Accumulating Memories
The storage room was a semi-abandoned space situated at the end of the women servant's quarters, on the uppermost floor of the house. Its purpose was that of any other room by that name: for storage, keeping files and spare uniforms and the like.
Of course, like many other storage rooms and attics and cellars, it could never be just a storage room. Not at that house.
Over the years, the room was unofficially designated as a Forgetting room of sorts. That is to say, a place to subtly deposit objects best left unfound until their worth was lost and the matter forgotten. A place where one never had to fear that their possession would be discovered. Nobody ever brought up the subject of the Storage room, let alone what it had become, but it was well-known amongst staff that even the butler and housekeeper had long since moved the files to a servants' study.
Subsequently, objects accumulated in the room. The floor drew a jumbled carpet of boxes and paraphernalia. Memories and broken chairs clambered up the walls and filled the space until it was a huge clutter of secrets, lies and hopes trapped in inanimate objects.
You opened the door of the room slowly. There was a musty smell flooded amongst the bits and pieces from decades of accumulation. The only light was a square half-covered window on the slanted ceiling which projected a shaft of light through the air, lighting up hundreds of particles of dust that floated slowly in and out of the dark. Everything had a definite air of history, like souvenirs from different points over the span of time collected together. Books, packages, large trunks, tins, bottles, notebooks, photographs, the list seemed to go on and on. You wondered which object had been placed there first, and which last.
Leaning against the wall was a rolled up sheet. It was worn at the edges and slightly yellowing. Trying to unroll it was a trying business because years in the same position forced the poster to roll straight back up again.
Holding it determinedly open at both ends against the floor, the corners curled indignantly as you read the ageing words. Your vision skittered over the text before your hand slipped over the worn floorboards and the paper sprang back into a coil in a heartbeat. The sudden splash of colours disappeared as quickly as it had appeared before your eyes. You gave up and leant it back against the wall.
He's head of staff now, and that is a respectable position in a respectable profession, and he has a responsibility to live up to it. He simply cannot let anything get substandard. He categorically refuses to let himself be second-rate. So he raises the standards as high as he can. Check that uniform is immaculate. The silver should be spotless. All pictures perfectly aligned. Everything must be done properly, because it's his house (that's how he feels about it, although it wouldn't be right to say it) and he will be respected for what he does. He will no longer be the subject of ridicule for a past he likes to believe never happened at all.
Only of course it did, and memories have an unpleasant habit of cropping up out of nowhere, straight of a different world into his Lordship's study. After that incident, he decides to make more of an effort to get rid of everything from that other world – that very unseemly, un-gentleman-like world. A few days afterwards, he goes to move a file from the storage room, and surreptitiously drops the object in the corner, then resolves never to step in the room again. This is the closest he will get to leaving his old life behind.
Swept into the shadows between two brown boxes was a sharp gleam of weary gold. You nudged it out and wiped off the dust hurriedly. It was a ring. A wedding ring. A tiny wreath of gold that suggested a world of possibilities: a love found, a love lost, like the sun being obliterated by storm clouds. There was an inscription in the metal, but the dusty light made deciphering it a struggle. You held it up to the window and the light, but the grime and dust amassed on the tiny piece of jewellery over time rendered the words meaningless.
He's got a new job, a new life and a new love. You could say he's a new man. Everything is perfect – well, she certainly is, anyway. She's sweet and kind and innocent and loyal and talking to her, seeing her laugh, is like finding a fresh flower in a garden of weeds. And she feels the same way about him. That's the best part of all. He should be happier than he's ever been before.
He knows this, but despite it, his mind keeps wandering back to a little piece of secrecy in the corner of a drawer in his room. It feels like a little rotten part of him, holding him back, holding him down and whispering 'You haven't forgotten me."
He doesn't want to lose what he's just found, so he sneaks off to the storage room. It's clutched in his fist so tightly it leaves imprints on his palm. He closes the door behind him, and regards the item for a minute or two, skimming a labyrinth of sin and hate, before abruptly hurling it away from him. It spins once, twice in the light, and then vanishes from view with a harsh clatter.
Slid into a box full to the brim with sheets of paper, all very official information, were a small pile of sheets used for something very different. It wasn't handwriting; it was small unnatural words printed with unerring similarity. Like a handwriting without a personality. Sometimes there was a blot, and sometimes the letters faded away into almost nothing.
The words themselves meant nothing to you: they were just pointless little sentences strung together without the connotation being the real purpose. Occasionally the same meaningless words were repeated, again and again and again as if the keys of the typewriter just got stuck on that phrase. Over the pages, the writing gradually got better, with blots few and far between and all the letters ordered correctly, like a formal newspaper article.
She's going far, she hopes, but she's going slowly. She loves her job, very much so, but all her life she's had a feeling that there's so much more waiting for her, and this is certainly not the extent of it. In her opinion, everybody had different designated aims and it's up to them to recognise them and reach them. Now, she knows she's never going to be rich or famous, but it's enough for her to be able to achieve what she wants entirely on her own.
Of course, it's going to take time. She's not naïve. It's a long laborious process. She lumbers down to a quiet section of the countryside, hoping nobody sees her with a great big machine and questions it, and then she practises. She practises every week, whenever she can. She likes words, they just work for her in some inexplicable way, and as they pour out she knows they're taking her forward. She just knows it.
But the others aren't ready to hear about it yet. She can't bear to think of the look on their faces. What if they're not happy for her? What if they don't understand? She has to wait until the right moment. She'll show them when they're ready, when she's ready. In the time being, she collects up the paper she's used for the day, sneaks back into the house and slides the sheets in an inconspicuous place in the storage room. One day it won't be a secret any more. But for today, it still is.
On top of a book in a small jumble of old wearied hardbacks sat a small pocket watch, shut tight and with the chain missing. It was a dull bronze-gold, with all the shine gone. It looked old, definitely Victorian. You picked it up interestedly. There were many light scratches over the exterior, like a coin. You felt the ridges of the letters engraved on the front in elegant lettering: "From Father to Son."
Clicking it open, you looked at the watch face and the hands, which had long stopped moving. At eleven fifty-three, to be exact. You'd have liked to know why it stopped at all.
It's an old tradition, his father said, passed down through the generations. Keep it safe, and when you're my age, you can pass it down to your son. How old is it? He'd asked curiously. Very, very old indeed, his father replied. My father got it from his, and I got it from him, and now I'm giving it to you. Keep it safe.
Years on, he still has no idea whether his father had been telling the truth or whether it had just been another lie. He doesn't ever want to know. He had kept it safe though, for as long as he'd had it.
Then of course, it all came crashing down. One fleeting kiss was all it took. A damp cold Christmas Eve, a soft light composed mainly of shadows, a sudden surge of passions and now he was not safe. After that evening, he can't stand to look at the watch without a huge feeling of shame washing over him and feeling like a child again, wanting approval from his dad.
From Father to Son, he thinks bitterly, in the dark gloom of nightfall in the storage room, well that's never going to happen now.
Folded up on the windowsill was a crumpled sheet of paper. Despite being abandoned, somebody had gone to the trouble of folding it up as neatly as possible, as if they were planning to use it again. Maybe they would, one day. You didn't know.
The care taken to keep it neat made you unfold it carefully too, almost feeling like you had no right to be looking at this particular sheet of paper. What if there was some secret you didn't want to know? Something you really shouldn't make yourself a part of?
Your worries vanished as you found yourself looking at a half-finished sketch. It was a drawing of a girl, or a young woman. Or half of her, at least. It was like a snapshot of movement captured in pencil, only to disappear into nothing the next second. She was looking sideways, an innocent smile on her face. You wondered how long this person looked at the girl, for the detail was surprising. Did she know they were going to draw her?
She's everything he could want. Cheerful, pretty, and kind. Nothing ever seems to get her down. He marvels at that. How can she spring straight back after any setback? And so kind too. The swift smile she'll give you when you take a plate from her, or offer to help. Her almost childish laugh. He would do anything just to see her smile again and again.
That's what he wishes he could do. But every time she's around, he seems to lose his voice completely. He thinks of a thousand funny things he could say, but instead he hears cut-up words and nonsensical phrases coming out of his mouth like some simpleton. He sees her polite distracted smile, and then he comes into the room. The man who manages to make Daisy light up as easily as anything. It's incomprehensible. The man is horrible, and yet, everything he wishes he could be. Clever, laidback and confident. And he steals her smiles in an instant.
So he contends with imagination. He sits up in his room, pencil in hand, and for a second his thoughts spill out onto paper. He almost gets carried away, and then he remembers. It will never happen. I'm not the man for her. And so he puts the paper away and doesn't draw again.
Stuffed into an unused trunk lay shattered pieces of a plate. There were two or three big shards, and then small chipped off pieces that lay around it like sand. It looked expensive, because you could see the remnants of an intricate pattern painted on the plate. Why had somebody allowed it to get broken and remain unrepaired? You touched one of the shards absent-mindedly, allowing some of the dust to brush off onto your fingers, and felt how sharp the serrated edge was. Had it been part of a collection? Was it an important plate? Probably not. It was just a plate, after all. How much could that mean to anybody?
The smash is deafening in the almost empty kitchen. It seems to reverberate on and on and on. Her eyes widen with growing horror as the dish separates into different parts and finally comes to rest with a shattering stillness on the tiled floor. For a minute she just stands there frozen with the realisation of what has just occurred. Terrifying consequences flit through her mind: losing her job, the disappointed faces, the shame…
Unless she gets rid of it. Erases all evidence, as it were. If she forgets about it, it never happened, isn't that right? She'll have to be quick though. Somebody might have heard the crash and is coming to investigate. She can't let it happen. She can't let people see what she's done.
She grabs a towel, trying to stop herself trembling, and swipes up all the pieces she can see, scanning twice to make sure there's nothing left over. Then she dashes up the stairs, praying nobody will see her and wonder. When she makes it to the storage room, she wrenches open a trunk and unfolds the towel, letting the splinters slide into it. Then she closes it, and races back downstairs. Nobody will ever know.
Next to the splintered plate were two or three leaflets. You opened them and read them. It was all about independence of a country. You raised your eyebrows at some of the libellous material and inflammatory pictures inside. Evidently somebody had had strong views on the topic. You weren't surprised they felt the need to hide it. Possessing that sort of pamphlet could leave you jobless and hated. Depending who read it. The paper crinkled as you turned the pages quickly, almost as if it were you that they belonged to. Eventually you placed it back where it was before, feeling as if you had somehow betrayed the owner.
He misses his home. He misses the hills and the streets and everything there was that this new place can never quite replicate. Of course, it's leaving from his home as well now. He hears what it's like. Fighting on the streets. Chaos. That, to him, affects him much more than the war in France. It feels like guns are closing in on him from both sides, and all he can do is choose where to go and join in. There's no hiding. His loyalties seem to be tearing up both ways.
Then he hears the news. A brother – his brother – killed for walking down a street. That does it. How can he fight for his brother's killers? In his mind, the Great War is a battle between two enemies of his own country, and he is not a part of it. He wishes he could return to his home and find the killers. He imagines what he would do to them. He sneaks leaflets into his room and feels the schoolchild sort of rebellion bubbling up inside him as he hides them, only this feeling is ten times more intense.
Surrounded by all these secrets cloaked in mystery and sadness, you wondered how much everyone was hiding from you. How much did one really know someone? Not everything could be deciphered or hinted at by inanimate objects, after all. That was a fact you knew all too well.
She doesn't hide anything you can hold in your hands, but in your head. Because sometimes, and only sometimes, mind you, she sneaks to the storage room and hides herself for a little while. It sometimes feels like she hides her emotions in the room, in the atmosphere, and she only re-joins them every once in a while, when she finds being emotionless too difficult. It's not as if she ever gets overwhelmed, exactly, but just…. Needs to be somewhere else for a short while.
Weakness is never so bad when nobody else can see you, she reasons. If she pretends it doesn't happen, and nobody else knows, then it practically didn't happen. That's her logic.
She'll never tell anyone though, not in her lifetime, because she wants people to know that she's a strong woman who doesn't go and weep like some average housemaid (except she does, and that's what she hates the most about herself at times).
You picked yourself up off the floor where you sat, and brushed yourself down to get rid of the dust. Then, checking that the hallway was clear, you left the storage room and closed the door behind you, and it felt like closing the door to a raw brutal world of lies and secrets.
Or perhaps, that was the one you were just returning into.
A/N Thanks to Ellie and Grace for the help with this. :D Hope everyone likes it.