Page 68 of The Paris Agent
“I think I convinced myself I could shortcut my grief for your mother by distracting myself but all I’ve really managed to do is to drag my memory back to the last time I tried to shortcut my own emotions,” Dad laughs weakly. “Your father, I am sorry to say, is the kind of man who needs very little encouragement to run away from his feelings rather than to confront them full-on.”
“These feelings you keep talking about,” I say, cautiously meeting his gaze. “You said you have ‘troubling feelings’ when you think about the war.”
“I made a lot of mistakes in those days,” Dad says. “I have all of this...” He waves his hands around his chest vaguely. “...guiltthat surfaces when I force my mind to go back and I can’t always make complete sense of it. I find myself surrounded, with aged, overdue feelings coming at me from all sides.”
Dad takes a step toward the bedrooms, but I stand and catch his hand. He turns to look at me, his eyes swimming in tears. I’d never seen him cry before my mother died. Now, I can’t help but wonder if this tender side of him was buried beneath a facade for decades. I throw my arms around him, and he returns the hug automatically.
“Dad,” I choke. “I’m sorry for all of it. I’m just sorry this is all so hard.”
“Life goes by so fast, doesn’t it?” he whispers roughly against my hair. “Most of the time my SOE days feel like something that happened to someone else, but when I really let myself think about it, it feels like it all happened no more than five minutes ago.”
Just then, Wrigley joins us, pushing his way between us to join in the hug. Dad and I both laugh half-heartedly, and as we separate, Dad brushes away a tear and bends to scratch Wrigley’s neck.
“Why don’t you watch some TV with me tonight?” I ask him, pointing to Mum’s armchair. “We can watch Monty Python and forget about our problems for a while.”
Dad pauses, and I think he’s going to refuse the offer, but then he shrugs and forces a smile.
“You’re just jealous because Wrigley always wants to go to bed early when I do.”
He sinks into his own recliner, right next to the one my mother always sat in, and I chuckle triumphantly when Wrigley struggles his way up onto the larger sofa, next to me. The dog falls asleep with his head in my lap after a few minutes, my hand resting in his soft fur.
I’m not sure we manage to forget about our problems, but we do laugh as we distract ourselves with a few hours of TV, and that’s enough for now.
If Dad had retired early, I’d have called Theo with the new information about Chloe right away, but it’s too late to call once Dad is in bed, so it will have to wait for morning. Still, I toss and turn in bed, unable to sleep because I’m haunted by visions of a young Theo sneaking into his parents’ room to investigate his own adoption.
A sudden thought strikes me.
My mother also had a drawer full of special paperwork. Even in all of the months since her death, it has never occurred to me to see what’s inside.
I haven’t been into my parents’ room since Mum died, but I slip through the door the next morning as soon as Dad leaves for work and am immediately startled by how confronting it is. Her clothes are still in the wardrobe, lined up on the hangers by color, items in the drawers folded to the perfectly sharp edge she preferred. Her shoes are lined up too, although my gaze sticks for a long moment on the empty space where her running shoes should be. I run my hand along the dresses and jackets on the hangers and let my vision blur.
I miss you, Mum.
Her marriage to my father seemed a happy one, except for one bewildering period when I was seven or eight. She and Dad were fighting all the time, and me and Archie convinced one another that a divorce was imminent. In a way that only children can, we decided that wehad done something to cause all of the fuss, and as the big sister, I decided it was my responsibility to figure out what we’d done wrong so I could fix it. The next time I heard them shouting, I left Archie to hide under the bed as we’d taken to doing, but I crept across to press my ear against their door.
“I know you’re in love with her!” my mother cried. “Why else would you be spending so much time at the workshop?”
“Because I’m trying to build a business, Geraldine!” Dad shouted back. “For God’s sake, you knew these years were going to be hard until we got the second shop up and running. I’m no more having an affair with that woman than I am a potato!”
“What’s an affair, Daddy?” I asked him the next day, and his eyes bulged.
“Where did you hear that word?” he asked me, voice strained.
“I heard you and Mummy shouting last night.”
“Mummy has the wrong idea about something,” he said, and he seemed very tired in that moment. I didn’t understand it at the time. I adored Mum. It just didn’t seem a prospect worth considering that she might have been in the wrong.
That was the last time I’d hear them shouting, but it was far from the last time I’d see a vicious jealousy in her. They loved to entertain and had a large group of loving, warm friends—but it was not at all uncommon for their dinner parties to end in Mum sulking because Dad spent too much time speaking to one of the other women.
I go to my mother’s chest of drawers and pull the bottom one open. It’s the deepest drawer and there’s an organized stack of paperwork in there—Mum’s old folio organizers, bills marked paid before their due dates, birth certificates, pay slips—each fastened to like documents with colored paper clips. I flick through all of it but find nothing at all unexpected, until I leaf through one of Mum’s old organizers and note the little cross marks in the corner of certain dates. This was how she tracked her period, which I know she did religiously until she entered menopause. I pack the drawer back up and walk to their en suite.
Dad hasn’t packed away her toiletries or makeup, and the sight of those bottles and tubes scattered across the counter-top makes my heart ache so desperately, I have to sit down on the closed toilet lid for a moment to compose myself. Her perfume is there on the bench—some cheap brand she discovered a few years back and fell instantly in love with. I spray it into the room and breathe it in, and I miss her so badly I would give anything—anything—to be embraced in her arms again.
I didn’t come into that bathroom to torture myself. I just know that there is onlyonearea of the house my father would never venture near, and that’s the box under the sink where my mother always kept her sanitary items. He’s always been deeply squeamish about the finer details of the female reproductive system.
I slide the box out and open the lid to find it fully stocked to the top with sanitary pads, even though my mother hadn’t had need of them for a few years. I dig through the box, and my hands begin to shake when my fingers close around a stack of envelopes buried at the bottom.
“It’s me. It’s Charlotte. Mum had hidden the letters from Professor Read,” I tell Theo in a rush when he answers the phone. “The first one they ever sent Dad was open, so I know she read it. The others were unopened, but just like Read said, his office sent letters to Dad at semi-regular intervals for more than twenty years. Mum must have been intercepting them when they arrived.”
