Page 47 of All the Things We Never Knew

Orla’s daughter. A typical Beatrice gesture – a mixture of care and thoughtlessness, emotion felt sincerely but expressed clumsily. It made me sad that Gray would never see the painting – he would have loved it.

I walked back downstairs and propped the painting up on the mantelpiece to show the children, then turned to the final envelope, feeling an immediate jolt of shock. On it was handwritten not my name, but ‘Nigel Graham’.

No one had called Gray ‘Nigel’ since the officiant on our wedding day.

I remembered asking him on our first date if Gray was a nickname, and if so what his actual name was.

‘Humphrey,’ he’d said.

‘Oh, come on. Really?’

‘Okay. Aloysius.’

‘Stop it!’

‘Sorry. It’s Percival.’

Then our drinks arrived and we’d changed the subject, and it hadn’t been until our first holiday together, when I saw it in his passport, that I found out. When I asked him about it then, he’d laughed, half-embarrassed, and said, ‘Come on, Anna. If you were called Nigel, wouldn’t you change it as soon as you could?’ And I’d had to admit that I would.

But whoever had sent this card still knew Gray as Nigel.

I slit open the envelope with a kitchen knife, not tearing it with my thumb as I had the others, and took out the card inside. No tasteful pond here, no muted watercolours on cartridge paper or tree clad in autumn foliage.

It was a white card embossed in silver. The number 25 was in the centre, surrounded by hearts and champagne flutes, their bubbles merging with the sparkly hearts and drifting towards the top of the page.

A silver wedding anniversary card. Except Gray and I had been married for only eighteen years and known each other for just twenty-one.

My hands were shaking as I opened it. The writing inside was elegant, written in royal-blue ink from a fountain pen.

Nigel

You might prefer to forget, but I haven’t. I think of you every day and hope you’re embracing them all in health and with happiness.

Love you still

J

The words shocked me like a kick to the stomach. Someone who loved Gray – who had loved him when he was Nigel. Whose love had begun or been consummated or formalised twenty-five years before. A woman whose name began with J, who Gray had never mentioned to me, not even once.

Someone – I found myself rummaging through Gray’s work bag, finding a spiral-bound notebook and laying it open on the kitchen table next to the card to make sure – whose handwriting bore a striking resemblance to Gray’s.

I checked the back of the envelope, but there was no return address. I studied the postmark and saw that the card had been posted in Edinburgh, a city I couldn’t recall Gray ever having visited.

I needed a drink.

I was alone with Augustus, and cats don’t judge, so I made a gin and tonic and went and sat in the garden. Never again, I thought, would I hear Gray say, We should give that shed a sand and a coat of paint. When he said, We should… like that, it meant one thing: it was a job that was officially his, which he was delegating to me but which I would passive-aggressively not do, and so it wouldn’t get done. He’d first said it about the shed three years ago; it was still unpainted and now was likely to remain so.

I’d never be able to ask him who J was and why he meant so much to her that she had thought of him every day for twenty-five years.

What must that be like? I wondered. Would I look back twenty-five years from now and realise I had thought of Gray every single day? Would I still feel this edge-of-a-cliff, terrifying grief, which switched without warning to anger? Did J, whoever she was, think of Gray with that same impossible, conflicting mess of emotions?

The only thing that got me through those days was the prospect of dulling the ache each evening with several glasses of wine, so that at least I would be able to sink into oblivion for six hours, even if on waking my head throbbed, I felt sick and the fresh reality of Gray being gone hit me just as hard as it had the previous day.

On the day of Gray’s funeral, when Sarah arrived at half past nine in the morning, she found me in the kitchen pouring a gin and tonic.

‘Anna!’ She looked at me with horrified pity. ‘What are you…?’

‘Just got to take the edge off,’ I muttered. ‘It’s Gray’s funeral, after all. It’s what he would have wanted.’