5. 6 Friend of the Family

He didn’t just send a card. Bernie didn’t say anything about it at the time, but we found out later that he came round one day to see the baby and bring a present. And that wasn’t all. He also wrote a chapter for the book that Bernie was compiling of stories and pictures about Richard. Her idea was to have something to show to Lucy so that she would know something of what her father had been like.

We – Angie and I – didn’t find out any of this until Lucy’s first birthday came around. We went round for tea that day and found the whole of the living room floor taken up with a massive plastic toy railway. When we asked where it had come from, Bernie told us that Jonah had brought it. It had belonged to his two boys and he’d handed it on to Lucy. It was generous of him to think of Lucy instead of saving it for his own grandchildren. It was even more generous of him to have gone to so much trouble over the chapter he wrote for the book.

Bernie must have had the book out to show Jonah shortly before we arrived and it was still lying there when we entered the living room. Angie had a look inside to see if there were any new entries and you should have seen the pages that Jonah had written! I think I mentioned before that his handwriting was usually all over the place. I suppose, being left-handed made it difficult for him – that and always being in too much of a hurry to bother about little things like legibility. At first, I couldn’t believe Bernie when she told me that he’d written the story himself. It was the most faultless calligraphy you’ve ever seen. I would never have thought him capable of such a work of art – except that, being Jonah Porter, he could do anything he set his mind to.

It must have taken him hours to complete. I wondered why he had bothered. It wasn’t as if Lucy was likely to appreciate the difference compared with a word-processed document. I have to admit that I suspected at the time that it was largely showing off. He must have known that some of his old colleagues – me in particular – would see the book, and he wanted his contribution to be demonstrably the best. Now, I think I was probably wrong. I think he was genuinely trying to do something to show his appreciation of everything he owed to Richard.

I don’t know why, but I have to admit to being rather resentful of Jonah showing an interest in Bernie and Lucy. After all, she’d chosen Angie and me for Lucy’s godparents, not him. I was glad that he hadn’t spent any money on Lucy’s present. Maybe Bernie was right when she said that he was really just de-cluttering his loft. Looking back, I wonder if Bernie detected my antipathy towards Jonah. She certainly never went out of her way to tell us about his visits.

For the next eight years, Jonah would turn up, unannounced, every year on Lucy’s birthday. Bernie tells me that she several times invited him to visit in between birthdays but he always declined. I suppose he was trying to maintain his mystique, by only appearing once a year and never making arrangements in advance. Typical Jonah! He was very good at ensuring that he was always the centre of attention.

Something else that I didn’t find out about until after the event was that he was secretly helping Bernie in her quest to find out more about Richard’s mother. I don’t know if I told you that she mysteriously vanished when he was eight years old and then, just as mysteriously reappeared when he was in his forties. After she died (which was when Lucy was only a few months old), Bernie decided to try to find out why she had deserted her little boy all those years ago. Talk about a cold case! If she’d asked me about it, I’d have told her she was wasting her time trying to get to the bottom of things that happened half a century before.

I’ll skim over the next five years, including Angie’s death and my subsequent marriage to Bernie. I’ve talked about them elsewhere. Since this is about Jonah’s relationship with my new family, I will just mention that Bernie invited him to our wedding and he sent his apologies. I can’t remember now what it was that prevented him coming, but I do remember a feeling of relief that he wouldn’t be there to upstage me in my moment of glory. I’ve often wondered what he thought of us getting hitched. I daresay he considered I wasn’t good enough for her. Maybe that’s why he didn’t come to the wedding – or maybe he just wanted to maintain his mysterious once-a-year routine – or maybe he realised that his presence might somehow queer my pitch. It’s no good asking him because he’d only insist that he had a prior engagement. He can be very stubborn about letting you know his true feelings sometimes.

Of course, now that I was Lucy’s stepfather, as well as her godfather, I was usually around when Jonah made his annual birthday visits. To be fair to him, he was always very careful not to usurp my position.

I remember particularly Lucy’s eighth birthday. We’d given her a new bicycle, which she was very proud of. Everyone cycles in Oxford and we’d been going on family rides together since she was small. However, I was still not happy with the idea of her going out on the road without Bernie or me accompanying her. Bernie disagreed, but she backed me up in front of Lucy. That, by the way, goes to show how much Bernie had changed compared with the way she behaved towards Richard when he wanted to protect her from potential dangers. She’s mellowed a lot over the years and manages to accept – not always with good grace, but at least with good manners – that other people have a right to be genuinely concerned about her wellbeing.

However, to get back to Jonah: Lucy appealed to him over the business of the unfairness of parents and their insistence that she was too young to be allowed out on her own on a bicycle. He listened to her arguments very seriously – he always spoke to Lucy as if he were a Regency gentleman addressing a lady – and then told her equally seriously that she ought to be glad that she had people who were so concerned about keeping her safe and that he wished his wife would listen to him when he asked her to be more careful riding her motorbike. That immediately deflected Lucy away from her grievance because she’d never come across the idea of a woman riding a motorbike and she immediately demanded proof that Jonah wasn’t making it all up.

Lucy’s ninth birthday was the last one to follow the established pattern. I have a home video of the day. I’d built her a tree house in the big oak tree in the back garden. Well, to be accurate, one of Bernie’s university colleagues, Dr Martin Riess, had suggested that it was a perfect tree for a house and the two of us had made it together. Lucy was very excited about it and insisted on taking Jonah up into the tree to see it in all its glory. Then after that, he climbed down and she jumped down after him and allowed him to catch her in his arms. She did that a few times, laughing more and more on each repetition of the game. I felt a pang of jealousy that my stepdaughter was favouring a comparative stranger with so much attention – and so much trust. I think Bernie realised that and that’s why she told Lucy that she ought to show more respect to our guest and give him a rest.

Then, a few weeks later everything changed for Jonah – and, as it turned out, for us too.

You can read more about Lucy's book and Bernie's quest to find out about Richard's mother in DESPISE NOT THY MOTHER which you can buy on Amazon or in the Kobo Store.

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