ELIZABETH

As she strolls up the path towards the cottage, Elizabeth Foster peels off her thin white cardigan and hangs it over her shoulder from one erect finger. Even here, where there is always a cool wind, the air is thick, weighted-down. The grass fails to tremble. Heat gathers itself up into long planks and beats down against the earth, insistent as a pulse. It is July. It is 1971. Elizabeth moves at a crawl.

A few steps later, she stops and turns to look over the village. Her village, as it once was; and continues to be, she supposes, though she has not lived here in the last twenty years. Today, it is pretty. House windows spark sunlight back up into the mountains. The slate roofs gleam as though polished. Elizabeth also knows it as it might be, ragged with clinging to the valley floor when the weather storms through, throwing trees about, dislodging chimney bricks, running the streets into rivers. But this does not prevent her from loving it. She knows this place. She became Elizabeth here.

Below her, a red mini rattles out from between the houses and into open space, then turns towards town. Though it is moving away, the puttering of its engine spoils Elizabeth’s mood a little and she resumes her walk, the steep incline creating a balled-up pressure in her calves which is both painful and pleasant. She doesn’t get much exercise these days. There is satisfaction in that ache.

In front of her there appears to be nothing but grassland, but Elizabeth knows that when she reaches the next turn in the path the cottage will become visible. Two-storeyed but low to the ground, its walls are the white of freshly washed sheets: it sits in the rough landscape like a fallen cloud. A washing line, nearly always full of men’s clothes, runs parallel to it, and as Elizabeth follows the curving stone track she sees that today six or seven pale-coloured shirts are pegged out, hanging still and dripping dry. She thinks she can hear each individual drop tapping the ground, but it might just be the insects clicking. There are so many infinitesimal noises up here on the mountain. Sometimes, when she visits, Elizabeth stands out in the garden and just listens, believing she can hear the squelchy throbbing of her own heart. She does it to silence the worry which swamps her whenever she calls on her father.

She hoists her handbag further up onto her shoulder. Inside, she has Emma’s university photos: the celebrations of the end of her first year. Elizabeth had asked her father to be there when Emma got home for the holidays, but as usual, he had refused. He didn’t want to spoil anything, he said; he was too old for that sort of thing. Elizabeth knows what his refusal was really about. Like so much else in his life, it was made by fear.

She pauses again, the cottage in full view, and pulls at the front of her blouse to encourage some air inside. There is a line of stickiness between her breasts she wants to wipe away, but will not, in case one of them is watching from the window.

The back door swings open, the dark wood moving away from the walls like a tiny wing, and Jack steps out, another load of washing cradled under his arm: trouser legs dangle over the sides of the basket. Still spry in his seventies, he whistles as he descends a couple of steps, crosses a strip of lawn, and sets the basket down beside the line’s side pole. It is as he lifts the first pair of trousers and flaps the water from them that he sees Elizabeth.

‘Libby,’ he says, his face spreading out into that happiness only children ever summon in their parents: that silly, wide-open sort of delight.

Elizabeth wonders if she smiles that way at her daughter; if it embarrasses Emma. It used to embarrass her when she was a teenager. Her own mother, opening the front door as she arrived home and grinning that way. Her own mother, walking past whilst she was lingering at the bus stop with friends and grinning that way. ‘Mam,’ she used to breathe, before bundling her backwards into the hallway or waving her away.

Despite having brought up her own daughter in England, Elizabeth instilled that sound in Emma before there was even the slightest chance of her repeating it. Mam. She would not answer to the softness of ‘mum’.

Elizabeth smiles and pushes herself to resume her walk. Already, her mind is on a long glass of lemonade and the bench which waits in shadow on the other side of the cottage. She and Jack often sit there during her visits, watching the stirrings of the village below and passing fragments of their lives back and forth. Sometimes, with a lot of careful work, she unearths some hint of the man he was in London: a unique scent at a party he once attended, or a name to which Elizabeth can attach no face. And sometimes, in those moments, she sees Jack as he must have been: tall and slim and handsome as anything with his dark, curling hair and his deep, brown-marble eyes. Only now has his hair started to splinter into grey.

He laughs at her when she speaks of the Jack she imagines, strutting about the city with an unbreakable smile and some scheme always in the working. She does not know how accurate this image is; how exactly she envisages the way he would shove his hands into his pockets as he walked, or the easy loping movement of his body before the years got hold of it. Jack will not tell her. There are a thousand things Jack will not tell her.

‘Here,’ he says as she reaches him, passing her a pair of trousers to peg. ‘Help an old man out.’

‘Haven’t seen any old men around here,’ Elizabeth answers, lifting her hands to the task.

‘Ah, always the charmer,’ Jack smiles. ‘You must get that from your mother.’

‘Which one?’

She says it too quickly; she knows she does. She does not want to sound flippant. Jack pings a sideways glance at her, fast as a freed spring, then smiles into the clothes. He understands this battle: they have been play-fighting it for thirty years.

‘That’s hers, too,’ Jack says. ‘That tenacity. You’re a grown woman, Lib. Stop being so nosey.’

‘Never,’ she replies, smiling back.

What Jack sees when he looks at her, Elizabeth cannot suppose. An elegant woman at five foot seven, she is, she knows, still attractive at forty-five. Men still watch her in the street. Her hair, which curls at the ends and is lighter now, in the summer, moves between a sandy colour and a more even brown. But her eyes are dark, almost as dark as Jack’s, and she has concluded – though she has tried to avoid such conclusions her entire life – that she resembles him a lot, not least in complexion. Odd, that she should look like this man. Her thoughts make her overly aware of her appearance, and she pushes out her bottom lip to blow her flick of fringe away from her forehead. Emma had talked her into chopping into her hair so that it rose up around her face this way, and she likes it now. She likes the feel of it, just brushing her shoulders. It makes her feel younger.

‘Em will be down next week,’ she says, to change the subject. She cannot tackle it again until she has had that lemonade. She is too hot.

‘She shouldn’t waste her time with old sods like us,’ Jack murmurs. Elizabeth knows he says it only because he feels he must. He doesn’t want anything for Emma but parties and dancing and fun. He hardly even wants her to study.

‘She wants to spend time with you old sods,’ Elizabeth tells him. ‘She can’t forever be flitting around with her friends, anyway. They’ve got families to visit, too.’

‘Is there a man?’

‘Not that I know of. I don’t ask, though.’

Jack nods seriously. They have finished pegging the clothes now and they wander around the side of the cottage to stand facing the lazy-bodied sun. It bleeds white hot across the sky. In the distance, a flock of unidentifiable birds fold into each other and then disperse, as tiny and weightless as pollen on the wind.

‘Jack,’ Elizabeth whines. Funny, how being home strips the last forty years and calls back that particular whine: the rising tone toddlers use for ‘why’.

‘Yes, love.’

‘Are you ever going to talk about it?’

‘No,’ Jack answers. ‘I made a promise.’

Elizabeth leans back against the cottage wall and closes her eyes. There is a film of moisture on her eyelids. Soon, she will go inside and splash her face.

‘Have you kept every promise you’ve ever made?’

‘No,’ Jack says. ‘But I’m keeping this one.’

‘Are you ready to go in?’

‘Absolutely not. Look at this. You’ve got to appreciate this, Lib.’ She laughs as he pleats down onto the ground and stretches his legs out in front of him, shaking his feet left and right like a pair of windscreen wipers. ‘I spend far too many days looking down there into cloud soup.’

‘Maybe you just shouldn’t look,’ Elizabeth replies, settling next to him, the stone path hard against her backside, ‘on bad days.’

‘Actually, I think maybe you grow out of good days and bad days when you get to my age.’

Elizabeth does not want to tackle the subject of ageing, not now, not with the sun on her face and a thirst in her throat, so she lifts a hand and taps at the window above her right shoulder.

‘I’m here,’ she calls.

‘And we’re always glad of it,’ Jack adds quietly. But Elizabeth’s greeting is not answered and they do not rise to go inside. Not yet. There is plenty of day left for that.

In the kitchen, Elizabeth sits at the dining table and stares at the cupboard door of the Welsh dresser, which has been left ajar to reveal a thin slice of darkness. Her eyes are still adjusting to the indoors light, and she squints at it, trying to distinguish exactly how wide it is. It is an innocent enough action – she wants to see clearly again – but she is also aware, in some secret part of her mind, that hidden inside are hundreds of photographs, slipped messily into various albums. Elizabeth knows they are there, not because she has viewed the photographs lately – or at all, in fact – but because she holds a memory, perhaps thirty-five years old now, of opening that cupboard door and discovering them, leather bound or cloth cased, and all coated with a layer of furry dust; of being told, quite definitely, that they were not for her eyes; of having to pull her hand quickly away from the slam of wood against wood. Never, before or after, had she been so frightened by her father. The set of his face that day made her imagine them ugly things, those photographs; disturbing things.

To her right, not fully in her sightline, Jack is busying himself with pouring that tall lemonade she’d been craving. One for her, one for him. No third glass.

‘I’ve got some photos of Em for you,’ she says. She is distracted, not really thinking through the words. As she speaks, she pushes one hand into the handbag which hangs off the back of her chair and retrieves them. ‘Perhaps you’ve got an album to slot them into somewhere?’

‘Perhaps,’ Jack answers. ‘Or I could hang them. I’ll find a couple of frames … So, how’s work?’

He bangs two glasses down on the table then, with a flick of his wrist, spins one dining chair around and straddles it, the way a twenty-year-old man would. As he settles, he winks at Elizabeth. Libby, as she has always been to him. When she had gone through that teenage stage of wanting to change every last thing about herself, Jack alone had refused to revert to her full given name. ‘You were Lib the day I met you,’ he’d said, ‘and you’ll still be Lib the day I die.’

‘Fine,’ she answers. ‘Good. Nothing new.’

‘There’s always something new. Every single day.’

‘Is that so?’ she smiles. ‘We’re feeling philosophical today, are we?’

‘Am I ever anything but? I am a wise man, Libby Twist,’ – he never has used her married name – ‘and you’d do well to remember it.’

‘Maybe I would remember it, if you behaved accordingly.’

‘Maybe I’d behave accordingly, if I were a boring old man.’ He pops his eyes and swigs from his glass, hiding his smirk against its rim. The rush of bubbly liquid down his throat is too fast and he starts to choke, bending forward over the table.

‘That’ll teach you,’ Elizabeth laughs, but her heart isn’t truly in this teasing – their own private ritual – today. She’s started something, in mentioning the photo album, which she does not feel able to stop. Whilst Jack recovers from his bout of coughing, she stands and moves towards the cupboard. There, she drops onto her heels and catches the knob between thumb and forefinger. The albums, she finds, are neatly stacked: not the chaotic towers she had been recalling. She lifts one from the top of the first pile and carries it back to the dining table.

‘Don’t, Lib, please.’

‘Why not?’ she shoots back, but Jack cannot answer this one and he stumbles over his words.

‘It’s not … Because … I just … Ah, come on. Looking in there is just going to make you maudlin.’

‘I solemnly swear not to become maudlin,’ Elizabeth recites, one hand pressing her oath to the air, the other already opening the covers. The very first photograph breaks her vow.

In it, her mother – her first mother – is sitting on the edge of a small pier, her legs dangling over sharp-peaked water. It must be cold, for she is overwhelmed by woollen layers: her hands, which grip the pier’s edge, are lost to the sleeves of a dark, calf-length coat; her chin juts over the doubling of a thick scarf as she peers down into the spiking sea; and her legs kick out – the right forwards, the left back as this particular image is snapped – so that her skirt folds up a little and reveals her ankles to the blackening sky. Her feet, Elizabeth notices with a smile, are bare. Though the puff of breath rising from her mouth betrays the bitter temperatures, she looks as though she is about to jump in. Perhaps she did. Elizabeth scans the photograph for her shoes and finds them discarded in the foreground, one tossed onto its side, the other sitting the right way up. She wonders if she put them back on before she left, or whether she wandered along the seafront like that, her arm hooked into her husband’s, her feet collecting millions of sand grains onto their soles.

The stories she’s amassed about Ruby over the years convince her of the latter.

She lifts her head to find Jack staring at her, his hands spread flat halfway across the table, his lips making a sad smile. He exhales, loud and acquiescent. Something is different today – she’d felt it even before she got here. Something has changed, or is about to change. She waits.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘I give up.’ Henry has never actually forbidden them from talking about Ruby, but they know, they’ve always known, that he is incapable of sharing that particular past with them. ‘She’s magnificent, isn’t she?’

Shouldn’t you say beautiful? Elizabeth wants to ask. Isn’t that how women want to be described? But Jack is right. Just sitting there, at the water’s edge, her face in profile, her legs moving forever with the sea, Ruby Twist is magnificent. Elizabeth nods her head. She wouldn’t even know how to spark like that.

She flicks to the next page. Here she finds images of Ruby and Henry: sitting outside a café, leaning into each other as a waiter or a diner captures the way in which her confidence only complements his shyness; wound around each other at some dance, Ruby showing him off by looking at him and only him when the rest of the room surely couldn’t have resisted the pale drape of her dress over her body. They are magnetised, these two. They cannot function, it seems, unless they are in physical contact. They are the most intense of lovers. Elizabeth had known, of course, that Henry and Ruby were married, but she couldn’t have known how deeply they had been embedded in one another. Naturally, there is no sign of Jack in the photographs. Or her mother. And perhaps that’s partly why she’s never been allowed to view them. It undermines all their memories, those four people who have each claimed her as their own, to be reminded that only two of them were there to begin with.

She is aware, of course – though only in the blurriest possible way – of how her family came to be what it is. What she has always wanted, though, is to be able to feel it; to be overwhelmed by the sounds and the smells and the sights of it; to be able, though it might seem as maudlin as Jack suggests, to mourn what everyone else mourns without having to invent the details.

There is no discovery now which can satisfy Elizabeth. The glamorous dresses Ruby wears; the way her nose crinkles when she smiles; the way she glares sometimes into the camera, serious as a schoolmistress – none of it is enough. Elizabeth’s questions have gone too long unanswered. Still, she is thrilled by the images. She turns another page. Jack, she’s sure, will soon slip up and start telling her the stories behind each one.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I’m in this one!’

‘Really?’ Jack asks.

Elizabeth points out the small but visible protrusion, the way Ruby is glancing down at her stomach and the unknowable thing held within. At her.

‘There.’

It is a shock, this evidence of her existence. The photographs seem so long ago, the clothes and the settings and the poses so strange to her, that Elizabeth can barely reconcile the people who fill them with her own life. How can that woman, with her curled brown hair and her smile and her love, have created her, Mrs Elizabeth Foster, Professor Elizabeth Foster, who walks from her front door to campus every morning to begin lecturing on the books which saturate her brain; who shares hours-long phone calls with her own, lovely, grown-up daughter; who needs her husband so painfully that his presence in a room still soothes and excites her as completely as it did when they met twenty-six years ago; who, whenever she is out of the country, misses the particular kind of rain that falls over her fathers’ cottage; who has known more parents than she’s ever been capable of coping with? Surely she could only have been a disappointment to the woman in these photographs.

She turns another page. They are sitting in a garden now, Henry and Ruby and another, older couple. Elizabeth pins them with an index finger.

‘Who are these two?’

Jack spins the album around to face him. ‘That is Grayson Steck,’ he says, pointing needlessly at the man grinning into the camera. ‘He was a friend.’

‘Of Henry’s?’

‘And Ruby’s. That’s his wife, Matilda.’

‘Did you ever see them, after you left London?’

Jack shakes his head.

‘Why not?’

‘She was dreadfully in love with Henry,’ Jack answers. ‘It was better for her to stay away from him.’

‘Was there anybody in London not in love with Henry?’ Elizabeth says, pulling the album back towards her.

Jack laughs. ‘Not many people.’

‘But he chose you.’

‘I suppose so.’

Elizabeth huffs. Always this vagueness with Jack. And maybe it’s because of the heat, or because she is impatient for Emma’s visit home, or because she’s been at the cottage for nearly an hour already and Henry still has not opened his study door, but she does not think she can stand it one second longer. She glances through the kitchen window at a rectangle of the world split equally into flat blue and bright green. It’s too good to be true, that view. It annoys her further.

‘Jack,’ she says, propping her elbows on the table and pressing her bunched fingers to her temples until the skin whitens. ‘Please.’ And Jack, recognising her exasperation, decides to disclose some truth. Elizabeth can see it moving through him – the fact, kicking its way to the surface. He is about to say: ‘Your mother was a showgirl’, or, ‘Your father was rich as a king’. He is about, perhaps, to reveal where he came from. And that is the biggest mystery, isn’t it? Jack Turner did not spring into life already grown: once, that man was a child. But he doesn’t say anything at all, in the end. Because at that exact moment, as if he divines that there is something happening he must put a stop to, Henry cracks open his study door and steps into the kitchen.

Instinctively, Elizabeth slams the photo album shut.

Her mother once told her that Henry Twist had more fear running through him than blood. The war did that to some men, she said. It pushed them in on themselves, silenced them.

Henry, though, had not always been silent. Elizabeth can remember days – and not enough of them, perhaps, but there were definitely days – when she would go up to the cottage to visit her fathers and find him as loose and easy, almost, as Jack. She knows that once, at least, she’d climbed up onto the slatted pen fence as Henry was feeding the pigs they’d kept then and that they’d pretended at throwing each other into the boot-sucking mud within. She can recall the blue-and-white striped dress she was wearing, the ankle socks, the way the wind dragged her ponytail across her eyes. She can see the smile Henry wore as they messed about at that fence, laughing at the snuffling of the hungry pigs then putting down more food so that their noise never subsided. She knows also that he used to come down off the mountain occasionally. When she was very small, a woman called Viv had written to tell him that her husband had died, and he had gone to the funeral. Elizabeth remembers her mother explaining that one of her fathers would be away for a few days; that he had to travel to London to say goodbye to a friend. She remembers that clearly, because she had never seen Henry away from the cottage and she couldn’t imagine him in any other setting. He was as essential to that mountain as the sky above it and the town below as far as Elizabeth was concerned. In bed that night, she had worried that without him the whole thing would crumble; that she’d wake in the morning and open her curtains to find a great gaping space where once her fathers’ mountain had stood.

And that’s how she thinks of it still – her fathers’ mountain – because no one else has lived on it, before or since. Henry and Jack built this cottage with their own hands. They have told her of that late summer a hundred times over, but today, Elizabeth wants to hear their words again.

‘Really?’ Jack asks. ‘Haven’t we bored you with this story enough times?’

‘You haven’t bored me with it once.’

From his place across the table, Henry smiles. ‘You’re a beautiful liar, you know. We bored the life out of you when you were a child.’

Elizabeth wants to stay angry at him, for only now emerging from that stuffy old study, for having wasted so much time he could otherwise have spent with her and Jack and Emma in there, for becoming the obsessive creature he presently is. But he smiles, and those soft-green eyes disappear into creases, and she can’t. He is an old man now, her father. He is inching towards his end.

‘How so?’ she asks. She just wants them to keep talking. She wants them to do that thing they sometimes do, when they talk their way so far into their past that they forget she is there in the room. It was such a definite part of her childhood, that vanishing act they performed together. It is comforting still.

‘With all our stories,’ Henry answers.

‘I love your stories.’ And she does. She just wants more. She wants to know it all. She wants to know what came before their arrival in Wales.

‘You’re humouring us.’

‘No,’ Elizabeth protests. ‘I really do love them. I’m made up of your stories.’

Jack rolls his eyes. ‘You’re made up of getting what you want, Miss Twist.’

She grins and settles back into her chair, knowing that soon they will begin to tell her of how the summer had been a long one, and lucky for them it was, because when September strolled in all they had were four exterior walls, an open doorway and two badly aching backs. They would work until, degree by slow pink degree, the light deserted them. Then they would lie in the grass like inverted stars, taking turns to knead their way down each other’s spines. They would return to the beds – two singles, of course – Ida had secured them with a local unmarried farmer by the name of Gareth, only when they were sure the man had long retired for the night and they could attempt to silently slide the heavy wood-framed objects into a double.

Here, they would smile, and Henry would blush a little, and they would admit that the attempt was never very successful: the bed legs would thump against the floorboards, and they would spook themselves into laughter, and Gareth must surely have known their game. But Gareth was a kind-hearted fellow and he said nothing through those weeks they spent sitting to a toast and bacon breakfast with him each morning. He was as gentle in his manner as he was strong in the shoulder, and perhaps that contrast was what Ida loved about him in the end. With Henry and Jack and Libby to bend her life around, she had needed the simplicity of a man like Gareth. She married him the Christmas after the Twists arrived, and fell in love with him slowly, over so many years that she could never say for certain when the feeling had begun. It was like an ancient tree, she would say, her love for Gareth: everyone knew it was old, but no one could tell you its exact age.

Most times, when they tell her of that summer, Jack’s narrative drifts towards this claim of Ida’s. Perhaps, Elizabeth thinks, it’s because he wishes Henry could love him so simply. And she hopes he includes that part of the story today, because she misses Ida. She misses her badly. She is still counting her absence in months. And one day, she thinks, Emma will grieve her this same way. The thought drags through her middle, like a balloon tied by its string to a newly dropped stone. Just the idea is unbearable. She attempts to talk over it.

‘Start with the owl,’ she says.

‘We told you about the owl?’ Jack replies. ‘See, you have heard this too many times.’

But Elizabeth insists, and she is able to listen for long minutes then as the two men describe how the barn owl had taken up residence in a corner of their unfurnished home, and how, once they’d watched her float in for two or three nights, like a tiny snowdrift, her pale chest proud and puffed, her dark eyes round and fearful, they hadn’t the heart to chase her away. Instead, when at the conclusion of their work they reclined on the grass to rest, they waited to catch sight of her, a spectral dot closing slowly in. Aged around twelve, Elizabeth had asked, precociously, how they could possibly know it was the same owl, returning each night. And Henry had informed her, patiently, that their owl had not had the normal tan and steel mottled wings of other barn owls; their owl had been pure white.

She thinks now that perhaps they had seen it as an omen, that owl, all white and unnatural – as unnatural as they were. Henry and Jack have endured their fair share of trouble since they arrived on the mountain. And that summer, that first hopeful summer, filled with the constant satisfying smart of physical labour through their muscles, and daily picnic visits from Ida and Libby, and the fresh olive and emerald promise of a new country unfurling before them, they must have feared it. They must have felt it coming. They must have been searching reassurance. The appearance of a beautiful, ghostly bird must have seemed like just that.

‘Have you seen one since,’ she asks now, ‘a pure white one?’

Jack shakes his head.

‘We still look, though,’ Henry says. ‘Most nights. At dusk.’

Elizabeth sits up, excessively shocked by this. ‘Do you?’

‘Yes,’ Jack answers, laughing. ‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. I just … I hadn’t imagined …’

‘What?’ Jack jokes. ‘That we like each other?’

‘That you … stand outside watching the sky. Romantically!’ She slumps back into her chair. She feels a little drunk. Because of the heat, she supposes, and the exhausting week she’s just blundered through at work, and the fact that, for some reason she doesn’t wish to examine, she is finally pulling some truths from her fathers.

‘We’ve had a good life, me and Jack,’ Henry confides, his words turned about on themselves by four and a half decades in Wales. ‘I don’t want you to ever think otherwise, Lib. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘No, really, I need you to understand.’ He reaches across the table to grab her hand and, though the sensation is odd with all these years of careful father–daughter distance between them, she lets him. His skin is loose and fragile: it reminds her of that flimsy packing paper, so easily torn. She studies the fingers wrapped around hers. The width of the knuckles betrays that these hands were strong once. Now, they are growing weak: it is visible in the veins which push away from the flesh, as though their connections have gone slack; in the smattering of darker spots which map a messy route up and under his shirtsleeves; in the ease with which his wedding ring swings around and around the digit. All these years and still he hasn’t removed that ring. She wonders if it bothers Jack.

‘I do understand,’ she says, catching Henry’s eye. She nods solemnly. ‘I promise I do.’

‘Good,’ he replies. Then, rising, he rounds the table to kiss the top of her head. ‘We’ve had a good life, us three,’ he mutters. ‘It’s been a good life.’

When thick, eye-widening darkness finally scales the mountain, sticky with the effort, Elizabeth decides she will stay the night. She can visit Gareth in the morning, when the walk down is safer. He would beg that of her, Gareth, the third man who has acted as her father, though she has never named him as such.

‘You don’t mind?’

‘Of course not,’ Jack answers. ‘I’m glad of the company.’

Henry curled into sleep hours ago and they sit now, Elizabeth and Jack, one either side of his sleeping form, on the armchairs flanking the settee he lies across. The lamps which light the room trail shadows like bridal trains, and they whisper into them, enjoying the naughty atmosphere they are creating. All of Elizabeth’s naughtiest childhood memories involve Jack. They would infuriate Henry and Ida by taking unplanned jaunts into the mountains and not returning until the bats led them home; by sneaking to the sweet shop and charming Mr Doyle into filling paper bags to bursting with toffees which they’d sit on the pavement outside to demolish, ruining their dinner; by always, somehow, managing to acquire a bloody nose or a bruised shin or a scraped knee.

‘Jack …?’

He returns her whining intonation. ‘Yes …?’

‘Is there a photo of you in that album, from back then?’

‘No.’

‘Liar.’

‘Oh, all right.’ He pushes himself out of his chair and goes to retrieve the album from the kitchen table. Elizabeth rises to follow him. They bend over the table together as he flips from page to page, years cartoon-flickering by. He stops near the back of the substantial volume and slides two fingers cautiously under the top edge of a photograph of Ruby and Ida, sitting before their parents on the shore, at Pwll she supposes. It pops free of its four corner-tacks. Beneath, there is a second image: a boy just spilling over into manhood, perhaps seventeen years old, in uniform.

‘Jack,’ she says. ‘How old were you?’

‘Sixteen,’ he answers. Then, with a wink, ‘Though I was claiming eighteen, naturally.’

‘Always misbehaving.’

He laughs. ‘Always. I think we might have had that in common, your mother and I.’

‘It’s funny you never met her,’ Elizabeth says.

‘I know. I think I’d have liked her, you know. She had sass, that girl.’

‘It won’t be long before Emma’s as old as she was.’

‘Make a man feel his years, why don’t you?’

Elizabeth smirks. ‘Isn’t that what daughters are for?’

She wanders towards the light, photo in hand, and tilts it this way and that, searching its every detail. He is beautiful, this younger Jack. He stands straight, pleased with himself and the uniform he has managed to cheat his way into. There is a gleaming point of pride on each of his cheeks, where the flash has caught his smile. His eyes are dark, brilliant, deep as love itself. It’s a wonder so many of those London women fell for Henry when there was Jack, too, standing beside him.

‘Why do you hide this?’ Elizabeth asks. ‘It’s brilliant.’

Jack shrugs and, turning away from her, begins shuffling the items on the table around: a salt shaker, an empty glass vase, the cold teapot she abandoned there an hour ago. He moves them from their places then slides them back again.

‘Oh, come on, Dad. It’s been so good today, getting to know things.’

‘Then why can’t you be content with it?’

‘Because there’s always something more.’

‘Of course there’s always something more. There always is. You can never know everything, darling girl.’

‘You know everything about Henry,’ she says.

‘I do not. What would make you think that?’

‘Well,’ Elizabeth pauses, lost for a moment in where her argument is going. ‘All these years …’

‘In all these years, Lib, he’s only ever shown me what he wanted me to see.’

She leans against the Welsh dresser, the wood a hard truthful line across her back, and crosses her arms. ‘That’s not true.’

‘It is. I’m certain of it. Do you want to know why?’

Elizabeth nods.

Jack reinstates the whisper they have just lately discarded. ‘I know because I wasn’t Jack when that photo was taken.’

‘What do you mean?’ Elizabeth hisses. ‘Who else could you be but Jack?’

Jack runs two hands up the back of his neck, rubbing at the bars of tension there, and bit by bit he explains it all again, the same way he did forty-five years ago, right up to that last night at Monty’s, when they drank themselves honest and dealt themselves new lives. He explains it all again, except this time, he tells the whole truth.

‘Come here,’ he says, indicating the back door.

Outside, they take a few measured steps away from the cottage, their feet cautious over the uneven ground. The moon is the perfect end of a telescope, pointed down at them. It is as though they are spotlit, standing centre stage. And they are, really, Elizabeth supposes; they are at the pinnacle of their own life stories. Everything to come, all of it, is unknowable. The future must be plunged into on faith alone. For no particular reason, she imagines herself taking a few steps more into the darkness, towards some precipice she might fall from. The thought of that endless freefall turns in her stomach. It is a peculiarity of human nature, she knows, to fear falling when we are safe. It is how we fight the drop into sleep. It is how we surrender to love. We fall and fall and fall.

At her side, Jack takes one long, hard breath, like a man readying himself for a dive into the deepest water. Perhaps he feels it too. Perhaps whatever truth he is about to speak will be his fall.

‘Jack …?’ she prompts.

He closes his eyes to find the words. ‘I never went any further backwards,’ he says. ‘I never went all the way to the beginning, and he never seemed to notice. Or he just didn’t want to know.’

‘And where was the beginning?’

Jack shakes his head.

‘It was so long ago,’ Elizabeth prompts. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

‘Of course it does. All of it matters. All the jobs I worked, and all the people I conned, and all the days I fought in that uniform. They’re what Jack is made of. You said it yourself. You’re made up of our stories.’

‘That’s –’

‘Different? How?’ He does not wait for her to answer. ‘No. He can’t ever know, Libby, but there were men. There were men before there were women. Do you see? It’s important, the order. There were men when I wore that uniform – that’s why I don’t show him the photo. He can’t know. He can’t guess.’

Elizabeth responds slowly, unable to marry the two pieces of information Jack is offering her. ‘Why? I don’t understand why the photo …’

‘I don’t know exactly, but I can’t let him see that boy. It frightens me – that he might see it in my eyes, sense it. He doesn’t want to know who I was before Ruby died. He pretends we’ve never discussed it. He needs to believe I wasn’t there before. He has to, to find what he wants …’

‘But, what’s he looking for?’

‘The impossible,’ Jack answers. Finally, he opens his eyes. Elizabeth notices the rim of tears along his lower lid, but pretends she has not.

‘Jack, please. Clearly.’

He turns away from her slightly, so that he can deliver his next words to the night instead of his daughter. ‘He’s searching for proof,’ he says, quietly. ‘I’m just part of the search.’ He stops and shakes his head. ‘I’m nothing but evidence. Don’t you see?’

‘No.’ She steps around him, so that they are face to face again. She doesn’t see, not completely. She can’t contemplate anything now but how distressed Jack is. She has to stop her interrogation. ‘No,’ she says. ‘That’s not all you are. Far from it. You’re my father, Jack.’

‘But I’m not,’ he answers. ‘You’ve always known that.’

She exhales protractedly. ‘Yes, I’ve always known, but it’s never mattered. It hasn’t.’

‘You kept asking, Lib. Even when you were tiny, you needed to know it all, to see it all.’

‘Yes. Yes, I know. I’m sorry.’ It has always been her curse, this need to fathom the nastiest depths of every situation, to be in possession of the absolute truth. Henry, it seems, suffers from the same affliction. ‘How can I make it up to you, old man? How about …’ she loops her arm through his and twists them both around so that they stand with their backs to the cottage and their eyes to the rest of the world, ‘… we keep a look out for that owl together?’

‘Yes,’ Jack says, rubbing away his tears with a quick swipe of one hand. ‘I’d like that.’

She leans in to touch her head to his, temple to temple. ‘What,’ she asks, ‘no cutting comment?’

And, ‘No,’ Jack answers. ‘No, not today. Today, I’m just going to be good to my daughter.’

‘Well, well,’ Elizabeth smiles. ‘That’s a first. I wonder how she’ll take it.’

Rather than go to their bed alone, or wake Henry, Jack settles in an armchair and falls into sleep in the most peculiar fast– slow way. His every movement is calibrated, careful. It is a task, this folding into a chair to rest. Even closing his eyes is a chore which seems to take minutes. And yet, he is asleep before Elizabeth has left the room. She watches from the doorway as her fathers’ breathing drops into sync. They are like the pendulums of two grandfather clocks, these two, positioned side by side; they swing time away in perfect unison.

Above the living room there is a spare bedroom, and soon Elizabeth will creep up to it, step by cautious step, one hand held between frame and closing door for too long because she is trying to muffle her every sound, because she does not want to wake those sleeping lovers. She has long imagined that when they go they will go together, as though their hearts are linked by some message system which will conspire and agree as to when to stop beating. It is her secret fear, every time she climbs towards the cottage now, that when she opens the door and moves inside, she will find two bodies, pressed together in the coldest sleep. And she is not ready for that yet. Not so soon after Ida’s mind took her body away.

It was the saddest possible ending for Ida – a woman who had decided, when her sister was lost, to become everything they both should have been; who had loved and laughed and given with every part of herself. Ida would wake each dawn with her husband just so that they could drink that first cup of tea together, then, while Gareth tended the farm, she would bake breads or knit jumpers to give away. She would organise boys to come in and work the farm so that she and Gareth could disappear for a week, to walk along the seafront on grey Swansea days and share single ice-cream cones. When the snows arrived, and they often did so high above sea level, she would take a shovel and dig her way around the village, clearing little paths all through the streets, and when men waved her down and offered to take over, she would laugh and continue and explain to them that so many years as a farmer’s wife had made her grow strong in the back. And she’d been a fun mother, when Jack was not thoughtlessly infuriating her. While the other girls were enduring a ticking-off for wading through the river at Witches’ Wood, Ida would be sitting beside Elizabeth as she towelled her feet and asking if she’d stepped on a fish. When, later, they started sneaking off to dances and returning home after dark, their lipstick shamelessly smeared, Ida did not punish Elizabeth for kissing boys but wondered instead if they were handsome or if they were good dancers.

She had been, in short, the mother Elizabeth has failed to be for Emma. But, God, isn’t she there, in Emma? Doesn’t Emma possess that very same simmering spirit her grandmother did? That’s a Fairclough woman right there, Henry had commented absently once, when Emma was perhaps fifteen and just beginning to brim over into her brightest, most buoyant self. Full up, she is. Full up with the world.

The memory pulls at that deep, lonely place where Elizabeth grew her daughter. Already, Emma is so much older than that girl they’d all smiled at. Already, and it has only been a minute.

Elizabeth is not yet ready for sleep, so she steps through to the kitchen, where she runs her flattened palm over the photo album. There are lives in there. Lives she will never really know. Lives already extinguished. She wonders how many of those people Jack has told her about today are still breathing; and whether Matilda and Grayson ever worked things out; and if Sally’s baby was properly loved; and how happy Monty really made himself with all those Bright Young People whose spark he fed off. She wonders what she will look like when she is nothing more than a photo in a photo album in a cupboard.

But she does not like the thoughts. And so she walks again about the house, brushing surfaces, putting glasses and teacups back on their shelves, humming an unidentifiable song. It is only when Jack has been asleep for an hour, and Henry many more, that she admits to herself why she wanted to stay the night.

There is no need for a lock on the study door. It has been an unspoken rule, this last forty-five years, that no one enter. And, as far as Elizabeth knows, no one has. Though surely Jack must have sneaked in, some late night or other, to discover how far his Henry’s work has come in more than four decades. Surely he has done that much. She pauses to listen for a movement, any movement, but there is only the long, dark swish of windy mountain nothingness passing outside the cottage and, abandoned on a cupboard top to her right, a watch, ticking out its own incessant rhythm.

‘Nothing,’ she whispers, and the shadows whisper it back.

Ridiculously, her hand is nervous on the doorknob, but she turns it all the same, and pushes the door, and is confronted within by stacks of books so high, so dense, that immediately she finds it difficult to breathe. Three walls are lost to the piles of bound pages. Jack’s words had led her to suspect this, but still the extent of it is shocking. The stacks sit four, five volumes deep, nudging their way towards the middle of the room. That spying moon strays through the window to Elizabeth’s left, bleaching the scattered surface of Henry’s desk, the scrawled-on papers there, but Elizabeth does not want to read them: she does not want to spell out her father’s madness.

She closes the door behind her. With only the dust for company, she edges along and reads the words on each spine which sits at her eye level. The Transmigration of the Soul. Metempsychosis: Studies from Life. Samsara. Rebirth, Renascence, Reawakening. She realises she is crying only when the letters of one particular title melt into incomprehensibility. The poor man. The poor man has wasted a lifetime in pursuit of certainty without once realising that it’s been there the entire time, sitting in the next room, waiting for him.

When she can taste the dust, heavy and bland on the back of her tongue, she slides quickly out of Henry’s study and through the side door of the cottage to stand under the slumping sky. She breathes out. New, fast-rolling clouds tumble over the mountainside, their bruised-purple edges hardly visible against the hour, but Elizabeth strains to see them. She needs to see them, to know them. She has been afraid, all her life, of not knowing. Somewhere in the darkness embracing her, a fox yowls for her mate, and Elizabeth wishes she could yowl for hers now; that, if she called to her husband, he would hear her and come. But of course he wouldn’t. She’s on her own. That fear rolls over her again – that inside their cottage, the same cottage they built with their own sweat and love, Henry and Jack are breathing their last breaths together – and, though there is a cold cut in the air now, she cannot risk going back through the door and discovering them gone. So instead she lowers herself onto the bench she has sat on so many times with one father or another and decides that when she and Emma visit next week, she will show her daughter those old photos. She will introduce her to her past. Then, she will let it go.

For now, though, she might simply sit here and keep watching for that bird, the way Henry and Jack have done for so many years. She might sit here, another of Ruby’s ghosts, until the sun shatters the night and she can appreciate the flushed rose ascent of the morning. She’d like that. It’s something, she’s sure now, her mother would have done.