There was a light shining from beneath the parlour door. Bruno stood for a moment in the hall, considering. Some instinct had brought him over the cliff to Paradise but now he waited, uncertain of the next move. This unexpected sense of confusion, caused by his instinct abruptly switching off, was similar to the dislocation he experienced when the two worlds of imagination and reality collided. Thinking about Mutt, remembering the past, he’d forgotten about Joss. Even as he thought about her, the parlour door opened and she came out into the hall. At her gasp of surprise and alarm he raised his arms, as if in a gesture of reassurance, but she continued to stare at him as if she were seeing him for the first time or adjusting to some new situation.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t thinking. I had a feeling about Mutt and just came on up. I haven’t got used to you being here yet, I suppose. Sorry to frighten you.’
She came towards him, out of the shadows, and he saw that she was struggling with some strong emotion. Bruno reached out and took her by the shoulders.
‘What is it? Is it Mutt?’
Joss shook her head and then nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose it is in a way.’ Her eyes, blurred by tears and shock, slid away from his and then anxiously fixed themselves on his face again as if seeking reassurance. Some familiar quality of compassion in his look seemed to give her confidence and he felt her shoulders sag a little as she relaxed in his grip.
Without speaking he led her into the drawing-room and pushed her gently into the corner of the sofa. Carefully he piled charred logs and embers together, then, picking up the bellows, puffed life into the fire with gentle, rhythmic movements. Grey ash glowed bright, a tiny flame pulsing and trembling whilst blackly scorched wood scintillated with a hundred flickering sparks. Huddled in the chair, her hands pressed between her knees, she watched him silently whilst her tired brain rocked with the effort of assimilating this new knowledge: Mutt, for all these years, had been living a lie yet Joss’s heart went out to her and tears rose once more to her eyes as she recalled the words and phrases her grandmother had written so long ago.
Bruno laid down the bellows and looked at her.
‘Want to tell me?’ he asked.
That detached part of him saw the imperceptible withdrawal, the tremor that tensed her knees and shoulders; noted that some indefinable fear made it impossible for her to meet his eyes. He hesitated, still crouching before the fire, realizing that her dilemma was one that related directly to him. Somehow, he intuited, the trustful ease with which she’d always approached him was damaged: his reliability was in question. Still crouched, he swore silently and then rose to his feet in one quick movement, thrusting his hands into his pockets.
‘Perhaps you found something,’ he hazarded, rather as if they were playing some kind of guessing game. ‘Some document that’s puzzled you.’ A quick glance at her troubled face gave him no assistance. Suddenly he remembered Emma’s remark about the American. ‘Or maybe it was a photograph.’
She swallowed, biting her lips, but still avoiding his eyes and he sensed something else besides this new lack of confidence in him. His hands clenched into fists as frustration rose inside him. ‘Come on, Joss,’ he wanted to say. ‘Help me to help you,’ but her white, unhappy face and restless eyes restrained him. There was an uneasiness about her that suggested guilt and suddenly he had an idea.
‘I suppose you haven’t by any chance come across a copy of Mutt’s will?’ he asked lightly. ‘I must admit it would simplify things if you have.’
She stared at him then. ‘Would it? I can’t imagine how.’
Her voice was almost childishly defiant and she shrank back into the cushions as he came to kneel beside the arm of her chair.
‘Come on, love,’ he said. ‘Don’t play games. Tell me what you’ve found.’
‘Letters,’ she said, eyes wide and dark. ‘I wasn’t going to read them and then I found I simply couldn’t resist. Mutt asked me to find them …’
Her voice trailed away into silence and he frowned.
‘Letters? What kind of letters?’
‘She wrote to her sister but never posted them. There must be more than a dozen of them. They explain it all. How she came here and who she really is.’
Bruno closed his eyes for a second. ‘Christ!’ he muttered. ‘I don’t believe it. Letters!’
They stared at each other. His shocked expression restored her as nothing else could have done and she drew her legs up into the chair, leaning closer to him, as if she saw that he might need some kind of consolation too.
‘I can’t take it in,’ she told him. ‘Nothing is what I thought it was. I just couldn’t grasp it to begin with but, after a while, how it affected me – all of us – didn’t matter so much as what I felt about Mutt.’
She hesitated as if hoping for some response, perhaps encouragement, but Bruno remained silent. There was something else in his face besides horrified disbelief, and after a moment she identified it: he was angry.
‘Letters!’ He swung himself to his feet and went across to the fire. Picking up the poker he stabbed it furiously against the logs. ‘All these years of secrecy, of promising to protect Emma from the truth and remembering to think twice before I speak, and meanwhile she writes it all down in bloody letters and leaves them lying about. My God! I simply can’t believe it.’
Huddled in her chair, Joss watched him anxiously. Despite her own shock during those first moments when she’d looked at Bruno and thought, But he isn’t my uncle and nothing is what it seems, she’d felt an overwhelming compassion for her grandmother: a strong identification with the young woman who’d written those letters, full of self-doubt and guilt but – having set her hand to the plough – trying not to look back.
‘They weren’t lying about,’ was all she could think of to say in defence of Mutt. ‘They were underneath lots of things in a drawer’ – but she knew that it was a feeble protest.
‘In a drawer,’ he repeated contemptuously. ‘Oh, well, that’s perfectly all right then. No-one is going to be looking for anything in a drawer, are they?’
She got up and went to him, taking his arm. ‘You need to read them,’ she said. ‘They aren’t just casual letters dashed off for fun. It was Mutt’s way of retaining her identity and trying to assuage her guilt. I can understand that. I expect she simply couldn’t bring herself to destroy them and then, as the time passed, they sort of faded and she forgot them.’ She shook her head impatiently. ‘I’m not getting this right.’
Bruno was watching her unsympathetically. ‘What about my identity?’ he asked. ‘All my life I’ve denied my mother and my sister. I’ve lied and prevaricated and thought it worth it for certain reasons. And now it’s blown wide open, all gone for nothing, because Mutt has an urge to commit her qualms to paper. Why letters, for God’s sake? And if you write letters, why not post the bloody things? Perhaps she has posted some and other people know the truth.’
Joss dropped his arm. ‘It’s not like that. You must read them, Bruno. Remember that she simply asked me to find them and if I hadn’t read them nobody would be the wiser. Please. Just keep an open mind until you’ve read them. After all, they won’t be telling you anything you don’t know except for the way Mutt felt right at the beginning.’
There was a silence. It was clear that Bruno was making an immense effort to take hold of his temper: a muscle jumped in his jaw and his eyelids drooped, giving him an uncharacteristically brooding look. Joss felt a twitch of fear. He seemed like a stranger and her sense of disorientation returned: they were not related, nearly everything that she had been told about her family was untrue, but even as she looked at Bruno she suddenly had an inkling of what it must have been like for him. Any guilt she was experiencing was quenched by her instinct that this was the right course to take.
‘Read them,’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t judge her until you’ve done that.’
He took a deep, barely resigned breath and nodded. ‘OK. Where are they?’
‘I’ll get them,’ she said quickly. ‘They need to be read in order. Build up the fire and I’ll make some coffee.’
He looked impatient, as if he felt he was being manipulated and wheedled into a receptive frame of mind, and she accepted the fact that her behaviour must seem almost patronizing. How could she, knowing the truth for a brief few hours, presume to advise Bruno, who had lived with it for fifty years? Before she could apologize or explain her feelings he had turned away and was piling logs into the grate. She hesitated for a second or two and then hurried out, down the hall and into the parlour. As she sorted and piled the letters her hands shook and she paused at one point, listening, wondering if she’d heard Mutt’s bell. There was only silence.
Bruno was sitting beside the fire, leaning forward, hands clasped loosely between his knees. Joss dragged forward the small round table and placed the letters beside him. He glanced at them and then at her; his eyes crinkled a little.
‘Sorry, love.’ His voice was gentler. ‘It’s been one hell of a shock for you too, I imagine.’
She nodded, biting her lip, and he shrugged and shook his head as if in despair at the situation.
‘I’ll get that coffee,’ she said – and left him to it.
In the kitchen she was seized with a sudden fit of shivering: her hands trembled and her teeth chattered.
Shock, she told herself. The spoon clattered against the mug and she spilled the milk as she poured it into the jug. Part of her was with Bruno reading the letters, willing him to empathize, other thoughts jostled to the forefront of her mind as she waited for the kettle to boil. Her mother: what would she say if she knew? Well, she must never know. The secret must be kept. Joss stared round the kitchen, hugging her arms across her breasts, trying to come to terms with the fact that she had no right here: that she and her mother and Mutt were interlopers. It was impossible to take it in.
Suddenly she needed to see Mutt. Her grandmother had still been deeply asleep when she’d looked in again earlier, halfway through the letter reading, and she’d felt oddly cheated – as if something significant might have been exchanged between them. Perhaps now, Mutt might be awake again and she, Joss, could somehow indicate that she knew the truth and that everything was all right: that, whatever had happened in the past or might happen in the future, Joss’s love for her was unchanged.
She made the coffee and took it into the drawing-room. Bruno didn’t look up; his face was set and absorbed. Joss slipped out again and up the stairs. She hesitated at the door, her heart banging in her side, and then gently turned the handle and went into her grandmother’s bedroom.
Mutt wasn’t there. Joss could tell at once that the room was empty even before she saw the lifeless figure on the bed. Mutt was gone and it was too late, now, for the truth.