I stared at it. ‘Well, she did send it,’ I said. ‘I wonder if she meant to.’
‘Perhaps someone else picked it up from the hall table and posted it, without her knowledge.’
This seemed highly likely to me. ‘That would have given her a turn.’
‘You are sure it is a “her”?’
I nodded. ‘Aren’t you? “My life has been a living lie.” “Your deceit and my weakness.” None of it sounds very butch to me. I rather like her signing it “a fool.” It reminds me of the pop lyrics of our younger days. Anyway, I assume the base deceit to which she refers comes under the heading of romance. It doesn’t sound like someone feeling let down over a bad investment. That would make the writer female, wouldn’t it? Or has your life steered you along new and previously untried routes?’
‘It would make her female.’
‘There we are, then.’ I smiled. ‘I like the way she cannot curse you. It’s quite Keatsian. Like a verse from ‘Isabella, or The Pot of Basil’: “She weeps alone for pleasures not to be.”’
‘What do you think it means?’
I wasn’t clear how there could be any doubt. ‘It’s not very mysterious,’ I said. But he waited, so I put it into words. ‘It sounds as if you have made somebody pregnant.’
‘Yes.’
‘I assume the deceit she refers to must be some avowal of a forever kind of love, which you made in order to get her to remove her clothing.’
‘You sound very harsh.’
‘Do I? I don’t mean to. Like all of us boys in those days, I tried it often enough myself. Her “weakness” implies you were, in this instance, successful.’ But I thought over Damian’s original question about the letter’s meaning. Did it indicate that he thought things were not quite so straightforward? ‘Why? Is there another interpretation? I suppose this woman could have been in love with you and her life since then has been a lie because she married someone else when she’d rather have been with you. Is that what you think it is?’
‘No. Not really. If that’s all she meant, would she be writing about it twenty years later?’
‘Some people take longer than others to get over these things.’
‘“I stare at my living lie each day.” “No one will ever know.” No one will ever know what?’ He asked the question as if there could be no doubt as to the answer. Which I agreed with.
I nodded. ‘As I said, you made her pregnant.’
He seemed almost reassured that there was no other possible meaning, as if he had been testing me. He nodded. ‘And she had the baby.’
‘Sounds like it. Though that in itself makes the whole affair something of a period piece. I wonder why she didn’t get rid of it.’
At this, Damian gave his unique blend of haughty look and dismissive snort. How well I remembered it. ‘I imagine abortion was against her principles. Some people do have principles.’
Now it was my turn to snort. ‘I’m not prepared to take instruction from you on that score,’ I said, which he let pass, as well he might. The whole thing was beginning to irritate me. Why were we making such a meal of it? ‘Very well, then. She had the baby. And nobody knows that you are the father. End of story.’ I stared at the envelope, so carefully preserved. ‘At least, was it the end? Or was there some more? After this?’
He nodded. ‘That’s exactly what I thought at the time. That it was the start of some kind of… I don’t know… extortion.’
‘Extortion?’
‘My lawyer’s word. I went to see him. He took a copy and told me to wait for the next approach. He said that clearly she was building up to a demand for money and we should be ready with a plan. I was in the papers a bit in those days and I’d already had some luck. It seemed likely that she’d suddenly understood her baby’s father was rich, and so now might be the moment for a killing. My offspring would have been about twenty then-’
‘Nineteen,’ I said. ‘Her life was a living lie for nineteen years.’
He looked puzzled for a moment, then he nodded. ‘Nineteen and just starting out. Cash would have come in very useful.’ He looked at me. I didn’t have anything to add since, like the lawyer, I thought this all made sense. ‘I would have given her something.’ He was quite defensive. ‘I was perfectly prepared to.’
‘But she didn’t write again.’
‘No.’
‘Perhaps she died.’
‘Perhaps. Although it seems rather melodramatic. Perhaps, as you say, the letter got posted by accident. Anyway, we heard nothing more and gradually the thing drifted away.’
‘So why are we discussing it now?’
He did not answer me immediately. Instead, he stood up and crossed to the chimneypiece. A log had rolled forward on to the hearth and he took up the tools to rectify it, doing so with a kind of deadly intensity. ‘The thing is,’ he said at last, speaking into the flames but presumably addressing me, ‘I want to find the child.’
There didn’t seem to be any logic in this. If he’d wanted to ‘do the right thing,’ why hadn’t he done it eighteen years before, when there might have been some point? ‘Isn’t it a bit late?’ I asked. ‘It wouldn’t have been easy to play dad when she wrote the letter; but by now the “child” is a man or woman in their late thirties. They are what they are, and it’s far too late to help shape them now.’
None of this seemed to carry any weight whatever. I’m not sure he even heard. ‘I want to find them,’ he repeated. ‘I want you to find them.’
