The Memory Collector: The emotional and uplifting new novel from the bestselling author of The Other Us

Matthew sets up the connection and moments later Heather sees her father’s smiling face, while Shirley, their stepmother of more than fifteen years, bustles around in the background, leaning in for a wave, but then discreetly disappearing. Probably to dust something. From the sublime to the ridiculous, Heather thinks, although she understands why Shirley’s military cleanliness must be soothing for her father.

‘Hey, there!’ their father says, and Faith gets the kids to tell him what they’ve been doing at school and pre-school respectively. They have some finger painting and spellings to show him, all prepared and laying ready on the desk. Faith fills him in on the wonderfulness of her domestic life, turning the taste of the custard that accompanied the apple crumble a little sour in Heather’s mouth, and then, before Heather can think of anything to say or plan an escape route, it’s her turn. She smiles weakly at the camera.

‘Hi, Dad,’ she says, feeling her sister’s eyes on her, monitoring her levels of family participation and judging her accordingly.

‘Hey, Sweetpea,’ he replies, using the nickname he gave her that everyone else has forgotten. ‘How’s work?’

Heather breathes out. Work is a safe subject. Work is good.

‘Going well. I’ve only got about four months left of this contract now, though, so I’m on the lookout for another post.’

‘Anything on the horizon?’

She shrugs. ‘There’s a senior archivist position in Eltham I’m interested in, but I’m not sure I’ve got enough experience yet, so we’ll see. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the work at Sandwood Park.’

‘Ah,’ her father says, nodding, then goes on to quote the first line of a novel. ‘That’s one of his, isn’t it?’ he adds brightly.

Heather nods. Sandwood Park used to be the home of the celebrated author Cameron Linford. His widow died recently and donated the house to a private trust. It’s due to be opened to the public in a month or two, and it’s Heather’s job to sort and catalogue the masses of documents chronicling the couple’s life: diaries, letters, financial ledgers, and photographs.

‘Found any missing literary masterpieces?’ her father asks with a twinkle in his eye. He always makes this joke and Heather always gives him the same response.

‘Not yet. But I’ll keep hunting.’

The shared moment of humour doesn’t do its job, though. Instead of connecting father and daughter, it only highlights the distance between them. Maybe it would be better if Heather did this when she was on her own – video chatted from the safety of her own flat without Faith scrutinizing her every word – but she never does that. She’s pulled the app up on her iPad a few times but always stops short of pressing the screen to connect.

Thankfully, the kids are eager to show off to their grandpa again, allowing Heather to relinquish centre stage. Alice conducts her little brother in a rendition of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, bringing the call to a dazzling finale.

When the monitor is blank again, Matthew goes off to settle the kids in front of the TV, but Faith hangs back.

‘Are we going to join the others?’ Heather asks. Even though she comes here every month, she’s never sure what to do, what the right or natural thing is.

‘If I have to watch even one more episode of Peppa Pig I might just shoot myself,’ Faith says drily, but then she turns to look at Heather. ‘We’ll go through in a second. Before that I have something I need to discuss with you…’

Heather’s stomach swoops. She and Faith never ‘discuss’ stuff. They’re polite, cordial, and matter-of-fact with each other, none of which involves sharing anything of any depth. After all the rows they had both before and after their mother died, they’ve allowed a crust of civility to harden over their relationship, and they both like it that way. ‘Ok-ay…’ she says warily.

‘Do you still have Mum’s things?’

A flash of cold runs through Heather, as if she’s just sprinted full-pelt into a wall of ice. Faith has blindsided her and being forced to think about ‘that room’ without her carefully constructed mental defences in place pulls her chest tight and her jaw even tighter. ‘W-what?’

‘Mum’s stuff,’ Faith repeats, frowning slightly. ‘You have some old family photos, right?’

Heather can’t speak. Her mouth has gone dry. Thinking specifically about what sits in her spare room has a tendency to do that to her. She nods.

‘Well, Alice has a school project. She needs photos of both Matthew and me as children, and I wondered if you could root one out?’

It would be odd for most people not to have photographs of themselves when they were young, ones passed on by parents, maybe when they moved out of home for the first time or started a family. Heather wishes she could play that card now, just tell her sister to go and hunt through the storage boxes in her vast attic, but she knows she can’t. It’s not that the photos don’t exist, just that they’re lost. Buried. At least, that’s what she assumes.

‘I… I don’t even know if I have them,’ she stammers, hoping against hope that Faith will let this drop.

Faith gives her a sideways look. A ‘Heather’s being difficult again’ kind of look that only a big sister can bestow. ‘Well, can you at least have a rummage around, see if you can lay your hands on any? After all, Mum didn’t leave any to me, just to you.’

Ah, there it is. The dig. She knew this was coming. Faith always wheels this out when she wants to guilt Heather into doing something, even though they both know being left out of the will was an act of kindness. If anything, Heather should be using that to hold Faith to ransom.

The thought of going through her mother’s possessions makes Heather feel physically sick. She wants to yell at Faith, tell her to do it herself, but she can’t let Faith see inside that room. She’d be even more disappointed with Heather than she already is. But Heather can’t rummage (just thinking the word makes her stomach churn) in there either. She’s stuck.

Faith sees the war going on behind Heather’s carefully schooled features and snorts. ‘You’re always so precious about Mum’s stuff, although God only knows why!’

Heather flinches. Not precious, she thinks, anything but. She’d rather let dust balls grow to the size of watermelons under her sofa than go in that room and really look around. It holds too many secrets. Too many horrible, horrible things.

Faith puts her hands on her hips. ‘It’s for Alice!’ she says, exasperated. ‘I know it’s a stretch to get you to do anything for me, but I thought, since it was for the niece you supposedly adore, that maybe just for once you’d act like you were part of this family and show some loyalty.’

It stabs Heather in the heart to hear this. She does adore Alice, even though she suspects the six-year-old is on the verge of mastering her mother’s disapproving look every time her aunt steps over the threshold. She so badly wants the kids to love her, for them to be able to come for days out and sleepovers, but once again that stupid room is getting in the way of anything good happening.

‘You don’t understand,’ she mutters.

Faith’s voice is silky smooth. ‘No, of course I don’t. How could I? Because Heather is special, Heather is different, no one understands her.’ She shakes her head. ‘It’s probably my fault,’ she says more to herself than to her sister. ‘I should have been tougher, shouldn’t have let you play the victim for so long, but I just…’ She trails off, shaking her head again.

Heather glares at her sister. She’s always known that the blame lies at her own door. She doesn’t need Faith to remind her.

Faith breathes out, regains some of her usual composure. It’s unlike her to lash out like this, to actually put words to the resentment Heather knows simmers under the surface. Pointed looks and a here-she-goes-again attitude usually describe Faith’s demeanour when dealing with her younger sibling.

‘Look…’ she begins, softening slightly. ‘I know you have… issues. But you don’t have to let them define you. I haven’t! Mainly because I got help, talked to people. There’s a really good person at our church. I’m sure she could fit you in if I asked her nicely.’

‘No.’ Heather’s response is firm and low.

Faith just stares at her. ‘Fine,’ she eventually says, her eyes narrowing. ‘But I’m starting to suspect you actually enjoy being this way, because you won’t get help, you won’t let anyone close.’

Seeing no change in Heather’s shut-down expression, Faith gives up and heads for the living room, obviously preferring the hated Peppa Pig instead of the company of her one and only sister. ‘Just find a bloody photo for Alice,’ she says over her shoulder as she walks away. ‘Because if you don’t, I’m going to come and dig one out myself. It’s the least you can do for this family.’

Heather shivers and wraps her arms around her middle. That can’t happen, she thinks. It just can’t. She’ll find some way of putting Faith off, maybe even scour the internet for old pictures that could have been Faith when she was younger and print them off.

She slopes into the living room and perches on a chair in the corner, more there for decoration than because it’s comfortable to sit on. Faith steadily ignores her as the children jump up and down, acting out parts of Peppa’s story as it unfolds brightly on the screen. The cartoon shows a made-up world where everyone fits in, where every story has a happy ending, and every child gets kissed goodnight before they fall soundly asleep in their own bed.

After four episodes, Matthew clicks the TV off. The children moan in unison, then Alice turns round and spies her aunt. Heather has been trying to blend into the wallpaper, just counting down the minutes until she can leave without Faith throwing another hissy fit.

‘Aunty Heather, you promised you’d play a game with us!’

Heather nods. Thank goodness. One shining moment in an otherwise crappy afternoon. Anything to distract herself from looking at the back of Faith’s head, when she knows her older sister is just sitting there, stewing. She smiles warmly as Alice comes running towards her, trailed by her little brother.

‘What do you want to play? Snap? That Disney-princess board game I got you for Christmas?’

Alice shakes her head and then glances at Barney, who is grinning, her obvious accomplice.

‘We want to play hide-and-seek,’ she says firmly.

The smile freezes on Heather’s face. ‘What?’

Alice rolls her eyes, a perfect reproduction of her mother. ‘Hide-and-seek, silly! You know, one person counts while the others hide? And then you have to try and find us. Only, I’m counting first because it was my idea, which means it’s my game.’