The Forgetting(31)

ANNA


LONDON

I wander through the gallery, past pale marble statues of naked figures and floor-to-ceiling windows, the soles of my trainers squeaking against the tiled floor. I walk slowly, trying to take everything in, waiting for something to spark a memory, but my mind is like a blank slab of clay, yet to be moulded into any recognisable shape. Stephen has told me that the sculpture gallery at the V&A is one of my favourite places in London and that I come here regularly. He felt sure it would ignite some memories, even went into work late so he could escort me here for opening time, has left me with typed, bullet-pointed instructions as to how to get home.

I gaze up at a statue of three nude women, their bodies entwined, recognise the name on the plaque – The Three Graces by Canova – but there is no recollection of ever having stood beneath it before.

Frustration pangs in my chest. It is a feeling that has punctuated each yawning hour of the past three days, since learning about the death of my parents. Three days in which I seem to have existed in multiple time frames, both real and imagined. I feel as though I am a collection of unrelated fragments, like broken glass that cannot fit together because the shards all come from different sources.

Over the past three days, Stephen has patiently answered my litany of questions about my mum and dad, about their accident, about a childhood I cannot recall. I have learnt that it was the night of my graduation ceremony when my parents, returning late from Manchester University to my childhood home in Gloucester, crashed into a tree on a dark, unlit B-road, both of them dead by the time a passer-by found the smoking crush of their car. I have learnt there was another car involved but that it left the scene, presumed to be culpable but never found. I have discovered that I am an only child, that my parents had me late in life, that I have no extended family. I am nobody’s daughter, nobody’s sister, nobody’s cousin, nobody’s niece. It is knowledge that has left me with a feeling of profound incompleteness: as though I am somehow unfinished, just a fraction of a whole.

Stephen has told me how we met soon after my parents’ death, how we were friends at first – for months, in fact – my grief too acute to contemplate anything more. How, as I gradually began to emerge from the fog of mourning, our relationship tentatively developed.

Stephen has told me everything I want to know. And yet the story feels distant, hazy, like a mirage in a desert. There are moments when I fear I might only ever exist in the slipstream of Stephen’s memories.

At the thought of Stephen, guilt needles my skin. All weekend he has been so unfailingly kind, so unremittingly patient. On Saturday afternoon we watched a concert on BBC iPlayer, a repeat of a Proms performance Stephen told me we’d seen at the Royal Albert Hall almost a decade ago. It was Tristan and Isolde by Wagner, one of our favourites he said, and as we rewatched it together, Stephen recalled a moment when I’d been moved to tears in the third act. I sensed Stephen watching me, waiting to see if it would provoke a similar response, and I searched deep within myself for why I had been so affected. But there was only a crushing sense of disappointment when nothing stirred, and I felt grateful to Stephen for not mentioning it again.

Yesterday he drove us to Hampstead Heath, held my hand as we walked up Parliament Hill and looked out over the city skyscape – the Shard, the Gherkin, St Paul’s Cathedral – all buildings I recognised but could not recall ever having viewed from that location before. Stephen told me it was one of our favourite walks, that we often went there on Sunday mornings before heading down the hill to the ponds and trudging up Fitzroy Park, into Highgate Village, for a pub lunch and a read of the weekend papers. He asked if I remembered going there on Christmas Day, stroking a brown cocker spaniel puppy that had skittered around my ankles, watching the bathers swimming in the ponds even as frost clung to the branches of trees. I had to shake my head, felt like a schoolchild who has been taught the same thing over and over but still cannot grasp it.

When we got home yesterday afternoon, I mentioned the photo albums in the loft, and Stephen suggested we wait a little while before tackling those. He said I often found it upsetting, looking at photos of my parents, and given everything I’d learnt that week, it might prove overwhelming.

I stop in front of another sculpture – a mother nursing her child – and am aware of something tightening across my chest. The air in the gallery feels oppressive suddenly and I know I need to escape this failed excursion.

Turning around, I hurry through the shop and towards the exit, frustration and disappointment jostling for prominence. I feel a quiet sense of determination that this is not how it will always be for me, this state of in-betweenness: stuck between a past I cannot remember and a future I dare not imagine. There must, I feel certain, be another way to jolt my memories out of hiding.





LIVVY


BRISTOL

Livvy’s laptop sat open on the sofa beside her, screen fully illuminated.

Six minutes to seven.

She felt like a job candidate, arriving early for her interview, eager to make a good impression. Her palms were clammy as she thought about the lost five thousand pounds, about the text from Imogen, about how on earth her mother-in-law had got hold of her mobile number. She was still convinced it was best not to tell Dominic about Imogen’s message. She suspected that a reaction from Dominic was precisely what Imogen wanted, and Livvy had no intention of playing into her mother-in-law’s hands.