I was happy with you, Anna, and happy to devote my life only to us.

It was Lisa who had prepared me for my separation from you. When I went back to work I found dear old Mrs Busby. I suppose she wasn’t so old, when you were still a baby, but she was grandmotherly even in her late forties. The first time she opened the door to me and saw me standing there with you in my arms, she said, in real tones of appreciation, ‘Oh, what a beautiful baby.’ I trusted her immediately. Whenever I came to collect you you were always clean, fed and occupied, and you had Reni James, company which you wouldn’t have had at home. I owed such a debt to Edith Busby. I loved my work. Life settled and didn’t feel lacking. I had you, my job, Roland. Dear Roland – he has always been such a good friend to us.

I saw Olivia one more time, in the summer of 1962. She was back up here for a time then. Alec Kemp more or less paid to keep her out of the way, like a wayward son being packed off to be shameful somewhere distant like Africa. Except she chose London.

My morning’s list of calls included a visit to a Mrs Kemp, with a new baby. The name registered, of course, but it never occurred to me it would be her, not here in Birmingham, nor with ‘Mrs’ as the handle on the name. She was living in Moseley in one of those enormous Victorian houses that had already been sliced up inside for flats. I had to climb a flight of stairs – grand ones once, though dirty and communal now – to find the chipped door marked ‘3’.

She was holding him as she answered the door, her small frame wrapped in a turquoise silk robe, hair loose and falling all over the place. The child was very tiny and startlingly dark. I realized immediately that the father must have been from India or similar. His eyes were huge, brown and alert.

We never spoke. As soon as I’d realized who it was I was on my way back down those grimy stairs and out to the car. When I sat down in the seat I was shaking. I managed to drive back to the clinic, and handed Olivia’s notes over to another Health Visitor. I wasn’t having anything of that. Not after all this time.

For Anna

May 1981

My dear one,

I suppose I should have written this a long time ago and got it out of my system. It’s our story: Olivia’s and mine. You used to ask me about Olivia so often when you were a little girl, and what I used to feed your curiosity was a lie, or at least such a selective version of the truth as to amount to one.

You will see from her letter enclosed with this that Olivia didn’t die during the war. In a way it was simpler for me to let you think she was dead all this time, and the fact was that for me she might just as well have died. I wanted her out of my life as cleanly as death would have taken her. She’d done such damage and I couldn’t stand any more.