‘I DON’T WANT to fall out over a boy,’ said Avril, when she came by to pick up Lydia on her way to school. Lydia had been watching for her out of the window, pretending to listen to music on her headphones.
‘I don’t want to either,’ said Lydia.
‘Good. But you can’t lie to me. You can’t. It does my head in, thinking that you could be hiding something from me. We’re supposed to be best friends.’
‘I wasn’t ly—’
‘Just promise not to do it, OK? Promise to always tell me the truth.’
Lydia nodded. ‘I promise,’ she lied.
‘Sometimes I wonder if you receive these cards, since you haven’t answered in so long. I suppose I can’t blame you for keeping me at a distance. I’m a stranger, after all, married to a woman who’s not your mother. I’m writing these cards for myself as much as for you – kidding myself that if I keep a channel of communication open, maybe one day you’ll answer me. You must have given me your address for a reason, mustn’t you?’
Lydia lowered the card. It was the third one she’d read; the other five sat, unopened, on Granny Honor’s bed.
‘What does he mean, he’s a stranger? Didn’t Dad spend any time with him at all?’
‘To my knowledge, they only met once.’
‘But why? Didn’t he want to know anything about his son?’
‘Until they met, Paul did not know he had a son. I never told him.’
Lydia stared at her grandmother. Her face was placid, as if she hadn’t admitted something so unbelievable.
‘You never told him you were pregnant? I thought …’
Granny Honor raised her chin. ‘You thought I would place an obligation on a man who had no intention of leaving his family? I had far too much pride for that. And I had no desire to be second-best in Paul’s life. That was a torture I chose not to endure.’
Lydia thought of the promise she had made to Avril this morning. ‘But you lied to Dad.’
‘I did not lie. I omitted. We never spoke of his father.’
‘But didn’t he ever ask?’
‘When he asked, I told him that his father was not part of our lives.’
How did you criticize your own grandmother for what she’d done when your father was growing up? Lydia studied Granny Honor: the patrician nose, the stubborn chin, the steady brown eyes. She had always been a little bit scared of Granny Honor. She always felt stupid next to her. But this …
‘I …’ She swallowed and thought about how to say it. ‘I would’ve been really sad not to know about my father growing up.’
‘You think it was a mistake. You think I did wrong, not to tell either of them.’
‘Well …’
‘Your father felt that way too.’
Honor said it softly, and she looked down at her lap as she said it.
‘It was a few months before he died that Stephen came to me,’ she continued. ‘He told me that he had met a man, a fellow academic, at a dinner. The man had stared at him all evening. He had seemed troubled. After the dinner, he approached Stephen and asked him his mother’s name.
‘He had worked out that Stephen was his,’ Honor said. ‘You see, Stephen and Paul looked very similar. To Paul, it may have been like seeing his younger self at the table with him.’
‘What was it like for Dad?’ Lydia asked.
‘Your father … was very angry with me. He and I argued. It was one of the only times …’ Honor lifted her chin again. ‘I have thought of it often. Especially as Stephen died not long afterwards. I have come to think that I made a mistake. And there is nothing I can do to make it up to your father. He died with that between us.’
Granny Honor was in the armchair; Lydia was sitting on the bed, next to the unopened letters. Honor’s posture was the same as it had been: proud, defiant, fierce. But something glittered in her eyes. It might be unshed tears. If they were sitting together on the sofa, Lydia might have reached out to her grandmother and hugged her. But there was a space between them. And something about Granny Honor’s posture forbade her from crossing it.
‘Do you think Dad ever wrote back to him?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. He may have, before he died.’
‘I hate to think of Paul writing, and writing, and not knowing that Dad is dead. Maybe we should write back to him,’ Lydia said. ‘There’s a return address on the back of the envelope.’
‘No,’ said Honor quickly.
‘But he would probably want to know that Daddy is—’
‘What difference can it possibly make?’
Lydia frowned. She thought it would make quite a bit of difference, personally, but Granny Honor seemed so dead set against it that she didn’t pursue it.
‘Paul wrote to me, too,’ said Granny Honor, softly again. ‘It was about the same time that Stephen and I argued. It must have been because he’d seen Stephen.’
‘Don’t you know why? Didn’t he say in the letter?’
‘I burned the letter as soon as I received it.’
Lydia couldn’t imagine ever receiving something from Avril and burning it. She couldn’t even leave a text unanswered for long. ‘Why?’
‘That chapter in my life was over.’
‘But he might have been writing to tell you that he’d got a divorce. Or that his wife was dead.’
‘Neither of which was true, according to the letters we’re reading now,’ snapped Honor. ‘It was finished. We have to live with the choices we make, Lydia. Sometimes hope is too painful to contemplate.’
She stood and walked, in that shuffling way she had now, to the window. Lydia could tell when she was being dismissed. She stood too, and hesitated, looking at her grandmother’s narrow back. Wondering if she should go to her and touch her shoulder. Hug her and say that she loved her anyway, even if she had kept that secret from Dad.
But Granny Honor wasn’t acting as if she wanted forgiveness. And anyway, what good would Lydia’s forgiveness do? Lydia had only been a little girl when all of this had happened.
She put the letter on the bed next to the others and went upstairs to her new room.
Sometimes hope is too painful to contemplate.
God, Granny Honor had lived a whole lifetime alone. She’d chosen to be by herself because she couldn’t stand to hope. She’d cut herself off from the man she loved, and cut her son off, too, because she thought the pain would be less that way. Because she only wanted the man she loved if she could have him fully.
Was that what was going to happen to Lydia too?
She lay down on her bed. It was funny, but when her bedroom had been downstairs she’d been driven crazy by all the noise. But up here, she could hear nothing at all. It was almost as if she were totally alone.