MIMI HADDON, “FEATHERED JACKET” (2006)

Caches of old papers are like graves; you shouldn’t open them.

Her mother had been cremated. There was no marble stone incised “Laila de Morne, born, died, actress.”

She had always lied about her age; her name, too—the name she used wasn’t her natal name, too ethnically limiting to suggest her uniqueness in a cast list. It wasn’t her married name, either. She had baptized herself, professionally. She was long divorced, although only in her late fifties, when a taxi hit her car and (as she would have delivered her last line) brought down the curtain on her career.

Her daughter, Charlotte, had her father’s surname and was as close to him as a child can be, when subject to an ex-husband’s conditions of access. As Charlotte grew up, she felt more compatible with him than with her mother, fond as she was of her mother’s—somehow—childishness. Perhaps acting was really a continuation of the make-believe games of childhood—fascinating, in a way. But. But what? Not a way Charlotte had wanted to follow—despite the fact that she was named after the character with which her mother had had an early success (Charlotte Corday, in Peter Weiss’s “Marat/Sade”), and despite the encouragement of drama and dance classes. Not a way she could follow, because of lack of talent: her mother’s unspoken interpretation, expressed in disappointment, if not reproach. Laila de Morne had not committed herself to any lover, had not gone so far as to marry again. There was no stepfather to confuse relations, loyalties; Charlie (as her father called her) could remark to him, “Why should she expect me to take after her?”

Her father was a neurologist. They laughed together at any predestinatory prerogative of her mother’s, or the alternative paternal one—to be expected to become a doctor! Poking around in people’s brains? They nudged each other with more laughter at the daughter’s distaste.

Her father helped arrange the memorial gathering, in place of a funeral service, sensitive as always to any need of his daughter’s. She certainly didn’t expect or want him to come along to his ex-wife’s apartment and sort the clothes, personal possessions to be kept or given away. A friend from the firm where she worked as an actuary agreed to help for a weekend. Unexpectedly, the young civil-rights lawyer with whom there had been a sensed mutual attraction, taken no further than dinner and a cinema date, also offered himself—perhaps a move toward the love affair that was coming anyway. The girls emptied the cupboards of clothes, the friend exclaiming over the elaborate range of styles women of that generation wore, how many personalities they could project—as if they had been able to choose, when now you belonged to the outfit of jeans and T-shirt. Oh, of course! Charlotte’s mother was a famous actress!

Charlotte did not correct this, out of respect for her mother’s ambitions. But when she went to the next room, where the lawyer was arranging chronologically the press cuttings and programs and photographs of Laila in the roles for which the wardrobe had provided, she turned over a few programs and remarked, more to be overheard by him than to him, “Never really had the leads she believed she should have had, after the glowing notices of her promise, very young. When she murdered Marat. In his bathtub, wasn’t it? I’ve never seen the play.” Confiding the truth of her mother’s career, betraying Laila’s idea of herself—perhaps also a move toward a love affair.

The three young people broke out of the trappings of the past for coffee and their concerns of the present. What sort of court cases does a civil-rights lawyer take on? What did he mean by “not the usual litigation”? No robberies or hijackings? Did the two young women feel that they were discriminated against? Did the plum jobs go to males? Or was it the other way around—did bad conscience over gender discrimination mean that women were now elevated to positions they weren’t really up to? Women of any color, and black men—same thing? What would have been a sad and strange task for Charlotte alone became a lively evening, an animated exchange of opinions and experiences. Laila surely would not have disapproved; she had stimulated her audience.

There was a Sunday evening at a jazz club, sharing enthusiasm and a boredom with hip-hop, Kwaito. After another evening, dinner and dancing together—that first bodily contact to confirm attraction—he offered to help again with her task, and on a weekend afternoon they kissed and touched among the stacks of clothes and boxes of theatre souvenirs, his hand brimming with her breast, but did not proceed, as would have been natural, to the beautiful and inviting bed, with its signature of draped shawls and cushions. Some atavistic taboo, a notion of respect for the dead—as if her mother still lay there in possession.

The love affair found a bed elsewhere and continued uncertainly, pleasurably enough but without much expectation of commitment. A one-act piece begun among the props of a supporting-part career.

Charlotte brushed aside any offers, from him or from her office friend, to continue with the sorting of Laila’s—what? The clothes were packed up. Some seemed wearable only in the context of a theatrical wardrobe and were given to an experimental-theatre group; others went to the Salvation Army, for distribution to the homeless. Her father arranged with an estate agent to advertise the apartment for sale; unless you want to move in, he suggested. But it was too big; Charlie couldn’t afford to, didn’t want to, live in a style not her own, even rent-free. They laughed again in their understanding, not in criticism of her mother. Laila was Laila. He agreed, but as if thinking of some other aspect of her. Yes, Laila.

The movers came to take the furniture to be sold. She half thought of inheriting the bed; it would have been luxurious to flop diagonally across its generosity, but she wouldn’t have been able to get it past the bedroom door in her small flat. When the men departed with their loads, there were pale shapes on the floor where everything had stood. She opened windows to let out the dust and, turning back suddenly, saw that something had been left behind. A couple of empty boxes, the cardboard ones used for supermarket delivery. Irritated, she went to gather them. One wasn’t empty; it seemed to be filled with letters. What makes you keep some letters and not others? In her own comparatively short life, she’d thrown away giggly schoolgirl stuff, sexy propositions scribbled on the backs of menus, once naïvely found flattering, a polite letter of rejection in response to an application for a job beyond her qualifications—a salutary lesson on what her set called the real world. This box apparently contained memorabilia that was different from the stuff already dealt with. The envelopes had the look of personal letters: hand-addressed, without the printed logos of businesses, banks. Had Laila had a personal life that wasn’t related to her family-the-theatre? One child, the product of divorced parents, hardly counts as “family.”

Charlotte—that was the identity she had in any context relating to her mother—sifted through the envelopes. If her mother had had a personal life, it was not a material possession to be disposed of like garments taken on and off; a personal life can’t be “left to” a daughter, like a beneficiary in a will. Whatever letters Laila had chosen to keep were still hers; best to quietly burn them, as Laila herself had been consumed, sending them to join her. They say (she had read somewhere) that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space—atoms infinitely minute, beyond conception of existence, are up there forever, from the whole world, from all time. As she shook this one box which was not empty, so that the contents would settle and not spill when it was lifted, she noticed some loose sheets of writing paper lying face down. Not held in the privacy of an envelope. She picked them out, turned them face up. Her father’s handwriting, more deliberately formed than Charlie knew it. What was the date at the top of the page, under the address of the house she remembered as home when she was a small girl? A date twenty-four years back. Of course, his handwriting had changed a bit; it does with different stages in one’s life. His Charlie was twenty-eight now, so she would have been four years old when he wrote that date. It must have been just before the divorce and her move to a new home with Laila.