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Now, as she sat far away in the white room that looked out over the sea, she knew that she must tell them. She owed them that. And she knew that it would hurt them.

Always the taste of bitterness and ash round her words. That never went away, no matter how far she travelled.

CHAPTER 28

Fourwinds, 1981

As soon as the letter came, a short note for Nicky, saying Sarah was sorry – no apology for Alice – Nicky began trying to trace where Sarah was staying through the postmark on the envelope which was for an isolated region on the West Coast of Scotland. Nicky found only one retreat centre listed in directory enquiries. He was triumphant, excited. He went into the study to call them and closed the door.

Alice waited outside, but after a long silence, no further sound of Nicky on the phone, she opened the study door and went in. She found him holding the receiver, the dial tone droning on. She took the receiver from his hand and replaced it in the cradle. He looked at her as if startled awake.

‘Some woman answered. Said Sarah doesn't want any visitors. She wouldn't come to the phone.' He got up, his face angry and confused, and collected his car keys from the hallstand. ‘I'm going out.'

‘You won't do anything silly, will you? You won't try and drive up there, not in the state you're in?'

‘She doesn't want to see me. Why would I go there if she doesn't want to see me? I don't know why she has to be such a bitch.'

He left. The front door banged shut.

Standing in the hallway she could see the wretched wedding cake still sitting on the side table in the dining room, a faint yellowed tinge to the icing. Ridiculous that it was still there, but no one had had
time to dispose of it or even begin to make a decision about who might use it. So many little details to unpick, the salt in the wound.

Ralph was in the sitting room.

‘Nicky called the place where she's staying, but she wouldn't speak to him.'

‘That's it?'

‘That's it.'

Ralph had poured a glass of white wine and was drinking it standing and looking out over the garden. Alice carried on telling him what she thought about the phone call. He listened in that half-attentive way he had, nodding.

‘Perhaps I should at least give the bloody cake away to someone who could use it,' she suggested.

He didn't reply.

‘Or throw it away,' she said, a little louder.

He turned round, puzzled. ‘If you think so.'

‘You think I should throw it away?'

‘Throw what away?'

He obviously hadn't been listening. Even with the wedding disaster there was something new in Ralph's distant mood that she couldn't account for.

Of course, there was work. In the morning Ralph was due to take the early train to London. Over the past few months he'd been going up regularly for meetings with clients. Very dull, he always told her. She hadn't paid much attention, not with the wedding preparations being so all-consuming. But watching Ralph now, hardly aware she was in the room, she felt a deflated sadness, an anxiety, a premonition of a race she was about to lose. There was something about this trip that he was hiding.

While Ralph was getting ready for bed she passed through the rooms downstairs, checking windows were shut, the doors locked.
Nicky was still not home so she left the hall light on. In Ralph's study she paused, looking around the shadowy room. The light from the hall shone dully on the leather cover of a diary left on his desk, a ribbon marker inside it. It wasn't the sort of thing she did; they never opened each other's letters, but she picked the little book up, slim and supple in her hands. It fell open at the ribbon marker. She saw the names of clients he was due to see the next day, two large companies, nothing unusual there. But on the next page was a note in faint pencil: C 4:30. Frowning, she held it towards the light, but there was nothing further to be gleaned. She closed the book and put it back down on the desk, prickling with unnamed fears, something ominous just out of sight.

She'd been so worried for Nicky, trying to convince him that a heart could always heal. But that wasn't really true, was it? The blood so vital to a body, the breath that inflates the lungs, how easily they could be pinched off in a moment, by a word, by the closing of a door. There were some blows that a heart could never recover from. She felt a tight pain at the base of her throat. Had she already lost Ralph?

CHAPTER 29

London, 1981

The taxi dropped Ralph off outside the Bloomsbury Hotel. A sudden shower had raised the smell of wet dust from the pavements. He hurried for the shelter of the portico. Inside he asked at the desk for Charlotte Gardiner. A man in a tailcoat showed him through to a long gallery lined with high bookshelves filled with the sort of ancient leather volumes no one is ever likely to read. He passed an old gentleman taking a sip from a tumbler with eyes averted. At the far end he saw a woman rise slowly from one of the leather armchairs, her shoulders still stooped as she held up a tentative hand in greeting.

Her face was thickly creased, the hair dark grey, but Ralph recognised the direct gaze and wide mouth of a young Tom Gardiner in Valencia. He wondered which of the children in the photograph on Mr Gardiner's desk would have been Charlotte. A lifetime ago.

They shook hands, the flesh over the back of her hand papery.

‘Ralph.'

‘Charlotte, how do you do? And am I right in thinking you're the eldest daughter?'

A shadow of pride passed over her face, mixed in with resentment. He was, after all, the child of the usurper.

‘I still am. But take a seat, won't you? And might I get you something to drink? Coffee? Perhaps you'd like something stronger?' Charlotte signalled to the waiter.

Ralph settled down opposite her. ‘I was very pleased to hear from you. I didn't realise you had my number.'

‘I didn't. I saw the wedding announcement and worked out how to contact you from that.'

‘Well, I'm very glad you did.' Ralph smiled.

She looked down at her hands quickly, and he understood that she had tracked him down reluctantly.

‘How is Tom? I thought perhaps he might possibly be here today.'

A shadow passed over her face. ‘I'm so sorry. Of course, you wouldn't know. Tom passed away, just over a year ago.'

‘Tom died?'

‘It wasn't unexpected in a way. We'd understood for a long time that he had a weak heart, and yet one manages to forget unpleasant things. It still came as a great shock.'

They sat in silence as Tom's memory ghosted through the gallery. The only sound the muted traffic filtering into the cloistered room, the light from the tall windows obscured by the folds of net absorbing the grey of the London air. He covertly studied her, his half-sister, and yes he could see it there, a faint likeness round the cheekbones, but there were none of the shared mannerisms that might denote family. She was a stranger really.

Charlotte turned to her handbag, fussing with the clasp, searching inside for something. She finally closed it with a snap, and held out a thick envelope.

‘After Tom died I found instructions for this to be given to you.'

Registering her brittle tone he took the envelope and slid out an old notebook. It was covered in red Moroccan leather, gold patterns tooled round the edge, worn away next to the leather tie.

‘Tom must have found it among Father's effects after the funeral. I think he had intended to pass it on to you, but for the last few years, especially after his wife passed away, and with his health not
being what it was, understandably things got on top of him. Then I wasn't sure how to find you – until recently.'

‘Thank you, Charlotte.'

He opened the front cover and was taken aback to read the inscription: ‘To Ralph, from his father.' There was also a piece of folded notepaper tucked inside. He opened it out and began to read. The date was for several years earlier.

Ralph could hear the boyish rise and fall of Tom's voice. For a moment he caught a whiff of something sweet again, a memory of sneezing on
the sugar on the churros; how he'd pretended to himself that night as they walked towards the lights of the film show, two brothers walking with their father. The taste of the fried dough had been spiked with a sharp longing, wishing so hard that Max was his real father – guilty with disloyalty.

‘Have you read this, Charlotte?'

‘It seems Tom didn't feel that I should see it, apparently, but I did read it, yes.' A sharp twist of the mouth for a second. ‘And if it's meant for you, you should have it.'

‘I'm very grateful to you, Charlotte. I hope we'll keep in touch in the future now.'

‘Ralph, I appreciate meeting you today. I do, sincerely, but there it is, you see: I was brought up to think of you and your mother as the imposters. It hasn't been easy over the years.' She smiled at him sadly and rose from her seat. Ralph followed her cue.

‘Goodbye, Ralph. I do wish you well. In the end I think we both suffered, in ways not so dissimilar. I'm not sure that anyone ever knew that man, not really.'

Ralph watched her make her slow progress between the club chairs, frail in her navy suit. When she was gone he sank down in his chair again.

It had always been so hard to know who Max really was; so many blank unknowable spaces, handed down as part of Ralph's inner territory, made it difficult to get one's bearings at times. But perhaps the answer, the coordinates to Max's soul, were here, inside the worn red notebook.

He rubbed a thumb over the leather, evoking a little of the spice of Max's cigars, and a memory came to him of Max, seated a little apart from the rest of the room, watching through those long, narrow eyes as he nibbled at the side of his finger. Ralph looked down at his fingers and he saw the ragged edges of bitten skin.

CHAPTER 30

London, 1981

Ralph couldn't bear to take the notebook out and glance through it while he was in the taxi, a fear that it might be lost if it wasn't firmly pressed inside his jacket pocket. In his hotel room he took off his mac, thumped down against the headboard and untied the leather fastener. Inside, the pages were crammed with Max's handwriting, small and dense, wilfully difficult to read.

Ralph turned to the first entry: Madrid, June 1940. He thought back. He would have been at the boarding school in Hampshire then, the summer before he went up to Oxford.

The first entry was for the day that Max and Lily moved from Valencia to Madrid, the Spanish civil war over, the Second World War almost a year old and the newspapers in the UK filled with the dismal news of the defeat at Dunkirk.