I shrug off my disquiet and step forward to confront the contents of the topmost box. Books, mostly paperbacks. Nothing literary, mainly best sellers in the Jeffrey Archer vein, though I’m literally judging these by their covers, as I don’t recognize too many of the titles or authors. Who was the reader, though: my mother or father? My father, I decide—surely he would have taken a book on his many gemstone-buying trips, and I don’t remember my mother ever losing herself in a book. I was a voracious reader in my childhood; I’d go through four or five books a week. When did that tail off?

The second box is the same, and the third. But not the fourth. It holds books, but not novels: these are scrapbooks, A3 size, bought in bulk, judging from the same dated floral pattern that rambles across several of the covers. The top one is labeled May 1980–Dec 1980 in my mother’s handwriting: the spiky M is unmistakable. I open it at random, the rough paper rasping at my fingers, and find myself in my father’s arms. We’re outside; he’s sitting on a wooden chair in the sunshine with me in his lap, a relaxed smile on his face and a beer bottle in one hand. 1980: I must have been around four. I’m not smiling, and I’m barely looking at the camera, as if it caught me dismissing it as something of no consequence. BBQ at the Haldanes is scrawled beneath. The photos are stuck into the album by triangular corner stickers that are losing their stick; some are floating freely between the pages.

I turn the page and find my parents together in a selection of faded snaps, probably taken on the same day, though one is missing—three of the stickers have maintained their grip, but the photo is gone. In this sequence, my parents are lolling on a rug on the grass, my father resting back on his elbows. My mother has a perm and is wearing some kind of beaded bohemian blouse. She has her bare feet tucked sideways under her and a smile on her face; it’s unmistakably her, but no version I ever met.