The Mind of an Obsessed Woman

Chapter One

Sabine carried the album to Brockley on the bus with it flat on her knees. She'd wrapped it twice in tissue and once in a supermarket carrier bag, because a carrier bag kept the rain off and nobody on a bus had ever tried to steal one.

It had taken her most of the summer. In May a pipe in the flat above Lennox Books had let go over a weekend, and the water had come through a ceiling tile in the stockroom, run along a shelf and found its way into a shortbread tin full of Maud Lennox's grandmother. By the time Maud opened on Monday the prints had fused into a single swollen brick. She'd brought them to the studio in a washing-up bowl.

Most people who brought Sabine something ruined apologized for it. Maud had put the bowl on the reception desk and said, "I know. I know. Just tell me honestly if they're dead."

They weren't dead. Sabine had separated them over eleven Thursday afternoons with a spatula, a humidity chamber and a great deal of not hurrying. Some had lost their corners. One had lost most of a wedding guest. The rest had come back flat and clean, and she'd mounted them in a new album with interleaving tissue and a label on the spine that said Edie Lennox, 1948 to 1971, in pencil, because ink was a commitment.

The shop sat in the middle of a parade between a launderette and a nail bar. It had a green door with a brass bell that rang twice, once when it opened and once, more quietly, when it settled. Inside it smelled of paper and the oil heater Maud ran even in September. Maud was behind the counter with her hair clipped up in a bulldog clip, eating a sausage roll out of the bag.

"Oh God," Maud said. "Is that her?"

"It's all of her."

Maud wiped her hands on her cardigan and then, looking at the tissue, wiped them again on a napkin. Sabine set the album down and folded the tissue back and stepped away from the counter so Maud could have it to herself.

Clients who got back a photograph they'd given up on usually cried, or talked very fast about the person in it. Maud turned the pages slowly with the edge of one finger and didn't say anything at all for almost a minute, and Sabine liked her more for that than she had for anything else so far.

"Look at her hat," Maud said eventually.

"That's Margate. There's a pencil note on the back of the original. Edie and Sid, Margate, 1953."

"How do you know that's Margate?"

"The Scenic Railway's behind her. And it says so on the back."

Maud laughed and covered her mouth with her wrist. "I grew up thinking she was a miserable old cow. Look at her. She's having the time of her life."

Sabine looked instead at the hook behind the counter.

It was an old brass coat hook screwed into the wall above the till roll, and on it, over Maud's parka, hung a bag. Green leather, darker along the handle where a hand had held it. A square brass clasp. A short strap, re-stitched with thread a shade too light.

Sabine knew the bag. She had seen it once, on a Saturday in June, in the window of a vintage shop in Tooting, and she had heard about it at length the same evening.

That had been at Maud's flat in Catford, at a dinner Sabine still wasn't sure why she'd been invited to. Maud collected people. She'd collected Sabine over a washing-up bowl. There had been six of them around a table meant for four: Maud, Maud's sister Ottilie and Ottilie's husband Rafe, a woman called Priya who worked at the library, a man whose name Sabine had forgotten because he'd talked mostly to Priya, and Sabine. Rules still allowed six indoors. Maud had counted them in at the door.

Ottilie was two years older than Maud and dressed as if she had a plan for the day. She'd worn tiny gold hoops with a stone in each, and she'd touched the left one whenever Rafe spoke. Over the lamb Maud had described the bag in the Tooting window. The green, the clasp, the obscene price, and the fact that she'd gone in and held it and put it back and walked round the block and come back and looked at it through the glass again.

"You always want whatever you're looking at," Ottilie had said, and laughed.

It wasn't unkind. Everyone laughed with her. Maud threw a napkin across the table and it landed in the gravy, and Rafe said that proved it, and the man whose name Sabine had forgotten said something about magpies. Sabine had laughed too, a little late, and then remembered the sentence exactly, because that was what her mind did with sentences.

Three weeks later Ottilie was dead.

Maud had sent a message to everyone who'd been at the table. It said that Otti had collapsed at home on the Saturday morning and died in hospital that night, that it had been a burst blood vessel in her brain nobody had known was there, and that the funeral would be small. Sabine had read it on the studio fire escape. She'd bought a card with no picture on it, because every picture seemed to be making a point, and written in it for twenty minutes and said almost nothing.

She hadn't gone to the funeral. She hadn't been close enough for that. She'd seen Maud twice since, both times at the studio about the album, and both times Maud had looked like someone who had been awake for a month and had decided to be funny about it.

"You found it, then," Sabine said, and nodded at the hook.

Maud looked round. Her face did something complicated.

"Oh," she said. "Yeah. In August."

"It suits the shop."

"I went back for it after the funeral." Maud turned the next page of the album without looking at it. "Isn't that awful? I walked past on the way to the bus and it was still in the window, and I just went in. I didn't even try to talk myself out of it. I think I thought, well, she can't say anything now."

She said it as a joke and it came out as the truth. She blinked at the album.

"It's not awful," Sabine said.

"It's a bit awful."

Maud's phone lit up on the counter between them, face up beside the sausage roll bag.

Parcelline: Your driver Nell is 2 stops away.

The kettle in the back room clicked off. A woman in a rain jacket came in, set the bell going twice, and asked if there was anything on ferns. Maud said there was a whole shelf on ferns, God help her, second case on the left, and the woman went to it.

Sabine looked at the bag again.

It was a good bag. Someone had looked after it for fifty years before Maud, and someone had mended the strap properly. Sabine felt sick, suddenly and plainly, and then ashamed of it. There was no reason at all for her stomach to have turned over.

Sabine's own mother had bought a conservatory the month after Sabine's grandfather died, and never once sat in it.

"Do you want tea?" Maud said. "I was making tea. Stay for tea. I owe you about four hundred cups of tea."

"I should get back."

"You're on your lunch."

"I was on my lunch," Sabine said. "An hour ago."

Maud went to make it anyway. Sabine stood at the counter with the album and read the spines of the books in the nearest case without taking in the titles. She could hear Maud in the back room talking to the kettle.

A courier backed in through the door with three boxes stacked on a trolley and set them down against the fern shelf. Maud came out and signed a screen with her finger, and the courier went, and the bell rang twice.

Sabine's phone buzzed in her coat. It was the studio.

"Where are you?" Crispin said.

He never said hello on the phone. He said it was a waste of both parties' time.

"Brockley. I'm dropping off the Lennox album."

"We don't deliver."

"It's on my way home. I took it on my lunch."

"Your lunch," Crispin said, "was at one."

She could hear the studio behind him. The extractor, Tomasz's radio low on something classical, the clack of someone using the guillotine too hard. Crispin would be at the end of the long bench in his apron.

"I'll be back by three."

"You'll be back when you're back. I've got the Hallam boxes sitting on your bench, and the Hallams are coming at four to be told what we've done with them, and at the moment what we've done with them is nothing."

"I'll be back by three," Sabine said again, and he hung up.

Maud had come out with two mugs. She'd put Sabine's in front of her with the teabag still in. Sabine took it that way and had only ever mentioned it once, in May, in passing, to the receptionist.

"Your boss?" Maud said.

"Yes."

"He sounds like a twat."

Sabine didn't say anything. Maud grinned at her over the mug.

"You don't have to agree. I can tell from your face. You've got a very agreeing face and you're not letting it."

"He's very good at what he does."

"Lots of twats are." Maud blew on her tea. "What do I owe you? Don't tell me. I know it's a lot. I got the invoice. I put it in the drawer and I've been opening the drawer every day and looking at it, like it's a spider."

"It's paid. The insurance paid."

"Bastian's insurance," Maud said, and her whole face hardened and then gave up. "Well. Good. That's the first thing that man's paid for in six years."

Sabine drank some of the tea because it would have been rude not to. It was too hot and she let it scald her.

"I'm glad she's back," Maud said. She had her hand flat on the album now. "Honestly. It's stupid. I haven't got many of anybody. Mum didn't keep things. Otti kept everything, but Rafe's got all that now and I can't really ask, can I? Not yet." She pressed her lips together. "Thank you. You're very good at your job."

"I just didn't hurry."

"That's what being good at a job is, mostly."

The woman with the ferns bought a book on ferns. Sabine put her mug down, half full, and said she really did have to go, and Maud came round the counter and hugged her with one arm, which Sabine hadn't expected and didn't know what to do with. She was pleased, and embarrassed to be pleased. Maud smelled of pastry and the heater, and the cardigan was rough against Sabine's cheek.

Sabine's eyes went to the hook over Maud's shoulder. From close up she could see where the old owner's hand had darkened the leather, and a small pale scratch on the clasp.

"Come back and buy something," Maud said into her ear. "I need the money."

* * *

She was back at the studio at ten past three. The Hallams came at four and were told what had been done with their boxes, which by then was a little, and Crispin did the telling and said I throughout.

Sabine walked home from the station in the last of the light. Her flat was on a side street ten minutes from the parade, the ground floor of a house split into three, with a sash window in the front room that rattled if a bus went past. She took off her coat and washed her hands for longer than they needed and cracked two eggs into a pan.

She ate half of them standing up at the counter, and then she put the plate down. Her stomach was a closed fist. She was frightened, and she didn't know of what.

It was nothing. It was a woman buying a bag.

A woman had stood in a shop window in June wanting something, and her sister had laughed at her for it, and three weeks later the sister had died of a thing in her head that had probably been there since she was born. Then the woman had gone back and bought the bag. That wasn't a pattern. That was grief, and August, and a person walking past a window on the way to a bus.

Sabine scraped the rest of the eggs into the bin.

She knew exactly how this went. She'd known since she was a child. A thought came in, uninvited and ugly, and she looked at it, and it looked back, and the only thing to do was to name it for what it was and put it down. So she named it. She was thinking something unkind about a grieving woman who had just hugged her.

She didn't put it down.

In the drawer under the cutlery she kept a stack of plain notebooks, black card covers, squared paper, five in a pack from the art shop by the station. She used them for treatment notes when she was working at home. She took the top one out and sat at the kitchen table and opened it to the first page and uncapped a pen.

For a while she didn't write anything. The window rattled when a bus went by.

Then she wrote the sentence exactly as she'd heard it, because that was what her mind did with sentences.

You always want whatever you're looking at.

Under it, smaller, she wrote the date.

16 September. The bag.

She looked at the two lines for a long time, and then she closed the notebook and put it back in the drawer on top of the others, with the cutlery, where it looked like nothing at all.

Chapter Two

Harland Conservation occupied the top floor of a converted tannery two streets back from Bermondsey Street, above a company that made artisan dog food and below a sky that came in through six long skylights and made the studio the best-lit room Sabine had ever worked in. On Monday mornings the skylights were still wet from the weekend, and the room was cold until ten. Crispin had a man who came to clean them once a month, and he was always a week late.

The Hallam boxes were on her bench where she'd left them. Four archive boxes of a Victorian photographer's studio stock that a great-great-grandson had found in a loft in Sydenham and wanted to know what to do with. Most of it was cartes de visite, small portraits on card mounts the size of a playing card, stamped on the back with the studio's name in gold. A few hundred were fine. A few dozen had been nibbled. One box had sat under a leaking water tank and grown a pale fur.

Sabine put on gloves and started where she'd stopped on Friday. The damp box smelled of a cellar even with the lid off. The nitrile squeaked against the card when she lifted the first stack, and she set her mask higher on her nose.

By eleven she'd separated the mold box into three trays: prints to clean, prints to stabilize and leave alone, and mounts that had shed their prints altogether. The last tray was the smallest. Empty cards, foxed with brown spots, the gold stamp on the back still bright. W. Hallam, Photographic Artist, Lordship Lane.

Crispin came down the bench at half past, drying his hands on a paper towel.

He was fifty-three and moved like someone who had once rowed. He wore a navy apron over a pressed shirt and he wore reading glasses on a cord, which he said was a practical decision and which everyone in the studio knew was an aesthetic one. He picked up one of the empty mounts by its edges and turned it over.

"What are these for?"

"They're from the damp box. The prints came away."

"I can see that." He put it down. "They're not for anything, are they? They're cardboard. Bin them."

"They're original."

"They're original cardboard." Crispin looked at the tray, then at her, with the particular patience he used on clients who asked if they could just use Sellotape. "The client wants the portraits. Nobody is going to look at an empty mount and weep. Bin them, log the count, move on."

He went back up the bench.

Sabine waited until he'd reached his desk. Then she took a polyester sleeve from the drawer, slid the empty mounts into it in the order they'd come out of the box, wrote the box number and the count on a label in pencil, and put the sleeve at the back of the tray.

You didn't throw away the original. That was the first thing anyone had taught her, at twenty, in a basement at Camberwell, and it was the only rule of the job she'd never once had to think about. You might not know yet what a thing was for. Somebody after you might. The mount carried the studio stamp and the stamp carried the date and the street, and one day a great-great-grandson in a loft would want to know which Hallam, and when, and where.

Tomasz, on the next bench, watched her do it and didn't say anything. He was cleaning the edge of a map with a brush so soft it looked like smoke.

* * *

The client came at twelve. She was from a local history society in Dulwich and had brought a cardboard tube of architect's drawings, and she was delighted with everything, including the skylights and the dog-food smell and the view of other people's roofs.

Crispin showed her round. He liked showing people round. He showed her the humidity chamber and the suction table and Tomasz's map, and then he brought her down to Sabine's bench, where Sabine was lifting surface dirt off a portrait of a bearded man with a pencil eraser crumbled to dust.

"And this is Sabine," Crispin said, "who is very, very careful."

The woman from the history society smiled at her.

"Too careful, sometimes. Aren't you." Crispin picked up the brush Sabine had set down and looked at the bristles. "You see this? She's using the wrong brush. That's a number four. You'd want a two on albumen, or you'll lift the highlights." He put the brush back a little too far from where it had been. "We all have our habits."

It wasn't a number four. It was a two. Sabine had bought it herself, in Lewes, and it had her initials burned into the handle.

"Oh, I'm sure she knows what she's doing," the woman said, uncertainly.

"She does," Crispin said. "Mostly."

They moved on to the plan chests. Sabine picked the brush up and put it back in its place and went on with the bearded man. Her face was hot to the tops of her ears. Her hands, when she looked at them, were perfectly steady. Crispin had never once been able to fault her hands.

She thought about Crispin leaving that evening. He cycled home to Blackheath on a road bike that cost more than her mother's car, and he kept it in the hall downstairs with a lock the size of a fist. She thought about him coming down the hill on it in the dark, and the chain going, and the handlebars going sideways, and his head going into the curb.

She stopped.

She didn't mean that. She didn't want that. It had come in on its own and it wasn't hers.

Under the bench, where nobody could see, she pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her left palm until it hurt, and kept it there while she lifted a speck of dirt from the bearded man's collar with the tip of the brush. When she took her thumb away there was a little red crescent. It faded while she watched.

She'd done that since she was about eleven. She couldn't have said who had taught her, only that it worked the way a slap works. Something bad had been let in, and now it had been paid for.

* * *

At one she ate her lunch on the back steps with Tomasz.

Tomasz was thirty and from Łódź and had the gift of being liked by Crispin without seeming to try, which Sabine had studied for four years and never managed to copy. He brought the same lunch every day, black bread with some kind of smoked cheese, and he offered her half of it every day, and every day she said no and he looked hurt for exactly one second.

"He did the brush thing again," Tomasz said.

"It's fine."

"It's not fine. It was your brush. I watched you buy it. You spent forty minutes deciding."

"He's under pressure with the Hallams."

"He's under pressure with being a dick." Tomasz tore his bread. "You should say something. Not to him. To Ruth." Ruth was the business manager, who came in on Tuesdays and Thursdays and was afraid of Crispin in a more practical way than anyone else. "Or you should apply for the V&A job. They're hiring paper people again."

"I'm not a paper person."

"You're a person who is too good for this bench and you know it."

He said it lightly, and Sabine felt it go in under her ribs and stay there, warm and sore. She didn't know what to do with things like that. She said she'd look at the job, which she wouldn't, and Tomasz nodded.

When he went back up, she stayed on the steps with her phone. The concrete was cold through her trousers. A delivery van idled at the gate with its back doors open.

She wasn't looking for anything. She was looking up the shop, because Maud had said she needed the money and Sabine had thought vaguely that she might leave a review. Lennox Books had a website with one page on it and a photograph of the green door. Secondhand, out of print and occasionally unhinged. Est. 2015. There were forty reviews, all five stars.

Sabine typed Maud's name instead.

It was a thing she did with people. She didn't think of it as prying. People put themselves in the world, and she liked to know the edges of whoever she was dealing with. She'd once found out that the woman who owned the studio's building had been a junior ice dancer, and had never mentioned it to anyone, and had enjoyed knowing it for months.

Maud Lennox turned up on a council page about pavement licenses. She turned up in a photograph from a Brockley street festival, wearing a crown made of paperbacks. She turned up, on the second page of results, in a local news report from August 2014.

Man drowns off north Cornwall beach.

Sabine opened it.

A man named Stellan Rusk, thirty-two, from Greenwich, had drowned on a Saturday afternoon after getting into difficulty while swimming off a beach near St Agnes. Lifeguards had been on duty further along the beach. He had been pulled from the water by two surfers and given CPR on the sand and pronounced dead at the scene. His fiancée, Maud Lennox, twenty-nine, had raised the alarm. The coastguard urged visitors to swim between the flags. There was a photograph of a wide pale beach under a gray sky and no photograph of Stellan Rusk.

Sabine read it twice.

She knew the name. She could hear it being said, in June, across the table in Catford. Priya from the library had asked Maud how long the shop had been going, and Maud had said "since Stellan," easily, reaching for the wine. The table had gone quiet in a way that had nothing to do with volume. Ottilie had touched her left earring and asked Rafe loudly whether he'd remembered to book the car.

She typed Ottilie's married name before she could decide not to.

There wasn't much. A funeral director in Dulwich kept an online page of notices, and Ottilie's was the third from the top, with a photograph that must have been taken at a wedding. She was laughing at something outside the frame. Calloway, Ottilie Jane (née Lennox). Suddenly, on 10th July, aged 38. Beloved wife of Rafe, adored sister of Maud, daughter of the late Rosalind. Private cremation. Donations if desired to the neurology unit at King's.

The late Rosalind. Sabine read that twice as well.

Below the notice there was a space for condolences, and people had left them. Forty-one messages. A lot of them said so sudden. One said I can't believe I saw you on Thursday. One, from someone called Jo, said She'd have hated all this fuss, she'd have wanted us down the pub, and had a crying face and a pint glass after it. Maud hadn't written anything. Rafe hadn't either. Sabine scrolled to the bottom and back to the top as though there might be a message from the sister she'd missed, and then she felt ashamed and closed the page. Her thumb had left a greasy print on the screen over Ottilie's laughing face, and she wiped it off on her sleeve.

A doctor had put a word to that one. A burst blood vessel. A thing that had been there from birth.

She opened the Cornwall report again anyway.

She sat on the step with her phone warm in her hand.

A fiancé drowned, and a year later a bookshop opened. A sister laughed at a bag, and three weeks later the sister was dead, and a month after that the bag was hanging on a hook behind the till.

She could hear exactly how that sounded. It sounded like a woman who spent too long alone in a quiet room looking for damage in other people's things. It sounded like the thought about Crispin's bike.

But the thought about Crispin's bike had come in by itself. This hadn't. This was two facts, and she had found both of them in the world, and she hadn't made either of them up.

Upstairs, somebody opened a skylight and the smell of wet roofs came down the stairwell.

Sabine took a screenshot of the report. Then she saved the page as well, because screenshots got lost, and then she went back up to the bench and put her gloves on and finished the bearded man's collar with the number two brush, the right brush, her brush, and didn't look at Crispin once for the rest of the afternoon.