The Memory Box

by Margaret Forster

  But what we missed up there was the memory box, my box. It was in the further attic all the time, the one I hadn’t had the patience to inspect thoroughly. Rory had shone his torch round and all we had seen were books, dozens of big volumes stacked up round the walls, and lots of huge rolls of what looked like paper (and I now know were maps and architectural drawings). I only found the box, hidden behind these piles, when I came to sell the house. I had to force myself then to inspect the attics, as well as every other room, to make decisions about where everything should go.

  And that was only a little over a year ago, a terrible year, too terrible to dwell on, so I won’t. My father, aged only sixty-five, and my mother – Charlotte, that is – only fifty-nine, both died within eight months of each other. The shock was agonising, my sense of outrage violent. This double blow seemed to me an injustice far more monstrous than the death of Susannah when I was a baby.

  I don’t know which death hit me hardest. My mother’s, I think, because it took so long, and I had time to realise what was happening, but my father’s was the more unbelievable, and in some ways more painful. He died first, of a stroke, without any warning. My mother went on living in the family house in the brief interval between my father’s death and the onset of her own terminal illness. She had no desire to sell it, to leave and move somewhere smaller where there would be no reminders of him. She wanted to be reminded of him: in fact, she found every reminder a comfort, her only comfort apart from me. Perhaps eventually, as she aged, she would have been obliged to move. I might even have tried to persuade her to do so since the house was so very large for one person, but she didn’t have time to grow old. She died in hospital, slowly, and it was left to me to dispose of our beloved home and its contents.

  There was always the option of living in the house myself, but I never considered this. It wasn’t anything to do with its size, there were other reasons. The house was in Oxford. I didn’t wish to live in Oxford, desirable though many people think it is. Being in that house after she and my father died was torture to me. The memories she wrapped round herself like a warm blanket pricked me like a hair shirt. Forced to enter it, to get things occasionally for my mother when she was in hospital, I had been overwhelmed by a longing to be back in my early childhood with my parents, loved by them and loving them. All the time I was fighting my way through crowds not of ghosts but of sensations. I felt slightly faint even putting my key in the lock, and once I was through the front door and had closed it behind me, hearing that distinctive click it made, and the light rattle of the brass letter box, I felt a kind of unpleasant excitement. The power of houses has always bewildered me – that mere bricks and mortar should possess such atmosphere is uncanny.

  After my mother died, the hardest thing I had to do, far harder than organising her funeral, was go into our old home. I wept then as I had not done before. For a whole month, I was obliged to go there day after day until every bit of furniture, every object, every book and picture, every piece of clothing, every last curtain and cushion was sorted out and ready to be collected by all manner of people. Someone suggested that I should employ a house clearance company, but I saw it as my duty to Charlotte to do the job myself, and I did it. This was, of course, how I found the box, though I very nearly missed it. I left the attics until last, and almost succumbed to the temptation to let the owner of a second-hand shop nearby do this final part of the clearing out, since I knew, or thought I knew, there was only junk up there. But then I recollected that glimpse, so long ago, of what had looked like drawings or plans. They might be work of my father’s and if so I felt I should at least look at them.

  I was very tired that last day, when I made myself go up there. The ladder didn’t glide down easily as it had done all those years ago for Rory. It was stuck through disuse, I suppose, and I had to yank it hard. I had difficulty, too, clambering up through the remarkably small gap and realised only when I’d hauled myself through that there must be a far bigger entry into the other attic or no furniture could ever have been taken up. I should have looked for another trapdoor. But once in the attics everything was as I remembered – chairs, little tables, chests of clothes. The second-hand dealer could come for them, his lucky day (because some might be of value). The rolls of paper were indeed old architectural drawings, though none was signed and I didn’t know if they were my father’s. I began pulling them along, covering myself with dust, ready to drop them through the trapdoor so that I could take them into the garden and make a bonfire.

  My father could never throw anything away – he was a hoarder, everything had to be kept, either in case it came in useful (however unlikely), or simply because he was fond of whatever it was. He was very fond of all his old plans and drawings – the very paper seemed precious to him. When I was little, he used to let me help him roll up the huge sheets he worked on and I loved to do it. ‘Slowly now, Catherine,’ he’d say, and, ‘Keep it even, keep it even, don’t press too hard.’ I’d roll up the paper at one end, struggling to do it neatly and keep pace with his rolling at the other, and together we would achieve the perfect roll he wanted. I found it hard to be slow and methodical and careful. I was all rush, and wondered why I couldn’t be like my father. When I ‘helped’ him do such simple jobs he’d smile at me and say I’d done well. He knew, even then, when I was only five or six, that I was not like him and he made allowances for my clumsiness and impatience all the time. Later, when I used to get upset because I wasn’t the person I wanted to be, wasn’t like him or Charlotte, he’d comfort me and say nobody could help their nature, all they could do was try to curb what they didn’t like about themselves. My grandmother, if she was around and heard him, would sigh and say, ‘Some people have a lot of curbing to do,’ or, more puzzlingly, ‘Some people I knew never learned to curb their waywardness.’

  But I couldn’t keep these dusty old rolls of crackly paper. And they were too personal to give away, even if anyone had wanted them, so I had decided I would have to burn them, however upsetting this proved to be. (I didn’t have time, though, in the end, and took them with me after all.) It was in moving these rolls that I found the box. What I actually saw was something that looked like a tarpaulin wrapped round a roughly cylindrical bundle and tied very securely. My attention might not have been caught if it had not been for an incongruous pink label attached to the cord knotted round this parcel. On the label, written in ink which had faded but was still decipherable, was my own name – ‘For my darling Catherine Hope, in the future’, it said.

  I felt instantly cold. Cold, and also apprehensive. Yet there was nothing frightening in itself about this pretty pink label, which was decorated all round the edge with tiny drawings of flowers, the petals of each one carefully coloured in. It looked, this package, as if inside its wrapping there would be a present, to be uncovered and put under a Christmas tree or on a table with a birthday cake, and yet I was afraid of its innocence. I crouched down beside it in the dim light of the attic, wondering what I should do. I would have to take it with me and open it, but I was afraid not only of further grief but of pathos, which I dreaded even more. How could this not turn out to be a pathetic task? Whatever my indifference towards Susannah, I could not help but be affected by the sight of her box. I wished passionately she had not done this. Who had thought of it, or was it her own idea? And what had she imagined was the purpose of her legacy? To tell me about herself? To make some kind of statement? To try to share in my unknown future? But she must have known I would be surrounded by information about her, that I would have photographs and memorabilia, that my father and her family would talk about her. What she could not have guessed was that I hadn’t wanted to know very much. My extreme contentment with Charlotte might have hurt her – and thinking that suddenly made me wonder if there was another motive behind the leaving of this box. It could be a sort of weapon, to be used from beyond the grave. A way of combating my denial. Was it screaming, ‘I was your mother! Listen to me!’?

  I k
new I was being melodramatic. The box wasn’t screaming at all. It had been stuck quietly here, muffled by its shroud of thick material, for nearly thirty years. It had been silent all that time, exerting no influence whatsoever, except perhaps over my father. I imagine every now and again he remembered its existence and fretted about it. Fingering the label, I realised he must have detached it from the box itself and tied it on to the cord when he had wrapped the box in this protective covering. Why had he done that? To alert me, to make sure it could be recognised for what it was when the time came? I struggled to remember precisely what he had said that morning of my twenty-first birthday. He’d briefly described how Susannah had kept this memory box absolutely private. She had told him she was preparing it for me, ‘in case’, but he had had no part in it. She didn’t want to discuss it, nor did she want help in deciding what should go in it. It had occupied her when she was too weak to move much from her bedroom and he had never seen what went inside. He had urged me, unconvincingly, to try to think of it as a happy experience. Susannah wanted to be secretive, and since by then she had so little privacy left in her life he had not pried. After she died, and he went through the miserable business of clearing her things out, he had been surprised how heavy the box was. But he hadn’t looked inside. He’d sealed the edges with masking tape and wrapped it in waterproof material, and put it in the basement of their Edinburgh house until it was sold. It went with the rest of the furniture into storage during the time I lived with my grandmother and he lived in his flat, and then, when he married Charlotte and moved to his new job in Oxford, it went with them. Every now and again he and Charlotte had discussed when I should be told about the box, but for years the time had not seemed right.

  I could understand this. I wasn’t an easy child. All sorts of things upset me, even if on the surface I seemed strong and tough. I had nightmares regularly – I can’t recall what they were about, except there was a lot of blood in them – and was for years a poor sleeper, often ending up in my parents’ bed. It was natural that they should fear the effect of giving to me a box full of unknown objects left by a dying woman who very possibly was not always in her right mind. And then later, as a young adolescent, I was given to violent rages alternating with spells of studied gloom – all very typical, but hardly the best background to cope with such a legacy in a balanced way. I don’t blame my parents at all for their hesitation. And I was sure that for years at a time they actually forgot about this wretched box – it was literally out of sight, out of mind, up here in this attic.

  Now the box would have to go with me. I shrank from having to touch it at all, but finally grabbed the cord where it was knotted at the side and dragged it to the trapdoor. I’d left a pile of cushions at the foot of the ladder so that I could throw down on to them any fragile objects I might find which were worth keeping. So far, I’d only selected one rather pretty old lamp. There was plenty of room for the box. It fell through the gap satisfactorily, and I climbed down after it. I was in a hurry by then. The estate agent who was to sell the house was coming to collect the keys and he was due any minute. I wanted the handover to be rapid so I had to be ready to zoom off. My car was already laden with stuff, the boot and back seat entirely filled, and only the passenger seat next to me was empty. The box had to go there. I shoved it in, then secured it by using the safety belt strapped through part of the cord. Doing this – hurriedly, roughly – I dislodged the pink label. It lay on the gravel beside the front wheel of the car and my stomach lurched. I stared, mesmerised, at the piece of innocuous cardboard and willed myself to pick it up. I couldn’t leave it there, to flutter pathetically in the wind and be rained upon or trampled by some stray dog. I snatched it up and put it in my pocket, then slammed the door shut just as the estate agent turned into the drive.

  I would never see our house again. I’d told the estate agent, untruthfully, that I was leaving the country and had given him full powers to sell the house as soon as possible to the first buyer who came up with the asking price (fixed by him). If it failed to reach that price, he was to reduce it as he thought fit – I wanted no consultations, I wanted nothing more to do with it. He would see to the final clearance. I think he was startled by my abruptness, and had been disposed to stay and chat. I left him standing on the front step looking bewildered and waving his hand slowly. I didn’t wave back. I didn’t look back through my mirrors either, and drove far too fast until I turned on to Woodstock Road. It was done. Our house was left abandoned and the sooner I got used to it the better. Better to think of it obliterated, with all it had meant to me in the past, than to imagine it inhabited by other people. I would destroy its power by annihilating its memory.

  It wasn’t a long drive back to London, and it was a route with which I was very familiar, but that day the journey seemed unending. I hated driving with that sinister box lumped beside me. I thought about bombs and the comparison seemed appropriate until I realised I couldn’t have it both ways: the box could not be both explosive and pathetic. I was getting in a state on its account and, as Charlotte would sensibly have pointed out, making it the object of all my distress over leaving our house. I reminded myself I’d been miserable and depressed before ever I found it in the attic. I was alone, at the age of thirty-one, Susannah’s age when she died. That parallel was not lost on me. She could never have anticipated that I would be so old when I finally received her gift. It suddenly struck me that the box might be full of things suitable for a young girl, or a teenager. This cheered me a little. It would be easier to deal with the contents if they turned out to be toys or even mementoes of my babyhood. Perhaps all I would find would be my first rattle, my first bonnet, and so on. My common sense told me this was unlikely, Susannah had surely been too imaginative to want to fill a box with such sentimental tokens, but I found the idea strangely comforting.

  I think I’d always known that she was imaginative, that she had left behind her many clues to this, which as a child I absorbed without understanding. There was my kaleidoscope, the first toy I remember loving. I had soft toys, the usual teddy bears and pandas, and dolls, but it is the kaleidoscope which I remember carrying round with me and hugging to myself when I was only about three or four. ‘She isn’t old enough for it yet,’ my grandmother had apparently said to my father. ‘She won’t be able to close one eye and look properly.’ But I could, and he knew I could. In that respect, if not others, I had the necessary patience and balance. He gave it to me. ‘Shake it,’ he said, ‘and look in the little window and you’ll see something pretty.’ I shook and shook, fiercely (as I did most things), and then, quite cautiously for me, I squinted through the glass opening and was dazzled by the myriad patterns which swirled before me. I shook and looked, and shook and looked, with such concentration that I developed a red ring round my right eye from pressing the kaleidoscope to it. My father took it away, but I screamed till I could have it back and finally some compromise was reached. Susannah made that kaleidoscope, actually made it, my father once told me, in a rare moment of nostalgia, when she was pregnant and well and happy. Other pregnant women knitted. Susannah made a kaleidoscope for a child who would not be old enough to use it for years.

  Reaching Hanger Lane and becoming part of London’s ceaseless traffic dulled my senses in more ways than one. I relaxed into the stop-start halting progress round the North Circular Road and the highly emotional frame of mind I’d been in gave way to idle speculation as to where I would choose to live when the Oxford house (already I was thinking of it like that, as ‘the Oxford house’, not ‘our’ house) was sold. I was going to be rich. In my terms, anyway. The Oxford house was certain, or so I’d been told, to fetch what I thought of as a fortune, and there was a cottage in Cornwall which now belonged to me, as well as life insurance policies and a hefty sum in the bank. The inheritance tax would, I’d been warned, be substantial, but still I would have plenty of money. The news had given me little pleasure at first, but gradually I was adjusting to it. I would be able to buy a
house of my own wherever I wanted and that realisation excited me. I cared about my surroundings. My flat had never been simply a roof over my head. I had loved decorating and furnishing it, and had spent time and taken infinite trouble making it as beautiful as I could. I was aware that I’d tried to imitate my father’s style, with the wooden floors I’d had laid and the use of cream and white paints and pale grey fabrics – the whole aim to give an impression of space and light. Every time I came back to my home I was soothed by the atmosphere I’d created.

  But my flat was not perfect. For a start, it had no garden. It was a maisonette, two floors at the top of an ugly house in Crouch End. No garden and no views, except of other dreary houses and a long, narrow street crowded with parked cars most of the time. Now I would be able to buy a house somewhere green and leafy and set about making it truly beautiful. I would search for it thoroughly. It would give me a purpose in life and, sad to say, that is what I knew I had singularly lacked for a long time. Work had recently failed to excite me as it had once done, and my personal life was a disaster. What a contrast with Susannah’s happy, purposeful life at thirty-one. She had loved my father, and he had loved her, since they were final-year students. My birth was, according to my grandmother, in what I thought of as a sickly phrase, ‘the icing on the cake’. I’d never liked thinking of myself as icing, sweet and sticky. I’d had this image of myself melting slowly in someone’s mouth. Anyway, my arrival completed Susannah’s famous happiness. That, and the hanging of a picture she’d painted in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition the year before.