‘About what?’
‘Everything.’
‘Well, I find it unnerving. The way she looks at you and hangs off your every word.’
‘Oh rubbish,’ I laugh.
‘And she’s always doing stuff for you,’ says Henry. ‘Picking up your dry cleaning and texting you reminders.’
‘She’s helping plan our wedding.’
‘OK, but it’s completely one-sided. She never wants anything in return.’
‘I found her the flat. I’m teaching her karate.’
Henry puts down the magazine and wraps his arms around me. ‘I just wonder how much we really know about her.’
I tell him about Tempe’s family – her two married sisters and the youngest, who died in the first wave of the pandemic. Her father is a soldier. Her mother is quite sick.
‘Little Women,’ says Henry.
‘What?’
‘You just described the plot of Little Women. The book. The movie. It’s almost the same story. The sisters, the father, the mother …’
‘That’s just a coincidence,’ I say, as I turn off the bedside light and lie awake, wondering if Tempe would lie to me.
An hour later, I’m still awake … still thinking. I slip out of bed and pad across the floor and down the stairs to the kitchen, where I begin searching drawers and cupboards, looking for the letter that Tempe told me to destroy. It was addressed to Margaret Brown and put in the wrong mailbox at the apartment she shared with Darren Goodall. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. I don’t know why. When something is written on paper, it somehow has greater importance or permanence than an email or a text message. Destroying a letter is like ripping the pages from a book or defacing a photograph. It feels like vandalism.
I find the letter wedged inside the diary that my mother gives me every Christmas and never gets used apart from jotting down shopping lists or reminder notes. The envelope is postmarked from Belfast and was addressed and re-addressed at least twice before it reached Tempe.
I take a knife from the block, and make a neat slit along the top edge, aware that I’m breaking the law. Inside is a single handwritten page. The sender’s address is in the top left corner and the date is 12 October last year.
Dear Maggie,
I hope this letter reaches you, wherever you are. So many of my letters have bounced back to me that I’m never sure if I found you or not. Maybe this will arrive at the right address at the right time. So much depends upon timing, doesn’t it?
There are things I’ve been longing to tell you. But more than that, I’ve been praying that you might come home. I know you are disappointed in me. We both said things that were unkind and hurtful, and I wish I could take my words back, because I miss you so much.
In a world of coincidence and chance encounters, I always think I might bump into you one day, that you might be walking along the street or wandering through the supermarket. There’s the theory about six degrees of separation, but we are much less than six degrees apart. We are one degree. We are as close as blood allows – mother and daughter.
It is so hard to think of how things have turned out for us and I often fixate on the ‘what ifs’， even though they make me feel deficient as a mother. I know it might be hard to believe, but once there was a time when you would not dream of leaving my side; when you chose me, without question, as the person you would always love. I was a lioness. You were my cub. Now you’re gone.
What news of home? I am still working at the pharmacy with Auntie Heather. She and your Uncle George are fighting like the old married couple they are. Your cousin Patrick is engaged to be married to a girl from Derry, whose accent is so broad I can’t understand half of what she says, but she’s very sweet.
I have some news about Bumble, who died in August. Feline cancer, the vet said, but he had a pretty good life. Even after you left, he would sleep on the end of your bed, and we buried him in his favourite sunny spot in the garden and put up a little plaque engraved with his name.
Apart from that, we’re all well. Your dad is still talking about retiring from the shipyard, but I don’t want him at home, following me around.
We both miss you so much. Every time I think of you, I feel an ache in my chest and my stomach, as though chains are tightening. A mother and her daughter should not be estranged, and if I let myself think too long and too deeply about you leaving me, I am sure my heart will break completely.
I hope this letter finds you well. I live for you and always will.
Mum xxx
I fold the letter and place it back into the envelope, feeling both guilty and intrigued by what caused such a profound breakdown. There is no mention of Tempe’s sisters; and her father appears to work for a shipyard, not the military.
Opening my laptop, I type the return address into a search engine and come across a property report. The house was last sold in 2007, which is probably when Tempe’s parents arrived in Belfast. Another page shows a planning application for a rear roof extension, submitted in 2014. The applicant was a Mr William Brown.
I have a name. I search for a phone number. Nothing. The letter mentioned a pharmacy, run by George and Heather. I do a different search, using Google Maps, and come up with eleven possible businesses.
I hear the stairs creak. Henry appears in the doorway.
‘I woke up and you weren’t in bed.’
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing important.’
I close down the laptop and follow him upstairs to bed, where I continue to lie awake, listening to his gentle snores. Tempe is like a condensed drop of colour that has landed in my world of water, spreading and outlining things, creating contrast and vividness. More than one drop might be too much.
25
Morning, after a restless night. Up early, I dress in my running gear and borrow Henry’s bike, which he keeps in the front hallway rather than chained up outside the house because the back wheel has been stolen twice. Now I bark my shins on the pedals every time I hang clothes from the radiator.
Lowering the saddle a few notches, I test the height, making sure my toes can touch the ground. The bike has drop-handlebars, solid tyres and a narrow wedge-shaped seat that would cut me in half if I rode it for too long. Setting off slowly, the wheels almost float over the ground as I cross Battersea Bridge and roll through Ranelagh Gardens before joining the cycleway and heading north through Chelsea, South Kensington and Bayswater.
After fifty minutes, I reach Kensal Green, where I lean the bicycle against a railing fence and unclip my helmet. Taking a seat on a low brick wall, I catch my breath and wait for Darren Goodall to emerge. He doesn’t get a wifely kiss on the doorstep this morning, or a travelling mug of coffee for the journey. He’s almost at his car when he looks up and notices me standing opposite him. I’m too far away to see the look on his face, but he glances over his shoulder, making sure that Alison isn’t watching.
He crosses the road and his eyes seem to sweep the entirety of me, noting the loops of sweat beneath my arms and the curve of my breasts.
‘What do you want?’ he asks.
‘Stay away from Tempe Brown.’
‘I wouldn’t touch that crazy bitch with a bargepole.’