The Girl You Left Behind

notebooks? Her reporting notebooks?’
    Marianne Andrews looks up. ‘I did
     bring them back from Barcelona but I’m afraid I had to throw a lot out.
     They’d been eaten to nothing by termites. One of the shrunken heads too. Perils of
     a brief marriage in Florida. Although …’ She stands up, using her long arms
     for leverage. ‘You’ve made me think of something. I may still have a bunch
     of her old journals in the hall cupboards.’
    ‘Journals?’
    ‘Diaries. Whatever. Oh, I had a crazy
     idea that someone might want to write her biography one day. She did so many interesting
     things. Maybe one of my grandchildren. I’m almost sure there’s a box of her
     cuttings and somejournals out there. Let me get the key and
     we’ll go have a look.’
    Paul follows Marianne Andrews out into the
     communal hallway. Breathing laboriously, she leads him down two flights to where the
     stairs are no longer carpeted, and a tranche of bicycles lines the walls.
    ‘Our apartments are pretty
     small,’ Marianne Andrews says, waiting as Paul pulls open a heavy fire door,
     ‘so some of us rent spare caretaker’s cupboards. They’re like gold
     dust. Mr Chua next door offered me four thousand pounds to take over the lease for this
     one last year. Four thousand! I told him he’d have to treble it, and then
     some.’
    They come to a tall blue door. She checks
     through her ring of keys, muttering to herself until she finds the one she wants.
     ‘Here,’ she says, flicking a switch. Inside the dim light bulb reveals a
     long dark cupboard. One side is lined with metal garage shelves, and the floor is thick
     with cardboard boxes, piles of books, an old lamp. It smells of old newspapers and jars
     of beeswax.
    ‘I should really clear it all
     out.’ Marianne sighs, wrinkling her nose. ‘But somehow there’s always
     something more interesting to do.’
    ‘You want me to get anything
     down?’
    Marianne hugs herself. ‘You know what,
     honey? Would you mind very much if I left you to dig around? All the dust aggravates my
     asthma. There’s nothing there of any value. You just lock up and give me a shout
     if you find anything. Oh, and if you find a teal blue handbag with a gold clasp, bring
     that up. I’d love to know where it disappeared to.’
    Paul spends an hour in the cramped cupboard,
     movingboxes out into the dimly lit hallway when he suspects they
     might be useful, piling them up against the wall. There are newspapers dating back to
     1941, their pages yellowed and corners missing. The tiny windowless room is like a
     Tardis. Its contents pile up in the hallway as it empties – suitcases full of old maps,
     a globe, hatboxes, moth-eaten fur coats, another leathery shrunken head, grimacing at
     him with its four oversized teeth. He stacks them all against the wall, covering the
     head with a tapestry cushion cover. Dust coats his hands, settles into the creases of
     his face. There are magazines with New Look skirts, pictures of the Coronation,
     reel-to-reel tapes. He takes them out, placing them on the floor beside him. His clothes
     become grey with dirt, his eyes gritty. He finds a handful of notebooks, helpfully dated
     on the front covers: 1968, Nov. 1969, 1971. He reads about the plight of striking
     firemen in New Jersey, the trials of the President. Occasionally there are notes
     scrawled in the margins: ‘Dean! Dance Friday 7 p.m.’ or ‘Tell Mike
     that Frankie called’. There is nothing relevant to wartime, or to the
     painting.
    He works methodically through each box,
     checking between the leaves of every book, scanning the contents of every folder. He
     opens every box and crate, piling its contents up and then replacing them neatly. An old
     stereo, two boxes of old books, a hatbox of souvenirs. It is eleven o’clock,
     twelve o’clock, half past. He looks down at his watch, realizing it’s
     hopeless.
    Paul straightens, dusting his hands on his
     trousers, keen to escape the airless, cluttered space. He longs suddenly for the bare
     whiteness of Liv’s house, its clean lines, its airiness.
    He has emptied the whole thing. Wherever the
     truth is to be found, it’s not in this overstuffed cupboard just north of the A40.
     And then, near the back, he spies the strap of an old leather satchel, dried out and
     snapped in two, like a thin slice of beef jerky.
    He reaches under the shelving system and
     pulls at it.
    He sneezes twice, wipes his eyes, then lifts
     the