The Astronomer Under Another Name

Her father had spoken, by Lorna's rough estimate, about four hundred words a month, and rarely had any of them been about himself. Clearing his loft a fortnight after the funeral, she expected tax papers, spare radiator parts, the plain residue of a plain man. What she found instead, behind the water tank, were forty years of notebooks in a tidy slanting hand, each page ruled into columns of dates, times and numbers. Beneath them lay a shoebox of printed bulletins from a society of amateur astronomers.

The bulletins carried a regular column of observations on variable stars, signed with the pen name Meridian. It took her an evening, comparing the handwriting in the margins, to be certain that Meridian was her father. He had stood in a cold garden on some thousand nights, she calculated, timing the dimming and brightening of lights she had never once seen him look at. He had told nobody: not her, and not her mother while she was alive. "Why would a man hide that?" she asked the empty loft, and found it had no more to say than he had.

One bulletin mentioned a reader who wrote to Meridian so often that the editor had started printing the replies. His name was Vidar, and he lived two hours up the coast. Lorna wrote to him without any real plan, and he answered by return, in a note that began, "I have wondered for years what he looked like."

Vidar turned out to be a small, careful man in his seventies who kept a telescope under a tarpaulin in his orchard, and he received her as though she were a rumour finally confirmed. He had a drawer of letters, he said, and brought them out. Reading them at his kitchen table, Lorna met someone she did not know. The Meridian of these pages teased and complained about the weather. Once he gave an entire page to a feud with a neighbour's floodlight, and he closed each letter with some version of "Clear skies, and say hello to the family."

What unsettled her was not that her father had been different on paper. It was that she recognised the jokes. Had anyone told her, as a girl, that the long silences at the dinner table were his way of saving the words for later, she would have taken it for an excuse. Now, with the letters in front of her, she thought it might simply have been true. He had spent his talk in a place where nobody could answer back, and she could not decide whether that was a kind of generosity or a kind of absence.

Vidar asked whether she would like to look through the telescope. It was not yet dark, but a few stars had come out above the apple trees, and he aimed at one of them with the patience of a man who had done it many times. "Your father measured this one every clear night since before you were born," he said. "It fades for a day or so, then recovers. He never missed a minimum."

Lorna bent to the eyepiece. The star was small, steady and entirely ordinary, and she realised, looking at it, that she was holding her breath. It was not reverence. It was the particular stillness she had watched from the kitchen window as a child, on nights when he would not come in for supper. She did not breathe out until Vidar cleared his throat behind her and asked, very gently, whether she could see it.

"Yes," she said, and stayed where she was.