She showed me the trunks, recently arrived by rail from the Cape and stored in the basement of her house. There were four of them: an enormous travelling chest of weathered, canvas-covered board, with hardwood slats and metal catches, so corroded they could hardly be opened; two smaller metal trunks, also rusted and dented; and an even smaller wooden chest with leather trim. Besides these, a few carpet bags, hatboxes, cardboard cartons. I looked at these things from the doorway. They were intriguing, like objects lifted from the bottom of the ocean; and they were also ominous, as if their long quarantine had failed to detoxify them or, like treasure pilfered from a grave, they might exhale some curse. They looked pale, unused to the light. The largest one was the size of a coffin and smelt of damp soil.
Occasionally, in the early years, I had been eager to meet Claude, not merely to satisfy my curiosity, but to fill in a gap in my friendship with Margery. Her mysterious friend was alive only in her accounts of him. In fact, he was so vividly present there, and so insubstantial otherwise, that I sometimes doubted whether he existed at all. But oddly enough, after he came to live in her house, my interest in meeting him waned. In any event, a meeting was discouraged. He had a flat of his own in the downstairs part of the house, adjoining the basement storeroom, which he never left. He did not enjoy visitors, Margery always said, he was impatient and cantankerous. He dribbled and complained. Later, when he was bedridden and increasingly frail, he saw no one at all.
After he died, I was annoyed that I hadn’t insisted on meeting him. Now I would never be able to establish a separate sense of him, and Margery’s stories would go unchallenged. But this feeling faded.
Although I don’t recall the exact circumstances, it was not long after Claude’s passing that Margery suggested I take a look through the trunks. Why? Because I am a writer, of course, and it was obvious that the trunks contained a story. I agreed immediately and we made an appointment for a few days’ time: she would have to unlock them for me and guide me into their contents. But when I thought the thing through at my leisure, something about it oppressed me and I called to put the arrangement off.
Weeks passed before my conscience pricked me. Margery wanted to get rid of these things one way or another, so that she could find a lodger for the downstairs flat, where the trunks were now being kept, the storeroom having proved too dusty or damp, according to the weather. She wanted to air the rooms and sweep away the shadows of the last months. I phoned and said I would come over to look through the trunks as soon as I had a bit of time, this weekend or the one after. But again, when the day arrived, the same gloomy reluctance beset me and I broke the arrangement. There was a touch of pique in my response, I think: she’d never seen fit to introduce me to the old bugger. Why should I take an interest in his dusty papers? But sometimes, as the weeks turned into months, the very opposite impulse would seize me, as I considered an equally fascinating potential, one that a biographer would appreciate. How much more intriguing it would be to meet the man this way, to gain access to his most personal papers and possessions, without the slightest direct impression of a living, breathing creature to spoil things. Then I would begin to worry that she might have got rid of the trunks in the meantime. I would give her a ring — surely she was getting sick of this by now? — and be relieved to discover they were still there. I’ll come past next week, I would say, to open the vault.
At this time, I was making plans to go abroad for an extended period. My departure date drew closer. Finally, Claude’s trunks could not be avoided: I would have to look into them or tell Margery once and for all that I wasn’t interested. In January 1999, I think it was, I made an arrangement to see the trunks, and stuck to it.
Margery led me downstairs to the flat. It was the only part of the house I had never been in. There was the bed in which Claude had died, covered by a candlewick bedspread through which the quilted lozenges of the bare mattress showed, an empty wardrobe breathing out naphthalene, a shelf containing the eccentric assortment of books he could still tolerate at the end. The four trunks had been pushed against the walls on either side of the bed, the three smaller ones on one side and the largest on the other, beneath the window. Some papers and objects lay on the broad windowsill.
On the bed, resting comfortably against the pillows, lay two stuffed animals, mangy relics of a distant European childhood. He wept when he saw those again, after all the years, Margery said, and told me their names. Nana and the Bear. They were animals of indeterminate species, neither bears nor dogs but something in between.
Together we shuffled through the things on the sill. A tin of China tea, still fragrant after decades in storage, like a flask out of the pyramids. A little calibrated gauge for converting Fahrenheit to Celsius. Photographs, immense enlargements of snapshots, five, ten, twenty copies of the same image.
Meet Claude, she said, picking two or three photos from the pile and handing them to me.
A delicate boy with brown curls, a sweet mouth. This child dressed as a Red Indian, with a nursery-blanket tepee in the background. This child on a rocking horse, with a Roman helmet and a wooden sword.
And Claude again, somewhat older, she said drily, handing me a Technicolor snapshot with a thick white border.
An elderly gentleman, sitting stiffly in a deckchair on some ocean liner, trying without success to recline. The mouth crooked and bitter, the face sharp, a few wisps of hair standing on end in the wind. No trace of the child left, neither the beautiful one with the curls nor any other you could imagine.
After a while, Margery went off to do some chores. Left alone with Claude’s personal effects, I felt like an intruder. I retreated to the most public part of the room — the book shelf — where I picked through the titles and made a few notes in a spiral-bound pad about the areas of interest: the occult, boarding-school stories for girls, great naval battles, the American West, unsolved mysteries, infamous crimes.
The trunks unnerved me. I had the feeling that I was on the brink of an obsession, that once I looked inside one of them, I would never be able to turn back. They lay there like an enormous, obvious drug, which it would be wise not to sample. I should refuse them, I should tell her I wanted nothing to do with them.
Nevertheless, I raised the lid of the smallest container, the wooden chest with leather trim. A musty exhalation escaped, as if the chest had just breathed its last. It was packed with papers, letters in coffee-coloured envelopes, photographs in boxes, calendars. Were these Claude’s papers or his father’s? I had no way of knowing.
The first folder I reached for was full of mementos from sea voyages: itineraries, menus, weather reports, news from the bridge about passages and docking times, certificates issued at the crossing of the equator, featuring a cartoon Neptune with trident raised, sea charts. Here was the plan of a Union-Castle liner in blues and greens, postwar colours that smacked of cocktail lounges and Formica kitchenettes, so crisp you would have thought it had just been printed, with a line of blue ink extending from Cabin 52 on the second-class level out into the sea-blue border, where, on a little raft of blue lines, the following handwritten words floated: Miss van den Broucke.