Boxes for Charity

By noon Katherine had filled three sheets of paper. Neat columns, underlined headings: "Sitting room," "Mum's bedroom," "Dad's study." Beside every item, a letter: S — sell, G — give away, K — keep. There were almost no K's.

"Are you going to take anything for yourself?" Nigel asked, holding Mum's porcelain shepherdess, the one he'd been afraid to even touch as a child.

"I've nowhere to put it. My flat's forty square metres."

He put the shepherdess in the G box and felt like a criminal.

Nigel knew what his sisters thought of him. And the worst of it was that they had reasons. Not the ones they imagined — but reasons.

Nobody knew about the debt to Crossfield Credit. Eleven thousand pounds that had started with repairs to the van for his little joinery business and ended with him borrowing to pay off the previous loan. Mum had known about the van — she was the one who'd given him two thousand back then and said, "Pay me back when you can, love. Or don't. I'm not counting." He'd meant to tell her about the rest at Christmas. Then on her birthday. Then there was no one left to tell.

When Derek Pierce rang, three days after they'd found Mum in the garden — her heart, quick, she hadn't even had time to be frightened — Nigel heard not sympathy in his voice but rescue. The house on Orchard Lane, Derek said, was worth a good four hundred and fifty. Split three ways — a hundred and fifty each. Nigel had been sitting in the van outside the workshop at the time, and for the first time in a year he'd breathed all the way down to the bottom of his lungs.

Now, standing in the middle of the sitting room, where Mum had done the crossword every evening in the armchair with the faded floral cover, that relief was going sour inside him, turning into shame.

"Nige," Katherine stood in the doorway with her phone. "Your estate agent has emailed me. 'As already discussed with your brother, I have an interested buyer ready to move quickly. The offer stands until the end of the month.' What exactly did you discuss?"

"Nothing specific. There's a developer, Ashford Homes, buying up plots on this street for new cottages."

"For cottages. So they'd knock the house down."

Nigel wanted to say it was just a house. Brick, tiles, the gutter Dad patched every autumn. But his eyes fell on the kitchen door frame, where their heights were marked in pencil: "Kat, 6," "Nige, 4," "Flo, 1" — and dozens of little lines above, all the way up to "Nige, 16," when he'd stopped letting anyone measure him. Mum had repainted the kitchen twice. She'd never touched that strip of wood.

He said nothing.

"He's offering four hundred and twenty," Katherine went on. "Below market. And within eighteen days. Why the rush?"

"Sometimes the buyer's in a hurry."

"Sometimes someone knows something you don't."

Nigel remembered that his sister had worked as an auditor for twenty years. She could see a lie in a column of figures the way he could see a crack in a plank.

Florence came down from upstairs — dusty, with cobwebs in her hair and a box of photo albums in her arms.

"The loft's full of old clothes. And this." She set the box on the table. "Albums, labelled by year in Mum's handwriting. Our whole childhood's in there. Except one. The spines are numbered — and number two is missing. Seventy-three to seventy-five."

"Maybe it got lost," Katherine said.

"Mum never lost anything. She kept supermarket receipts from 1996. I've just seen them."

Silence settled. One album — a small thing. But for some reason that small thing sent a chill down Nigel's spine.

The phone buzzed in his pocket. Derek.

Nigel went out into the garden, where Mum's roses were already starting to run wild, and answered.

"Nigel, my friend. Holding up?"

"Holding up. Listen, my sisters aren't keen on rushing. Katherine wants to go through the house first."

The line went quiet for a moment. Then the voice came back — warm, soft, and a little too even.

"Of course, I understand. But you ought to know one thing, so there's no misunderstanding later. Your mother and I had an arrangement. Since the spring. She wanted to sell the house to this particular buyer herself. I'll pop round tomorrow at nine and explain everything."

"What arrangement? Mum never said she wanted to sell."

"Margaret was a very private woman," Derek said gently. "You know that. There was a great deal she didn't tell her children."

The line went dead.

Nigel stood among the roses, looking at the kitchen window, where his sisters were bent over the albums. For the first time in three weeks he wasn't thinking about money. He was thinking that he hadn't known his own mother at all — and that the man who apparently had known her better would be here tomorrow morning.