A Habit of Dying (2 page)

Lots one to twenty-eight came and went in fewer minutes then, on twenty-nine, a hiatus as the lot could not be found. Nervous laughter all round as the item, a gold wedding ring from the glass cabinet, was located on a lower shelf An unremarkable piece that attracted little interest. And yet, like nearly every item in the sale, it had a history and a story to tell, had once been a treasured possession, only to now be reduced to anonymous insignificance. Lydia prepared herself to follow the bidding for the medals. The auctioneer invited a start at a hundred, Lydia’s limit, but for the moment she was unperturbed. It was quite normal for no one to join on the opening offer. It started at fifty and leapt past a hundred in three bids. She watched in amazement as several bidders took the price to two-fifty She could see one bidder sat close to her but the other was more camouflaged. The unseen buyer won the day at three hundred and twenty five. Lydia was astonished. She was sure that the medals were completely standard issue, unique only by the name engraved on them. She could not believe that such things would command so high a price without there being some other story behind them. In thinking that, she immediately resolved to research the person to whom they had been issued, regardless of the fact that their medals now belonged to someone else.

Judging there to be at least thirty minutes before she needed to be in her place, Lydia took herself back down the stairs and out of the building. She wanted a cup of tea and regretted leaving home so hurriedly, for she had planned to bring a flask Instead she was reduced to buying a cup from the burger van. It did not meet her needs, too hot to sip at once and too unpleasant when it had cooled sufficiently But she was in the fresh air and took the opportunity to
people watch, a favourite pastime. She would imagine whole lives based on a moment’s observations. The clothes, the age, the smile or lack of it, the hands, the walk - she fancied that they told her everything and there was never anyone to tell her differently. She checked her watch. Time to go back and see how the sale was going, see if there was any life in the room.

There was not. Lot seventy-one, a pair of binoculars, well used, went for five pounds, seventy-six, a box of assorted ephemera for two. Eighty-four was a selection of Second World War books and magazines that she had looked at carefully. They were interesting but not unusual and she had a copy of one of the books that her father had collected. Eighty-nine — A Quantity of Assorted Albums. This was her. Opening offer is twenty with no takers. Lydia keeps quiet and waits. Who’ll start at ten then? No takers. Come on, a fiver. Lydia waves her catalogue. Five, we have five do I see ten? Thank you, ten. Do I see fifteen? Lydia’s catalogue flutters again. Yes, fifteen. Twenty anywhere? Thank you, twenty. He looks at Lydia. Against you madam. Twenty-five? She nods. Twenty-five. Back to you sir, I’ll take two. Twenty-seven? Somewhere behind Lydia a man shakes his head. And he is probably right, thinks the successful bidder, twenty pounds should have been the top. To her surprise Lydia’s heart is thumping and, she mocks herself, all over twenty-five pounds plus commission for a box of old photo albums.

Placing the box on the table next to her desk, Lydia contemplated its dusty contents. It was tempting to immediately open them up and pore over them but she resisted. It was not her way. First, she preferred to savour the prospect, rehearsing the method and the rewards to be gained in the next few weeks, perhaps even months. Now the cost of her purchase seemed more than justified, a paltry sum for the hours of investigative pleasure that would ensue as she followed each hint and clue until she’d unearthed all that could be discovered of the people fixed in the sepia pictures. Four photograph albums, one postcard album with most of the postcards missing
and a couple of old ledgers. Of these seven remnants of forgotten lives, she had looked at only one volume during her flying visit of the day before. That alone contained the whole basis of her purchase, a photograph of a group of people in a garden, crucially dated as 1911. Vitally, right there beneath the print were written the names of the group. This she had taken to be the key to unlocking the door of discovery.

For the rest of the afternoon Lydia held the prospect and possibilities of the photos in her head, the project enlivening her before she had even begun. Finally, when the domestic routines of her day were complete, she settled at her desk and began the first stage. Each of the volumes would be inspected in turn, no notes taken, no bookmarks placed at interesting points, just a slow turning of the pages, an absorption of their contents, their feel, their texture. Even then Lydia would not turn first to the album that contained her presumed key, but rather she would take each from the box in turn and let herself sink into their contents. She had called it her immersion therapy before discovering that the phrase meant the exact opposite to what she understood by it. Nonetheless, it remained as the way that she described it to herself

The first album she took from the box was not an album at all but a ledger, completely devoid of any entries. An account book without accounts, every page still waiting for its first debit or credit to be entered in the proper boxes between the green feint denoting the columns. Its emptiness in some peculiar way saddened her. She guessed that it could have been printed at any time before around 1970. It was the spreadsheet of its day and its day had ruled for hundreds of years in one form or another. It had certainly ruled more elegantly, if rather less efficiently. Lydia put it aside, thinking that if nothing else she might one day find a use for it.

The next album that came to her hand was in a sorry state, its cheap paper-and-card covers splitting, the black pages barely held in place by the thin cord binding. But of the photographs it once contained, there was not one remaining. It had been used, it had been well used, its twenty or so pages had once held the faces of friends and family, often turned through and, in Lydia’s imagination
at least, turned through with love and affection. All that remained of this gallery were the carefully written captions beneath the spaces that once contained their subjects. A woman’s hand, Lydia supposed, in white ink on the black card, reminding the viewer of the dates and the places. Ethel, Violet, Rose and Albert; Tooting, Clapham and Chelsea; first birthday, VE Day, Christmas 1938, August 52. The life of a family in snapshot captions. There was little to inspire beyond a certain sadness, a certain nostalgia for people and places unknown. The white writing on black pages brought to mind her own family and her mother’s little collection of photo albums. A parent’s own childhood, forever alien and obscure to the child, forever other-worldly, forever showing a different person than the mother or father that the child knows. Lydia allowed herself a few moments on each page, seeing the words rather than reading them, sensing the thoughts of the author rather than struggling to find perfect meaning where none would be found.

Still she deferred the album that she had quickly flicked through, the album with names and places and photographs to match, the album she supposed to be the key to the ultimate satisfaction that awaited her. Preferring to savour that prospect, she chose instead a slimmer one, one she thought might be a little more modern, a little nearer her own time. Her guess proved correct. This third selection was indeed closer to her own childhood, a family album of smiling faces, of holidays and ice creams, of round faced children in plimsolls and airtex tops. There were a handful of colour pictures scattered on the last few pages, but mainly they were of a muddy black and white that spoke of cheap processing and Box Brownie imaging under an inexpert hand. A few had captions that gave a name or a year. Lydia let herself drift into the scenes, taste the ice cream that cost three pence when a threepenny bit was a single twelve-sided coin. She looked at the man posing proudly beside the shiny car, all chrome bumpers and white-walled tyres and wondered if his wife took the same pride in it. Their first car? Certainly the finest car that they had ever owned, something to mark them out from their friends and neighbours. And where to
go in their new found affluence? Why, to Hastings and to Margate to make sand-castles across the promenade from the Beach Hotel, sea-view rooms a little extra. Lydia spent maybe half an hour slowly absorbing the scenes and the family, touching their lives, sharing their moments, becoming familiar with Fred and Archie, with Susan and Paul and the enigmatic ‘self’. At length she put them all aside, knowing that they would be revisited and examined as clinically as she was able.

Choosing the second of the two ledgers next, at first glance it also appeared unused, but in fact it was neither empty nor a ledger. Whatever its original purpose, the pages had once been separated by very thin sheets of something which to Lydia seemed akin to the grease-proof paper that her mother might have used for cooking. These sheets were all that remained, since the pages that they separated had all been removed. So it was a book not only void of writing but also of pages and she was about to discard it when a final flick through took her to the last few sheets. It was not void of writing at all. In fact it had a lot writing in different styles and inks, covering perhaps twenty of the translucent pages. It was not what she expected or thought might be valuable in her original purpose, but true to her curiosity she began to read the last and most legible entry.

It has taken forever to get these first words out of my head onto this page in this old copy book. I have struggled so long and now they are written but none of the words are about what I need to write about. They are written now like this because a woman who I see once a week, an old woman, a volunteer at our local centre, has listened to me breaking into pieces over the last few weeks and the idea of writing out my demons has come up again today.

Lydia stopped, suddenly shocked and embarrassed that she found herself reading these private words. This was not for her eyes, this was nothing to do with her. It immediately and vividly reminded her of finding letters from her grandfather to her grandmother amongst her mother’s things. They had been written from Tokyo bay in the days after the end of the war in the Pacific. Eventually,
she had screwed up the courage to read them and found them so personal, full of love and yearning to be home, full of disgust for the scenes of war still fresh in his mind. Even though it was several years after her mother’s death and more since her grandparents’, she still saw herself as a thief, a peeping Tom. Now these raw words gave her that same sensation. She closed the book and put it back in the box.

As if needing an antidote to the unexpected intrusion into her own sensitivities, Lydia seized the prize from her collection, lay it squarely on her desk in front of her, hesitated a second to catch the last frisson of anticipation, then opened the collection of Edwardian photographs that had first attracted her. Unseeing faces from long ago looked out at her from the pages, fixed in aspic, forever sepia. Men and women caught at an instant in lives that had long been led, with all the superiority of age, the unknowing freshness of youth. Lydia turned the first leaf and let her eye settle to the photograph that had brought her to this point. A group of fifteen, casually arranged in the time-honoured way, adults seated with younger folk standing behind them, children on the ground. A family, certainly, most likely with grandparents seated in the middle with their children around them, their grandchildren at their feet. Lydia let her gaze fall slowly on each in turn, looking into the eyes, reaching out for the warmth of the summer day, listening for the sounds of an Edwardian summer. And beneath the photo, arranged in three lines to correspond to the three rows of faces, were written the names
Mr Melville, Self, Alice, James, Henry
and below
Beatrice, Isabella, Papa, Mama, Albert, Joseph
and finally the youngest
Phoebe, Albert M, Albert, Harriet.
In the same hand beneath the names was written
Longlands 1911.
Priceless stuff, thought Lydia, already letting her mind take her to a moment at some point in the future when a great great grandchild of Papa and Mama would be joyfully united with these Alberts and Phoebes and Josephs.

For maybe half an hour or more Lydia leafed through the album, soaking up the people, studying faces, noting the change in dress, the uniforms towards the end of the album, the same names repeated, children maturing through adolescence. Just as important
were the absences of some as time passed. But this was detail that would be noted and catalogued later, for now the only purpose was to get a feel for this family, slip under the skins of these people. For all her looking, for all her breathing in of the faces and lives, it came as a shock to realise suddenly that ’self and Alice must surely be twins. At this stage of her process she did not trouble herself with detail, with noting each name. Lydia looked through again to see if there was a photograph of just the two of them together, but there was not. The 1911 tableau was the only one in the album where they appeared together, stood side by side behind Papa and Mama. At length Lydia put the album aside, content with her progress. She guessed that it covered perhaps the ten years to 1920.