In Australia, Adam Torrington took a few days’ emergency leave from his job as a university lecturer because his ex-wife Judith had died suddenly of an aneurism. Her death had shocked everyone because she’d always been so fit and healthy, and his daughter Gemma, who’d been living with her mother, was nearly hysterical with grief.
He’d rushed round to see her straight away when a friend of Judith’s phoned to tell him the sad news.
‘I can manage on my own,’ Gemma shouted at him when he arrived at the house. She tried to bar his way in and he had to push her aside.
‘No, you can’t. You may be ahead a year at school, but you’re still not even seventeen, and won’t be an adult legally till you’re eighteen. If you don’t let me look after you, you could even be taken into care, because you have no other relatives in Perth.’
‘You don’t want to look after me!’
He stared at her in surprise. ‘Where the hell did you get that idea? Of course I do. I want very much to take care of you now.’
‘Then why did you hardly ever come to see me after you’d left?’
He sighed. ‘You know why. Your mother wouldn’t allow me to see you more often.’
‘What? You’re lying. She told me you didn’t want to see me more often.’
This accusation cropped up at regular intervals and for all her claims to be grown up, there were times when Gemma still acted like a small, sulking child about her parents’ divorce.
‘You should have treated Mum better then she wouldn’t have divorced you,’ she muttered.
‘It wasn’t anyone’s fault. We just … grew apart. She was the one who suggested divorcing, actually. I wanted to try counselling.’ Because he hadn’t wanted to lose his daughter. He held up one hand as Gemma opened her mouth. ‘I’m not arguing about that again. If you won’t believe the truth, I can’t do anything about it.’
‘I’ve only got your word for what the truth is … now!’
He ignored that, reminding himself how badly she must be hurting. ‘I’ll go and pick up some of my clothes and move into the spare bedroom. Do we need to go food shopping?’
Silence, then she nodded. ‘I don’t have much money and we were due to go shopping. Mum used credit cards most of the time, not cash.’
‘You’d better come with me, then. You’ll know better than me what we need at the supermarket. After that,’ he hesitated but it had to be done, ‘we’ll need to arrange the funeral.’
Which made her start weeping and slam off into her bedroom.
He gave her a few minutes then yelled from outside the door. ‘I’m leaving in ten minutes. If you want to help sort out the arrangements you’ll need to come with me.’
She joined him a couple of minutes later.
He went to his flat first to get some clothes and other stuff. Gemma stared round it as if she’d never seen it before, though she’d been here a few times. ‘Pokey, isn’t it? No wonder you want to come back to Mum’s house.’
‘That house is still half mine legally. I left it like that so that you could stay there till you grew up. Um, did your mother make a will, do you know?’
‘I don’t know. Could you ring her lawyer and ask?’
‘I’d prefer to call in and do that face to face. It looks as if we’ve got a busy day ahead of us.’
It would probably be good to keep Gemma occupied, but he’d be up until after midnight catching up with some crucial assessments he had to do for work.
They got the shopping over and done with, then went to the lawyer’s office, where the receptionist was very helpful once Adam had explained the problem.
She nipped in to see her employer between clients and he took Adam and Gemma into a little side room to have a quick word and arrange for them to get a copy of the will.
‘Two copies,’ Gemma said. ‘I want my own.’
He glanced quickly at Adam, who nodded.
‘When you get the will, I suggest you go somewhere private to read it. Wills can be … upsetting. Though this one is very straightforward.’
So they went to sit in the car, each with a copy.
Adam finished first and saw Gemma brushing away a tear. He didn’t say anything, waited till she looked at him.
‘So you own everything now except my half of the house, Gemma.’
‘I’d rather have Mum back.’
‘Of course you would. So would I.’ He tried to hold her hand for comfort and she let him for a minute or two, then shook him off.
‘What now?’
‘We have to arrange the funeral. When your mother’s friend rang me she said there has to be an autopsy, though they have a fair idea what happened.’
‘Cut Mum up? That’s horrid!’
‘I agree.’ He let a minute or two pass then said, ‘Do you think your mother would have preferred a female undertaker?’
Gemma managed a nod but didn’t seem able to speak.
‘I know where there is one. A friend of mine used them when his mother died recently and he said they were very good.’
The undertakers were, but the interview was inevitably a harrowing ordeal and Gemma’s anguish had tears welling in his eyes as well, more for her than for her mother.
His daughter even let him put an arm round her as they left.
She began sobbing loudly the minute they were in the car and throughout the journey, and bolted for her room as soon as they got into the house.
Damn. He’d forgotten to ask Gemma if there was a spare front door key. He might need to get a new one cut for himself because Judith had made a big show of changing the locks the very day he moved out.
After he’d put his things away in the spare bedroom, he went to knock on Gemma’s door and heard her talking to someone. On the phone to a friend, he supposed. ‘What do you want for tea?’ he asked when she came to the door, eyes reddened, lashes damp.
‘I’ll get it for myself.’
‘I’d prefer us to eat together from now on.’
‘You’re not a good cook.’
‘Are you?’
She shrugged. ‘Not bad. Mum taught me.’
‘Then you can cook the evening meal and I’ll clear up after it.’ He could see her thinking this over and was hard put not to sigh in relief when she nodded.
It wasn’t all bad living in his old home. He’d forgotten how quiet it was in a single dwelling compared to a large block of flats with mainly younger occupants and associated social events.
After breakfast, Gemma vanished and Adam found her in her mother’s room, fiddling with the things on the dressing table.
He cleared his throat to gain her attention. ‘Do you want to start clearing out your mother’s room?’
‘Not yet. When I can face it.’
‘It’s better that we face it together. If you don’t want to start till after the funeral, that’s all right by me.’
She stared at him, then gave a reluctant nod.
‘I’ll lock her bedroom door until then so the cleaner won’t go in there.’ He definitely didn’t want Gemma going through things on her own. He knew from friends that nasty surprises sometimes showed up when clearing out houses after a death.
‘You have no right to lock me out of Mum’s room! How did you find the key? She never used it.’
‘I was looking for a front door key among the spares. Judith had labelled them all, luckily. She always was well organised about details. I can let you into her bedroom any time you need something.’
‘As long as you stay out as well, I’d rather get the funeral and the exams over first, anyway,’ she muttered.
‘I wondered if you’d like to redo this year and take your final exams next year? After all, you’re a year ahead of the other students.’
She shook her head. ‘No. I’m ready now, really. I’ve been studying hard and I’m still getting As. I want to do Mum proud.’
‘Good for you. Anything I can do to help, just let me know.’
‘Don’t your students have exams?’
‘We assess during the year, mainly. My area of IT is a very practical, hands-on set of skills, more of that than theory. And I’m dealing with a postgraduate course mainly.’
Somehow the two of them rubbed along together in the house. Gemma alternated between being hostile and suspicious, and being extremely needy emotionally, trying his patience a dozen times a day, not to mention contradicting herself from one day to the next.
He waited till after the funeral and her exams were over to raise the subject of Judith’s room again.
‘We need to clear out your mother’s things now.’
Tears welled in her eyes. ‘My friend said you’d want to do that, get rid of every sign of Mum.’
‘Well, she was wrong about why we’re doing it, but I can’t see the point of keeping some things, like Judith’s clothes. You won’t want to wear them, will you? No, I thought not. Though you can keep a few as mementoes if you like. Your choice.’
‘I can clear her room out on my own.’
‘As I said before, it’s going to be a hard thing to do. Better we tackle it together.’
She looked at him doubtfully. ‘And then?’
‘Then we’ll sit down and discuss the future together. And where we’re going to live.’
After breakfast, he led the way upstairs, unlocking the bedroom door and hesitating to go in. It seemed longer than five years since he and his ex had shared this room and yet in some ways it was as familiar as his own hand. Even though she was no longer here, it felt as if he was invading her territory.
Gemma must have heard her parents quarrelling during those last few months and had given him dirty looks from time to time as if all the fault lay with him. The final straw had been when he’d done an exchange for one semester with an American lecturer, a very prestigious opportunity to gain, and had come back to ice woman and sleeping in the spare bedroom.
He didn’t know what Judith had told their daughter about the divorce, but it must have been something that blackened his name because in spite of all his efforts, Gemma had joined her mother in keeping him at arm’s length after he moved out. Even on his monthly meetings with her she was cool, talking mainly about school, her grades and her friends.
Gemma’s voice brought him back to the present. ‘Dad? Are you going to stand there all morning staring into space?’
He shrugged. Why the hell had he started reliving all that? It was long over and he’d never be able to set the record straight with his daughter without Judith to back him up.
Sighing, he ran one hand through his hair, still dark, though thinning and threaded with more silver than he liked these days, and said quietly, ‘It’s not easy to turn out someone’s personal belongings, darling. Are you sure you don’t want me to do it on my own?’
‘No. I think Mum would want me to do it on my own.’
He wasn’t risking that. ‘Not a chance. But we’ll do it together if you wish.’ As she opened her mouth to protest he added quickly, ‘Where do you suggest we start?’
For once, Gemma refrained from making a snarky comment and shook her head helplessly. When she brushed away a tear, he even dared put one arm round her, but that was going too far and she shook him off.
‘Fat lot you cared about her.’
He looked at her in surprise. ‘Of course I cared and I care deeply that she’s dead so young. Whatever gave you that idea?’
‘You were the one who was unfaithful while you were in America. So you can’t have loved Mum.’
‘Ah. So that’s what she told you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, it isn’t true.’
‘Don’t lie to me. She told me all about it. Someone wrote to her about it.’
Not possible because it had never happened. ‘I was never unfaithful to her in the whole time we were together.’ But he suspected that Judith had been unfaithful to him while he was in America. Why else would she suddenly want a divorce?
‘Easy to say when she’s not here to contradict you.’
‘I can only tell you the truth.’
When Gemma turned away from him, he tried to build a bridge without blackening his dead wife’s name. ‘It was Judith who asked for a divorce. I hadn’t been unfaithful. I swear that by your best teddy bear.’
That familiar oath, which Gemma had created as a child because she didn’t like anyone saying ‘Cross my heart and hope to die’, brought her up short and she frowned at him.
‘Judith told me she’d fallen out of love with me.’ He returned his daughter’s gaze without flinching. ‘By that, I assumed she’d met someone else.’
‘Easy to say that when she isn’t here to defend herself.’
‘I’m not going to labour the point for that very reason: she isn’t here to put her side. It’s up to you whether you believe me or not.’
He hadn’t wanted to lose touch with his only child as he’d seen happen with other divorced men. And yet, in spite of his efforts to keep the peace, it had happened to him, too.
He took a few rubbish bin liners off the roll and handed them to his daughter. ‘All right. Let’s get this job done. How about you go through her clothes? Keep anything you want as a memento. Put the good things in one bag, the throwaway clothes in another. Your decision. We’ll take the good things to the charity shop and the rest to the rubbish tip. I’ll go through your mother’s drawers.’
‘I should do that.’
‘You think I haven’t seen her underwear before?’ And he knew Judith had concealed things in her drawers, so he wasn’t risking Gemma finding something that would destroy her illusions about her mother.
Without a word, she took the bin liners from him and went into the walk-in wardrobe. He heard her sniffle and blow her nose, and though her back was towards him, he saw her hand raise a tissue towards her face a couple of times, presumably to wipe her eyes. He didn’t dare offer any comfort. Well, what comfort was there when you’d just lost your mother?
Sighing, he began to investigate the contents of the two matching chests of drawers: tallboys, Judith had called them when she inherited them from her grandmother. They didn’t match the décor of this modern house but they were beautifully made pieces and she’d wanted to keep them, even though they made the room feel crowded.
He ran one hand across the polished wood of the nearest top, which had a neat inlaid border at the edges with black stringing, then forced himself to start on the job. He decided to work his way up the drawers from the biggest one at the bottom to the smallest at the top. He didn’t know why he chose to work that way, it just seemed right, because you couldn’t pile big empty ones on little ones as easily, could you?
Underwear, far sexier than she’d worn for him, went into the big plastic bag, followed by equally sexy nightdresses. They looked just about new so he asked Gemma which bag had the good things in and shoved them in as well.
To his relief there was nothing incriminating.
As he was pushing the last emptied drawer of the second chest back in, it stuck. It was the top one and jiggling it about made no difference. Pulling it out again, he bent his head to peer into the shoulder-height hole, thinking some piece of clothing must have been caught at the back.
To his surprise he could see a small piece of wood sticking out in one corner. When he reached in and tried to move it, it jerked and with a loud click the carved outer panel on that side opened. ‘What on earth—?’
Gemma peered out of the walk-in wardrobe. ‘Something wrong? Oh. That must be the secret hiding place. Mum once told me there was one in one of the chests, but she wouldn’t tell me where it was or how to open it. She said I had to wait till I was twenty-one.’
His heart sank. What were they going to find?
‘I wonder if there’s anything in it.’ He touched the panel and found it opened wider, showing a tall, thin space with narrow shelves. The top two had big envelopes, presumably full of papers, standing upright on them, held in by strips of what was clearly modern elastic strung across from old brass hooks. The other shelves held small boxes, the sort which usually contained hatpins or sets of buttons.
He looked at his daughter. ‘There are quite a few things hidden in it. Who’d have thought?’
As she reached out to pick up the nearest packet, he blocked her hand. ‘I’ll deal with whatever it is.’
Gemma glared at him. ‘I’m staying here. You’re not hiding anything of Mum’s things from me. She might have left me a letter, in case. People do, you know.’
He’d intended to send her away, just in case there was anything incriminating, but Gemma had that stubborn look on her face and if there was a letter for her she had a right to see it. ‘Since you insist.’
If she didn’t like what they found, she’d just have to accept it. ‘I won’t hide anything, but I’m going to take all these bits and pieces out first and put them on the bed. You can watch but I’ll open them. If you try to interfere, I’ll lock you out of the room again.’
With a disgusted look, she stepped back and folded her arms across her chest. ‘All right. Go ahead, play Mr Dictator.’
‘Sometimes you forget that you’re still a child and I’m the parent.’
‘You’ve never let me forget it. Mum was a lot kinder to me than you.’ She sobbed suddenly and clapped one hand to her mouth. But she shoved his arm away as he would have put it round her for comfort and grabbed a tissue from the box to wipe her eyes.
He opened the first package, which proved to contain letters, all in the same handwriting, and using the same type of notepaper and envelope. They were addressed simply to ‘Judith’ and must have been given to her by hand. When he opened the top one, he quickly realised it was a love letter to his wife. He glanced at the date: a month after he’d gone to America. It was signed by a man she’d worked with for several years.
He stared at it in shock and disgust. It was a few moments before he realised that Gemma had come to stand next to him and had also read the letter. He spoke gently, ‘Darling, this isn’t for your eyes.’
‘I’ve seen it now.’ She looked at him with anguish on her face. ‘I can’t believe it. I’ve met Guy a few times and he’s a horrible, smarmy creature. How could she?’
Adam hadn’t liked Guy Fenton either.
‘She said you had been unfaithful.’
‘I told you I wasn’t, Gemma.’
The silence that followed seemed fraught with their unvoiced thoughts and reactions, then he folded up the letter. ‘I’ll read a couple of the most recent ones and that’s it: I’m going to burn the rest unread.’
‘Send them to that man’s wife!’ Gemma said. ‘I’ve met her, too. She seemed really nice. She deserves to know the truth.’
‘No, darling. I won’t do something as unkind as that.’ He stared down at the envelopes, so many of them. It seemed ridiculously old-fashioned in a computer age to handwrite love letters instead of sending emails, but perhaps that had seemed romantic to the two people involved.
No need to check that Fenton knew Judith was dead, thank goodness. Only why hadn’t the fellow been at her funeral? Others from her workplace had paid their respects.
Adam knew he ought to feel outraged, or something similar, but apart from disgust at having her cheating confirmed, he felt numb more than anything, had done since they rang and told him his forty-one-year-old ex-wife had dropped dead at work and suggested he might wish to tell his daughter.
He kept a surreptitious eye on Gemma, worried at how this might be affecting her. He saw her swallow hard, still looking shocked. She blinked her eyes to get rid of tears, but didn’t make one of her spiky remarks aimed at him, thank goodness.
He wished now that he’d obeyed his first instinct and made her leave the room so that he could check the contents of the hiding place in private. Only if he’d done that, she’d still be blaming him for cheating on his wife, instead of realising it had been the other way round. And he wanted desperately to win her love again. She had been such an adorable little girl.
‘Daddy’s Princess’ was an overused cliché, but nonetheless it described perfectly how he’d felt about his only child … still did.
Setting the love letters aside, he looked at the next bundle of letters, hesitating, absolutely dreading now what else he might find. Perhaps Fenton hadn’t been her only lover.
To his surprise, Gemma moved closer and slid her hand into his. ‘It’s terrible when someone dies and all their secrets are revealed. I never understood that before.’
‘I think the worst was that your mother died so suddenly and so young. Most people clear out their stuff as they grow older. Gemma … this doesn’t really matter now, so we won’t tell anyone. Agreed? And it doesn’t affect the fact that your mother loved you.’
She hesitated then nodded.
He waited to see if she’d say anything else but she didn’t, just knuckled away another couple of fat, slippery tears. Taking a deep breath he opened the next packet of letters.
‘These are older, from her family mostly. They seem to be in date order.’ He fanned through them, then gasped as he saw one of the early ones. Even after all these years he recognised that elegant italic handwriting.
Before he could hide it, Gemma said, ‘That one’s addressed to you.’
‘Yes. I wonder when it arrived?’ He squinted at the date stamp and saw in shock that it had been posted the same year he came out to Australia. It must have arrived just before he and Judith got married after their whirlwind romance.
Gemma looked at him in puzzlement. ‘Hadn’t you seen it before?’
‘No.’
‘Who’s it from? Do you recognise the handwriting?’
‘Yes. A girl I used to go out with.’
‘Why did Mum open it, do you think?’
‘I don’t know.’ Relieved that his daughter seemed to believe him, he turned it round in his hands, staring at it through a blur of emotion. It brought back so many memories just to see that handwriting.
‘Aren’t you going to read it?’
‘I think we should let the past go. Whatever’s in that letter can’t matter now.’
‘I don’t agree. It must be important if Mum kept it all these years.’
He was so relieved that his daughter was still talking to him civilly that he did as she suggested and held the letter so that they could both read it. She pressed closer to him and when he put his arm round her, she didn’t pull away.
‘Oh, no!’ Gemma clapped one hand to her mouth, made a little mewling noise of pain and burrowed her head against his chest for a moment or two.
He didn’t know what to say or do. His thoughts were spinning in a surge of fury and dismay. It was immediately obvious why Judith had kept the letter from him: she hadn’t wanted anything to stop them marrying. But even though they’d been living together at the time, she’d had no right to open his mail. And it had been unconscionable to keep a letter as important as this from him.
He looked sideways at his tense, white-faced daughter. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Could it be true? Technically, I mean. Did you have an affair with this Dorothy Redman woman while you were courting my mother?’
‘Not exactly. I’ve never played around with two women at once. I wouldn’t do that. I knew Dorothy before I left England, but I hadn’t met your mother then.’
She looked at him in puzzlement. ‘But Mum always said you two met when she was on holiday in England. You met in Brighton, near the Pavilion, and kept in touch because you’d fallen in love.’
‘Judith’s aunt upset her by saying the two of us would never last and she accused me of using Judith to get permission to stay permanently in Australia. So Judith and I agreed to pretend that we’d known one another for longer, that we’d met when she visited England the year before.’
‘You can’t have loved that other woman if you left her behind.’
‘I thought I loved her. I was going to send for her, but then I met your mother and I knew it hadn’t been a lasting sort of love with Dorothy. I thought it’d be kinder just to vanish from her life, then she could blame me.’
‘If you were so much in love with Mum in those days, what went wrong?’
‘I don’t know. Judith would never discuss it except to say she was bored by me and fed up of me going away. It started during that year where I had to work really long hours because a colleague was ill.’ Was that really why Judith had gone astray? Because of his frequent absences? Or had she had other affairs? What did that matter now?
Gemma brought him back to the present. ‘What would you have done if you’d known that this Dorothy person was pregnant before you married Mum?’ She tapped the letter.
‘Who knows? Gone back to England, I suppose. Accepted the responsibility, even if I did nothing else about it.’
‘If you had gone back, you might not have returned to Australia. You might even have married her and then I wouldn’t exist. That’d make your life easier now, wouldn’t it?’ She pulled away from him suddenly.
‘Don’t be silly. I’m glad you exist. I love you to pieces and always have done since you grasped one of my fingers in the hospital just after you were born. If we’re being brutally frank, you’re the main reason I stayed with your mother for so long. I didn’t want her keeping me away from you.’
‘How do I know that’s true?’
‘Teddy bear’s honour.’
Again, the old phrase stopped her in her tracks. It was a silly oath, but she knew he’d never lied to her when he used it. They’d only used that phrase to make important statements to one another. Would it still convince her that what he was telling her was true? He prayed so.
Gemma moved away from him, shoving her hands in the pockets of her jeans and giving him that don’t-touch-me look again. But behind it he could see pain and doubt.
Oh, his heart ached for her! She was too young to understand the tangles people got into with their relationships. Too young to know the truth of the French phrase: tout passe, tout lasse, tout casse. Everything did pass in the end, and you did grow weary of things, even of being angry at your ex-wife. He wasn’t as sure that everything broke, but the journey to acceptance of change could still hurt.
There was silence, then he folded the letter, put it back into the envelope and slipped it into his inner pocket. ‘I need time to think about this. Please, Gemma, don’t tell anyone else.’
‘As if I would. I’m not proud of what Mum did.’
The question he couldn’t possibly answer was: if he pursued this now, after all these years, would he make things worse for Dorothy? Would he even be able to find her again? A lot could have happened in eighteen years. She might not even be alive.
Had she had the baby – his baby – or had she lost it? There wasn’t a second letter from her in the package.
‘What are you going to do about it, Dad?’
‘I’m not sure. Make enquiries, at least. Perhaps go to England. If Dorothy did have my child, I’d want to meet it.’
‘Can I come too? The child would be my brother or sister.’
He took a sudden decision. ‘We could go during the Christmas holidays, perhaps? Most schools and universities are closed for the whole of January.’
‘I don’t want to celebrate Christmas this year.’
‘We won’t decide anything yet. It’s been a big shock – I can’t see my way clearly. But I won’t do anything without discussing it with you, working it out together. Will that be all right?’ And it wouldn’t hurt her to have a gap year.
She nodded, but she didn’t meet his eyes and she’d hunched her shoulders again, as if trying to keep the whole world at a distance.
Well, both of them had had a bad shock today, hadn’t they? It would take some getting used to.
And what the hell was he going to do about this new problem? Hadn’t he enough to deal with?
Only … what if he did have another daughter or a son? Adam had to find out. He couldn’t live with uncertainty about something so important.