swing by Nightshade Cottage, and if, as he hoped, Lorelai was fine, it would also be a good excuse to see if Charlotte was about. He wanted, he needed, to see her again. There was no point trying to dismiss what he was starting to feel for her. If anything, the discussions they’d had yesterday after that weird encounter with her ex had clarified his feelings for her. He wouldn’t have been half so bothered by Todd if he hadn’t been starting to fall for Charlotte. He’d loved spending time with her over the past few weeks, and he wanted to continue seeing her, even when she moved back to Bristol. He really hoped she was feeling the same way.
Pulling into the driveway, he noticed the light on in the annexe, and his heart sped up. He’d definitely knock on the door later. He headed around the back of the house, trying to rehearse how to broach the subject with Lorelai. She could be the most easy-going person in the world, but when the mood took her, she could also be the most stubborn. She wouldn’t take kindly to the suggestion that something was wrong with her memory, and he knew he’d have to handle things carefully.
Reaching the back door that led into the utility room, he paused and peered in. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to see. Lorelai was more likely to be settling down in her living room at this time of the evening. He’d intended to give a brisk knock of the door and then go in for a chat. What he saw, however, made him freeze in the act of knocking.
It was as if what Thea had told him was being rewound and replayed, right in front of his eyes. Lorelai was sitting at the kitchen table, with a huge, disorganised pile of paperwork in front of her, frantically rifling through it, and clearly looking for something. She looked agitated, and more stressed than he’d ever seen her. Observing her for a few seconds longer, Tristan’s heart sank. Maybe Thea was right: it looked as though they did have cause for concern.
Gently, not wanting to startle her, he tapped on the windowpane. Lorelai glanced up, and as if a switch had been flipped, her expression changed when she saw him. He pushed open the utility room door and moved quickly into the room, before she could struggle out of the wooden kitchen chair.
‘Hi, Gran,’ he said gently. ‘Don’t get up.’ He pulled out the chair next to her and sat down. ‘What are you looking for?’
Lorelai gestured vaguely to the papers that were strewn over the table. ‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. ‘I was just, er, just hoping to…’ She trailed off in apparent confusion. ‘It can wait. What can I do for you, my darling?’ And there, behind the befuddlement, was his grandmother. Tristan fought an inexplicable urge to burst into tears. He had no idea how long she’d been sitting there, but there was no evidence of her having cooked dinner for herself, or any other signs that she’d been away from the kitchen table.
‘I was just passing,’ he said softly, ‘and I thought I’d see how you were.’
Lorelai smiled knowingly. ‘Making a duty visit to your grandmother before you pop next door to see her tenant?’
Tristan smiled back, feeling more reassured by Lorelai’s tone. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Well, I’m sure Charlotte will be as pleased to see you as I am.’ She reached forward to try to bundle up the papers, but as she did so, several of them fell onto the floor between herself and Tristan. ‘Bugger,’ she muttered, leaning down to retrieve them.
Tristan was swifter. He picked up the fallen documents and couldn’t help but notice some very familiar handwriting on the one nearest to him; handwriting he hadn’t seen for a long time.
‘What is this, Gran?’ he asked carefully. His eyes were drawn to the page he was holding, not just because it was so recognisable, but because the penmanship became sloppier the further down the page it went, as if the writer was in an increasing state of frustration. It was a section of a handwritten letter, but not the beginning of it, and Tristan’s brow furrowed in confusion as he began to read.
‘Just give it back to me, darling,’ Lorelai said quietly, but there was an undercurrent of tension in her voice. ‘It’s something I should have binned years ago. That’s all I was doing now when you came in. It’s nothing important.’
Eyes glued to the page, Tristan ignored his grandmother. In mounting confusion, as the words he was reading began to sink in, he found he couldn’t tear his eyes away. Eventually, he reached the bottom of the page and looked up.
‘This is from Great-Uncle Philip,’ he said softly. ‘I recognise the handwriting. Who’s it written to?’
Lorelai’s silence extended between them. Impatiently, Tristan looked at her, willing her to answer.
‘It’s nothing,’ Lorelai eventually insisted. ‘Just an old love letter to a girlfriend, that’s all. Give it back to me, there’s a love.’
‘I never knew Uncle Phil had a girlfriend. He kept that close to his chest.’ Tristan gave a brief grin, which faded from his face when he saw the expression of unease on Lorelai’s face. ‘Gran… what aren’t you telling me?’ He glanced down at the rest of the papers he’d retrieved from the floor and saw the first page of the letter. Before his grandmother could snatch it back, he began to read. As he did so, the amusement that his uncle might have had a secret girlfriend morphed into something entirely different.
‘Tristan…’ Lorelai said again. ‘Just give them back to me. They don’t concern you.’
Impatiently, Tristan shook his head and continued reading. As he did so, his hands started to shake so badly, he nearly dropped the letter again.
‘Darling,’ Lorelai murmured. ‘Let me try to explain…’
It was as if Lorelai’s voice was light years away. Tristan’s world had shrunk to the words on the page he was holding. The writing began to blur before his eyes as he read further, trying to stem the rush of emotions that threatened to overwhelm him.
‘He was in love with Mum…’ Tristan heard his own voice as if it was outside his own body. ‘All those years, he was in love with her.’ From the corner of his eye, he could see Lorelai nodding.
‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘Your mother was the only woman Philip ever loved.’
A terrible thought occurred to Tristan as the possible repercussions of what he was holding sunk in. ‘Did she… did she ever feel the same way?’ With a struggle, he raised his gaze to look Lorelai straight in the eye. He had to know she was being truthful.
Lorelai didn’t hesitate when she shook her head. ‘No. She never felt for him as he felt for her.’ Lorelai tried to reach for the pages in his hand. ‘Let me have those. It’s all ancient history. An old man’s desire for someone he knew he could never have.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us, Gran?’ Tristan said. He could feel a pain in his throat that refused to go away, no matter how hard he swallowed. ‘All those years that Uncle Philip kept his distance from us… and we couldn’t work out why. Was it because of this?’
Lorelai nodded. ‘Your mother was Uncle Philip’s best and brightest student when she was at university. She was all set for a career in academia, under his tutelage, when she finished her postgraduate degree. Philip adored her, thought they’d make a wonderful research team. He’d never been in love before: he was forty years old when she came to work with him, and he fell for her, hook, line and sinker. Your mother was twenty-five.’ She paused. ‘Somehow, though, she always seemed to be the one who was wiser about the world. He’d spent his whole career in labs, in libraries, pursuing the abstract and chasing the unknown. He had very little idea about life outside his subject.’
Tristan nodded. The perception he’d had of his great-uncle tallied very much with Lorelai’s account of him. The man had been so bound up with his research, with his books, that Tristan and Thea had always been slightly intimidated by him. When he’d come to live with Lorelai at the end of his life, he’d been a remote figure, and had shunned any attempts by the twins to get to know him better. ‘So, what happened?’
‘They’d secured some funding from the European Union to extend the research she’d carried out for her doctorate. It wasn’t quite enough, but Philip convinced Laura to stay on for the two years of the project – he assured her he’d find funding from other sources to make it work. Really, he just wanted to be with her, and the prospect of another two years’ study with her was a great reason for him to keep pushing for the money. She even moved into his spare room – he was living in Redland in Bristol at the time – and they spent day and night together.’ She paused, searching Tristan’s face for a reaction before continuing. ‘I suppose he thought that, eventually, with them both in such close quarters, she’d fall in love with him, too.’
‘But that didn’t happen.’
‘No.’ Lorelai sighed. ‘You could say that it was written in the stars. Your father, who was a couple of years older than your mother, as you know, had graduated before she’d come to work in Philip’s department. He’d been working at Greenwich Observatory since he’d graduated, but he wanted to get back into the research side of things. Being far more commercially minded than Uncle Philip, though, it was a means to an end – his goal was to go out into industry, eventually, and he saw a short-term placement at North Wessex as a good string to his bow to achieve that aim. He and Uncle Philip could never see eye to eye about that: Philip was an academic through and through: he lived for the intellectual challenge of discovery and research. Your father saw research as a means to an end, and his goal was to work for a corporation, at the cutting edge of commercial research, if he could. They often argued about the merits of their own paths. It was never an easy relationship.’
‘So Dad came to work in Uncle Philip’s lab?’ Tristan let out a breath, feeling as though he was bracing himself for what he knew was inevitably coming.
‘Yes. He was everything that Philip wasn’t… charismatic, confident, charming… your mother, of course, was smitten. Uncle Philip watched it all happen; observed the woman he adored falling in love with his own nephew, and he couldn’t do anything to stop it.’ Lorelai brushed at her eyes impatiently. ‘When your parents decided to get married, it was the final straw for him. He cut off contact with them both, and with me, for a long time. By the time you and Thea were born, he’d retreated so far into his work that he was a virtual stranger to us all. As far as I know, he never told your mother how he felt but when he died, I was sorting through some of his old paperwork. That’s when I found the letter. He obviously never sent it to her, but it was all there.’
‘So Mum never knew?’ Tristan asked. He was trying to keep a foot on the bottom of the pool, but the abrupt intersection of the past and present was sending him off balance. He’d spent most of his life trying to get away from the traumatic undercurrents of the past, and now it felt as though the waves were once again rising around him.
Lorelai smiled sadly. ‘I have no idea. Your Uncle Philip was intensely private: rather like you, in fact. Played his cards very close to his chest for his whole life, never letting anyone in.’
Tristan winced at the comparison: his memories of his uncle were of a person who seemed embittered by experience, and reluctant to let anyone close to him. Was he, himself, really like that?
‘The accident destroyed your uncle almost as much as it did the three of us,’ Lorelai continued. ‘But he could never talk about it. The maudlin side of me wonders if it was a broken heart that killed him, in the end. After your mother died, he just seemed to give up. By the time he came to live with me, he was damaged beyond repair.’ Lorelai looked as though she was about to add more, but at the last moment she stopped herself.
This did not go unnoticed by Tristan. ‘What aren’t you telling me, Gran?’
‘Nothing, darling,’ Lorelai replied, a little too quickly. ‘Heavens!’ she then exclaimed, rising from the chair with a creak. ‘I had no idea it was that far past dinner time. I’d better get something together. Did you want to stay for a bite?’
‘Gran, please.’ Tristan reached out a hand and covered one of Lorelai’s, hoping to stay her progress before she started buzzing around the kitchen. ‘I know when you’re not being truthful with me. There’s something else, isn’t there?’
‘Don’t be daft!’ Lorelai’s smile looked forced, and Tristan became worryingly aware that he didn’t know the whole story.
‘Gran,’ Tristan said, keeping his tone as gentle as he could. ‘Whatever else you need to tell me, I’ll understand. I promise you.’ Mindful of his earlier conversation with Thea, and wanting as much clarity as he could get now, for fear of what might happen in the future if Lorelai really was in danger of losing her memory, he pushed again. ‘You’ve always been there for me, and I want to be there for you now. You shouldn’t have to keep things to yourself any longer.’
Drawing a deep breath, Lorelai’s expression was bleaker than he’d ever seen it. He knew she was steeling herself to give him the final part of the puzzle. As she faced Tristan, and looked him straight in the eye, he felt the warning creak of Pandora’s Box being fully opened, and for a moment, he wanted to slam the lid shut again.
‘Tristan, my darling, darling boy,’ she began. Tristan felt the warmth of her hand as it closed over one of his, and he braced himself for another revelation.