The Fourth Letter Was the One That Did It

The letters were from a woman called Joan.

They ran from March 1959 to November 1962, and they were all addressed to Eileen at their grandmother’s address in Wolverhampton, which Gwen recognised immediately, because she had been taken there every Sunday until she was eleven and could still draw the hall.

There were twenty-two of them. Gwen counted twice.

They were not, in themselves, dramatic.

They were about work. About a supervisor called Mr Prentice who was a menace and who is mentioned in nine separate letters with escalating contempt. About shoes, repeatedly — Joan was having ongoing trouble with a pair of shoes across at least four months. About the weather, and a dance, and somebody called Ronnie who appears twice and then never again.

They were funny. That is the thing Gwen was least prepared for. Joan was extremely funny, in a dry, sideways way, and there is a line in the seventh letter about a colleague’s wedding hat that made Gwen laugh out loud at her own kitchen counter at half past nine at night, five months after her mother’s funeral, with her brother on speaker.

“What?” said Ian. “What is it?”

“Nothing. It’s just — she’s funny. This woman’s funny.”

“Read it to me.”

She read it to him, and he laughed too, and then neither of them said anything for a bit, because they had both arrived at the same place: that their mother had had a friend who was funny, in 1959, and that neither of them had ever heard the name Joan in their lives.

It was the fourth letter that did it.

It is dated 2 June 1959 and it is mostly about a heatwave and a broken fan. And then, two thirds of the way down the second side, without any change of tone at all, there is this:

I think of him every single day and I expect you do too, and I have stopped apologising for it. You did the only thing anybody would let you do. It was not a choice, Eileen, whatever your mother says. A choice is when there are two things.

Gwen read it out loud down the phone.

She got to the end and then read the last sentence again, and then put the letter down on the counter and put both hands flat on either side of it.

Neither of them said anything for what she later estimated was close to a minute. She could hear a tap running somewhere in Vancouver.

“Right,” said Ian, eventually.

“Yes.”

“‘Him.’”

“Yes.”

“Gwen—”

“I know,” said Gwen. “I know. Let me get to the rest of them.”

There is a thing that happens when you re-read a set of letters knowing one fact, and Gwen did it that night, from the beginning, out loud, while Ian stayed on the phone and did not go to work.

It is all there. Once you know, it is all there, in the margins.

In the first letter Joan writes: Are you eating? Your mother will say you are and I want to hear it from you.

In the second: Do not let them tell you what you are to feel about February.

In the sixth: He will have had his first tooth by now I should think.

In the ninth, in a different pen, clearly added after the letter was finished: You are allowed to write his name down, you know. Even just on a bit of paper that you burn.

At about eleven Gwen said, “I’m going to stop.”

“All right.”

“I’m going to stop because I’m reading her post,” said Gwen, and her voice went. “I’m sitting here reading my mother’s post with a cup of tea like it’s a novel, and she put a label on it, Ian, she put a label on it specifically so this wouldn’t happen—”

“She put it under the water tank,” said Ian.

“What?”

“She put it under the water tank,” he said, “in a house she knew you’d be clearing. Not in a bank. Not in a solicitor’s. Under a tank, in a box, with a label on it that a person would have to choose to ignore.” He paused. “Gwen, she didn’t hide it from you. She hid it for you.”

Gwen has since decided that this was the single most useful thing her brother has ever said to her, and she has never told him so.

At the time she said, “I’m going to open the envelope.”

“The little brown one?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to—”

“Stay on,” said Gwen.