Between 12 January and 11 February 1978, Christopher and Phyllis wrote a total of ten letters each. During this time, the Ripper killed again: Helen Rytka, an eighteen-year-old prostitute from Huddersfield. Christopher cut out the relevant newspaper articles, stuck them in his scrapbook and returned to his letters to Phyllis. Writing to his birth mother, he told me, became his favourite way to wind down after an evening lost in medieval studies or the horrors of the Holocaust. With each letter came the momentary appeasement of his all-pervading desire to be in constant communication with her. But barely a day, sometimes barely minutes after he had written, the need to reach for her renewed itself, stronger still. It moved me to hear him say this. Love is where the idle mind travels.

And so, when the InterCity pulled into Warrington station at 2.25 p.m. on Saturday, 11 February 1978, Christopher found himself, rigid with tension, at the window of the train door. He had stood there since Manchester Piccadilly, unable to sit a moment longer, staring out of the window as if she, Phyllis, might appear skirting along the hedgerows like a phantom.

The photograph she had sent was indeed blurry. In one of her letters she’d mentioned that she hated having her photo taken and always looked a fright. She was, he thought, saying that out of modesty, but I know she didn’t have a high opinion of the way she looked. Despite the poor focus, Christopher thought the photograph showed a pretty young woman not too much older than him. She was holding an ice cream, though the sky at her back was grey, and her light brown hair blew up and across her cheeks in the wind. She was smiling, and when he looked into the photo, as he had done every day since, he imagined her smile was for him.

He had tied all her letters together using the scraggy tinsel from Adam’s miniature Christmas tree and stored them in a shoebox under his bed. A nightly routine had become to unwind the glittering thread, pick one at random and read it before he went to sleep, a routine that almost always finished in him taking out every one of the letters and reading them from first to last. He would close his eyes and think of her and him together, always sitting or lying close, hands clasped, heads bent in a soft apricot light. He wondered sometimes where this light came from, and what it meant.

He stepped down off the train and waited for the crowd to thin. One by one the horde dispersed until only one remained: a young woman in a burgundy wool beret, a woman once blurry brought suddenly and shockingly into focus. She was standing in front of a blow-up image of Jimmy Savile – InterCity. This is the age of the train – her face the very picture of anticipation.

‘Phyllis? Phyllis Curtiss?’

But she was already walking towards him. She wore bell-bottomed jeans like his and a long black woollen coat. She could have been another student, maybe a PhD student. Her arms flew out like wings, but almost immediately she clapped them to her sides as if she did not know whether or not to fly.

‘Christopher?’ Her hair was fair rather than brown as she had said, but her eyes were dark – brown, like his. Margaret’s eyes were blue – he shook the thought away. ‘Christopher, is it you?’

‘Yes,’ he said, almost too choked to speak. ‘Yes. It’s me.’

Her eyes shone, a rim of tears at their edge; her mouth pressed itself into a tight smile. She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring, her shoulders rising, her chest seeming to inflate. When she exhaled, she gave a short gasping laugh – of surprise, of joy, of something neither of them could identify but which filled the air, the sky, and on.

After a moment’s hesitation, she came forward. Her hands flew up and dropped and flew up again, and when she was close enough, she reached and touched him lightly on the arm, as if to check he was really there. He found himself unable to move, filled with a kind of burning. She stood back, straightened, gave another half-gasp, half-laugh. Her hair was not black like his but her nose was not thin at least, perhaps a little like his own, and her eyes were definitely brown and carried a smudge of grey beneath. He reached for where she had touched his arm and held himself there, as if injured. But he was not injured.

‘Here you are,’ she said.

He nodded, all ability to speak quite gone.

She reached up and placed a forefinger under the inner corner of his eye, then traced her finger down a little, the way a tear might run. As if suddenly aware of what she was doing, the intimacy of it, she withdrew her hand and placed it flat against her own flushed cheek.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Just … my dad used to say that my eyes had been pushed in with sooty fingers. And yours have that too…’ She covered her mouth with her hand. Her eyes brimmed, overflowed at last. ‘I can’t believe it.’ She laughed that small gasping laugh again and took a step back. Her eyes did not leave his.

‘I…’ he began but could not continue.

‘Let’s get you home,’ she said gently, reaching into her coat pocket for a tissue and dabbing at her eyes. ‘To my house, I mean – if I can manage to drive. I don’t know if I can, mind you, I’m shaking like a leaf here.’

With her arm at his back, she ushered him out to the car park and then walked a little ahead. Every other step, she turned and gave a laugh, as if embarrassed or as if to apologise for something.

‘This is our chariot,’ she said, and stopped.

They had reached a bronze-coloured Austin Princess. The bodywork had rusted in patches and the black vinyl roof had started to peel. ‘Bit of a banger, but she goes.’ She unlocked the passenger door first, touched his arm again, the lightest tap, before making her way around to the driver’s side. In her wake, he smelled flowers, though he could not have said whether it was perfume or soap.

‘Get in,’ she called over the top of the car. ‘Excuse the mess.’

Inside, in the footwell, were six or seven green toy soldiers of the type he himself had played with as a child: no bigger than a thumb, their feet moulded to small flat rectangles so they could stand and fight. He guessed they belonged to the twins, whose names he had learned off by heart from her letters: Darren and Craig. Despite being messy, the car was comfortable, with soft rust-coloured velour upholstery. It smelled of sports kit, of trainers. There was a box of Kleenex tissues on the dashboard, four or five tapes in the square recess next to the gearstick, what looked like a woman’s handbag of tan leather on the back seat.

Phyllis started the engine. A blast of music came from the cassette player – French: Blondie, ‘Denis’.

‘Sorry,’ she said, turning down the music. ‘David tapes the charts every week for the car.’

‘I used to do that,’ he said, filled with inexplicable joy. ‘Every week.’

‘So you like music, then?’

‘Yes, very much. Do you?’

‘Love it. I like Fleetwood Mac, do you like Fleetwood Mac?’

‘I love Fleetwood Mac. I like the song… what is it… the one from the new album… “Dreams”? I like that one best.’

‘That’s my favourite too!’ Her voice had risen both in pitch and volume. She flapped her hand in excitement, her engagement ring flashing next to her wedding band. She turned to him for a second and smiled. One of her front teeth crossed the other – he had not noticed that until now – and it was all he could do to stop himself from reaching over and drawing his thumb down the squint line made by the overlap.

She grasped the steering wheel, laid her arms around its rim and rested her head against her hands.

‘I’m not sure I can drive,’ she said, and laughed. ‘Just give me a minute.’

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I could drive now either.’

‘Thanks.’ After a moment, she pulled herself upright and rubbed her forehead. When she spoke again, her voice shook. ‘Dig around in the glove compartment,’ she said. ‘I think the Fleetwood Mac’s in there. I need Stevie Nicks to calm me down, I think.’

Christopher opened the glove compartment. Three cassettes fell from the jumble onto his lap. They were mostly BASF, all copies, all with labels scribbled in black felt-tip pen: the Best of Motown, the Bee Gees, Billy Joel. Phyllis had let down the handbrake and was now edging out of the car park, into the traffic. All the while, she drew in short breaths, making a soft whistling sound, blowing out those breaths again as if after a shock. Though all he wanted was to drink her with his eyes, he made himself look away, wanting to leave her some privacy in the height of emotion seemingly too raw, too powerful to conceal. He understood – more than she could know. He’d had to flatten his feet to the floor to stop his legs from trembling.

He busied himself with the tapes and found a grey TDK with Rumours scribbled on the label.

‘This is only just out, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘You’ve got hold of a copy very quickly.’

‘That’s David does those,’ she said. ‘A right old pirate, he is. Terrible.’ She was negotiating a roundabout, glanced at him as she turned left and onto a dual carriageway. She had taken off her hat, and against the sun her hair spun a wispy halo.

‘I can’t believe you’re in my car.’ She seemed to have recovered her voice and her tone had levelled. ‘I just… I can’t believe you’re here. My baby. My baby, Martin.’

‘I can’t either,’ he said. ‘But I am.’

‘You are.’

They had been together less than fifteen minutes and already happiness had flooded into him, warmed his insides like wine. He wondered if he had ever felt so happy. He doubted it.

‘I think we have the same nose,’ he said.

‘Do you? You know what they say about noses. Run in the family, don’t they?’ She laughed, and he laughed too, conscious still of keeping himself in check, aware that if he didn’t, he might howl for the near pain of such joy.

Minutes later, they came to a bridge: pale green, industrial looking – steels, rivets, arches. It held the road that they drove over now, another bridge to their right, its sandstone blackened with soot. To their left, what looked like a town; beneath, a river shone brown.

‘That’s the railway,’ she said, gesturing at the blackened stone bridge. ‘The Leeds train doesn’t stop there. The road we’re on now is called the Runcorn–Widnes Bridge,’ she said. ‘David’s grandfather had a hand in it. Literally. Lost his hand when one of those beams hit him. T’other side is the estuary, and that’s the old town further on. We were in Widnes just now, and when we reach the other side we’ll be in Runcorn.’

‘Is that Runcorn?’ he asked, nodding towards the town.

‘That’s what I meant when I said the old town, sorry. But yes it is, love.’

Love.

They drove off the bridge and onto another dual carriageway.

‘The Mersey,’ she said, anticipating his question with, he thought, a kind of telepathy. ‘The Runcorn–Widnes Bridge is like the Golden Gate Bridge except with twice the fog and half the sunshine. Just kidding. The canal’s down there, did you see it? One of the teachers where I work lives on a barge somewhere along here. I’ve never been on it though. The barge, I mean.’

‘Do you live near?’

‘Not too far now.’

In the wing mirror, the pale structure of the bridge shrank behind them. They left the dual carriageway, turned right and right again – Christopher lost track until Phyllis turned left into a road of semi-detached houses, about the same size as his parents’ but with leaded bay windows and larger front gardens, dwarf walls, hedges. She pulled into a driveway, at the end of which was a garage, set back from the house.

‘Home sweet home.’ She turned off the engine and opened her door.

He got out and followed her back up the drive and around to the front of the house. Phyllis chattered as she let them both in. Inside, it was warm, almost hot after the cold of the outdoors.

‘I left the heating on,’ she said. ‘Take your coat off and hang it with the others.’

He did as he was told, putting his jacket over a child’s anorak since there was no free hook. His hat and gloves he stuffed into the pockets. She was already in the kitchen; he could hear her clanking about, the flush of water.

‘Tea?’ she called to him.

‘Thank you, yes.’

She was singing to herself: ‘Dreams’. The song had stuck in her mind, no doubt after they’d listened to it together in the car. He sang it too, softly, while he took off his ankle boots. On the floor underneath the coats were a pair of men’s walking shoes, two pairs of boys’ football boots and a pair of women’s tan leather boots with a heel. His own boots he placed neatly on the end, in the row.

Minutes later, he and Phyllis were sitting at the small Formica kitchen table, hot tea in ivy-patterned china mugs before them. He had imagined this moment so many times but had not been able to envisage the sight of her until now, smiling at him as she was through the lazy steam, her hair a little fuzzy from the damp air. There were fine lines at the edges of her eyes. Her skin had pinked a little, making her look like a schoolgirl. She put her hand over the mug to warm it. The house smelled sugary, as if she had been baking. He could feel his toes throbbing as they warmed up.

‘David’s taken the boys to the football. It’s Liverpool at home, not sure who they’re playing. I thought it’d be better if it was just the two of us today.’

Phyllis sighed. For a moment neither of them said anything. As if synchronised, both placed their lips to the rims of their cups, despite the obvious fact that the tea was too hot yet to drink.

‘Can you tell me?’ The question came out before he had a chance to stop it. ‘I mean, do you think you can talk about it – about me, that is?’

She put her tea down and smiled at him sadly. ‘I can.’

‘I shouldn’t have asked,’ he said quickly, feeling himself blush. ‘I shouldn’t have asked like that. I’m sorry.’ He stood, took off his sweater, sat down again. ‘Sorry, I’m overheating.’ He reached for his drink, but she caught and held his hand.

‘What did I say about apologising? You should save it for when you’ve done something wrong. And you’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘Sorry. For apologising.’

She laughed, cocked her head as if to study him. ‘You’re shyer than your letters.’

It was his turn to laugh, out of embarrassment. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.’

He turned his hand in hers, flattening the back against the cool tabletop. Their hands lay palm to palm, the tips of her fingers at his wrist, his fingertips at hers. Her hand was much smaller than his, her skin pinker, her nails longer. Her watch was a blue Timex. It looked like a boy’s watch and he wondered if it belonged to one of the twins. Beyond the strap, her pale arm vanished into the burgundy wool sleeve of her sweater.

‘What do you want to know?’ she asked him.

He made himself meet her eye. ‘Everything you can tell me, but only if you can. I don’t want to upset you.’

She took his hand in both of hers and lifted it as she stood. She led him through to the living room and told him to sit down.

He sat on the sofa, felt it sink beneath his weight. The fabric of the cushions was velvet – green, the colour of wine bottles. The carpet was paisley – greens and yellows, thick under his stockinged feet. Although the room was warm enough, she crossed to the opposite wall and lit the gas fire all the same, as if the merest chill could not be allowed, as if she were in fact trying to keep him warm forever now she had brought him in from the cold. Above the fire were photographs in frames. He wanted to go over and look at them but did not.

Phyllis returned to him, took his hand once more in hers and laid their knotted fingers on her leg. Normally such a gesture would have filled him with angst, but it didn’t, not with her.

‘When I got your letter…’ She stopped and inhaled deeply. She was dressed much like the girls at university – a casual sweater and jeans. Not like Margaret – not like a mother at all.

‘You don’t have to tell me right away,’ he said. ‘It’s enough just to be here for now. It’s a miracle to be here with you.’

‘It is.’ It was barely a whisper. Her fingers tightened around his. ‘It’s an absolute miracle.’

He could feel the warmth radiating from her. Human warmth. A human bean. The line where their thighs ran down to the sofa’s edge was dark. He could not see the cushion beneath. He wondered if he had ever sat this close to his mother, Margaret.

‘You don’t have to explain yourself to me,’ he said. ‘That’s not why I came.’

‘I want to.’ She looked up into his face and smiled. Her eyes were wet – they had not dried in all the time they had been together – and she reached up and tucked his hair behind his ear. The tenderness of the gesture was almost unbearable. He closed his eyes a moment and opened them again.

‘You’re Christopher now,’ she said.

‘Yes. But I was Martin. Your baby.’

On the mantelpiece, a carriage clock ticked. The gas fire hissed. A car passed by, though he wasn’t sure if the noise came from the road in front of the house or the one behind.

‘Every morning,’ she began, taking his hand again, ‘when the post drops through, I get a moment where I feel this little pulse of excitement. And then when I see there’s nothing but bills, bank statements and the like, the feeling drops like a stone and all I feel is disappointment. Most people get that probably, but I think it’s more so for me because of what I’m always hoping for. Maybe I’m no different to anyone else. Maybe we’re all longing for something special to happen. Maybe life is just a constant process of readjusting our expectations.’

‘But that day you got my letter,’ he interrupted – couldn’t help himself.

‘Yes,’ she said, and squeezed his hand so tight it hurt. ‘That day I didn’t have to readjust anything because something special did happen. There was your letter in its little white envelope, all neat and precise.’ Her left eyelid lowered halfway in a comic expression, as if she were joking or being ironic, or perhaps she had something in her eye. He did it too, felt his eyelid tremble. ‘And the address was written in this painstaking handwriting. Black ink. So neat. It was addressed to me, of course. And I knew. I just knew. I was shivering before I even opened it. Standing in the hallway shivering.’

He said nothing, stayed utterly still, held his breath in case the sound of it stopped her from continuing.

‘Of course it was five o’clock by the time I got to read it. The house was like Clapham Junction. I had to do the packed lunches, get the kids sorted, go to work. God knows how I did. Then after work I had to pick up the twins, get their dinner, get them settled. I fed them early then put them in front of the television, took the letter upstairs and into the bathroom. It’s the only room with a lock in this house. Not very picturesque, I know, but I sat on the loo and read your words, and I felt as if my bones were melting. Literally, Christopher. You should’ve seen me. I was crying so much my jeans were covered in wet spots. You’ll think I’m romanticising, but I’m telling you it was like that. It was like forgiveness and redemption all at once, except I only realised in that moment that I’d been waiting to be forgiven, if that makes sense. I’d waited for your letter for over half my life and there it was in my hands, and all I had to do was hold on, not mess up, and I had a chance of seeing you again. Even as I was reading your words, I thought: this will be my first story for him, this right now, sitting in this bathroom on this loo seat, crying over his letter. I’ll lighten it up for him, I thought. Joke about having the loo paper right there, how handy that was to dry my tears.’ She sniffed, smiled, rolled her eyes, as if to suggest she was silly.

He wanted to tell her there was nothing silly in anything she had said, but could not speak. He had imagined her reading his letter in her room, perhaps, or in the kitchen. But it didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

‘I hadn’t forgotten your birthday,’ she said. ‘How could I? So on the twelfth of March last year I knew you’d turned eighteen, just as I knew you’d turned one and two and every year in-between. I had nothing of you except for the smallest picture, no bigger than a credit card, black and white. You were barely a week old when…’ She stopped again, threw her eyes to the ceiling, blinking fast. He placed the flat of his hand between her shoulder blades and told her it was OK, that there was no rush.

She nodded, closed and opened her eyes, passed her hand over her brow. ‘I’d registered with NORCAP on your birthday, and since then I’d been running for the morning post much like I used to run for my Bunty comic when I was eight. Except Bunty used to come regularly, on a Thursday I think it was. Whereas your letter never came.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

‘Don’t be sorry, love. Nothing for you to be sorry about. It’s me that’s sorry.’

‘No. Don’t say that.’

‘Well I won’t if you won’t, eh? How about that?’ Her left eye closed again but only a little way – her tic or mannerism or whatever it was – and she laughed the small gasping laugh he now recognised as hers.

He laughed too, in a similar way, and again closed his left eyelid a little. ‘And then?’

‘Then? Then nothing. The months passed. Spring, summer, autumn, and before I knew it, it was Christmas. David said I should forget about it, but I couldn’t. I thought you must have decided to live your life without me, and that was fair enough.’

‘No!’ Christopher raised their tangled fingers to his lips and kissed the knot they had made. Odd, that he felt no strangeness in doing this. Just the opposite, in fact.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘You’d every right to make your choice, love. I couldn’t say I’d made mine back then, but that was my fate.’

‘What do you remember about me?’

‘Your smell,’ she said quickly, and smiled. ‘The way your head smelled, especially in the morning, the day after you were born. I inhaled it like it was Vicks, and I remember thinking, I could live off that smell. I wouldn’t need food or water or anything, just that. And your head was so soft and your eyes were so round and wise, as if you’d been here before and you were looking at me as if to say, What are you doing here? And then I suppose my most vivid memory after that is handing you over. Sister Lawrence. She had this placid smile and I wanted to punch her, punch that smile right off her face. Not that that would have solved anything. She was all right, one of the nice ones. And I was fifteen. I had no real idea of what I was doing – I couldn’t grasp the enormity of it. I put my baby into a stranger’s arms because that’s what I was told to do. But my hands had become hot and sticky with holding you and they got stuck under your head. Sister Lawrence had to slide her own hand between your head and my hand and kind of prise you away.’

‘Where was this?’

‘At the convent. We were in the mother superior’s office. Some girls had their whole pregnancy there, but I was allowed to stay at home. I wasn’t allowed out of the house once I started to show, but at least I wasn’t at the convent for the whole time. Bloody miserable place.’

‘Were you alone?’

‘No. If my memory serves, my parents took me there with you in my arms and brought me home alone. There was no conversation before, and when they drove me home, no conversation then either. The subject was never mentioned again. You were never mentioned again. Nothing, not a word, as if removing a whole human being from our lives was little more than the end of a chapter. It was all at best inconvenient, at worst unfortunate. Any attempt to speak of it beyond that day was to pay too much attention to something best forgotten.’ She stopped, rubbed her forehead, ran her hand over her eyes. ‘Different times.’

‘You don’t have to say any more.’ It cost him all his will to say it. He wanted more. He wanted all of it. Every detail played out, second by second.

‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘They know about you, Mum and Dad. Now, I mean. They’re looking forward to meeting you. Thing is, we’re not going to get anywhere looking backwards and blaming people, are we? It was a long time ago.’

How wise she was – how good, how kind.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked her.

‘Of course, love,’ she said, patting his hand. And then, after a moment, ‘Gerard, that was the mother superior’s name. This was at St Matthew’s. I missed my O levels. I took them a year later at college. I’m grateful to my parents for that. They were very particular about that, and I would never have become a teacher without them. I was bitter at them for years, of course, but now I think they were trying to do right by me, that’s all. I’d always been bright at school and they didn’t want to see me waste it.’ She breathed deeply, shook her head as if to clear it before continuing. ‘The mother superior’s office was a drab old place though. You should have seen it. Brown, everything brown, although that could just be how I remember it – maybe I’ve got it in sepia tones in my mind or something like those old photos. When I think of it, I can smell dust even though there wasn’t a speck. Incense, too, and something else, which I think now must have been carbolic soap or some such. None of your Shield there, I can tell you – none of your Impulse body spray or what have you. No smell, no colour. Even the books were brown – it’s a wonder I didn’t develop a hatred of them right there and then, a wonder that they, not God, became my salvation.’

‘Salvation?’

‘Yes, love. Education. Look at you, at university. It’s fabulous. You’ll get your degree and you’ll be able to get a decent job rather than stacking shelves or emptying bins like some of these poor souls. You’re going to have a good life, Christopher. There’s nothing stopping you.’

‘No,’ he said, feeling his chest loosen and swell. ‘Not now.’

‘I’m already proud of you and I’ve only known you five minutes.’ This time when she laughed, he laughed with her. He had known she was going to laugh, had seen her eyelid begin to quiver, so was able to meet her laugh with his own. As he laughed, he felt his left eyelid lower and wondered if he’d always done this and was only noticing it now.

‘And that was it really,’ she said. ‘I had to sign some papers, I remember, though I can’t remember any of the words. I just signed. Insidious duress, I’d call it now. I was fifteen, did I mention that? It outrages me even now. Signature! I didn’t have a signature! What fifteen-year-old has a signature? I didn’t even have a chequebook! I just wrote my name in my best handwriting, that was all. I consigned my Martin, you, to the arms of a nun not much older than me, and that was it.’ She began to cry. ‘Sorry, ignore me. I haven’t talked about it for a long time.’

He pushed his arm all the way around her shoulders. Her shoulders were narrow; in the cup of his hand he could feel the small square of bone at the top. It was only after he had put his arm around her that he realised he had done it. But even then, on realising, he had no desire to pull it away.

‘I didn’t cry,’ she said, composing herself, reaching into her sleeve for a handkerchief. ‘Not then. I signed, and then I gestured to Sister Lawrence to let me take my baby one last time. I wanted to press my nose into the soft folds of his… of your neck. I wanted to breathe my last breath of you. Your own baby’s neck, the softness, the sweet smell… I can’t even put that into words, Christopher. I only hope you get to experience it one day and you’ll know what I mean. I thought if I could inhale you, I could breathe you into my marrow or bottle you and stopper you inside me or something, but they wouldn’t let me take you. I can remember my mother turning me by the shoulders and walking me to the door. It was all so bloody gentle, so bloody quiet. But inside I was a volcano. And I’ve played that moment over too many times to count and each time I wonder how I didn’t scream, why I didn’t throw my mother’s hands from my shoulders, snatch my baby and run out of there and never come back. I could have taken my chances. You and me against the world. But I didn’t. And that’s what I’m sorry about. No amount of confessions can remove the weight of that.’

She pressed her hands flat over her face and wept. He pulled her small body towards him. She let her head rest against his chest and sobbed into her hands, and he kissed her hair and told her it was all right. It was all right. It was all right.

‘I’m here now,’ he said. ‘No one can take you away from me.’