The Memory Box

by Margaret Forster

  It was in thinking about what I would read that my mind took a sudden and surprising leap. As I went into my local bookshop I was thinking about how Susannah’s feathers would be a good subject, if I were a writer, for a short story – ‘The Feathers’ or ‘The Seagull Feathers’. And then I thought ‘The Seagull’, and that there was a short story, a famous one, with that name. I was wrong, but not so very wrong. It was not a short story I was thinking of, but a play, Chekhov’s play. I knew it was ridiculous, but this bizarre idea, that my gull feathers would somehow be explained in a play by a nineteenth-century Russian dramatist, fascinated me. My father had certainly had Chekhov – and Dostoevsky, and Turgenev – among his books. Who knew if Susannah, obliged to spend so much time resting, had read this play and tied it in with some obscure message she wished to convey?

  I suddenly remembered that Susannah had at one time wanted to be an actress. This wasn’t one of my grandmother’s stories but told to me by my Aunt Isabella. She’d come to watch me in a school play – she and Rory were staying with us and came with my parents. It was Toad Of Toad Hall and I was the bombastic toad, a part I loved. I overdid Mr Toad’s cavorting about and shouted rather than spoke my lines, but I got a lot of laughs and was quite flushed with my success when I rushed to ask my family what they had thought. My parents were full of praise, as ever, but Isabella was tight-lipped and did not hang back from pointing out that she thought I’d been ‘showing off a little, just like Susannah used to’. My father quickly said Mr Toad was a show-off, it was that kind of part, but Isabella said all the same I’d upstaged the others at several crucial moments – ‘just like her mother’. It could all have got very ugly – I was on the edge of tears to be told I had been less than wonderful – but Charlotte smoothed things over and, though I never quite forgave my aunt, no real argument resulted. I think she must have felt a little guilty because later on that evening she said she thought I’d make a fine actress if I toned myself down a bit. ‘Your mother was going to be an actress once. She auditioned for RADA but didn’t get in and she gave the idea up, luckily. Our mother was relieved, she’d never approved of acting, she thought it brought the worst out in Susannah. And so it did.’

  But maybe Susannah had still been interested in the theatre, maybe she’d read plays for pleasure and still had her little fantasies of being an actress, perhaps it was not so absurd that she’d tried, through leaving me the seagull feathers, to direct me to a play, because it said something about her.

  There was no one to mock, no one to tell me how silly I was being, nobody to talk sensibly and tell me not to be preposterous. It was crazy enough to connect three ordinary bird feathers with a particular place and look for some revelation by going there, but to seek literary enlightenment through so forced a parallel was wilfully stupid. But I wanted to be stupid. And I had to have something to read, so why not a World Classics cheap copy of Anton Chekhov’s Five Plays? I was smiling when I bought it, hugging to myself the joke, but once settled on the 10.45 train from Euston and reading The Seagull the idea that this was a joke receded. Looking for meanings, I found them instantly. The first line Masha speaks, the second line in the play, is ‘I’m in mourning for my life, I’m unhappy.’ Then everything Nina says is meaningful in the context of Susannah’s situation – ‘My heart’s full of feelings for you’ … ‘What is to be, will be.’ She thinks she is like a seagull herself – ‘I’m a seagull’ … ‘Something seems to lure me … like a seagull.’ And then her final long speech before she runs out through the French window – ‘What a life it was – so serene and warm, so happy and innocent.’ My eyes were jumping from line to line, picking up odd words, refusing to read properly or to make sense of the play as a whole. I hardly knew what it was about, except that this woman Nina’s life appeared to have been somehow ruined when once it had been perfect. And the seagull, or a seagull, with whom she identifies, is killed.

  End of my mad notion that Susannah had made a literary reference. I found myself blushing a little as I closed the paperback and stared out of the window. How dangerous it was, this game, because that was what it was turning out to be, a game, one without any rules of play and only the merest chance of an elusive prize at the end. My imagination was enjoying itself, conjuring up absurdity after absurdity, trying to make profound what was simple. I had let some kind of brake off and was freewheeling, my mind rushing down all kinds of strange alleys. Seagulls, feathers, visions of Susannah floated before me dizzily and I felt a kind of physical excitement I did not like. It was a relief when the dreariness of the Midlands gave way to the hills of the North-West and it soothed me to stare out at the smooth roundness through which the train was travelling. I was like a medium coming out of a self-induced trance.

  By the time I got off at Carlisle I was sensible again. Which was fortunate, because the drive from there to Whitehaven was not the easy coastal meandering I’d expected, but a fraught business, which involved driving on a difficult, quite narrow road, with very few stretches of dual carriageway, among large lorries. There wasn’t much chance to look at the scenery and I had only a faint impression of mountains off to my left for a long way. It wasn’t until I was almost at Whitehaven itself, high up on a top road I’d somehow strayed on to from the main road in an attempt to escape the traffic, that I sensed anything glorious about the landscape that corresponded to my father’s memories. But then I saw the sea stretching away to a blue line of hills on the Scottish side and on my other side a great vista of soaring and dipping mountains, and I began to appreciate something of the hold his home county had had over him.

  What I didn’t know, and pondered as I drove into the town down a long and winding road, was whether Susannah had shared his affection. She was a Scot, not a Cumbrian, and surely more loyal to her own hills. And unlike my father she hadn’t been a great climber and walker, not possessing, because of her heart condition, his stamina and strength. I didn’t even know how many times she had actually been in this area. There was that first summer, when he’d brought her home to meet his mother (not a success – she’d thought Susannah looked ‘delicate’ – too true), but after that? I didn’t know. I thought there must have been at least one other occasion, when they went walking, and there was their honeymoon and the photographs from that in a more southern part of the county, showing Susannah looking incredibly tanned and healthy and far from delicate. I had her map with me, and the rucksack, numbers 2 and 3, and had vague ideas of going on from Whitehaven to explore further if I felt like it.

  All the time I was trying to find my way round the town (and I seemed to go in circles, realising I was passing certain buildings twice), I was straining to imagine my urbane father coming from such a place. I couldn’t see him belonging at all, and the feeling increased once I’d parked the car in a little turning off the quayside. I tried to see him as a boy, playing on the miserable, muddy patch of dark sand I could make out beyond the wall of an inner harbour, and failed. Then I walked down a sad shopping precinct full of shoe shops with wire baskets of cheap trainers standing outside until I came to a small market place, where the tourist office was housed in a pretty painted old building. It was a relief to reach it. They gave me a street map there, and I followed its directions to Washington Square, where I knew my father had been born and brought up. It wasn’t a square at all, but a triangle in the middle of narrow streets and connected to others by a cut. Now here I could see my father, sitting sketching perhaps on the bench in the square, drawing the five little trees quaintly lined up on the cobbles, or copying the mural of the George Washington sailing ship, dated 1732, which adorned the brick wall of a house backing on to it. It was so strange to come from the shabbiness of the shopping area, with its dispirited air, and from the forlorn harbour, into this charming enclave and I felt pleased. I stood and stared up at the house where my father had lived, its three windows stacked neatly one above the other, as he had described, with the top window that of his room. It didn’t seem to be a private hous
e any more, none of these houses did. There were plaques on the outside of most of them stating hours of business and none had curtains at the windows. But there was still an air of faded gentility around, which was unexpected and soothing.

  It was distracting to be conjuring up images of my father when I was here to think of Susannah. I saw how Whitehaven would have confused her, coming as she did from a fairly affluent Edinburgh family who lived in a solid, stone-built house among others the same, in an area where there was no mistaking general prosperity. She’d never lived cheek by jowl with obvious poverty as my father had done here, hidden from it but part of it. This house, his house, in Washington Square was an elegant, Georgian residence but I knew that inside it had been sparsely furnished and always cold, unlike her own overstuffed, overheated home. My paternal grandmother had had very little money after her husband died when my father was sixteen, and she herself had never worked, so she had sold most of the furniture, anything that fetched a decent price, and lived a spartan existence. I thought about knocking on the door and asking to see round it, but didn’t. It wouldn’t look the same; there was no point.

  Instead, I walked along Queen Street a bit and turned down the next corner into Cross Street. There were several houses in its short length with bed-and-breakfast signs in their windows and I chose one for the cheerful geraniums hanging in a basket outside. The woman who answered the door was not at all cheerful. She stared blankly at me and had to think for a long time before agreeing she had a room vacant and that she could provide me with an evening meal. She told me where I could park my car for the night and once I’d done this I returned immediately because ‘evening’ apparently meant five-thirty and it was nearly that. Having the meal was a bit embarrassing. There was only the woman, a Mrs Robinson, and me. She didn’t eat. I sat at a table laid with an embroidered cloth and she pottered between kitchen and table waiting on me. I was given bacon and egg, which I don’t much care for, toast and cake and a large pot of tea. She stood and watched me eat as though I were a creature from outer space and I began to feel like one. All attempts to engage her in conversation failed, or rather petered out quickly. She said, ‘You’re not local,’ a statement so obviously true I couldn’t think of a reply. I said my father had lived here, round the corner, and at the name Musgrave she took a brief interest. Yes, she knew the name. Plenty of Musgraves around still. She didn’t ask me why I was here, betraying no curiosity whatsoever, so I didn’t tell her (though I realised I’d quite wanted to). The moment I’d finished the bacon and egg and nibbled at the toast, she whipped my plate away, saying she was going to choir practice and must get the dishes washed first.

  By then it was dark, though only seven o’clock. I was tired, so went to my room, thinking I would have a bath and read until I fell asleep. The bathroom was next to my room, at the front of the house. After my bath, I stood wrapped in a towel, drying my hair with another while I looked out of the clear panes above the frosted glass. The seagulls were everywhere, silvery white in the dark, gleaming in the dull light of the few street lamps. There was one on the window sill, its beak hawked and its legs longer than I had ever thought they would be. The noise they made was not so much a screeching as a high-pitched whistle and it was insistent. I wondered, as I went back to my room – enough to give me vertigo with its swirling patterned red carpet and curtains of pink and yellow stripes – how long the birds would keep this up. Were they governed by the tides? Did they sleep? Would they soon all swoop off and leave the square suddenly silent?

  I think they must have done. It was quiet enough, at any rate, when I woke briefly in the night. But then in the morning there was a different noise, rain, heavy rain, lashing against the window and a moaning wind coming through the gap I had left open. The room was cold and I shivered getting out of bed and rushed to pull on jeans and a thick sweater. Mrs Robinson offered more bacon and eggs – I could smell the bacon already frying – and was put out when I declined. I asked if by any chance she had coffee and she was aggrieved, saying of course she did. A large mug of instant coffee was triumphantly produced and I made the best of it. Who did I think I was, coming here with my hoity-toity metropolitan ways and expecting real coffee, black and bitter? She asked if I would like a flask filled to take out with me. At first I said no, but then changed my mind. It looked as if I was going to get drenched. I might never find a café. Watery Nescafé might at some point taste like nectar.

  At least I’d come well equipped. I was no novice when it came to being out in exposed places in horrible weather, and had all the right clothing: lightweight but waterproof leggings and jacket, with a hood, and wellingtons. I had a case, for my camera and tripod, which was completely watertight, and I carried a large and, unfortunately, heavy golfing umbrella which I used as a shield when taking photographs in such conditions. Crazy to attempt to take shots at all in such poor light, but I’d had some remarkable successes all the same, some dramatic results in similar conditions. I didn’t know why I was thinking of taking photographs that day – it was just automatic, it was what I did, my job. Wherever I went I had a camera with me; it was part of me, sometimes the only part in which I had any pride. Taking pictures had always seemed to help me feel real, to steady myself when I felt I was wavering. The photographs were solid proof that I had been where I thought I had been and seen what I thought I had seen.

  And yet I had always known not to trust the camera in this way. I soon learned its limitations, its tricks. Every time I looked at a photograph I had taken I saw the deceit. It was not what was in the photograph that gave the lie to it, but rather what was outside the frame, what was missing. I knew very early on, without being able to articulate it, that photographs are made, not taken. They are created, formed by the photographer, who can persuade the onlooker to see what she wants them to see. As Cartier-Bresson made me see that road in France as a fluid, peaceful surface, enticing me along it in a dreamlike way until I failed to register where the road might be coming from or going to, it didn’t matter to him. I knew I would have made a different photograph and might not even have seen the seductive curve he used to such soporific effect. He made something calming and beautiful out of a scene I might turn into something sinister and harsh. It happens all the time, the photographers’ emotions as well as their vision forming the photograph.

  I wondered often why I had always distrusted photographs of Susannah. Portraits, after all, ought to be safest from the photographer’s interpretation – people, straight to camera, where is the room for interpretation? But they are not. Photographs of people are always, to me, sentimental in no time at all. Before the film is even developed, a kind of death has taken place in the subject. The person has changed, they will never be as they were in that photograph again. I look at Susannah, posed so carefully by my father to her best advantage, and all I see is death. Those photographs make me shudder. I don’t think, How lovely she looked, how fine her eyes were. Instead, I think, This is a reminder of a life over. So I don’t take people, ever. I take landscapes only, and always black and white. Colour is less true, more subject to exaggeration. I automatically distrust a colour photograph. Looking at Susannah’s eyes and hair in my father’s photographs I think, No, they were not that shade of blue, that shade of gold – that is the colour of the film, of the print, and what can be seen is a mere approximation. Blue eyes, blonde hair, yes, but where is the subtlety? Colour blanks it out.

  Trudging through the sodden streets of Whitehaven that morning I took a grim pleasure in my preference for black and white pictures – looking for colour, I would have been dismayed. There was none. Once I was out of the town and climbing a track leading from the quayside to a headland, there was no colour anywhere – grey leaden sea, black gusts of rain, sullen grey sky weighted with huge dark clouds. And everywhere the seagulls, great blurs of palest grey tossed into the sky. Yet for no reason I could think of, I began to feel exhilarated.

  IV

  HOURS I LAY there, hours and hours al
l the long, wet day, on my front, barely sheltered by the umbrella, stuck up to the top of its handle in the grass and yet threatening all the time to blow away. I watched the sea through half-closed eyes, the rain driving into the side of my hood, stinging my right cheek even though it did not penetrate the waterproof fabric. The material stuck to my skin, cold and clammy, but I dared not ease it away. The sea before me, far below, was ugly, black and bitter, the tops of the heaving waves a dun brown, like beer, and the white foam and spume not white at all but more a filthy ivory. Every now and again I had another look through the lens of my camera, as protected as I could make it by a smaller transparent umbrella within the larger one, and saw the same – thick clumps of seagulls travelling so swiftly no shutter could cope with the movement and produce more than a blur.

  There were hundreds of gulls, driven in great angry gusts back from the sea. They were tossed high above the waves, which kept up a ceaseless crashing on the shingle, all along the battered shoreline. I had never seen anything like this violence of wind and water, full of such fury and menace. The birds seemed at the mercy of these dramatic elements and yet they could not be subdued – again and again they were hurled towards the land, then forced yet higher into the air, only to turn and strain towards the horizon, when their effort would begin again. I couldn’t imagine why they did not fly inland and find shelter until the storm was played out. Or let the wind take them where it wanted to. They seemed heroically determined to fly out to sea and would not give up, staying close together, striving as a group, not a stray to be seen. I wondered if they were shrieking in protest but it was impossible to hear them. There was no sound except the roar of the wind and the thudding of the waves. The birds were silenced so long as the gale blew.