fiction / London / 1993
17 August 1993
The letter arrived with a pale rectangle in the paper where the rain had thinned it. Her name was inside, written in a hand she knew too well, although the man who owned that hand had been dead for six years.
Anna read the envelope at the kitchen table without opening it. She had inherited from her mother a belief that bad news became less vulgar if one made it wait. The handwriting slanted forward with the same false urgency her father had brought to trains, birthdays, apologies, and every other appointment at which he had arrived both late and offended.
The postmark was blurred. The stamp had begun to lift at one corner. Someone had written her address in blue-black ink and then, beneath it, in pencil, added PLEASE FORWARD IF GONE. The phrase seemed almost tender until she imagined the number of hands through which the letter must have passed, each one deciding that her father's unfinished business was not theirs.
It was not a ghost story at first. It was a legal matter, or that was what Anna told herself as she stood in the hallway with her coat still wet at the cuffs. The solicitor had written to say that a box had been found in the locked cupboard of a house in Greenwich. Her father had rented the house under another name. The box contained papers, two railway tickets, a watch without hands, and twelve letters addressed to Anna but never posted.
She took the train because trains made grief behave. They set it moving in one direction and gave it windows to look out of. By the time she crossed the river the rain had become a fine black net over the city, and every roof seemed to be holding its breath.
Her mother had disliked Greenwich. Too maritime, she used to say, as if the river were an impolite relative who kept mentioning death at table. Anna had never understood the objection as a child. Now she watched the wet masts and grey terraces slide past and wondered how many of her mother's opinions had been maps folded small enough to fit inside ordinary conversation.
The solicitor was young, which irritated her. Grief should not be administered by people with clear skin. He gave her the box in a room that smelled of polish and paper dust. On the lid was a watermark: a crown, a fox, and the words CARR & SONS, 1962. She knew the mark. Her father had used that paper for formal apologies.
"There was also a key," the solicitor said, and placed it beside the box with the solemnity of a man who had been waiting all week to perform one useful gesture. The key was small, brass, and newly labelled: cupboard, rear room. Her father's labels had always been precise where his loyalties were not.
Anna asked who had found the box. The solicitor looked down at his notes. A builder. The house was being divided into flats. The rear room had been sealed behind plasterboard. He said this as if plasterboard were a natural geological fact and not something a person chose to put between himself and evidence.
The first letter began: My dear Anna, this is the version in which I tell the truth. The second began the same way. So did the third. Each letter contradicted the last. In one, he had left because he was ill. In another, because he was ashamed. In another, because her mother had known everything and forgiven nothing. By the eighth letter Anna understood that truth was not what the box contained. The box contained attempts.
She arranged them by date and then by mood, because chronology failed almost immediately. Her father had dated two letters on the same Sunday and placed himself in two cities. In one he was in Bristol, too poor to come home. In the other he was in London, rich enough to be cruel. Both letters mentioned rain. Both asked her to remember him kindly. Neither managed the kindness of accuracy.
The watch without hands was wrapped in a handkerchief embroidered with the initials M.V. Her mother's name had been Margaret Vale before marriage. Anna held the cloth to her face and smelled only the cupboard: dust, metal, old damp, the odour of secrets that had lost their heat.
In the ninth letter her father described a woman called Elise who had "kept me from vanishing altogether". In the tenth, Elise became a nurse. In the eleventh, a student. In the twelfth, a mistake. Anna looked for Elise in the railway tickets, in the address on the box, in the careful spaces between sentences. The woman was everywhere and nowhere, which made her, Anna thought, very likely real.
At home that night she spread the letters across the table and held each page to the lamp. The watermark appeared only when the light passed through it. Crown. Fox. Date. A hidden emblem made visible by pressure and brightness. She thought then that perhaps families were made the same way: not by what they said in ordinary light, but by the marks that appeared when held up to heat.
Her mother had burned his photographs in the garden and kept his books in the sitting room. As a child Anna had taken this for inconsistency. Now she recognised the method. Destroy the face. Preserve the marginalia. Let the man vanish from the mantelpiece and remain, more dangerously, in the underlined passages of novels he had abandoned halfway through.
Near midnight she found a thirteenth sheet tucked behind the cardboard lining. It had no date and no salutation. The same paper, the same watermark, but the handwriting was her mother's. I know where you are, it said. I know what name you are using. If you write to Anna I will tell her everything, and if you do not write I will tell her nothing. Choose which cruelty belongs to you.
Anna read the sentence until the words loosened from meaning and became marks. There it was: not a secret kept by one person but a structure maintained by two. Her father's cowardice had needed her mother's discipline. Her mother's silence had needed his absence. The marriage had continued after he left, not as love or hatred, but as an arrangement of withheld paper.
The final letter was blank except for her name. Anna kept that one. It was the most honest.
In the morning she returned to Greenwich with the key. The house was open to the weather. Workmen had stripped the rear room to joists and brick, and the cupboard no longer existed except as a rectangle of cleaner wall. Anna stood inside that absence and understood, with a calm that frightened her, that explanation was not the opposite of mystery. It was another room built around it.
She left the twelve letters in the solicitor's box and took only the blank one, the watch, and her mother's threat. At the station she held the blank page to the window. Crown. Fox. 1962. Her own face floated over the watermark, transparent and severe, belonging briefly to both sides of the paper.