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6. TWO YEARS EARLIER

I woke the morning after reading A Special Kind of Friend refreshed. I was eager to start work and had planned to look through my notes then type them up. I knew there was some paper in the dresser cupboard; everything seemed to end up either on or in our dresser. I could picture the sheaf of paper sitting beneath the games of Scrabble and backgammon, but when I tried to pull it out, it wouldn’t come. It was trapped in the back of the dresser. A panel had been pushed in and I pressed against it, trying to release the paper, but it wouldn’t budge. Something was stuck between the dresser and the wall. I put my hand around the back and touched something soft. It was an old handbag of Nancy’s, a cunning one, which had managed to evade the trip to the charity shop.

I sat back against the wall, stretching my legs in front of me with the handbag on my lap. It was black suede with two pearl drops clasped around each other. I dusted it down and looked inside. There was a set of keys to Jonathan’s flat, a lipstick, and a handkerchief still pressed in a square where it had been ironed. I took the top off the lipstick and sniffed it. It had lost its scent but kept its angled shape from the years it had stroked Nancy’s lips. I held the hanky to my nose, and its perfume conjured up memories of evenings at the theatre. What I hadn’t expected to find was the yellow envelope of photographs with KODAK in thick black lettering on the front. This was a precious find and I wanted to make an occasion of it.

I made myself some coffee and settled down on the sofa, anticipating a flood of happy memories. I assumed the pictures were holiday snaps. I think I even hoped there might be a few of the Martello tower, that finding the handbag was Nancy’s way of helping me on with my project. In a way it was, but not the one I had had in mind that morning.

My head, which had been so clear at the start of the day, felt as if the contents of someone else’s had been dumped into it. I could no longer tell which thoughts were mine and which were theirs, which ones were true and which were lies. My coffee had gone cold; the pictures were spread out on my lap. I had expected images I recognised, but I had never seen these pictures before.

She was looking straight into the camera. Flirting? I think so. Yes, she was flirting. They were colour photos. Some were taken on a beach. She was lying there, a smiling sweetheart on holiday in a red bikini. Her breasts were pushed up as if she was some sort of pin-up girl and she certainly looked as if she thought herself a very desirable woman. Confident. Yes, that’s what it was. Sexual confidence. Others were taken in a hotel room. They were shameless. She was shameless. But I couldn’t look away. I could not stop looking. I went through them again and again, tormenting myself, and the more I looked the angrier I became because the more I looked, the more I understood.

What chewed at my heart was that I knew who had taken these pictures. The pain came when I realised who was behind the camera. I knew that handsome face but I couldn’t find him. I looked and looked, but however many times I went through them, all I could see was his shadow, caught on the edge of the frame in one shot. I even went through the negatives, holding them up to the light in case there was one of him which hadn’t been developed. There were more negatives than prints and I hoped one of these might reveal him, but they were blurred, out of focus, useless.

How could Nancy have brought those photographs into our house? And then hidden them from me, allowing them to sit and fester in our home. They must have been there for years. Did she forget about them? Or did she take a risk, knowing that I might come across them one day? But it was too late. By the time I did she was dead. I would never be able to talk to her about them. She should have destroyed them. If she wasn’t going to tell me, then she should have destroyed them. She had left me to find them when I was a pathetic old man, long after the event, long after a time when I could have done anything about it.

One of the things I had most prized about Nancy was her honesty. How many times did she look through those pictures in private? And then hide them again? I imagined her waiting for me to go out and then looking through them and then hiding them when I came home. Every time I took something out of the dresser, every time we played Scrabble, she knew they were there and didn’t say a word. I had always trusted her, but now I worried about what else she might have hidden.

It is extraordinary how much strength anger gives one. I turned the house upside down searching for more secrets. I attacked our home as if it was the enemy. I went from room to room, ripping, spilling, tipping, making a god-awful mess, but I found nothing else. The whole experience left me with the sensation that I had reached down into a blocked drain and was groping around in the sewage trying to clear it. But there was nothing solid to get hold of. All I felt was soft filth, and it got into my skin and under my fingernails, and its stink invaded my nostrils, clinging to the hairs, soaking up into the tiny blood vessels and polluting my entire system.