I walked back to the terrace, resolved to find the maid and leave her with my thanks to pass on to Gracie, but Gracie was awake and waving her hand, though she could not have seen me until I had mounted the steps. I slipped my sandals back on, and said how beautiful I found her garden and how lovely the view over the sea was, and how I envied her. I said it as a compliment, not thinking how she might interpret ‘envy’, but I saw I had said the wrong thing. ‘Ah, I’m not to be envied,’ Gracie said, suddenly sad, ‘I’m not to be envied by you, no, I’m not. You’ve all your life ahead. There’s the envy.’ To my alarm, I saw tears squeeze out of her eyes and she dabbed at them with the edge of her sleeve. ‘Oh please,’ I said, ‘don’t cry, Gracie, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to …’ But I couldn’t think what it was I hadn’t meant to do or say and was reduced to holding her hand anxiously. The few tears were soon over, though, and my hand pressed, to show me I was forgiven, I felt, for whatever I’d said, and after a while I thought it safe to begin to say my goodbyes and express my appreciation of her allowing me to talk to her. She ignored this and said, ‘Your mother died?’ I said yes, a long time ago. ‘Do you cry for her?’ she asked. I said I didn’t, I hadn’t known her and I’d loved my stepmother and there had never seemed anything to cry about. ‘You don’t cry for your mother?’ Gracie repeated, seeming incredulous. I said no again, firmly.
I thought she had probably forgotten the little history I’d given her, and certainly forgotten all about the box and what had been in it, but she then said, ‘I’m thinking what your mother was meaning with her box. It would be the pain of knowing she was leaving you. I watched my Douglas, and he knew he was leaving, and the pain was something awful. He couldn’t bear to talk of it to me, but he didn’t need to, I saw it plain.’ Her own expression became one of pain as I watched her, silent myself partly through embarrassment and partly respect for what she was struggling to say, her eyes tightly shut and screwed up. ‘It’s a terrible thing to be with someone you love when they’re dying,’ she said. ‘Terrible, Terrible … he held my hand so tight … he found no peace in the going, no comfort in everlasting peace … he was desperate to live, he wouldn’t believe anything was his God’s will.’ More tears bumped down her wrinkled skin and I hunted for a tissue in my pocket and pushed it into her hand. But she didn’t seem to want to use it, only to let the tears run their course. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I didn’t mean to bring back sad memories.’ She opened her eyes then and smiled, even gave a little laugh. ‘Oh, you weren’t bringing them back,’ she said. ‘They never leave me. I’m a silly old fool, I like to have them. I keep Douglas living that way, you see, thinking about him, thinking about the good days as well as the bad. I cry, but it’s better than feeling nothing, it keeps him here, with me.’
I left soon after this, feeling faintly nauseous and disturbed. The maid had come out with another young woman and between them they had helped Gracie to her feet and she half walked, was half carried, into the house. Upright, she was taller, even though bowed, than I had guessed and I saw that once she had been a big, strong woman. I didn’t know her age, but suspected she was well over eighty. How many years, then, had she been keeping Douglas alive? Fifty? Sixty? I’d forgotten to ask her when she first came to Bequia and how old she had been then. It was horrible to think about, her determination to go on remembering a man dead so long, and I realised as I walked back to the car how lucky I had been that my own father had not behaved like that. He’d found Charlotte, maybe allowed himself to find her, and Susannah had not been kept alive in the way Gracie kept her Douglas alive, clinging on to him because she had nothing else, and now never would have. The dead have to die, they have to be let go. I was sure of it. And yet I hadn’t myself let either of my parents go. I thought about them every day still, many times a day. It was only Susannah, whom in my conscious memory I never had known, that I was happy to surrender to death. But now she was fighting to come back, to fill my head with images of her I had never had and had not wanted to have, and any moment I was running the risk of feeling the pain of loss Gracie still felt for Douglas and which I had never felt for Susannah.
Driving slowly back the short distance to Port Elizabeth, I thought about this other pain Gracie had described, not of the loss itself but of being with a person who knows they are dying and who refuses to be reconciled to this because they have someone to live for whom they cannot bear to leave. Me. Susannah couldn’t bear to leave me. I tried to imagine the situation Gracie had conjured up – me in my cradle, Susannah holding my hand and willing herself to live for me. Torture. And myself, a baby, oblivious to it, doing nothing to comfort her, as Gracie had tried to comfort Douglas. My father had once said Susannah never, ever admitted she knew she was likely to die, not in so many words. Her memory box was the only form of admission and even then she never actually said what it was she was preparing it for – the future, my future, ‘in case’, but not necessarily a future after her death. Pretence had been the name of the game and my father had played it with her, refusing to acknowledge she was likely to die, just as she had wanted. What had it done to her, this knowing and yet refusing to know? I wondered whether, if she had had a disease to which a time limit could be given (cancer, say, when a prognosis of terminal within a certain number of months could be given) she would have acted differently, or would she have refused to accept that prognosis too? It was impossible to know and yet these kinds of questions nagged away at me.
I was beginning to change my mind yet again about the motive behind the memory box. Maybe it was a sort of insurance policy: if I prepare for leaving my baby I will never have to. That was why there was no written explanation of the contents and why they seemed so haphazard. They were haphazard, selected in panic, however carefully wrapped and numbered and packed. She was clutching on to solid things as a kind of ballast against screaming hysteria. This wasn’t a treasure hunt, there was no treasure to be found at the end of it, it was a piling up of defence mechanisms, the building of a bulwark against terror. And I was now pulling it apart, tearing it down, exposing the great hole it had hidden, and I was falling into it. I was letting this dead woman possess me. She had been, in the midst of her fear, so clever. She was emerging to tell me I was half hers, to show me that if she could not live herself she would live in me. However hard I tried to deny it, my genetic inheritance was hers. I might not look like her, I might not act like her, but sure enough there were genes in me that were hers. It was a question of cells. She was in me, somewhere, and she had known she would be. I was the one who, until lately, had refused to admit this. I was doing the pretending, as I had done for over thirty years.
I felt shaken, and once I had parked the car, I walked along the boards beside the sea, not wanting to see Rory yet. I wished I knew about the science of genes, how many cells, or letters, or whatever they are called, go to make up the DNA alphabet. I was ignorant. But I recalled vaguely from school science lessons that women carry more genetic information than men. Susannah would have bequeathed more to me than my father, whatever the physical evidence to the contrary. I knew too, or thought I knew, that characters are not inherited even if families think they are, think some offspring is exactly like a parent in personality. We’d all been surprised by this at school, which is how I’d remembered it, and been somehow relieved. And relieved as well to be assured by our teacher, who for once had us attentive, that environment acted with genes and so genes could not entirely dominate. I had wanted only my father’s to determine what I was, hating to think of that other inheritance because it couldn’t be Charlotte’s.
So, how was I like Susannah? Or rather, what, genetically, had been her influence – no, was still her influence – on the map of myself she had made of me with my father? Did it matter? I had never wanted to find out. If I, in turn, had had my own child, maybe I would have wanted to. Susannah would have been passed on through me to him or her and I think I might then have been curious to know what I was passing on. Not that anybody
could tell me, unless it was some measurable disease or defect. A heart defect. I knew I didn’t have one. There had been a great deal of neurotic checking of this when I was a child, which, although I hadn’t understood then what it was about, I’d sensed was connected with the dead Susannah. There was always such relief on my father’s face when the doctor pronounced me perfectly sound, and I’d hear him apologising for bringing me to be examined yet again and the doctor would reassure him with words like ‘in the circumstances’ and ‘I understand, what with her mother …’ My grandmother, too, was always looking at me anxiously – did I tire easily? Was I very pale? Did I get short of breath? Did I have a blue tinge round my nostrils? … No, none of them. That part of my genetic inheritance was sound and nothing to do with Susannah.
I was moody and difficult the next couple of days and began to plan to leave Bequia. ‘We can’t stay here for ever,’ I snapped at Rory. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said. I told him I wasn’t made of money and that he had exaggerated notions of my supposed wealth. He retorted that we were living on Bequia far, far more cheaply than in London and he could probably get work here and fend for himself. I sneered at the use of the word ‘work’ by him. He didn’t understand the meaning of it. What would he do? Wash dishes, wait at tables? He said he’d be quite prepared to do either or both if he could support himself like that. I told him to go ahead, but I’d bet he would need a work permit before long. In the end, he came back with me, though swearing he now had an ambition in life and would return under his own steam, for ever. We had a last day swimming from our favourite beach and to please him, and to make up for being so edgy, I took his photograph. He loves having his photograph taken and is always complaining because I’m not interested in portraits – ‘I’d make such a wonderful subject.’ He posed himself on a rock on the hillside not far from Gracie’s house and didn’t guess I was moving him so that I would get more of the background – the trees, the great sweep of ocean below, that same distant smudge of an island I’d seen earlier – than of him. I wanted it as a memento of where Susannah might have been.
It was only as I took it that I realised how, with his hair grown longer in the month we’d been there, and curly with all the sea water, he would look just like her from the distance I’d chosen, only his head and shoulders in shot.
VIII
THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF the turtles were as good as I knew they would be and I had no trouble placing them. They immediately earned me other commissions and suddenly I was busy and enjoyed being busy. There was no more drooping round my flat, or lying on the sofa staring hopelessly at the shell (which now had another alongside it, almost identical, which I’d brought back from Bequia), and I had no time to think about moving. Nor did I have any time for Rory, who disappeared again from any life as he so often did. That was the pattern of our relationship – periods of closeness then spells when we didn’t even ring each other, and when sometimes Rory changed address and I didn’t have his telephone number.
But his mother rang me, just before Christmas. Ostensibly, she was ringing to ask if I had enjoyed my trip, but there was such suppressed excitement in her usually doleful voice that I suspected there must be some other reason for the call. There was. Hector had had a letter from the Prime Minister, saying he was ‘minded’ to confer a knighthood on him for his services to industry and in recognition of his work for disabled servicemen, if he was minded to accept. Hector was very minded indeed to accept and Isabella was ecstatic. She told me twice this news was absolutely confidential and I must tell nobody whatsoever, and was rather hurt when I carelessly wondered aloud who I knew who would be interested. She said she’d rung Rory at the last telephone number she’d been given but only got an answering machine and the voice on it hadn’t sounded like his. She wanted him to know about the honour his father was to receive and to say she hoped he would rise to the occasion and accompany them to the Palace when the time came.
I doubted if he would, though I didn’t say so, but what seemed remarkable to me was that Isabella was extending this invitation at all. I would have thought she and Hector would have wanted to keep their errant son a hundred miles from this investiture in case he disgraced them. But in any case I didn’t know where Rory was and I too only had the telephone number she had, so I couldn’t help. Isabella hadn’t finished with me, though. She and Hector were coming to London and they wanted me to dine with them at the Savoy, where they always stayed. It was to be a private celebration and they wanted me and Rory to join them and ‘show some family solidarity for once’. That was rich. There hadn’t been much solidarity from them. But when she then asked me too, in due course, to accompany them to the Palace, and I instantly refused, I felt so mean I accepted the invitation to dinner and promised to try to track down Rory. ‘You will dress nicely, Catherine, won’t you?’ Isabella said. ‘I know what you and Rory think about dressing smartly, but for Hector’s sake do him the honour, will you? No jeans and jumpers?’
It was a bloody cheek, giving someone of thirty-one instructions on how to dress, but I let her get away with it. In fact, I thought I would shock her by really dressing up, by arriving for our date in knock-out splendour, all glamour and glitter. The only problem was that I hadn’t the clothes. There was nothing whatsoever elegant or glamorous in my wardrobe. I needed Rory for my own ends now – he would know what I should buy and how I should look – but, like his mother, when I called his number I got only a voice that was not his. I would have to manage on my own. I can’t remember how I came to think of the necklace I’d found in the memory box but suddenly I did. I’d imagined I would never wear it, since it cried out for some sort of beautiful dress and all that went with it, but now I saw it could be my starting point. I got it out and looked at it closely. The stone was an emerald, so green was the obvious colour to go for. Susannah had once worn it with a green dress. There were two pictures of her wearing it in the albums, one on her wedding day, one at some function later on. On the wedding-day photograph, the green glittered above the neckline of the ivory satin gown and matched the trailing ivy in her bouquet; in the other, the green of the dress was a darker shade of emerald and the stone did not stand out so noticeably. Maybe I should go for white, or cream, or even pale grey …
I supposed at first it would have to be a dress and one with a generous neckline to show off the necklace. The whole point of such a piece of exquisite jewellery was to allow it to dominate, and to do that it had to sit on a bare throat with enough space for the pendant in which the emerald was set to lie just above the cleavage. Both Susannah’s dresses had had quite low and wide necklines which had perfectly offset the necklace. I had no such dress. I had never wanted such a dress. Every garment I possessed had either a high neck or a modest V-neck. The idea of going out to find and buy a dress which would flatter the necklace but in which I would feel acutely uncomfortable did not appeal. But I would have to shop for something, and so I went out full of gloom to do the looking. I hate shopping for clothes. I like to shop for things for my flat, for furnishings and furniture and household things, but not for clothes. Charlotte loved to shop. She could spend whole days trailing round shops looking for nothing in particular, even though no one would have guessed she had any interest in how she dressed (she had no taste at all and always looked ordinary). But I couldn’t and didn’t, I bought things in chain stores, in a hurry, and when I liked something I bought it in threes so that I wouldn’t need to bother again for a long time. This meant I was an innocent when it came to designer clothes. Rory, on the other hand, was an expert, bandying around the right names with nauseating familiarity. When he raved over some garment he’d purchased, at great expense, for the name, because he or she ‘cuts so beautifully’, I infuriated him by saying it looked straight out of Marks & Spencer’s to me.
I had no idea where to go. For two days I wandered round Harrods fingering dresses, thousands of them, millions of hideous frocks, and in the end had to leave empty-handed. The very department ‘evening
gowns’ were in made me feel out of place – the thick carpet, the slightly perfumed air, the racks of bewilderingly similar clothes, the glassy-smiled assistants, the mirrors (in which I could see my slouching, scruffy self).
It brought back memories of shopping as a young teenager in Oxford with my mother – picture us, Charlotte in her pleated skirts and boxy jackets, so way out of fashion they were a fashion statement in themselves, and me in jeans and big, baggy sweatshirt, protesting that I had no need for a dress or, as she put it, ‘a pretty skirt and a little top’ for some wedding we had to go to. Charlotte would drag me towards a garment covered with sprigs of flowers – most of her own things were covered with sprigs or spots or whirls of some terrible pattern – and I would just glare, or turn on her my most practised look of incredulity. Forced to try something on, I would go into the changing-room and deliberately sabotage whatever I’d been given – I’d ruck it up round my middle and yell, ‘Too short,’ or jam the zip and say, ‘Too tight.’ And I did find myself smiling as I wandered round the shops, just at the memory of my mother’s face, all puzzled and concerned, and my own silly performance.
The Memory Box Page 13
