3

AND JUST HOLD ON a minute. She’s in the bed. And the wedding album is on the floor. It had slid off the bedcover. The photographs are scattered all over the duvet. OK. But who cares? It’s the wrong album.

That’s not the album she wants at all. Is it? No. And those are not the photographs she needs. Not tonight. That’s why she keeps waking. She’s been looking at the wrong pictures.

Firstly there was the leather photo album downstairs. And then there was the wedding album in the wardrobe. But there was a third option. Wasn’t there?

Slowly easing herself up off the bed, she moves around the room to the wardrobe. She replaces the photos in the back cover of the wedding album, and then folds the tissue paper around it before settling it back into the box. Her back is cold. She must be careful of that. The heating is not on and the night is freezing. She shouldn’t be standing around in her nightdress.

But where are the other photographs? Where is her life? She gets a sudden rush of panic. Where? It’s always the same. Like when she mislays her keys. The fear that someone has stolen them. It’s just that she can’t remember for a moment. Her mind goes away for a few seconds. And then it comes back. ‘Thank God,’ she whispers, when it returns. She closes the wardrobe. Unlocks her bedroom door. Shuffles out onto the landing.

Birdie is no fool. No. And there’s no danger of her falling down the stairs if she sticks to the rules. So once again she sits on the top step and then moves down one at a time. Feet first. Then bum. Until she’s at the bottom. That’s an achievement at this hour of the night.

Now where are they? Under the stairs? Yes. She flicks on the light. Pushes back the rack of coats. Peers in at the shelf behind the coats. The shoe polish. OK. Brushes. Yes. Studded golfing shoes. The top of the old wooden driver. A box of golf balls. What looks like a brush, except the teeth are as hard as nails. She stares at that; wonders what it’s for.

Hush Puppies! That’s what it’s for. Yes. Hush Puppies.

The Vet wore Hush Puppies in his retirement, because of the bunion.

And there they are at last. Tiny little photos, squashed into a red tin box with the word Oxo on the lid, and hidden at the back of the shelf. She reaches for the box. She knows before she opens it that they are inside. Her treasure.

She returns to the stairs and sits on the first step and hugs the little red tin. Now she can really open everything. Because everything is in the box.

On Friday afternoons, when Gussie was little and not yet a scholar with the nuns, he would sit on the back seat of Birdie’s Raleigh bicycle, and they would freewheel down the avenue and out the gate and farther down the hilly road towards town. In those days there were hardly any houses on the long mile stretch between home and the little stone bridge over the river, which marked the beginning of what they called ‘the main road’. Old Mrs McWeeney, a woman who wore black clothes and had white hair, lived in a musty drawing room in a grand two-storey nineteenth-century mansion with bay windows. The walls were built of grey slate stone that looked like the sky on a rainy day. And farther down the hill were the two Misses Bewleys, spinsters who lived in a more modest farmhouse without character.