‘It’s a miracle to me that you’ve found me,’ she says quietly. ‘That you’ve come to see me. That we’ve talked like this. Could we see it that we’ve found each other now, maybe? That there’s still a chance … of something? Will you at least think about it?’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I say. And I pick up my bag and I walk out of the café and I am back on the street in the still bright sunshine, heading for home.

CHAPTER 45

Dad, of course, is not at The Palladian. I knew he would already have left, with Kemp, for Hornsey Wood Reservoir. I need to see him. I need to tell him that I’m not angry now, that I understand a mess of a mother – a too-young, fleeing, disappointed and disappointing mother – would have been worse than no mother at all. That I know he was shielding us from hurt. That our mother may have been in the shadows of our lives all along, without us knowing – but she was better there, than out in the light.

I don’t blame Dad for keeping their secret. This painful, justified secret he engineered and instigated. He did it for us, and at least Angela will have her answer now – she will finally get the reply she’s been searching for, all this time. Who my mother is, and where she has been. If she has thought about us, cried for us. Seen our faces in her dreams. I have never sought a reply, but I know the one she gave me in the café was incomplete, full of gaps and blanks and missing pieces. Do I want them filled in? Angela may seek to read between the lines of the letters our mother never wrote or sent, from a Sweden she never lived in. Angela may want to re-start a dialogue with Ellen – resurrect a relationship, a lost life. Do I? Do I want to go searching behind shadows for more answers? When my answer has always been Dad?

He has been both father and mother to us. All those years ago, he kept the ship sailing when the seas were rough and the skies dark, keeping the light in our lives when the sun seemed far from us all, and though he left that helm a long time ago, when the guide dogs went, and he and I both, eventually, withdrew from the world and sat in our chairs – the window and our hearts closed – he has still been there, my dad. He has always been there.