Page 60 of All the Things We Never Knew

Shit. What do I tell her about the emotional life of an old toy horse?

‘I think he’s enjoying a well-deserved retirement,’ I hazarded. ‘Maybe one day, if you ever have a daughter, we can take him off to some specialist toy restorer and get him spruced up again, and it’ll be like a total new lease of life for him.’

‘Like on The Repair Shop. Remember, Mum, Dad was obsessed with that show during lockdown.’

‘Him and half the country,’ I said. ‘But yes, just like that. He’ll be quite safe here until you need him again.’

Or until I decided I could no longer stay in the house on my own. But there was no point in raising that prospect now, not when Lulu needed so badly to feel that her home and her memories would be here forever.

But she seemed satisfied with my fudged promise. ‘Now where’s that box of Dad’s stuff you were talking about?’

‘I hope it’s here somewhere. It’s possible he chucked it out at some point, but I don’t think so.’

I squatted down in front of the low cupboards that had been fitted beneath the eaves and eased open a door. Inside were four cardboard boxes, their sides still unfaded and the tape that sealed them fresh. On two of their lids, in Gray’s sloping capitals, ‘DVDs’ had been written with a Sharpie; the others were labelled ‘Videos’.

I burst out laughing. ‘Your bloody father.’

‘What?’ Lulu asked.

‘We had a massive row about these a few years ago. I don’t know if you remember, the bookshelves in the front room were absolutely stuffed with the things. Old movies, DVDs, box sets – he never watched them. He said they’d be worth a fortune if he put them on eBay, but I knew that was nonsense, and anyway he’d never get around to doing that either.’

‘So he put them up here?’

‘He told me he’d taken them to the charity shop. In fact he swore blind he had. But he stashed them up here instead, the bugger.’

‘Poor Dad. I think you were mean, making him get rid of things he wanted to keep.’

I sighed. ‘Maybe I was. But he got his way, didn’t he? And now it’ll be my job to get rid of them at some point.’

‘But not now?’ Lulu asked anxiously.

‘Not now. Don’t worry.’ I closed the door and opened the next one along. ‘Here we go.’

The box I’d pulled out looked quite different from the others. Its greige cardboard was faded and caked with dust – a reminder of the time, which felt as if it had lasted years, when the house was a building site and everything in our lives had been dusty. The tape that had once sealed it was dried out and peeling away. The long-dead corpse of a spider slipped out from beneath one of its flaps, making me and Lulu recoil.

‘I hope there aren’t more of those in there,’ she said with a shiver.

‘There won’t be,’ I promised, although I was far from sure. ‘Do you want to take this downstairs or look through it now?’

Lulu hesitated. ‘Let’s open it here.’

The desiccated tape pulled away quite easily from the top and sides of the box, and I eased open the flaps. Inside, I could see the back cover of a book, dark blue but faded around the edges, as if it had spent hours in bright sunlight. The borders of the pages were yellowed and curling.

Lulu lifted it out and read the title on the front cover. ‘Sixty Famous Solos. Classical Piano Sheet Music. That can’t have been Dad’s. Dad hated classical music.’

But beneath it were more books of sheet music – more than a dozen of them. Chopin’s Complete Preludes, Nocturnes and Waltzes. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Ultimate Piano Solos. Classical Piano Masterpieces for Intermediate Players.

I pulled the books out of the box, mystified. Beneath them was a brown A4 envelope with ‘Nigel Graham’ written on it in faded handwriting I didn’t recognise. I opened the flap and peered inside, then extracted a sheaf of stiff paper. There were eight sheets of it, in slightly different colours and printed in slightly different typefaces, but all bore the same logo in the top right: that of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, and each certified that Nigel Graham had passed his practical examination, from grades one through to eight.

I sifted through the pile, once and then again, studying each certificate as if there’d be some anomaly there – some other boy’s name, some obvious alteration that had been made. The text seemed to swim in front of my eyes, but when I blinked it was still there, still the same.

Gray. The man who’d ask me to turn the radio off if he walked into the kitchen when I was listening to Classic FM. The man who’d feigned an attack of the flu when a client had invited him to the opera. The man who’d come reluctantly to church when we spent Christmas with my parents, but would only mouth the words to the hymns.

And yet, between the ages of ten and eighteen, he’d been not just musically capable, but apparently gifted.

‘Mum,’ Lulu asked slowly. ‘Why did Dad never call himself Nigel?’

‘I’m not sure. When I first met him, he told me his name was Gray. That’s what everyone called him. I guess he thought it was a naff name and he’d rather be called something a bit cooler.’