The Missing Letters of Mrs Bright (ARC)

by Beth Miller

  Edward went on, ‘Georgia was completely freaked, and after they recovered, she got it in her head that we should do genetic tests, see if there were medical issues that might affect them as they got older. I thought it was a daft idea, but there was no talking her out of it, and, actually, once I got my results, it was pretty interesting. It showed my Irish heritage from you; in fact, amazingly, it nailed it down to Donegal. I remember you saying your great-grandmother came from Donegal.’

  ‘Yes, she did…’ I wasn’t sure where this was going. ‘Was there anything about hereditary illnesses?’

  ‘We showed the report to the boys’ paediatrician but he didn’t think there was anything to worry about. Anyway, the relevant thing,’ and Edward raised his eyebrows, ‘was that Dad’s famous Scandinavian heritage was missing.’

  ‘Oh.’ I turned away, under the guise of making tea. With trembling hands, I poured water into mugs.

  ‘You know how he’s always gone on about being descended from Vikings?’

  ‘I certainly do.’ God, how often, and how thoroughly, Richard had told me about it.

  ‘I even did a school project on it, do you remember? Drew myself as a Viking boy? So,’ Edward said, buttering some bread, ‘I thought Dad must have made a mistake, or been misinformed. So I asked him, how come my test didn’t show up any Scandinavian DNA.’

  I dug my nails into my legs. Oh God, poor Richard. ‘And after fudging for a bit, about how those tests weren’t necessarily accurate, he told me he wasn’t my biological father.’

  ‘Jesus. Edward, I am so, so sorry.’ I splashed too much milk into the mugs and sat down. A few minutes ago I’d been furious with Richard; now I felt heartbroken for him. All those years we’d not talked about it, all those years he’d considered himself as much a true father to Edward as he was to Stella. What a horrible blow it must have been, to have had to finally reveal the painful truth we had worked so hard to suppress.

  ‘Bit of a facer, as you can imagine,’ Edward said, running his hand over his eyes.

  ‘Sweetheart. I handled it all so badly. I’m so sorry.’ A thought occurred to me. ‘Is that why we’ve not seen anything of you for such a long time?’

  He nodded. ‘Been processing it.’ He sipped his tea, winced, and fished out the teabag I’d failed to remove. ‘I was really bloody angry for a long time.’

  ‘God, I’m sure you were. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It felt as if you and Dad had played a trick on me. Like I was the butt of a joke that everyone knew except me.’

  ‘Oh, darling! It wasn’t like that at all.’

  ‘I know, and I don’t think like that anymore. But I’m telling you how I felt then.’

  I nodded, determined to stop interrupting. I must let him speak.

  ‘Georgia said I should talk to you about it, but I wasn’t ready. Actually, I’m not sure I’m ready now.’ Even as a little kid, he’d rarely cried, but his eyes were watery. ‘I didn’t even know if I was part of my family anymore.’

  ‘Oh, Edward.’ I inadvertently let out a sob, and covered my mouth. ‘Of course you are!’

  ‘No, it’s fine, I know that. Logically.’ He attended to the grill, turned fish fingers over. How prosaic life was, the way it just went on, with fish fingers and tea, when one’s whole world had been turned upside down. Not looking at me, he said, ‘Thank goodness for Georgia. And my therapist.’

  ‘You have a therapist?’

  ‘Why not? Stella had one. All the kids from complicated families are doing it these days.’

  ‘Ah God, I didn’t want to give you a complicated family.’

  ‘They all are, though, aren’t they? That’s what my therapist says. Boom times for her. But no, I’ll be honest, it was hard. It’s weird, you know, to discover that you’re not who you thought you were.’

  I shook my head. There must have been a better way for me to manage all this.

  ‘So what did Dad… Richard…’

  ‘It’s all right, Mum. He’s still my dad.’ Edward smiled. ‘He told me what had happened, and that you’d both agreed to keep it a secret. He told me he was,’ Edward paused, and continued in a lower voice, ‘always very proud that I was his son.’ He was definitely crying a bit, and he definitely didn’t want me to acknowledge that.

  ‘Jesus, Edward. I can’t believe Richard didn’t tell me any of this.’

  ‘I asked him not to, Mum.’ He slid the fish fingers onto plates. ‘I didn’t want to rake things up for you, and Dad didn’t either, especially as Granny Hurst was so ill. I did wonder, when you left him, whether he had told you after all, and it had caused a huge row.’

  ‘No, he never said a word.’ Poor Richard, carrying all that on his own. ‘So did you try and contact, er, David?’ How bizarre it felt, saying David’s name out loud, to Edward, of all people.

  ‘I met him.’

  ‘You met him?!’ My heart started banging as fast as if I’d been running.

  ‘I’ve met his wife.’

  ‘You’ve met his wife?!’

  ‘This is like that infuriating game Finlay plays,’ Edward said, ‘where he repeats everything you say.’ He picked up the plates. ‘I’ll let them eat in front of the telly, for a treat.’

  He went out, and before I had time to even think, my phone buzzed, making me jump; mind you, anything would make me jump right now. It was a text from Rose, checking in. She knew I’d come up here, but assumed the visit was purely to spend time with Edward. At some point I would have to tell her the whole thing. God, there was so much more to tell than even I had known. I hoped Rose wouldn’t be too angry that I hadn’t confided in her before now. For the time being, I decided that, like Edward, I just needed to express my feelings.

  The revelations keep on coming, Rose

  * * *

  What’s happening, K?

  * * *

  All my chickens are coming home to roost

  * * *

  Has your phone been hijacked by a cliché-bot?

  * * *

  I’ll tell you when I see you. We are going to need a LOT of wine

  Edward came back in and I put my phone away.

  ‘Would you like something to eat?’ he said. ‘There’s some nice beef casserole Georgia made, left over from the other night.’

  ‘Sod the casserole!’ Maybe I was still an impatient mother. ‘Tell me about meeting him, please!’

  ‘OK.’ Edward sat down next to me. ‘Once Dad told me David’s name, it was easy to track him down.’

  I nodded. I’d found this out myself.

  ‘Endevane is incredibly rare. It’s a corruption of an obscure Welsh name, did you know?’ Edward went on.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, faintly. My heart still seemed to think we were doing a marathon.

  ‘Is that why you love going to that cottage in Wales?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any connection.’ But as I said it, I wondered if there was some weird subconscious shit going on, as Bear might have said.

  ‘I expect I’ve got quite a lot of Welsh DNA myself, thanks to David,’ Edward said, ‘and the boys too. The DNA test confirmed we’ve got a lot of Celtic in us, at any rate.’ Luckily he didn’t expect a reply. It was going to take me a while to, as Edward put it, “process” that.

  ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘I tracked him down on Facebook, told him who I was, and he said he’d like to meet me.’ He took a nonchalant sip of tea.

  ‘How? When? Where?’ I held out my arms wide, in a visual representation of tell me everything.

  ‘It was a few months before he died, I guess. He lived in Dorset, and I was coming down south for work, so we met in Chelsea for a drink.’

  My son, and the father of my son, met in London. I would have been no more than a few miles away from them at the time. I’m surprised I didn’t get some kind of alert, like a plague of locusts, or the water in the taps running red.

  ‘It was just the one time,’ Edward said. ‘I could see he would have been a very nice-looking bl
oke when he was young.’

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  ‘He looked a bit like me.’

  ‘You are a nice-looking bloke, yourself.’ I studied him, allowing myself to catalogue the resemblances I’d always seen but never spoken of, except in letters to Bear: the fair hair flopping over the forehead, the grey-blue eyes, similar in colour but not shape to Stella’s, the cast of the jawline. ‘Was his wife there?’

  ‘No, she wasn’t, but she knew about me. I don’t know if he’d only told her after I contacted him, or if she’d always known.’

  ‘Were they happy, do you think?’

  ‘I’m not sure. He was a drinker. He told me that a few years ago his wife had had enough of him boozing, and left him.’

  I hadn’t expected David to turn out to be a drinker. But then, I didn’t really know him at all. ‘Were they separated, then?’

  ‘No, he managed to give up drinking, and she came back, but then he was diagnosed with cancer.’

  ‘What kind?’ I wasn’t sure why I needed to know that, and nor was Edward, because he looked at me oddly.

  ‘Oesophageal, I think he said. He described himself as a former alcoholic. He was up front about it. He drank orange juice. He told me straight away that he was ill, and that he didn’t know how much longer he had. He was really glad I’d got in touch.’

  I couldn’t believe Edward had, after all, despite my foolish inertia, got the chance to meet David before it was too late. It was such a relief, only relief was too small a word to describe it. I felt as if an actual physical burden had been lifted off me, that a heavy rucksack was no longer weighing me down. My heart started slowing at last.

  ‘Did you like him?’ I asked. It was an inadequate question to cover everything I wanted to know.

  ‘I don’t know. I guess so. It was only a couple of hours. He was nice enough. I didn’t feel there was a particular connection. He stared at me a lot, I suppose he was trying to see his face in mine.’

  Nice enough. All these years I’d held David in a special, magical place in my heart, the road not travelled, the one who got away. And yet other people could see him and think, nice enough. The thought made me smile.

  ‘I didn’t think of him as a replacement for Dad, or anything like that,’ Edward said. ‘Your dad’s the one who brings you up.’

  ‘I’ve always wondered, though, how things might have been different.’ I looked intently at Edward, hoping he would realise the significance of what I was saying, the guilt I felt about not giving David more time to decide if he wanted to be with me, be the father to my child. ‘How it would have been if David and I had stayed together, brought you up together.’

  ‘It probably would have been different, Mum,’ Edward said, ‘but it might not have been any better. It could easily have been worse.’

  ‘Your dad wasn’t exactly round a great deal when you were a kid, though,’ I said. ‘He was so busy, working all the hours.’

  ‘I was never in any doubt that he loved me,’ Edward said. ‘He was, and is, a good dad.’

  Bear told me I’d made up an imaginary love story. That things with me and David weren’t how I remembered them. ‘He was very handsome,’ she’d said, ‘but I don’t remember him being all that nice to you.’ Maybe she and Edward were right, and things wouldn’t have been better with David. Either way, it was high time to draw a line under it. I hadn’t married David, I’d married Richard. It hadn’t been perfect, not by any means, but for a long time, it had been good enough.

  ‘David asked me to pass on a message to you, Mum.’

  ‘To me?’ Christ. Like I said, Rose, the revelations keep on coming.

  ‘He said he wasn’t very nice to you when you told him about me, and to tell you he was sorry.’

  ‘Ah.’ I closed my eyes for a moment, to let that one wash over me. ‘He was terribly young. We both were.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  I opened my eyes. ‘Yes, darling.’ Just squashing down thirty years of repressed stuff here, but otherwise, I’m dandy. ‘Are you?’

  ‘I’m very relieved I’ve told you.’

  ‘Right back atcha.’ I smiled at him. ‘Did he want a relationship with you, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think so, and I didn’t want one with him. I kind of needed to see him, but once was fine. His wife Verity called me when he died, said she thought he’d have appreciated me coming to the funeral. So I went with Georgia. We didn’t talk to anyone apart from Verity. I spotted his kids, but I wasn’t sure if they knew about me or not. So I didn’t approach them.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Edward. You’re such a… such a…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Such an amazing grown-up.’ I stroked his cheek, and then took his hand in mine. He held onto it tightly and we sat for a few moments in silence. I burned with a thousand questions, but I knew that if there was any more to tell, he would tell me in his own time. Perhaps it would take a while for him to open up any further. Perhaps I’d never know. Perhaps there wasn’t any more to tell.

  ‘Mum,’ he said, breaking into my thoughts. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  He took a mouthful of tea, made a face as it was cold, and said, ‘Do you not love Dad anymore?’

  Edward – a mature man, and yet sometimes, still my little boy.

  ‘I do love him, sweetie. I thought I didn’t, before. But I’ve realised I do, it’s just in a different way, a way I didn’t immediately recognise as love.’

  ‘Love is complicated, isn’t it?’ he said, and he came over and put his arms round me. It was our first hug in I don’t know how long.

  ‘It must have been hard for you, back then,’ he said, ‘when you were pregnant with me.’

  ‘Oh, darling.’ My eyes filled with tears. In his arms I allowed myself to remember, for the first time in forever, the paralysing cold dread I’d felt when I realised David didn’t want to know. Imagining Mum’s reaction – ‘You must give the baby up for adoption.’ Or Rose’s – ‘I’ll book you an abortion.’ Not knowing the right thing to do, making decisions that resonated down the years.

  ‘Sorry I haven’t been there for you and Dad these last few months,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve been dealing with a lot,’ I said. ‘We both understand.’ I knew I could speak for Richard when I said this. ‘And I’m sure Stella would too, if you ever want to tell her.’

  ‘God, I suppose I should.’ I felt him shake his head against my shoulder. ‘I’ll never hear the end of it. I’ll go and see them soon.’ He let me go and sat back in his seat. ‘And can we come to Bryn Glas for a few days in the summer holidays?’

  You would never know that moments earlier he had been in the grip of powerful emotions. I admired his ability to bounce right into the next thing.

  ‘I was telling Georgia what a great place it was for a run-around when I was a kid, and she’s mad keen for the twins to be somewhere outdoorsy with no internet.’

  ‘How lovely!’ I decided I’d let them find out when they arrived that Imogen’s sons were installing super-fast Wi-Fi.

  ‘When can you move in? Are the renovations finished?’

  ‘Nearly. I’ve arranged to take it from Wednesday. Imogen’s managed to convince her family to give me a rent reduction on the grounds that I am a sensible and mature woman. Ha! If only they knew. And because I’m going to restore the barn.’

  ‘You’ll stay with us a few more days, then, won’t you?’ Edward asked. ‘No point rushing off if it’s not ready yet, and the boys love having you around.’

  ‘I love seeing them. And you.’ I had to press my lips together to avoid any more teary outbursts. My son wanted me to stay. I hadn’t blown everything.

  I’d been accustomed, lately, to looking back on my life as a series of minor disasters and major errors. But actually, you could look at it in an entirely different way. My life was full of exceptional children and wonderful friends. New possibilities were right around the corner. When you
compared my life to a lot of other people’s, it turned out that I was really extremely lucky.

  ‘Daddy!’ Jamie called from the living room. ‘Can we have pudding?’

  ‘Cheeky sods,’ Edward said, ‘they had a massive ice cream with you.’

  ‘I’ll make them a fruit salad,’ I said, getting up. I gave him one last kiss, my golden-haired boy, and then I started slicing apples and bananas, and let the prosaic slide back into my life. It was less exciting, for sure, but considerably more restful.

  Letter written on 17 June 1988

  Dearest Bear,

  * * *

  Oh God, B. I don’t know how to even start this letter. I don’t know if I’m coming or going. Shit, shit, I’m so all over the place. I wish you were here and I could sit next to you with a couple of rum and Cokes and tell you the whole thing. Or maybe just Coke for me… that’s a big clue right there. I daren’t tell Rose, she’d start fussing and I really don’t want any fussing. As for my mum, she will kill me. I’m never telling her, full stop.

  OK. Long story short. You know I’ve been seeing David and I’m in love, love, love? It’s been absolute bliss. I’ve barely seen the inside of a lecture theatre these last few months, we’ve hardly been out of bed. So, deep breath Bear, that little chick’s come home to roost. A few days ago I fainted on the way to a lecture, and my tutor sent me to the GP. He did a preggers test, and I expect you can guess the result.

  It took me till yesterday to pluck up the nerve to tell David. Oh, Bear, it was awful. Awful doesn’t even cover it. It was like he was a different person. I suppose I’d sort of hoped that he would kiss me, hold me, tell me it would be OK, ask me if I wanted to get married, even. But he kind of acted like it was all a major inconvenience that I needed to sort out. He was so matter-of-fact, I even wondered if this wasn’t the first time a girl had given him this news. Basically, he assumed I’d get an abortion. He didn’t ask how I was feeling, or anything. His first comment was, ‘I can pay half if that helps.’ I didn’t even clock what he meant, I thought he meant half of the costs of the baby, or maybe even half of the cost of the wedding. Thank God the penny dropped before I said anything about a wedding!