‘I don’t know what we’re going to do,’ Elle mused. ‘It’s most definitely locked.’
Charlie took the bait and forgot that he was supposed to be sulking. ‘Maybe we could blow it up.’
They retreated to the living room and she switched on the electric fire. The flickering orange glow from the artificial flames gave the suggestion of warmth but it would take a while to chase away the early morning chill. They kept on their winter coats as they cuddled up on the sofa with the box perched on Elle’s knee. Charlie rested his head on her chest while his small fingers explored the contours of the lock as if he could magic it open.
Elle had no idea what the box contained or why her dad would have buried it but she was convinced she held the key. She had brought her dad’s watch with her and had already taken it from her bag without Charlie noticing. She pulled it from her pocket and let it dangle in front of them.
It had been a long and trying day and the air around her was becoming warm and heavy, weighing down on her eyelids as she kept her eyes on the key as it swayed from side to side. She was waiting for Charlie to realize what it was but his eyes were now closed and his steady breathing shallow. He had fallen asleep. Elle was on the verge of joining him but curiosity gave her the will to stay awake long enough to unlock the box and take a quick peek at the contents.
The box contained a handful of envelopes and scraps of paper, together with an assortment of coins and a few other trinkets including a faded red ribbon which she presumed had once bound the letters addressed to her dad. Imagining the outpourings of love they might contain, she sneaked the letters into her coat pocket before closing the box and leaving the remaining treasure trove for Charlie to discover in the morning.
Sleep brought with it dreams of her parents and the love letters they hadn’t wanted to share with the world but had been unable to destroy. White pages fluttered across Elle’s mind like the wings of a dove but the dream darkened as she tried to run away. Flapping wings chased after her but she wouldn’t turn around. She was too frightened to look. She didn’t want to see the intimate detail of a marriage she could never measure up to.
4
It was Rick who woke them up, grumbling about a banging headache and begging her to find him some painkillers. As she struggled into wakefulness, Charlie stirred too. He immediately grabbed hold of the metal box as Elle got up from the sofa and disappeared into the kitchen. She rooted out the pills and took a couple herself, sharing the glass of water she had poured for Rick.
‘You shouldn’t have stayed down here with Charlie. It won’t make it any easier getting him back into a routine. And look at the state of you. What have you been doing?’ Rick asked, grabbing hold of her hand to inspect her fingernails which were blackened with dried earth. He shook his head and to Elle’s relief didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I can’t leave you alone for five minutes. You really do look awful, darling. Are you sure you’re not taking on too much?’ Through bleary eyes he gave her a look of concern and pulled a tangle of curls away from her face.
His hand was cold and soothing on her forehead. She closed her eyes. ‘It was a long day yesterday,’ she conceded. Elle could feel the bundle of letters weighing down her coat pocket. She tried to recall that first flush of love when she had been the one collecting love tokens of their relationship.
Rick had been visiting a young niece in hospital when they first met. She was newly qualified and had been flattered and then overwhelmed by Rick’s attention. It had certainly won her parents over. Elle had thought it sweet of him to drive miles out of his way to pick her up from work even though the hospital was within easy walking distance from home, or to phone her dozens of times each day when she was out of his sight. It was only after they were married that she began to feel the bite of his possessiveness. He rarely accused her directly of encouraging attention from other men but found more subtle ways to question or challenge her motives for even the most innocent encounter. Very early on in their marriage he made it known that he was unhappy for her to continue with her career, but for a few years she had stood her ground. It was only when she became pregnant that she had given in and become a full-time housewife. Now, she had accepted her role in life and there was no doubt in her mind that becoming a mother had brought her a new sense of purpose and immense reward.
On the face of it, life was perfect but, inside, the love she felt for her husband was like a flickering fluorescent light. She still wanted to love him – in some ways felt obliged to respond to his devotion – and more than anything she wanted to emulate the example set by her parents, but the light flickered more off than on until eventually she had become used to the lightless, loveless marriage in which she existed. She willed the light to reappear as she stood in front of Rick and let him kiss her headache better but the tension in her jaw made her head ache all the more.
‘Dad, have we got any dynamite?’ Charlie piped up.
Rick checked his pockets before he answered. ‘Sorry, Charlie, I must have used my last stick last night.’
Charlie muttered and was about to leave but his dad stopped him. ‘Hold on, what have you got there?’ Rick’s bloodshot eyes widened at the sight of the mud smeared box in the little boy’s equally grubby hands.
‘It’s my buried treasure,’ Charlie replied looking up towards Elle for back up. ‘Isn’t it, Mum?’
‘You haven’t got your dad’s key here, have you?’
Elle put her hand in her pocket, the one that didn’t contain the letters, and pulled out the watch. She tried to concentrate on the look of excitement that lit up her son’s face rather than the glint in her husband’s eye as she handed it over.
Charlie rushed into the living room and sat down on the floor. His fingers didn’t have quite the dexterity to turn the key in the lock.
‘Here, give it to me,’ Rick said, reaching down to prise the box and key from his son. There was only the briefest tug of war. Rick was always going to win.
The box was unlocked in seconds and it took fractionally longer than that for Rick to take a full inventory of its contents. He practically flung it back at his son. ‘Nothing but a load of crap,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe the old goat had nothing to leave you, Elle.’ He was looking around at the contents of Harry and Anne O’Brien’s lives that had been splayed out across the room. He kicked a box and his toe caught the corner of the tattered cardboard box that she had found in the bureau. The force of his kick tore through the cardboard allowing the contents to spill out onto the floor. ‘It’s going to cost a small fortune to get this place cleared. There’s nothing here worth selling so it’ll all end in the tip.’
‘Hey, I’m keeping that box,’ Elle said.
Rick ignored the collection of scattered photos which included one of their wedding day and pulled a porcelain figurine from the box. ‘Seriously? It’s full of rubbish.’
Elle could feel her cheeks burning. The anger came out as a sob, much to her annoyance. ‘I don’t care if it is worthless. It’s not worthless to me. It’s all I have left.’
Charlie rushed over to his mum, wrapping his arms around her waist. ‘You’ve still got me,’ he told her.
His innocent assurances made her feel worse rather than better and she didn’t have the strength to fight her tears. She wanted to howl and the hand she put to her mouth barely held back her anguish. She was vaguely aware of Rick standing there, momentarily sideswiped by his wife’s outburst of emotion. Then he too hastened to her side. ‘You have both of us,’ he insisted. ‘And we’re going to be all the family you need.’
5
It was Monday morning before Elle had any time to herself again. With Rick’s unexpected arrival at her dad’s house, there had been no way to conceal exactly how much progress she had made and it was quickly decided, by Rick naturally, that they all deserved a day of rest. They had been home by lunchtime.
Elle would have to go back of course; the mountain of boxes and bags would need to be dropped off at various
charity shops, recycling centres or, as Rick was eager to point out, dumped into the nearest skip. She had brought just one box of keepsakes home with her in the end, having been browbeaten into accepting that boxes full of china would only be left to gather dust at the back of their garage and that was no way to remember her parents. She had insisted on keeping the tattered box of childhood mementos however and when she had the time, she and Charlie would create memory boxes of their own.
Being the diligent housewife and mother that Rick expected and demanded, she worked to a tight schedule and Monday was usually spent cleaning the house from top to bottom after a weekend of Rick and Charlie undoing all her hard work. The remainder of the week followed a similar routine of housework and shopping. She wasn’t one for coffee mornings; the other mums she had befriended over the years had come and gone – with the exception of Elle, they had all moved onwards and upwards. Some had found new challenges or returned to work, a few had discovered alternative social circles, whilst for others, divorce had seen them move on to pastures new. Elle told herself she was happy enough in her own company and it made life easier. For one thing, she didn’t have to face a cross-examination from Rick if he spotted something amiss, like an extra mug in the dishwasher.
After her visit home, the spacious Southport house felt more empty than usual as she rattled through her chores. With the beds stripped and the washing on, Elle poured herself a strong cup of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table. The letters she’d hidden in a box of cereal at the back of a kitchen cupboard were now piled up in front of her. The cloud of steam from her mug warmed her face as she sat staring at the handwritten address on the uppermost envelope. The washing machine was churning away and rain battered against the patio doors. She picked up the first letter, only to put it to one side before picking up and doing the same with the next and then the next until she had created a new pile slightly to the right of the first. She was prevaricating again.
Since discovering the hoard, Elle had come up with many reasons why she shouldn’t read the letters, the first being that her dad had gone to great lengths to conceal them. The dream about the doves had unsettled her too: she hadn’t wanted to read them and be left wanting in her own life. But a new, more disconcerting reason had presented itself as she sat looking at the unopened envelopes. They were all addressed to her dad, either at her grandparents’ address or care of the forces, but the letters weren’t from her mum. Even if the unfamiliar handwriting hadn’t been enough to convince her, then the 1960s date stamps gave little room for doubt. Her mum would have still been a young schoolgirl and hadn’t yet met her dad.
She took a gulp of coffee which was now lukewarm, but it wasn’t the caffeine entering her system that made her heart race. Having found the earliest dated envelope, she pulled out the letter and started to read.
By the time she unfolded the last letter her hand was trembling and her coffee cold. The possibility that her dad had another life before her mum wasn’t unthinkable, but another love? Another soul mate? Elle went back to the first letter and reread them all over again.
It was impossible to put together the whole picture when all she had were the letters to and not from her dad, but the passion and torment described in Corinne’s elegant script made the love she shared with Harry as tangible as the musty letters themselves.
Corinne had started writing to Harry when she left Liverpool to begin university life at Cambridge. At first it was difficult to imagine what the two had in common. Harry was the son of a docker and had been prepared for a life of hard physical graft while Corinne had evidently been nurtured to make the most of her intellect. But the letters in Elle’s possession were filled with such passion and judging by the constant references to Harry’s letters that passion had been reciprocated. The descriptions of longing and love made her feel like a peeping tom, made all the more uncomfortable because the desire was aimed at her own father.
At first, the letters the young couple shared had kept their separation bearable and their love alive, but three years on, the tone of the correspondence had changed to one of desperation. Corinne was at pains to reassure Harry that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. From what Elle could make out, her dad hadn’t thought himself good enough for her. Determined to better himself before taking on such a well-educated wife, he had decided to join the navy with hopes of becoming a naval officer, thereby earning his right to be by her side.
But Harry didn’t have Corinne’s privileged upbringing or education and he had been destined to fail. When he finally accepted that his ambitions would never be realized, he had broken off their unofficial engagement, as evidenced by a fraught letter from a heartbroken Corinne pleading for him to reconsider. More begging letters followed, apparently unanswered, and then in 1966 the inevitable happened. Corinne wrote to tell Harry that she was marrying someone else. And then the letters stopped.
Silence had descended in the kitchen. The aftermath of the rain trickled down the window in lazy droplets and the indicator on the washing machine flashed impatiently to be emptied. Elle paid her surroundings no heed; she was engrossed in a past in which she had played no part. It felt odd to discover that her dad’s heart had remained bruised and battered for almost ten years until he fell in love and married Anne in 1975. As she carefully stacked up the envelopes again, she wished that she had left them undisturbed after all. She added to the pile the tattered receipts and tickets that had been in the box too, keepsakes that she hadn’t even tried to decipher. She had invaded her dad’s privacy enough as it was.
Elle stood up and stretched, walked over to a cupboard and took out her sewing basket. She found a reel of thin red ribbon and was cutting a piece long enough to tie up the letters when her hand froze mid-action, the jaws of the scissors opened wide. Her hand swayed as the image of something she had just seen registered in her mind. It was a date stamped in faded blue ink. She rushed back to the table, scrambling for the ticket that had become imprinted on her memory. It was for the Empire Theatre to see some musical or other, but the show was of little importance. It was the date that concentrated her mind: 1984.
6
Elle tried telling herself that the keepsakes hidden away with the letters were a sweet and innocent remnant of her parents’ long and happy marriage. The half-dozen receipts and tickets were all dated between 1982 and 1985, and she would have been in primary school around that time. She reasoned that romantic outings for the two of them – the two being her mum and her dad – would have been worth remembering, wouldn’t they?
The theory was plausible but it didn’t put her mind at ease, not when they had been kept together with such outpourings of love from another woman. There were so many questions unanswered and no one left to answer them, but it didn’t stop her trying. She carefully inspected every item that remained in the rusted metal box. The assortment of old coins and key rings offered up no more clues, so she turned her attention to the box she had filled with mementos from her parents’ house but to no avail. She would have to continue the search elsewhere.
As luck would have it, Rick had arranged for her to meet someone from the clearance company at the house the next day. While she was there, she was determined to go through every scrap of paper she could find.
‘I’m afraid there isn’t much of a market these days for this kind of furniture,’ the rep from the clearance company was telling her as he opened the creaking wardrobe door. They were standing in her parents’ bedroom. The dark wood bedroom suite had been there for as long as Elle could remember.
‘I think it was a wedding present for my grandmother and then passed down through the family,’ Elle said, annoyed that yet another person had cast a glance over her family’s life and judged it worthless.
Tony scratched his head and gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘It’s hard coming into someone else’s home and having to put a value to it,’ he said, ‘but I have to set sentimentality to one side and decide what’s worth reselling and what
will be stripped down or disposed of. I’ll go away and work out the figures, but it looks as though the labour and disposal costs are going to be more than any income I can generate. You’ll have to warn your husband that there will be a charge.’
‘I was going to clear all the clutter myself,’ Elle offered as she led Tony back downstairs. ‘Would that keep the cost down?’
‘Not much to be honest, but every little helps. I’ll quote on the basis that all the bags of rubbish will be gone.’ He saw her wince. ‘And the boxes of smaller items too.’
As she was about to open the front door for Tony, her mobile began to ring.
‘Is he still there?’ Rick asked.
‘I’m just seeing him out now,’ Elle said. She was looking at Tony, who gave her another sympathetic smile. It was the third call from Rick while the rep had been there.
Rick waited on the phone long enough to be satisfied that the man had left.
‘Don’t you want to know what he said?’ she asked.
‘Of course, but not now, Elle,’ Rick said impatiently, as if she had been the one disturbing him. ‘I’ll call you later.’
Elle dropped the phone back into her pocket and sat down on the old sofa with the first couple of bin bags lined up and awaiting inspection. She stared at the threadbare armchair.
‘I know you wanted to keep your secrets, Dad,’ she began. ‘And I wish you had, but it’s not an option any more. I have to know what happened. Those letters have knocked my belief in everything I held sacred. Your marriage to Mum was solid; it was meant to be the blueprint for the rest of my life, for God’s sake.’ She let the last statement echo across the room and gulped back a sob. ‘Wasn’t it?’
Elle paused, waiting for an answer, but there were no sounds other than the hum from the electric heater glowing ominously in the fireplace.
The Keeper of Secrets Page 3