We took my car. On those rare occasions when other people drove me, my right foot hovered constantly over a phantom brake pedal; I had to grit my teeth to prevent myself from yelling ‘Watch out!’ or ‘The light’s changing!’ I watched other road-users in the rear-view mirror, and out of the corner of my eye, anticipating their every move. My fingers itched to change the gears or take hold of the wheel. I was not what you would call a relaxed passenger.
We crossed the river at Hammersmith, manoeuvred around its clogged-up roundabout and took the A40 into the West End, overtaking the slow weekenders in their family saloons. As we were cutting up through the backstreets around Regent’s Park we came upon two men loading a camel into what looked like a glorified horsebox. Or were they taking it out, delivering it to the zoo? It was hard to tell. The camel was single-humped and looked as if it had reached the end of its patience. It had planted its wide, padded front feet sturdily on the wooden ramp and wasn’t budging an inch one way or another. Just before we turned the corner into Gloucester Gate, I looked in the rear-view mirror and it was still there, as immobile as a statue.
We reached the house twenty minutes later, having toiled through the clogged traffic of Hampstead Village. I hadn’t been back since I’d walked out of it at the age of eighteen, with any illusions I’d had about the benevolence of the world lying in tatters around me and with only the hundred quid I’d raided from my mother’s study to sustain me until my university grant came through. ‘Give me a couple of minutes, will you?’ I asked Eve, and left her sitting in the car on the driveway.
The house regarded me furtively through its shuttered windows. If it recognized me it gave no sign. But I remembered everything about it: the pattern of the creeper as it wound up around the eaves and how it turned to crimson in the autumn, then became plague-spotted and finally a sickly yellow before littering the garden with its annual death. I remembered the rhododendrons whose contorted branches hid the dens of my youth, and the smooth patches on the slate path up to the front door that had been worn by the passage of thousands of feet. It was a Georgian house and its proportions pleased the eye of the adult who regarded it now. As a child, it had seemed vast to me; now it seemed substantial but hardly enormous, impressive but not ostentatious, as if it had somehow shrunk over the course of the intervening years. I looked at it steadily, and knew that I would sell it. I did not even want to go inside. Too many memories waited for me, and not just in the box in the attic.
Instead, I took the path that led around the side of the house to the back garden and gazed at its familiar landscape, hardly breathing, as if to move or make a sound might frighten away the delicate shades that lived there still. I felt that if I were to slip past the screening cover of the dense yew hedge I would surprise my six-year-old self, barefoot and sun-browned, my hair braided in untidy squaw-plaits, victoriously flourishing my latest find: a slow-worm or a toad unceremoniously disinterred from the rockery. Or that if I closed my eyes I would hear the whoops and howls of our little band as we chased one another between the flowerbeds with spud-guns. But the only sound I heard was the alarm cry of a blackbird high up in the cedar tree, liquid and shrill.
I walked on, into my past.
The pond where I had lain on my belly for hours on end, spying on the lazy meanderings of the ornamental carp through the murky depths, was now matted with weed and overgrown with convolvulus and meadow grass. There was the rockery, now little more than a random pile of stones overrun with ground ivy, nettles and dandelions. My father had been no gardener even in his youth; it was my mother who had set about keeping nature at bay. Armed with long-handled loppers, her gardening gauntlets and a pair of secateurs, she seemed like a medieval knight going out to do battle with a small but annoying dragon. Clearly no one had done anything to the garden in years. Wandering through the long grass, I half expected to find the remains of my old wigwam: tatters of faded yellow cloth flapping from skeletal poles like a becalmed Marie Celeste, my old rag-rug and toys still scattered where they had been suddenly and mysteriously abandoned. I walked over to the spot where it had stood all those years ago, but there was not even the tell-tale crispy brown circle it left on the lawn when dismantled and packed away for the winter. It might never have existed; and neither might that laughing, bright-eyed child.
Dark clouds had gathered overhead and as I stood there, remembering, it began to rain. Sticking my hands deep into my coat pockets, I trudged back to Eve.
‘Come on, then,’ I said. ‘Let’s go inside.’
I avoided the subject of the attic for as long as I could, though I kept catching Eve casting her eyes towards it every time we passed through the hall, with its winding baronial banister. By the end of three hours we had made a rough inventory of the contents of the house, concentrating on the furniture, the paintings and the more valuable artefacts my parents had collected from around the world. I could not bring myself to enter what had been my parents’ bedroom. My own room was along the corridor. Gingerly, I pushed open the door.
Everything was just as I had left it all those years ago, except that it was now rather dusty and faded. On the walls were posters for The Slits and Crass and The Rezillos, angry music for an angry girl; inside the wardrobe, a jumble of clothes that were probably back in fashion in the seedier streets around Camden. I closed the door. That was an era of my life I never wanted to return to, a chapter of a book I wished to leave closed for ever.
Back out in the corridor, I found that Eve had pulled the attic ladder down.
‘You know you’ve got to,’ she said gently.
I knew she was right. There was no avoiding it. Up I went.
I have heard of people with a morbid fear of attics. There are countless tales of ghosts and mad folk lurking in the hidden, dark spaces of our houses: all good psychological symbols for the Self and the Other, for the dark side of our personalities that we fear, for the irrational part of the world that we cannot understand and so feel threatened by. It was not the attic that made my hands shake on the ladder. I had no fear of ghosts, as such. I’d scared the kids at school half to death with stories of vengeful spirits and the walking dead. I had no idea where I got such stories from, except that as a child I seemed to be possessed of a ghoulish imagination and a strong stomach. When next door’s terrier was run over in the road and I saw its guts spilling out on to the tarmac like great fat white worms, I didn’t run away and cry but stood there, gripped by my own fascination. Who knew a dog’s body contained such things? I elaborated my next ghost story with these gruesome details and Katie Knox was sick in a rosebush. But since then I’d spent a very long time suppressing my overactive imagination, straitjacketing it into the world that accountants and other such grown-ups inhabit. My fear as I went up into that dark, cobwebby space was of giving the dead power over me in the form of things that would prey on my mind rather than on my body.
At the top of the ladder I reached for the flashlight that my father stowed to the right of the hatch; and there it was, in the same place it had always been. The memory of the last time I had been up here jangled at the edge of my consciousness and I pushed it away into the dark place it had come up from. I clicked the switch and a beam of light swept over the attic space. Boxes. Boxes everywhere.
What had I expected? A solitary box sitting in the middle of a great void, waiting just for me?
I climbed up over the edge and walked the boarded floor in search of the one with my name on it. I’ll say this for my father: he was organized. I supposed I had inherited that trait from him. I wondered, scanning the neat labelling and the clarity of his archiving, whether he had known he was going to die, and, if so, for how long? There were boxes of books, by subject; boxes of shoes; boxes of archaeological records; boxes of old papers.
At last I found it. I had probably passed it two or three times, as it was a lot smaller than I’d been expecting; perhaps I’d been influenced by Eve’s ghoulish suggestion about it containing the remains of my mother. I crouched down. Isabelle, it said on the top in my father’s striking italic scrawl. The paper on which this had been written was yellow with age, and the ink was faded. I wondered just how long the box had been sitting there. It had been carefully closed with packing tape so that I could not simply rip into it then and there, tip whatever it contained over the floor and walk away. I picked it up. It was light, but as it tilted something inside shifted position and fell to the other side of the box with a dull thud.
What on earth could have made a noise like that? I stared at the box as if it might contain a skull, or a withered hand. Oh, stop it, Iz, I told myself firmly, and tucked the thing under my arm. It was hard descending the ladder with one hand, but I managed it without mishap. Eve eyed the box greedily. ‘Go on, then, open it.’
I shook my head. ‘Not now. Not here.’