As we finish up our food he suggests we go. He asks for the bill and as he pays I disappear to the ladies’. My feet are killing me but I think I manage to walk out of the restaurant without looking like I’m hobbling. He’s waiting for me outside, talking into his phone. When he sees me he raises his eyebrows and ends the call.
‘Let’s go over to Hyde Park,’ he says. ‘I have something I need to talk to you about and, if you don’t mind, I’d rather do it away from the office.’
‘Of course I don’t mind,’ I say, secretly intrigued.
We find a bench in a relatively quiet, shady spot. As I go to sit down he squints into the sun as he looks towards the café.
‘Do you fancy an ice cream?’ he asks. The question is oddly incongruous with the professional demeanour he is trying to maintain.
As I wait for him, I take my shoes off again and wiggle my toes in the grass. After a few minutes, he comes back and sits down next to me with two huge ice creams and hands one to me. I know he has something to tell me and part of me wants him to get on with it, but I also want to prolong this moment. It’s been a long time since I got to sit in the sun doing nothing with a beautiful man. Alec didn’t like to do nothing, and his had beauty faded in dusty Cambridge seminar rooms.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ he says suddenly.
‘What?’ I look blankly at him, but he’s looking away from me. I’m sure that before Monday I’d never met this man before. I’d remember surely?
‘I was wondering how long it would take you to remember me, but you clearly can’t.’
‘I’m sorry but no,’ I say, a little alarmed now.
‘We met a few times when we were kids.’
‘We did?’
‘Yeah, my mum and dad used to go to your mum’s parties back in the 70s before either of us were born. When your mum started them up again to honour your birthday every year, Dad used to drag me and my brother along. Do you remember how they’d put all us kids in a room together and hope we’d behave? You hated it! You hated having your house invaded by children. I think you preferred being with the adults!’
This rings a vague sort of bell but like so many things that happened in my childhood, events seem to melt into each other and I’ve put them all in a box at the back of my brain that I hardly ever look in. Like the box with my mother’s old headshots.
It feels strange to think Edwin knew me as a child and I have absolutely no recollection of him. I suddenly feel a little vulnerable and exposed and pull my dress down over my knees.
‘How old are you?’ I ask.
‘Thirty-five, so I’m a few years older than you. I guess my memories of that time are a bit clearer.’
He looks a bit crestfallen that I don’t remember, or take any delight in his memories.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘Oh, please don’t apologise. It’s just that those parties meant the world to me when I was a kid. My mum died when I was two, just after my brother was born, and as soon as we were old enough we were sent off to boarding school. I don’t think Dad knew what else to do. I don’t think he knew how to cope. One of the reasons I went into law was simply so we’d have something to talk about.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Stop apologising!’ He smiles. ‘Those parties usually fell in the half-term holidays and were always a highlight in a rather dreary childhood. I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.’
I don’t want to admit to him that I can remember some things about those parties very well and I’m still not ready to think about a certain man and a certain Beatles song. I decide it’s time to change the subject.
‘You said you had something to tell me,’ I say, finishing up my ice cream and searching in my bag for a tissue.
‘Yes. There is still a lot of paperwork to go through and sign. It’s all going to be very boring I’m afraid. It seemed more appropriate to tell you about this away from the office. It’s not strictly to do with your inheritance.’
He opens his briefcase and pauses, looking at me as though he’s trying to decide what he needs to do. After a moment, he takes out a sheaf of letters, all written on old-fashioned thick blue writing paper. The writing is big and loopy and written in that Peacock Blue ink that used to be so popular at school. Every letter is unopened and is addressed to me and every letter has ‘return to sender’ and a Notting Hill address scrawled across it in a very familiar hand.
‘A few weeks before your father died he asked me to go and see him. He was in hospital by then but he was still his old self in many ways. A terror to the nurses in general, always sneaking cigarettes despite the cancer and the oxygen.’
It occurs to me that I may well be sitting next to the only person who really knew my father in his later life. I need to ask questions, lots of them, but I just don’t know what to ask.
‘He gave me those letters and said that after he died I was to give them to you, so you’d know he hadn’t forgotten you.’
I look at the letters again. This means my father knew where I was all my life. And that my mother kept him away from me. I could have known my dad if it hadn’t been for her.
‘Every year on your birthday he wrote to you, from the day you were born until you were eighteen.’
‘And these are those letters?’ I ask. I’m feeling light-headed as I hold the letters in my hands. As I hold something my father had touched, had written. ‘Are they all here?’
‘Unfortunately not,’ Edwin replies. ‘At some point over the years some have been mislaid. Bruce didn’t seem to know where. He was quite distressed about some being missing, but they might turn up yet.’
‘You said he stopped writing when I was eighteen,’ I say, still staring at the letters in my hand. I realise I have an overwhelming urge to sniff them but that’s probably something I should do in private. ‘Why?’
‘I think he hoped you’d come looking for him yourself then.’
‘How could I look for someone my mother claimed to have forgotten? It could have been anyone in London according to her!’ I snap.
He holds up his hands. ‘I’m sorry; I didn’t mean that to sound so accusatory. It is what it is. But he wanted you to have the letters.’
I shake my head, looking at the letters in my hand. A single tear drops onto the envelope on the top of the pile, smudging the ink.
‘Come on,’ he says, noticing my distress. ‘Let’s get you home.’
‘But isn’t there still paperwork to do? Don’t we need to…’
‘No, there’s no hurry, Julia,’ he says. ‘Are you in London next week?’
‘Yes, I’m not going anywhere.’
‘We can do all of that next week then. For now, let me get you a cab.’
I clutch my letters and stagger after him in my uncomfortable shoes. All I want to do is change them for running shoes and run as fast and as hard as I can.
*
In times of trouble or intense emotional anxiety I only have one place to turn. Running. As soon as I get back to Campden Hill Road I grab my running things from my suitcase and hit the pavements of Kensington in the early evening sunshine.
Running was something Alec had introduced me to. He ran miles and miles a week. He was always competing in half-marathons that he expected me to get up at the crack of dawn to accompany him to. He was always trying to