She reached into the rubbish and lifted a tin out of the potato peelings. She stared at it.
‘These are peaches, Dorothy,’ she said to an empty kitchen. ‘Peaches.’
She felt the tears before she even knew they had happened.
*
‘The problem, Dorothy, is that you think too much.’ Harold’s gaze never left the television screen. ‘It’s not healthy.’
Evening had tempered the sun, and a wash of gold folded across the living room. It drew the sideboard into a rich, dark brandy and buried itself in the pleats of the curtains.
Dorothy picked imaginary fluff from the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘It’s difficult not to think about it, Harold, under the circumstances.’
‘This is completely different. She’s a grown woman. Her and John have probably just had some kind of tiff and she’s cleared off for a bit to teach him a lesson.’
She looked over at her husband. The light from the window gave his face a faint blush of marzipan. ‘I only hope you’re right,’ she said.
‘Of course I’m right.’ His stare was still fastened to the television screen, and she watched his eyes flicker as the images changed.
It was Sale of the Century. She should have known better than to speak to Harold whilst he was occupied with Nicholas Parsons. It might have been best to try and fit the conversation into an advert break, but there were too many words and she couldn’t stop them climbing into her mouth.
‘The only thing is, I saw her. A few days before she disappeared.’ Dorothy cleared her throat, even though there was nothing to clear. ‘She was going into number eleven.’
Harold looked at her for the first time. ‘You never told me.’
‘You never asked,’ she said.
‘What was she doing going in there?’ He turned towards her, and his glasses fell from the arm of his chair. ‘What could they possibly have to say to each other?’
‘I have no idea, but it can’t be a coincidence, can it? She speaks to him, and then a few days later, she vanishes. He must have said something.’
Harold stared at the floor, and she waited for his fear to catch up with hers. In the corner, the television churned the laughter of strangers out into their living room.
‘What I don’t understand’, he said, ‘is how he could stay on the avenue, after everything that happened. He should have moved on.’
‘You can’t dictate to people where they live, Harold.’
‘He doesn’t belong here.’
‘He’s lived at number eleven all his life.’
‘But after what he did?’
‘He didn’t do anything.’ Dorothy looked at the screen to avoid Harold’s eyes. ‘They said so.’
‘I know what they said.’
She could hear him breathing. The wheeze of warm air moving through tired lungs. She waited. But he turned to the television and straightened his spine.
‘You’re just being hysterical, Dorothy. All that’s over and done with. It was ten years ago.’
‘Nine, actually,’ she said.
‘Nine, ten, what does it matter? It’s all in the past, except every time you start talking about it, it stops being in the past and starts being in the present again.’
She gathered the material of her skirt into folds and let them fall between her hands.
‘Would you stop fidgeting, woman.’
‘I can’t help myself,’ she said.
‘Well, go and do something productive. Go and have a bath.’
‘I had a bath this morning.’
‘Well, go and have another one,’ he said, ‘you’re putting me off the questions.’
‘What about saving water, Harold?’
But Harold didn’t reply. Instead of replying, he picked at his teeth. Dorothy could hear him. Even over Nicholas Parsons.
She smoothed down her hair and her skirt. She took a deep breath to suffocate her words, and then she stood up and walked from the room. Before she closed the door, she looked back.
He had turned away from the television, and was staring through the window – past the lace of the curtains, across the gardens and the pavements, to the front door of number eleven.
His glasses still lay at his feet.
*
Dorothy knew exactly where she’d hidden the tin.
Harold never went into the back bedroom. It was a holding place. A waiting room for all the things she no longer needed but couldn’t bear to lose. He said the thought of it gave him a headache. As the years turned, the room had grown. Now the past pushed into corners and reached to the ceiling. It stretched along the windowsill and touched the skirting boards, and it allowed Dorothy to hold it in her hands. Sometimes, remembering wasn’t enough. Sometimes, she needed to carry the past with her to be sure she was a part of it.
The room trapped summer within its walls. It held Dorothy in an airless museum of dust and paper, and she felt the sweat bleed into her hairline. The sound of the television crept through the floorboards, and she could picture Harold beneath her feet, answering questions and picking at his teeth.
The tin sat between a pile of blankets her mother had crocheted and some crockery left over from the caravan. She could see it from the doorway, as though it had waited for her, and she kneeled on the carpet and pulled it free. Around the edge were photographs of biscuits to tempt you inside, pink wafers and party rings and Jammie Dodgers, all joining cartoon hands and dancing with cartoon legs, and she held on to them as she lifted the lid away.
The first thing she saw was a raffle ticket from 1967 and a collection of safety pins. There were Harold’s tarnished cufflinks and a few escaped buttons, and the cutting about her mother’s funeral from the local paper.
Passed away peacefully, it said.
She hadn’t.
But beneath the pins and the grips and the buttons was what she had come for. Kodak envelopes, fattened with time. Harold didn’t believe in photographs. Mawkish, he called them. Dorothy didn’t know anyone else who used the word ‘mawkish’. There were very few pictures of Harold. There was an occasional elbow at a dinner table, or trouser leg on a lawn, and if anyone had managed to capture his face in the frame, he wore the expression of someone who had been the victim of trickery.
She searched through the packets. Most of the photographs were rescued from her mother’s house. People she didn’t know, held within white, serrated edges, sitting in gardens she didn’t recognize and rooms she had never visited. There were Georges and Florries, and lots of people called Bill. They had written their names on the back, perhaps hoping that, if their identity were known, they would somehow be better remembered.
There were few photographs of her own – an infrequent Christmas gathering, a meal with the Ladies’ Circle. A photograph of Whiskey fell to the carpet, and she felt her throat fill.
He had never come home.
Just get another cat, Harold had said.
It