I came back three times in the next week to look at the trunks, and never got past the surface layer in each one, the thick skin it turned to the world. When I tried to dip below that surface, just to see how deep it was, I couldn’t breathe. I had no idea what to do with the trunks, but before I could bite back the words, I found myself proposing to have them carried to my place.
But you’re about to go away, Margery said.
That’s not a problem. I’ll put them in storage, along with my own stuff, until we decide what to do.
A few days later, I came back with the station wagon to fetch the trunks. We got the street guards to carry them out for us. It’s not the done thing, distracting them from their duties, but they were only too pleased to earn a bit of extra cash — until they felt how heavy the things were. They were strong young men but they sweated over it, and got their paramilitary uniforms so dirty I felt obliged to double the fee we’d offered.
Besides the trunks, I took Claude’s personal library, packed into cardboard boxes. In the end, three trips were needed to carry everything to my house. Nana and the Bear stayed behind. At their age, we agreed, they would not survive the move.
The trunks stood in the spare room. The house, already made uneasy by my impending departure, felt this shapeless new memory in a back room of its mind, a name that would not come to the tongue. A stranger’s past was seeping out into the troubled air, dragging the hands of the clock back just when they should have been hurrying forward.
Now that it was done, I could not believe I had brought these things here. In six weeks, I would be leaving (the house had already been let), and I had a mountain of things to sort through and pack up before then. I had gathered the necessary stock of cardboard boxes, garbage bags, mothballs, plastic packaging tape, indelible markers. I had a past of my own to order, and that was what I should have been doing, instead of sitting in this hot, stuffy room — the sash window had been jammed for years: another repair I never got round to — going through Claude’s trunks.
On a cursory examination, the contents fell into three categories: books, papers, things.
The books. Most of those in the trunks had belonged to Berti, Margery said. Claude had sold off nearly all his own books when he moved to Somerset Road. Those he’d kept, which had been on the shelf in his flat, were now in five or six separate boxes. In any event, I could tell by the age of the books and the fact that most of them were in German and French that they had belonged to the father. Some of the books for children, the treasures of that unimaginable boy with the sweet mouth and the adorable curls, had his name in the covers. There were some beautiful storybooks, things that could have been collectors’ items, had they not been scribbled all over with crayons.
The things. Berti’s cut-throat razors. Pillboxes, wallets, portfolios. Twelve pairs of glasses with nearly identical round black rims: every pair Berti ever owned. A broken compass. Cigarette tins with smaller objects rattling around in them (eye teeth, tiepins, a crumbling scarab). Claude’s baby shoes. A lock of blond hair in a wax-paper envelope.
The papers. Bundles of letters. Generations of family correspondence (Claude to his mother from boarding school in Manchester, Berti to the family from his many trips abroad). Albums of postcards. Photographs from the turn of the century: hand-tinted, mounted on ivory boards joined by silken ribbons, with tracing paper spread over them like veils. Photographs from mid-century: glossy stacks like playing cards, with thick white borders or deckle edges, a profusion of prints. Forty years of pocket diaries. Schoolbooks, passports, maps, itineraries, stock sheets, calling cards, university notes, newspaper clippings. Death notices edged in black. Wedding invitations, certificates, receipts, bundles of sheet music. A recipe book in black-letter type.
I examined and classified, opened tins and envelopes, and made lists and notes. There were papers in English, French and German. I had gathered from Margery that Claude was German-speaking, although he’d spent part of his childhood in France and his youth in England. That might be helpful for creating order and I made some notes to that effect. Afterwards, I returned everything as nearly as possible to the place I had found it, as if the disposition of things in the trunks might contain a revealing narrative of its own. But my cataloguing did not disperse the haze of irretrievable significance that hung between me and these things.
It would be better, I knew, not to touch them at all. The custodians of archives and museums wear cotton gloves in the interests of preservation — not of the objects, but themselves. Allowing these memory-laden, use-soiled things to come into contact with living, breathing skin is dangerous. A prophylactic barrier is advised.
In the following weeks, as I began to pack up my household in earnest, I realised that I had misread the message of Claude’s trunks. They were more than a warning about a debilitating fascination with the leavings of one life, assembled here in tin and leather and glass; they were a prophecy of the distasteful end that awaits all those who set too much store by the written word. The pointlessness of paper.
Let me be frank: Claude’s trunks were not my only burden. I already had Louis Fehler’s trommel.
A decade earlier, Louis Fehler (not his real name) had left me his papers to look after while he went abroad, travelling light, and then promptly died. I’d been carrying his blue trommel around with me ever since, packed with outlines of novels, biographical notes and other things, unsure what to make of them.
It’s a problem, clearly, that people give me their papers. The reason is obvious: I hoard such enormous quantities of my own. My house looks like a public library or some archive of the ordinary; I cannot get rid of a book or throw away a receipt from Pick n Pay. What difference will another little stack of documents make? I am like an animal lover who gets a reputation for taking in strays. The book lover.
Of course, there’s more to it than storage. These papers are entrusted to me, placed in my care and assigned as my responsibility. People put their papers, or the papers of their departed loved ones as the case may be, in my hands, because they want me to read them, think about them, edit them or otherwise reorder them, and write about them. They would like me to make something of their leavings.
I tried to explain this to the movers, but they were irritated. The trommel bothered them less than the trunks, which I had failed to include on the inventory for the quotation (they had not yet come into my possession at that time). No matter, they wanted me to unpack the contents of the trunks into smaller boxes. They would injure themselves trying to move these coffins, they said, it was unreasonable of me to ask. Finally they relented and said they would move them as they were, but they made it clear they would not be held accountable for any damage done to my property in the process. They fetched a trolley with two wheels and upended the smallest trunk on its scoop. As if to demonstrate that their warnings had been in earnest, on the way out to the truck they dragged the trolley through flower beds, cracked two tiles on the path and knocked a chunk of plaster out of the gatepost.
The trunks were conveyed to a self-storage depot next to the highway near the Gosforth Park toll plaza and stacked along with my own possessions. They looked like ancient sarcophagi among my flimsy boxes. The men were right, not coffers but coffins. Even Louis Fehler’s trommel felt insubstantial by comparison. In the stuffy interior of the sealed storage unit, they smelt like old, unwashed bodies.