Prologue
Sometimes a heartbeat is all the time it takes to reach a decision.
It may not even feel like a considered choice. Just the veering away from the prospect of more misery – a final spur to movement. The room remains unmoved. A silent witness. But loyal in its way to the woman who has just left it. The chair pushed out from the table tells no tales. The plate of half-eaten roll and cheddar (extra mature) with leftover Christmas pickle (eight months old, but still going strong) lies in mute defiance.
The man calls her name, and without pausing to be invited in, pushes open the door that leads from the hall into the kitchen. And why would he pause? He has already let himself in the front door without asking.
He huffs and puffs his way around the kitchen, opening the fridge, flicking through the diary left open on the table.
The diary doesn’t give her away either. Its record of parish meetings, choir practice and a planned visit to a local garden with her curate; a testament to a seemingly blameless life. Maybe there is something in the handwriting? A neatly formed hand, precise and clear, apart from a kink in the S’s that look as if they would like to escape from the regularity of the line.
Opposite him, the back door to the garden (which always requires a doorstop) for once stands half open, half closed. Stilled, as if in anticipation, like the rest of the room.
Then, very slowly, it swings on its hinges and quietly clicks shut.
Ninety miles away, off an alleyway in North London, another door is pushed open. A different woman, a different life. The mail piled up in the entrance slithers aside and the broken bell clinks its tinny welcome. First across the threshold is a solitary leaf. A twist of orange, sent spiralling by a late August wind that holds within its warmth the piquant tang of autumn. The woman watches the leaf’s spinning progress into the quiet darkness of the shop within. For her, autumn has always been a season of beginnings; punctuated, in her childhood, by the anticipatory thrill of new shoes, crayons and pencil cases.
Now she only thinks of endings.
1
Out of place
Jo stoops to retrieve the post and, as she does so, she picks up the stray leaf. It lies in her open palm like a coloured-paper ‘mood fish’ that as children they would hold in their hands to tell their fortune. The leaf trembles and then is still. She wants to ask it, does this mean that one day she will be happy? She wants the orange leaf ‘fish’ to tell her, if when she is thinking about James, is he ever thinking of her? During all those minutes that stretch into hours, she wants to believe that if at some point he is missing her, this would constitute a connection between them. A thread of hope that she could twist around her little finger and gently pull on. Jo closes her hand around the fragile substance of the leaf, cocooning it in the hollow of her hand, and tucking the post under her arm, she pushes the door wider.
Stepping inside, her suitcase wheels rumble in rhythm over the tiles that mark the entrance to her Uncle Wilbur’s shop. Taylor’s Supplies is a premises not much bigger than an elongated cupboard, selling a mixture of hardware and stationery. This has been her uncle’s business and home for the past fifty-two years.
Looking around, it is much as Jo remembers it. From the front of the narrow premises, one aisle leads away from the door, turning left at the back of the shop (where there is an archway to a small kitchen, a toilet, and stairs to the upstairs flat). A second narrow aisle returns back to where Jo is now standing. This is all there is to her uncle’s shop, apart from the small area at the front where a glass-topped cabinet sits, set at a right angle to the window. This old-fashioned oak cabinet (which, in a former life, Jo imagines, had displayed handkerchiefs or gloves) comprises of a top shelf given over to fountain pens and, underneath, a series of broad drawers containing the larger sheets of paper that Uncle Wilbur sells.
A place for everything and everything in its place.
Jo can hear Uncle Wilbur’s voice echoing in her head; and studying the shop, she can see that he has held true to his favourite maxim. The shelves may be more sparsely stocked than in previous years, but everything is neat, everything is in its place.
Apart from her uncle, she thinks, who is miles away from here.
And apart from her.
Jo glances at the gap between the counter and the wall. Here, suspended by string on a wooden pole, hang the brown paper bags. Bags that, miraculously, seemed to accommodate everything Uncle Wilbur sold, from a few screws and nails (bag twisted at the top to securethem) to a long metal saw with gleaming teeth.
And here is where Jo played ‘post offices’ as a child, tucked away in her secret spot. (A place for everything and everything in its place.) Standing behind the counter, shielding her from sight, her uncle appreciated that a busy postmistress needed a ready supply of stationery. As a little girl, one of her greatest joys had been when her uncle had beckoned her over and presented her with a brown paper bag bulging with some intriguing shape. Inside might be a notebook with its cover missing or a receipt book with a scrape in the carbon paper. Uncle Wilbur had told her (and more importantly, Mrs Watson-Toft, his bookkeeper with the basilisk’s stare) that he only ever gave away ‘damaged goods’. But when she was older, Jo began to suspect that when Uncle Wilbur had seen her younger self gazing covetously at a new batch of receipt books, he had run his broad, flat fingernail over the carbon paper on purpose.
Looking up, Jo notices a small, square calendar pinned to the large noticeboard on the wall behind the counter. This is all that is displayed there. The month is now August, but it still shows July’s date. Fleetingly she wonders what her Uncle Wilbur used to use this noticeboard for – she can’t recall it being here on her visits to the shop as a child.
Leaving the post and the leaf on the counter, Jo takes her suitcase to the back of the shop and mounts the stairs. From the first-floor landing, a half-glazed door opens into a small entrance hall. A low bench sits under a row of coat hooks, on which her uncle’s dark grey winter coat still hangs.
Off the hall is a bathroom. This has an ancient suite in brilliant white, and is heated by a small, ineffective blow-heater. Jo is not looking forward to using this room. She knows from experience that even when the bath is full of hot water, the outer edge is still ice-cold to the touch.
The hallway opens up into a living room, beyond which is the kitchen. Both have long sash windows overlooking the alleyway. Opposite the first window are two doors to bedrooms. Jo wavers for a moment, undecided whether to use her uncle’s room or the box room she slept in as a child when she visited for a few weeks each summer. She opens the door to the smaller of the rooms and is soon unzipping her case. Most of the clothes she flings onto a chair. What she is looking for is at the bottom of her bag.
She pulls out the dark-blue denim dungarees, their fabric stiff in her hands, like card. Jo stares down at them, unsure why it was so important for her to bring them with her. Her best friend, Lucy, left them in her cottage after staying over one evening – oh, it would have been months ago now – vintage Fifties, high-waisted, wide-legged dungarees. Lucy is a lover of all things vintage. As a teenager, and still now, as a 38-year-old woman, she wears the dresses that she begged off their grandmothers. Jo sees her own passion for stationery as an echo of her friend’s quirky connection with the past, and clings to her love of newly sharpened pencils, knowing it makes her feel closer to Lucy. Even at primary school, the two of them were attuned and in step – without fail and without effort, winning the annual three-legged race at the school’s sports day.
Jo sits on the bed, holding the dungarees to her. And now? Now she thinks that even if someone tied her and Lucy’s legs together, they would not be able to keep in rhythm. She has never felt more out of step with her best friend, and she cannot clarify in her mind exactly why. She knows there are probably many reasons, but whichever way she stacks and rearranges these reasons – her point of view; her perception of Lucy’s point of view – it never gives her a sense of truly understanding what has gone wrong between them. They rarely text each other now; and when they do something jars, and Jo can’t put her finger on what or why. She just knows that if she and Lucy were to try a three-legged race now, rather than emerging as the natural victors, they would both fall flat on their faces.
Jo’s far-off gaze gradually refocuses on the precise tidiness of the small room. She should really put her things away in the chest of drawers. (A place for everything and everything in its place.) It doesn’t take long. Less than ten minutes later her possessions are stowed away and her empty suitcase is stored under the single bed.
There is just one thing she doesn’t have to unpack, or to put away. There is no need. It is not something that she can hide away at the back of a drawer. However much she would like to.
Jo knows she has no option but to carry her broken heart around with her, wherever she goes. James saw to that when he left her four months ago.
