three

Autumn, 1968

I knew there wouldn’t be any sweets in the sweetie tin, but I opened it.

About a year after we’d moved into our own house in Totleigh Way, I was looking in Kathryn’s drawer for a bar of soap. She kept soap in her underwear drawer for the fresh smell.

But instead of soap I came across an old sweetie tin. On the outside, there was a picture of toffees in all kinds of wrapping.

Inside was a small pile of photos – there couldn’t have been more than twenty – held together with a piece of white lace. I slipped the lace off. It was soft and wide, with a blue bow on it, and it was threaded with elastic.

It wasn’t until afterwards that I realised this was a wedding garter, and that Kathryn hadn’t worn a garter on our wedding day.

The top photo was of Jack, smiling, on a motorbike, both feet firm and flat on the ground. I recognised Kathryn’s house behind him, the neat hedges that her father always kept so well. Jack was wearing wide trousers, with a sharp crease down each leg.

I let the photographs fall on the eiderdown.

‘What are you doing?’

I tried to scoop the photos back up into the box, but my fingers seemed to have jammed in one useless position.

‘Howard? What are you doing?’

Kathryn snatched at the photos and turned away from me. ‘You’re getting them in a muddle!’ She began to sort them, placing each one out on the bedspread so she could survey them. ‘What were you thinking?’

I stood behind her and watched her shuffle the photos. She was careful not to touch anything but their edges. ‘What a muddle,’ she kept saying.

She slipped the garter back around the photos. I had an idea then that it looked like one of those fancy ribbons people tie round the necks of poodles and other silly dogs.

I reached out and tried to draw her to me, but she kept her arms rigid at her sides, holding the photos in one hand.

‘Please don’t touch them again,’ she said. ‘They’re all I’ve got.’

For the next month, I stopped myself from opening that sweetie tin. Every Saturday when Kathryn was at the library and I was alone in the house, I made myself go into the garden and away from that drawer. I told myself that I must not invade her privacy, that to peek would be unforgivable, that anyone with an ounce of integrity would leave the photos to lie there in their ribbon, wrapped and safe and in the past, just where she left them.

But I kept seeing the image of Jack on the motorcycle, his feet so steady, his smile so wide. And I kept imagining what would be on the other prints: Kathryn and Jack smiling in all the local beauty spots, Hepton Lock, Whitley Clumps, Shotton Hill, Bradley Woods in the springtime, for the bluebells. I had to look to see if it was as perfect as I imagined it to be. To see where he’d taken her so I could avoid going there. To see how I could take better photographs than him.