For a moment the words were a blur of tears and I had to stop reading. Dad was finally saying all the things I needed to hear. ‘Jeremy,’ I said shakily, holding out the letter, ‘can you read it to me, please. I can’t seem to…’
‘Of course.’ He took the letter, angled it so that it caught the light, and after he found his place, read aloud in his clear, expressive voice.
‘“I’m proud of you, Fran. Despite my mismanagement you’ve grown up beautiful and talented and independent. I know we’ve drifted apart and bitterly regret my stupidity, my lies and evasions. I miss you and long for you to come home. When we speak on the phone, why can I never manage to forget my pride and ask you to visit? Pride and guilt and grief have imprisoned me for too long. Jeremy has made me see this. But maybe it’s all too late. All I can do now is to tell you the truth, the truth I should have told you years ago, and to beg your forgiveness.
‘“I will start by telling you how I met your mother. It was at a Christmas concert at a church in North London. She sang that old German carol “
Es ist ein Ros entsprungen
” with such deep emotion that I was entranced. She was particularly beautiful that night. She wore a long black dress, shot through with crimson that matched her lips. Her hair was pinned up on her head and sparkled with jewels.
‘“After the concert the singers mingled with the audience for mulled wine and mince pies. Angela stood among a group of her friends, joining in their conversation, but looking a little tired. The musician friend I’d come with caught me staring at her and offered to introduce us. She seemed even lovelier close to and had such a beautiful smile. I managed to produce some vaguely intelligent comment about the music and found her so easy to talk to, so confiding. We conversed for some time, about Bach and about her career. I discerned from one or two passing comments that she wasn’t entirely at home in this cultured, well-heeled crowd. Her father worked as a clerk for Suffolk County Council and securing her training had been a real struggle. She aroused in me both protectiveness and admiration. Later, when I left, I found her on the steps of the church looking lost. I hailed a taxi for her, but we ended up sharing it, since Westminster was only a step beyond Pimlico where she had a room in someone’s house.
‘“By the time I stepped out of the taxi at
Minster Glass
I had her phone number carefully written on the concert programme in my breast pocket.
‘“We began to meet regularly. Angela’s training was based in London at this time and I went to hear her whenever she performed. At other times, we visited art exhibitions together, or the opera. I tried to share with her my love of church architecture, art and stained glass.
‘“Before long, I found myself, for the first and only time in my life, deeply in love. And I could hardly believe my luck when she told me she felt the same way.
‘“Our courtship was the most wonderful time–full of art and music and the excitement of discovering each other. We were a couple of innocents. We didn’t think about the hows and wheres of the future, just the why: that we wanted to be together. She was a very passionate person–quite impulsive and vital. She also had a fragile side that showed itself in lapses in confidence, and I was glad to be there to help her. I tried to be strong and reassuring; was proud that she seemed to lean on me.
‘“We got married the Christmas after we met, quietly at her parents’ church in Ipswich, with her younger sister as bridesmaid. My parents both being dead, there was only my father’s Aunt Polly there for me, and the musician friend who’d introduced us acting as best man. We moved into the flat above
Minster Glass
.
‘“At first, we were terribly happy together. I worked in the shop all day while she went off to rehearse. In the evenings I would go to hear her sing. She had a voice like an angel. Angie, my angel. Once she gave me a tie-pin of an angel; lapis lazuli set in gold. I have it still…”’
‘So that’s where it came from,’ I burst out. I rummaged in my handbag for the little brooch I’d rescued from the workshop floor.
‘That’s it,’ Jeremy said, taking it from me, holding it so it gleamed in the candlelight. ‘He carried it with him always.’
He passed it back to me and took up the letter once more.
‘“Over the next couple of years, Angie’s career began to take off. She was invited to perform all around the country and this, of course, Fran, was still a time when wives were expected to put their husbands before professional duties. I did my best to be encouraging. When work allowed I would travel with her, but that couldn’t be often. And sometimes she was invited abroad and I didn’t go at all.
‘“Two years passed and the strains began to show. She seemed to be away so much. I could have stood her absences; it was her attitude when she came back that hurt me more. I could see that she was changing. She seemed less content with our life together. The criticisms started. The flat was difficult to make nice. Couldn’t we move? she asked. But actually she didn’t put much effort into making it nice. She always said she was bored by housework and cooking. She wanted to go out and eat in restaurants and have fun, which I didn’t enjoy particularly, and couldn’t afford, and then I felt belittled when she said she’d pay. She told me we needed to move somewhere smarter where she could invite people back. I wasn’t comfortable with that idea. Her musical friends could be quite clique-ey and I often felt left out.
‘“Of course, in the end I wished that I’d gone along with her desire to move, even if it had meant scrimping and saving, but which of us can see into the future? At the time it seemed as though she wasn’t just criticising the flat but me as well, and so I held out.”’
‘Maybe that’s not how she meant it though,’ I couldn’t help interrupting. ‘Perhaps she just wanted him to share the camaraderie of this exciting life she had.’ This letter was, of course, all from Dad’s side and I felt some need to stand up for my mother. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Do go on.’
‘“And then”,’ Jeremy read, ‘“Angela found that she was pregnant. We were stunned, having discussed the matter of starting a family and decided to put it off for a few years.
‘“Your mother was very anxious all the way through her pregnancy. She was worried about how a baby would affect her work, for she could hardly travel so much once she had you. But it wasn’t just that. She was affected psychologically. She had scares about her health, didn’t sleep well and became convinced that people were breaking into the flat as we lay in our bed. But despite all these anxieties, we obviously hoped that our relationship would be closer when you were born, that you would draw us together again”.
‘That’s a great responsibility for a small baby, saving its parents’ marriage,’ Jeremy said with a sigh. He read on.
‘“For a while, after your arrival, everything was blissful. You were a quiet baby, who slept through the night almost at once. Her friends used to remark on how easy you were. After a few months, with the help of a part-time nanny, your mother was able to resume her singing in London. And she found she enjoyed looking after a baby. In fact, we were both absolutely besotted with you”.’
Tears slipped down my face, and when Jeremy looked up and saw them he fell into silence. One of the candles on the altar flickered and died with a breath of smoke. He looked at his watch and slowly folded the letter. ‘Come on,’ he said gently, ‘we’d better go back. Sarah will be sending out search-parties. Shall we read more later? Or tomorrow even?’
‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’m exhausted.’ Then: ‘Thank you,’ I told him, as he locked up. I felt immensely grateful to him for being there with me.
That night I slept badly, thoughts about Dad’s letter rushing like crazy round my head. In the morning, I got out everything about my mother that I’d rescued from the flat and looked at it with new eyes. Here was her photograph, still tucked into the Burne-Jones book she gave Dad. This must have been how she looked round about the time that they met, her eyes filled with life and hope.
I took the photograph and the concert programme with me when I went with Zac to see Dad that afternoon. Even if Dad couldn’t see the picture or hear what I had to tell him, it helped me to talk to Zac about my mother in Dad’s presence. Who knew what Dad might absorb from our conversation. Zac didn’t say much, just, ‘She’s very lovely,’ when I showed him the portrait.
That evening after dinner, Jeremy and I repaired to the lumpy armchairs in his study. He messed about getting the gas fire working, cursing it in a quite unChristian fashion. Finally, satisfied, he retrieved Dad’s letter from his desk drawer and settled down in his chair.
‘Are you sure you’re up to this?’ he asked me.
‘I need to know,’ I replied.
He began to read again.
‘“When you were one year old, your mother left you behind in order to travel to Germany for a series of concerts. Her own mother came to stay to help out as I had to work and, anyway, I didn’t feel confident about the care of a baby. These days, young chaps change nappies at the drop of a hat. I’d never changed a nappy in my life.
‘“She returned a week later and it was instantly clear that something about her was different. Some door was closed against me. She still looked after you tenderly, but with me she seemed distracted. I knew, with a sense of panic, that we were growing further and further apart, but I had no idea what to do about it. My resentment grew and festered.
‘“Every time she went on tour she would leave you with me, no longer encouraging me to accompany her. In fact, she told me it was bad for you to be carted around like a bag of shopping and that, although she missed you, it was better that you stayed at home with me. When your grandmother couldn’t come I depended on the nanny but, more and more, I would find myself in sole charge and was surprised to find that I enjoyed looking after you.
‘“This went on until after your second birthday and then came June the twenty-third, that awful night in 1965. I’ve been over and over it so many times it’s difficult to remember exactly what happened, but I’ll do my best. Angela arrived home in the early hours of the morning, and woke me in terrible distress. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong and we quarrelled. Eventually, it all came out. She had been having an affair with another musician–a young English tenor whom she’d met on the Berlin tour. She was deeply in love with him, she told me. She looked white and exhausted, but I had no interest in her pain. I was incandescent with rage, but determined not to show it. I told her to go. She came out with some story that the affair was over, that she had come back, wanted to mend things. But I wouldn’t hear her. I was too angry, didn’t want to know. She had spoiled everything for ever. I had adored her, had given her all of myself, but she had thrown it all away. I couldn’t bear to look at her”.’
I cried out then, and Jeremy stopped reading. ‘That’s so like Dad,’ I whispered. I remembered the few times I had seen my father really angry with me, how cold his anger could be, how he would withdraw from me for days until I was frantic with grief, and then he’d suddenly relent. Perhaps that’s how he ended up with so few friends. If he gave his loyalty he expected loyalty and obedience in return. Like King Cophetua, whose image he had ripped from my wall, he had adored his beggar maid, and she had spurned him. She was given no second chance.
‘Go on,’ I told Jeremy gently. He found his place on the page.
‘“I left the room, returning a moment or two later with you in my arms. I wanted to hurt Angela, show her what she was losing. I told her to say goodbye to you and leave. I said I would sue for divorce and for custody of you. And, since she had spent so much time away from home, I felt in justice it would be granted to me.
‘“Angela gave a great cry of despair and tried to take you from me, but I pushed her off. She cried that she had nowhere to go, so I told her roughly to go to her lover. It was then she impressed upon me that this option was no longer open to her. ‘Go home to your parents then,’ I said wildly, and pulling her suitcase from the top of the wardrobe I threw it to her. I watched her pack a few clothes, then pick up her handbag and her vanity case. She cried goodbye to you–an anguished goodbye that I still hear in my dreams–and went downstairs.
‘“It is useless to speculate how the situation might have been redeemed, had what happened next not taken place. Don’t think I haven’t been tortured by such speculations for the rest of my life. Maybe, once we’d both calmed down, we would have found some way forward. But alas, we were never given the chance.
‘“I walked with you over to the window. The scene that unfolded there is forever imprinted on my memory. I saw her step out into the road and turn to look up at the window, with an expression of desolation that haunts me still. Desolation turned to terror as a car, full of partygoers, accelerated round the corner and knocked her down. We rushed down to the street but there was nothing I could do. She died in hospital later that night”.’
Jeremy stopped. I stared at the opposite wall, playing it all out in my mind.
I had been there
–I had heard them quarrel–but the memory of it was, thankfully, lost to me. I had been with my father when he ran down to the street, when the ambulance came, when they’d taken her away, my mother. I imagined myself crying, screaming for her, understanding that something had gone terribly wrong but not knowing what. But I couldn’t remember a thing about that night. I could only remember the way she used to hold me close; the pattern of a dress–the scent of her.
‘Are you all right, my dear?’ Jeremy asked quietly.
I nodded mechanically. Then after a moment I said, ‘He killed her–that’s what he thought, didn’t he? That he killed her.’
‘“That is the burden that I have carried all these years”,’ Jeremy read on. ‘“That my anger and callousness contributed to her death. I robbed you of your mother, Fran, and I can never forgive myself. I have always been afraid to tell you about her, not only because it’s so painful for me, but because I feared to lose you, too. I thought you would hate me if you learned that I caused her death. If you grew up in innocence of her, I believed that you wouldn’t miss her; that you would be happy. Lately I’ve come to see that I was wrong. I regret the deep silence between us, the gulf I long to cross. I pray for the courage to cross it before it is too late. I remain, despite everything, Your loving father, Edward”.’