I admired his attitude in a way. I like decisive people, and Tony was always that. He had a lot of other qualities, too, which I admired and I kept thinking of them on the long drives I was making. Tony had principles but he wasn’t self-righteous or dogmatic. He loved his work – he is a solicitor, in a practice handling mainly legal aid defence cases – and had a sense of purpose about it, something which I, of course, lacked. I worked only because I liked to. Pleasure and fun took the place of purpose, and any satisfaction was always merely personal – not for a moment do I ever think my photographs serve much purpose. We used to argue about what Tony called my aimlessness, the way I was never striving towards a goal but was apparently the complete hedonist. It irritated him that I didn’t, as he alleged, put my talents to better use. He thought that by choosing to photograph landscapes I was choosing the soft option. Photographs, he argued, should have more than beauty about them. They should make some moral point. I used to jeer at him, and tell him his high-mindedness was a pain, but I quite liked his efforts to direct me into raising my standards and thinking more carefully about what I was doing. He maintained that inside the I-only-do-what-I-like Catherine there was another person, one who would welcome being made to do more than that. He said I insisted on being superficial and that I needed something to anchor me, to stop me drifting about.
I thought more and more of what Tony would have made of Susannah’s box. He wouldn’t have scoffed, like Rory; he wouldn’t have said the contents were of no significance, just junk. He would have gone the other way and probably driven me mad with his theories and the intensity of his concentration. Puzzles appealed to him. He liked things to be complicated and even when they were not, had a habit of making them so. It used to infuriate me when he deliberately turned something simple and straightforward into a nightmare of possible hidden meanings. But apart from being intrigued with what was in the box the best thing about it, from his point of view, would have been that it forced me at last to think about Susannah. He had been fascinated (unnaturally so, in my opinion) by the fact that my ‘real’ mother had died when I was six months old. He said it could not have helped but affect me profoundly and would not accept that I hadn’t been affected at all, that Charlotte was my mother and the dead Susannah a blank.
He’d met Charlotte, of course. While we lived together, it was inevitable he would meet the parents who were so much part of my life. We went to stay with them in Oxford for the weekend before my father died and they were successful visits. Charlotte liked Tony and got on better with him than my father did; she was more drawn to his seriousness, whereas my father found it a bit daunting and was perhaps perplexed as to why it appealed to me (though he never said so). Charlotte thought he had ‘lovely manners’ and ‘listened properly’, not the most flattering reasons to give for liking someone but, since manners and paying attention to what others said counted for her, not trivial either. But Tony thought Charlotte dull. He said she was quite sweet but boring and that never in a million years could she have been my mother. Even if he hadn’t known she was not, he swore he would have guessed. I was annoyed and told him not to be so ridiculous, the world is full of daughters who resemble their mothers not one bit either in looks or character, and I immediately reeled off a list of those we both knew. But he was adamant. Somewhere, if you knew them well enough, you could always see at least a glimmer of the mother in any daughter. I denied this, and then I turned to asking what his point was anyway. He said that in my case it meant there was a missing link and always would be and it was of great importance to his understanding of so many things he didn’t understand about me.
He liked to look at photographs of Susannah and then study my face and compare them. I hadn’t, at that time, photograph albums in my possession, but he saw the photograph in my father’s study, the one with Susannah in the background on the boat, and that started him off; then he found a couple of others around the Oxford house (Charlotte had always made a point of having them displayed quite naturally with all the other family photographs). No one among all the people who had known her had ever seen any resemblance between Susannah and me, but Tony found one after his diligent study. Only he saw what he claimed to be identical shaped ears, pointing solemnly to our well-shaped, round lobes and then to my father’s lack of any lobes at all. It was nothing, but he acted as if it were something. Ear lobes, for heaven’s sake. But he did have to concede that in general I did not look at all like Susannah. Unfortunately, he chose to say this in front of my father and to go on to ask him how he thought, looks apart, I might all the same be like her. My father didn’t like this. He replied, quite curtly for him, that he had no idea. He said Susannah had died many years ago and he couldn’t remember enough about her now to be sure of comparing anything about me with her.
Tony didn’t believe him. He said my father must be reminded all the time of his dead wife and that it must be natural to look for a mother in a daughter. I defended my father vigorously and pointed out that since, apart from not looking in the least like Susannah, I had not grown up with her and had not automatically picked up her mannerisms, and had instead inevitably adopted many of Charlotte’s, how would he be reminded of her? I reminded him that Susannah had had a Scottish accent and that I did not, so my father couldn’t hear her in me either. Environment, in my case, had won the contest with heredity. But Tony wouldn’t accept this. Confronted with how disturbed I became over the memory box, I knew he would have felt vindicated. What was all my angst about if not a long-put-off search for my ‘real’ mother? And why, Tony would’ve asked, did I want to find her now, at this point in my life, when my other mother had just left me? In his opinion, it would all have been obvious and satisfyingly neat. I struggled, knowing this, hearing Tony in my head so irritatingly clearly, to articulate, if only to myself, what was coming out of dealing with the box. I was not looking for my ‘real’ mother, I absolutely rejected that, but I was looking for myself, that was true. He would have liked that. I was glad not to be saying this out loud, when I would certainly have stumbled over the words, but instead imagining the conversation I might have had with him. In my own head, I could try, and try again, to grasp what I meant. I had some kind of impression – I took this slowly – that something in me had never properly connected. With what? I didn’t know. An ugly simile came into my mind: I was like a plug looking for a socket and until I found it the current couldn’t flow. Tony would have really liked that.
On that headland in Whitehaven, beside the holly tree on Melbreak, putting on the red hat in the aeroplane, what had I felt? Plugged in? Nothing so plebeian. What, then? A frisson, an excitement, a sensation not unlike vertigo, of being shaken and turned upside down. I had shivered on all those occasions, I had felt disembodied for a few seconds, and when this inner upheaval had subsided there had been a sense of disappointment that some profound truth about myself had evaded me. I would never have said this aloud to Tony, but it struck me that for some strange reason I might have said it to Rory. He had always empathised with my restlessness and sense of disconnection from life. Tony had never known what I was talking about. Tony never felt restless or disconnected; he was never waiting for something to rescue him from waiting. And he had no missing link. He knew exactly who he was and where he came from. He’d been so eager to introduce me not only to his parents (his father, a solicitor, his mother a schoolteacher), but to his brother and his two sisters and even to various aunts and uncles – he belonged, like Charlotte, to one of those tribe-like families and he was proud of it. Such families seem to me smug. I couldn’t wait to get away from Tony’s clan and it offended him. He accused me of being standoffish and said I hadn’t tried to fit in. Quite right, I hadn’t. Why should I want to fit in to a group I found alien?
Tony’s mother never did like me. She would deny it, naturally, but I think she made her mind up about me before ever she met me. She had liked the woman with whom he had had a five-year relationship before he met me, someone who had gone to sc
hool with him and whose family lived in the same county. This woman had been ideal in his mother’s eyes, a teacher, like herself, an infant teacher in a local school. Then I came along and spoiled everything, including the conventional marriage everyone had anticipated for him. But I tried so hard, I know I did. I didn’t want to meet Tony’s mother, but he was so devoted to her it had to be done. I dressed up for the occasion. I got out of my jeans and jumper and wore a dress, just a simple summer dress, a plain cream-coloured thing. I wanted to look as innocent and unthreatening as possible. Demure, that’s how I thought I should try to look. His mother was trying hard too, I think, determined to smile and welcome me warmly, but I saw the doubt in her eyes. Afterwards, I found out that Sarah, the girl before, had been a Susannah-like creature – slight, blonde, very pretty – and there was I, as tall as Tony, and, in spite of my cream dress and well-brushed hair, not at all demure. She couldn’t bring herself to say how lovely it was to meet me. Instead, she said how much she’d heard about me and, to me, in my paranoid state, that sounded as though she had heard things she didn’t like. I wasn’t a nice, safe, worthy teacher like Sarah, but a freelance photographer which sounded arty and unstable. And I hadn’t known Tony at school and my family hadn’t mixed with his all their lives, with our mothers meeting at parents’ evenings. I didn’t have the kind of background Mrs Crowther was familiar with. She was probably as nervous as I was but it didn’t show. ‘How did you and Tony meet?’ was her first direct question and when I said in an aeroplane, that he’d picked me up somewhere over the Channel on the way back from Paris, I knew I’d said the wrong thing. The truth, but wrong. Her Tony did not pick people up. He was a gentleman, who wouldn’t do anything so vulgar. She didn’t, of course, say any of that, but she stopped smiling and raised her eyebrows and was visibly taken aback. ‘Not quite a pick-up, Mum,’ Tony said, carefully. ‘We just were sitting next to each other and got talking. All quite natural.’ If I had left it at that things might have been OK, but I didn’t, I had to jump in and say, ‘Of course it was a pick-up! You even accidentally-on-purpose knocked my bag over to give yourself an excuse to pick everything up and talk to me.’
Oh God. The tone was set and I had set it. My real awkward, prickly self broke through at once in spite of all my vows to be sweet and gentle. Who could blame Mrs Crowther for thinking her darling son had been ensnared by an ill-mannered, abrasive hussy? I tried desperately to make up for this unfortunate beginning, but it was no good. I failed to fit in. Maybe if, that first time, I had just had to cope with the parents I would have managed to redeem myself, but there were so many other relatives there, all invited to Sunday lunch to meet me. My only small success was playing football with Tony’s nieces and nephews in the garden – it was a relief to get outside and I dashed about energetically in spite of my too-tight dress and I think the children liked me, I think they did. It rained later in the afternoon and we played Scrabble and I did quite well, surprising Mrs Crowther with a wider vocabulary than I think she’d given me credit for. She queried my ‘shandrydan’ and when I said it was some sort of old, rickety carriage with a hood and that I’d come across it in a caption to a photograph she raised her eyebrows and picked up the dictionary. There was a rather tense silence while she looked it up and though she said, ‘Clever girl, you’re right,’ I felt I hadn’t been clever at all: I’d been a show-off.
I was exhausted by the time we left, and depressed. I couldn’t understand how quiet Tony could come from such a family, all so hearty and noisy, so jolly and extrovert. I never liked visiting them and it never got any easier. I sent Mrs Crowther flowers after that first time, and always wrote and thanked her after each visit, but I was only doing what Charlotte told me to do. I simply couldn’t connect with Tony’s mother and he could never understand why.
I was thinking as I drove into Hampshire what a relief it had been, once Tony and I had parted, when I’d realised that I need never see the Crowthers again. I expect they felt the same way about me. I didn’t stay long in Hampshire, only a day and a night, and I suspected the photographs wouldn’t be as good as the others I’d taken in Dorset. I hadn’t felt confident taking them and even began wondering, in a fanciful way, if it was because I didn’t like being on Tony’s patch. He always said he’d leave London in a few years’ time and go back to where his parents lived, or near there. I’d been appalled to hear it. Long before we had reason to split up I’d heard a warning signal: don’t get serious because you could never be a country solicitor’s wife. It would have driven me mad, that kind of settled, safe, cosy existence. I like to move on, move around, all the time.
Driving back finally to London, on a cold afternoon with a threat of snow behind the dull sky hanging over the bleak countryside, I found myself wondering if that was after all entirely true. Did I really, still, want to move on all the time? Surely I was more centred on my home, my flat, than a true wanderer would be? And once I found a house that attachment would increase. Then I had a fleeting new thought about the memory box: it wasn’t a box reflecting a woman focused on domesticity. Not exactly a startlingly original observation, but it made me consider for a moment what kind of daughter Susannah would have wanted me to be. I was beginning to think she would have wanted someone different from the daughter Charlotte wanted me to be, that she would not have brought me up in the same way. I had never let myself think before that Charlotte as a mother was anything less than perfect – she was so kind and gentle, so wrapped up in my welfare, so determined always to put me first and forgive me anything. Love had never been more unconditional than the love she had shown to me. I felt I was betraying her in some way when it entered my head that maybe Susannah would have treated me differently and that it might have been better for me. Was Charlotte what I had needed, however great her devotion to me?
My father had not always thought so. Sometimes he had criticised her for what he called ‘over-indulging’ me (carefully avoiding that unpleasant but more accurate word ‘spoiling’). I’d heard him say of me, ‘She needs to learn not to be so selfish’, and, ‘She needs to discipline herself.’ He accused Charlotte, too, of letting me flit from one thing to another without her insisting on any kind of continuity or stability, and told her this was bad for me. That phrase – ‘bad for her’ – was said quite a lot when I was a child and not only by my father. My grandmother used it frequently. She also suggested to Charlotte that I needed a tougher approach: ‘Catherine needs to finish what she starts sometimes,’ she said. So far as I can recall, Charlotte never made any reply to either of them. She didn’t argue with them, or tell them, as she well could have done, to deal with me themselves if they didn’t approve of how she treated me, but I always had the sense that she didn’t agree with them. She never made me carry on doing anything I said I was bored with. My boredom was enough. She would always try to find me something more interesting to do and was never angry. ‘You give that child her head,’ my grandmother would say, ‘she’ll get out of control if you’re not stricter, she’ll think she never has to settle to anything.’
Did I ever get out of control? Not while my grandmother was still alive, but perhaps I came near it for a while later. I was expelled from one school for a ridiculously silly reason. All I did was spray paint on a wall. True, it was a newly whitewashed wall and, true, what I sprayed along it was vulgar and maybe a bit cruel, but at the time I saw no harm in it: I thought it was funny, and the cartoon I did at the end of what I’d written I thought quite talented. We had this games teacher called Miss Henn and a science master called Mr E. G. Gannon. We all hated both of them. Miss Henn was a bully who forced girls who had no athletic ability at all to try to do backward flips off a high box and regularly reduced them to tears, which she seemed to enjoy. I was never one of her victims but I couldn’t bear her malicious attitude. And Mr E. G. Gannon – he always wrote his name like that, complete with initials – was a bully of another sort. He liked to sneer at pupils, using heavy sarcasm to humiliate them, and we all d
readed his lessons. Well, it was known that Miss Henn and Mr E. G. Gannon went out together – they’d been seen walking in the Botanical Gardens, holding hands (which of course made all of us thirteen-year-olds feel sick because he was fat and she was ugly). I sprayed on the new white wall the words ‘HENN LAYS E.G.G.’ and I did a cartoon of the two of them with Miss Henn lying on top of Mr Gannon. She had very bushy, red, coarse hair and a big, powerful bottom so that was simple enough to caricature and he was bald and wore enormous horn-rimmed spectacles and had a droopy moustache, so there was plenty there to identify him. A stranger couldn’t possibly have recognised that my crude outline was a representation of those two teachers, but the whole school did.
When the headmistress asked me why I did it I remember shrugging and being unable to answer and I suppose that made my little crime more heinous than ever. ‘It was a joke,’ I said, which maddened her further. She said she would like this ‘joke’ explained to her because she failed entirely to see any humour in my actions. I had ruined a newly painted wall, and would most certainly have to pay for it to be repainted, and I had hurt two innocent teachers very much. ‘They hurt people all the time,’ I blurted out. But the headmistress didn’t want to hear my excuses. She wanted me to apologise profusely to the two teachers and then she might consider allowing me to remain in her school. I refused. My parents were angry with me, but I presented myself so convincingly to them as the champion of the underdog that they were not as furious as perhaps they should have been. My father did say, rather wearily, that writing rude words on a wall was no way to register any kind of protest, but he was so annoyed with the school for expelling me that he didn’t go on about it.
The Memory Box Page 16
