*
The shop isn’t dissimilar to ones I went to as a child with my mother. There is a smell that I remember, the earth of the potatoes, the cold of the chiller, another – floral – scent that might be the sweet-williams in a bucket by the door but is more likely floor cleaner.
The lady behind the meat counter wears a chequered blue-and-white coat and a white hairnet. She smiles at us warmly. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Do you have chicken sausages?’ Leo asks.
‘Not on this counter.’ She takes off her apron. ‘But I can come and show you where they are.’
I look around but there are no other customers to serve, she might as well come with us.
She keeps up a chatter of geography as we walk the few metres to the cabinet. ‘There we are: anything else?’
‘I want to do anchovy pasta tonight,’ Leo says.
‘Smashing,’ she says. ‘We’ve got two kinds of anchovies. Fresh or tinned?’
This is one step too far for Leo. He taps his hands on his thighs while he thinks.
‘Tinned please,’ I say. ‘I’m sure we can find them.’
She’s a little older than me, probably late fifties, and she clearly hasn’t got anything else to do. The sun shines in through the bright stickers on the shop window, bathing the empty aisles with a kaleidoscope of light. ‘No, no, I’ll show you.’ And she leads us round the aisles like a tour guide. ‘Are you on holiday?’ she asks Leo. ‘In Crouch-on-Sea, I mean.’
‘I live here.’ Leo doesn’t look at her when he answers, he is scanning the shelves of tins, running his finger along the coloured labels.
‘We’re only here for the summer,’ I say, ‘from London.’
‘Are you the artist? The one who’s moved into Pear Tree Cottage?’
‘Oh, I wish.’ I smile at her. ‘I’m a teacher – was a teacher. But we’ve moved into Hatters Hall.’
She stands upright and stares at me. ‘How lovely. Are you related to Araminta?’ She goes on without pausing, absent-mindedly straightening the front of a row of baked bean cans. ‘She’s wonderful, isn’t she? Absolutely tireless.’
I want to say that no, she’s nasty and – as far as I can tell – only relentless in making sure I have a miserable time, but instead, I smile. ‘She does very well.’
‘She tries so hard to keep that old place going. Goodness knows how – all on her own in that enormous building. Must be very creepy at night.’
‘It’s not creepy.’ Leo’s brow is furrowed. ‘It’s my daddy’s house.’
‘Colonel Hugo was my husband’s grandfather,’ I say, feeling a lot less grand than that sounds.
The shop assistant puts her hands on her hips. ‘Well, I never. How exciting. Lyons-Morrises back at the house.’ The ‘lions’ makes me flinch. ‘You must be so grateful to Araminta for keeping it all going for you.’
I try to distract the woman by pretending to search for something on the bread shelf. It makes no difference at all.
‘She’s absolutely devoted to that place: it’ll be so nice for her to have someone to help her.’
Leo saves the day. ‘Do you stock XD comics?’ he asks in the voice he keeps for when he is determined to get what he wants.
‘The one with the man shaped like a boulder?’
‘Rockman.’ Leo says it to her first, then a few times under his breath to mark his disapproval that she doesn’t know her products better.
She leads us to the front of the shop where there are banks of magazines. Leo spots it immediately.
‘Got it.’ He pulls the comic out and dances from foot to foot in excitement. He is singing a tuneless little song about the fight scenes and explosions he’s looking forward to inside.
‘It’s so lovely to have the Lyons-Morris family back . . .’ she says as we wait at the till.
I can’t bear the pronunciation any longer. ‘I’m Cate,’ I say, ‘and this is Leo – Colonel Hugo’s great-grandson.’
‘Jess.’ She points to her name badge. ‘Colonel Hugo built most of this village – as I’m sure you know. And he paid for the library and the swimming pool from the money he left when he died. We’re very much indebted to him. To your family.’ She beams at me as I try to stack the wire basket into the pile by the till.
‘I didn’t know.’ I feel a little ashamed, and hide my embarrassment by concentrating on packing the shopping.
‘The Colonel’s very well thought of in Crouch-on-Sea, and often remembered. Araminta too. It’s taken its toll on her over the last few years. It’ll be lovely for her to have a bit of help.’ She looks up and smiles. ‘We’re all very fond of her round here.’
*
Leo’s magazine doesn’t occupy him for that long.
‘I’m going to go and find Curtis now. He said I can help him in the garden.’
I need to have a bit of a chat with Curtis before anything like that can happen. ‘Maybe we need to get to know him a bit better before you do that?’ Maybe I need to threaten him with exactly what will happen to him if I smell cannabis on my son’s clothes. I have a duty of care to Leo that has to come before offending strangers or making assumptions: I will wear my suspicion of Curtis as parental armour until he’s proven otherwise to me, and to Leo.
Leo flops next to me on the sofa, knocking my laptop off my knees.
‘Watch what you’re doing.’
‘It wasn’t me.’
‘Yes, it was, don’t be silly. You need to be careful.’
He stands and walks to the window. ‘I won’t be careful,’ he says deliberately and stares at me, his chin forward and his eyes narrowed.
Leo, like his father before him, is a sensitive soul. Friends – and sometimes strangers – comment on his easy access to his emotions, the fact that he can be so open and demonstrative. They see the sunny Leo, the bright side of that inhibition – what they don’t see is his frustration. When things go wrong for him – and they go wrong just as often as they would for anyone else – that same easiness that makes him such a great person to live with, that allows him to experience every happiness up close and personal, can turn into a rage he doesn’t have the skills to control.
Richard, who didn’t have an extra chromosome, felt his own and other people’s pain every bit as keenly, even before he was ill. Things that would make me sad for a moment or encourage me to drop an extra donation in a collecting tin would make Richard out of sorts for days until he could think of something, however tiny, that he could do to help. He would trudge door to door with leaflets that took hours to make in the days before home computers and printers; he would stand in the High Street – however bad the weather – and campaign against losing a tree or closing a leisure centre. It drove me crackers.
I can feel the rolling thunder of one of Leo’s meltdowns from across the room.
‘Where’s your book? Shall we carry on reading where we were yesterday? Remember the Turkish Delight that Edmund wants to eat?’
Leo doesn’t say anything but his hands tap worriedly against his thighs, a drumbeat working up to a crescendo.
In our old flat, walking away sometimes worked, but I don’t know this place well enough: I don’t know how safe the windows are, whether one might burst open if Leo barrelled into it. We are three floors up. I look at Gog and Magog silhouetted behind Leo, staring out towards the garden. They might challenge any incomers but they wouldn’t catch my son in full storm.
Leo is looking at his feet, a rumbling noise starting in his throat.
‘What’s the matter? What can I do to make this better?’ But this is the thing he won’t know: by the time his exasperation has reached this point, he will have forgotten what was at the root of it – if he ever knew.
‘I want to go to and see Curtis.’
‘Right, come on then.’ There is nothing I can do but give in.
*
Leo cheers up the second we leave the house and start across the lawns. Araminta is striding in front of the pond, her arms full of what
look like bulrushes. We are too close to her to avoid eye contact.
‘Gosh, do you do everything round here?’ I ask her, gesturing to the wispy stems.
‘There are volunteers who come and cut the grass, do most of the gardening in fact. These are for a table display in the hallway. We have a coach party in tomorrow.’
‘It’s a lot of work,’ I say and attempt a smile.
She doesn’t smile back but her voice is a little less cold. ‘In Colonel Hugo’s day there were six full-time gardeners.’ She looks up the field towards the trees in the distance. The grass has been cut in a wide stripe to encourage walkers but either side of it meadow grasses are waist high and dotted with yellow flowers.
‘I’m going to see Curtis, Mrs Minta,’ says Leo. ‘He said I can help him.’
‘That’s a very good idea, Leo. We always need help in the garden. But Curtis will have left, I think. The museum will close soon.’ She looks at her watch.
‘Ah, about that: I wondered how that works. Once it’s closed, I mean.’ I tell myself that there is no reason to be afraid of Araminta; after all, the lady in the shop likes her. I remind myself of parents at my school, angry and indignant people who I’d stood up to in the classroom in the face of all sorts of threats, threats I dismissed without breaking a sweat. ‘Are we allowed into the garden in the evenings?’
‘It isn’t really a case of being “allowed”,’ Araminta says. ‘Leo is the heir here, it’s more about what’s practical. The gardens are locked at the perimeter gates, although I will get you a key cut so you can come and go as you please, but we are already inside so there is no reason you shouldn’t enjoy the gardens after – or before – hours.’
Her use of the word ‘we’ is the main reason I feel uncomfortable about enjoying the gardens at all.
‘I see you’ve met Hippomenes and Atalanta,’ she says, directly to Leo and ignoring me. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’
‘They’re very . . . shiny.’ Leo pauses for a second over the adjective, trying to find the right one. Shiny is good, it’s exactly what they are. He seems to have forgotten about Curtis for the moment.
‘These two are from an ancient Greek story. Atalanta, that’s the lady, she decided she would only marry a man who could beat her in a running race.’
‘I can run really fast,’ says Leo.
Araminta smiles, it is a tight smile using muscles she lost control of a long time ago. ‘Hold on,’ she says and puts the bunch of bulrushes on the ground. Tiny flower fairies drift from their cottonwool tops and lift on the warm air. ‘Atalanta could run faster than any of the boys – and she knew it. She didn’t want to get married at all.’
‘I want to get married,’ Leo explains to her. ‘I had two girlfriends in London, but I didn’t want to marry them. They weren’t the right one.’
‘It’s good to be choosy,’ I say, forcing Araminta to attest to my continued presence with a small nod of her head.
‘Hippomenes, that’s the boy, couldn’t run faster than Atalanta either,’ she says. She is warming to her subject. ‘So he asked Aphrodite, the goddess of love, for some help and she gave him three golden apples.’
Araminta’s voice has completely changed, it has peaks and troughs and inflection. Gone is the hard sibilance she saves for me.
‘Hippomenes ran as fast as he could, but that wasn’t fast enough. But, as he ran, he threw the apples, shining and perfect, and made of pure – but delicious – gold. Atalanta stopped to pick them up and eat them. Because of that he managed to run past her – just. Atalanta was so impressed by his efforts that she fell in love with him and married him.’
‘What a fabulous story,’ I say, feeling that we may have reached some kind of common ground at last.
She shoots me a look. ‘It isn’t finished yet.’ Her hands brush down the front of her skirt, as if my words are irritating bits of grass that have stuck to her. ‘What happened next is the good bit,’ she says to Leo. ‘And why they’re here with us.’
Leo nods at her, his eyes wide with excitement.
‘Hippomenes forgot to say thank you to the goddess Aphrodite for her help. That was a terrible thing for the Greek gods – to not say thank you. As a punishment, and there are lots of versions of this bit – this is an ancient story and it wasn’t written down – but I’ll tell you our version . . .’ She squints into the sun and I can see the tiniest wrinkles in her powdered skin.
‘Aphrodite was so angry that she turned both of them into lions.’
‘Like me,’ Leo shouts. ‘Leo means lion.’ He claps his hands on his thighs with excitement.
‘Back in the olden days,’ Araminta continues as if he hasn’t spoken. ‘People believed that lions could only mate . . .’ She looks at me for confirmation of using the right word for Leo, and I nod: a tiny bridge between her and me. ‘ . . . Lions could only mate with leopards. Not each other. So what Aphrodite had done was punish them by making sure they could never be together.’
‘Never be married,’ Leo says, his voice quiet.
‘Exactly. But now we know they were wrong. Male lions and female lions may not look the same, but that doesn’t mean they’re different species. They’re exactly the same animal – they just look different.’
Leo lets out a loud, ‘Phew.’ He is clearly relieved that Hippomenes and Atalanta will mate after all.
‘And that’s why they belong here and why they – and the lion – are the emblems of Colonel Hugo’s collection. Your great grandfather put these statues here and he told all the people this story. Then he took the people into the museum and showed them the lion, the lioness, and the leopard. He explained the different species to people who couldn’t have found out otherwise.’
‘That’s very cool,’ Leo says. ‘I like lions.’
‘The small back door by the kitchen,’ Araminta says directly to me, ‘it isn’t linked to the museum alarm. You may use that – we call it the scullery door – at any time of the day or night. The key is with the set you got from the solicitor.’
She bends down and scoops up the bulrushes. ‘Oh, of course. You lost those.’
*
It is the evenings that are going to be the worst here. In the evenings, there is nothing to explore, nothing to discover. In the evenings, there is only the long empty silence of the past, rolling around the quiet of my bedroom.
I start to write to Simon but I’m not sure what to say. I want to tell him about the ledger in the chapel, about how worried I am that my entry would read ‘Cate Morris, redundant at fifty. Did very little after that.’ And part of me wants to tell him about Araminta, that her loneliness is so palpable and that I am starting to wonder if the prickle of those spines is just protection, evidence of how long she’s been alone, how hard it is to share with other people. Does she know that pain, whatever causes it, is easier to bear when you can hand half of it to someone else?
Sitting by myself makes the past swell up – it is a tide that returns whenever my mind is still. When Leo was ten, Simon was with us for his longest period. It was shortly before we lost our beautiful house: back when we had enough bedrooms for him to easily camp out with us, whenever his research projects would let him. Back when our lives didn’t involve strangers and bitter old women intent on picking at the scars left when my happiness was removed.
Simon spent a lot of time writing up research papers late into the night so that he could be available to take Leo to school or to talk to Richard while I went to work.
Richard had withdrawn, hidden inside himself like a hermit crab. We had a community nurse visiting, a social worker, everyone who could help tried so hard but it was never enough. Richard spoke a different language to us – for him, we were all part of the problem, every dialogue we had about him moved us against him, was meant to harm him.
Richard had been proud of our en suite bathroom. He built it himself from a chunk of our over-sized bedroom. There was no room for a window so his engineer’s mind had solved the problem by maki
ng one wall entirely out of glass bricks. It shone like a lantern, like a glowing heart in the corner of the room, whenever we went in it in the dark. We loved it.
I knew something was wrong when Richard wouldn’t answer – I’d gone through the house calling out, looking for him, and the white-tiled bathroom was the last place I looked.
He was standing at the sink, leaning in towards the mirror. At first, I thought the tiny speckles all over the porcelain of the basin were ants. Then I saw the blood, the speckles and drips, the scarlet beads everywhere across Richard’s face.
‘What are you doing?’ I screamed it, at the top of my voice. I couldn’t immediately work out what was going on but I knew Richard was hurting himself and that he must stop.
‘I don’t know.’ Richard’s voice was a sob. ‘I don’t know.’ He raised his hand to his face again and it made sense. In his fingers were my sharp blue tweezers, the ones that made my eyes water when I neatened my brows. The uniform ants across the basin were Richard’s beard hairs. He was methodically pulling out his stubble, follicle by follicle. His face looked like meat, the raw pinkness of it, the blurring of skin and blood.
I pulled the tweezers from his hand and he sank to the floor, his face pressed against the pedestal of the basin, his blood leaking and smearing everywhere on the white.
I screamed and screamed for Simon, my arms round Richard’s sunken body, trying to hold him to me, to the moment, to his life.
We went with Richard to the hospital, watched him bandaged and medicated, saw the pain leave his eyes when he was sedated into a merciful sleep. We left at the same time, Simon and I, and – together – collected Leo from his after-school club. For all the world like an odd little family when, really, the spine of our unit, the man who joined us all together, was lying in a hospital bed, unable to do anything more than face the wall and stare.
*
I have never revealed, to anyone, the manner in which Richard took his own life: and I never will. Apart from dedicated medical intervention, what kept my generous, humble, husband alive for longer than he might otherwise have been was his concern for the person who would find his body. I know because he told me: sometimes in those tiny discussions in the dark; often in an incongruous situation – one where we should be safe – pushing Leo on a swing in the park or basting a chicken hot from the oven. It was a strange way to live but it kept him from dying.
The Museum of Forgotten Memories Page 8