Chloe shot him a silent thank you and Hannah grinned. ‘So I’m not going to need the pepper spray to defend myself?’
Maybe Hannah was joking and maybe not. Jon smiled. ‘That rather depends on what you’re defending yourself from.’
He went back to his meal and the matter was dropped. When the waitress brought coffee, Hannah reached for the folder. ‘I want to show you... I found some things out. About Dad.’
Chloe breathed a sigh of relief. The nagging fear that perhaps there had been legal papers in the folder, something that formalised Hannah’s intention to leave Amy behind, was unfounded. ‘Show me. I’d love to see.’
Hannah opened the folder on the first page. A black and white map of the village, a few of the buildings coloured in by hand. ‘This is where Dad lived. In blue. And the mauve is where our grandmother was born.’
Chloe leaned over the map. ‘Right here? By the village green?’
‘Yes, her parents had a shop.’ Hannah’s face had the intent look she got when she had hold of something and wasn’t letting go. ‘Haberdashery.’
Hannah leaned over, flipping through the pages, finding the right one. The photograph was a copy of an older one, the creases showing up on the print. ‘Who’s that standing outside?’
‘Guess.’ Hannah’s face was flushed with triumph.
‘I don’t know. The proprietor...our great-grandfather?’ Chloe peered at the figure. She could hardly make any features out, just a man in a white apron standing in the shadow of the doorway. He looked as if he had a moustache.
‘Yes.’
‘Wow.’ Chloe looked at the photograph again. ‘Where did you get this? You’ve done it all in the last week?’
‘No, I’ve been working on it for a while, using the internet, but coming here everything fell into place. The pasteur at the church gave me the photo. His predecessor had a thing about the village history and he collected a load of things and catalogued them all. It’s all still kept up at the church, along with the parish records.’
‘But...’ The nagging doubt that there was something wrong with the photograph suddenly resolved into certainty. ‘The shopfront. It says Delancourt. That wasn’t our grandmother’s name, was it?’
Hannah laughed. ‘Wondered when you’d notice. When Dad’s father left, she reverted back to her maiden name. And Dad took her name, because he didn’t want anything to do with his father.’
Chloe stole a glance at Jon. Families breaking up, not wanting anything to do with each other. If the subject was a sore spot for him, he wasn’t showing it.
‘Why did Dad do that?’
‘His father beat them.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’
‘The pastor at the church put me in touch with someone who knew Dad. They were at school together. I went and talked to him.’
Sadness suddenly struck Chloe. This was all fascinating, but Hannah had left her own child to chase people who were long dead. She asked the question as gently as she could.
‘This is why you left? To find out about our dad?’ Chloe swallowed down the impulse to be cross with Hannah. Surely this was no reason to abandon Amy.
The light died in Hannah’s eyes. ‘No, I...’
‘Sometimes, when you can’t make sense of the present, it helps to try and make sense of the past. Because the past is over and done with and can’t hurt you.’ Jon spoke suddenly, his voice gentle.
Hannah’s eyes began to blur with tears. ‘I’m sorry, Chloe.’
‘It’s
okay. You did the best you could, Hannah, and you made sure that Amy was safe.’ Chloe was beginning to see that maybe Hannah had done the only thing she could do. Something was very wrong, and she’d been trying to protect Amy from that. She reached for her sister’s hand, holding it tight.
Hannah was retreating fast, her face taking on that look of dumb watchfulness that Chloe had seen so many times before. They had to stop now. She glanced at Jon and the ghost of a nod told her that he understood.
‘May I look at your photos, please, Hannah?’ He slid his hand across the table towards the blue folder.
Hannah nodded, and Jon started to leaf through the pages, asking questions and complimenting Hannah on what she’d found out. Slowly Hannah began to emerge from her shell and started to talk fluently. It seemed that this project was her way of making sense of something.