Chapter Fifty-Two

London, July 1973

Eve thought everyone was very kind in the hospital. There seemed to be a never-ending supply of tea in plastic beakers, and they brought her little meals on trays with lovely puddings like sponge and custard. On the morning she was due to leave, one of the nurses brushed her hair and smoothed Pond’s cold cream on her cheeks.

“We’re making you look nice for going home,” she said.

“That’s lovely. I must come here again,” Eve said.

“No offense, but I hope you don’t,” the nurse replied, and Eve laughed.

“Framfield,” Eve said. “I live in Framfield.” She was excited about seeing her house. All the flowers would be out in her garden.

Her husband collected her and they caught a taxi together, the black kind where you sit in the back seat and feel the vibrations of the engine and hear a kind of rattling, humming sound. It stopped in the wrong place, outside an apartment block, but she let her husband lead her into a lift and up to the third floor.

When he unlocked the door of an apartment, she walked in and recognized that she had been there before but she couldn’t remember whose apartment it was. That telephone table was familiar, but now it had some wilted sweet peas collapsed over the side of a vase. In the sitting room she recognized the royal blue sofa in front of the TV and the table by the window. She sat down, quite content to be there.

Her husband brought her a cup of coffee. He said their daughter, Patricia, was in the kitchen, putting some shopping in the refrigerator. She was staying for supper, he said, and had bought some nice fish for them.

“Lemon sole—your favorite,” he said.

Eve smiled and thanked him, although she couldn’t remember having had lemon sole before. Did it taste of lemon?

After a while she went to the bathroom and looked in the cabinet: it was full of shampoos and creams and talcum powder. She opened the talcum and sniffed its sweet powderiness; it reminded her of babies. Nice soft towels hung on the rail. You could walk into the shower, like the ones in the hospital, and there was a little stool for sitting down.

I should remember this, a voice in her head nagged. Something is wrong. But then she decided it didn’t particularly matter because it all seemed very nice.

When she went back to the sitting room, her husband asked if she wanted a sherry and she said, “Yes, please,” although she couldn’t remember what sherry tasted like.

“Are we married?” she asked him. The question just slipped out and straightaway she regretted it. She could tell from the look that flashed across his face that she’d hurt his feelings, although he was quick to turn it into a joke.

“I’m not the type to make a girl live in sin,” he quipped. “We got married on the eighth of October nineteen twenty-three, fifty years ago this year.”

“Course we did.” She nodded, sad to have upset him. She hated upsetting people but sometimes words came out of her mouth without her having thought about them properly first. She watched him pouring two glasses of sherry, careful to make the liquid the same level in each, and felt a rush of love for him.

“Would you like me to show you pictures of our wedding day?” he asked as he handed her a glass.

“I’d love that,” she said. She sipped the sherry and found it was delicious.

He went out into the hall and when he came back he was holding an album. He sat on the sofa beside her and opened to the first page. It showed a photograph of a bridal couple but they looked funny. The top of the lady’s head was only just level with the man’s shoulder. The height difference was comic. She chuckled.

“That’s us, Pipsqueak,” he said, and she touched the picture with a finger. The girl looked nothing like the face she saw in the mirror but she recognized it was her all the same. She had dark wavy hair cut in a bob shape, and she was quite pretty, with owl eyes set in a round face, but she was not smiling. She looked very serious.

“You wore an ivory chanteuse dress,” he said, “and your train was trimmed with old Brussels lace. That was your ‘something old.’ Look how long it was!”

Eve turned to her husband, then back to the photo, and she could see the similarities between him and the man pictured. He already had receding hair in the photograph, and that high forehead and his trim moustache were almost exactly the same. The only difference was that his hair was now gray instead of dark.

“Your bouquet was made of orange blossoms and they had the most glorious scent,” he said. Suddenly Eve could smell it. It was so strong she looked around to see if there were flowers in the room, but there weren’t. They hadn’t brought home the flowers she had in the hospital because Patricia said it was bad luck.

Brograve turned another page and began to name their wedding guests: lots of names, lots of faces, and she didn’t remember any of them. Didn’t matter. They were probably dead. She was glad to see she’d been popular once, although it made her melancholy that she wasn’t now.

“That’s your brother, Porchy,” he said. She thought she recognized him. “And there’s Howard Carter.”

Eve remembered Howard. “He found Tutankhamun,” she said. “And then there was a curse.”

“No.” Brograve smiled and shook his head. “There was no curse. That was just a fairy story.”

“Really?” She was sure there had been a curse. That’s what had caused her to lose her memories.

“Far from being cursed, we’ve been very lucky, you and I,” he said. “We have each other, as well as a beautiful daughter and two dashing grandsons. We have a comfortable home; and we’ve had lots of foreign holidays. Most people aren’t as lucky as us.”

“Why were we lucky?” she asked, and he kissed her on the lips before he replied.

“Because of your sunny personality. I was in the glooms when we met and you brought me the gift of happiness. You still do.”

“You’re very welcome,” she said, and kissed him back, but it made her feel sad that she kept getting things wrong. A wave of emotion brought tears to her eyes.

“Don’t cry,” he said in a soothing voice. “Everything’s fine. You had a funny turn but you’ll soon be right as rain.”

She couldn’t help it; the tears rolled down her cheeks. Her husband took out a handkerchief and dabbed at them.

“I know how to cheer you up,” he said. “Would you like me to sing the national anthem?”

“Yes, please,” she said, although it seemed an odd thing to do.

“God save our gracious queen,” he began, and Eve giggled. He had a terrible voice, singing it all on the same flat note. Then she stopped abruptly, hoping he wouldn’t be upset that she was laughing at him.

“Oh Lord our God arise, scatter our enemies,” he continued.

Her daughter came into the room saying that dinner was ready and she started laughing too. It must be a joke. Eve laughed even louder than before, glad they were all laughing at the same thing.