“No, but you see, they’re not—”
“Your gran.” She smiled suddenly, a distant memory firing. “Your gran used to wear this type.” And the look she gave me then was so unguarded, so unexpectedly pleased, that it was all I could do not to seize the lid from the box and declare myself the ghastly traitor that I was. “Did you know that, Edie? Is that why you bought them? It’s a wonder you could still find the old—”
“They’re not slippers, Mum. Open the box; please, just open it.”
“Edie?” An uncertain smile as she sat in the nearest chair and pulled the box towards her. She offered me a last wavering glance before turning her attention to the lid, lifting it and frowning at the pile of discolored envelopes within.
My blood ran hot and thin, like gasoline beneath my skin, as I watched the emotions flit across her face. Confusion, suspicion, then the intake of breath heralding recognition. Later, as I ran the memory over in my mind, I could pinpoint the precise instant at which the scrawled handwriting on the top envelope metamorphosed into a lived experience. I saw her face change, her features adopting, once more, those of the almost-thirteen-year-old girl who’d written the first letter to her parents, telling them about the castle in which she’d found herself; she was there again, caught in the original moment of composition.
Mum’s fingers rested on her lips, her cheek, then hovered above the soft indentation at the base of her throat, until finally, after what seemed an age, she reached tentatively into the box, withdrew the pile of envelopes, and sat holding them in both hands. Hands that were shaking. She spoke without meeting my eyes. “Where did you …?”
“Rita.”
She released a slow sigh, nodded as if she’d been given the answer to something she should have guessed. “How did she come by them? Did she say?”
“They were with Gran’s things, after she died.”
A noise that might have been the start of a laugh, wistful, surprised, a little bit sad. “I can’t believe she kept them.”
“You wrote them,” I said softly. “Of course she kept them.”
Mum was shaking her head. “But it wasn’t like that … my mother and I, we weren’t like that.”
I thought ofThe Book of Magical Wet Animals. My mother and I weren’t like that either, or so I’d thought. “I suppose that’s what parents do.”
Mum fumbled envelopes from the pile, fanning them out in her hands. “Things from the past,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Things I’d worked so hard to put behind me.” Her fingers lightly traced the drift of envelopes. “Now it seems no matter where I turn …”
My heart had begun to race at the promise of revelation. “Why do you want to forget the past, Mum?”
But she didn’t answer, not right then. The photograph, smaller than the letters, had fallen loose from the pile, just as it had the night before, slipping onto the table. She inhaled, before lifting it higher, rubbing her thumb across its surface; the expression on her face was vulnerable, pained. “Such a long time ago, yet sometimes …”
She seemed to remember then that I was there. Made a show of tucking the photograph back among the letters, casually, as if it meant little to her. She looked directly at me. “Your gran and I … it was never easy. We were very different people, we always had been, but my evacuation brought certain things to the fore. We fought and she never forgave me.”
“Because you wanted to transfer to grammar school?”
Everything seemed to freeze then; even the natural circulations in the air stopped their swirling.
Mum looked as if she’d been struck. She spoke quietly, a quaver in her voice: “You read them? You read my letters?”
I swallowed, nodded jerkily.
“How could you, Edith? These are private.”
All my earlier justifications dissolved like flecks of tissue in the rain. Shame made my eyes water so that everything seemed bleached, including Mum’s face. Color had dissolved from her skin, leaving only a splatter of small freckles across her nose so that she looked like her thirteen-year-old self. “I just … I wanted to know.”
“It’s none of yourbusinessto know,” Mum hissed. “It’s got nothing to do with you.” She seized the box, clutched it tightly to her chest, and after a moment’s indecision hurried towards the door.
“But it does,” I said to myself, then louder, my voice trembling, “you lied to me.”
A stumble in her step—
“About Juniper’s letter, about Milderhurst, about everything; wedidgo back—”
The slightest hesitation in the doorway, but she didn’t turn and she didn’t stop.
“—Irememberit.”
And I was alone again, surrounded by that peculiar glassy silence that follows when something fragile has been broken. At the top of the stairs a door slammed shut.
