The Last Kiss Goodbye (2 page)

Chapter One

London, present day

Abby Gordon looked down at the curled sepia map spread out on the oak table in front of her and sighed
.
I mean, who cares where Samarkand is anyway? she thought rebelliously. She had a sudden urge to scrunch the map up into a ball and toss it into the incinerator. She imagined the fire catching, watching as it glowed and burnt. Shaking her head she looked around the room, wondering if anyone had noticed that she was blushing. No, only nice Mr Bramley, an elderly academic bent over his research on the other side of the glass door.

Mr Bramley certainly cared very deeply for this map. Mr Bramley would probably jump into the incinerator to save it.

Get a grip, Abby, she told herself, imagining poor Mr Bramley on fire.

There had been a time, not so long ago, when she had loved her job as an archivist at the Royal Cartography Institute. Okay, so it wasn’t the Tate or the Courtauld Institute. She didn’t spend her days cataloguing priceless paintings like some of her friends from her art history degree course were doing. She wasn’t working for a hip gallery or a prestigious auction house, or acting as assistant to some famous photographer. But the RCI’s archive was spoken of in hushed tones by map nerds and geography enthusiasts around the world. Abby wasn’t one of them herself, but she couldn’t help delighting at the treasures she found among the clutter. There were the maps, of course, thousands of them, all kept in climate-controlled (which meant chilly if you hadn’t worn tights) walk-in cupboards. There were atlases, some common, some very rare and valuable, including one once owned by Marie Antoinette, a heavy leather-bound tome that no one – not even her boss Stephen – was allowed to touch. And there were the artefacts: an old boot, an oxygen tank, a tarnished brass compass, most of which were stuffed randomly into the cardboard boxes next to Abby’s desk. On the face of it they were just bits and bobs from long-forgotten expeditions. But every one of them had a story behind it – Captain Scott’s compass, Stanley’s pith helmet, an ice pick that had gone on the first ascent attempt of Everest.

But most surprisingly, for an organisation dedicated to maps, the bulk of the collection was photographs. Hundreds of thousands of negatives and slides, collected from every expedition since the invention of the camera. The trouble was, most of them had never left their boxes, and that was the reason Abby had been recruited eighteen months earlier: to catalogue them and, hopefully, bring them out into the light. It seemed like a never-ending task.

Taking a deep breath, she rolled up the map and slid it carefully into its tube, pleased that she had struck off at least one thing on that day’s to-do list.

Russian Steppes, printed and hand-coloured c. 1789, Morgan Johnson.
Abby knew it was worth thousands of pounds, if it ever made it to auction. Not that it would. It was stuck here in the dusty basement of the Royal Cartography Institute, shoved on a shelf, waiting patiently for someone to look at it, to care about it.

Well, she knew how that felt.

The phone rang.

‘Hello, Archive,’ said Abby in her best telephone voice. ‘Hello?’

There was heavy breathing, muffled sounds of chatter and laughter in the background. She knew instinctively it was her boss reporting in from a long lunch.

‘Abigail, it’s Stephen. Can you hear me?’

Abby managed a smile. Stephen Carter, director of the archives at the RCI, was hopeless on the phone. He always behaved as if he were a Victorian gentleman and this was his first time using one of the new-fangled machines.

‘Everything all right back there?’

Abby looked up at the teetering pile of boxes.

‘Nothing I can’t handle.’

‘Good, good,’ he gushed. ‘Now I just wanted to let you know I’m not sure I’ll be back this afternoon; you know how these meetings go.’

She did indeed. Stephen was slurring his words a little.

‘Good news, though,’ he continued. ‘Christine has some exciting information about the exhibition. I can’t wait to tell you.’

Today was Stephen’s monthly lunch date with Christine Vey, director of the collections, a pompous woman who had zero interest in the RCI but a lot of interest in furthering her career. Christine’s plans always made Abby uncomfortable; they were never good news for the people who worked at the Institute.

‘Anything I should know about?’ she asked.

‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow,’ said Stephen. ‘In fact we should have a debrief on where we are up to. Christine wants a full written update. She’s really gone out on a limb for us agreeing to this exhibition, so there’s no letting her down. Are we understood?’

‘Of course,’ Abby muttered, quickly typing out an email, a group message to Anna, Ginny and Suze, her three best friends, checking that they were still on for drinks that night.

‘First thing tomorrow we’ll run through the final image selection, and then you can walk the slides and negatives over to the lab,’ continued Stephen, his words tumbling out of his mouth as he hurried to finish the call.

‘Now, I must fly. Oh, and could you prepare the 1789 Johnson for Mr Bramley? You know how particular he is.’

‘Already done,’ she said as Suze pinged an email straight back.

See you at the bar. So glad you are feeling up to this.

‘Excellent, you are a treasure.’

And then he was gone.

Abby put the phone back in its cradle and glanced at her watch. It was not even 4.30. Ages until she could justify leaving, even if Stephen wasn’t due back in the office.

Besides, there was the debrief to prepare for. Stephen Carter was not a bad boss, but he was a stickler for detail, a sucker for pleasing the powers-that-be, and as she was technically only a temporary member of staff – thanks to her rolling contract – she knew she would be the scapegoat for any archive mishaps, failures or inconsistencies.

Now that she was on her own, now she was supporting herself, with no safety net of family or lover, she didn’t like to think of the consequences if anything happened to her job.

She felt herself getting teary, but blinked back the emotion as she made her way into the photography room: long rows of battleship-grey metal shelves, each one holding dozens of filing boxes filled with negatives, slides and prints.

She moved down the rows, running her fingers over the boxes. This was actually the part of her job Abby loved the most. Maps she couldn’t get too passionate about; how could anyone get worked up about a badly drawn picture of Lancashire? But with the photographs, it was different. There was something magical about them. They were intimate records of a special time before the world was really known, taken by the few people who dared to go out there into the wilds. She sat down on an office chair and pulled down a box. Broadly, her job was to catalogue the collection, writing up what was in each box: expedition, year, part of the world, names and achievements, that sort of thing, so they could all be logged on to her computer and cross-referenced.

But she also had another task: she had to make these ghosts pay. That, really, was the reason why she had been hired: she had been brought on board to curate exhibitions, to bring these long-neglected slides to the attention of the public.

Their first exhibition, to celebrate the Institute’s bicentenary, was to be held in three weeks’ time, and Abby wasn’t entirely sure they were ready. Selecting the images to display had been easy. The title of the show was ‘Great British Explorers’, and there had been plenty of spectacular expeditions to choose from: ascents of Everest and K2, trips to the Poles, even Livingstone going up the Nile. But there was still something missing, something that left a hole at the centre of the exhibition, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, and she was hoping that she would know it when she saw it.

Taking a deep breath, she pulled out a narrow box and opened it. Inside was a selection of slides. She took the first one and held it up to the light. A group of small figures, dwarfed by the snowy peaks behind them. She held up the next: a mid-shot of a team of porters, grinning at the unseen cameraman. She looked at the side of the box; it was labelled
Mortimer Expedition, Nepal, 1948
. She rolled her chair over to the light box, flicking it on and using a loupe – a sort of glorified magnifying glass that allowed you to see the image as if it had been printed full size.

The stark monochrome image of the jagged Himalayan peaks was striking, but it just wasn’t different enough to the dozens of other stunning images she had of snowy hinterlands. And that was the problem – the exhibition was looking very snowy, very hilly, very white. Very one-note.

She puffed out her cheeks, wishing she was allowed to bring a cup of tea into the photograph room. But that was forbidden in the confined, claustrophobic space that reminded Abby of one of those old submarine movies.

Minus the well-toned sailors, she thought grimly.

For a moment she regretted working in such a dark and isolated environment. Her friends had certainly thought she was mad when she had given up a full-time job at the V&A. But they hadn’t known her true reasons for leaving. Hadn’t known why she had swapped it for a freelance position at the RCI.

Abby and Nick Gordon had kept their struggle to have a baby very private. Even though they had been the first couple in their friendship circle to get married, no one asked them when they were going to hear the patter of tiny feet. They were a thirty-something couple living in London, having fun and throwing themselves into their careers. Besides, it was something of a taboo subject. An intimate issue. If you suspected a friend of having fertility problems, you certainly didn’t ask. Not unless they wanted to share it with you.

Abby and Nick had been warned how difficult IVF was going to be. But she hadn’t expected it to be so physically and emotionally demanding. She’d given up her job and taken a flexible position at the Institute. But still there was no baby. And then there was no husband.

She pulled down another box, black-and-white prints this time.
Peru, Amazon
, said the label,
1961
.

She focused hard, trying to forget about the images of Nick that popped into her head at random.

Sitting down, she took the photographs out of the box, balancing them on her thighs as she leafed carefully through them.

The first was of a man tending to some mules, a wide-angle of a long valley, lush with rainforest. The second was a beautiful close-up of a hummingbird, the third a gaggle of porters carrying huge baskets, their faces worn and weathered by the sun.

At least it’s not snow, she thought, sensing that she might find something of use in here.

She carried on flicking through the images until one photograph forced her to stop in her tracks. A picture of a man and a woman inches apart. His hand was on her cheek, her palm over his, in what looked like a tender goodbye. Abby put her own hand to her mouth, her breath frozen in her throat. It was beautiful, moving, and yet she couldn’t really say why. It wasn’t such an unusual scene, the sort of thing you saw every day at stations and airports.

But this was different; there was tension, heartache here. The woman looked distraught. But why? Who was this man? And who was his lover?

She flipped the picture over. The label on the back read:
Blake Expedition, Peru, August 1961
.

She could tell from the other photographs that he was going into the jungle. Was she begging him not to? And had he still gone anyway? She wondered how old these two lovers would be today, whether they were still alive and if they were still together.

She looked back at the picture. God, it was good. And she just knew it would be perfect for the exhibition. She had already collected enough of those jaw-dropping high-impact shots – tiny figures hacking their way up a rock face or icicle-festooned ships stuck in ice floes – but this? This was different. This image had emotion, a sense that there was more to exploration than simply getting up and going. It rooted the heroic act in the real world, made you think: What if I was going? How would I feel? And how would I feel if I was being left behind? It was a photograph that spoke quite clearly of the power of love and the fear of loss.

She didn’t realise she was crying until a fat tear splatted on to the light box.

You can’t go dripping all over the priceless artefacts, she scolded herself, running out of the photograph room to find a tissue.

‘Abigail? Are you quite all right?’

She turned to see Mr Bramley staring up at her. Christopher Bramley was one of their regular members; he often came down to the archive for support material for his research. White-haired and bent, he rarely spoke except to request some document or map.

‘Yes, fine, thanks,’ said Abby quickly, rubbing her damp eyes.

The old man raised his eyebrows. ‘I do hope so,’ he said kindly.

She wondered how much he knew about her life. Whether he had heard.

‘Here you go. The maps you were after,’ she said more brightly.

‘I think I’m your last customer of the day. The Institute is rather empty out there,’ he smiled, rummaging around in his pocket, pulling out a tissue and handing it to her. ‘I’m sure Mr Carter won’t mind if you lock up early and go home.’

She nodded, deciding that was just what she would do, and returned to the photograph room to finish up.

She slipped the Blake print into a cardboard envelope, resolving to ask Stephen about it tomorrow. After all, he had worked in the collection for over ten years and had an encyclopedic knowledge of every explorer and map-maker in the last three hundred.

She flipped off the lights, checked that everything was locked and pulled on her jacket.

‘See you tomorrow, Mr Bramley?’ she said, swinging her bag over her shoulder as she walked through the research room.

‘Oh, I shouldn’t wonder,’ replied the old man. ‘Off out?’