All through our marriage, Richard was my best friend, and an amazing father. He knocked himself out trying to provide for us, trying to make us the perfect family: but so much of the time, he just couldn’t make that work.
I was overwhelmed by the shuddering loneliness of living with someone with chronic depression. It’s hard to stay sympathetic and sad and angry all at the same time, torn between meeting the needs of both the people you love. I held my breath for so long trying not to let Richard’s illness impact on Leo, trying not to let Leo’s day-to-day demands take too much of a strain on Richard. I once imagined there was nothing worse than being in charge all the time, the press-ganged pilot who navigated Richard’s anxieties and worries and got him back onto even ground.
But then Richard killed himself and the sheer joy of being with him, the summer warmth of caring for someone, the human softness of his body, it all came flooding back. A spotlight of pain projected my loss in vivid relief: still does. I live with a Richard-sized hole in my life: almost a physical thing in the room we slept in; in the places we took Leo to; in the kitchen every day when I finish work. He isn’t here and I don’t know where he is.
All I know is how much I loved him.
Chapter Two
The gravel drive crunches a song of despair under the wheels of my car, each pop a painful reminder that we’re inching towards this life we didn’t ask for, and away from everything we ever had.
In the passenger seat, Leo has kept up a steady stream of ‘Are we there yet?’ punctuated only by a dirge of his friends’ names repeated over and over to the tune of a horrible television advert. I’m trying not to shout at him, trying not to be an even worse parent than I already am. The strain of keeping quiet shows in my knuckles, wrapped tight white around the wheel.
‘Are we there yet?’ asks Leo, one more time.
This time, with my heart in my mouth, I have to answer, ‘Yes.’
‘Eric? And Sadie? And Ollie? And Dean?’ He’s being deliberately obnoxious, believing that he can winkle a promise out of me if he’s sufficiently irritating; a chafing grain of sand that could grow, if Leo tries long enough, into, ‘Yes, all your friends are here, they’re going to jump out and shout surprise and we’ll both go back to our real lives.’ Lives we both, in most ways, loved. And that’s the most bitter thing about love; you can’t understand it, measure it – not all its edges and intricacies – until it’s gone and the clear print of its negative self is left behind.
Evidence of the house is everywhere, though the house itself is still out of sight: a faded sign on the main road pointed us down a lane that became a gated tunnel of green leaves – hopeful spatters of lime-coloured light landing on the bonnet of the car. There were stone pillars either side of what must have once been a magnificent gateway, bridges in the classical Greek style that have long since lost the fountains that played over them or the ponds they led into. A quarter of a mile or so down the lane, it peters out into this long tree-lined drive, the sound of gravel, and the uneasy feeling of regret.
Each side of the drive, aspen trees wave us on. They are so overgrown that their tops mingle with each other, forming a hedge high in the air. Their trunks are straight and bleak.
‘Are we there yet?’ says Leo.
‘I said we are.’ I want to stop the car – delay the inevitable – but the removal men in the van behind us are paid by the hour.
‘There’s no house.’ Leo is sinking further down in his seat, scrunching his shoulders up and his head down, working up to full a meltdown.
I know how he feels. We’ve been driving for seven hours, stuck in traffic for five of those, inching south down the M25 and grudgingly moving forward on the M20. I’m a Londoner. I belong in a place full of chattering people, of smells, sounds and tastes of multiculture, of dozens of nosy, self-absorbed villages strung together into one huge city. Leo had everything he needed in London. A club for every afternoon of the week while I finished work, sports teams and music lessons, art group and dancing. I had neighbours to step in and take him swimming if I was stuck, friends who could watch him at the drop of a hat if I wanted to go to the pictures or lie in a park and watch the clouds overhead by myself.
When people move, they say they’re swapping something for something else: the bustle of the city for the bucolic countryside, the chill winter breezes of the seaside for the shores of southern Spain. Leo and I don’t have the luxury of a swap. What we had has gone.
‘I want to see Dean.’
‘Dean’s in London. Can you see the house yet?’
‘I want to see Dean.’
There is nothing I can say. Leo doesn’t like change, and he doesn’t have the life experience to know that people move around, float by, stay sometimes or are gone: that there will be more people. I have that experience but my faith in it has disappeared.
There is a flash in the road, an amber streak across my peripheral vision at the bottom right-hand edge of the windscreen. The bump, when it comes, is more a noise than a feeling.
I stop the car and get out. I know I have hit something, I know it is an animal: a small soft creature versus the metal of my car bumper. Behind me, the removal van pulls over too.
The fox is lying by the side of the drive. It looks perfect except for the one angry gash on its pointed head, almost hidden by the way its tail curls around the small body, for all the world as if it is sleeping.
‘Did the fox get run over, Mummy?’ Leo has got out of the car. He is looking at the sad little corpse.
‘It ran straight out in front of me,’ I say and my voice cracks slightly. ‘Poor thing.’
The fox doesn’t look like foxes did in London. The foxes we’re used to are coloured by the grey landscape, infected by the soot and the brick and the car fumes. This one is vivid orange, glossy and plump. We are used to mangy foxes with scratched-up fur, living out of bins: this one has had an altogether more organic diet.
‘Oh, dear.’ The oldest of the three removal men has climbed down from his van. ‘Poor little bugger. Let’s move him to the hedge.’ He grabs a piece of old fabric from the cab of the van and uses it to protect his hands from the fur. ‘There you go.’
I feel like I should say some words, stroke the still small ribs. I have never killed anything before.
‘We do need to get on, Cate.’ The removal man taps his watch. ‘I’ve got to get that lot home for tonight.’ He gestures towards his colleagues.
‘Sorry, little fox,’ I whisper. I am near to tears. I look in the rear-view mirror as I drive away but his body is hidden by the green hedgerow.
*
One last curve in this dilapidated drive and the left-hand edge of the house breaks out of the trees. And then it keeps going. Across and across, window after window.
‘Where’s our house?’ asks Leo.
This place looks like a hospital, or a boarding school, or – exactly what it is – a museum. ‘This is our house,’ I tell Leo.
‘Daddy’s house?’ This is as much as Leo has grasped of where we are going – and to some extent it’s true.
Richard’s family have owned this house for two hundred years, since they built it. My blood runs cold when I think what might have happened if it wasn’t here, if there wasn’t a trust still running it. I knew all along that the heir to the estate is entitled to live on the premises, although I never imagined a scenario where that might need to happen. Now, with every other avenue closed, we are here at the door.
I reach in my handbag for the solicitor’s letter and the keys. The letter explains that Leo and I will have our own apartment but we will share the building and garden with the museum and its visitors. It’s not ideal, but none of this is. We’re supposed to be greeted by Mrs Buchan – although greeted seems unlikely to be the right word – but we’re five hours late and she’s probably gone home.
I dig into my bag a bit deeper. The keys aren’t there. I’m not the sort of person to lose things, unless you count jobs, husbands, and ho
mes. I don’t lose keys or letters or small, ineffectual everyday details. I get out of the car so that I can tip my handbag onto the seat, but I know they’re not there. Tissues and envelopes, Leo’s asthma pump, my purse, the keys aren’t there. They really aren’t. And I checked at least ten times before we left, I checked once we were in the actual car.
‘Leo?’
He’s got out too, he’s standing on the drive looking up at his ancestors’ achievement.
‘Leo, where are the keys? Did you take them out of my bag?’
Leo looks at his feet. ‘Nope.’
And then I remember the new keyring, the shiny silver abacus that one of my work colleagues gave me as a leaving present and the way its tiny perfect beads slid from one end of the frame to the other. I remember how much Leo wanted to play with it and how I said he couldn’t. And that’s when I know that the keyring, and the keys, are in a lavatory stall at the M20 services.
It’s one of those parenting moments, one where every fibre of you wants to shout, scream, even run away. But another part of you – almost always the dominant one – remembers that you can’t. You’re the grown-up. You can do this the easy way or the hard way. You can suck it up and deal with what you have or you can waste hours of your life on an exercise that will simply result in two of you crying instead of one. An inner part of me, one I ban and hide and silence, asks me whether Richard’s version of parenting was the same and, it whispers in a voice I hate admitting to, ‘Isn’t that why we are where we are now?’
‘Very impressive, Cate.’ The oldest of the three removal men walks towards my car. ‘Your furniture’s going to rattle a bit in there.’ Behind him, the others have pushed up the back of the van and are standing around – stretching out tense muscles, rolling cigarettes, waiting to unpack.
‘It’s a flat, two bedrooms. The rest is mostly empty. And I’ve lost the keys.’ My angry inner voice adds, I haven’t lost the keys, Leo has, but that’s not going to help us right now. I smile at him, trying to disarm the fact that he thinks I’m an idiot.
‘Are they in your bag?’
I’m still smiling, my face rigid with tension. ‘I looked.’
‘The car?’
Leo stops me from explicitly outlining my frustrations by throwing up on the gravel drive. Spatters of vomit moisten the dust on the removal man’s boots.
*
When I’ve cleaned Leo up – and apologised profusely – things seem to have reached a new entente cordiale. The removal men are prepared to excuse my stupidity in the light of Leo’s car sickness and the entire plaintive horror of the situation. They have started stacking boxes near the front door while I sink myself in the task of opening it.
The traffic jam has meant that the solicitor’s office closed long before we got here. All the numbers I have for the museum and the estate office ring out and there don’t appear to be any neighbours.
Leo is being entertained by the removal men – they are lovely with him. He’s been allowed to sit in the cab although, since he confided in the youngest one, Frank, that it was him who lost the keys, they’ve turned the radio off and taken the keys out of the ignition. ‘Just in case, mate,’ they told him when he said he’d like to work the windscreen wipers a bit more.
‘I reckon I can get in there.’ Frank points to an upstairs window that’s slightly ajar. The front door of the house is porticoed, two sandstone pillars flank the wide door, and a tumble of tangled vegetation grows round them. Here and there a wide purple flower turns its face to the sinking sun.
‘Are you sure?’ It’s a long way up and seeing Frank break his neck would really finish the day off. ‘And I don’t know which window is which; you might end up in the actual museum.’
‘We haven’t got that much choice,’ Philip, the oldest removal man says. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had to take an alternative route in.’
‘And there’s an alarm,’ I add, ‘because of the museum. The instructions are here but the keypad is inside the front door. I doubt you’d get there in time.’
‘The only certain thing,’ Philip says, ‘is that we can’t stay here all night.’
‘My tent is in one of the boxes,’ Leo offers, both helpfully and hopefully.
‘We won’t get all these boxes in your tent, mate,’ says Frank. ‘Even if we could find it.’
The wide grounds in front of the house are edged with railings rusted with age and weather. Once upon a time, they would have been painted an elegant white, now they are bent brown rails running around the edge of an overgrown field. I try to imagine the field full of carriage horses, resting their soft muzzles over the top rail, keeping the grass neat and clipped with their slow snuffled chewing. It’s a million miles away from the reality. I don’t know what I was thinking of, coming here, how I thought this could possibly be the answer to our homelessness, me losing my job. And now we are here, we can’t even get in.
‘Well?’ says Frank, looking up at the window, two floors above us.
‘I don’t think you ought to.’ I don’t know what my alternative suggestion is. ‘What about Health and Safety?’ Years of school-teaching have left their mark on me.
‘Beauty of working for yourself,’ says Phil. ‘And no witnesses.’ He nods towards Frank, who starts to climb onto the wide green windowsill.
Leo spins round and round on the spot, his arms above his head. ‘Frank’s a superhero,’ he shouts. ‘Can I go up too?’
I can see Leo won’t even be able to heave himself up to the windowsill that Frank now stands on, body flat against the window, arms splayed like a tightrope walker, so at least that’s not one of my worries.
Frank reaches above him. There is a wisteria clinging to the front of the house, its twisted trunks long-dead and past flowering; twigs and wizened leaves drop down as Frank tries to get purchase over the window frame. The noise he makes as he heaves himself from the windowsill to the flat porch roof of the portico is loud in the silence of the drive. This really is the countryside; the absence of cars, people, sirens, all remarkable on the still air.
‘Go on!’ shouts Leo as Frank bicycles his legs for momentum, his top half lying flat on the portico.
‘You’re nearly there, lad,’ Phil says, and we both will Frank’s upper body to weigh more than his legs or he’s going to crash back down onto the drive in a way that he’d be lucky to survive in one piece.
Below, Frank’s white trainers waving in mid-air, the door opens. It doesn’t open wide, like someone is welcoming us with expansive gestures or enthusiasm. It opens slightly, with suspicion and unease.
‘Can I help you?’ The welcome isn’t gracious but I’m overwhelmed with relief that there’s someone here.
‘Miss Buchan?’
The sunshine is thrown onto her face in the gap of the doorway. Her eyes wrinkle up against it. Her hair is short and steel grey, her face unlined and powder soft. She is small, thin, and angular.
‘How nice to meet you properly,’ I say, recognising one of the moments when one must tell slight untruths.
‘How do you do, Mrs Lyons-Morris?’ She has the tone of someone who is being inconvenienced.
Above her, Frank’s legs have stopped flapping, his trainers are peaceful, side by side, to the left of her head. It is not a good start.
I’m sure Frank and Phil are hoping as hard as me that she hasn’t noticed the legs, or the man on the porch roof.
‘We dropped the Lyons,’ I remind her. ‘And this is Leo, Leo Morris.’
‘Hello, Leo,’ says Miss Buchan and steps out of the door-way. ‘You look just like your daddy.’
I try to put an exact age on her but it’s difficult: her clothes are tight and tweed, a short necklace of pearls sits neatly on her neck. She holds her slim hand out towards me, ready to shake my hand. She is somewhere between forty-five and seventy-five but then, so am I.
Her hand looks tiny in mine. My fingers wrap round hers and I feel like an oaf. I compensate by shaking her hand vigorou
sly and she looks at me as if she’d rather I let go.
‘You may call me Araminta,’ she says in a cold flat voice and nods her head to show that she means both of us. ‘I take care of the house and museum.’ She says that mainly to Leo.
‘I live here,’ shouts Leo. ‘And Frank. And Phil.’
As he says it, Frank lets go of the porch roof and half-slithers, half-falls into the drive next to Araminta.
‘We couldn’t get in,’ Phil and I say at the same time, leaving a gaping void of silence afterwards.
‘I lost the . . .’
‘We were unloading . . .’
We sound like children and both stop trying to explain.
‘Well, you’re here now,’ says Araminta, in a voice that shows how much that displeases her. ‘Shall I show you to the apartment?’
‘Are we going in my house?’ asks Leo, and Araminta breaks the straight line of her grimace for the first time.
‘Yes. This is your house. And it was your daddy’s house too. He lived here when he was a little boy.’
I open my mouth to argue, to say that, no, Richard never lived here. His grandparents lived here but he hated the place and seldom came near it, but something in her face makes me stop. There’s a sudden softness – directed at Leo, definitely, but more than that, beyond that. I wonder if she is old enough for it to be a memory of Richard.
I look at Leo standing by the door and imagine Richard on the same steps, his hair sticking up in the summer breeze, like Leo’s does. I picture a boy-Richard running through the paddock opposite, climbing the iron-railed fences, swinging up the huge oak tree that spreads its green branches wide over the field. And, if he did come here often, will he have left any of himself behind?
The Museum of Forgotten Memories Page 2
