The Museum of Forgotten Memories

by Anstey Harris

  The man has a sketchbook in his hand. ‘I was drawing the netsuke,’ he says.

  ‘May I?’ I put my hand out towards the paper and he turns it round to show me.

  The netsuke the man has chosen to draw is a tiny fox, his white-tipped tail waving skyward with vigour. It is perfect.

  ‘That’s so beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  And then a memory, the trace of someone else’s words. ‘Are you the artist who’s moved in to Pear Tree Cottage?’

  Chapter Ten

  Malcolm calls across the Japanese drawing room before the artist has time to answer me.

  ‘Cate, we’re all about to leave. My lot would love to say goodbye.’ He smiles broadly. ‘And thank you, of course.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say and make full eye contact with the artist for the first time. His eyes are a piercing blue, the colour of the sky outside this afternoon, of the sea when the very edges have frozen in a wild winter.

  ‘I’m Patch,’ he says to my retreating back, ‘Patch Samson.’

  I am blushing too much to turn back and respond. A part of me I thought had died struggles to the surface of my skin and my cheeks boil red with heat. I need to be outside.

  *

  I’m back by the ticket office, seeing Malcolm’s party to their coaches, when the alarm goes off.

  Araminta comes – almost running – into the foyer. Her face is pale.

  ‘Is that our flats? The upstairs?’ I instantly worry about our doors not locking, realising that our lack of privacy is so much worse than simply that: we are vulnerable.

  ‘No, I didn’t put that on. This is the museum floor.’

  ‘Can you tell where? Is there a panel?’

  She knows immediately what I mean. ‘It’s not that sophisticated. It’s only on the doors and some of the cases.’ She turns to go back towards the galleries. People are moving out onto the lawns now, convinced that this is a fire alarm. The mums with the buggies hurry past us.

  ‘Can you organise people here?’ she calls as she half-walks, half-runs, back towards Gallery One.

  ‘No.’ I follow her. ‘You can’t possibly go in there on your own.’

  She starts to object and then gives up. I imagine she is as frightened as I am.

  The animals are still, the glass intact. If they have seen anything untoward it has not bothered them and they are not going to share it with us.

  Araminta and I move on through the galleries, our ghostly reflections the only thing that is moving. The animals watch us with those round glass eyes, following our every movement, in every corner of the rooms.

  The alarm has been triggered in the library. An oak door underneath one of the huge mounted heads – the bison – has been pushed open. Whoever did this has moved round behind the desk, past the red rope cordons, past the sign that says ‘PRIVATE’ in upper case red letters. Whoever did this may well still be in the unlit room behind the doorway.

  ‘What’s in there?’ I ask Araminta. I hadn’t realised that there were doors behind the desks. When I glance round, I see three more closed doors, one on each wall.

  ‘Books? More objects from the collection that aren’t on display? I couldn’t know without checking the inventory. All these storerooms are packed with cases, floor to ceiling.’ She moves into the doorway of the tiny room and I have no choice but to stand behind her – just in case.

  ‘There’s no one here.’ She gives a slight shiver. We can both imagine what could have happened if there had been.

  The noise of the alarm shrieks round the library. We have been too frightened to hear it. It only comes back into focus now, now that we are breathing again.

  ‘We can only turn it off at the desk,’ says Araminta, and she closes the opened door behind her.

  *

  It is six o’clock before we’ve got all the visitors out and Leo back in. He is exhausted by his day but tanned and happy.

  ‘Shall we have a drink in the garden before you go and have a bath?’ I ask him.

  ‘A very good idea,’ he says. ‘And with Mrs Minta.’

  He is absolutely right: we need to capitalise on the truce while we can, embed the idea that Araminta can talk to me without scowling – even if it is only when we are hunting down intruders in our house. ‘Absolutely. I’ll get the drinks, you go and find Araminta.’

  ‘And crisps,’ Leo reminds me as he leaves the kitchen.

  I’ve put two wine glasses on a tray for Araminta and me, and a beer for Leo. He prefers drinking straight from the bottle. I couldn’t find a wine cooler so I’ve used a glass jug filled with cold water. The wine bottle is perched in it at an angle. The jug is bulbous and carved with a geometric pattern – I’m fairly certain it’s crystal but we’re supposed to use these elaborate and valuable heirlooms as everyday items. The water that comes out of the old kitchen taps is incredibly cold, already chilled: I try not to think about the lengths of lead piping that probably deliver it.

  I settle the tray on a picnic bench near the pond and sit down. It’s been a long day: we will all sleep well tonight. I run one foot against the other in order to kick off the pumps that I chose because they were so plain and, hopefully, formal.

  ‘You forgot the crisps.’ Leo is annoyed.

  I put my head in my hands. ‘I’m sorry.’ I move to get up and fetch them: I’m too tired for an argument.

  ‘Why don’t you get them, Leo?’ Araminta sits down opposite me.

  Without a word, Leo starts back across the lawn.

  ‘And then we can have a chat.’ Araminta waves her hand at her glass when I’ve only half-filled it. It makes me a bit more cautious with my own. ‘We need to talk about what happened today. I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your notice that we really don’t have much in the way of security.’

  ‘It’s a worry . . .’

  ‘And that the more people we have in, the worse a situation that becomes. I’ve checked the upstairs rooms – ours, and the other ones that are unlocked. I hope you don’t mind that I looked in yours. Just to be sure.’

  It had crossed my mind that someone could be hiding in our apartments. I was putting off checking them for as long as I could: everything of mine worth stealing is in boxes – even I couldn’t find it easily. ‘You should have waited for me: what if there had been someone up there?’

  The peacock is parading by the pond, Atalanta and Hippomenes continue their motionless glide towards us with hope on their faces and the sun on their golden hair. It’s hard to believe that anything bad could happen here.

  ‘We’re trapped between a rock and a hard place.’ Araminta takes a sip of her drink, her fingers are tiny against the glass and her knuckle bones stick out from her skin. She may be brave and spiky, but she is fragile.

  ‘If we don’t get visitors in, we close. If we do, something will – eventually – get stolen.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she says. ‘And there is no money to pay for a more sophisticated alarm system – or security guards. I think we can both agree that whoever opened the door was speculating about what they might find.’

  ‘Unless it was one of the toddlers.’

  She arches her eyebrow at me to show what she thinks of that idea. Leo returns with a bowl of crisps; the crumbs down his T-shirt explain why he took so long.

  ‘Are they nice, those crisps?’ I ask him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Let me check. I’m very hungry from digging.’ He takes the biggest crisp from the top of the bowl and makes a big show of holding it up. Translucent sunlight shines through it, every bit as gold as the two statues. ‘I think today was my best day ever,’ he says. ‘I love living here.’

  It is the impetus I need. ‘We have to carry on.’ The statues stare at me, willing me to say more, willing me to mean it. ‘Everyone in the village seems so happy to have the family back.’ I think about Richard before I say the next bit, but he does nothing to stop me. ‘To have the Lyons-Morris family here once more. Back where they belong.’
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  ‘And when you return to London, after the summer?’ Araminta is a step ahead of me. Her face is set in the grimace I’m more used to.

  I take a big swallow of my wine. The oak tree to our left and the crazy monkey puzzle zigzagging its way skyward nod their leaves in encouragement. ‘Maybe we won’t go back. Maybe we can put more work into attracting visitors all the time, not solely for special occasions. That way, we could afford to take on staff to help us.’

  ‘It had the potential to be a great day and we took a lot of money in tickets.’ She pauses and stares at me, clearly thinking her words through before she speaks. ‘I am willing to compromise.’ In the distance a cockerel crows, announcing the end of his working day. ‘We take one more try at a big day, an event. If that fails, we go back to how we were. For however long that lasts.’ She raises her glass to her lips. ‘I do want this to work, you know,’ she says and emphasises the word ‘want’ to make me believe her.

  It is a small step forward, but it’s something. We can make this work, I know we can. I can make it work for my own sake, for Leo: even – I am surprised to find I care – for Araminta.

  We fall into a companionable silence of sorts. Leo is humming and occasionally talking about his gardening. Araminta is as deep in thought as I am. I’m thinking about social media and avatars when I remember the artist from Pear Tree Cottage.

  ‘Have you met Patch Samson? He’s an artist.’

  ‘I have.’ Her face gives nothing away: I cannot tell if those vivid blue eyes left her blushing too or if she is judging me for asking questions about a handsome stranger. ‘But not in the capacity of artist. He’s here often – he brings his students to paint in the museum.’

  ‘He’s a teacher?’ There was something primal, wordless, in the way he and I looked at each other. An instant and real connection. Perhaps it was simply that – he is a teacher and that made him, somehow, familiar to me, somehow recognisable.

  ‘He took over the art group down at the community centre a couple of months ago. I did wonder if Leo might want to join. They’re a lovely group, all around his age.’

  Two things really please me: the thought that I have a reason to meet Patch Samson again – it makes my cheeks flush and I press my wine glass against them to cool my skin. More responsibly, I am immensely touched by the idea of Leo attending a class in the centre paid for by the grandfather he never met. It seems so very right.

  *

  I have three glasses of wine all in all. Two sociably with Araminta, and a third – more maudlin – on the lawn by myself when she’d gone to bed and Leo was in the bath.

  Now that I’m back upstairs, in the flat that’s not as interesting – or hopeful – as the rest of the day has been, things feel less perfect. I had forgotten, when I said that perhaps we’ll stay, that we have a piece of thick green fabric for a front door and that, however much things have softened with Araminta, we have to share a kitchen.

  From: Cate Morris

  To: Simon Henderson

  Subject: Where Was I?

  Mail: I know you can’t hear me up in the wilds, but I’m affirming my own positive thoughts by writing them down. One step forward, two steps back, but at least I’m not in the ‘same’ place. How’s that for spin?

  I used to write to Richard, after he’d died. Long emails and then send them to his address – and then open them myself because he was gone. I know you did it too because I saw them (why mention it now? Hashtag: BlameWine) but I didn’t open yours – it seemed wrong. They weren’t meant for me.

  I gave myself permission to believe that because the words turned into something intangible while they crossed the ether, maybe he could decipher them. I know it’s a myth, but it’s one that suited me in the first couple of years.

  I wish you were here. I wish he was here. That would make me glad I was here.

  xxx

  My anger towards Richard, stoked and fuelled by the wine, bubbles up – one of the moments where I wonder how he ever could have wanted to do this to us, to leave Leo and me responsible for each other, for everything.

  As ever, the second the anger rises, the guilt pulses in behind it. The two tussle for a while, jostle for superiority, but always – and rightly – it is the guilt that wins.

  I lie on my bed, tearful now that Leo has gone to bed and it is safe to be honest with myself. The top drawer of my bedside cabinet, the one I brought from home with all its contents intact is at my eye level. I know that I will find the photograph there, right at the bottom, buried under other – more honest – memories.

  We’d gone to the seaside for the day: Simon was staying with us for a few weeks to give me respite care for Richard, and his mum had come down for the day. We’d gone to a garish coastal town, one with arcades and air hockey, and fish and chips for Simon’s mum.

  We’re lined up on the concrete sea defence: Richard on the left. I tell myself you wouldn’t know, that you couldn’t see how ill he was at that point – but you could. Even the other people walking past would have had an idea that something was wrong. It’s in his tense muscles, his pursed worried mouth. It’s written across the furrows of his face. He is sitting next to Leo but he doesn’t have his arm round him. Instead, Richard sits awkwardly on both his hands. I know that was the only way he could keep from tugging at the skin around his nails, rubbing and pulling them until they were red and painful. Not one atom of him is at peace. He picked at the fish and chips, lining flakes of white cod up on his plate and refusing to eat anything that had touched the batter: he asked the waitress for a second plate that he used to pile the crisp orange batter on and tiny pools of oil leaked onto the white china.

  Leo in the picture is untroubled. By that stage, maintaining the illusion of a normal happy life for him was my main concern. That day he had eaten candy floss and doughnuts from a booth by the end of the pier. His grin in the photograph is wide and guileless, smeared all round with dust that has stuck to the leftover sugar. He is wearing a red sweater and a large round badge that says, ‘I am 11’.

  Simon is next to him. It is typical Simon – happy, open, ruggedly healthy. He had a year-round tan long before he moved to New Zealand. He is snuggled up close to Leo, leaning in to his shoulder and grinning to the camera.

  I am at the other end to Richard, bookending these two men who were the most important in his life. His son and his best friend: two of his three greatest achievements, he used to say.

  You can see the worry in my face too: it’s more than ten years ago but I look worn, exhausted – older than I do today.

  The present-day me involuntarily touches my hair, it probably needed a cut then even more than it does now. I was thinner then too, but not in a good way. In a way that says I was constantly worried about making sure my husband was eating, that my son was happy, in a way that evidences there was very little of me left for me.

  Between Simon and me – and you wouldn’t see if you didn’t know to look – his hand and mine are locked together, fingers knitted and thumbs wrapped under, his large palm over the back of my hand. You can just see the crimped edge of our blended hands squashed, almost out of sight, between my right thigh and his left leg.

  Our knuckles are white.

  Chapter Eleven

  I wake full of strange feelings: it takes a while to recognise optimism and hope. We have been strangers for too long.

  I make a list. It’s always been my first port of call: long after lists stopped helping, when having any kind of order was impossible, I still wrote them – little pieces of flotsam, wishes awash on a tide of real life, reduced in value to less than the paper they were written on.

  I write this, more positive, list in bed. The first item on the list is ‘Art Club’ and I am pretending to myself that it’s for Leo. In reality, it would be great to have a friend, a real person – nearby – who understands my life and its complications. Perhaps Patch could be that: I’m not sure I could cope with anything more than friendship, however comforting the i
dea might be. I long for someone to talk to properly, to unload onto.

  A brief search on my phone shows that there is an art session this morning and it’s open to drop-ins. The next item to be dealt with, although I’m too embarrassed and ashamed to write it down, is ‘what to wear’: I don’t want to look like Lady Lyons-Morris today with my string of fake pearls – nor do I want to look like I haven’t really unpacked or hung up any of my nice clothes, although that’s the truth.

  Leo is next door, wandering about: trying to convince him that Art Club is a better idea than his ‘best day ever’ is going to be a big job. There’s always something, I think, and the self-pity I’m more used to climbs back into bed with me.

  I toss the notepad back down on the bed, the pen after it. The pen slips sideways off my bent knees and settles in a dip of the duvet cover. Black ink pools through the fabric like a flower blossoming. ‘Oh, fuck it,’ I say and put the pen back on the bedside table.

  *

  In the end, Leo plays right into my hands.

  ‘I’m a bit tired and my neck aches.’ He rubs the back of his neck and pulls a face far more twisted than required. ‘I did a lot of work yesterday. I might take today off.’ He stretches out his arms in a pretend yawn, perfect white teeth underneath rosebud lips.

  ‘Oh, I was going to suggest we did something else today anyway. How do you fancy a painting club?’

  He picks up his favourite dog-tooth-check trilby and puts it on his head: he’s going out. And that’s it: it doesn’t eventake any cajoling or negotiating on my part.

  *

  When we get to the centre, the first thing we see is a tiny brass plaque on the wall commemorating the gift of the centre to the village. I’m explaining that to Leo when Patch comes out through the main door.