The Last Letter from Your Lover

vacuum-cleaner receding down the corridor. Jennifer straightened her back, and lifted the lid from another box of shoes. She had been doing this for days, spring-cleaning in the depths of winter, the other rooms with Mrs Cordoza’s help. She had pulled out the contents of shelves and cupboards, examining, restacking, tidying with a fearsome efficiency, stamping herself on her belongings, imprinting her way of doing things on a house that still refused resolutely to feel like her own.
    It had started as a distraction, a way of not thinking too much about how she felt: that she was fulfilling a role everyone else seemed to have assigned to her. Now it had become a way of anchoring herself to this home, a way of finding out who she was, who she had been. She had uncovered letters, photographs, scrapbooks from her childhood that showed her as a scowling, pig-tailed child on a fat white pony. She deciphered the careful scrawl of her schooldays, the flippant jokes of her correspondence, and realised with relief that she could recall whole chunks of it. She had begun to calculate the gulf between what she had been, a buoyant, adored, perhaps even spoilt creature, and the woman she now inhabited.
    She knew almost everything it was possible to know about herself, but that didn’t ameliorate her ever-present sense of dislocation, of having been dropped into the wrong life.
    ‘Oh, darling, everyone feels like that.’ Yvonne had patted her shoulder sympathetically when Jennifer had broached this, after two martinis, the previous evening. ‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve woken up, gazed at the unadulterated loveliness that is my snoring, stinking, hung-over husband, and thought, How on earth did I end up here?’
    Jennifer had tried to laugh. No one wanted to hear her prattling on. She had no alternative but to get on with it. The day after the dinner party, anxious and upset, she had travelled alone to the hospital and asked to speak to Mr Hargreaves. He had ushered her into his office immediately – less a sign of conscientiousness, she suspected, than professional courtesy to the wife of an extremely wealthy customer. His response, while less flippant than Yvonne’s, had essentially told her the same thing. ‘A bump on the head can affect you in all sorts of ways,’ he said, stubbing out his cigarette. ‘Some people find it difficult to concentrate, others are tearful at inappropriate moments or find they’re angry for a long time. I’ve had gentlemen patients who became uncharacteristically violent. Depression is not an unusual reaction to what you’ve been through.’
    ‘It’s more than that, though, Mr Hargreaves. I really thought I’d feel more . . . myself by now.’
    ‘And you don’t feel yourself?’
    ‘Everything seems wrong. Misplaced.’ She gave a short, diffident laugh. ‘Sometimes I’ve thought I was going mad.’
    He nodded, as if he had heard this many times before. ‘Time really is a great healer, Jennifer. I know it’s a terrible cliché but it’s true. Don’t fret about conforming to some correct way of feeling. With head injuries there really are no precedents. You may well feel odd – dislocated, as you put it – for a time. In the meantime I’ll give you some tablets that will help. Do try not to dwell on matters.’
    He was already scribbling. She waited for a moment, accepted the prescription, then stood up to leave. Do try not to dwell on matters .
    An hour after she returned home, she had begun to sort out the house. She possessed a dressing room full of clothes. She had a walnut jewellery box that contained four good rings with gemstones, and a secondary box that contained a large amount of costume jewellery. She owned twelve hats, nine pairs of gloves and eighteen pairs of shoes, she noted, as she stacked the last box. She had written a short description at each end – low courts, claret , and evening, green silk . She had held each shoe, trying to leach from it some memory of a previous occasion. A couple of times a fleeting image had passed through her mind: her feet, clad in the green silk, descending from a taxi – to a theatre? – but they were frustratingly ephemeral, gone before she could fix them.
    Do try not to dwell on matters.
    She was just placing the last pair of shoes back in their box when she spied the paperback. It was a cheap historical romance, tucked between the tissue paper and the side of the box. She gazed at the cover, wondering why