Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [59]
This archiving of their lives was, and had always been, Mark’s department. Mum would never have been organized enough. She was absolute rubbish at stuff like that. Gloriously chaotic. Mark was ying to her yang. There was one album for every year of their marriage. They were large, navy blue albums, with the pictures neatly stuck down on real paper. Occasional pencil notations, of dates and places and names, led you through the years of their life together. Each album had its year embossed on the front in gold lettering, and they were, of course, in the right order on the shelves. Amanda knew Mum had envied Mark his organizational abilities, but she did it grudgingly, gently mocking him for his neatness, always threatening to go into the study and rearrange things in his absence. “That’ll get him.” Amanda was flicking through them now.
1993: Amanda wheeling Hannah’s pushchair along the pier in Brighton.
1995: All the girls standing by a hire car in France. She remembered that trip. She’d discovered her first period at a service station somewhere near Limoges.
1997: On a beach in Crete, Mark’s nose sunburned.
2000: Disney World, Hannah in Minnie ears, Amanda in the stance of a petulant teenager.
Mark left Hannah and came to sit beside her, and for a few minutes they looked at pictures together in silence. Then Amanda looked up.
“The pictures from before she met you, of me and Lisa and Jen, and my dad? Did you keep them?”
“Of course.” Mark looked at her, surprised and mildly disgruntled at the question. “I wouldn’t throw those away. There are loads. Not in albums, though. Do you want to see them?”
“Can I?”
“Course you can. They’re upstairs….”
They were in a large box, dusty at the top of a wardrobe in the guest room, stamped with a moving company’s logo. In, of course, spectacular disarray. Bloody hell, Mum, Amanda thought, as she sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the bed, and began sifting through them. There were people she didn’t recognize. Places she didn’t remember.
Mark leaned in the door frame, his arms folded. “I should do something with them, really. She always meant to sort them out….” His voice drifted away for a moment, but Amanda seemed to be barely aware that he was still with her. “Are you looking for something specific?”
“Clues. I’m looking for clues.” She didn’t look up and she didn’t elaborate. She said it so quietly that he wasn’t entirely sure whether she was answering his question or just talking to herself. After a minute or two, he left her to it. God knows it did strange things to you, missing her.
Amanda lifted a large handful of pictures out of the box and dropped them into her lap, flicking through them as they fell. They told a thousand stories, didn’t they? The pictures of your life. But they left a lot out, too.
She found a picture of Mum at her first wedding, young and slim, in a dress with a cinched waist and a big puffy skirt. She didn’t know who the bridesmaids were. Why had she never noticed? Never asked? Now, she supposed, she would never know. Lisa’s christening, Jennifer’s first birthday party. All the earliest pictures were special occasion shots. You didn’t use a camera all the time, in those days. Not like today, where parents spent years watching their children grow up through the lens of a camera or a video, capturing hours’ worth for posterity.
She didn’t really know what she was hoping to discover. He just disappeared. Donald. Suddenly. He was in the pictures, and then he wasn’t. There was no shot of him with a pregnant Barbara and two small girls around her. He wasn’t at her christening, he wasn’t at her first birthday party.
Amanda stared at her mother’s face in all the pictures. She couldn’t see what was going on behind her eyes, and her smile. She didn’t look any different after he’d gone. Why would she?
She thought about what Mark had said, about Mum moving further away from them as time passed. It was weird. You looked at a picture of her, and it just looked weird. Like when