The Keeper of Lost Things

“Intimacy, both physical and emotional, had always been a disappointment to her.” 

Laura’s low self-esteem comes from a limited experience with love. Save for a scattering of dates, that disappointment is entirely centered on her failed marriage. She comes to see that her decision to reject the possibilities of intimacy may have been premature. 

“But gradually, imperceptibly, infinitesimally she let him be. She let him make a life without her. The trace that lingered, and still remained to this day, was the scent of roses in places where it could not be.” 

Anthony is hardly paralyzed emotionally by the constancy of his bond to his dead lover. For Anthony, the absence of Therese has become a presence. Anthony is haunted gently, suggested by how often he catches the light scent of roses. 

“Over the years he had filled his drawers and shelves with fragments of other people’s lives, and somehow they had helped to mend his—so cruelly shattered—and make it whole again.” 

Keeping lost objects is not enough. Collecting what others have lost becomes, for Anthony, a way to help him cope with the loss of his lover. What the dynamic obviously lacks—Anthony cannot restore the lost objects to their owners—is the very thing that Laura is charged to achieve. 

“But he could not regret his life without Therese. He would a thousand times rather have spent it with her, but to give up when she died would have been the greatest wrong.” 

Love sustains Anthony. Here is the complex emotional dynamic that sustains Anthony for 40 years. In keeping his memory of Therese, maintaining the bedroom where they slept as her shrine, and tenderly boxing her letters, photos, and knick-knacks, Anthony maintains a delicate balance between the past and the present. 

“Because Laura could see that these were so much more than things; much more than random artifacts arranged in shelves for decoration. They were important. They really mattered.” 

Because of Laura’s disappointment and regret, Anthony intuitively senses her ability to care about his collection and to respond emotionally to the objects on his shelves, seeing that she understands the profound implications of loss. 

“[B]ut it was Anthony’s wish that you should endeavor to return as many of the things in his study to their rightful owners as you possibly can.” 

When the lawyer explains to Laura the special charge in Anthony’s will, she is at first overwhelmed by the challenge. Even with the reach of the website Laura launches and the few successes she has, she comes to see the reality of absolute loss and the need, in turn, to move on.

“It felt as though the last remaining thread that bound us together had been broken. Like a clock unwound, I stopped. I stopped living and began existing.” 

This passage from Anthony’s letter that Laura receives after his death suggests the power of objects. In losing the Communion medallion with which Therese entrusted him, Anthony is denied a tangible bond with his dead lover, a loss that would help make concrete and immediate the otherwise abstract loss of her in death. 

“There would never be the right girl for Bomber. But they were friends, best friends. And for Eunice, that was infinitely better than not having him in her life at all.” 

Eunice understands early on that the man she loves will never be hers to love. The friendship between Eunice and Bomber affirms that a man and a woman can be friends without the bond of sexual intimacy and that this kind of intimacy enhances rather than spoils friendship. 

“If you never get sadness, how do you know what happy is like?” 

In her clear-eyed simplicity, Sunshine enunciates a central tenet of both Anthony and Eunice’s loves: Loss teaches a person what they have. Neither regrets loving a person they cannot have, and both argue that their life is better for the experience even without the traditional happily-ever-after ending. 

“Middle age. Ready for big knickers, hot flushes, and winceyette nighties. And she absolutely wasn’t.” 

Laura is at an emotional crossroads. In her forties, she is terrified that Vince was her life’s love and that the chance for her to be loved has slipped away. Her perception of middle age is clichéd, comically dire, and overly dramatic, as her relationship with the hunky Freddy will come to show her. 

“It’s not just Sunshine that you’re hiding from; it’s everything. And it’s time to stop hiding and start kicking life up the arse.”

Laura’s friend Sarah acts like a spiritual mentor. Following her unexpected arrival, she gives Laura the courage and insight to stop wasting her life wallowing in self-pity. Sarah tells her here she is afraid—afraid to be happy, to be hurt, to be alone, to be with someone.

“I hope you’ll be very happy in your big house with your little retard friend and your toy boy.” 

Vince’s crude, ugly dismissal of Laura’s new life reveals how little she has lost in losing him. In a novel about the impact of loss, losing Vince is critical to Laura’s redemption. Sometimes loss is a good thing. When Freddy summarily kicks Vince out of Padua, Laura’s redemption begins. 

“But he did look much happier now, and was beginning to view life as a curious adventure rather than a terrifying ordeal.” 

When Laura and Freddy take in an abused stray dog, whom they name Carrot, the dog’s slow adjustment to a new life without fear parallels Laura’s own emotional recovery from her long brutal married life of suffering and anxiety. 

“She’s not upsetted with just you […] she’s upsetted with everyone.” 

Sunshine understands intuitively the dimension of Therese’s anguish. The pain of loss alone explains the discontent of Therese’s ghost. Anthony is not to blame. The loss of the medallion during the chaos after the car accident, like the loss of any special object, reflects the impact of many factors. Therese’s anger is directed at the world itself. 

“But honestly, what more does she want? She should be happy now she’s got him back. Instead she’s hanging around here misbehaving, like a disgruntled diva; deceased.” 

At this point, Laura understands relationships only in the simplest kind of arithmetic: subtraction and addition. In death, Therese did not have Anthony. Anthony is dead. The two are together. Therese should be content. Only in appreciating the implications of the medallion through her brief encounter with Eunice does Laura at last understand the implications of profound loss. 

“It’s time, my love. It’s time to let go.” 

Godfrey, Bomber’s father, is about to become a memory. Among the many relationships depicted in the novel, the relationship between Grace and Gordon, Bomber’s parents, is the only one that matures across time—that is given the chance to provide long-term stability and emotional support. The two grow old together, their love sustaining them. This tender moment when Grace whispers into Godfrey’s ear to surrender to Alzheimer’s reveals the depth of love. 

“But not so much a pause as a bloody great full stop as far as being even remotely attractive to men was concerned.”

Laura’s narrow perception of time, here seen in her lament over the approaching onset of menopause, reveals how she still resists the idea of being sustained by the past rather than burdened by time. Only when she clumsily manufactures the break-up with Freddy, sure she is breaking up with him before he has a chance to break up with her, and feels that loss does she understand the superficiality of her logic.

“And now we have to find a way to stop her being sad.” 

Sunshine, with her simple and direct way of assessing situations, lays out exactly what Laura and Freddy need to do. The lingering presence of Therese now is not malevolent or selfish. Sunshine understands intuitively that Therese is sad, emotionally devastated, and can only be happy when her loss is restored.

‘‘Mad as an ant with his arse on fire. […] But him a lovely man inside […]. Lovely, but dying.”

In the story, Alzheimer’s suggests that worse than dwelling in the past is losing the past. The assessment of Bomber late in his struggle with Alzheimer’s by one of the facility’s more eccentric patients summarizes his position as a person with and without a past, with and without memories, with and without time. 

“Get. Me. Out.”

In a lucid moment before he dies, Bomber reaches through the fog of Alzheimer’s to ask Eunice for help. Basing his request on the last moments of the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which they are watching, he convinces Eunice to muster the courage to arrange the death of the only man she has ever loved. 

“Eunice knew that there would only be one chance; one moment when all the love she ever felt for this man would crystallize into the inconceivable strength she would need. It was time.” 

The decision to facilitate Bomber’s dramatic leap to his death is another of the novel’s gestures of love. However, Bomber’s death is different from the death of Therese: If Therese’s accident creates Anthony’s memory, here Eunice’s actions are deliberate and calculated. She will in essence turn Bomber into a memory that will sustain her. 

“She counted herself very lucky to have a second chance at both life and love, but she was still afraid that any attempt, however lighthearted, to tether their relationship might cause love to bolt.” 

At this point, Laura has learned little from Anthony. Laura here talks herself out of love. Shortly before she stages her fight with Freddy, she is convincing herself that she is not worthy of being loved and that even to say the word “love” would make Freddy disappear from her life. Only her encounter with Eunice will convince her to remedy her low self-esteem.

“You’re very hard on yourself, my dear.”

A complete stranger, Eunice, herself denied a life of love, on an errand to collect the cremains of the man she loved, enlightens Laura to the possibility that life has not passed her by. She tells Laura that she is worth loving and that maybe Laura will find the courage to live only when she accepts the need to be honest with herself.