The Pieces of Ourselves

by Maggie Harcourt

  As Hal steps through the door, his feet leaving prints in the thick dust, there’s the faintest suggestion of movement in the air; a ghost of a breeze on my face. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I have the strangest sensation the attic has been holding its breath. Waiting.

  For him. For now. For this.

  Or maybe it’s just that the window frames are old and warped and draughty – a bit like the one in my bedroom. I fold back the shutter on the first window and give the grubby pane a shove – it swings open with an angry creak and light floods into the room.

  “Oh.” The sound Hal makes is somewhere between a sigh and a gasp, interesting enough to make me turn around…

  Which is when I see the boxes.

  “Oh.”

  They’re stacked up in rows, all along the back wall where the roof slates meet the stone. Some of them are cardboard archive boxes like most of the ones in the library. Others are big wooden tea chests bound with metal bands, some with their lids half-off. There are metal archive boxes, what looks like an old filing cabinet and, right at the far end, a pile of wooden crates.

  “That’s…a lot of boxes,” Hal whispers, staring at them.

  “You wanted boxes. Maybe be careful what you wish for.” I peer into the nearest of the tea chests. It looks like it’s mostly full of straw to me, but it’s hard to tell. I give the lid a nudge and it slips off the edge and clatters to the floor, sending up a cloud of dust. Hal coughs pointedly.

  “Maybe we start by you not doing that again?” he says, waving the fallout away theatrically. “Some of us have allergies, remember?”

  “I thought you were putting that on for the curator! What are you allergic to?” I ignore the urge to sneeze.

  “Dust, mostly. And the sun.”

  “The sun? You can’t be allergic to the sun.”

  “Really?” He pulls at a tuft of his hair. “See this? This is the mark of someone who counts the sun as their mortal enemy.” He drops the end of his hair. It falls straight into his eyes. “When I was a kid, someone – I don’t even remember who – told me that if you’re a redhead you’ve got to watch yourself in the sun because it hates you. So the next day I went out and dyed my hair.” He walks over to the next window and unlocks it, swinging the pane open and leaning on the sill to look out over the gardens.

  “And how did that go for you?”

  “Not well.”

  I can’t help it. I shouldn’t laugh, but something about the look on his face – the sheer disappointment that he couldn’t disguise who he actually is, or change it – is both adorable and very, very funny.

  He looks even more wounded when I start laughing, which doesn’t help.

  “Sorry,” I mutter eventually, doodling in the dust with the toe of my shoe. “But now we’re here, what’s your plan?”

  He leans his weight back against the sill and stretches his legs out in front of him, studying the row of boxes. There is a very, very long silence.

  “Do you even have a plan?”

  The sound he makes is high and uncertain.

  “You had a plan in the library.”

  “Yeah, but there wasn’t quite so…much.” He waves in the general direction of the crates, boxes, cabinets and other items hulking across the attic. “I guess we just pick a box to start with and work our way through from there.” Striding from the window, he brushes the dust carefully off the top of the furthest metal box, flipping back the lid and peering inside.

  From my spot at the far end of the row, I watch him lean over that box, then the ones either side of him, peering at the lids or labels on the sides like a kid checking the parcels under the tree on Christmas morning, looking for one with their name on it. I try to picture him, little him, eight years old and trying to dye the colour of his hair away.

  A feeling I don’t quite understand flickers around my heart, as though someone has lit a Catherine wheel inside me, slowly spinning and throwing out sparks. It’s not that I don’t recognize it – I do – I’m just used to feeling like it’s in my head, not my heart. It’s the same bright, fizzing whirl that comes with mania – the feeling of possibility. That I could do anything, that anything could happen.

  “Hey, Flora!”

  He’s holding a bundle of old papers. Flakes flutter from the edges, drifting down to the floor like snow.

  “Careful, they’re breaking apart!” Crouching down beside him, I put my hand beneath the stack to support them. “Should we even be doing this? Remember what that curator was like with her whole, ‘You don’t touch them, I do’ thing?”

  “Well, she’s not here, is she?” He nudges me, his voice conspiratorial. “Look at this lot. They’re names. Names, ages and dates of birth. They’re children.”

  “Why is there a list of children in the attic?”

  “They’re the bombed babies.”

  I stare at him. “What the hell is a bombed baby?”

  “The curator told me about it at Fallowmill. A couple of the big houses around here were used to house kids who’d been bombed out of their homes in the Second World War.” His eyes slide away from the papers and along the row of boxes. “Which would mean these are from the 1940s.”

  “We want earlier.” I lean back. “These boxes are all the same – the metal ones. Maybe we should try a different type?”

  “That makes sense. The boxes which match were probably all packed up together. Different box, different time. Which ones do we try next then?”

  I scramble to my feet, and he does the same – carefully lowering the list of bombed babies back into the box he took it from and sliding the lid back on. I make a mental note to tell Barney what we’ve found, and move up the row to the wooden tea chests.

  “These ones. I think we try these ones next.”

  “Flora…”

  “Mmm?” I half-glance up from the pile of old receipts I’ve found. The Holmwoods, whoever they were, seemed to really, really like beef broth. At least, I hope they did, because they definitely got through a lot of it.

  “No, really. Look. Look, it’s here. I think…”

  Hal’s voice skips up an octave – and his hand slides into mine.

  “What?”

  I don’t dare to look down at our hands. I can’t. If I look, he might realize and move.

  Instead, I look at him, and he looks back, and the hand holding out a piece of writing paper to me trembles.

  But all I want is to be with you. Whatever it takes, and whatever it costs.

  The writing and the headed notepaper is familiar now, so familiar that I can almost hear Albie in my head as I read. Another of his letters to Iris, hidden away, keeping their secret safe through the years. The light in the attic shifts as a cloud drifts across the sun outside. “Is this what I think it is?”

  “Read a bit further down. Near the bottom.” Hal tries to point out a line near the end of the page, but his finger is jumping up and down so much that he gives up, folding it away into his palm. “Sorry. It’s just…”

  “I know. It’s a lot.” I skim down to the line he was trying to show me and clear my throat. “‘All my life, I’ve been told that I had a role to play, that there was a space in the world I should fill; that I would know it when the time came. Now I do, and that place is beside you, as your husband, if you would do me the honour of having me?’”

  “A lot,” murmurs Hal. His voice shakes as much as his hand did. “The only thing they could do was elope – there’s the ruin and deception Jane was talking about in her letter, right there. If anyone caught them, she’d be finished. No job, no reference – and no Albie.”

  Does he know how soft his voice has become? How it slides through the attic, carried on the warm dusty air? Maybe, like me, he can feel the change in the atmosphere, in the letters. Hope and fear now sit hand in hand behind Iris and Albie. They have so much at stake. So much to lose.

  And we know how the story ends.

  Time slips by in silence, only the shifting shadows on the floo
r and the moving piles of pages to mark it. The attic air has warmed around us, and filled with something close to static. It makes my skin hum and my hands shake…and I think it’s coming from Hal.

  Possibility.

  Every time he comes near me, sparks flicker up my arms and into my chest. Watching him pore over these letters, half-frowning or moving his lips in an echo of the words on the pages…it makes my heart hurt. But not because I’m sad. The opposite. Something is changing. Something in me is waking up. Something that wants…I don’t know. But it’s been a long time since I wanted anything, except maybe to be left alone – and now I don’t think I want that so much. Or at least I think maybe I do want to be left alone, but alone with him.

  What would Iris and Albie make of this, of us? Would they mind? Would I mind someone reading my letters – my thoughts and hopes and dreams and fears – in a hundred years’ time? I don’t know. All I know is that it’s almost starting to feel like we’re meant to find them. Sole heir to a family fortune and a housemaid? If it wasn’t such a perfect coincidence it would almost be silly. I picture them passing in the hallway of Hopwood, her eyes lowered in case anyone could see them…and then her gaze coming up to meet his. His hand reaching for hers, the slightest, lightest touch and then gone.

  “So, she must have agreed to marry him, right? That’s what the letter from Jane was about – Iris told her sister, who wrote back and warned her it was a bad idea. What then?” I tip my head back and rub my neck. I’ve been leaning forward over all these letters, bills and receipts, these pieces of other lives, for so long that it aches when I straighten up.

  “They couldn’t have just gone. They would have needed a plan. Money, somewhere to go. Somewhere they’d be safe, where they could start over without anyone knowing who they were.”

  Somewhere safe. Somewhere to start over.

  Ironic, really – they were running away from the exact place I ran to.

  “They must have really loved each other. To risk everything – to give everything up – just to be together.”

  “I guess so.” Hal’s hand rests on the nearest pile of papers, his fingertips almost within touching distance. If I stretched mine out, I could reach them. But I don’t, and however much I want him to move his hand towards mine one more time, he doesn’t either.

  I look at all the papers in front of us. “Do you think it’s weird, doing this? Reading their letters? They were here – right here – and now we’re looking through the things they wrote, the things they said to each other…? It’s like…bringing them back, you know?”

  “I guess so. I hadn’t really thought about it like that.” He brushes a fleck of paper off his knee.

  “I mean, it’s kind of nice. It’s almost like someone finally gets to know their secret. They don’t have to hide it any more.”

  “I’m not sure they did hide it from absolutely everybody in the house, though. That’s something else I found.” He sifts through one of the piles, spreading out the pages like tarot cards, looking for someone else’s future.

  Meet tonight usual place GH will come to kitchen door.

  “‘GH’?”

  “I think they had someone helping them. Someone they trusted. They must have done. Think about it – we know they were going to run away, and they must have been meeting up in secret while they were planning it. That can’t have been easy, not back then. There’s no way they’d have got away with it for long on their own.”

  “So you think they had someone taking messages for them?”

  “Isn’t that what you’d do?” Hal’s eyes move from the sheet of paper to mine, holding them.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never had a secret relationship.”

  Hal opens his mouth and closes it a couple of times, like a goldfish. “Nah. Me neither. Or, you know, any relationship.” His cheeks slowly work through several different shades of pink. “Umm.” He clears his throat, scratches his left ear and then apparently becomes very, very, very interested in a splinter of wood sticking up from the floor.

  “No. No, right. No.”

  Me neither.

  But maybe…

  The words I want just won’t come out. They stick to my tongue, they wind around the insides of my ribs like barbed wire.

  The attic is suddenly very hot. Very, very hot and filled with the sound of drums, which I think might actually be my heart.

  I try to talk over it, just in case he can hear it. “So, is this what you want to do?”

  A look of pure panic crosses his face. “Sorry, what?”

  Oh.

  OH.

  “What you want to do. In the future. For a job?” This time, the words all come out in a rush. For once, I’m quite glad.

  His face relaxes. “This? You mean research, right?”

  “You seem to like it. To be…kind of at home in it.” And he does. Not like he belongs in the past, exactly, more like he belongs with it. They’re comfortable with each other.

  I wonder how that feels, being comfortable with the past.

  “I guess. Like I said, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather when I was younger, and he didn’t exactly know what to do with a kid. So he took me to museums. Something about the past stuck. I just…like it. I like spending time with it.” He pats the nearest stack of papers.

  “How come you’re not doing it at university?”

  It’s a mistake – I know it as soon as I’ve said it, but I don’t know why. Everything about Hal darkens and closes up again – as though the shell that had almost dropped away has snapped shut around him again. His eyes close, and when they open again there’s someone else behind them.

  “I wasn’t given the choice.” Even his voice is darker, heavier.

  “To do history?”

  “To go to university.”

  “Oh.”

  Who would get excited about being smuggled into a university history library? Someone who knew they would never get the chance to be there for real. It can’t be the money – someone like Hal Waverley doesn’t worry about money. So…why?

  He reads the question in my face, and I wish, I wish, he hadn’t. But he answers anyway.

  “Family business, remember?”

  Only me to carry on the family name.

  “Hang on, you weren’t allowed to go to university because of the hotel business?”

  “Yep.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “It didn’t seem to matter either way. And the only person in my family who would have backed me up…”

  “Is your grandfather.”

  “Was my grandfather. Once, anyway. Not so much now. I can’t ask him to get into the middle of that. Stress isn’t good for him.” He turns his face away.

  “Your dad really didn’t give you a choice?”

  He looks down at his knees, his hair falling over his face and hiding him from me. “A choice? No. He’s not into those. Orders, but not choices. We, uh, don’t get along. Which is unfortunate when you think about it, with him being my father and my boss. Head of the family, head of the company. He gets the final say on everything.” Hal’s voice tightens. “Everything.”

  “What about your mum? Didn’t she think it should be your decision?”

  I edge closer, hoping to see something familiar behind the curtain of hair.

  “She’s not around much. She travels a lot – she’s the ‘company ambassador’, which means she gets to be on the payroll for running off and spending as much time away from home as possible. Does a lot of charity events, you know? Drinks a lot of martinis, takes a lot of sedatives. You would too, if you were married to my father.”

  I leave the space blank, the air empty. His words need it, but I can feel there’s more here, things under the surface, tucked away in the dark. Things Hal doesn’t want to bring out into the light.

  I know what it’s like to have somebody poking around in your head, trying to know who you are from the inside, not from the outside. I won’t force it. />
  “How about you? You didn’t want to go to uni?”

  “Ha!” Of course, I didn’t mean to make that sound out loud.

  Hal raises an eyebrow at me from under his fringe.

  “Sorry.” I shake my head. “It’s complicated. Uni and I are…let’s just say we’re probably not a good match.”

  “But you’re good at this. Researching.”

  “Maybe? Kind of. I don’t know.” I blow out a long, slow breath…and it takes half the dust off the nearest box with it. “I don’t think uni would be much use for me, anyway. I always wanted to work in films.”

  “In films? Doing what?”

  “Anything. Working on locations, maybe? I don’t know.”

  I do know, because it’s what I always used to say when people asked me, before. I wanted to work in films. Always. And I wanted to work in locations – finding them, researching them…I never told anyone, but that was what my prize-winning history project, the one that got me involved in all this, was about. I told myself that if it was good enough, someone would notice. They would see me and think I was good enough. I was convinced.

  Maybe that should have been an early warning.

  Not that any of it really mattered, because The Future always felt like it was a long way off…and then suddenly it felt like it was the kind of thing that only happened to other people.

  “Films,” says Hal, thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

  “Really?” I fold my arms. “So what would you have said?”

  “I don’t know,” he says – then adds so softly that I almost miss it, “not yet.”

  Not yet.

  It’s an invitation – a hand waiting for me to take it. A door held open.

  Possibility.

  The attic is alive with it.

  The sun has moved around from the window. I’ve got no idea how long we’ve been up here – my phone is somewhere in my bag on the other side of the attic. All I know is that I don’t want to leave right now. If I do, all this possibility might evaporate, slipping through my fingers.