‘But one thing I’mnotsorry about is that you were there with Dotty; that she wasn’t alone. I’m so glad that you were with her at the end. She thought the world of you, darling, she really did. Thank you for being there.’
Hot tears slid silently down Annabel’s cheeks. ‘I’m glad I was there, too,’ she said, reaching for a tissue to wipe them away.
‘On a more practical note, Annie, we need to start thinking about the funeral. The doctors here have said I won’t be able to fly for a couple of weeks with this new hip, so I’m afraid we’ll have to hang fire for a while.’
‘Don’t worry, Dad, that’s fine.’ She blew her nose and set her mind to practical thinking. ‘It’ll give us more time to get everything ready. I had a chat with William last night and he’s coming down in a couple of days. I’m sure we can start sorting things out between us. Just please don’t rush, Dad, I know what you’re like; please don’t persuade the doctors to let you travel before the new hip is ready for it.’
‘Thanks darling, I appreciate that. I’m glad William is coming down, I hate to think of you being there on your own.’ There was a brief pause and Annabel feared that he might ask about things with Luke. She was relieved when he didn’t. ‘I’ll have a chat with your mum about travel dates after I’ve seen the specialist this morning. Then we’ll ring Reverend Pascoe and see when it can be arranged. But if you want to keep busy and make a start, I know that Dotty had an envelope in thebureau with her funeral requests in it. Favourite readings and hymns, that sort of thing. Do you mind looking it out?’
‘Typical Dotty.’ Annabel smiled. ‘So organised, right up until the very end!’
After breakfast, she replied to a text from Luke, telling him that she was OK. She had called him from the hospital the previous day and he had offered to come down to be with her for moral support, but it had felt more than a little half-hearted. ‘Just say if you want me to come down, Annie,’ he had said. ‘I can probably rearrange a few things and make the time, if you need me to.’
‘If you want me to . . . If you need me to . . . ’It was all a bit half-arsed, Annabel now reflected. If he truly loved her, surely he shouldwantto be there for her, not just come down because she wanted him to. After the bombshell conversation from a couple of nights ago, everything seemed so uncertain. It felt like the grains of sand of their relationship were slowly trickling through her fingers.
She sighed and took a mug of coffee through to the study. Monty followed dutifully and settled himself on the sheepskin rug by the fireplace. The room faced east and the sun’s early-morning rays were already streaming in. Her grandmother’s old oak bureau stood in the corner of the room and Annabel felt strange as she sat on the chair in front of it. It felt wrong to be opening Dotty’s desk, to intrude on her personal belongings. But she took a deep breath and lowered the lid, which folded down to form a writing desk in front of her.
Inside the bureau, Dotty’s characteristic organisation was on display. Colourful notebooks and journals stood smartly alongside pigeon holes arranged with an assortment of stationery. Shelves were neatly labelled in Dotty’s familiar hand, ‘Bills’, ‘Documents’ and ‘Personal’. Annabel felt a twist of emotions.She smiled as she remembered watching her granny in full ‘admin mode’ sitting in this very spot, yet felt guilty to be invading her inner sanctum.
Carefully, she flicked through the papers on the shelves. She bypassed the bills section and sifted through the documents and personal papers, hoping to unearth the envelope her father had mentioned. There were letters, medical documents, Dotty’s birth certificate and driving licence, but nothing obviously marked ‘Funeral’.
‘How strange,’ Annabel mused, thinking how unlike her grandmother this was. ‘It must be in here somewhere,’ she thought aloud, before taking out all the papers from the bills shelf and sorting through them on her lap. Still nothing.
As she was putting them back, her eye was drawn to the shiny brass handle of the little drawer at the top of the bureau. It was only small, measuring about 10cm wide, and Annabel nearly overlooked it, assuming that the envelope she was searching for would be much bigger than that. She slid the little drawer open and gave a smile of satisfaction as there, right in front of her, she saw a small green envelope labelled in Dotty’s neat, cursive script ‘Funeral.’
Annabel sat back in the desk chair and took a deep breath before carefully opening the envelope. She thought of her granny – her vibrant, full-of-life granny – sitting right here, committing her funeral requests to paper and sealing them shut inside this envelope. It seemed rather morbid, but Dotty had been a practical woman with legendary organisational skills. Of course she wanted to have a hand in her last hurrah.
Annabel still found it hard to believe that her granny had gone; it had all been so sudden that she half expected the old lady to come into the room at any moment and tell her off for going through her things. If only she would.
Inside the envelope were three pieces of paper. The first was a note to Noel which brought tears to Annabel’s eyes as she read,
Darling Noel, you have been the most wonderful son. Thank you for everything and for doing this one last thing for me. Be happy. All my love, Mum x
The second was a list of Dotty’s favourite hymns and pieces of music. Annabel sighed sadly as she saw that the hymns – ‘How Great Thou Art’ and ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’ – were the same two that they had sung at her grandfather’s funeral seventeen years earlier. For the entrance Dotty had chosen the beautiful ‘Pie Jesu’ and Annabel couldn’t help but smile at the exit music, Glenn Miller’s upbeat dancehall tune ‘In the Mood’. Dotty had always loved it and Annabel remembered watching her grandparents dancing as it played on the record player when she was a little girl. It had been played at their wedding reception, her grandfather had explained as he twirled his grinning, rosy-cheeked wife around the sitting room. Annabel smiled through her tears at the happy memory.
The last insert was a cutting taken from a newspaper. It was a poem called ‘She is Gone’ that had been read at the Queen Mother’s funeral. The words were poignant, asking the reader not to mourn the passing of their loved one, but to celebrate the happy times and smile at the joyful memories. Dotty had obviously approved of the sentiment to have added it to the envelope and Annabel thought it was perfect. Noel had asked her to do a reading at the funeral and this would be spot on.
She slid the contents back inside the envelope and stood up to close the bureau. As she was about to slide the little drawerclosed again, a flash of silver caught her eye. Tucked in the corner of the drawer she saw a tiny key, the sort used for a little padlock. She took it out and examined it. It had no tag nor any clue to identify its use. Annabel frowned and cast her mind back to the times when she had seen her grandmother working at her desk, but was unable to recall her using a key to open anything.
From its hidey-hole in the little drawer, it made sense to Annabel that the key should open something inside the bureau. She looked around for a keyhole, but to no avail. She was just about to give up when she remembered something from a murder mystery she’d watched years ago – an Agatha Christie maybe? – where the killer had hidden the weapon in the secret compartment of his desk. She renewed her search, this time carefully pressing, tapping and feeling her way around the drawers and shelves, hoping for some sort of clue.
Suddenly, she found it. On the panel beneath the bottom shelf in the far right corner, her fingers made contact with a sliding cover. It was made of the same material as the panel and almost impossible to tell that it was a separate piece. It was only a few centimetres wide, but slid – if a little stiffly – both left and right, revealing a tiny keyhole. Annabel could see now that the plain-looking panel was actually a secret drawer, about a foot wide and a few inches deep. She put the little key in the lock and held her breath as she tried it. It turned easily and the secret drawer clicked open.
‘Bingo!’ Annabel said, waking Monty and startling him into action. The old dog got up from the hearth rug and came to rest his muzzle on Annabel’s leg, eager to find out what was going on. ‘Well, Monty’ – she rubbed his ears affectionately – ‘I think we’re in. What on earth has Dotty been hiding in here?’
She paused for a moment, that uncomfortable feeling in her stomach again. It was one thing poking around her grandmother’s desk to find her funeral requests, but quite another to nose around her personal things. But something drove her on. Was it her historian’s instinct or her recent doubt over her father’s parentage? She wasn’t sure, but she suddenly felt an overwhelming need to find out what her grandmother had been keeping secret.
Annabel slid the drawer open and carefully lifted out several brown A4-sized envelopes. The only marking on each one was a number written in Dotty’s hand. She opened the top one first, labelled ‘2010,’ and slid out the contents: a collection of old, sepia photographs, held together by a large paperclip, and a short, handwritten letter.
She removed the paperclip and thumbed through the photos. She was surprised to see that they were of Dotty. But not Dotty as Annabel knew her or had ever seen her before. This was a much younger and much more beautiful Dotty in a very different setting. This was no London scene, where Dotty had grown up, or even rural English countryside, it was distinctly foreign.
In the photos, the gardens were lush and tropical, with palm trees and voluminous blooms. Even the people were different. There was a family portrait – Annabel recognised the images of her great-grandparents, the Templetons, with their children, Dotty and her brother Thomas – but with them were several Chinese people in traditional dress. Had the family gone on holiday when she was younger? Dotty had always been so adamant that she had never travelled and never wanted to, that this made no sense to Annabel.
She turned to the last photo and her heart almost stopped beating. There, outside an elegant white church, was the sameyoung woman in a wedding dress. Standing next to her, their arms linked, was the same Chinese-looking lady from the other photographs, wearing a traditional Chinese outfit. They were both smiling at the camera, looking a little nervous. They were obviously close.
Annabel turned the photograph over and saw it had been labelled on the back ‘With Mrs Llewellyn on her wedding day, St Andrew’s Cathedral, May 1940.’ She stared again. The bride in the photograph was the spitting image of her grandmother, but it couldn’t be her. Could it? Annabel’s mind started to whirr: who was Mrs Llewellyn and why had Dotty locked away her photograph? If itwasDotty in the photo, she must have been married before meeting Annabel’s grandfather. But surely Dotty would have told her if this was the case? It all seemed so unlikely.
She picked up the letter and began to read, hoping to find some sort of clue.
