The Memory Box

by Margaret Forster

  So I rang Isabella and told her I just thought I’d let her know I was going away for two or three weeks, maybe a bit longer. She was pleased, said it would do me good, I’d had a rough time and she’d been wondering how I was recovering. She asked where I was going, somewhere nice and sunny she hoped, and when I said Bequia, she gave no sign of recognition, just expressed a vague interest without seeming to connect this unusual destination in any way to the dead Susannah. I let her ramble on a bit, about my taking care to use a good quality sun-screen cream, and then I mentioned I had an old address book of Susannah’s which listed a cabin in Bequia. She was silent a moment, and then said, ‘Does it? Where is that exactly? Is it America? She had a vac job in America once, I remember that.’ I said no, Bequia was an island, one of the Grenadines, and gave her the description the guidebook had given me, the bit about the safe harbour and so forth. There was another, longer pause, into which I read either confusion or some struggle to remember. ‘Aunt Isabella?’ I prompted. ‘Did Susannah go there, then, can you remember?’ ‘All I recall’, Isabella said, ‘was that she went sailing, her first year at university. I never knew who with – some well-to-do person she got in with, some gang she was invited to join. But I thought they sailed round Scotland. I can’t believe they went that far, never.’ Trying to sound very sensible and not at all excited, I pressed on. ‘But she would have told you afterwards, wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t she have been full of it, if she did something so daring?’ A sigh came down the line. ‘She’d have told my mother, but we weren’t good friends at that time.’ A famous feud between the sisters had been hinted at by my grandmother, but I decided it would not be diplomatic to pursue this. And now that I’d been given every encouragement to believe Susannah might have gone to Bequia – well, I convinced myself I had – Isabella had served her purpose. We moved on to Rory. She always used phone calls, whatever they were ostensibly about, to enquire if I knew how her son was. He almost never called her and she rarely knew where he was to call him (not that she would necessarily have done so). I said he was well, and coming with me, I was treating him. She loved the idea – for once, she would be able to visualise him safely in my company and not in that of the decadent crowd she imagined he spent his time among.

  I didn’t tell Rory, when we met up at Heathrow early in the morning, that I’d rung his mother. There was no point in starting our jaunt off in the wrong mood and any mention of either of his parents invariably made him sullen and irritable. He was in great form, looking very smooth in brand-new white chino cotton trousers and black T-shirt, quite the male model as I immediately said, with a sneer of course, and he’d obeyed instructions about hand luggage only. He had always been a congenial travelling companion, very relaxed, very keen on observing other people, just as I was. I knew we looked like a couple, which is no bad thing if you are a woman. It prevents any hassling from lecherous men, and stops people of either sex latching on to you because you’re alone. I could have done with Rory on many of my trips and quite liked his being taken for my lover. Nobody could possibly guess that we were related. So convincing was our partnership that we had sometimes registered as a married couple, if we needed to in more staid establishments, and very often shared a room and even a bed when travelling. I don’t like sharing a bed with anyone, but if I have to, Rory is perfectly acceptable. He’s a peaceful sleeper, no tossing and turning or snoring.

  I’d made it plain, that evening he came round, that he was going to have to behave himself. Twice, on previous excursions together, when I was not paying for him and had no hold over him, he’d behaved outrageously and I hadn’t forgotten. Once I’d had to bail him out of jail – and the other time collect him from hospital, where he’d had to have stitches for a deep cut over his eye. The anxiety he caused me that second time had been enough to make me swear I would never go anywhere with him again, and up to then I never had. I’d made it clear that if he didn’t take my warnings seriously I’d ditch him and cancel his ticket home. He’d said he didn’t know what all the fuss was about – he’d been young and stupid the last time we’d travelled and now he was old … well, older, and very, very wise. He was going for the sun and the adventure and the pleasure of my wonderful company and he would neither get drunk nor indulge in sexual encounters. He said he’d given up sex, just like me. I said I hadn’t given it up, what a ridiculous idea. ‘Well,’ he beamed, ‘let’s just say we’re both resting, darling.’

  We flew Club Class, a hideous extravagance. Rory was delighted. ‘Oh,’ he murmured as we went into the Club Class lounge and sank into the deep armchairs with a drink in hand, ‘I’ve always wanted to be a little rich boy and leave all the riff-raff behind.’ I laughed, but thought how my parents would have disapproved. They were well off but never travelled Club Class or stayed in expensive hotels. They had none of Rory’s taste for luxury and up to then neither had I. In fact, I’d prided myself on always travelling the cheapest way possible and had endured many a long haul cramped in Economy when I could have afforded better. I had never wanted to seem rich and my parents were pleased about this, feeling, I expect, that their example was being followed, their standards upheld in this respect at least. But now I was done with all that. I had decided it was a silly sort of self-denial when I had the funds to fly in comfort. It was spoiling Rory, though, to include him. I should have made him travel Economy. It slightly annoyed me that he took Club Class as his due, betraying no sign whatsoever of any embarrassment at my abundant generosity.

  ‘Why aren’t you telling me this is too good of me?’ I asked him, only half jocularly, as we boarded the plane and were shown to our luxurious seats.

  ‘You can’t be too good,’ he said, smartly. ‘I’m worth the best.’

  ‘Don’t push it, Rory,’ I said.

  ‘Oh come on,’ he said, ‘don’t be petty. You know I know you’re loaded now.’

  ‘So that makes it all right, does it?’

  ‘Don’t you think so? I mean, if you’d scrimped and saved …’

  ‘Then you’d insist on going Economy?’

  ‘No, but …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But I’d be ever so humble and grateful. I’d get down on my knees’ – and he got down on them there and then and I could see the other passengers thought he must be doing something terribly romantic such as proposing – ‘and kiss the hem of your jeans and show you the hair shirt I was wearing and refuse all wine and food, and …’

  ‘Oh, stop it, you idiot,’ I said, slapping him none too gently.

  He is such a taker. I am not. I don’t like taking from anyone. I’d rather be a giver, though not for any worthy reason. It’s about control, obviously. If I give, I control; if I take, I am controlled. If someone offers me something for free I am at once suspicious. Rory never is. The more people have wanted to give him the happier he has been to take, and their motives have troubled him not at all. Nor has he ever worried about having to give something back in return. ‘No such thing as a free lunch’ is a saying which mystifies Rory. Of course there are free lunches, he’s spent his whole life trading on them and so far has never recognised any obligation to pay them back. He has become notorious for never returning hospitality and when I have tackled him about this meanness he has defended himself on the grounds that he is a charming guest who sings beautifully for any supper he is given. Such confidence.

  Rory slept most of the way across the Atlantic, even though it was a daytime flight, but I didn’t. I sat with Susannah’s red hat on my knee, thinking about her. I hadn’t worn the hat to travel in, just held it in my hand. Rory had noticed, of course, but had said nothing. He could have pointed out with justification that it wasn’t a very suitable hat either to take on this kind of holiday or to match what I was wearing (jeans, a sweater). But he didn’t, maybe thinking any reference to it would result in another lot of boring ruminations about the box, and I was grateful. The hat felt comforting to hold. The velvety material was so soft, as I turned it round and
round, and I began to think of Susannah wearing it. She certainly wouldn’t have worn it when, as I was determined to believe, she’d sailed to the West Indies. This was a city hat, a Seventies hat, I was sure, worn with a long ethnic skirt and a lot of beads. And yet I’d chosen to bring it with me now. I hadn’t planned to. I’d looked round my sitting-room before I left it, a last look to check windows were closed, and it had caught my eye, perched so attractively on the glass head, and I’d snatched it off on a sudden impulse.

  I wondered who she’d been with when she went, in whatever way she did go, to Bequia. With a man? Several men and women? I tried to think of the people outside her family whom I’d heard mentioned as her friends. There was a Gillian who’d lived next door in Edinburgh. I’d had her pointed out to me by my grandmother when she’d insisted on showing me photographs of Susannah and Isabella as little girls. ‘I wonder whatever happened to Gillian,’ my grandmother would say, which seemed to suggest the friendship hadn’t survived. Then there was Lorna. She’d been at university with Susannah and was her bridesmaid, together with Isabella, when she married my father. Lorna, I knew, had been a real friend right up to the end. I’d met her, at my grandmother’s, when I was about six and I’d been uncomfortable while she held me on her knee and reminisced about this dead woman who was supposed to have been my mother. I think she was disappointed at my total lack of interest, as she was bound to be, but she went on sending me birthday and Christmas presents right up to when I was eighteen. Lorna, I was sure, would still be very much alive. I didn’t have an address for her, though I knew she’d emigrated to Australia, but I was fairly certain I could track her down. Lorna would know, surely, about this Bequia jaunt. She might even have been on it herself, though my memory of her, a child’s vague impression, was that she was too sensible to go off on what must have seemed a wildly adventurous trip across the Atlantic.

  There must have been a man, or men, involved. I suspected a crew of women only wouldn’t have sailed so far in the Fifties. And who had the money to finance the voyage? There must have been someone with money, and I felt it more likely to have been a man. A man with a rich daddy who let him have his yacht. Susannah could sail, though, I knew that. She’d learned as a child with her uncle, who’d taken her round the Scottish islands, her and my grandmother and Isabella. My grandmother told me she and Isabella hated it, but Susannah loved it and went again. Maybe she crewed for some rich young undergraduate. Or maybe not. Maybe he was a boyfriend, even a lover, someone she knew before my father, and she didn’t have to contribute to the cost. But wouldn’t Isabella have known afterwards, even if they weren’t the best of sisterly friends at the time? Or had my aunt been concealing something?

  My head began to ache with the strain of trying to concoct some reasonable scenario and I envied Rory, who slept blissfully on at my side. I reminded myself that Susannah might never have been to Bequia. An address in a book didn’t prove it. There was no real evidence that Susannah had been where I was now going, and I had repeated this over and over to myself since deciding to book the flights, but suddenly, halfway across the Atlantic, I began to blame her for leading me on. Why couldn’t she have left me alone, or been clearer? What would have been wrong with a little note stuck in the address book – ‘Dear Catherine’ (no, it would have been ‘Dear Hope’) – ‘I kept this little book because these are all the places I had holidays in and maybe some day you’ll visit them and think of me. I loved Bequia, in the West Indies, best. It was so thrilling sailing there – yes, sailing – with …’ What was the point of being so enigmatic? I felt like waking Rory up and yelling at him and only just stopped myself. But the old anger I’d originally felt about the memory box resurfaced and I became so agitated I had to walk up and down for a while in the narrow confines of the aeroplane. A stewardess asked if I was all right and, shamed, I sat down again.

  I put the red hat on, and the dark blindfold provided by the airline, and tried to lull myself to sleep. I must live in the present. It was the only way, but controlling my urge to leap ahead into the future, or speculate about the past, and never live in the present, was almost impossible. Tony had complained about this all the time. He’d found it so wearing, the way I endlessly anticipated what was going to happen or fantasised over what already might have happened – he said it was imagination gone mad. But the present had never seemed a real place to me. It was useless, dull. Everything exciting lay in the unknown, the future, where anything was possible. Susannah knew that. The future was where she had wanted to be, with me. My head seemed to grow hot and I felt the perspiration standing out on my forehead, but I couldn’t take the red hat off. Its soft crown covered my hair as it had covered hers, the material caressing my head as it had caressed hers, little messages of memory breathing through the fabric to me. My eyes behind the blindfold were tightly closed, but I began to see her in this hat, smiling, holding her hands out, and slowly I began to lift my own, only to drop them as Rory said in my ear, ‘Are you practising yoga, or what?’

  I took the wretched hat off and scrunched it into a ball and thrust it into the flap of the seat in front of me. It could stay there, I didn’t want it. Rory, wide awake now, said, ‘Temper, temper,’ and I told him to shut up. ‘It suited you,’ he said, ‘you should wear hats.’ I told him I had always hated hats, that I hated them now, and would always hate them. ‘Well, goodbye red hat, then,’ he said, lightly, but he squeezed my hand affectionately, knowing how I always got going with my strings of hates – hate this, hate that – when I was particularly miserable and upset. We ate yet another meal, drank yet more wine, and after that I surprised myself by really sleeping until we were about to land in Barbados. The next four hours were hellish. The LIAT plane which was supposed to take us on to Bequia was delayed with engine trouble and we had to wait in a hot and crowded airport until another was found. We ended up flying in a chartered plane so small it took only six people, including the pilot, and it was fortunate we had only hand luggage, because the minute hold and the other three seats were taken up with goods being transported to the island. The noise was awful, the claustrophobia acute. We seemed to fly so slowly over the open sea, and not all that high above it, only very occasionally passing over land, over islands that were mere dots of rock surrounded by rings of white foam. I looked down and tried to imagine a yacht slipping through these blue-green waters and wished I had thought to enquire if we, too, could actually have sailed rather than flown this last stretch of the way. And then the pilot gestured and shouted over the roar of the engine and we saw Bequia ahead and a landing strip improbably short. ‘Here we go!’ he shouted, and I closed my eyes.

  VII

  IT WAS THE quietest airport I had ever known. One uniformed woman was on duty and that was all. She checked our passports and waved us on through the completely empty building, quite a sizable building too, not a shack but newly built of modern materials. Outside, there were no taxis or buses, nor any clue as to how to get ourselves from here to wherever on the island we were going (but where was that?). We saw a narrow road, leading up a hillside that rose above the sea, but there was no one and nothing travelling along it, and no sign saying where it went. ‘Bliss,’ Rory said, and sat down, his back against the wall, his face lifted to the sun. Typical. He waited contentedly for me to take charge. And I did. I’d seen a telephone inside and went back to the one official to ask if I could use it. She said yes. I went to see if there were any cards pinned up beside it by taxi firms or hotels, as there usually are, but there were none. It wouldn’t have been much use if there had been because I discovered the phone was broken. I went back to the woman and said so and she agreed. I asked if she knew how we could get transport, and she said, ‘Where you goin’?’ ‘The town,’ I said. ‘No town here,’ she said.

  But there was a village, a thriving village, all strung out round Port Elizabeth bay when we found it. We walked. It took over an hour, nearer two, but it was a beautiful walk over the spine of the island with spectacul
ar views of the bay from the top. The road was good and it was empty for the first couple of miles except for others walking. All along the way it was like walking through a garden, with brilliantly coloured foliage and flowers cascading down the banks on to the road, and to the right we saw the hillside dropping away to a long, curved beach, in terraces of greenery. From the highest point on the road we could see the sea on both sides, calm and blue on one, choppy and dark green on the other. Rory moaned a bit about the weight of his bag and the soreness of his feet, but even he was struck by the loveliness all around us and the lack of man-made horrors. We passed hardly any houses and those we did pass were low and painted white and half-hidden by every species of climbing plant.

  It was downhill from the halfway mark and an even better road, wider, twisting and turning gracefully to Port Elizabeth. There was only one street, running along the waterfront, the sea coming right up to the boards alongside it. The houses were brightly painted and decorated in yellows and reds and greens, all higgledy-piggledy jammed together with only a sombre bank interrupting the colour. There was a huge ship moored next to the long pier sticking out into the bay and we saw scores of small boats cramming the sea beyond it. The bay was clearly a haven for yachts, its arms enfolding them so completely there was no swell on the sea. We had no idea where to go but there were several cafés along the seafront, so we went into one and asked for bed-and-breakfast places and were directed to the very end of the street, to a little wooden house painted green with white shutters, its crenellated top a startling purple.