must be about nineteen eighty-seven.’
I would have been twenty-seven. A lifetime ago.
My son’s lifetime.
‘When was he born?’
He dug his hand into the box again, passed me a slip of paper. ‘January,’ he said. It was yellow, brittle. A birth certificate. I read it in silence. His name was there. Adam.
‘Adam Wheeler,’ I said, out loud. To myself as much as to Ben.
‘Wheeler is my last name,’ he said. ‘We decided he should have my name.’
‘Of course,’ I said. I brought the paper up to my face. It felt too light to be a vessel for so much meaning. I wanted to breathe it in, for it to become part of me.
‘Here,’ said Ben. He took the paper from me and folded it. ‘There are more pictures,’ he said. ‘Do you want to see them?’
He handed me a few more photographs.
‘We don’t have that many,’ he said as I looked at them. ‘A lot were lost.’
He made it sound as if they had been left on trains or given to strangers for safekeeping.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I remember. We had a fire.’ I said it without thinking.
He looked at me oddly, his eyes narrowed, pinched tight.
‘You remember?’ he said.
Suddenly I wasn’t sure. Had he told me about the fire this morning or was I remembering him telling me the other day? Or was it just that I had read it in my journal after breakfast?
‘Well, you told me about it.’
‘I did?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
When was it? Had it been that morning, or days ago? I thought of my journal, remembered reading it after he’d gone to work. He’d told me about the fire as we sat on Parliament Hill.
I could have told him about my journal then, but something held me back. He seemed less than happy that I had remembered something. ‘Before you left for work,’ I said. ‘When we looked through the scrapbook. You must have, I suppose.’
He frowned. It felt terrible to be lying to him, but I didn’t feel able to cope with more revelations. ‘How would I know otherwise?’
He looked directly at me. ‘I suppose so.’
I paused for a moment, looking at the handful of photographs in my hand. They were pitifully few, and I could see that the box didn’t contain many more. Were they really all I would ever have to describe my son’s life?
‘How did the fire start?’ I said.
The clock on the mantelpiece chimed. ‘It was years ago. In our old house. The one we lived in before we came here.’ I wondered if he meant the one I’d been to. ‘We lost a lot of things. Books, papers. That kind of stuff.’
‘But how did it start?’ I said.
For a moment he said nothing. His mouth began to open and close, and then he said, ‘It was an accident. Just an accident.’
I wondered what he was not telling me. Had I left a cigarette burning, or the iron plugged in, or a pot to boil dry? I imagined myself in the kitchen I had stood in the day before yesterday, with its concrete worktop and white units, but years ago. I saw myself standing over a sizzling fryer, shaking the wire basket that contained the sliced potatoes that I was cooking, watching as they floated to the surface before rolling and sinking back under the oil. I saw myself hear the phone ring, wipe my hands on the apron I had tied around my waist, go into the hall.
What then? Had the oil burst into flames as I took the call, or had I wandered back into the living room, or up to the bathroom, with no recollection of ever having begun to cook dinner?
I don’t know, can never know. But it was kind of Ben to tell me that it had been an accident. Domesticity has so many dangers for someone without a memory, and another husband might have pointed out my mistakes and deficits, might have been unable to resist taking the moral high ground. I touched his arm, and he smiled.
I thumbed through the handful of photographs. There was one of Adam wearing a plastic cowboy hat and a yellow neckerchief aiming a plastic rifle at the person with the camera, and in another he was a few years older; his face thinner, his hair beginning to darken. He was wearing a shirt buttoned to the neck, and a child’s tie.
‘That was taken at school,’ said Ben. ‘An official portrait.’ He pointed to the photograph and laughed. ‘Look. It’s such a shame. The picture’s ruined!’
The elastic of the tie was visible, not tucked under the collar. I ran my hands over the picture. It wasn’t ruined, I thought. It was perfect.
I tried to remember my son, tried to see myself kneeling in front of him with an elasticated tie, or combing his hair, or wiping dried blood from a grazed knee.
Nothing came. The boy in the photograph shared a fullness of mouth with me, and had eyes that resembled, vaguely, my mother’s, but otherwise he could have been a stranger.
Ben took out another picture and gave it to me. In it Adam was a little older — maybe seven. ‘Do you think he looks like me?’ he said.
He was holding a football, dressed in shorts and a white T-shirt. His hair was short, spiked with sweat. ‘A little,’ I said. ‘Perhaps.’
Ben smiled, and together we carried on looking at the photographs. They were mostly of me and Adam, the occasional one of him alone; Ben must have taken the majority. In a few he was with friends; a couple showed him at a party, wearing a pirate costume, carrying a cardboard sword. In one he held a small black dog.
There was a letter tucked amongst the pictures. It was addressed to Santa Claus and written in blue crayon. The jerky letters danced across the page. He wants a bike, he says, or a puppy, and promises to be good. It is signed, and he has added his age. Four.
I don’t know why, but as I read it my world seemed to collapse. Grief exploded in my chest like a grenade. I had been feeling calm — not happy, not even resigned, but calm — and that serenity vanished, as if vaporized. Beneath it I was raw.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, handing the bundle back to Ben. ‘I can’t. Not now.’
He hugged me. I felt nausea rise in my throat, but swallowed it down. He told me not to worry, told me I would be fine, reminded me that he was here for me, that he always would be. I clung to him, and we sat there, rocking together. I felt numb, totally removed from the room in which we sat. I watched him get me a glass of water, watched as he closed the box of photographs. I was sobbing. I could see that he was upset too, yet already his expression seemed tinged with something else. Resignation, it could have been, or acceptance, but not shock.
With a shudder I realized that he has done all this before. His grief is not new. It has had the time to bed down within him, to become part of his foundations, rather than something that rocks them.
It is only my grief that is fresh, every day.
I made an excuse. I came upstairs, to the bedroom. Back to the wardrobe. I wrote on.
These snatched moments. Kneeling in front of the wardrobe or leaning on the bed. Writing. I am feverish. It floods out of me, almost without thought. Pages and pages. I am here again now, while Ben thinks I am resting. I cannot stop. I want to write down everything.
I wonder if this is what it was like when I wrote my novel, this pouring on to the page. Or had that been slower, more considered? I wish I could remember.
After I went downstairs I made us both a cup of tea. As I stirred in the milk I thought of how many times I must have made meals for Adam, pureeing vegetables, mixing juice. I took the tea back through to Ben. ‘Was I a good mother?’ I said, handing it to him.
