A Line of Blood by Ben McPherson

the camera.
    ‘Did Dad take this?’
    ‘Yes.’
    I looked at my mother. She was watching me for my reaction; there was no anger, no sadness now, just a resigned patience.
    ‘She’s beautiful, is she not?’ she said at last.
    There was a searching look in her eyes. I fought the urge to say something soothing.
    ‘Yes, Mum, she is beautiful.’
    ‘Thank you, Alexander.’ A little smile of satisfaction. My mother set great store by honesty. She didn’t want me to protect her.
    ‘He told me all about her. He wanted me to have all the facts at my disposal. Before I said yes to marriage.’ She nodded, as if to herself. ‘They were very much in love, you know. They wrote to each other, all through the war in Korea, and when he got home he kept writing, and so did Noriko. Then suddenly her letters stopped, and your father could only assume that she had ended the relationship. A terrible blow to him.’
    She refilled my glass, then refilled her own. ‘And of course your father’s misfortune was my good fortune. He was a very handsome man, and a very honest man. He loved me, and he adored you, son. He really did. More than anything in the world.’
    ‘Dad loved you most of all, Mum.’
    ‘No, Alexander, no.’ She took my hand in hers, catching me in the lie. ‘I’m seventy-eight, son. I’m not afraid of the truth.’
    ‘OK, Mum.’
    ‘Anyhow, one day your father received a letter from Japan. It was from Noriko, and it troubled him greatly. She asked why he had stopped writing. Your father showed me the letter, because he thought I ought to know; and then he burned it, because he was a good man and he had made his choice.
    ‘And then … and then he went to his mother, and he asked why she had hidden Noriko’s letters from him. And at first she denied it, but eventually she admitted that she had burned them. A cruel thing to have done, do you not think?’ She left the question hanging for a moment. ‘But I have her to thank, I suppose, because without her there would be none of this.’
    My mother went to bed shortly afterwards. I wandered around the flat for a while, trying to understand what I should be feeling. My father was everywhere here: his books, his records, the rack of pipes and the stacked ashtrays; his keen eyes staring out from silver-framed photos, never less than immaculately turned-out. The sharpness of those collars.
    My father’s life had been a series of tickets out: the army; Edinburgh; my mother. He had entered the forces as a welder, and left as an engineer; he had taken a second degree at Edinburgh University, met my mother at a dance. He had
come up
. A sharp-looking man with quick wits and an easy charm, by the time he had left the army he had erased the Govan shipyard from his voice. He had
made good
. His parents lived an hour down the road. Tower-block folk, he called them. We never visited my grandmother.
The Noriko story, of course.
It made sense now.
     
    My father had taken me to a war film once, at a cinema on the outskirts of town.
    Later, at home, he had sat for hours, silent in his chair, smoking his pipe. And though he would often boast to his friends about having had ‘a good war’, I had seen him crying at the cinema.
     
    I could hear my mother sobbing from the room that she and my father had shared. I thought of knocking on the door, of entering the room and sitting there, holding my mother’s hand over the blue silk counterpane. But it would mortify my mother to know that I could hear her in her grief. It would bring her no comfort.
    Now was the time I should have cried: for my father, for my mother, for what was lost. All those decisions my mother had taken, alone, in her demure desolation.
    Could you not have waited, Mum?
    I paced through the flat, my teenage self again, skirting the walls, trying not to cross my own path, trying not to hear my mother’s sobs.
    I tried to ring Millicent. Four rings, then voicemail. It was three o’clock, but she must have known