INHERITANCE OF LIES

Chapter 3

Nora sat down at her grandmother's desk and untied the ribbon and put the first letter in front of her.

The date at the top was March 3rd, 1971. Eleanor had been forty-two years old. Nora's father Thomas would have been seventeen. Nora herself would not exist for another decade.

She read it.

3rd March, 1971

Haverstone, Wiltshire

To the child I have seen and cannot yet name

I do not know how to begin this. I have sat at this desk for two hours now and the beginnings I have tried have all been wrong — too cold, too careful, too much the voice of a woman who has spent twenty years keeping her feelings at a useful distance. I will try instead to be plain.

A woman came to this house six weeks ago. I had not invited her. She arrived on a Tuesday evening in January, in the dark and in the cold, and she stood at the door and she told me her name was Renard and that she had something I needed to see.

I should have sent her away. I know this. I knew it then. Instead I let her in, because her eyes had the look of someone who already knows which door you will open before you know it yourself, and because the thing she held out to me was a photograph, and in the photograph was a child I did not recognise, and on the back of the photograph, in my own handwriting, I know my own handwriting, I have lived with it for forty-two years, was a name.

Your name.

I cannot write it here. Not yet. I don't know why, perhaps because writing it makes it real in a way I am not ready for. But I know it. And seeing it on the back of that photograph, in a hand I would swear was my own and that I have no memory of forming, was the single strangest moment of my life. And I have had several strange moments. I was in a cipher room in 1944. I know something of strangeness.

She told me that the photograph had come from a collection. That the collection documented and here she was very careful, very measured, as though she had planned the precise order of the words, events that had not yet occurred. She said she was one of several people tasked with preserving and transmitting this documentation. She said my name had been given to her as someone who should receive a portion of it.

I asked why me.

She said: Because you already know, Mrs. Voss. You have always known. You simply haven't had the evidence yet.

She left the photograph. She left a number I could reach her at. She left nothing else. I have spent six weeks trying to decide what she was: a fraud, a lunatic, an operative of some kind running a manipulation I cannot yet identify. I have tried all three explanations on and found that each of them fits poorly around certain facts that I cannot make go away.

The main fact is this: I checked the handwriting. I have samples of my own hand going back thirty years. I had a man at the university, I did not tell him why compare them. He said they matched. He said it was the same person, same pen pressure, same idiosyncratic letter formations, written at a similar age to my current samples. He asked if I had a twin.

I do not have a twin.

I am writing to you because I have to write to someone. Because there is no one in this house I can tell. Thomas is seventeen and I will not put this on him, and there is no one else and because writing has always been how I make sense of things I cannot otherwise hold. I am writing to you because you are the one person, in all the world, to whom this already belongs.

I don't know what the photograph means. I don't know what she wants from me. I don't know if I should trust any of this, and the trained part of my mind, the part they built in the cipher rooms tells me constantly and loudly that I should not. But I keep coming back to that photograph. To the handwriting. To the name on the back of it that I have not written down anywhere since she left, because some part of me is superstitious enough to believe that writing it will make it binding.

I will write it down when I know more. I will write to you again when I know more. I am making you a promise I cannot yet keep: that I will explain all of this, eventually, in full, with nothing hidden.

I have hidden too much already. I know this. The people I love know it too.

Until then, with love I have not yet learned to say aloud,

E.V.

Nora set the letter down.

She sat for a moment with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the garden through the window, where the bare earth of March offered nothing by way of comfort, and she thought about what she had been given and what she had not.

Eleanor in 1971, forty-two years old, describing a woman who arrived on a Tuesday in January and showed her a photograph of a child with Eleanor's own handwriting on the back. A name she wouldn't write down. A promise to explain everything. Written to a person who did not yet exist.

Nora understood preservation. She understood what it cost to hold something carefully for decades, the patience of it, the discipline of it, the way you had to believe, every year, that the thing you were holding would eventually matter enough to justify the holding. She spent her professional life doing it for strangers. The idea that Eleanor had spent thirty years doing it for her, writing these letters, maintaining this archive, carrying this weight, was doing something to the clean sealed version of their story that Nora had kept in a locked room for twelve years. She could feel the hinges.

She did not want the hinges to move. Not yet. Not until she understood what was behind the door.

She picked up the second letter.

It was dated 1971 as well, September, six months after the first. Shorter. The handwriting was less careful, more compressed, the pressure of the pen heavier in a way that meant Eleanor had been either tired or frightened when she wrote it, and given the content of the first letter Nora would have wagered on both. She read the first paragraph. Then she read it again. Then she put the letter very carefully face-down on the desk and stood up from the chair and walked to the window and looked at the garden for a long time, because she needed a moment before she finished it.

The second letter was only four paragraphs long.

The first paragraph described Renard's second visit and what she had brought with her this time, not a photograph but a file, which Eleanor described in the tight, clinical shorthand of a woman who had once catalogued signals intelligence and knew how to compress the unbearable into notation.

The second paragraph was a single sentence.

The third described what Eleanor had done in response, and why, and what it had cost her, written with the kind of quietness that was worse than anguish.

The fourth paragraph began: By the time you read this, you will already know that your father did not die in a car accident. What you will not know, what I have never told anyone, what I am writing down now so that someone, somewhere, will finally know the truth is that I was in the room when they decided to kill him. And I said nothing. I said nothing, and I have lived with that every morning since, and I am writing this to you because you are the only person in the world I trust to decide what to do with it.