The Unforgotten

by Laura Powell

  ‘That’s right,’ says Jerry with a nod.

  ‘You must be Mary’s husband,’ continues the man, glancing into the hall and turning over a large padded white envelope in his hand. ‘Is she home?’

  The man’s eyes are purpled with tears and his hair is oily, but his black suit looks expensive.

  ‘No, she’s not,’ says Jerry carefully, looking at the envelope. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘It’d be easier if I came in,’ says the man, a nervous edge to his voice.

  He turns over the envelope again and traces his finger along the seal. There is no name, not even an address on it. Jerry looks at him for a second longer, then steps back to let him inside.

  ‘What’s this about?’ he says when the front door is shut and they are standing either side of the telephone table, a potted orchid between them. ‘Are you a friend of my wife?’

  ‘No, but I think my father was,’ says the man. ‘I’ve just come from the church. That’s why I’m…’ he gestures to his black tie. ‘Sorry, I haven’t even introduced myself. Simon Gallagher.’

  Simon sticks out his hand again and Jerry takes it a second time. Was. Gallagher. He lets a tiny sigh escape. John Gallagher is gone for good then. And he is instantly guilty at his relief.

  ‘My father left this package with one of his nurses, it’s for your wife,’ says Simon. ‘I didn’t even realise he had visitors apart from me.’

  ‘What’s inside?’ says Jerry, surprised at his own bluntness. He composes himself. ‘I’m sorry. None of my business. My condolences.’

  ‘Thank you. I just wondered… do you know whether they were close?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ says Jerry. ‘Old acquaintances, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Simon. A pause. ‘I haven’t looked inside. I didn’t even know it was there.’

  ‘I’ll see she gets it.’

  Simon looks crestfallen.

  ‘I was rather hoping that I might give it to her myself. I wanted to ask her if he’d said much about me when she visited him.’ Simon props a palm on the telephone table. ‘He was a very closed man, my father. Sometimes I think I hardly knew him at all. I just thought that… I don’t know what I thought.’

  ‘She’ll be a while, I’m afraid,’ mutters Jerry. He clears his throat. ‘She’s out shopping with our daughter and… Well, she only saw him once at the care home.’ Then he adds as casually as he can, ‘Your father didn’t talk about her then?’

  ‘He didn’t mention her once,’ says Simon, as though still surprised. ‘I thought the nurse must have made a mistake when she gave me the address and this,’ he adds, raising the envelope. ‘Dad didn’t have many friends, even when he was younger. I was writing his memoirs and—’ He stops and shakes his head. ‘Listen to me going on.’

  ‘His memoirs?’ blurts out Jerry, horrified. ‘He’s written an autobiography?’

  ‘Well, I was ghostwriting it but he changed his mind last minute, so the finished book has a grand old audience of four. Him, me, my secretary and an editor. But what can you do?’

  He spreads his hands and forces a laugh but it sounds hollow. Jerry smiles placidly. Simon holds out the envelope and he takes it. It is heavy; heavier than he expected. Whatever is inside is hard and blockish and rectangular. Simon still doesn’t move.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ says Jerry as politely as he can. ‘A beer? Soft drink?’

  Simon shakes his head and looks at the door with a sigh.

  ‘No, I should get to the wake. I was going to ask if your wife – if Mary – wanted to come. As I say, I didn’t know about her until today, otherwise she’d have been invited too, of course. It’s a shame she’s not here.’

  ‘A shame,’ agrees Jerry with a nod, opening the front door. Simon is just reaching the gate when he turns back.

  ‘I almost forgot,’ he calls. ‘You don’t know anyone with the initials BB? Perhaps another of their old friends?’

  Jerry shakes his head tightly. He waits until Simon’s silver saloon is a spot at the end of the road before he closes the door, presses his head against it, and lets out a long shaky sigh.

  John Gallagher hadn’t looked at all as Jerry had expected. He had pictured him, as he raced to Eugenie Heights, as a tanned hulk of a man with shining black curls, crystal eyes and a suave silk suit. Then he saw him.

  ‘So you’re John,’ he had blurted out.

  He had wanted to laugh. This was the man who had held his wife captive all these years? This pale worm in an orthopaedic bed?

  He had tried to mask his surprise when John spoke and he recognised his voice from the television. He masked it again when John admitted that he had loved Mary, a schoolgirl then with a different name. It all sounded so seedy.

  Jerry had always known that, inwardly, Mary was never fully his; that she was bound by something or someone else, only he hadn’t considered that the man would be so old and so unthreatening, or she so young when she knew him. He hadn’t wanted to know.

  He still didn’t want to know anything more than where Mary was – he needed to find her urgently; he had found out from the doctor’s letter about the cancer and that her treatment was to begin the next week – but as he stood over John’s bed, he let himself listen to the story about the innocent wife-beating man who was wrongly imprisoned for those famous murders, and the biscuit factory owner who Mary believed was the real killer. There was something improbable yet unsurprising about the story. Everything slotted together; finally he understood why she was as she was.

  But when John got to the bit of the story about Mary’s mother; about how he covered it up and carried the guilt for Mary to save destroying her life further, and her memories, Jerry had gripped the window pane and sunk onto the sill. He closed his eyes too.

  When he opened them again, John looked different. He was taller and more forceful. Jerry’s expression must have been transparent because it had made John smile in a slow, strange way. I win. I loved her more than you ever could, said that smile. Jerry had jumped to his feet and made for the door.

  ‘Send her back to me,’ John had called after him. ‘I need to explain it all properly to her.’

  ‘Do you really think I’m going to ask her to come back here? She’s ill. Seriously ill.’

  John had winced but hadn’t asked more. ‘Still, it should be her choice,’ was all he said.

  Jerry had glared at him one last time and stormed out. He hated that John was right. But he had intended to tell her. Then he had seen her; his Mary. She had held his hand. She had really cried.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’ she had said, tightening her grip on his hand.

  ‘I saw you on the street back there. You walked so fast, I couldn’t keep up.’

  ‘No, how did you know about St Steele?’

  ‘John told me,’ he had said. He paused. ‘You disappeared and I was looking everywhere for you… I found his name and address on that bit of paper in your old diary.’

  She had turned white but she still hadn’t dropped his hand.

  ‘I always knew you weren’t from Reading,’ he had admitted. ‘Your accent…’ She had sucked in her breath. He had opened his lips. ‘I’d have understood if you’d just told me about your mother dying when you were young and wanting to start fresh with a new name and everything. John said how close you were with her and how hard it hit you.’

  ‘John,’ she remarked, as though trying out the name on her lips for the first time.

  ‘He was an old friend of yours.’

  ‘He was an old lover,’ Mary had corrected him gently.

  ‘An old lover,’ he had agreed quietly through gritted teeth.

  He could have said the rest but she had cried again. He would tell her later.

  ‘And you can really accept me lying to you all these years?’ she said between sobs.

  ‘Oh, Mary,’ and he had pushed his face into her hair that smelled different; it smelled of coconuts.

  ‘Did he say anything else?’ sh
e had asked, her eyes faraway.

  She was watching a branch moving in the distance. Something was rustling. A magpie had appeared in the clearing. It swooped low and its wings brushed the pond. The water rippled.

  ‘Just that I might find you here.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘That’s all,’ said Jerry with a careful nod; he would tell her later. ‘But you didn’t need to run off. Of course you should visit a dying old friend, lover, whoever he was to you. I’d have understood… it all.’

  ‘I should tell you the whole story.’

  They had walked for two hours around the clearing, through the woods, along Newl Grove and down to the shingle. They walked until their feet were soaked, until their shoes were gritty, until the sky was black, and until every noise stopped except the whisper of the waves and the lilt of Mary’s silvery voice.

  He had let her spill out every scrap about her guilt and about the asylum and the breast cancer, which she truly believed was her punishment, and all the while he pretended he knew none of it. About Nigel Forbes too, and George Paxon, and John Gallagher whom she had thought loved her, but now realised never cared for her at all.

  ‘I didn’t even know him,’ she finished. ‘It was all fantasy, I built it up in my head.’

  Then Jerry opened his lips – it was time to tell her what John had really done for her. But the rain had started again and she pointed at a sign that said ‘rooms available’.

  ‘Let’s stay the night,’ she had cried breathlessly.

  There was only one room left, a single. They shared the narrow bed and locked together as a whole while they slept, and while the owner’s Yorkshire Terriers scratched at the bedroom door. When they woke, they kissed.

  ‘We’ll fight this, I’ll come to every hospital appointment with you,’ he had whispered in her ear before they rose.

  They ate their slippery bacon rashers and cold toast and strong tea in silence.

  She still didn’t speak as he drove her home, but neither did she look out at the streets with a wistful face, as he had expected her to. Instead, she rested her hand on the gearstick, on top of his hand.

  ‘We’re going to be OK, aren’t we?’ she had said, as though she was realising it, rather than asking him.

  And all of her stayed in the car with him; all of her was his, finally. He couldn’t risk losing her now.

  Jerry finishes his lager in one and turns over the envelope in his hands. He opens a third bottle and a fourth. He wipes down the worktops, he stokes the bonfire again and he throws on a branch to resurrect it. Then he sits on the hard splintered bench between the conifer and the pear tree and, in a single movement, he tears open the padded white envelope. The ripping sound cuts into the peace of the morning. He pauses and looks around before reaching inside to pull out the contents.

  It is a book. The pages are stiff and the cover is blank but for a row of x marks where he supposes the title should be, and beneath them:

  PROOFCOPY

  a memoir by John Gallagher

  Jerry flips open the first page, then changes his mind and shifts to the back. There is an index. He scrolls down his thumb to B, to E, to M, to S, but her name isn’t listed. He looks for St Steele next; for Cornwall; for Cornish Cleaver; for Nigel Forbes, but he finds none of them. He thumbs through the front pages. Two are blank, one has the author’s name again and something about copyright laws. There is a fourth introductory page too, which is blank but for these ten words.

  For BB. Some things are too precious to be contained.

  Jerry smacks shut the book and jumps to his feet. He grips the cover, raises his right arm and draws it back. As he slams his arm forward again, releasing his fingers and hurling the book across the garden, he closes his eyes and lets out a bellyful roar. There is a clunk and a hiss, as the flames bolt up out of the dustbin. Jerry opens his eyes and crosses the lawn to the bonfire. The flames are already licking the cover; the pages are wilting and charring nicely.

  He doesn’t notice the smaller, thinner envelope that fell out from between the pages as the book flew across the garden; he doesn’t notice that the envelope has landed on the rockery; and he doesn’t see that it is white and letter-sized with three blockish forward-slanting words on the front, written in bright blue ink.

  To my Betty.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Mum, Dad, Amy, Mollie, Nan V, Guppa, Nan P, Grampa and Andrea for your unstinting belief and encouragement. To my first readers, Eleanor Drew, Paul Sellars and Hannah Walford. For your part in turning this into a reality, thank you to Fiona Brownlee, Robbie Guillory, Adrian Searle, Richard Skinner, Karolina Sutton, Laura Waddell and everyone at Literature Wales. Huge thanks to Norah Perkins, a most wonderful agent, who was the best support imaginable during the bumpy bits – and has made it so fun along the way. Thank you to my friends – especially Kathryn, Kim, Alix, Gemma, Sarah R and Nat – for listening patiently to me witter on about this for years, and for never once saying “isn’t it done yet?” Thank you to Sarah B for seeing it through the final hurdle and being the most loyal and enthusiastic cheerleader. Thank you to Wills for your support and for reading this in its many drafts. And last but by no means least, thank you to my amazingly talented Faber friends – Georgina, Jonathan, Judith, Julia, Matt, Molly, Rosie and Wendy – without whom it wouldn’t have been possible to, as we say each session, ‘keep going’.