She too felt guilty, and was glad of the black veil that hid her face. No one could see that there were no tears. Her eyes were so dry they burned. She looked around the sad little gathering: a woman who’d worked with her mother, a couple of neighbours, the vicar, the professional mourner — and David. And David was only there because of her. These were all the friends her mother had to show for thirty-seven years. A strange, shy, introverted woman, her mother had not made friends easily. Lisa reconsidered. No, her mother had not made friends at all. Perhaps if Lisa’s father had lived... But her mother had never even spoken of him. A young soldier killed in Aden in the Sixties. Lisa had only been fifteen months old. She had no memory of him at all. Not even second-hand. Her mother had locked away all the photographs. ‘No point in living in the past,’ she’d said. And Lisa had never thought to question it.
Thirty-seven! To Lisa’s eighteen years it seemed old. But she supposed it was quite young really. Too young to die. Cancer of the breast. Her mother had been aware of the lump for over a year and been too frightened to see a doctor. It was Lisa, finally, who had made her go. But too late. I didn’t love her, Lisa thought. I can’t even cry. She knew she was depressed only for herself, for her future — alone.
David took her arm to lead her away from the graveside. David. Yes, she had forgotten about him. He wanted to marry her, he said. But she was too young and he was too keen. And, anyway, there had to be more to life, hadn’t there? Yet still she felt safe with him, like now, as he put a comforting arm around her shoulder. She glanced back as the gravediggers moved in to shovel earth carelessly over the coffin, burying her mother, her past.
‘Come on, love.’ David urged her gently away. She turned back towards the future with a heart like lead, and saw a man standing under the trees at the far side of the churchyard. A tall man in a dark coat, hands pushed deep into his pockets. He had no umbrella, no hat, and his short-cropped hair glistened in the rain. Lisa paused and David followed her eyes. ‘Who’s that?’ he said.
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, her heart thumping. It could only be David. She stood uncertainly for a moment, then decided to let it ring out. Finally, she took a hammer and chisel from the toolbox under the sink and carried them up to the attic. Balancing the torch on a nearby box, she directed the beam on to the padlock and set about trying to break the lock. She quickly realized that wasn’t going to work, and turned to the clasp on the trunk itself, gouging with the chisel at the wood behind it. It took ten minutes of hacking and splintering before finally it broke free. Then she paused, breathless, almost afraid now to open it. With trembling hands she took the torch and lifted the lid on the past she thought had been buried with her mother.