The Memory Box

by Margaret Forster

  I visited this memory again that night, enjoying it as I always did. It ended, as ever, with Isabella saying, ‘The image of mother, it’s so unfair.’ And my father saying, ‘She isn’t an image.’ All the times this memory had flashed unbidden into my head, rather than being called up by me, I had disliked what Isabella had said and liked my father’s reproof, or what I took to be a reproof. It pleased me to have him correct her. I liked to hear him say I was my own self and not an image of anyone else, especially someone dead. But that night, after what Isabella had said hours before, I found myself halting and checking the familiar memory. Something was wrong, something jarred. I began at the beginning again … stones … heat … teapot … voices … It made me sweat to try so hard to catch a meaning I’d never thought of. ‘The image of mother …’ But was that it? Had Isabella said ‘the image of her mother’ or ‘the image of mother’? I’d always taken her meaning to have been ‘her’ mother, but I’d never remembered that she’d said ‘her’. Did she? Again and again, I went over it. No, she had not said ‘her’. She had said ‘the image of mother, it’s so unfair.’ I felt panicky, realising this; the whole memory was slipping and sliding out of control, Rory’s face was hidden, the light was dimmed, the heat receding … and yet why on earth did it matter?

  I’d been told that when Susannah died, Isabella had wanted to adopt me. She’d thought not only that my father should be grateful but that it was her right to claim me. It was my father, not my grandmother or Isabella herself, who told me this when I was grown up, with some indignation as well as amusement. My father said she had brought considerable pressure to bear, pointing out that a man on his own with his living to make was in no position ‘to rear’ (as she’d put it) a baby girl. When he had vehemently rejected her offer, which had sounded more like a demand, he’d pointed out that her mother, my grandmother, had said she would be more than happy to have me live with her during the week when he was working and he’d take over at weekends. He could afford a nanny and she would do all the actual looking after. But Isabella had gone on the offensive at once, saying that he was taxing her mother’s strength and that at seventy-two she was not up to the demands made on her by a baby and then toddler even if there was a nanny as well. The responsibility would be hers and my father was taking advantage of her and asking too much. Her health would suffer and her life would be shortened. There had been a horrible argument only resolved by my grandmother discovering what Isabella had been saying and more or less telling her to mind her own business. Then, of course, within a very short time, Charlotte had come along, solving everything.

  Isabella had always implied that my father had only married Charlotte to give me a mother. She’d hinted this to me when I was about thirteen and staying with her and I’d been shocked not because of any fear that this might be true but that she could be so wicked as to make it up. I knew my parents loved each other: there had never been any doubt about it. But Isabella couldn’t bear the fact that they did – why, when she had Hector? – and what was worse she couldn’t bear my devotion to Charlotte. She was always sniping away at her and it was all because she felt if Charlotte had not come on the scene she would in the end have been able to take me over as she had wished. She’d almost managed it anyway before Charlotte rescued us all. The nannies had come and gone, three within the first nine months, and Isabella had come rushing to fill the gap on each change-over. My grandmother was relieved and appreciated the rest it gave her until someone new was found. Isabella had taken me to her own house every day and petted and played with me (and pretended I was hers, I think). Rory naturally suffered accordingly, though since he was only a baby himself, a mere four months older than me, perhaps not too severely. My father, working so hard then, had no alternative but to allow this to go on until he had found a new nanny, and when he had it was only reasonable to let Isabella hand me over gradually. This ‘gradually’ was, each time, spun out and led to trouble with the new nanny and the whole business was fraught. I suspect that marrying Charlotte was not the only relief for him but so was leaving Edinburgh soon after. Isabella never forgave him. Once we were all in Oxford, she had lost me. All she was left with was Rory, and she used him to draw me back as I grew older. I loved him, not her, and she knew it.

  I have no memory, of course, of all this tension and if it is there I have no wish to regain it. Loss of memory, or failure of some period to imprint itself on the memory, can be a blessing too. But having thought about all this that night before falling into a disturbed sleep, I woke next morning convinced I had more choice than I’d realised about what I wanted to regain from the recesses of my mind. I was surprising myself all the time by my new determination to use the contents of the memory box to discover things not about Susannah but about myself. Her objects were acting like triggers, whether she had intended them to or not.

  And I still had several to pull.

  IX

  AT THE END of January, I had to go down to Cornwall to clear out my parents’ cottage. I’d only been there once since my father died, to fetch things Charlotte had wanted, and not at all since she herself died. The cottage had never meant much to me, though it was pretty enough. It had only three rooms, perched one on top of the other in a slot of a building with a wooden deck at the back overlooking the Fowey estuary. This was where my father had come to sail and where he’d tried, and failed, to make a sailor of me. I only had to step on to a boat to be sick. He, of course, was a great sailor and so, I’d been told, was Susannah – genes on both sides which should have made me completely happy on water but which had failed to pass through to me.

  There was the one good photograph of my father and Susannah on a boat. Most of those photos of them together in the early years of their relationship were small and blurry, unlike the studies taken of Susannah alone. Someone had used a cheap Brownie camera to snap them; but that one photograph which was clearly the work of a professional had hung framed in my father’s study for as long as I could remember. It was twelve by fifteen inches, black and white, glossy. Every detail was defined, the strands in the coiled rope lying on the deck of the boat they were on, the shine on the metal fittings, the grain of the wooden planks – all superbly visible. It had been taken for a yachting magazine for which my father had written an article, on the conversion of MFVs (Motor Fishing Vessels). He was in the forefront, beaming straight to camera, and Susannah was in the background, sitting with her back against the mast, legs drawn up, elbows on knees, head between her hands, looking very serious. All the time, even when that photograph was taken, her heart was clogging up and she was often breathless and tired. But my grandmother said she wouldn’t face facts, indeed simply denied them. She was a fighter. She was going to lead the life she wanted to lead. She was going to be normal.

  She should never have had me, never have thought of having a baby. I’d heard that said as a child and had resented the insinuation that somehow I had caused her death. But they were fair enough, those words. Of course she should never have had me. She wasn’t fit enough. The pregnancy and then an agonisingly long-drawn-out birth (Isabella had once foisted the details on me until I’d walked out of the room) had weakened her when she was already weakening, or rather her heart was. She’d even breast-fed me for three months against all advice. She must have been mad. What did she think she was doing, risking her life, or at least her health, to have a baby? It can’t have been because my father persuaded her. He’d never have done that. I’m sure he would have wanted to avoid any risks.

  He was never a risk-taker himself. But maybe, before he came into Susannah’s life, she was involved with someone who was, someone who encouraged her to be reckless. Going off to the Caribbean as she had done, sailing there, was, I had come to realise, incredibly reckless. My father would never have considered it. Sailing round the coast and islands of Scotland was about his limit, or later to the Scilly Isles. He didn’t even sail to the Mediterranean, never mind the Caribbean. But someone else did, and Susannah had le
apt at the chance, responding to the idea of an adventure which was dangerous in itself but especially for her. I began to see this as a steel-like thread running through her and I wondered if it had frightened those around her. It was strange to think she might have been frightening. I found myself thinking about it a lot, and speculating about who she might have scared most. Not her mother. My grandmother was not a woman I could imagine frightened. But my father? Very possibly. I’d scared him myself sometimes, with my outbursts of temper, and he’d do anything to placate me. And maybe Isabella. I don’t know why that idea came into my head, considering I’ve always thought of my aunt as formidable. It was something my father once said, I think, which had never struck me as significant before, something to the effect that when he first met Isabella she had seemed so timid beside Susannah and he couldn’t believe they were sisters. ‘Of course, she’s changed since then,’ he’d added, and laughed.

  At any rate, I’m sure it was Susannah herself who made the decision to have a baby, unless becoming pregnant was an accident. Possible, always possible, and abortions were against the law then (I think). Or if it was an accident, if I was a mistake, maybe she couldn’t contemplate abortion even if it had been obtainable. Who knows? Who wants to know? (But that was what was becoming so irritating – increasingly, I did, I wanted answers to questions I’d never asked and which no one could now answer.)

  Whatever the history of my conception, I’d been wanted most passionately. Photos of Susannah pregnant showed a woman radiating joy and those taken with me in her arms have an ecstatic quality of an almost religious intensity. She looks as if she worshipped me. There is not a flicker of anxiety in her face, not a hint of concern that she might leave me motherless, yet in six short months all that changed. Life, her life, became so fragile that she assembled her memory box. It was so frustrating not to understand precisely what had happened. I was ignorant, muddled, and wished I had a doctor friend who could explain about Susannah’s type of heart disease. I could, I suppose, get her death certificate and see what was written on it, but I haven’t done so yet. I had once asked, though, where she was buried. It was one of the very few direct questions about her that I ever did ask, as a young and rather ghoulish teenager. The answer was that she wasn’t buried at all. She was cremated and her ashes scattered in the Firth of Forth.

  My father had apparently said he’d like his scattered from the deck of their cottage on to the Fowey estuary. Charlotte and I had been going to make a pilgrimage together to do it, but then she fell ill and I had to go and do it on my own, at her insistence. I hated the task. Probably that was why I had taken against the cottage, or at least it was a strong contributory reason. I’d rather his ashes had been left in the Oxford garden, but Charlotte said no, he had wanted to be part of the sea just like Susannah. I didn’t argue, it didn’t matter. But going down there now to do a final clear-out took me back, of course, to that terrible period of time between the two deaths and I couldn’t wait to be away. Luckily, there wasn’t much clearing to be done. The cottage wasn’t like the Oxford house. My father hadn’t wanted two proper homes, just a place to sleep when he was not on his boat, so there was only the most basic furniture and none of that of much value. It didn’t take me more than a couple of hours to sort out the clothes and books and the one or two personal items, like the telescope mounted on a stand at the window, which I’d once bought him. The new owners were delighted I was leaving everything else behind.

  I felt no regret as I left it and drove off into Devon and then on to Dorset, where I had a commission to photograph some churches for a magazine. I enjoyed doing rural winter scenes, when the landscape looks barren, but is full of the kind of unexpected detail I like. Winter suited my style best and I always felt confident. I was feeling pretty confident then anyway, happy to be working regularly and resolved to have a break from thinking about Susannah’s box. I hadn’t finished with it, but at least (or so I told myself) I’d finished being obsessed and distressed by my inability to understand the significance of its contents. It wasn’t going to rule my life. Whenever I went back to my flat, I was always surprised to see the shell on the bathroom shelf, the rucksack hanging on a hook behind the kitchen door, to find the necklace in my drawer – all these little bits of Susannah. It was like having the most self-effacing of guests, but one whose presence was nevertheless everywhere.

  I stayed in small hotels or bed-and-breakfast places where there were few other guests at that time of year. Often, I had dining-rooms to myself and always I had the full attention of the proprietor or landlord. They had a certain curiosity about me entirely owing to my equipment – my cameras and other paraphernalia fascinated them and gave me some status, even if they weren’t sure what that was. I always had plenty of offers of help to load my car, and remarks would be made about the bags and boxes being too heavy for a young woman to lift on her own. ‘You’ll ruin your child-bearing organs,’ one hotelier joked, impertinently I thought, but he beamed as he insisted on helping me, though I’d told him no assistance was needed. I smiled politely and resisted the retort I’d like to have made, which was that these were organs which would never be used. Not the sort of response one can easily make, really, without causing embarrassment. I can’t have children, I’m pleased to say. That’s not quite true: it is unlikely that I will ever conceive a child, and I think of myself as unable to.

  It is a long and, I suppose, sad story, but it can be reduced to a brief explanation and has never in fact been a matter for sadness so far as I am concerned. When I was eighteen, I became pregnant, through sheer carelessness. I don’t blame the boy, I blame myself. Anyway, having done such a stupid thing I didn’t want my parents to know. I wanted to protect them from the suffering my foolishness would cause. So I had an abortion without telling them – not so difficult in 1982. I had money, and I had friends who’d gone through the necessary system.

  The abortion was perfectly straightforward, or so I thought, but then I got some sort of infection afterwards, again through my own carelessness, I expect (or at least it never occurred to me I might not be to blame). I had a horrible few days in hospital – luckily when my parents were on one of their very rare holidays abroad – and afterwards I was told that my Fallopian tubes had been damaged. At the time I didn’t care. So long as I wasn’t in pain, I didn’t care. The doctor who broke this news, which he obviously thought likely to upset me, said I might care a good deal later on, ‘when you want to have babies’. Conceiving, he said, would be difficult. I’d need my tubes blown and one of them was likely to be permanently blocked. He seemed offended instead of relieved by my calm acceptance of this information.

  I have never yet wanted to have a baby. This is so hard to explain that I don’t try to. Most of the men I’ve had affairs with have never needed to know the whole truth. Tell a man he has no need to worry about contraception because you’ve taken care of it and he is delighted, merely assuming you are on the pill. But, of course, sometimes, only twice to be precise, I have had to explain. When an affair has become more than that, when there has seemed every possibility of it becoming more permanent, even a question of marriage, then it has been time to confess. And a confession was what it always felt like, something I dreaded because of the possible reaction to it. And it certainly caused a strong reaction – concern and caution in about equal measure. Men do want children, or the two I loved did, and wanted them more than they had realised up to that point. Forced to accept that, if they stayed with me, the chances would be slim, they discovered that children had been very much in the scheme of their lives, however little thought they had given the subject until required to. Once the significance of what I had to tell them sank in, they reacted with barely concealed dismay. Their professed love for me began to wither, especially when I said I didn’t want to have my tubes blown or anything like that.

  I was shaken by their reaction. It seemed that I was no longer a proper woman to them once I’d said I couldn’t give them the fruit of t
heir own loins – oh, wonderfully biblically put, but I fell into such flowery language when going over the matter. Tony would say I was being monstrously unfair. He always swore his love for me had nothing to do with any children we might, or might not, have and that it made no difference to our future together. And, of course, being Tony, he pointed out that nothing had yet been proved. I pushed him, though, I insisted that he should answer honestly this question: if it turned out that I really was barren, would he still have wanted children? He said yes, but that it was irrelevant to how things were. He wanted me, that was enough. But it wasn’t enough. He lied, I knew he did. He was very family-minded, coming as he did from the kind of family Charlotte had belonged to, large and close. Everything began to go wrong between us from the moment I told him about the state of my wretched tubes and my reluctance to have treatment. He was determined to think he could persuade me to test the truth of what I’d been told.

  I was surprised how often I found myself thinking of Tony while I was working on that trip. Something similar had happened with another man, years before, when I’d got to the same point of telling him, but after we parted I’d hardly given him another thought. I forgot him, and couldn’t believe I’d felt about him as I must have done to tell him something so intimate. But I hadn’t forgotten Tony. I thought of him a lot, wishing we were at least friends. He’d said, very quietly, that being ‘just friends’ would make a mockery of what there had been between us, and could still be, if I had not been so pig-headed and stupid. The parting had been painful to him, and he had never understood why I’d broken things up, and the only way he could deal with it was by never seeing me again, so I shouldn’t talk to him about being ‘friends’. I’d told him not to be so melodramatic, that it didn’t suit him and wasn’t like him, it wasn’t reasonable and civilised, and he’d said that was how he felt, I could label his feelings how I liked. There were limits, he said, even to his tolerance.