Not that she’d admit it, and certainly not to Margot, but there was a small part of Elodie that looked forward to Alastair’s weeks in New York. She missed him, of course, but it was restful in some way knowing that for six whole nights she could stay at her own place, in her own bed, with her own books and her favourite teacup, without having to negotiate and explain herself.
It was true what he said: her flat was tiny and there was that old chip-grease smell in the stairwell, whereas his was large, with two bathrooms, and always enough hot water, and never any need to listen to the neighbour’s television through the whisper-thin floors. But Elodie was fond of her little flat. Yes, there was a trick to getting the kitchen sink to drain properly and the shower only ever managed a half-flow when the washing machine was running a cycle, but it felt like the sort of place where real human lives could be and had been led. There was history in its natty old cupboards and creaking floorboards, the loo that was reached only by climbing three carpeted stairs.
Alastair seemed to consider it endearing that she found comfort in such diminished surrounds. ‘You should be staying at my place when I’m away,’ he always said, his place being a sleek apartment in Canary Wharf. ‘You don’t need to go back to your lair.’
‘I’m happy here.’
‘Here? Really?’ They’d had a variation on the same conversation at least fifteen times and he always reserved his most sceptical glance for deployment at this point, its target invariably the corner in which Elodie had arranged her dad’s old velvet armchair beneath a fairy-lighted shelf of treasures: the painting Mrs Berry had presented to her when she turned thirty, the charm box Tip gave her after her mother died, a framed strip of funfair photos taken with Pippa when they were both thirteen.
Alastair favoured mid-century Danish design and believed that if an item couldn’t be purchased from the Conran Shop, it had no business being on display at all. Elodie’s flat was ‘homely’, he was willing to concede, but only before adding, ‘Of course you’ll have to give it up when we’re married – we can’t very well put the crib in the bathroom.’
Obviously, it was churlish to feel anything other than excited at the prospect of living in such a grand, glossy place, but Elodie just wasn’t a very grand, glossy person, and she was terrible with change. ‘Little wonder’ – this was the psychologist she’d seen for a time when she first went up to Oxford. ‘You lost your mother. It’s one of the most significant and frightening changes that a child can experience.’ Such loss, Elodie was reliably informed by Dr Judith Davies (‘Call me Jude’) after three months of weekly sessions in the warm front room of her Edwardian house, couldn’t help but embed itself within a person’s psyche.
‘You mean it’s going to affect my every life decision?’ Elodie had asked.
‘I do.’
‘Forever?’
‘Most likely.’
She had stopped seeing Dr Davies (‘It’s Jude’) soon after that. There hadn’t seemed much point, though she had missed the pot of citrus mint tea that appeared on the scuffed wooden table at the start of each session.
The doctor had been right: Elodie had got no better with change. Picturing other people in her flat, hanging their pictures on the hooks she’d hammered into the wall, arranging their teacups on the sill where she grew her herbs, enjoying the view from her window, gave Elodie the same dread feeling she’d experienced sometimes on holiday when she woke in an unfamiliar room utterly lost because none of her touchstones were there.
She hadn’t had the heart to break the news about the move to her landlady yet. Mrs Berry was eighty-four years old and had grown up in the house in Barnes, when it was still a family home and not three and a half flats above a fish-and-chip shop. She lived, now, in the garden flat behind the shop. ‘This used to be my mother’s morning room,’ she liked to reminisce after a glass or two of her favourite sherry. ‘Such a lady she was, such a fine lady. Oh, not in the aristocratic sense, I don’t mean that, it was just her nature.’ Mrs Berry’s eyes took on a particular shine when she started to slip into the past and she became less careful with her cards. ‘What are trumps?’ she’d ask at the start of each round. ‘Spades? Or was it Curlies?’
Elodie was going to have to cancel the game they’d pencilled in for that evening. She’d promised Penelope a list of recordings and a selection of clips by Monday. Now she was on a roll, she couldn’t let anything get in the way of ticking items off her list.
She shut down the computer and capped her pen, lining it up against the top of the jotting pad. The desk was clear except for the satchel, the sketchbook and the framed photograph. The first two could be re-boxed and stored; the last faced another weekend amidst the jumble of office supplies within the lost box.
Before tucking the photograph away, Elodie took a picture with her phone, just as Pippa had done. She would need it if she were to give more thought to her dress. It wouldn’t hurt to look at it beside the veil, either.
After a moment’s hesitation, she took a photo of the house in the sketchbook, too. Not because she was allowing herself any longer to entertain the notion that it was somehow, magically, the house from her mother’s fairy tale. She took the photo simply because she liked the sketch. It was beautiful, and it made her feel things: a connection to her mother and a tethering to the unbroken part of her childhood.
And then Elodie slipped the satchel and sketchbook into a new archive box, affixed the label she’d printed off, and filed them in the storeroom on her way out of the door and into the busy London street.
III
Mrs Mack used to say that a needy man’s budget was full of schemes. She’d say that sort of thing whenever she wanted one of us to try a new scam, we kids that lived like rats in the runners within the set of small rooms above the bird shop on Little White Lion Street.
I’ve been thinking about Mrs Mack lately. And Martin and Lily and the Captain. And even Pale Joe, who was the first person I ever truly loved. (The second if you include my father, which I don’t always.)
Mrs Mack was kind enough in her way. It was a way that included plenty of beatings for those that got on her wrong side and a tongue so sharp it lashed, but she was fairer than most. In her way. She was good to me; she took me in when I was desperate; I believe she even loved me. I betrayed her in the end, but only when I had to.
It is different on this side. Human beings are curators. Each polishes his or her own favoured memories, arranging them in order to create a narrative that pleases. Some events are repaired and buffed for display; others are deemed unworthy and cast aside, shelved below ground in the overflowing storeroom of the mind. There, with any luck, they are promptly forgotten. The process is not dishonest: it is the only way that people can live with themselves and the weight of their experiences.
But it is different over here.
I remember everything, memories forming different pictures depending on the order in which they fall.
Time passes differently when I’m alone in the house; I have no way of marking the years. I am aware that the sun continues to rise and set and the moon to take its place, but I no longer feel its passage. Past, present and future are meaningless; I am outside time. Here and there, and there and here, at once.