Free The Ghost Writer by John Harwood Page A

you won't know how precious she is until she's gone. I only wish she could understand that I'm no threat: the last thing I want is to take you away from her.'
    Alice was entirely sincere in this, because she still clung to her conviction that, short of a miraculous healing, we must never meet. But I had other plans.

    U NTIL I ASSEMBLED MY PASSPORT APPLICATION , I HAD never seen a full copy of my own birth certificate. The short version I had used until then had told me nothing about my mother except that her maiden name had been Hatherley. Now I discovered that Phyllis May Hatherley had been born on 13 April 1929, in Portman Square, Marylebone, London Wl. Father George Rupert Hatherley, occupation Gentleman; mother Muriel Celia Hatherley, nee Wilson.
    It ought not to have come as a shock. She had never actually
said
—at least I could not recall her ever saying—that she had been born at Staplefield, which after years of fruitless searching of atlases and reference books, I thought I might have found. Collins' Road Atlas of Britain showed a tiny village—the only Staplefield in the index—on the southern fringe of St Leonard's Forest in West Sussex. Just a minute black circle on a yellow byroad called the B2114, but it looked and felt right, though by no stretch of the imagination could anyone have expected to see ships at Portsmouth, fifty miles away to the south-west. Alice thought it would be quite common for a big country house to have the same name as the nearby village. Yet I still hadn't asked my mother about it—or anything else in her life before Mawson. Why had I always believed that her own parents had died when she was very young? Had she actually told me that, or had I simply imagined it? Why, above all, had I accepted her silence for so long? Didn't I have a right to my own history?
    That evening, in our sitting room after dinner, I handed her the certificate. She took one look, and thrust it back at me.
    'Why did you get this?' Her voice was ominously taut.
    'I'm applying for a passport.'
    'Why?'
    'Because I'm going to England. As soon as I can afford to.'
    My mother's attention was apparently fixed upon the unlit gas heater in our old fireplace. I could not see her face clearly because of the standard lamp between our armchairs, but its light fell upon her clasped hands, suddenly reminding me of old Mrs Noonan's, fingers clamped around swollen knuckles, blotched purple and livid white, the nails suffused with blood.
    'You mean to stay,' she said at last.
    'I don't know yet, Mother. If I did, I'd want you to come and live there too.'
    'I can't afford it.'
    'I could help.'
    'I wouldn't let you. Anyway, I couldn't stand the winters.'
    'But you hate the heat, Mother.'
    'The cold would be worse.'
    She was speaking mechanically, as if hardly aware of what she was saying.
    'Mother, I didn't show you that to upset you. But it's time we talked—again. About your family. Because it's mine, too.'
    The silence dragged out until I could bear it no longer.
    'Mother did you hear what I—'
    'I heard you.'
    'Then tell me—' I broke off, not knowing what to ask. 'I—look, I still remember everything you used to tell me, when I was—before I—everything about Staplefield, and your grandmother, and I want to know—why you stopped talking about it, why I don't know anything—' I heard my voice beginning to quaver.
    'There's nothing to tell,' she said after another long pause.
    'But there must be. Your own parents. What happened to them?'
    'They both died before—when I was a few months old. I don't remember anything about them.'
    Her hands had dropped out of sight, below the arm of her chair.
    'So—so did you live with your grandmother—Viola—was she your father's, or your mother's—'
    'My father's. I told you everything I could remember, when you were a small boy.'
    'But why did you stop after I—was it her picture I saw that day?'
    'I don't remember any picture.'
    Her voice sounded flatter and more