“What, I don’t understand. Did you take these?”
“No. They’re Jack’s, from his camera. The one we bought him for his birthday.”
“Wow, they’re amazing, they really are,” Anna says, pulling the laptop closer. “That was a lovely day wasn’t it, Swanage.” She keeps scrolling through the photos as if she is looking for something in particular and then looks at me. “I thought we had lost the camera, though. You have it then?”
“I do, yes. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, goodness, not at all. It was your thing. You boys. Going up tall buildings, taking pictures from the heath.”
“Yeah, he loved it. There’s something else I wanted to show you,” I say, shuffling up next to her. “So, when I’m coding the pages and uploading the panoramas, I write these little messages to Jack.”
“What do you mean, messages?”
“They’re just memories, things about Jack that I remember from that particular place where we went. They were hidden before, buried in the code, but I’ve made them all public now. Look, if you mouse over the photo, the text comes up.” I take a deep breath. “I suppose it’s all the things that I would say to him if I could, if he was here now.”
“Oh, Rob, that’s so lovely.”
“But look, this is what I wanted to show you. I made a version of the site for you. You just have to log in as you, and it means that you can also add to them, add your own memories of Jack.”
“Thank you, Rob, that’s wonderful, but you didn’t need to do that...”
“I know I didn’t need to, but I wanted to, because this has all been about me, hasn’t it? My sadness, my drinking, my grief, and I let you down in the most horrible way. I didn’t once think about you, how all this affected you, how you were dealing with things. It was just about me, and I’m so sorry for that...”
Anna is staring at one of the photos, one Jack took of the two of us, wearing our raincoats on a Dorset beach.
“There was something you said the other day,” I say, “that made me feel so low. You said you were ashamed of how you were with Jack, that you wished and regretted that you hadn’t done more and I understand that, I really do. But it’s not true, because he adored you, he really did. Fathers and sons are one thing, but it’s different with a mother. He needed you in a special way, a way he could never need me.
“Do you remember in the mornings sometimes, the times he slept late and we were already downstairs in the kitchen and he would come, still sleepy, his hair standing up, and he always wanted his mom first, to come and rest his head on your lap. Never me. He always had to go to you first. And I always loved that. I loved watching the way he so obviously cared so much about you.”
I can see Anna’s bottom lip begin to quiver, so I put my arms around her. She doesn’t pull away and buries her head into my neck.
I have a sudden and desperate urge to be with her, to know her once again, to discover the person she had become, the person she’d been even before we had first met. Because that was love. To feel sorrow that you had no part in someone’s past. To be with her when she was washing paint pots, or running through sunflower fields, or sitting at her desk, trying to make sense of her sums.
That Christmas when we went to Suffolk to visit her parents, Anna took me to her secret place. We were bored, wanted to escape the house, so we went for a walk. It was, she said, the place she would come as a child when she wanted to be alone.
We walked deep into the woods around her house, until we came to a dense thicket of trees and shrubs. It seemed impenetrable, but Anna said there was a way through, a way she had to learn. She went first and I followed, twisting and turning, getting down on our hands and knees. After the last part where we had to crawl, we came to a huge clearing, the trees and shrubs forming an awning, as if it had been hollowed out by a giant machine.
She came here to read, she said, to escape her parents. She would bring a blanket and some fruit and cheese and stay here all day. It was pristine, untouched, a place where no human apart from Anna had been, and I don’t think—then and now—I had ever loved her more. I wished I could have seen her as a child, her knees pulled up to her chest, needles of sunlight pricking through the canopy of branches and leaves.
I pull her close to me and kiss the top of her head, and it is inadequate as a gesture, but I do not know what else I can say or do.
“Did you see this one?” I say, pulling over the laptop, wanting to divert her, to make her feel better. She clicks on a photo of Beachy Head, the day we had a picnic.
“Aw, I remember that day. The weather was just perfect.” She looked at the photo again, as if she is remembering something. “Rob, I just don’t know what to say, they’re so lovely. God, that box from the Chinese, I remember that, how he used to sleep with it.”
Anna closes the laptop. “I’m sorry, though. I can’t look at them here, or I’ll be an absolute mess. More to the point, I had forgotten what a huge geek you are.”
“We all need a project, right?”
“Right. So are you working on something new?”
I smile nervously, not sure whether to mention it or not.
“What?” Anna says, looking at me sideways.
“Well, don’t laugh, but I’m actually still trying to do something with my drones.”
Anna smiles at me, as if she
