Chapter 11
Florence tidying:
Black sweatshirt dress
Black tights
Black ballet shoes
Diamond earrings
Florence Perkins was on her knees in front of an over-stuffed bookcase in the attic room at the very top of the three-storey villa that she’d grown up in and where her mother had lived for almost sixty years of her long life.
Like every other room in this large and attractive home, the attic room was packed, no, a better description would be rammed full.
In fact, the rooms upstairs were the worst. Up on the first and second floors, where visitors never came, Florence’s late mother, Emily, had given her passion for ‘collecting’ full rein.
Florence was Emily’s only child and now that her mother had died, peacefully in her nursing home bed at the age of ninety-four, Florence – not at all peaceful, still some way from a nursing home (fingers crossed) aged sixty-five – was somehow going to have to sort all of this muddle out before she put the beloved Perkins family home on the market.
The huge task ahead filled her with fear and sadness and dread.
It was an enormous task. Monumental even.
In those last weeks when her mother had become properly ill and could no longer be looked after at home by the rota of carers, Florence had been far too wrapped up in visiting, making arrangements, spending time with her mother, trying to cope with the knowledge that there wasn’t much longer left, to even think about the house.
And now, in this quiet, empty time, when her mother had been lovingly buried next to Florence’s father in the graveyard of the village where they’d both grown up, before setting off for London as young and adventurous twenty-year-olds, now the task of the house was here, rearing up to meet her.
If it had just been junk, that would have been so much easier.
If Florence had been confronted with rooms full of rubbish, old newspapers, heaps of discarded clothes, matted takeaway boxes, the kind of things you see on house cleaning videos, that would have been a far simpler task.
She could have swooped in with rubber gauntlet gloves, a face mask and heavy-duty bin bags, scooped it all up and sent it out to a waiting skip at the front door.
But instead, her mother and father’s decades of accumulation was the proper collecting of valuables, mixed in with a confusing amount of vintage treasures, untidiness, a tendency to keep almost everything, as well as the inevitable junk.
With almost every item there was a danger that she could be throwing away something that the auction house, or even a museum would be desperate to have.
Florence could be throwing away history, important historical records, not to mention important art, antiques and collectables.
So, the task came with a heavy responsibility that was weighing down on her shoulders and making her feel close to hopeless.
And she was not a hopeless woman. In fact, quite the opposite, Florence Perkins was very bright, capable, accomplished and knowledgeable.
She’d been working in law for forty years until her recent retirement.
She lived in a beautiful, riverside penthouse flat that was – perhaps in reaction to her parents’ love of clutter, layering and keeping – an absolute temple to minimalism.
Florence was very inspired by the traditional Japanese way of life.
She had the bare minimum of possessions in her airy, cream-coloured eyrie.
But everything that she owned was exquisite and the very best of its kind.
When people came round, she could see their eyes out on stalks.
She had one sofa (Le Corbusier), one chair (Eames), three important modern paintings and several beautiful lamps.
Her wardrobe ran along similar lines. Three work suits (Westwood, Armani and Jil Sander), one handbag (Hermès), one black dress (Chanel), her casual clothes were mainly Japanese.
The antithesis to her parents, she saved, she held back, she waited for exactly the right thing and then she tried to only ever buy once.
For her, the only reason to buy something was if something she owned had been completely worn out and needed to be replaced.
Anything that came into her life that she didn’t need, she immediately sold or donated.
Her favourite gifts to give or receive were flowers, luxury food items, or tickets to an event and an outing – not things that would clutter up your life until you had a three-storey townhouse knee-deep in all the objects that had come into your life and somehow got stuck there.
She had told herself early this morning, when she’d set off from her calm and beautifully organised home that she just had to start somewhere in her parents’ house and make one small corner better.
Then carry on from there. And maybe the smallest of the three attic rooms would be exactly the right place to begin, she’d thought to herself as she sat in the quiet of the early morning Tube.
* * *
Now, Florence had bin bags and a selection of labelled boxes and the radio on, so she was just going to start.
Divide and conquer, she told herself. She would look carefully through everything – pile by pile, shelf by shelf, drawer by drawer – and she would decide, then place things in the relevant bag or box: bin, recycle, keep for me, keep for charity, keep for auction, keep for…
it was the final category that was troubling her.
She suspected she was going to come across things that should be kept for, well, history, or posterity perhaps.
Maybe she should ask the local museum, or would that be ridiculous?
And then there was the question of making bequests – there had been a vague instruction in her mother’s will about bequests ‘to family and friends to be arranged by my daughter, Florence’.
But that was all she had to go on. When she’d organised the funeral, she’d gone through her mother’s old address book and not found any living friend.
There were some children of friends who expressed their sympathy but politely declined the funeral invitation.
And family? Florence was an only child, with no children of her own, and, as far as she knew, both her mother and her father had lost touch with their siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces years and years ago.
She had put an obituary in both the local London paper and the local paper for her parents’ home village a week ahead of the funeral with details of the service, but still the only attendees were her and several kind friends of hers who’d insisted on coming along.
So, who had her mother meant? Was Florence supposed to track someone else down?
And then decide what to give them? It all felt like a mountain of effort ahead.
* * *
Come on, Flo, jolly well pull yourself together. Just pick up this pile here and let’s get going.
There was a knee-deep pile of books and papers stacked before the bookcase that she would have to go through before she even got to the books.
So, taking a first handful of stuff, she began to look through one old electricity bill, another electricity bill, a pile of random grocery receipts – easy enough to put these items into the recycling box.
The programme for a play, that went into the recycling too.
Now she was getting into the kind of nitty-gritty where it was more difficult to decide.
Here were two carefully cut-out obituaries from a newspaper, the paper tanned light brown with time.
She’d never heard of these people – one an actor, one a career diplomat by the sounds of it.
Well, they were deceased, she so couldn’t contact them or gift them some of her mother’s belongings, so she decided to put the notices into the recycling.
Now she was looking at photographs of children, quite modern judging by the colour and the clothes, taken in the last twenty years or so. She turned one of them over to see the words:
Happy Christmas from Oz Aunt Emily. Lots of love from the Lynx family xx
The Lynx family? She had no idea. Her mother’s maiden name had been Gardener.
So, was this a relative? Or the children of a family friend?
Reluctantly, knowing that she had to keep going and couldn’t stop to worry about every possible connection, she put the photos into the bin bag.
Next in the pile was a small sketchbook.
Flipping through it, Florence saw it was almost completely full of her mother’s pen and ink drawings and quick, fluid watercolours and she couldn’t help sighing.
Her mother had not been a professional artist, like her father, but she had loved to draw and paint, filling up much of her spare time with it, so the house was going to be packed with her mother’s work.
Florence already knew she was going to have to be brutal and keep only the very best of both her mother and her father’s work, otherwise her home would be as full as theirs.
So, without looking through the sketchbook again, she threw the decorated pages into the recycling, but it wasn’t without a pang.
More receipts, more programmes for plays and concerts that had happened years and years ago, she put them all without too much examination into the box.
She tried not to think about how slowly she was progressing.
She had time, she reminded herself, she had all the time she would need.
Even if this work took her months, she would do it properly and it would eventually come to an end and be done.
A long, white envelope was next, with her mother’s name and address handwritten on the front in black ink.
The top had been sliced open and Florence brought out the letter inside.
It seemed to be from a rather grand address in Paris.
The gist was ‘we believe you have in your possession valuable items that were intended for our collection. We would like to talk to you about the restoration of these items.’
Florence felt a wave of concern. Had her mother ever resolved this? Surely… she looked at the date of the letter – April 2005. This must have been sorted out by now. And why not say what ‘the items’ were? As she put the letter into the box marked:
keep for me
she couldn’t help thinking that it was strange.