Reluctantly Home(47)

She had no idea which books were missing, but that was of no importance. Books could be replaced if necessary. It was what else had been sitting safe and sound next to them that was crucial.

Her heart was thumping so hard in her chest now that she could hear it in her ears. She stumbled to the shelf, hardly daring to look for fear of what she might see, but when she did, there they all were, lined up neatly in date order. Her diaries. Evelyn had been an inveterate diary-keeper since childhood. Growing up in a house where she didn’t fit in with the other occupants, her diary had provided a welcome escape from the torments of day-to-day life. Back then, she had kept them safely hidden away from her family, never quite trusting any of them not to read what she wrote and then mock her for it.

Of course, there had been no need to hide the diaries in recent years, and so she had decided to place them on the shelf. Even though she didn’t read them often, their mere presence reminded her of the life she had had before. And there they had sat, untouched, for over a decade. It had been too unbearably painful to open their covers and read the most intimate thoughts of the person she had been before, and yet it was impossible to throw them away. There was too much of herself woven into her words. Each diary recorded a part of her life before – growing up in this very house, then her escape to London and the wonderful years she spent there, and finally the miracle of living with her beautiful baby girl. Before . . . Evelyn had left them all untouched on the shelf.

But then gradually, as the years ticked by, she had begun to feel that she might be ready to open these little snapshots into her life and peek in. She had started tentatively with her own childhood and the years spent growing up with Peter and Joan. Her words reminded her of how little she had had in common with her family. She had always been different to them, and consequently, in her own mind at least, a little bit special, from the moment she was old enough to develop a sense of self.

Feeling emboldened, she had continued working through them. The London years had been fun to revisit. She had enjoyed rereading the tales of life in the shabby little flat on Kentish Town Road, and Brenda, and then dear Ted.

And then finally, she had turned to the volumes that catalogued her life with Scarlet. There were so few of those in comparison to the rest, and she had cherished every entry, lingering over them as you might a fine wine, savouring every sentence and the memories each one evoked. By the end, she had even been able to reread the last one. There had been no more diaries after 1983. What would have been the point?

But where was it? Evelyn could see at once that it wasn’t in its place. The 1983 volume was different to the others and so easy to spot. Rather than the plain business diaries she had favoured before, it had daisies on the cover because Scarlet had been with her when she’d bought it, and she had let her choose. But now it was nowhere to be seen. Her eyes flicked backward and forward as she became more and more desperate, but she couldn’t see it.

The space on the shelf that Nicholas must have cleared was to the right of her diaries. Surely, he wouldn’t have swept up the final one as he removed the old paperbacks? But it appeared he had. In a panic now, Evelyn hunted the floor for the box he might have used to pack the books into. It could still be here. He had said he would take them to the charity shop, but perhaps he hadn’t yet got round to it.

But there was no box. The box, the books and the missing diary were nowhere to be seen.

Evelyn felt sick. Of all the diaries, that one was the most precious to her. It couldn’t be gone. And yet it appeared that it was.

Evelyn threw herself out of the office and into her bedroom to retrieve her mobile phone. She had to ring Nicholas. Wherever he had taken that box to, he had to get it back.





28


Pip pushed open the heavy wooden door, stepped into the library and was immediately transported back in time. She hadn’t been aware that the library had a smell, but now it hit her so hard she wondered how she’d not noticed it before, given how much time she had spent in there as a girl. There was that familiar scent of old papers, but there were other smells as well – decades of beeswax rubbed into the shelves, the musty dampness that sea salt added to old buildings and a slightly unsavoury odour of unwashed humans. The combination flew Pip back to her childhood as fast as any chart hit of the time might have done.

She was delighted to see the old place didn’t look any different. There were a couple of extra tables in the centre of the room that now bore computers rather than the daily newspapers, but other than that it could still have been the 1990s.

Pip stood on the threshold and took in what she saw, feeling strangely nostalgic. She had been in far grander seats of learning than this one over the years, and yet there was something intangibly special about here. A lump formed in her throat, but she swallowed it back down. After the previous evening’s experience, she didn’t dare start crying again – who knew when she might stop?

She squared her shoulders and headed towards the wooden desk where the books had been stamped back in her day. Now it would all be done by the swipe of a smart card, but that would be less magical. There was nothing quite like the sound of that stamp.

A man was standing at the desk and for a moment Pip thought it might be Mr Lancaster, who had been the librarian when she was a girl, but when he looked up his face was unfamiliar.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked kindly.

‘Do you still keep microfiches of the Southwold Gazette here?’ she asked.