The Memory Box

by Margaret Forster

  So, I felt familiar with this map although I’d never been to this part of England, but I knew my father had been born in the coastal town of Whitehaven and that he had spent his youth fell-walking and climbing. He and Susannah had also spent their honeymoon somewhere in the Lake District and though she hadn’t been strong enough to climb much, she had apparently enjoyed walking and loved the landscape. I suppose it was odd that my father had never taken me there, if he had such happy and significant memories, but then that in itself might explain why he never did revisit his old haunts once Susannah had died – too sad, too much part of a past he was trying to get over. And Charlotte was not a country lover, so it would have meant leaving her to go off by himself, something he never had any desire to do.

  Whitehaven was not on this map, but I reckoned it could not be far off it. My eye went at once to a red cross marked at Buttermere and from there followed the pencil markings alongside a green dotted path almost parallel with the lake, then turning to go up a stream called Scale Beck. At what I could see from the contours was the top of this pass through the fells, the pencilled trail turned right and on to what was marked as the Mosedale Holly Tree. There it stopped, at another red cross. Beside this cross there was a small exclamation mark, also in red. (Rory would have loved it – X marking the spot, treasure definitely buried there, etc.) Clearly, I was meant to take this map and follow this route. I supposed I should be grateful for some positive directions at last. Doubtless the rucksack was meant to go on my back, but I had my own excellent rucksacks, of various types and sizes, and would have no use for such a flimsy version. The straps were too thin and would cut into my shoulders, it wasn’t waterproof and the fastenings were inadequate. There was one main pouch, closed with a drawstring, and two small ones. I felt inside each of them but they were empty. Something had once leaked, juice of some sort by the look of the stain, and there were bits of dried tissue in one of the small pouches. I scraped them out painstakingly and gave the whole thing a good shake. No, I wouldn’t use such a rucksack if ever I decided to follow the trail.

  The hat was red. Was it to partner the necklace, meant to be worn with it, or was it a companion to the rucksack? It wasn’t elegant enough to match the jewellery but far too frivolous and fragile to be worn fell-walking in the famous Lake District weather. Made of crushed velvet, it was of the sloppy variety, the kind of hat that can be pulled into different shapes. The wide brim was overstitched, giving it a little more substance than the crown. It was the sort of hat that had absolutely no shape until it was put on, but I was reluctant to place it on my head. I picked it up and found myself smelling it. It had a spicy, pungent smell, quite pleasant, not at all musty. I saw there was a flower sewn on one side, a dried rose, the petals partially disintegrated. Nervously, I played with it for a while, turning it round and round, and then, to get it over with, pulled it quickly on to my head. It felt immediately comfortable, but then it was the sort of hat that was so soft and pliable it would fit any head. I picked up the silver hand mirror and cautiously looked at myself. The hat suited me. I played with it again, twisting and turning the brim, pulling it first to one side and then the other until I was satisfied. I never wear a hat, except sometimes a cotton baseball cap to keep the sun out of my eyes when I am working. I knew I would never go out of the house wearing this hat. It wasn’t my style, any more than the necklace was.

  Did Susannah put it in my box just because she had loved it? Or more than that? Had it been worn on some momentous occasion? I would have to get the photograph albums out to check. Then it occurred to me that perhaps, if, as I suspected, she’d imagined I’d open this box when still a child, the hat was for dressing up. It would have been too large, and would have fallen over my eyes, but being pliable it could have been rolled back and, yes, I knew I would have enjoyed playing with it. So would Rory. He would probably, aged six or seven, have looked even more like Susannah than my grandmother always vowed he did. Too late. I had a glass head, the sort used to model hats, which I’d picked up in a junk shop, admiring the green of the glass and thinking it would make a pretty ornament on my sitting-room shelf, where it would catch any sunlight. I put the red hat on it. It looked perfect, the red velvet and the green glass together.

  There was only one layer left. All four objects remaining were wrapped in the same paper, plain gold with silver ribbon round, and all were roughly oblong in shape. Books? The first was indeed a book, small but thick, with a cover made of a William Morris patterned material, grey with peacock feathers of paler grey and washed-out blue. It was an address book, made for Liberty of London, and had the customary letters of the alphabet cut into the right-hand side. There was space for three addresses on each page, the words ‘name’, ‘address’ and ‘telephone number’ printed in purple. Flicking through, I noticed it was not overfull, but it was a while before I realised there was something strange about the entries. There were no names. None at all. There were addresses, and sometimes telephone numbers, but no names of people. This was literally an address book and nothing more, and the addresses seemed to be mainly of hotels and similar establishments. Most of them were in England and Scotland with a smattering in France. Holidays? Were these places where Susannah had enjoyed holidays? Was she attempting to send me off on one long holiday? If so, she would be disappointed. I was well travelled already and none of the destinations I registered as I turned the pages attracted me, or if they did I’d been there already. Paris, for example. She’d written down the name of an hotel on the Ile St Louis which I knew. A perfectly nice but ordinary small hotel. Perhaps to Susannah it had been exciting. The 1950s, the decade she was most likely to have gone there, as a student, was not a time when foreign travel was common.

  I put the address book down, and picked up the next offering. It was a paintbox, a Winsor & Newton box of watercolour paints complete with well-used brush, sitting neatly in its slot between two rows of the paints. These were square, six either side. The greens, yellows and the white and brown were well worn down, the reds hardly touched. The box was that hard black plastic – plastic? I think so – on the outside and white on the inside. Someone had clearly mixed colours on the inner white lid. It would have been her own paintbox, of course, though only one of several she’d possessed, because I’d seen others. My grandmother had had one. She gave it to me when I was about ten and staying with her, wondering aloud if I had ‘Susannah’s talent’. That effectively put me off wanting to use it. Later, my parents gave me a similar paintbox, without any mention of Susannah or her talent, and I discovered I enjoyed painting and was good at it. My father was pleased and encouraged me and I turned out some quite creditable efforts. He bought me some oils later on and I found I liked oil paints even more than watercolours. Susannah, I knew, had never touched oils. She’d stuck to watercolours. I wouldn’t use this set of paints. I closed the box, but gently, surprisingly touched by the sight of it. More than any object so far it had made me feel sad. Used paints are sad to me, though I find it hard to say why.

  It seemed logical that the next thing I unwrapped should be a painting. It was about ten by eight inches, unframed. The scene was a hillside with some kind of building halfway up. This building, a cottage or croft, was sketched in pencil, and so was a stream, or what I thought appeared to be a stream running past it. It was an unfinished painting, obviously, with only the sky and the top of the hill and some boulders properly painted. I looked at it for a long time, trying to make something of it, trying to have some positive response or even some critical appreciation, but all I felt was depressed. It was a rather drab attempt at a painting, no better than the famous one of the empty meadow. Was it left to me so that it would inspire me to finish it? Or was I intended to track down the place it depicted? But so little was depicted. This unassuming hill with its cottage could be anywhere.

  The last package had been wedged with some difficulty in the very bottom of the box. It looked square, but when I opened it there was a cylinder of rolled-up pape
rs within the strong cardboard box. I unrolled them. I was looking at reproductions of colour prints. Two of them cut out of some art book; good draughtsmanship, a bit sentimental, probably nineteenth-century, I guessed, but I didn’t recognise the artist. One showed a mother in a blue dress cradling and kissing a baby; the other a mother in a cream gown cuddling her baby. They might not be mothers, of course, I told myself: they could be nursemaids. But there was something about the way the babies – both naked – were held that suggested motherhood. I rolled them back up, disappointed.

  It was over and hadn’t proved traumatic after all. Such a lot of unnecessary angst over what had turned out to be a collection of harmless mementoes. Rather wearily, I stuffed all the wrappings back into the box and put the lid on. I wanted to put the box somewhere out of sight. My cupboards weren’t deep enough to hold it without the doors sticking open, but I found a place in my darkroom, under the sink, a compartment empty except for the stopcock taps, where I managed to wedge it. I felt much better when it had been hidden. Some of the objects themselves could stay on display. The hat was already a fixture on the glass head, the necklace in my mirror drawer (one of those wooden swivel mirror stands), the rucksack with the map inside hung on a hook in my bedroom behind the door, the shell sat on a bathroom shelf, the feathers I took out of their plastic bag and stuck in a bottle which also stood on the bathroom shelf. The silver hand mirror I wrapped in a cloth and put in a drawer full of sweaters together with the address book. This only left the rolled-up prints, the paint-box and the unfinished painting. I put them in a pine linen chest which was at the top of the stairs with only a spare duvet in it.

  I don’t know why, but I had made a list of everything in numerical order. I suppose I thought that once I’d unwrapped the packages I’d forget how they had been numbered and that it might be important. But looking at the little list I couldn’t see why the correct sequence should be important at all. Why were those feathers numbered I? And the prints 11, last? I wandered about for a bit, list in hand, restless and perturbed. I didn’t like being made to feel stupid, suspecting that I wasn’t spotting connections which someone brighter might make. I was tired too, and hungry, so eventually I put the list on my desk, made myself some pasta and ate it in front of the television, watching the news, but not taking it in. All the time I was looking at the screen I was seeing not the images actually flashing across it but all the things that had been in the memory box, an endless procession of them over and over again.

  In bed, it was worse. I was sleepy, but the moment I closed my eyes, ready to drift off, the wretched box was before me, so confident of its power over me. I told myself that now it was stuck under the sink in the darkroom, its contents revealed, it had no power any more. But this was not true. The after-effects of opening it were different but still powerful. The fear of some kind of horrible surprise had gone, and so had the terror of being swamped by emotions I hadn’t known I could feel, but nevertheless something threatened me still. Susannah had reached out to me through her box, as she intended to, and even if I did not fully understand what she was saying, she had succeeded in making a claim on me. I could no longer reject her. She had forced herself into my mind, where I had never wanted her to be. I had worked hard since I knew of her existence, knew she existed at all as my mother, scarcely to think of her. Now I lay in the dark obliged to think of myself as once part of her. I must have been with her when she was choosing and wrapping and arranging the things in the box. I would have been in a cradle or cot beside her bed. She would have hung over me, perhaps talked to me, showing me what she was leaving me, telling me why she was doing it. I found myself, in my half-asleep state, straining to imagine her voice, to see her face looming over mine, to feel the tenderness of her touch …

  I sat up and switched on my bedside lamp. This was sick. It was also ridiculous. I reminded myself I had been only a few months old and could have no memory of Susannah. There was nothing to recall. But what is memory anyway? Could it be claimed nothing is forgotten, even a small baby’s impressions? Could I, in fact, have memories of Susannah embedded in my brain somewhere if only I knew how to log into them? Was the problem only one of retrieval? I slumped there in bed, wondering what happens to memories not remembered. I envisaged them in a kind of vast lost-property room, all jumbled together and crowding each other, clamouring to be let out. It seemed to me that if it is hard sometimes to remember, it is also hard to forget. Perhaps if I went to a psychiatrist, or a psychotherapist, my baby memories would resurface, but I had no intention of doing that. I swore to be stern with myself, sensible. The only important truth was that I remembered nothing and that this had always been a blessing. I had been protected from the pain of Susannah’s death. I hadn’t pined for her or cried out for her. I hadn’t even known she’d disappeared for ever, but had at once accepted my grandmother as a substitute and thrived until Charlotte came into my life.

  There was no way of being sure that this cheerful version, in which I had always believed implicitly, was absolutely accurate. Maybe I had missed her. The not crying, the easy transference to my grandmother’s arms, need not necessarily signify that I had not registered they were different. I remembered suddenly how my Aunt Isabella had once remarked, in tones almost of disapproval, how adaptable I had been, as though she felt it was neither natural nor right that I had been so docile and had not screamed at my deprivation. She’d seemed to think it shocking how happily I’d given up Susannah, who had loved me with such a fierce passion. Maybe she would rather I had been inconsolable, knowing instinctively what I had lost. I recalled what I’d felt when I first saw the box, that it might be a weapon. She might have wanted me to resent her death. This thought startled me – I had always assumed it must have been a comfort to her, knowing how young I was, thinking I would remember nothing and that therefore her death would not blight my own life. She knew she was going to desert me, but what if, rather than being glad I would not remember her, she had been angry? Perhaps rage had been packed between the layers of her box: ‘How dare you not remember me, how dare you say I mean nothing to you, how dare you never call me your mother?’ She was not, then, entertaining me or educating me. She was intent on making me examine my attitude to her. I was to take stock and include her in doing so.

  I got up, walked about, had a drink of water, went back to bed, but didn’t put out the light. Sleep was going to elude me for a while yet, I knew, so that the best thing to do was make myself comfortable and try to be calm. I’m always trying to be calm. ‘Calm down,’ has been said to me endlessly, by my parents, my grandmother, my teachers, my lovers: ‘Calm down, Catherine, for heaven’s sake!’ What is so wrong in being turbulent, volatile, I wonder. But of course I know perfectly well what’s wrong with it. It is tiring, wearing, for other people. They read into my agitation some sort of madness, I think, and it frightens them. They think I might explode and harm them. Or myself. But it runs through me like a stream of hot lava, this bubbling rage I seem always to have within me – rage about things not worth the rage. People said I would learn to control it, or at least direct it, but I never really have. It is me, and I’ve stopped being ashamed of it. I’ve stopped wondering where it came from, too, although it used to worry me terribly in case this was Susannah coming out in me. Nobody had ever told me she had a fiery temper, or that she was capable of the kind of rages which regularly overcame me, but, when I felt the need to blame somebody for the state I was in, it was convenient to blame her. I did that a lot, secretly. And once, when I screamed at my poor grandmother that I couldn’t help being bad, it wasn’t my fault, I was made that way, I saw the strangest look come over her face. It scared me, and I hurled myself into her arms, and sobbed and said I was sorry for yelling. She just stroked my hair and held me and was silent.

  Tony was the only person who succeeded in helping me to be calm when I was angry or upset. He was calm himself, this man I used to love not so very long ago, not so many weeks before the memory box came into m
y life to disturb me. Tony lived with me for over a year, the year that ended with Charlotte’s death. He helped me through my father’s death and then through Charlotte’s illness. He helped me stay sane, by loving me and tolerating my rage and understanding the misery that was fuelling it. It was Tony who taught me tricks other people had tried to teach me and which I had rejected. I had always been so insulted to be told to take deep breaths, or to close my eyes and count to ten when I was furious about something and letting rip. Tony didn’t come out with rubbish about deep breaths and counting, but he did introduce me to yoga and practised it himself with me. I jeered, I sneered, but grudgingly I let him teach me and, though it didn’t stop me exploding from time to time, it did make me calmer in general. So did his ideas for making my bedroom a soothing place into which I could retreat. Tony put new lighting in and together we chose a carpet to cover the plain boards: the room became a softer place, less stark, less bare. We painted the white walls a pale apricot and left them bare except for the wall opposite the bed. This was to hold what he solemnly referred to as my ‘calming picture’. I humoured him and after great deliberation chose a print I’d always loved.

  It’s a Cartier-Bresson photograph, ‘En Brie’, taken in 1968, a classic in black and white. It’s the one showing a road leading between fields of what might be lavender, a road broad in the foreground and narrowing to pass through a long avenue of trees, the sort of road so common in the French countryside. The line of trees curves to the left, fading into the horizon. Half the picture is sky. No clouds, just smooth, grey sky. No people or buildings. Many a night, in the half gloom of my bedroom I’ve stared at that photograph and followed the clear yet mysterious road. Usually, it helped me travel to sleep but that night it had the opposite effect. I felt suddenly alert. I began to turn over in my mind what I would leave in a memory box. Would I put this photograph in it? And if I did, what would I intend it to convey, and what might it signify to the person to whom I bequeathed it? I saw how it would help to think about this. The only way to make sense of Susannah’s legacy might be to put myself in the position of leaving a similar one myself. Instantly, I realised the dangers. Presented with a print of this Cartier-Bresson photograph, what might a recipient think? Surely, they would home in on the place. They would decide that wherever this road was, I had walked or driven along it and that it was somehow of great significance to me. They would feel bound to find it and then wait for enlightenment to dawn. But it wouldn’t. The place, the road itself, was of no importance and going there would have told them nothing about me. I had never been to Brie. It meant nothing to me. What meant something was purely the art of the photograph. It would have been left as a marker of my taste.