The Keeper of Lost Things

by Ruth Hogan

  When she began working at Padua, Laura stopped writing. The short stories were, thankfully, no longer necessary to provide an income and her novel ended up in the recycling bin. She had lost all confidence to begin another. In her darkest moments, Laura wondered to what extent she had engineered her own failures. Had she become an habitual coward, afraid to climb in case she fell? At Padua with Anthony she didn’t have to think about it. The house was her emotional and physical fortress, and Anthony her shining knight.

  She poked with her fingertip at the skin forming on the surface of her hot chocolate as it cooled. Without Anthony and Padua she would be lost.

  CHAPTER 5

  Anthony swirled the gin and lime round in his glass and listened to the ice cubes tinkling in liquid the color of peridots. It was barely noon, but the cold alcohol woke what little fire was left in his veins, and he needed it now. He took a sip and then set the glass down on the table among the labeled bric-a-brac which he had taken from one of the drawers. He was saying good-bye to the things. He felt small in the gnarled oak carver, like a boy wearing his father’s overcoat, but aware as he was of his own diminution, he was not afraid. Because now, he had a plan.

  When he had started gathering lost things all those years ago, he hadn’t really had a plan. He just wanted to keep them safe in case one day they could be reunited with the people who had lost them. Often he didn’t know if what he had found was trash or treasure. But someone somewhere did. And then he had started writing again; weaving short stories around the things he found. Over the years he had filled his drawers and shelves with fragments of other people’s lives, and somehow they had helped to mend his—so cruelly shattered—and make it whole again. Not picture-perfect; of course not after what had happened. A life still scarred and cracked and misshapen but worth living nonetheless. A life with patches of blue sky amid the gray, like the patch of sky he now held in his hand. He had found it in the gutter of Copper Street twelve years ago according to its label. It was a single piece of a jigsaw puzzle; bright blue with a fleck of white on one edge. It was just a scrap of colored cardboard. Most people wouldn’t even have noticed it, and those who did would have dismissed it as rubbish. But Anthony knew that for someone, its loss could be incalculable. He turned the jigsaw piece over in the palm of his hand. Where did it belong?

  JIGSAW PUZZLE PIECE, BLUE WITH WHITE FLECK—

  Found in the gutter, Copper Street, 24th September . . .

  They had the wrong names. Maud was such a modest little mouse of a name, quite unlike the woman who owned it. To have called her strident would have been a compliment. And Gladys, so bright and cheery-sounding; it even had the word “glad” in it. But the poor woman it described seldom had any reason to be glad now. The sisters lived unhappily together in a neat terraced house in Copper Street. It had been their parents’ house and the place where they had both been born and brought up. Maud had entered the world as she had meant to carry on in it; loud, unattractive, and demanding attention. Her parents’ firstborn, they had indulged her until it was too late to salvage any sensitivity or selflessness in her character. She became and remained the only person of any significance in her world. Gladys was a quiet, contented baby, which was just as well as her mother could barely accommodate her basic needs while coping with the exhaustive demands of her four-year-old sister. When, at eighteen, Maud found a suitor almost as disagreeable as herself, the family breathed a collective and only very slightly guilty sigh of relief. Their engagement and marriage were enthusiastically encouraged, particularly when it transpired that Maud’s fiancé would have to relocate to Scotland for his business interests. After an expensive, showy wedding, chosen and then criticized by Maud and entirely paid for by her parents, she left to inflict herself upon an unsuspecting town in the far west of Scotland, and life at Copper Street became gentle contentment. Gladys and her parents lived quietly and happily. They ate fish and chips for supper on Fridays, and salmon sandwiches and fruit salad with tinned cream for Sunday tea. They went to the pictures every Thursday night and to Frinton for a week each summer. Sometimes Gladys went dancing at the Co-op with her friends. She bought a budgerigar, named him Cyril, and never married. It wasn’t her choice; simply a consequence of never being given the choice. She had found the right man for her, but unfortunately the right woman for him had turned out to be one of Gladys’s friends. Gladys had made her own bridesmaid dress and toasted their happiness with champagne and salty tears. She remained a friend to them both and became godmother to their two children.

  Maud and her husband had no children. “Bloody good job too,” her father remarked quietly to Cyril if the topic were ever raised.

  As her parents grew older and frailer, Gladys took care of them. She nursed them, fed and washed them, kept them comfortable and safe. Maud stayed in Scotland and sent the occasional useless gift. But when they eventually died, she found the funerals very upsetting. The contents of the Post Office Savings Account were divided equally between the two sisters, and in recognition of her devotion, her parents left their home to Gladys. But the will had a catastrophic codicil. It stated that if Maud should ever become homeless, she could live in the house in Copper Street until her circumstances improved. It had been kindly meant to make provision for a circumstance which her parents had believed to be most unlikely, and more easily included for that reason. But “most unlikely” is not impossible, and when Maud’s husband died he left her homeless, penniless, and speechless with rage. He had gambled away every asset they possessed, and rather than face Maud, he had then deliberately died.

  Maud returned to Copper Street an old-woman-shaped vessel of vitriol. The peaceful, happy life that Gladys enjoyed was destroyed the moment Maud arrived at the front door demanding money from her sister to pay the taxi driver. Untempered by any trace of gratitude, Maud invited misery as a permanent houseguest. With her accomplished repertoire of tiny tortures she tormented her sister at every turn. She put sugar in her tea, knowing full well that Gladys didn’t take it, overwatered the houseplants, and left a trail of mess and chaos in her wake. She refused to lift a finger to help with any of the chores, and sat all day growing fat and flatulent, eating fudge, doing jigsaw puzzles, and listening to the radio at full blast. Gladys’s friends stopped coming to the house and she went out as often as she dared. But her return was always met with a punishment; a precious ornament “accidentally” smashed or a favorite dress inexplicably burned with the iron. Maud even frightened away from the garden the birds that her sister had lovingly fed by leaving out scraps for the neighbor’s cat. Gladys could never disregard her parents’ wishes, and any attempts to reason or remonstrate with her sister were met with disdain or violence. To Gladys, Maud was a deathwatch beetle; an unwelcome parasite who had invaded her home and turned her happiness into dust. And she tapped. Just like a deathwatch beetle she tapped. Pudgy fingers tapping on the table, the arm of the chair, the edge of the sink. The tapping became the worst torture of all: incessant and invasive, it haunted Gladys day and night. Macbeth may have murdered sleep, but Maud murdered peace. That day she sat at the dining room table tapping as she contemplated the huge half-completed jigsaw puzzle in front of her. It was Constable’s The Hay Wain—a monstrous reproduction of one thousand pieces and the largest she had ever attempted. It was going to be her masterpiece. She squatted toadlike in front of the puzzle, a surplus of buttocks spilling over the edges of a chair groaning under her weight, and tapped.

  Gladys closed the front door quietly behind her and set off down Copper Street smiling as the wind whisked and twirled the crispy autumn leaves along the gutter. In her pocket her fingers felt around the edges of a small scrap of cardboard, machine cut, blue with a tiny fleck of white.

  Anthony’s fingers traced the edges of the jigsaw piece in the palm of his hand and he wondered whose life it had once been a tiny part of. Or perhaps not so tiny. Perhaps its loss had been disproportionately disastrous to its size, causing tears to flow, tempers to flare, or
hearts to break. So it had been with Anthony and the thing that he had lost so long ago. In the eyes of the world it was a gimcrack, small and worthless; but to Anthony it was precious beyond measure. Its loss was a daily torment tapping on his shoulder: a merciless reminder of the promise he had broken. The only promise that Therese had ever asked of him, and he had failed her. And so he had started to gather the things that other people lost. It was his only chance for atonement. It had worried him greatly that he had not found a way to reunite any of the things with their owners. Over the years he had tried; advertisements in the local press and newsletters, and even entries in the personal columns of the broadsheets, neither of which had produced any response. And now there was very little time left. But he hoped that he had at last found someone to take over: someone young enough and bright enough to have new ideas; someone who would find a way to return the lost things to where they belonged. He had seen his solicitor and made the necessary adjustments to his will. He leaned back into his chair and stretched, feeling the hard wooden struts press into his spine. High on its shelf, the biscuit tin gleamed, burnished by early-evening sun. He was so tired. He felt that he had overstayed his time, but had he done enough? Perhaps it was time for him to talk to Laura, to tell her that he was leaving. He dropped the jigsaw piece onto the table and took up his gin and lime. He had to tell her soon, before it was too late.

  CHAPTER 6

  Eunice

  JUNE 1974

  Eunice dropped the keys of the petty cash tin back into their rightful place and closed the drawer. Her drawer. In her desk. Eunice had worked for Bomber for a whole month now, and he had sent her out to buy iced buns for the three of them so that they could celebrate. The month had flown past with Eunice arriving earlier and leaving later each day, stretching her time in a place and with company that made her feel ignited with exciting possibilities. In those four short weeks she had learned that Bomber was a fair and generous boss, passionate about his job, his dog, and films. He was also her matinee idol. He had a habit of quoting lines from his favorite films and Eunice was beginning to follow suit. Her taste was more contemporary, but he was teaching her to appreciate some of Ealing Studios’ finest, and already she had piqued his interest sufficiently for him to see a couple of newer releases at the local cinema. They agreed that Kind Hearts and Coronets was utterly marvelous and Brief Encounter tragic; The Exorcist was shocking but the spinning head bit hilarious; The Wicker Man chilling, The Optimists of Nine Elms magical, and Don’t Look Now atmospheric and haunting, but with rather excessive exposure of Donald Sutherland’s naked buttocks. Eunice was even considering the purchase of a red duffle coat like the one worn by the dwarf in the film and doing some haunting of her own. And, of course, The Great Escape was perfection. Bomber said that the wonderful thing about books was that they were films that played inside your head. Eunice had also learned that Douglas liked to go for a little stroll at 11 A.M., particularly if it took him past the bakery which sold such delicious iced buns, and that he always ate the icing first and then the bun. And finally, she had learned that poisonous Portia was every bit as odious as a bowl of rotting offal.

  Bomber was in the kitchen making the tea and Douglas was chivvying him along by dribbling on his chestnut-colored Loake brogues in anticipation of an iced bun. From the window, Eunice watched the street below, today bustling with life, but only recently paralyzed by a death; pedestrians and traffic stopped in their tracks by a heart stopping forever before their very eyes. According to Mrs. Doyle in the bakery, Eunice had been there. But she hadn’t seen a thing. Mrs. Doyle recalled the exact date and time, and every detail of what had happened. As an ardent fan of police dramas on the television, she prided herself on being an excellent potential eyewitness should the occasion ever arise. Mrs. Doyle inspected unfamiliar customers carefully, committing to memory lazy eyes, thin mustaches, gold teeth, and left-sided partings, all of which she believed to be signs of a questionable moral character. And women with red shoes and green handbags were never to be trusted. The young woman who had died had neither. Dressed in a powder-blue summer coat with matching shoes and handbag, she had collapsed and died right there outside the bakery against a backdrop of Mrs. Doyle’s finest cakes and pastries. It had happened on the day of Eunice’s interview at 11:55 A.M. exactly. Mrs. Doyle was sure of the time because she had a batch of Bath buns in the oven which was due out at twelve.

  “They were burned to buggery hell,” Mrs. Doyle told Eunice. “I was too busy phoning the ambulance to remember the buns, but I don’t blame her. It wasn’t her fault that she went and dropped dead, poor love. The ambulance came quick enough, but she was already gone when it got here. Not a mark on her, mind you. Heart attack I ’spect. My Bert says it could have been an ‘annualism,’ but my money’s on a heart attack. Or a stroke.”

  Eunice could remember a crowd gathered and a distant siren, but that was all. She was sad to think that the best day of her life so far had been the last day of someone else’s, and all that had separated them had been a few feet of tarmac.

  “Tea up!”

  Bomber plonked the tray down on the table.

  “Shall I be mother?”

  Bomber poured the tea and dished out the iced buns. Douglas settled down with his bun gripped between his paws and set to work on the icing.

  “Now, my dear girl, tell me what you think of old Pontpool’s latest offering. Is it any good or shall we chuck it on the slippery slope?”

  It was Bomber’s name for the slush pile of rejected manuscripts. The scrap heap of stories invariably grew so high, so quickly, that it avalanched onto the floor before anyone transferred it to the bin. Percy Pontpool was an aspiring children’s author and Bomber had asked Eunice to look at his latest manuscript. Eunice chewed thoughtfully on her iced bun. She didn’t need any time to decide what she thought, but simply how honest to be. However amiable Bomber was, he was still her boss and she was still the new girl trying to deserve her place. Percy had written a book for little girls called Tracey Has Fun in the Kitchen. Tracey’s adventures included washing up with Daphne the dishmop, sweeping the floor with Betty the broom, cleaning the windows with Sparkle the sponge, and scrubbing the oven with Wendy the wad of wire wool. Sadly, he had missed the opportunity of having Tracey unblock the sink with Portia the plunger, which might have proved to be some small redemption. Tracey had about as much fun as a pony in a coalpit. Eunice had a horrible feeling that Percy would be working on a sequel called Howard Has Fun in the Shed, with Charlie the chisel, Freddy the fretsaw, and Dick the drill. It was a load of sexist codswallop. Eunice translated her thoughts into words.

  “I’m struggling to envisage an appropriate audience for it.”

  Bomber nearly choked on his bun. He took a swig of tea and rearranged his face into a suitably serious expression.

  “Now tell me what you really think.”

  Eunice sighed.

  “It’s a load of sexist codswallop.”

  “Quite right!” said Bomber as he snatched the offending manuscript from Eunice’s desk and hurled it through the air toward the corner where the slippery slope skulked. It belly flopped onto the pile with a dull thud. Douglas had finished his bun and was sniffing the air hopefully in case any crumbs remained on the plates of his friends.

  “What’s your sister’s book about?”

  Eunice had been dying to ask ever since her first day, but before Bomber could answer, the downstairs door buzzer sounded. Bomber leaped to his feet.

  “That’ll be the parents. They said they might pop in for a visit while they were up in town.”

  Eunice was eager to meet the couple who had produced such contradictory offspring and Godfrey and Grace were a double delight. Bomber was a perfect mix of their physical characteristics, with his father’s aquiline nose and generous mouth and his mother’s shrewd gray eyes and coloring. Godfrey was resplendent in salmon-pink jumbo corduroy trousers, teamed with a canary-yellow waistcoat, matching bow tie, and a rather batt
ered but still decent enough panama. Grace was wearing a sensible cotton frock with a print that might have looked more appropriate on a sofa, a straw hat with several large yellow flowers attached to the brim, and smart shoes with a small heel but comfortable for walking in. The brown leather handbag which was tucked firmly into the crook of her arm was large and sturdy enough to biff any would-be muggers, who Grace was convinced were lurking in every alley and doorway of the city, waiting to pounce on country folk like her and Godfrey.

  “This must be the new girl, then.” Grace pronounced it to rhyme with bell. “How do you do, my dear?”

  “Very pleased to meet you.”

  Eunice took the hand that was offered; soft but with a firm grip.

  Godfrey shook his head.

  “Good God, woman! That’s not the thing at all now with the young’uns.”

  He grabbed Eunice in both arms and squeezed her tight, almost lifting her feet from the floor, and then kissed her firmly on both cheeks. She felt the scratch of whiskers he’d missed when shaving and caught a hint of eau de cologne. Bomber rolled his eyes and grinned.

  “Pops, you’re shameless. Any excuse to kiss the girls.”

  Godfrey winked at Eunice.

  “Well, at my age you have to take any chance you can get. No offense intended.”

  Eunice returned his wink.

  “None taken.”

  Grace kissed her son affectionately on the cheek and then sat down purposefully to address him, waving away offers of tea and iced buns with a dismissive hand.

  “Now, I promised that I should ask, but I refuse to interfere . . .”