Fiona Harper - The Memory Collector - The emotional and uplifting new novel from the bestselling author of The Other Us

‘Put on a good face,’ her mother always said when they left the house. So no one would guess, so no one would know. Even social services hadn’t guessed the horror that lay inside the detached house in a ‘nice’ area for years. And Heather has cultivated this approach in her adult life, carefully painting a veneer of Perfectly Normal on top of her real self.

‘Oh, I’m not mysterious at all,’ she says.

‘How long have you been living here?’ Damien’s girlfriend asks.

‘A couple of years,’ Heather replies, feeling as if she’s giving something away she shouldn’t. Her mother taught her that information was to be hoarded just as much as belongings. It wasn’t until Heather was almost a teenager that she realized not everyone shared this mindset, that some people live their whole lives spilling everything out of their mouths with no thought for the consequences.

‘Oh well, don’t let Jason here keep you awake late at night when he gets maudlin and decides to play his Smiths albums back to back,’ Tola adds, sticking her tongue out at their host.

‘Oh, no, I don’t… I mean… he doesn’t. Not that I’ve heard anyway. He’s a good neighbour.’ And she shoots a look across at him and is rewarded by a burning sensation in her cheeks.

Thankfully, the rest of the group are in an ebullient mood and the conversation quickly sweeps by Heather. She stands there on the fringes of the group, sipping a beer that someone handed her, and smiling shyly every now and then when someone says something funny. She doesn’t mind that she doesn’t know any of the people they’re referring to or that she doesn’t get the in-jokes. It’s nice to stand out here in the sunshine and feel… well, as a thirty-two-year-old woman ought to feel. Just for a moment, she forgets about the faceless house in Hawksbury Road with the new driveway. She forgets about the toy giraffe that rode all the way home in her handbag.

‘So, what do you do, Heather?’ the guy with the ginger beard in the stripy T-shirt asks. She wants to call him Isaac, but she’s not sure that’s right.

‘I’m an archivist.’

‘You work in a library?’

‘Yes, well, sort of, I’ve moved all over the country since I qualified, but I’m from this area originally. I moved back when I got a job covering maternity leave for someone at the V&A. Now I work at a stately home.’

‘Cool,’ Tola says. ‘I love that museum. Which bit do you work in?’

‘Um, I’m not…’ Okay, maybe this isn’t as easy as she’d first thought, but Tola and T-shirt Man have open, enquiring looks on their faces. They don’t look as if they’re scanning the garden for someone more interesting to talk to, so she carries on. ‘I finished there about a year ago and was lucky enough to find another contract within commuting distance, so I didn’t have to pack up and move away.’

Jason comes up behind her. She knows it’s him from the smell of hickory smoke and the way the whole of her back warms up as he gets closer. ‘What’s this I’m overhearing about packing up and moving away?’

She turns to look at him. He’s frowning instead of looking hopeful, which surely has to be a good thing. ‘Oh, no one!’ she says quickly. ‘I was telling…’ – there’s a pause where she realizes she still doesn’t know T-shirt Man’s name – ‘your friends about my job.’

‘Which is?’

‘I work at Sandwood Park in East Sussex. It used to belong to a famous author but his widow died recently and the whole estate was left to a private trust.’

‘They didn’t have any kids to leave the house to?’ Tola asks.

Heather smiles. This is nice, having people interested in what she’s saying. Slightly giddying, in fact. She can’t resist keeping it going by sharing a bit of gossip. ‘Well, yes, actually, they did, but the wife decided not to leave her beautiful Arts and Crafts home to any of her two remaining children or five grandchildren. She left specific instructions to her solicitor to that effect, saying she didn’t trust her offspring not to rip out half the walls, replace the grand conservatory with sliding glass doors that fold up like a concertina, or make a swimming pool out of the rose garden. So she left them nothing but the ashes of their dearly beloved family pets: three dogs, two cats, and a guinea pig.’

‘Ouch!’ Tola says, laughing.

Heather feels as if she’s floating inside. She made another person laugh; she had no idea she could do that.

This leads to some bantering back and forth about jobs, during which Heather learns that Jason is an ‘heir hunter’ like that programme on daytime TV. His firm, based in central London, tracks down the beneficiaries of unclaimed estates and reunites them with their inheritances. For a commission, of course.

Someone new saunters up. ‘Hey, Jason. Great barbecue,’ the guy says. ‘Is Alex coming? I haven’t seen him in ages.’

Something odd happens then. Jason’s normally affable and friendly demeanour cools to freezing point and he gives the intruder a stony look. ‘No. Alex isn’t here.’ And then he just walks off, leaving the rest of the group looking awkwardly at each other.

‘Well done, Jack,’ Damien mutters.

‘What?’ the new guy says, looking most perplexed. ‘He and Alex have been best mates for years. I thought they’d have patched things up by now.’

Tola shakes her head and rolls her eyes. ‘Really? What parallel universe are you living in? I know Alex was caught between a rock and a hard place, but once you break Jason’s trust like that, there’s no coming back from it. Don’t you remember what he was like about Caleb and the whole bike incident?’

Jack’s eyes widen. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘It’s as bad as that? I didn’t know.’

Heather feels as if she’s eavesdropping, even though she is not. She should really walk away, but she’s too hungry for information about Jason to do that.

‘Well, when you factor in there was a woman involved…’ Tola adds darkly.

All of them glance over at the barbecue, where Jason is now flipping burgers so hard that one falls on the ground.

Damien sighs. ‘He’s a great bloke, but he’s got to get over his knight-in-shining-armour complex. It might work in the storybooks, but in real life those girls he keeps trying to rescue are the kind of women who’ll really do a number on you.’

Tola flips her long braids over her shoulder. ‘Are you saying you’re not the rescuing type? What if I needed you to rescue me?’

Damien pulls her to him with one arm and plants a kiss on her lips. ‘You’re much too feisty to be anyone’s damsel in distress,’ he tells her, and Tola obviously approves of his answer because she grins at him.

‘You’d better believe it!’

The whole group laughs, which causes the cluster of people nearby to turn and join in. Heather merges into the group with them and listens to the stories about other people’s lives – what they do, who they love, who they don’t love any more and would, therefore, love to shame on Twitter, if it wasn’t beneath them.

The group are all in stitches about someone’s tale of a drunken-holiday tattoo when Jason calls her over to the barbecue. ‘Sausage?’ he says, brandishing a plump offering with a pair of giant tongs. She nods. She even smiles. ‘We could do this again some time over the summer,’ he adds. Heather must look a bit panicked because he laughs and adds, ‘Don’t worry! I’m not going to be filling the garden with people every weekend. I meant, now that I’ve got this barbecue, I might as well use it. You could join me for burgers and sausages one evening. Or if I get really adventurous, maybe even a chicken drumstick or two?’

Heather flushes. ‘I couldn’t let you do that—’