The Love of My Life(15)

I wonder if she’s slipping into one of her Times. It’s not like her to leave it open.

After a pause, I reach up for the folder, which clicks open.

John Keats looks worried, so I put on a jungle album from our Spotify favourites. Ghosts of My Life, it’s called, by someone called Rufige Kru.

The folder is all but empty.

There are a few recent things; her PhD; a thank you letter from a charity she’s been sending money to for ten years; the last paper driving licence counterpart Emma had before they became obsolete. A photo of Emma and her father outside an enormous naval ship, an old work ID of Emma’s. But nothing else.

The dog is still watching me.

This cupboard is seldom open, but I’ve seen this folder often enough. It’s always been overstuffed, just like mine – life is perplexingly full of vitally important papers that never actually get used. The files we use to store them expand and fatten to the point of bursting: they don’t slim down to almost nothing.

I pull out her work ID, still attached to a well-worn lanyard.

EMMA BIGELOW, it says. BIOLOGICAL AND MARINE SCIENCES. I smile at her photograph. Even with the required impassive expression, my wife looks at once subversive, beautiful and amused.

I stand back to get a good view of the cupboard. She must have moved the papers to a different shelf.

Only she hasn’t. Everything else is labelled and accounted for. I could open up all the lever arch files in front of me, but what would be the point? She’s not going to have hole-punched her birth certificate.

I go upstairs to look at the piles of stuff in our bedroom, but there’s no pile of papers there.

They haven’t been left in the mess on the landing.

They aren’t in the empty box she’s recently started using for haphazard document storage, perched halfway up the stairs.

I know the papers were there a few weeks ago, when we went to Paris to celebrate the end of Emma’s chemo. I was right next to her in the study when she got her passport out. And I remember grinning at the state of her folder, because it was even more full than mine.

I’d have noticed those papers, if she’d got them out: this is not a big house. I’d have had to shift them to put down a cup of tea, or to stop Ruby covering them with paint or glitter glue or bogies: there’s something about their absence that feels a little odd.

I don’t know it yet, but this moment is the moment I start spying on Emma.

I go down into the dining room; a sea of paper. It’s all Emma’s granny’s; she died years ago but Emma still hasn’t sorted through her things. There’s only about four square feet of floor space available in here; the rest is stacked knee-high.

I climb from one clear patch of floor to another, looking around me. There is no pile of Emma-related papers. It’s mostly musical scores and violin studies and yellowed bank statements that should have been thrown out decades ago. Most of the paperwork is stuffed into shopping bags from the eighties – white Sainbury’s with orange lettering; Tesco with thick blue stripes. Everything is covered in a substantial layer of dust.

. . . Except for the old Marks & Spencer’s bag in the corner, which I see when I climb over to the furthest floor clearing. It’s also from the eighties, when their bags were bright green with St Michael in gold cursive. And, although most of the bag is as dusty as the rest, there are several shiny gaps where the dust has been disturbed by someone’s fingers. In the last few days, by the looks of things.

I pause. This mission is beginning to transcend its fact-finding scope.

But this bag.

It’s in the furthest corner of the room, half-under Emma’s grandmother’s old desk. It’s concealed from the view of anyone standing in the doorway by a brass fireguard; I can only see it now because I’ve climbed so far in.

To put something in this bag, in this corner, would be to deliberately hide it. Why would Emma want to hide something?

I reach over and pick it up.

The very first thing I see is her master’s certificate from Plymouth University. The next paper is the letter she got from Berkshire Police when she was caught doing 40 mph in a 30 limit in Slough last year. Briefly, I smile. This letter made her furious – I’m surprised she kept it, but equally, I know how hard she finds it to throw anything away. She really is her grandmother’s granddaughter in that regard; hoarders, the pair of them.

Next is the leaving card her crew and colleagues from the BBC series sent her after she was mysteriously sacked. We will miss you so much! I will never look at a breakfast buffet in the same way! Really hope we can work together again soon!

Next is Ruby’s passport, then two of Emma’s – one of them current, the other expired, with the corner clipped off by the Passport Office.

I open the expired one, smiling in anticipation of an old photo of her I might not previously have seen, only to find the name and photo page ripped out. I flick through but there are no stamps. I return to the missing page. It’s been done in an amateur way, with tears still visible, as if perhaps someone was in a hurry.

I check the photo page of the other passport: this one is definitely hers. EMMA MERRY BIGELOW.

I stare at the expired one. Is it Emma’s? If so, why would she rip it up?

Slowly, tentatively, unease begins to snake through my veins. A large part of me is still quite sure there’s a sensible explanation for this hidden bag of things, but I’m struggling to imagine what it would be.