The Memory Box

by Margaret Forster

  What else would I leave? I tried to think of myself, of what I had become, what I was, of my life in general. What would I want the unimaginable daughter to know? What would it pain me to realise that photographs and the testimonies of others had not told her? Susannah had left a husband, a mother, a sister and several uncles, aunts and cousins, who had not only tried to keep her memory alive but who had in their possession a whole archive of material about her. If I had wished, I could have been swamped in it. (My grandmother in particular had seemed determined to tell me what I didn’t want to hear – there was no stopping her, and I grew to dread the words ‘Susannah used to’.) Hers were all stories in which this Susannah won things, it seemed to me – prizes galore for the best handwriting, the best-decorated Easter egg, the fastest crossword-puzzle solver, the best singer, the best verse speaker – on and on went the litany of praise. She used to work so hard, try so hard, think so hard; she used to smile so winningly, make friends so easily, charm people so completely. All my grandmother wanted, of course, was to bring her alive for me, but that was the very thing she could not do. Maybe if she had told me just one story, given me just one example, of Susannah being naughty or spiteful she would have succeeded, but she never did. As a child, I assumed there were no such detrimental tales to tell, and only now do I realise my grandmother may have been censoring Susannah’s past, if with the best of motives.

  No child of mine would have had all that. There were no grandparents to be keepers of my flame; most of my cousins had faded out of my life. There was only Rory who had truly known me and who was still close. And he would not be trustworthy. Any box of mine would be far more significant than Susannah’s – it would have to speak for itself and compensate for the almost entire lack of other voices and evidence. And there would be no husband to safeguard it …

  That was a stupid thought. If I had had a child there would have been a father if not a husband. I thought about this, getting deeper and deeper into absurd speculation, moving further and further away from my original starting point. I saw I was obstinately refusing to answer properly my own crucial question: what would I put in a memory box if I had to leave one? Good God, it was simple enough. Then I saw why I was being so evasive. It wasn’t because I couldn’t think what I would need to communicate, but that I was ashamed of what that was. Susannah had had plenty to be proud of. Happy things. Good memories. I did not. I had to confront the fact that I had made a mess of much of my life. I had done things with which I did not particularly care to acquaint those who did not know. Only my childhood, especially my early childhood, was worth trying to encapsulate, my first supremely fortunate ten years or so. I would have liked a child of mine to have known of this happiness, hoping the knowledge of it would please them. But how could I pass it on, if I was obliged to, in the shape of some object to go in a comparatively small box? I thought of our house in Oxford, my lovely childhood home, and I remembered the model my father had once made of it, a doll’s house given to me on my seventh birthday, the most beautiful object. I still had it, sitting in a broad alcove halfway up the stairs. But it was too big to go into a hatbox, or indeed a crate. The doll’s house could not be part of my memory box. It could only be a memory in itself.

  Yet somehow having thought of starting with this house I felt less agitated. It reassured me, the reminder that of course I had something worth communicating of my life however it had turned out. This box business was only, after all, about communication, nothing else. There was no justification for regarding anything Susannah left for me as sinister. I didn’t need to sweat and strain for deep meanings. And then I slept.

  III

  I WOKE LATE the next morning, a Sunday, feeling cheerful. Taking my coffee into the sitting-room, I looked at the red hat on the glass head, the sunlight glancing off it just as I had known it would, and prepared to think differently about what had been in the memory box. I told myself this was, after all, like a treasure hunt, though not the sort Rory had liked to romanticise about, and that I should regard it as fun. I would treat each of the eleven objects as a clue and following these clues, in search of Susannah, I would have a sense of purpose. Indeed, it was a welcome diversion for me even if she could not have known I would need it.

  What did I need a diversion from? It was embarrassing to admit the answer even to myself: life, my own life. I needed a respite from life in the manner I was increasingly living it. It wasn’t that I was suicidal – suicide never entered my head. I was just tired, jaded. I could find little pleasure or satisfaction in anything I did and I was angry with myself for feeling like this when I had so much to be grateful for. Everything seemed flat and when real tragedy happened, when both my parents died one after the other so unexpectedly, this seemed only to point up how little happiness I had been enjoying anyway before I had real reason to be unhappy. It had been almost a relief to have cause for my vague feelings of despair. What a sorry, un-Susannah-like state of affairs. I had no idea exactly how this had come about. Everything had been so promising but then had just collapsed, and I found myself at thirty-one looking back with disbelief at myself at eighteen, nineteen, so confident and determined.

  I hadn’t looked ahead much then, didn’t have precise plans, but then not many eighteen-year-olds do, except the fortunate few who have always wanted to be doctors or lawyers and see their paths clearly marked. I just assumed … I don’t, in fact, remember what I assumed. That things would happen, I suppose, that I needn’t worry about the future, it would come to me. I never had worried. I never had had reason to worry. Occasionally, my father would enquire, in a mild sort of way, if I’d thought what I would like to do in life. I remember being surprised that he should need to ask at all. Surely he knew that I’d go to some sort of place where I could learn more about photography and then I’d be a photographer. I wasn’t interested in anything else, but of course I hadn’t thought it out, I hadn’t the slightest idea how one became a photographer by profession – I just liked taking photographs. Wasn’t that enough? My father didn’t think so. He thought I should have a more general education, and either go to university or art college to do a foundation course then a degree. I refused to go to university and only agreed to the basic foundation course because I had heard everyone had a good time doing it (and at St Martin’s in London I had a very good time indeed).

  There wasn’t much photography in the course then, but that didn’t bother me. I took photographs anyway, pleasing myself, without a thought about earning a living. I saw no need to. Ever since my parents had given me a good camera, a Pentax, on my tenth birthday, I’d known I was hooked. I taught myself the obvious way, through trial and error, taking endless photographs, and the only help I had was in learning how to print them. Luckily, my school had an excellent art department with photography as one of the options in the sixth form, and I was a quick learner. My father fitted out a little room that had once been a coal cellar as a darkroom for me and he was quite happy to finance what he thought of as my hobby. He bought me a Leica on my eighteenth birthday, more extravagance. But it wasn’t a hobby, it was a passion, and I think he was amazed how it came to absorb me. I was soon entering competitions and winning some, and as far as I was concerned that was it, that’s what I’d do. Patiently, my father pointed out that winning competitions was one thing, but paying one’s bills another. Bills? I don’t think I even knew what he meant. You could say that it was his own fault: he and my mother had been over-indulgent. They had never made me realise the value of money. I had never had to work at menial jobs in the holidays to earn pocket money as most of my friends did. They gave me a generous allowance and I actually thought my expenditure modest, on the grounds that I rarely bought clothes or records, failing to appreciate what I cost them in other ways (cameras, films, equipment). A case could be made out (not that I would make it) for my parents being responsible for much that happened simply through being too generous. The curious thing to me now is how little shame or guilt I felt at being the only
, spoiled child of well-off parents. I took it all as my due. I seemed to think it was my birthright to be so cosseted, and had no qualms about it.

  They financed me through St Martin’s and then bought me my flat. As if that wasn’t enough, they gave me an income until such time as I could earn enough to support myself. It took me four years and never once did either of them remonstrate and say I would have to get some kind of other job if I couldn’t make photography pay. They were utterly, completely supportive and it didn’t concern me in the least. All I can say in mitigation of my bland acceptance is that I loved them and showed it. I didn’t move away from them, they were never a burden to me, as so many of my friends find their parents (and as Rory with equal cause for gratitude certainly finds his). I loved them, I liked them, I phoned them almost every day and visited them every other weekend. They shared in everything I did and the warmth between us never cooled, or only very slightly. Over men, the two before Tony. My choice of men friends, of lovers, did produce not so much a cooling of the affection between us as an anxiety which had never been noticeable before, even if it had existed (as I’m sure it had). They became a little tense; it made them uneasy when certain men moved into my flat. They were always visibly relieved to hear they had moved out.

  Maybe it was men I was tired of, not life. There hadn’t been many. Only a few. Only two of any importance. I wasn’t good at relationships, that was the trouble. I always grew restless and felt claustrophobic a few months into a relationship, however much I loved the man. It made me wonder, of course, how much I loved them. Could what I felt be love, if a great deal of the time I wished they were not there? Didn’t being in love mean you couldn’t get enough of the loved one? My father and Charlotte loved each other. They never seemed to want to be apart longer than a day. And the happy Susannah had been the same, with my father, so far as I knew, her only lover. Perhaps I am simply a bad judge both of men and of what love is. In any case, my personal life was very far from rich and satisfying and I couldn’t seem to sort it out. I preferred being alone.

  I realised, though, that morning, how much I wanted Susannah’s legacy to touch and change me, to work magic. I knew it was foolish to have such expectations, but I felt that unless I forced myself to make an effort and be optimistic, I would waste these gifts left to me with such love. And there was love there, whatever else, I was sure of that. Everything had been wrapped with such care and packed so tenderly. But maybe it was the thought of this love which I had always instinctively feared. If I felt the love, I would feel, too, its withdrawal. Perhaps I had unconsciously been clever all these years to refuse this posthumous love. It could fill me with a resentment and a rage against fate which I had been spared.

  That day, I made a plan. I studied the list of objects that had been in the box and resolved to try to trace them in the order in which they had been numbered. ‘Trace’ was not exactly what I meant, but I could think of no more appropriate word. I wanted to do a sort of study of each object which would involve trying to find out its possible significance first in its own right and then with regard to Susannah. If a trail leading somewhere was intended, then this, I was convinced, was how I would follow it. If there was no trail, if, in spite of the numbers, this was merely a random collection of mementoes meant to serve as the most tenuous of links with a dead woman, then it would be exposed as such.

  I regretted having to start with the three feathers, really, because of all the objects they seemed so vague. There was nothing that I had been told about Susannah to connect her with birds. She hadn’t painted birds, there had been no books about birds amongst those belonging to her which I had sent to a dealer. A trip to the library next day and half an hour’s study of a pretty limited ornithology section taught me that the three feathers were neither rare nor exciting. They were the feathers of the common gull, found all along the sea coasts of Britain. It was unlikely that even an expert would be able to say where they had come from. So, straight away, I felt disappointed. Back home, I held the feathers in my hand, thinking hard. Where had Susannah got them? Was the number 1 to indicate some reference to her childhood? Or those sailing trips with my father? (I remembered only one ‘seaside’ photograph of her that had hung in my father’s study – on a boat somewhere, though no gulls that I could recall.) I got out the oldest of those photograph albums bequeathed to me by my grandmother. It was the sort with thick, black, cardboard-like pages on to which the mostly small square photographs were stuck with strong glue. No snaps of Susannah at the seaside, none at all. A few beside various lochs, but none actually at the coast.

  The photograph albums covering Susannah’s life were all together. I’d packed them in one box, the two my grandmother gave me and the two dating from when my father had started taking photographs up to and including my own birth. As soon as I opened the first of the albums kept by my father, I found pages of photographs of Susannah taken by the sea. Too many, all too alike, which is probably why they’d barely registered before. He’d had a fixation about getting her in profile, in the foreground, so that the eye focused on the line of forehead and nose and chin and very little else. He must have had her sitting on a cliff top because the background was all sea and sky. And yes, there were gulls, seagulls, white dots, sometimes swarms of them, in this background, though none distinct. Because my father was a methodical and neat man, all these photographs were labelled. He’d written little captions, in italic handwriting, underneath – date, place, everything. These first few pages of pictures in the first of his albums were all from the summer he met Susannah, at the end of which he’d taken her home to meet his widowed mother who lived in Whitehaven. Some of them were taken on trips to places along the coast – St Bees, Allonby, Skinburness – but most at Whitehaven itself.

  Did the feathers come from the Whitehaven coast? Well, was it a fair assumption or not? It seemed so to me. Susannah had begun not with any link to her childhood but with a link to my father. In a way, it was the most vital of links since it was to produce me. But it was hard, all the same, to see the relevance of leaving me three gulls’ feathers. Did she want me to go to Whitehaven on a kind of memory lane trip? The idea made me feel slightly queasy, but on the other hand I had never been to Whitehaven, or indeed to Cumberland (my father never called his county ‘Cumbria’). After his mother died, when I was too young to have any memories of her, though she apparently lived with us in Oxford during each of her last two winters, he never went back, for the reasons I have already guessed at. Cumberland was closed to him. If he’d still had relatives living in Whitehaven, especially a brother or a sister with a family, then I’m sure he would have got over whatever block he had and taken me there, but he was an only child, as bereft of family as Charlotte was blessed and burdened. In his rare mournful moods, he would tell me I was the last of an ancient line of Musgraves and recite poetry to me, lines I think from Walter Scott, in which our name was lauded.

  I always liked having a regional surname even if I had never been to that region. ‘Musgrave’ doesn’t have a particularly attractive sound, in fact rather the opposite, but I fancied it went well with Catherine. I dropped the Hope entirely. Of all the things I was grateful to Charlotte for, I was most fervently grateful that she’d changed my name, or rather selected my other name for me to be known by. At birth, I was named Catherine Hope, to be called Hope. Susannah called me Hope. But Charlotte, when she became my mother, when I was still only a little over a year, asked my father if he could bear her to use my given first name of Catherine. My father said he preferred it, and then it turned out that my grandmother, whom he consulted with trepidation, was pleased. Catherine was her own name and she, too, had not approved of my being called Hope. Everyone, then, was glad to reject the name Susannah had chosen for me. Precisely. Hope, indeed. It was unbearable to think of, and when later – much, much later – I did think about it, I hated it. I didn’t want to be her hope, I didn’t want to think my name had been invested with such symbolism. I was her hope for t
he future and it had failed. Every form I ever filled out after the time I knew this gave my name as Catherine Musgrave.

  I couldn’t really see any point in going to Whitehaven just because a few seagulls appeared in photographs of Susannah taken there, but on the other hand it was a town I’d always wanted to visit, if because of my father rather than her, and there was nothing to hold me back from going. I was a free agent. I had no ties. I needed a change. It was early autumn and the weather was pleasant, so I decided to go. But I didn’t drive there. I’m not a keen, or a particularly good, driver, and there was something wrong with my car. I didn’t want to wait until it was put right – my enthusiasm might fade within the forty-eight hours the garage needed – so I went by train, to Carlisle, and arranged to hire a car up there.

  The best thing about train journeys as opposed to car journeys is, of course, that one can read. Tony was always surprised by how much I did read. He said I hadn’t seemed a bookish person when we first met. I took this as an insult, not a compliment, and demanded to be told precisely what he meant. Did he mean I seemed too empty-headed to be a serious reader? Too frivolous? Too stupid? He was patient and said no, none of those things, but rather that he thought I was more of a visual person who preferred pictures, films and television as stimulation. And he hadn’t thought I’d have the sheer patience that reading demands. I seemed always on the move, always rushing, and he couldn’t see me sitting still, turning the pages of any book. Well, he soon learned he was wrong. I read more than he did for pleasure and not what he would have called light stuff either. I love thick biographies and best of all, to alternate with these, volumes of classic short stories.