Lisa drew back her veil to see more clearly. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, I don’t like the way he’s looking at you.’ And David hurried her away. But the vision of the man remained with her. Something about his eyes.
‘That was an ugly scar on his cheek,’ she said.
II
At first she just wandered around the house touching things. Her things. The chair by the window where she sat nights reading her cheap romances, as though she might discover in them what she had failed to find in life. In the bedroom a brush lay on the dresser, her hair still tangled among the bristles. Lisa teased some out and ran it between her fingers. Soft, shiny. In the wardrobe her coats and dresses hung in neat rows. Lisa ran a hand along them. She picked out a jacket, held it against her face. Smelled it. Her mother’s smell. It is hard to believe, she thought, that someone is dead, when you can run their hair between your fingers, breathe in the smell of them from their clothes.
This was still her mother’s house. Always would be. A neat little semi in a neat little south London suburb. A place for everything and everything in its place. She had been ordered, fastidious to the point of obsession, Lisa just one more possession with a place in the order of things. Cared for, but without love, without warmth. Lisa had always known it, but never rebelled. Been unhappy but safe. Now anger welled inside her and she grabbed an armful of clothes from the wardrobe, throwing them across the room. She swept her arm across the dresser, sending make-up, perfume, brushes, ornaments clattering on to the floor. She stood for a moment, breathing hard, exulting in the violence of her rebellion. A rebellion that had come too late, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing – a remembered scrap of schooldays Shakespeare came back to mock her. Self-pity fuelled her anger as she ripped the sheets from her mother’s bed, lifting a pillow and slamming it repeatedly against the wall until it burst and filled the air with feathers, like snowflakes on a still winter’s day. And something inside her broke, releasing all the tears that had refused to come earlier. She fell on the bed sobbing wretchedly. Her mother had no right to die! How could she have done this to her?
It was almost dark when she rolled over and realized that she had slept. The bed was still damp where she had spilled her tears. She looked around at the chaos and felt numb. Why had she been so insistent that David did not come back after the funeral? They had almost fallen out over it. But he had conceded, finally, hiding his hurt, and said he would call tomorrow. She wished he was there now. Someone to hold her, to keep her safe and warm. She shivered, realizing how cold she was, and went downstairs to turn on the fire and make herself a mug of coffee.
She tried to think dispassionately about David. He was twenty-four, good-looking with his green eyes and mane of fine red hair. A night-shift reporter on one of the London papers. She had met him a few months earlier when he had guest-lectured as an ex-student on the journalist course she was taking at college. He still lived with his parents. Steady, middle-class people. Very pleasant, very dull. Her mother had liked David, the first boyfriend she had allowed her. He was safe and sensible. ‘That boy’s got his head screwed on,’ she used to say. But Lisa kept seeing him thirty years on, a clone of his father. Safe, sensible, dull.
She cupped her hands round the mug. There had to be something else. Nice! It was the word her mother used to describe everyone and everything that offered no risk. What she meant was safe. Lisa reflected that there must be a lot of her mother in her. It was what drew her, too, like a moth to a light. Safety. Only, she knew it was an illusion.
She wandered through to the living room. On the mantelpiece stood a framed photograph of herself aged twelve. A child with a pleated pony tail and a neatly pressed school uniform. Where was that little girl now? Time. It all seemed to slip away, like a shadow at the end of the day. She felt more like eighty than eighteen. As though her life was already over.
She gazed for some time at the photograph before she remembered the trunk in the attic. Years ago, as a child, she had found and opened it. She could have been no more than five or six. But she remembered the photographs, dozens of them in albums and a shoebox, faded black and white prints. There had been all manner of papers and documents in it, and an old jewellery box. Her mother had found her there with the trunk open and screamed at her and slapped her face. Never was she to go near that trunk again. She was confined to her room for the rest of the day. Some weeks later, while her mother was in the garden, she had crept back to the attic to discover that the trunk had been made secure with a heavy padlock.
The trunk was still there, behind a pile of cardboard boxes, thick with dust, untouched for years – perhaps since the time her mother had first padlocked it. The bulb in the attic had blown, and Lisa had to manoeuvre carefully by torchlight. She tugged at the padlock ineffectually and wondered where her mother might have kept the key.
She turned the house upside down but could find nothing that resembled the key she was looking for. The phone started to ring, loud and insistent in the empty house. It stopped Lisa in her tracks,
