The Scrapbook (24 page)

‘I thought you'd left me. I'm so sorry, mum, I didn't mean it.'

She can't see me, for a moment, though her eyes are on me. We've been here before, she and I, and all I can do is wait for her to re-focus, to come back from the past and frame me once more within the boundaries of her world. There were times when I found it irritating but right now I'm terrified. It's all I can do not to raise a hand to my mouth and bite, to check that I'm actually here and I do exist.

Then her eyelids flicker and I can see myself duplicated in her irises, outlined in miniature. I feel such relief. She shifts slightly to free herself from my weight and a smile perches high on her cheekbones. Her hand strokes the many robins and snowmen splashed over the book cover, sweeping in gentle circles as if she's stroking the skin of a loved one and is enraptured by the feel of their flesh against hers.

‘I'd forgotten. Fern, I'd forgotten it. But it's like he's here with me again, right now.'

She raises the scrapbook and turns a couple of pages then holds it out to me, just quickly, before angling it jealously away. The silver chain dangles from its safety pin, severing the words she's written. I remember that day, going fishing with them both. I remember the flash of light in my net.

She turns another page. A dried fern leaf. I lean closer to read what she's written about me but she pulls back, out of reach, and turns the pages until they're blank. Then she closes the book and opens it again, starting at the beginning. Her lips twitch as she reads. I sit beside her and wait until she's finished. She's still smiling when she slides a finger between the first pages ready to return to the start once more. I can see a scrap of dark fabric but she lays the book across her chest then and resumes the rhythmic stroking. She can't bear to not be touching it.

‘I'd forgotten the feeling of how it felt, being with him. Loving him. Not even a photograph managed to bring that fully to life. But this…' She bends her head and sniffs at one of the snowmen. ‘This is us. This is him. My memories. When I read these, Fern, I can actually smell him. He's so here
I can actually see the dent his body's making on the mattress as he sits beside me.'

I find myself looking at the area she's waving her hand over, straining to see what she's seeing. ‘But if it means that much to you, why did you leave it in the oak? You could have got it out at anytime.'

She laughs and clutches the book closer to her throat. ‘Because I got scared. I waited for so long and then I believed he'd never come back while I contented myself with this pale copy of what we had. I couldn't bear to destroy it so I dropped it into the tree. But you freed him for me, you gave him back to me, and he hasn't changed a bit, Fern. He's still him.'

I'm dying to take the book from her and read it through for myself but there's no way she'd let me. It's hers and just hers. The way my father was hers and just hers. She'll never share him.

I can smile, though, at her joy. ‘But he has to have changed, mum, over the years.'

She shakes her head and brings her fist up to her temple. ‘Not in here he hasn't. He's just the same.'

There's nothing more to say. Before I leave the room she's opened the scrapbook again and I don't think she even knows I've gone. When I look back her face has loosened into a gasp as the words she's written unravel across her memory. I'll never know what's in there, but I can guess and if I want to I can make it up. Imagine their love affair and recreate it for myself. The first glimpse through to the last kiss, and every scene between. That way I'll have a piece of him too.

Tommy taps on the window when I'm peeling potatoes for dinner and I shriek and nearly chop the end of my thumb off. I'd been listening out for a car in the lane but he must have walked the couple of miles to get here. I wave him round to the door but he stays where he is and waves back.
Come out here.

‘You scared me.' I hug him and peer over his shoulder to the gate. It's nearly entirely night now.

‘I'm sorry, love, but I wanted to talk to you alone. Where's your young man?'

I shrug. ‘He just popped out. He'll be back soon, and mum's upstairs.'

‘I haven't spotted you at the viewing point for the last couple of days.' Tommy smiles at me. ‘I was hoping I'd see you.'

‘Oh, I've stopped driving up there now. Once you've seen a few ferries going in and out you've seen them all.' I laugh and shiver. ‘Won't you come in? I'm making dinner. Mum should be down soon, it's way past gin o'clock.'

He narrows his eyes at me. ‘You really don't want to know what I've got to say, do you? So you've read the letter your granny sent her sister?'

I nod and focus on his face. No more avoidance. ‘Yes. And you knew. She told you what she was going to do, didn't she?'

Tommy draws his breath in sharply and looks at the ground. ‘You must hate me. I'm sorry, love. I won't make excuses. Just believe I'm sorry. But your mum, does she know?'

He rubs at his arms and hunches into himself as he waits for the answer. Such fear for her, and such love. How could I hate him?

‘No, she doesn't know. She doesn't need to.' I watch him sag with relief and when he raises his head the corrugations around his eyes have smoothed out. He grasps at me.

‘Oh, that's a weight off, love. The last thing I'd have wanted was to hurt her. You know she didn't want me involved, your granny. She didn't tell me much but I knew she was planning something, something magical, to get rid of him. I didn't pay much mind but then your dad just stopped coming round so I asked her about it. I felt a bit silly if I'm honest, but she told me she'd done a spell and her sister would take care of things if it were needed.' He's babbling now. ‘And then you said you were going to visit her and I started worrying that she'd let something slip or just outright tell you. And the thought of your mum finding something like that out, and of knowing that I'd known, well, it didn't bear thinking about.'

I take the hand that's squeezing my arm and hold it for a moment. ‘I don't want to hear any more. In order to keep on loving Granny Ivy and you, I need to not know any more of what she did. Okay? Now, come inside and have a drink. Please.'

He allows himself to be led around the house and into the warmth of the kitchen. I call to mum and she shouts an answer. I can hear her banging around up in her room. No doubt hunting down another hiding place for her scrapbook. Maybe I should give her a list of all the places not to hide it if she doesn't want it to be found.

‘What are you going to do now?' Tommy asks me as he puts the kettle on. ‘About finding out what happened to him? You don't really believe all that about your granny making him disappear, do you?'

I return to the sink and the potatoes. From here I can keep an eye on the lane. ‘I don't know what I'm going to do. Probably nothing. I don't think mum really wants to know, not deep down, and maybe it's better that I don't. He left us. I should leave it at that.'

The trees that line the lane are suddenly bleached and bright, bony against the black sky. I tense as I wait to see if this car will stop. Behind me, Tommy fidgets with his glass.

‘But surely you want to know? What if he's still alive?'

A car glides to a halt just past the gate. He's back.

I look at Tommy. ‘He left us. He went back to his wife. That's it. There's nothing else to find out.' I walk out into the hall so that I can meet Rick at the door.

There are streaks of dried tears across his cheekbones but he smiles when he sees me, and nods. His travel bag is slung over his shoulder. As I watch him walk up the stairs to put it in my room and hear him speak to mum as he passes her on the landing, I stand in the gloom of the hallway and finally let myself think of her. The wife. The wronged woman. I gave him a choice, one that my mother never gave my father, and he chose me. I want to meet her and tell her I'm sorry but I know that'll never happen. You don't get to be sorry in situations like these.

Mum grins at me when she comes downstairs, mouth wide and greasy and maroon. I'm sure that's the same lipstick she's had since I was a girl and it hasn't aged well. I think about pointing that out, maybe giving her a tissue for the excess that has clumped between her front teeth, but she winks and points at the ceiling, slaps at my arm as if I've achieved something clever, and I just smile back and nod. There's something grotesque about her delight and I hope she can wipe the grin off before Rick comes back down.

In the brighter light of the kitchen I see that she's wearing the silver chain I caught in my net so many years ago. Its tarnish has stained her throat brown. I try not to stare. She really doesn't want me to look for my dad, then. If she did, or if she believed there was a chance he'd come back, she wouldn't even think of publicising this example of her deceit. The irony of the situation makes me bitter suddenly. All these years, not thinking about him, never wanting to see him again, and now I do want it, so much, and it's too late. Mum's content with her memories. He'll never age for her now, and he'll never stop loving her.

Tommy finishes his drink and refuses another. He kisses mum gently on the forehead and I walk with him to the front door.

‘He did love you, your dad,' he says to me. ‘The times I saw him with you, he was lit up with it. I followed him back to the dock once, when you were only a toddler, and I gave him a shove or two. Threatened him with all sorts if he came back. I still hoped, then, that Iris might give me a chance, especially with a baby to think about. He was scared, I could tell, but he was back a couple of weeks later. I never spoke to him after that. There was nothing more to say. I don't know why he left in the end, or where he went, but it won't have been because he didn't love either of you enough.'

His kindness makes me long to press my cheek into his chest and cry for a while. He doesn't understand that if I want to believe dad wouldn't have left us willingly, then I have to believe Granny Ivy's magic disposed of him in some awful way, and I don't want to believe that. I don't ever want to think of that again. But there is another option; that he loved us all and he would have carried on with his complicated juggling of wife, lover and child for as long as he could, only something happened to him. A heart attack, or a car accident. Something that wasn't the result of a lack of love or my granny's malevolence. If I choose to look for him then I'll have to be prepared to find that out, and then live with it. I'm not sure that I am prepared. He loved us. He left us. Maybe that can be enough.

When I go back in Rick's pouring mum a gin and looking strained. I kiss him and sit down at the table. Mum's grinning like a circus clown, lipstick smeared all around her mouth. I frown at her and wiggle a finger over my own face but she doesn't seem to understand.

‘Champagne,' she announces. ‘There's a bottle in the cupboard. I was saving it for something else but I think we should open it tonight. We've got something to celebrate.'

Both Rick and I wince. I try to catch his eye, to mouth an apology, but he keeps his back turned as he cuts a lemon into slices. I kick out at mum under the table and shake my head but she stands up bossily and points at the broom cupboard in the corner of the room. ‘It's in there, Rick, could you get it out please? It's on the floor behind the bread-maker.' She shoots me a triumphant glance. She's better at hiding things than I gave her credit for.

As Rick eases the cork out of the bottle with a pained look, I know I have to rescue him from this before mum's lack of tact sends him running for his car. ‘So, mum, you and Tommy,' I say, leaning towards her with my chin propped on my palms. ‘Was it a regular thing or just the once?'

She reddens immediately and the lipstick disappears against the backdrop of her skin. ‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘Of course you do,' I tell her. ‘The other night, when Tommy was here, you both let it slip that you'd enjoyed some… intimacy. Something more than friendship. I was just wondering whether it was a regular thing. All those years, when I was away and you had the house to yourself.' I raise my eyebrows at her suggestively. ‘Because if you want me and Rick to go out tonight and give you some space…?'

I let the rest of the sentence hang in the air between us and watch it thud down onto the table. Mum, puce now and outraged, stands up. ‘What a disgusting thing to say. There was never. It was only the once and it was his fault for bringing the wine over. If you're going to keep going on about it then I'll eat my dinner in the living room.' She turns and rushes out.

I stand up and take the bottle of champagne from Rick. ‘It's okay, you don't need to open it.' I put my arms around him and hug him to me. Our sinful love.

‘If our daughter falls in love with a married man then I'll kill her,' I say. ‘It stops here. With me.' I nuzzle his neck and we sway together for a moment until mum calls out for her gin.

A Page From A
Calendar (showing two months)

Nine weeks and three days. The longest you'd ever been away from me. Nine weeks and three days. When I heard your car in the lane I didn't even get up from my bed. It couldn't be you; you couldn't be back. In my imagination you'd died over and over. Burnt to ashes in a house fire. Broken apart in the wreckage of your car. Slithered overboard on the ferry. I knew exactly what your face looked like as you slipped silently into the sea with out-flung arms.