‘Actually, it is. As I have the box, and that’s the end of that.’
‘Do you want this to turn ugly? Do you want me to lawyer up? Because trust me, I will.’
‘Knock yourself out,’ I say, panicking that if he does this, I have no idea what his rights might be. As he pushes and I panic, the more defensive I feel. Should I burn them? Is there a destruction of property case he could then wield against me?
‘… Are you pretending that you and Susie got along?’
Fin’s face contorts into restrained contempt: ‘I didn’t say anything about us getting along. I said that’s irrelevant to you effectively thieving, because you’ve decided her things belong to you. They don’t.’
I could tell Fin he was filed in her phone under a stinging insult but, in the teeth of his loss, in his old family home, and with his diminished dad in the next room, I don’t have the stomach to be that unkind. Nevertheless, I’m absolutely sure if he had the same on me, he’d use it.
Mr Hart reappears, bearing a cup of tea for Fin, and the doorbell’s ringing again.
‘I’m ever so sorry,’ he says. ‘I meant to say, my cleaner’s due tonight. I hope you two lovebirds can entertain each other.’
The door closes again and we hear a female voice. She’s speaking in that pointedly upbeat, firm sort of way that suggests she’s well aware of Mr Hart’s challenges.
‘I fly back the day after the funeral,’ Fin says. ‘Return Susie’s things to me by then or expect a nasty letter.’
‘You don’t have any qualms about disrespecting her wishes, do you?’ I say.
‘You don’t have any qualms about using her speculative wishes to do whatever suits you.’
‘Suits me?’ I hiss. ‘You think I’m doing this because I’m enjoying it?’
‘I said it suits you. Only you know why that is.’
We blaze at each other, at an impasse, and I don’t want to have this fight when it might upset a newly bereaved dementia patient. (Are you still bereaved when you’re unaware you’re bereaved?)
I drain my tea, head to the downstairs loo for both urination and reconnaissance, and find it pristine.
As I leave, receiving a cheery farewell from Mr Hart, I see Fin has ducked into the front room to talk to the cleaner.
I wilt at leaving a vulnerable senior citizen with an enemy combatant in the house, but what else can I do?
17
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first thing I do when I get home is check the box is still there.
Do you want this to turn ugly? Do you want me to lawyer up? Because trust me, I will.
Finlay Hart isn’t just dislikeable, he’s frightening.
I hammer up the stairs, drag the box from under my bed, lift the lid and check everything’s still there. Perhaps I should move it from here? It’s a very standard hiding place and I feel like Finlay Hart is capable of breaking and entering. In a balaclava and bright white sneakers, clambering out of a window as he hears my key scraping in the lock, Roger mewing his confusion. These are febrile imaginings but I’m not able to be rational about this, or anything to do with Susie.
This second poke through the contents of the box is when I notice it. As I rearrange the bundles of letters, I see a hole has been ripped in one of the envelopes by the way Susie’s torn it open.
It reveals feminine handwriting that’s not Susie’s, and quite clearly, the words:
around Eve, she might
I stare and stare and drop it, dully, putting the lid back on. My heart is racing, my face suddenly warm. Me. There’s a letter that talks about me.
Around me, ‘she’s not’. I’m not, what?
The desire to read it is considerable, to the point of overwhelming. I’d been so firm and genuine in my conviction not to snoop, but this level of temptation is unexpected.
The angel on my shoulder says: your initial instinct was correct. Eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves. This is still a letter marked only to Susie, and as far as you know, she’d never discussed its contents with you. Do you really want to see something that might be jarring or upsetting, the day before her funeral?
The devil says: you didn’t ask to see this and now you have, it’ll scratch at you until you know what it is. It’s almost certainly nothing. And look at the date! It’s from ten years ago. You were in your early twenties. It’ll be trivia. Can you remember anything you might’ve written down about Susie a decade ago that would have great significance now? Well then!
I hypothesise outcomes. If it’s mindless bitching, meanness, disloyalty, suggesting Susie’s been misspeaking me to a third party, how will I feel? It will hurt, yes.
However, Susie and I were close enough that we were able to snap and complain to each other and about each other, and it meant nothing. The air between was always clear. It was part of what made us such formidably good mates, there wasn’t that residual build-up of unspoken gripe that seemed to end up clogging the pipes of lots of other female friendships.
(This, for example, describes Hester’s. She has an array of moral objections, jaded observations and historic grudges about everyone she’s supposed to count as close. If you meet a Hester pal, and say something like: ‘Verity’s good company, isn’t she, lots of anecdotes’ immediately she’ll fire back: ‘She’s SO exhausting, and FYI, none of that stuff about that tabloid editor she dated was true. She’s very colourful, if you know what I mean.’ No wonder she was short of bridesmaid ideas.)
Then I think, Eve, what the hell – what could possibly be anywhere near as bad as what you’ve already been through? What could touch THAT?
Open it, read some shit that was merely replying to Susie fretting that she didn’t know how to tell you that you didn’t suit a dress (that you can’t even remember owning, and she’s not here to jog your memory, and that will hurt just as much) and move on. Laugh, and get a stiff gin and tonic. Then commence internet searching whether Finlay Hart can legally compel you to hand these effects over.
I open the box again and pull the letter out from under the elastic band. I knew as soon as I saw my name I was going to read it.
I unfurl the paper, shaking out the pages and turning them first to check it’s to Susie – Dear Suz!! – and then to check who it’s from.
Becky. Hmmm. Becky was Susie’s closest friend at university, from her accountancy degree. I never liked her, which could sound like it was a consequence of simple rivalry, but it really wasn’t. Susie and I were so fixed as best-friends-who-also-had-other-friends, I never feared Becky taking my place. In fact, it was the other way round. I think Becky very much wanted me out of the picture, which is where some of our wariness of each other came from. She and Susie went travelling together in Europe after university and it was documented in a way that subtly yet clearly laid claim to her ‘gorgeous number one super bff’ in every caption. I found Becky a bit tiresome, fakey and super girly. She probably found me misanthropic, sweary and super not interesting.
These days Becky and her husband have a grand pile in Cheltenham and Becky’s husband is something important in a picture agency for news wires. When we’ve met on her Susie visits to Nottingham, she’s never wasted an opportunity to say: ‘Declan could get you an interview, you know, just say,’ regards journalism, as if it isn’t rude to offer professional help to someone who never said they needed it.