The Keeper of Lost Things

by Ruth Hogan

  “Shoo! Shoo! Sit! Down!”

  Baby Jane kept coming.

  Halfway across the floor, Portia capitulated with an undignified retreat and an unladylike barrage of expletives.

  Bomber began gathering his things.

  “I’ll come with you if you want me to.”

  Eunice repeated her offer of help. He smiled gratefully but shook his head.

  “No, no. I’ll be fine. You stay here and look after Madam,” he said, reaching down to fondle Baby Jane’s ears while she gazed up at him adoringly.

  “At least we know now that it’s true,” he added with a mischievous grin.

  “What’s that? That Portia’s a complete waste of hot air and high heels?”

  He shook his head and gently lifted a blond paw in his hand.

  “Nobody puts Baby Jane in a corner!”

  Eunice hooted with laughter.

  “Get out of here, Patrick Swayze!”

  CHAPTER 23

  “Lost and Found by Anthony Peardew. I knew there was a copy somewhere in the house!”

  Laura came into the kitchen triumphantly waving a slim volume of short stories. Freddy looked up from the laptop he was hunched over on the kitchen table. He took the book from her and flicked through it.

  “Is it any good?”

  “It depends what you mean by good.”

  Laura sat down in the chair facing him.

  “It did very well. Apparently Anthony’s publisher at the time was very happy. He was a peculiar little man, I seem to remember. He came to the house once or twice. Used far too much hair spray.”

  “Too much!” Freddy expostulated. “I should think that any is too much. Unless you’re Liberace. Or a ballroom dancer.”

  “It’s called male grooming.” Laura smiled. “But I wouldn’t exactly call that your specialist subject,” she added, looking at the unruly mop of dark curls that crept over the collar of his shirt and the stubble that shaded the contours of his face.

  “No need,” he replied, winking at her. “I’m naturally handsome.”

  He was, Laura silently agreed. Oh God! She hoped it had been silent. But maybe she’d nodded. She could feel a telltale flush creeping up her neck. Bugger! Maybe he would just think it was her age. Double bugger! Maybe he would just think it was her age. Middle age. Ready for big knickers, hot flushes, and winceyette nighties. And she absolutely wasn’t. In fact, she was going on a date.

  “But did you think it was any good?”

  Freddy was speaking.

  “Sorry. Miles away. What was that?”

  Freddy waved the book at her.

  “Lost and Found—what did you think?”

  Laura sighed and spread her hands on the table in front of her.

  “I thought it was safe. It was beautifully written, as always, but the content had lost a little of his usual edge. It was a bit too ‘happy ever after’ for me. It was almost as though if he wrote enough happy endings for other people, he’d get one for himself.”

  “But it never came?”

  Laura smiled sadly. “Until now.”

  Fingers crossed.

  “Is that why he stopped writing?”

  Laura shook her head.

  “No. He wrote several volumes of these short stories, based on the things he found, I now assume. At first they were optimistic tales; congenial and commercial. Bruce the peculiar was delighted with them and, no doubt, the money they brought in. But over time the stories grew darker; the characters more ambivalent; flawed even. The happy endings gradually gave way to uncomfortable mysteries and unanswered questions. All this was before my time, of course, but when I eventually read them, I thought they were much better and they were certainly more like his earlier work; crediting his readers with both imagination and intelligence. Anthony told me that Bruce had been furious. He just wanted more of the ‘nice’ stories; literary lemonade. But Anthony had given him absinthe. Bruce refused to publish them and that was that.”

  “Didn’t Anthony look for another publisher?”

  “I don’t know. By the time I started working for him, he seemed to be writing them more for himself than for anyone else. Eventually he stopped giving me anything to type at all apart from the odd letter.”

  Laura picked up the book from the table and tenderly stroked its cover. She missed her old friend.

  “Maybe that’s what we should call the website—Lost and Found?”

  The website had been Freddy’s plan. At first Laura had been unsure. For so many years Anthony had resisted the intrusion of technology into his tranquil home, and to throw open the doors to the behemoth Internet and all its goblin relatives so soon after his death somehow felt like a violation. But Freddy convinced her.

  “The only thing Anthony asked you not to change was the rose garden. He left the house to you because he knew that you would do the right thing. It’s your home now but it came with a covenant on its coattails and Anthony trusted you to use whatever method you saw fit to get those things back to the people who are missing them.”

  The website would be a huge, virtual “lost property” department where people could browse the things that Anthony found and then reclaim items that belonged to them. They were still working on the details, including the name.

  “Lost and Found. Too boring.” Sunshine had wondered in from the study looking for biscuits.

  “Shall I make the lovely cup of tea?”

  Freddy rubbed his hands together in exaggerated delight.

  “I thought you’d never ask. I’m as dry as James Bond’s martini.”

  Sunshine filled the kettle and set it carefully on the hob.

  “How can the drink, which is wet because it’s the drink, be dry?”

  “That’s a good question, kiddo,” said Freddy, thinking, To which I’m buggered if I know the answer.

  Laura saved him.

  “How about the Kingdom of Lost Things?

  Sunshine wrinkled her nose in disapproval. “St. Anthony kept all the lost things safe. He was the keeper, and now you are. We should call it the Keeper of Lost Things.”

  “Brilliant!” said Freddy.

  “Where’s the biscuits?” said Sunshine.

  Laura arrived back from the hairdresser’s salon just as Freddy was leaving for the day.

  “You look different,” he said, almost accusingly. “Have you got a new jumper?”

  She could, quite cheerfully, have kicked him. Her jumper was several years old and bore a generous sprinkle of pilling to prove it. But she had just spent the best part of two hours and seventy quid having her hair cut and colored with what her stylist, Elise, had described as burnished copper lowlights. When she left the salon, tossing her glossy, chestnut mane like a frisky show pony, she had felt like a million dollars. Now, for some reason, she felt like she’d wasted her money.

  “I’ve just had my hair done,” she muttered through gritted teeth.

  “Oh, right. That must be it, then,” he said, rummaging through his rucksack for his car keys. Finding them, he gave her a quick grin and headed for the door.

  “I’ll be off, then. See you tomorrow.”

  The door closed behind him and Laura gave the bamboo umbrella stand a petulant kick, toppling its contents onto the floor. As she gathered up the scattered umbrellas and walking sticks, she told herself that her new hair wasn’t for Freddy’s benefit anyway, so it hardly mattered if he hadn’t noticed.

  Upstairs, Laura admired the new black dress hanging on the front of the wardrobe. It was elegant and tasteful but with a hint of “sexy,” exposing just the right ratio of legs to cleavage for a woman of her age, according to the saleswoman who had taken Laura’s credit card. Laura thought it was a bit tight and bloody expensive. She would have to eat only a little and be sure not to spill anything down the front of it.

  Her date was called Graham. He was Vince’s area manager and she had bumped into him in the car park of the Moon Is Missing after her lunch there. She had met him many times at dealer
ship Christmas dinners and numerous other social trials while she was married to Vince and he was married to Sandra. But now she wasn’t, and neither, quite recently, was he, and so he had asked her out. And fresh from meeting Felicity for the first time, she had thought, Why not? and said yes.

  But now she wasn’t so sure. As she wriggled into her dress and checked her hair yet again in the mirror, she was beginning to have doubts. According to Elise, whose salon chair doubled as a confessional for most of her clients, Laura was currently the favorite topic of conversation with the locals. In life, Anthony had attained the status of a minor celebrity on account of being a published author. In death, therefore, it automatically followed that his affairs should remain squarely, if a little unfairly, in the public domain. His public’s assessment of Laura apparently ranged from “a conniving coffin chaser” and “a gold-digging tart” to “a faithful friend and deserved beneficiary” and “former traditional Irish dancing national champion.”

  “But I think Mrs. Morrissey might have got you muddled up with someone else there,” Elise had to admit. “Well, she is nearly eighty-nine and only eats cabbage on a Thursday.”

  Perhaps, thought Laura, she shouldn’t be going out at all. People might think she was enjoying herself too soon after Anthony’s death. In her new dress, with her new hair, it might look as if she were flaunting her inheritance; dancing on his grave before the earth had a chance to settle. Except, of course, he’d been burned and scattered, so technically there wasn’t one. Well, it was too late now. She checked her watch. Graham would be almost there. He had always seemed like a nice man. A gentleman.

  “You’ll be fine,” she told herself. “It’s only dinner.”

  But by the time her taxi came, she wasn’t feeling hungry at all.

  Graham was indeed a gentleman. He was waiting for her at the restaurant with a champagne cocktail and a slightly nervous smile. He took her coat, kissed her cheek, and told her that she looked lovely. As Laura sipped her drink, she began to relax. Well, as much as she could within the bondage of her dress. Perhaps it was going to be fine after all. The food was delicious and Laura ate as much of it as she could manage to squeeze in while Graham told her about his marriage breakup—the spark just fizzled out; they were still friends but no longer lovers—and his new interest in Nordic walking—“a total-body version of walking with the aid of fiberglass poles.” Laura resisted the urge to make a joke about him not looking old enough to need one walking stick, let alone two, but she had to concede that he did look fit. Forty-six next birthday, his torso was happily unencumbered by middle-aged spread, and his shoulders were broad and hard-muscled beneath his well-pressed shirt.

  In the ladies’ room, Laura congratulated herself as she reapplied her lipstick.

  There’s certainly nothing wrong with my date, she thought. And he had beautiful table manners. She pressed her lips together and dropped her lipstick back into her bag.

  Graham insisted on accompanying Laura home in a taxi, and, relaxed by the wine and his easy company, Laura allowed her head to rest momentarily on his shoulder as she gave the driver directions to Padua. But she wasn’t going to invite him in for coffee; the drink or the euphemism. She knew that she shouldn’t let the gossip bother her, but she couldn’t help it. And the “tart” epithet was the slap that smarted most. She’d only slept with three men in her entire life, and one of them was Vince, so he didn’t count. She wasn’t proud of it; in fact she wished there had been more. Perhaps if she’d tried more men out, she might have found the right one for her. But not on a first date. And Graham was a gentleman. He wouldn’t expect it.

  Ten minutes later, a rather bewildered Graham was on his way home in the taxi. He hadn’t even got past the front porch, let alone first base. Laura was in the bathroom gagging and gargling with antiseptic mouthwash. As she spat the stinging liquid into the basin, she glimpsed her still-startled expression in the mirror. Teary mascara was already dribbling black scribbles down her cheeks and her lipstick was smudged into a grotesque clown’s mouth. She looked like a tart. She struggled furiously to escape from her dress, wrenching it over her head and viciously screwing it into a crumpled ball. In the kitchen, she flung it into the bin and yanked open the fridge door. The prosecco tasted rank after the mouthwash, but Laura persevered and gulped it down. She took the bottle through to the garden room and lit the fire in the grate, knocking over her glass and breaking it in the process.

  “Shit! Bugger! Bollocks! Stupid sodding glass!” she addressed the sharp fragments, which sparkled in the firelight. “Stay there broken, then. See if I care!”

  She wandered her way unsteadily back to the kitchen and found another glass. As she worked her way through the rest of the bottle, she stared into the flames wondering what the hell she’d been playing at.

  Horribly drunk, and exhausted by sobbing and hiccuping, Laura fell asleep on the sofa, her tear-swollen face buried in her beautiful, newly burnished hair.

  CHAPTER 24

  She slept for roughly ten hours, but when she woke, she looked like she’d been sleeping rough for several weeks. The thudding inside her head was soon echoed by a sharp tapping on the glass of the French windows. With considerable effort, Laura raised herself up just enough to see who it was that was making her already abominable headache even worse. Freddy. By the time she had struggled to a sitting position, he was standing over her, stony-faced, holding a mug of steaming black coffee. Laura clutched her dressing gown tightly around her aching body as Freddy registered the two wineglasses, the empty bottles, and Laura’s state of dishevelment.

  “I see your date went well.” His tone was just a little more clipped than usual.

  Laura took the coffee from him and muttered something unintelligible.

  “Sunshine said that you were going out with your boyfriend.”

  Laura sipped her coffee and shuddered.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” she rasped.

  Freddy raised his eyebrows at her.

  “Well, it looks as though things got pretty friendly to me.”

  Laura’s eyes filled with tears but her belly filled with anger.

  “What the hell’s it got to do with you anyway?” she snapped.

  Freddy shrugged. “You’re right. It’s none of my business.”

  He turned to go. “And thanks for the coffee, Fred,” he muttered.

  “Oh, bugger off!” Laura replied, just about under her breath.

  She took another sip from her mug. Why in God’s name had she told Sunshine about her date?

  Laura could feel the warning rush of saliva in her mouth. She knew she wouldn’t make it to the bathroom, but it would be rude not to try. Halfway across the parquet floor she was sick. Very sick. As she stood cold and miserable with vomit-splashed legs, and still clutching the mug of coffee, she was glad that, at least, she’d missed the Persian rug.

  An hour later, having cleared up the mess, been sick twice more, stood under the shower for ten minutes, and dragged on some clothes, Laura sat at the kitchen table nursing a cup of tea and staring at a piece of dry toast. Her date had ended in disaster. The memory of Graham’s tongue squirming lethargically in her mouth like the death throes of a particularly wet slug brought her out in cold sweat. Well, that and the aftermath of two bottles of fizz. How could she have been such a fool? The sound of the doorbell pierced her mournful reverie. Sunshine. Oh God, no. Please not today, she thought. There would be endless questions about last night and she just couldn’t face it. She hid in the pantry. Sunshine would eventually come round to the back door if her ringing was unanswered, and if Laura stayed where she was, slumped at the table, Sunshine would see her. The ringing continued; patient and persistent, and then the back door opened and Freddy walked in.

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  Laura frantically shushed him and beckoned him over to the pantry. Even such a slight activity caused her temples to throb. She held on to one of the shelves loaded with ancient jars of pickles to
steady herself.

  “God, you look rough,” said Freddy helpfully. Again Laura put her finger to her lips.

  “What?” He was beginning to lose his patience.

  Laura sighed.

  “Sunshine’s at the front door and I really can’t face her today. I know you probably think I’m being pathetic, but I just can’t cope with all her questions. Not today.”

  Freddy shook his head scornfully.

  “I don’t think it’s pathetic. I think it’s just plain mean. You’re a grown woman hiding in a cupboard from a young girl who thinks you’re great and loves your company, just because you’ve got a stonking and probably well-deserved hangover. At least have the guts to go and make your excuses to her face!”

  Freddy’s words stung like nettles on bare flesh, but before Laura could reply, the mood at the front door suddenly turned nasty.

  Sunshine had no idea who the blond woman was marching up the path, but she looked pretty cross.

  “Hello, I’m Sunshine. I’m the friend to Laura. Who are you?”

  The woman narrowed her eyes as she looked Sunshine up and down, trying to decide whether or not she was obliged to answer.

  “Is Freddo here?” she demanded.

  “Nope,” said Sunshine.

  “Are you sure? Because that’s his fucking Land Rover on the drive.”

  Sunshine watched with interest as the woman grew redder and crosser and began jabbing the doorbell with her immaculately manicured finger.

  “That’s Freddy’s fucking Land Rover,” Sunshine replied calmly.

  “So he is here, then, the arsing arsehole!” the woman spat.

  She jabbed at the doorbell again, and banged on the door with her fist.

  “She won’t answer,” said Sunshine. “She’s probably hiding.”

  Felicity stopped banging for a moment.

  “Who is?”

  “Laura.”

  “What, that funny housekeeping woman? Why in God’s name would she be hiding?”

  “From me,” Sunshine replied with a sad smile.

  “Well that bloody sodding shit of an arsehole Freddo better not be hiding from me!”