The picture album was kept on the bookshelf in the drawing room. Only my aunt called it the drawing room; my uncle, a tired-looking man with prematurely grey hair rolled his eyes every time she did. I asked him once about it, when he was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of milkless tea.
“Ronnie,” he said, for my aunt’s name was Veronica and forbidden to me, “likes to… see the best in things, shall we say. Why not call it a drawing room? If the house had more than five rooms and a lean-to then we might have call to need another name of it, mightn’t we?”
I would get the picture album down and turn the pages of it when no-one else was around. That usually meant the mornings of the weekends, when my aunt refused to get up before 10 and my uncle, who got up before dawn every weekday, also took the opportunity to sleep a little longer. In the silence of the house and the slanting rays of pale sunlight that crept past the branches of the trees in the garden and through the dusty glass of the bay window I would get the album down and run my hands over it’s fake leather cover. It felt rough and plasticky and it crackled when I opened it. The pages were filled with small square photographs, some in colour but most in black and white, each tucked into a pocket of yellowing plastic. The pages were faintly sticky and I had to turn each page carefully to pull the plastic envelopes apart with another crackle.
I didn’t know anyone in the pictures for the first eight or nine pages. They were young people who gradually got older as I turned the pages and studied each scene. Initially there were six of them, three men and three women, who were playing croquet or sitting at a table and eating or drinking. After two pages though the pictures showed only two of them, and I guessed that they had got married. Then a baby appeared in the pictures, and for a page there were only photographs of the baby. As the baby got older the pictures started showing all three of them more, and then the parents disappeared and the baby, now a young woman, started appearing with people I took to be her friends. Soon enough those pictures became just her and a young man, and I recognised them as my mother and father.
The tenth page was where I spent most of my time. The first two picture envelopes there were empty and there was no indication as to why the pictures were missing. Then I appeared in the third picture, dressed in baby clothes and not-really-smiling at the camera.
The twelfth page was where the pictures stopped altogether. There was a cutting from a newspaper, fragile and yellowing and I avoided opening it up or touching it in case it fell apart. In three paragraphs my parents’s death in a car accident were recorded as though it were a shop opening or a minor social event. The first time I read it hot tears fell from my eyes and a tight sensation knotted my stomach. I had dim memories of coming to visit my aunt and uncle and waking up in the morning, puzzled that I was still in their house, and then my uncle sitting me at the table with him and gently explaining that my parents needed me to stay with him and my aunt for a little longer.
A little longer became a lot longer and I’m sure at some point they explained to me that my parents were dead; probably around the time they changed my school to one closer to where they lived, but by then I’d found the newspaper cutting and read about it for myself. I’m not sure though; I’m not sure at all that my aunt thinks I’m old enough even now to know what happened to my parents.
I set the album back on the shelf on Sunday morning, pushing it back between one of Jane Austen’s monstrosities and a hard-cover book on gardening. The album made a faint squeak and I pretended to myself that it was a small noise of satisfaction to be back in its place. I turned around to leave the drawing room, closing the door tightly behind me as though I’d never been there, and there was my uncle standing in the doorway. Now it was my turn to squeak.
“Don’t let Ronnie know you’ve been in here,” he said and left quietly.
I tugged the drawing room door closed, making sure it looked just like it did when I’d opened it to come in and hurried into the kitchen to find him. He was there alone, still looking tired even though he’d only just got up. He was stood at the stove, with his back to me, setting the kettle on a burner and lighting the gas.
“Uncle?” I said. My voice quivered just a little and I felt a shiver run down my spine. My aunt was quick to admonish, to caution and to criticise but she left actual punishments to my uncle. He was the one who would send me to my room, or smack me — a single slap to the back of my legs that would sting for thirty seconds. He was always restrained, but the implication was that he didn’t have to be, and I knew that I didn’t want to ever push him to the point of thinking he needed to hit me twice.
“If she catches you there’ll be hell to pay,” he said. He looked round and looked over my head so that I looked behind me too. The hallway was empty. “She won’t wait for me to come home.”
“But why?” I asked. “Is it because of the missing pictures?”
He didn’t answer at first, instead taking cups from the cupboard and setting them down loudly on the counter-top. Then he found a teaspoon from a drawer, rattling the cutlery. Then the tea-caddy needing taking from its place at the back of the counter, lined up with the sugar and flour canisters against the white tiles. Then he looked round again, checking once more that the hallway was empty.
“Don’t talk about them,” he said. “Even if she catches you, don’t talk about them.”
“Bu—“
“Shush!”
He didn’t shout but I heard in that word the implicit threat that if I didn’t, I’d invite punishment. I opened my mouth, and then thought about how hard that single word had sounded. I nodded instead.
“Good girl,” he said and the harshness of his tone had mellowed back into the gentle voice he used almost all the time, and especially with my aunt. “I think it’s about time you learned about an adult vice, isn’t it? Let’s make you a small cup of tea.”
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