The Keeper of Lost Things(7)
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.