“Then how did you know how to find him?” Alice asked.
Only the truth served her in that moment, so she told it the only way she could. “I’ve always known,” Elizabeth said, feeling somehow ashamed that she both had the address and had never visited before. “But I didn’t know whether you were still living here.”
“It’s a long way to come on the off chance, isn’t it?”
Elizabeth wished it were just the two of them, and then felt guilty for the thought. What right did she have to such expectations?
“Alice, love,” Tom said, moving to his daughter, “you needed to get going, didn’t you? Weren’t you heading off when Elizabeth surprised us?”
“Well I was, but . . .” Elizabeth realized her visit had thrown the young woman, upset the foundations upon which her life was built. Her voice was soft, just for Tom. “I can stay if you want.”
Tom shook his head. “I think we’ll manage. And anyway, we’ve got a lot to talk about after all this time.”
With a degree of reluctance, Alice nodded. “Okay, well I’ll be back tomorrow.” Turning to Elizabeth, she said, “It was nice to meet you,” although Elizabeth doubted the sentiment was true.
* * *
After Alice left, Tom guided her to the settee, and took a seat in the chair by her side. “She’s quite protective of me. Especially now.”
“Daughters,” she said, and he smiled knowingly.
“Cup of tea?” Tom eventually asked.
Elizabeth nodded, and after he left for the kitchen, she took the chance to look around, glad for a moment to herself. The house was much grander than anything she had expected before coming inside. The ceilings were high and corniced, and a fireplace crackled with a golden log molten in the center. It was otherwise silent, but she couldn’t help but wonder about the presence of his wife. Where was she?
Drawn like a moth to light, she moved toward the pictures on the wall, each an image of a life well lived, his family throughout the decades they had spent apart. In some he was engaged in fatherly duties: teaching Alice to ride a bike, erecting a tent. In most of the pictures he was with his daughter at various stages of life. Elizabeth had always imagined him being a good father, and it seemed that she had been right. The photographs transported her back to 1975; she never could forget that year, or the wish he left her. I wish we could raise a family together. How she wished that one could have come true.
“Is she still standing today?” he asked as he returned from the kitchen with two cups on a tray. He nodded to a painting of Wolf Rock Lighthouse hanging in the center of one wall. Wolf Rock was the lighthouse that sat roughly seventeen nautical miles from Porthsennen shore, the final testament to man’s attempted reign over the oceans before the vast wastes of the Atlantic. Elizabeth’s great-grandfather had been one of the first keepers almost a century before.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, turning away from the picture. She could never work out quite how she felt about Wolf Rock. It plagued her dreams, an obelisk to her greatest loss, yet throughout her life she must have painted it more than a hundred times. Thoughts of that isolated monolith roused fear and hatred, yet when she saw its light skipping across the water it still brought her closer to Tom, even after all those years. “Nobody lives on it nowadays. Everything is automated.”
“Probably for the best. Nothing good comes from living that far away from the people you love.”
“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not so far when you think about it. London is a lot farther away from Porthsennen than a lighthouse just off the coast.”
“Not as dangerous, though.”
“No,” she conceded with a smile. “I suppose that’s true.”
They were quiet for a moment then, fifty years apart a chasm too difficult to breach. So much needed to be said, although still she found it was impossible to say any of it.
“It’s changed a lot over the years, hasn’t it?” Tom ventured when the silence became too much.
“What has?”
“Porthsennen.” Easing into the settee, he handed her a mug of tea, and her heart skipped a beat when his fingers brushed hers. She sat down too, right on the edge, as if she didn’t really belong there. “I didn’t put any sugar in. Is that still how you drink it?”
“Yes.” The intimacy of his knowledge of her, there in his house, surrounded by images of his life and family, stirred a deep-rooted sense of her own mistakes. So much had happened to him during the time they had been apart. Her life remained small in a way his wasn’t, and she felt a sense of shame for the part she had played in their separation, and began to wonder what she was doing there.
“I saw what they did to the roundhouse,” he continued. “A gallery now, eh?”
“I sell my paintings in there,” she said.
“Oh, I know,” he said, smiling. As he pointed over her shoulder, her gaze followed, and there she saw a small watercolor of the beach that she had painted several years ago. “I’m always thinking about the place, and you too.”
The sight of her work, there on the wall alongside images of his life lived without her, suddenly shattered her cool. They were dancing around fifty years of estrangement as if they’d seen each other last week. All the things she wanted to say were stuck inside, making it difficult to breathe. “I shouldn’t have come here,” she said, setting her tea down, standing from the settee. “When you didn’t come, I should have just left it at that.”
“What?” he said, his mouth wide with shock as he followed her toward the door. Before she could enter the hallway, he took hold of her arm. “Please don’t go now,” he begged.
To feel his hands touch her only made her want to go even more. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I do,” he said, his grip firming up. “You were thinking of me.”
His cheeks were flushed from the hurry to stop her. “Well of course I was,” she said, raising her voice. “But why? Fifty years, Tom, and not once did you knock on the door.” This wasn’t how she had imagined their reunion, but now she found she had to say it. How could she forgive herself if she kept quiet? “Why keep coming if you never wanted to see me?”
“I had to,” he said, and she sensed he too felt ashamed.
“How did you even know where I lived after I moved?”
“Porthsennen’s a small place, Elizabeth. Wasn’t too hard to find you.” She knew that must have been true enough. “But in all fairness, you never opened the door either. You could have, but you didn’t.”
“I did once,” she said, unable to stem the flow of tears.
“Did you?”
“The first year. I saw you. I ran after you.”
He hung his head. When he slumped onto the settee, she sat down beside him. “I didn’t hear you,” he whispered. She could see that he was embarrassed. “Still, you were married then, had a little baby. And you also knew where I lived, it seems, and you never came either.”
“Actually, that’s not quite true,” she said, feeling as if it was a confession of sorts. The truth of the situation depleted her, the memory of that day a painful recollection that left her with a deep sense of resignation. “I sat on that bench across the road. I saw you with Alice, and then I suppose when it came to it, I couldn’t knock on the door any more than you could.”