‘Oh, yes,’ Helena said, ‘you should take that one, too. It’s mostly stuff of your grandmother’s.’
Lucy pulled up the flaps and looked inside. A yellow ring-bound file lay on the top, and when she opened it she saw notes in her father’s small neat handwriting – lists of dates, diagrams with arrows, and a reference to a book about the D-Day landings. Military history then, that was all. Disappointed, she took the file out. Underneath was a big square tin, once used for cake or biscuits, with a picture of a garden on it. She lifted the lid and smelt the scent of roses. The tin contained a jumble of mementos. She closed it again. She wouldn’t look at it in front of Helena.
‘What should I do with the books?’ Helena was at the shelves, straightening a row of old school stories with decorated spines. She looked out of place up here. Tom’s study had been his private world. Here he’d spent many hours reading in the big armchair, or at the desk writing, or surfing websites of second-hand booksellers.
‘I’d only want them because they’d been Dad’s,’ she said, ‘and I just haven’t room in my flat.’
‘What about your mother?’
‘No. Can’t you try that shop in the high street?’
‘That would probably be best.’ Helena was looking round the room now, wondering what else should be given its marching orders. Her eyes came to rest on the computer. ‘There’s something else I need to give you, Lucy. Your father was doing some research into family history. It might interest you. I tried to print the document off this morning, but the wretched thing wouldn’t work.’
‘I’ll have a go, if you like,’ Lucy offered, curious. She sat down and switched on the computer.
‘I guessed his password straight away,’ Helena said. ‘It’s “wasps”. ‘ Tom’s favourite rugby team.
Lucy typed it in, smiling, and watched as a series of icons appeared on a black and yellow desktop. Helena pointed her to a file labelled Cardwell. A page of text yawned open. Lucy stared at the heading. It was a man’s name.
‘Who’s Rafe Ashton?’ she asked.
‘You haven’t heard of him?’ Helena replied, frowning.
‘No.’
‘Your father said he was his uncle. You must have heard of him.’
‘No, I haven’t,’ Lucy insisted. Great-Uncle Rafe? The name meant nothing.
‘I gather he was your Grandfather Gerald’s younger brother.’
‘I’d no idea he had one. Why wasn’t he Rafe Cardwell then?’
‘He must have been a half-brother. Anyway, he went missing in the war or something. It’s all a bit confusing.’
‘I’ll take it away and have a look.’ Lucy was annoyed that Helena appeared to know more about the family than she did. The printer clattered into life and several typed pages slipped softly into the tray. She tucked them into the cardboard box and, with the box in her arms, gazed around her father’s room for what was perhaps the last time.
‘I ought to go,’ she told Helena. ‘I’m due at a friend’s house in London at eight.’
‘Of course,’ Helena replied, but she looked disappointed.
Once on the road again, Lucy quickly forgot about Helena. Her mind was already on the mystery of Great-Uncle Rafe.
Lucy lived in a tiny apartment that her father had helped her buy, not far from the canal at Little Venice in North London. She loved to walk the towpath and watch the barges come and go, sorry that she’d missed the days when they’d been pulled by horses. Nowadays, they mostly carried tourists. The previous year, a series of photographs she’d taken of the area had sold well in an exhibition at a Camden gallery.
So far as work was concerned, Lucy felt at a bit of a crossroads. Photography was her hobby, but she might let it become more. She liked the small TV production company where she worked, but wanted more responsibility. Her boss, Delilah, had been encouraging. ‘We’re always being asked for short documentaries,’ she said. ‘Serious themes, women’s lives, that sort of thing. Bring me some ideas.’ Lucy had tried one or two on her, but nothing that had worked yet.
At twenty-seven, Lucy still hadn’t found anyone she’d want to share her life with; being fiercely independent, she wondered if she ever would. Will, whom she had met through work, was the latest in a not very long line of boyfriends.
In the weeks after meeting Helena, when she could bear to, Lucy would lift one of her father’s boxes onto the breakfast-table in her flat and take out its treasures one by one. Over his personal things – a carved wooden box containing cufflinks and tie-pins; his favourite LPs with their folk band covers – she didn’t linger, putting them out of painful sight and mind in a cupboard in her bedroom, but the photograph of her grandmother had taken a hold on her. She stood it on the desk and found herself glancing at it as she worked. It was strange, realizing that the elderly invalid she’d known had once been this beautiful young girl.