Page 55 of All the Things We Never Knew

We’d never visited Swansea, where Gray grew up, because he’d said there was no point, nothing left for him there. He must have loved his mother – he’d insisted on naming our daughter after her. But as far as I knew he had never laid flowers on her grave or been to the place where her ashes were scattered.

I shut the laptop and left the study, closing the door behind me. The answers weren’t here. They were in the places that had shaped Gray as a child. That’s where I needed to look.

THIRTY-ONE

ORLA

7 August 2024

I am writing this at the table in the garden. It is already warm and has been light for well over an hour – it was before five when I was woken by Aengus and Iseult playing tag on my bed, frantic to be allowed outside to lay waste to the bird population. Now, of course, having had their breakfast and a lengthy wash, they are stretched out on the flagstones in the sun, only rousing occasionally to scold furiously at a magpie.

And for me, the day stretches ahead, almost featureless. The house is empty except for me and the cats – there are no lodgers, no meals to cook, no responsibilities. Only Barney will come this afternoon to spend an hour or two at the piano.

Unlike my daughter, I have no ear for music, but I can tell that he is improving. Not only that – there is a visible change in him when he sits down at that piano. It’s as if two things are happening to him at once: first, the weight of sadness that bows his shoulders when he arrives seems to lift; as soon as his hands touch the keys a smile appears on his face and by the time he leaves he is lighter, freer. And second, the gawkiness and awkwardness of his early adolescence leaves him, replaced by assurance – almost cockiness – that reminds me of his father. His entire body seems to be saying, Look at me! I’m good at this!

I wonder why Gray didn’t discover this gift and nurture it – why there is no piano in the front room of number eight like the one I bought for Beatrice to play. Even if, like me, he didn’t care a jot for music and actively disliked classical music, he cared about his children very deeply. To deprive Barney of something that will bring such pride and happiness for the child’s whole lifetime seems bizarre to me – almost cruel.

But perhaps this talent and passion of Barney’s has only revealed itself now. Maybe some boys are late bloomers. I grew up in a household of women; I went to boarding school with girls and only met my own daughter when she was a young woman of twenty-two – boys are a mystery to me.

And so is his late father, in his own way. I knew Gray as Anna’s husband, Lulu and Barney’s father, my neighbour. A successful man who had turned his creative passion into a thriving business. But the funeral brought home to me that his life before he and Anna moved to Damask Square is a total blank: Gray never spoke to me about his past. And at the funeral, although there were dozens of people there to pay their respects – friends, neighbours, colleagues, Anna’s sisters and their husbands, Anna’s mother and father – there was no one who might have known him as Nigel.

Anna must know his history, or at least some of it. But she has never spoken to me about any in-laws, either, nor any old friends of Gray’s. I wonder why.

THIRTY-TWO

LAUREL

‘Well, I’d call that a success.’ Harry stacked up the last few leaflets and put them in the box. ‘We’ll have more nurses than we can shake a stick at in a few years, if that lot were anything to go by.’

‘Careful what you wish for.’ I tried to echo his upbeat tone, but the truth was I was exhausted: fatigued from my sleep being interrupted by dreams of Gray, then spending the rest of the night scrolling futilely on my phone looking for clues to how I might track down Joel. Weary of putting a brave face on things at work, given that few of my colleagues knew of Gray’s existence, never mind his death. Worn out from providing care and sympathy to other people when I didn’t feel entitled to claim any myself. ‘It’s not like we can afford to pay the ones we’ve got.’

‘True.’ He winced. ‘Anyway, I think I can just about stretch to a half of lager down the Crown and Castle – fancy it?’

‘God, yes. I could murder a drink. And I don’t know about you, but if I never see another teenager in my life, it’ll be too soon.’

‘I couldn’t help noticing,’ he remarked as we made our way to the locker rooms, ‘that your girl didn’t turn up. Your fellow’s daughter, who we saw at the school earlier in the year?’

‘Lulu.’ I frowned. All day, I’d been looking out for her, trying to spot her among all the other teenage girls who’d turned up to the hospital careers open day. But I had been disappointed – not just because speaking to her would have given me a longed-for connection, however tenuous, to Gray, but because… Well, because of her. Because she was his child and she would be suffering even more than I was. I could picture Gray’s face lighting up in a smile and him saying, Ah, so you saw my girl? How is she?

Now, I wouldn’t have the luxury of imagining that conversation with him.

‘No, she didn’t show,’ I said to Harry. ‘Shame, really. But the schools only went back last week – I guess she’s busy. But she texted me a couple of days ago and said she’d see me here. I hope she’s okay.’

‘A sixteen-year-old with better things to do on a Saturday than hang out with the likes of us.’ Harry turned one way into the men’s locker room while I turned the other into the women’s. ‘Hard to imagine, really, but here we are.’

I laughed. ‘See you in ten minutes.’

It was more like fifteen by the time I’d showered, changed and applied some lip gloss, but soon we were sitting at a table in the pub garden, a jug of sangria and a bowl of chips between us.

‘Starving.’ Harry dipped a few in the paper tub of ketchup and shoved three of them into his mouth at once. ‘God, talking all day takes it out of you.’

‘I’m more thirsty.’ I gulped some sangria. ‘My throat feels drier than when I did a hundred-k cycle last weekend.’

It had been an unsuccessful attempt to escape my thoughts and subdue my body into sleep, but I didn’t tell Harry that.

‘Get you, Miss Fitness Influencer. Wasting your weekends doing that, when you could be doing things that are actually important.’

‘Like what?’ I asked.