The bureau in the corner of the sitting room was packed with old magazines, letters and scraps of paper. As Eve pulled out a bundle of postcards, she dislodged some receipts; they scattered across the carpet, brown with age, the printing so faded it was impossible to tell what most of them had been for.
This was going to be hard work.
‘Selling the flat will take ages,’ she’d said to Flora, partly to reassure her fretting mother that nothing would change immediately. ‘The sales process always drags on, even once you’ve found a buyer, so there’s plenty of time to sort things out.’
But the young couple Gav had found to buy the place, were now pushing to exchange. Their solicitor was being remarkably efficient at sending through the relevant paperwork; a bit too efficient, thought Eve, having found six emails from him when she got into work yesterday.
She’d been involved with hundreds of sales since she started working as an estate agent, in her twenties, and it was impressive to come across a lawyer who actually did what was promised, ahead of time. On the other hand, it was also a bit stressful. She knew she wasn’t at her most organised right now, but she had so much on that, every time his name popped up in her email inbox, she felt like crawling underneath her desk, shoving her fingers in her ears and humming loudly. Maybe she was turning into her mother, after all?
‘Looks like this one could beat the record,’ Gav had bellowed yesterday, as he stood beside her desk. The quickest deal the agency had ever put through had taken place in just under four weeks, from the Friday when the offer was accepted, to the Thursday when the new owners took possession of the keys. ‘My finest hour!’ Gav had shouted. ‘Johnsons out, Burgesses in. Wham, bam, removals van!’
Eve had no desire to turn the sale of Flora’s flat into some kind of race so she didn’t react to Gav’s comments. Given any encouragement at all, he’d have the completion schedule written up on a wall chart and would be standing beside her, with his red Sharpie at the ready, pestering her for hourly updates. But, whenever the sale went through, she would be glad to see the back of this place. The rooms were still full of Flora’s furniture, but they now felt strangely empty and unloved. Every time Eve came here, she flung open windows and propped open doors, but the place still smelt musty and slightly damp.
When her mother lived here, she had loved visiting. Now, she had come to dread the way the front door stuck when she pushed it across mounting piles of junk mail. Looking down the hall at the faded blue carpet and the patterned wallpaper, it all seemed so tatty and old-fashioned; there were cobwebs collecting in the high corners of the rooms and carcasses of woodlice were cluttering up windowsills which were well overdue a lick of paint.
But she had no choice but to keep coming back. The furniture must be advertised in the local paper or sent to auction; the pictures and mirrors had to come down off the walls; the books would need to be packed into boxes and delivered to the nearest branch of Oxfam.
In some ways, that was the easy bit: Flora’s lifetime of personal paraphernalia was tougher. Not just clothes and shoes, but also photographs, ornaments and toiletries. On the shelves in the sitting room were collections of unused crystal glasses, dusty figurines and blue and white willow pattern plates propped up on display stands. Costume jewellery spilled out of dishes on her dressing table in the bedroom and, when Eve unscrewed the lid on a pot of Nivea, the cream inside was brittle and caked around the edges. The bathroom cabinet was full of decades’ worth of yellowing bandages, out-of-date packets of pills and bottles of cough mixture so ancient their contents had solidified.
It was hard knowing where to start, so Eve allowed herself to pick just one thing to tackle on each visit. Today she was sorting out this old bureau. She sat back on her heels and began to put everything into piles, with magazines and yellowing newspapers going straight into a bin liner for recycling, along with the illegible receipts – why on earth had Flora even kept them?
She read a few of the messages on the postcards. They were from names that rang no bells – friends of her mother from decades ago, whom she probably hadn’t kept in touch with, and now wouldn’t even remember. It was tempting to bin them without showing Flora, but that wouldn’t be fair. These weren’t the remnants of Eve’s own life, it was her mother’s history she was holding in her hands.
‘You’ll regret it, if you don’t keep precious memories,’ Flora had always told Eve, when she was growing up. ‘It may just seem like a birthday card now, but when you look at it in a few years’ time, you’ll remember so much more than the card itself.’
Teenage Eve had sighed and rolled her eyes, dismissing her mother’s sentimentality. But middle-aged Eve now knew that to be true.
She scooped all the cards into a pile and put them to one side. A couple of weeks ago, she wouldn’t have considered sharing any of this with Flora, because her mother’s misery at having to leave the flat had been too intense, too raw. Eve would have worried that highlighting the memories would cause unnecessary upset.
But Flora finally seemed to be settling in at Three Elms. For one thing, the frequency of desperate phone calls had decreased. Today there had only been one, just after 9am, when Flora asked for a new face flannel. For the rest of the day, Eve’s mobile had remained silent. When she went in to the home last weekend, she’d been surprised to see some framed photographs on display – favourite ones Flora used to keep in the sitting room of her flat; Eve had put them into the ancient suitcase when they came to Three Elms, but Flora had refused to do anything with them when she first arrived. Now they were lined up in a semicircle on the chest of drawers.
‘Oh Mum, how lovely you’ve put those out,’ Eve had said. ‘It’s good to have something of your own in this room at last.’
‘Why wouldn’t I put them out?’ Flora had asked. ‘They’re my photos. You do say some silly things.’
Moving closer, Eve had realised one of the photographs was upside down. She turned it the right way up, without saying anything.
As she sifted through the contents of the bureau now, she came across more photographs – mostly sepia-tinged ones of long-dead ancestors she didn’t remember.
She caught her breath as she came across a photo of herself and Ben. This was a really early one, possibly taken only a couple of months after they’d met in a pub down by the harbour. She and her friend Hannah had gone out for a drink, and she could still remember the thrill of realising that the two good-looking blokes at the next table were glancing across at them. Jon had been the chatty one, moving his chair around and asking to join them. Ben had been quieter, more her type; the bare skin on her arm had tingled when his sleeve brushed over it as he reached for his drink. Jon and Hannah had gone on a handful of dates before going their separate ways, but she and Ben lasted the course. In less than a year, they were living together in a flat in Bedminster; another twelve months after that they had bought their house. Eve ran her finger across the photo: the two of them looked so damned happy.
She put it to one side and ploughed on. There were plenty of pictures of Flora, including a black and white shot of her as a young girl, posing in a professional photographer’s studio, and prints of her as a gawky but recognisable teenager. Eve wasn’t surprised there were no pictures of her parents’ wedding: Flora had always said none were taken.
‘It was small,’ she’d told her. ‘Hardly any guests, registry office. Times were hard. We didn’t have the money to spend on anything fancy.’
Eve had only ever seen two photographs of her father, both slightly faded, black and white prints. In one he was leaning his elbows on a gate, looking into the camera, his fringe flopping over his face, his mouth stretched into a wide smile. In the other he was with Flora, his arm draped carelessly around her shoulder, the two of them standing on a beach. This was the photo Flora had kept on her bedside table for as long as Eve could remember.
They had been a beautiful couple. Whenever Eve pictured her mother now, she thought of her as a little old lady, with white hair and skin so weathered that the lines on her face looked like a roadmap. But years ago, Flora had been a beauty, with opaque blue eyes and thick auburn hair that constantly slithered across her face like a curtain, however many times she tucked it behind her ears. She had gone through a stage of piling it up on top of her head, curled into a bun that looked effortlessly casual; when she saw pictures of Flora like that, Eve always thought she looked like Audrey Hepburn.
Now she picked up a snapshot of herself and her mother, their heads tilted towards each other, raising glasses to the camera. They both looked much younger, and it must have been taken years ago at some family celebration, but she couldn’t remember which one. There was a striking similarity between them – the shape of their noses, the nub of their chins, their slightly lopsided grins – and they both looked so happy.
The bureau was now almost empty; the bin liner bulging with ancient certificates, invoices and bills from utility companies.
‘Why did you keep all this crap, Mum?’ she muttered. ‘What was the point?’
There was an old shoebox tucked away at the back of the bottom shelf, and, dragging it out, she opened the lid. God, yet more Christmas cards and letters, the messages inside from people Eve couldn’t remember.
Would be super to see you in the New Year! Love Terry and Joan
Hope all’s well, yet another Christmas – where does the time go? Maureen
She looked through a few more cards – there were dozens of them on top of what looked like a pile of letters at the bottom. But she was exhausted and had done enough sorting for now. The prospect of a long soak in the bath and an early night was so much more enticing than another couple of hours going through the contents of the flat. She could come back at the weekend to carry on with all of this, and perhaps tackle the musty coats, shoes and handbags that had lain untouched for years at the back of the wardrobe.
Eve pushed the lid back onto the shoebox. She would take it home and look through it when she had more time, select a few cards to share with Flora.