Page 90 of All the Things We Never Knew

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked. ‘You must be cold.’

‘Thank you.’

She gestured to the sofa, and I took off my coat and sat down, hearing the hum of a kettle and the clink of china from the nearby kitchen.

I tried to imagine Gray living in this house, but failed.

Louisa returned a few minutes later, a mug in each hand. She put them down on the table then hurried out again, coming back with a pint bottle of milk and a sugar bowl. I said yes, please to milk and no, thank you to sugar, and she handed one of the mugs to me.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘It’s a long way.’

I shrugged. ‘Thank you for having me.’

Then we both said together, ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ and smiled in unison, the tension seeming to lift a little.

‘It’s supposed to be the worst thing in the world, losing a child.’ Louisa’s accent was hard to identify – not the lilting Welsh I’d heard since getting off the train, but something else that could have placed her almost anywhere. ‘But really, I lost him years ago.’

I nodded, willing her to go on.

Her shoulders seemed to slacken with something like relief. She looked down at the surface of her tea but didn’t drink any of it, and then she began.

‘I was a terrible mother. I can see that now, but at the time… I was a mess. I was ill, but I didn’t know it then. I thought the world was against me. I was alone, after Dylan left. Nigel was all I had, and I needed him, but at the same time I pushed him away.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

As tactfully as I could, I explained what Seren Chamberlain had told me, leaving out the bit about bringing dodgy men home from the pub.

‘I can remember very little of it now,’ Louisa told me. ‘After Nigel left – after I cut contact with him – I had a breakdown. It was after that that I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, although my therapist prefers to call it emotionally unstable personality disorder… I was lucky – I got help. It took a while, but I did. In the past I’d probably have been locked up in some asylum.’

‘But you’re – you’ve recovered now?’

‘As much as anyone with this condition can be said to have,’ she replied sadly. ‘I still have therapy – talking therapies, cognitive behavioural therapy, the lot. It helps. Music helps, and walking in the hills. But not medication. If it did, I’d rattle when I walked.’

‘I’m glad,’ I told her. ‘I’m glad you’re well, and here. But you never saw Gray – Nigel – again?’

She shook her head.

‘He did think of you, you know. Our daughter is named after you. We call her Lulu.’

Louisa put down her empty mug and brushed away a tear. ‘I’m glad of that. After what happened, I thought he would never want to have anything to do with me again. But it turned out that wasn’t the case.’

I felt a jolt of shock. ‘Really?’

She reached over to the table again and took up a large brown envelope. It was the kind that lawyers use, with a gusset and a loop of string to hold the flap closed, and I could see that it was full to bulging point.

‘He wrote to me,’ she said. ‘For twenty years, he wrote a card on my birthday, and on his birthday and at Christmas. He wrote when he met you, and when you got married and when your children were born. He didn’t want to see me, but he was thinking of me, all this time.’

‘That must have been…’ I began, but I couldn’t frame the words for how it would have made Louisa feel.

‘I tried, you know,’ she said. ‘I tried to get in touch with him. Or Seren Chamberlain did. It was after your Louisa was born, after I… I’d been in hospital. We thought then that he might be willing to see me. Seren got her boy, Joel, to look on Nigel’s Facebook and he located your house from the posts Nigel had put on there. And Joel went and saw Nigel there.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry for how he reacted. That must have hurt.’

She nodded slowly. I could see in her face the pain that rejection had caused.

‘Nigel never mentioned it in his letters to me,’ she went on. ‘But they kept coming. I knew I had to accept that that was all he would give me – all I deserved to have of my son.’

‘No one deserves to be rejected by their child like that.’ My words surprised me with their fierceness. ‘It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t well.’