The Memory Box

by Margaret Forster

  It was odd that she’d started with the foreground. Nobody ever does that. First thing we were taught in art lessons was to start at the top and work downwards. She should have begun with the sky, which would be grey. Any other colour would look wrong. A pale, misty grey, very difficult to capture. I stroked my cleaned brush over the white and then the black and applied it to the painting. Too deep. It needed more white. I put the brush down and stared again at the painting, now with my own inexpert marks upon it. One thing, I couldn’t really ruin it since it showed little talent. And yet I felt I was doing just that, ruining it, defiling whatever of hidden value had been there. I was rejecting what I had decided was her purpose in leaving it to me: to encourage me to seek this place out in order to complete the painting as faithfully as I could. I had to be there, where she had been. Anything else would be cheating.

  Still I resisted the crazy idea of trailing round Scotland looking for a likely stretch of open moorland – good God, I’d be spoiled for choice. But then fate took a hand. I was asked to do a job for the Scottish Tourist Board, which involved taking photographs not for a gaudy colour brochure but for a specially commissioned book called something like Hidden Scotland. I was to search out places not on the usual tourist beat and try to capture ‘true wildness’, making the shots as dramatic as possible. They’d wanted Fay Godwin, but she wouldn’t even consider it – she did her own books and had her own projects – so I felt flattered to be next in line after someone whose work I’d admired so much. If ever I were good enough to have my own exhibition I’d want it to match her superb ‘Presences of Nature’.

  Tony always said how unexpected it was that I lacked that kind of ambition (to have an exhibition, he meant). He maintained that on the surface I seemed the ambitious type – opinionated, even aggressive in manner. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t channel my energies into getting together a body of work which would justify some kind of public display and through being exhibited would raise my status, not to mention my bargaining power. He thought I frittered my talents away on commercial jobs unworthy of them. In fact, I take only those assignments that appeal to me and, as he well knew, the money is irrelevant. There was nothing wrong, that I could see, in working for commercial concerns.

  So, I have no ambition in the sense that Tony wanted me to have. I never said so to him, but my only ambition is to keep on doing what I like and get nearer to satisfying myself. That’s the hardest thing to do, satisfy myself. I’m always just missing, not exactly perfection – I don’t think perfection exists, or even that one should expect it to – but missing what I had intended to capture. Sometimes it’s just a question of a shadow here, a darkening where there should have been more light, or of a very slightly wrong angle – something technical like that. Technique is important and mine isn’t of the highest standard. I understand the technicalities – I am not one of those photographers who haven’t been trained properly in the use of a camera – but I am too impatient to profit from my understanding. I tend to rush, to follow my eye too quickly. This captures mood and atmosphere, but it damages the standard of the result. One day, I always tell myself, I will take time and try harder and I will be satisfied. But I never do.

  I didn’t think I would do it on the Scottish Tourist Board job either, but I was quite confident I could satisfy them, if not myself, and that was enough. I thought I would start off around Edinburgh and base myself there. So it was a logical next step to ask Isabella and Hector if I could stay with them. Isabella was as surprised to hear my request as I was to find myself making it. I hadn’t been near their house for a long time, a fact much resented by my aunt. Once Rory had left home, there was no attraction. I still went to stay with my aunt and uncle so long as he came home in the school holidays, but when they were over, that was it. Rory left school at seventeen – he refused to stay any longer – and after that he came and stayed with us sometimes in Oxford. My grandmother was dead by then, so there was nothing to take me back to Edinburgh. Probably this upset Isabella and seemed like a calculated insult as well as siding with Rory, but I didn’t see it like that. I couldn’t really believe she wanted me to visit her anyway when we had never really got on and she was surely as conscious of this as I was. The odd phone call, the obligatory Christmas and birthday cards with maybe a note inside, and that was enough in my opinion.

  After she’d finished getting over the surprise, she seemed pleased, and was more welcoming than I would ever have given her credit for, when I arrived after my long, exhausting drive. I’d almost forgotten how much I liked their house in Heriot Row, how elegant it had always seemed compared with our Oxford home with its Edwardian heaviness and large suburban gardens. A town house like Isabella’s and Hector’s in the heart of a city like Edinburgh was exciting and different. I’d loved the noise of the cobbles, and the old-fashioned street lamps, and the friendly look of a terrace as opposed to houses like ours so disdainfully separated from each other. Isabella put me in Rory’s old room at the top of the house, overlooking the street, and I was startled to find it virtually the same as when I used to share it with him. The bunks had gone, to be replaced with a brass bedstead, but otherwise nothing had been touched. Everything of Rory’s was still there, even some clothes hanging in the cupboard. His posters were on the walls, of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley and other musicians he’d liked in his teens, and his collection of fashion magazines gathered dust on a shelf. Photographs of actors stood on the chest of drawers – he adored Richard Burton, which I’d always thought puzzling – and there was what looked like a cash box beside it which I knew contained make-up. I tried to open it to check, but it was locked. I thought it peculiar that Isabella had kept this room unchanged, that she hadn’t cleared it out. It felt like a dead person’s room, like a shrine, and I couldn’t help wondering if it meant Rory’s parents had closed their minds to him. Or perhaps it was just a sign of laziness. People in large houses can become lazy in that way; they can afford the luxury of leaving rooms untouched and not going into them. My parents did it in Oxford. I can’t think either of them went up to the top floor from one year’s end to another after the cousins stopped coming to stay. Charlotte sent her cleaning lady up to give that floor a good going over every now and again and that was it. Now I realised Isabella must do the same – there was no dust on the surfaces, no smell of neglect. The windows had obviously been opened regularly and the bed aired. It was made up with fresh sheets for me and there were flowers on the bedside table.

  I missed the bunks. God, how Rory loved them. He slept on the top one, I on the bottom. Those bunks hadn’t been at all necessary for reasons of space – the room was easily big enough to take three, never mind two, single beds – but Rory had pleaded to be allowed them and for once was not told to be sensible. He’d wanted them so that he could pretend he was at sea. First he’d clamoured for a hammock, but when told that really was silly (no reason given) he switched to bunks as the next best thing. When he’d moved on from pretending he was a sailor on the high seas, he liked to imagine he was floating. He’d lie on the top bunk and convince himself he was suspended in the air and no one could touch him. Lying below him, I always felt buried alive, trapped, and I worried too that he would fall through the bottom of his bunk and land on me, crushing me to death. I’d get breathless during the night for fear of this happening and often tipped myself out on to the floor and slept there rather than go on dreading possible suffocation. Rory did once offer to let me sleep in the top bunk, but when I climbed the ladder I knew it wouldn’t work. The very sensation of being up in the air which he liked made me panic. I preferred to be near the floor. So he was always on top and I was below, always pretending I only fell out accidentally.

  And yet I missed the bunks, in spite of these far from happy memories. The new bed was very comfortable, but I didn’t sleep well the first night, thinking about Rory. Lying in his old room I considered his accusation more carefully, that he’d never been loved by his parents, away from his ow
n bitter attitude. Never been loved? Never been touched much, as I had been, but did that mean ‘never loved’? It was so hard to tell with people like Isabella and Hector, people not given to visible signs of emotion. Who could be sure that their seemingly cold façade signified a lack of love? Their anger with him, which I had seen often enough, was possible to justify, but which came first, his own bad behaviour or the feelings of rejection he claimed had triggered it?

  But what was clear enough in my memory was Rory’s announcement that he was gay and his parents’ open horror at this news. He’d insisted I should be there when he told them, saying that otherwise he wouldn’t have the nerve. I told him I thought it was wrong to have me as a witness, it would only make it harder for Isabella and Hector to accept. My presence would embarrass them. It was something Rory should do on his own, but he said he couldn’t and wouldn’t. ‘Why don’t you tell them?’ he actually said and seemed to imagine I’d consider it. He maintained he’d tried loads of times to tell them, but they didn’t want to hear and always deliberately misunderstood what he was edging towards, or else left the room just as he got going. ‘They’d take it from you,’ he’d pleaded. Why he thought that, I don’t know. I was only just seventeen myself, a girl – they would on the contrary think I didn’t know what I was talking about and if I managed to convince them I did they would be shocked at my knowingness. It was an impossible suggestion and I said so. But then Rory was in such despair I agreed to be there, as he wanted. I didn’t understand his burning need to tell them, but he said it was driving him crazy, that it was something he had to get out in the open and have done with, then he’d know where he stood. Half of him, I think, wanted to be thrown out of the house, a never-darken-our-door-again situation, and the other half wanted to be told they’d always known and it didn’t matter. But either way he wanted a dramatic showdown and was determined to get it.

  I went to Edinburgh as soon as I’d finished school, for two weeks. Rory hadn’t bothered to write more than his name on most of his school exam papers – not that his parents yet knew that – and hadn’t a hope of passing anything except maths. Maths came naturally to him. He hadn’t had to do any work yet he reckoned he knew enough to pass that one. At any rate, he was in great spirits, the weather was brilliant, and we had a good time. His parents had taken a cottage on the coast near Berwick-upon-Tweed and I went there with them all for the second week. Rory and I slept all morning then went off in the afternoon to find somewhere to smoke. It was still beautiful, sunny weather and we lolled in the grass near the sea talking rubbish about what we were going to do in the holidays – or in Rory’s case, now he’d left school, or so he said. I was leaving on the Saturday and he decided he’d make his announcement (that was what he referred to the breaking of the news as, really pompously) on Friday evening, after supper. We were going out to a restaurant about five miles away, a place famous for its seafood, and Rory said that would be the best time, ‘when they’ve stuffed themselves and Dad’s on the whisky’.

  I hardly touched the lobster, I was so nervous – far more so than Rory. He was so charming that evening, and his manners perfect. He was extra solicitous, helping his mother off with her coat, pulling her chair out for her before the waiter could, inviting his father to tell us about his latest deal (which usually had us yawning rudely) and in general being a son anyone could be proud of. He looked at his most handsome, too, his – blond hair brushed till it was quite smooth, his shirt properly buttoned up and his school tie (which he loathed and never, ever, wore outside school) neatly knotted. He’d even put a suit on, though his mother had said he didn’t need to and ordinarily he had to be bribed to wear it. I saw people admiring him, and I saw that Isabella saw them and that she was gratified. We looked a lovely family group, just what she wanted us to look. And yet she was very far from being stupid and I saw a certain wariness in her expression as she looked at butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth Rory. Hector was entirely taken in, doubtless thinking Rory had at last seen the error of his ways, or that the discipline of his school had worked this miracle, but Isabella wasn’t. She waited, and so did I.

  We got back to the cottage about ten o’clock. ‘Early start tomorrow for you, Catherine,’ said Hector. ‘You should be off to your bed.’ I said yes, I should be, ready to chicken out at the slightest encouragement, but Rory leapt in to say let’s have a farewell drink before we go to bed. He got Hector’s favourite malt whisky out, and filled glasses for us all. Even Isabella drank whisky occasionally and she didn’t demur. I saw her noticing what I noticed: Rory’s hand shaking slightly, though not enough to spill the whisky. He was agitated, clicking his fingers and whistling and walking about the small room, with his drink left standing on the table. Suddenly, he snatched it up and drank it in one go and said, ‘I have an announcement to make.’ Both Hector and Isabella smiled. I expect Hector thought he was going to say he’d decided after all to stay on at school and take Highers (the equivalent of our ‘A’ levels), and Isabella thought he was going to say he’d decided to take the boring job she’d fixed up for him for the holidays, helping in an old people’s home. What Rory, in fact, then went on to say wiped the smiles off both their faces rapidly. ‘I want you to know’, he said, ‘that I am gay. I-am-gay. A homosexual. There is no doubt about it, I’ve always known …’

  ‘Don’t be disgusting!’ Isabella said, then without another word she got up and left the room. ‘Mum!’ Rory shouted after her, but she was out of the room and up the stairs and had gone into her bedroom all in a moment. Hector sat there stupefied, then he groaned and put his glass down and covered his face with his hands. ‘Dad?’ Rory said. ‘Oh my God,’ Hector said, his voice muffled, ‘my God, why did you have to …’ Rory looked at me. He had a funny, twisted grin on his face, as though to say, ‘Told you so.’

  ‘Uncle Hector,’ I said, ‘it isn’t anything terrible.’

  He dropped his hands and gave me such a baleful glare I flinched. ‘Keep out of this,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here, to hear this.’ His fat face was horribly red and I thought that any moment he might have a fit (if I’d known about strokes then I’d have been sure he was on the edge of one).

  ‘She’s my witness,’ Rory said. He, on the other hand, was white-faced, a little muscle working away in his left cheek and his eyes so narrowed they’d almost disappeared.

  ‘Witness?’ Hector said, incredulous. ‘What the hell do you mean, witness?’

  ‘She’s a witness to what I’ve told you,’ Rory said, ‘so you and Mum can’t pretend I never did. I’ve told you I’m gay. That’s that. You know. I’ve been trying to tell you for years and you’d never …’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ Hector roared. ‘Stop all this. I’ve had enough. God knows why you have to make such an issue of it. God knows why you’re so bloody proud of being a queer.’

  Rory laughed. He shook his head and laughed. I thought it would be enough to make his father strike him, but looking at Hector, as I did, fearfully, I saw that he’d realised, amazingly, what I’d realised – that Rory might appear to be laughing, in a terribly false-sounding way, but he was near to crying. I went and put my arms round him and he put his round me, and we stood there like the two babes in the wood did before they lay down.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Hector, and slumped back into his chair. All the rage had gone out of him. He sighed and closed his eyes and eventually said, ‘We’d better all go to bed – this is no use. Things will look different in the morning.’

  ‘I’ll still be gay,’ Rory said.

  Hector didn’t reply, just shuffled off, looking old and beaten. And, of course, he had to face Isabella.

  The next morning I was up very early. A mini-cab was coming to take me to the station at seven, but I was up and ready by six, dying to be gone and hoping nobody would be awake, so that I could avoid any post-mortem. But Isabella came down just before the cab arrived. She made herself some tea without speaking and then, when I began to thank her for havin
g me, she cut in and said, ‘I hope you’ll be discreet, Catherine. There’s no need to repeat any of Rory’s silliness.’ It was so tempting to agree, especially as by then I could hear the cab coming up the lane and in a moment I’d be gone. But I managed to say that Rory wasn’t silly, and that it had been hard for him to tell the truth and even that I admired him. ‘Admire him?’ Isabella said, disgust contorting her features. ‘There’s nothing to admire about what he thinks he is, young lady.’

  So it wasn’t surprising, was it, that I had no time after that for my dear aunt? I rushed back to Charlotte and told her everything and she said, ‘Poor Rory.’ I loved her more than ever. But when I told my father he said, ‘Poor Isabella and Hector,’ and I was outraged and asked him how dare he feel sorry for parents who were so cruel and behaved so brutally. My father said they hadn’t, that he didn’t see their reaction as cruel or their behaviour as brutal. ‘So, if I’d come to you and Charlotte and said I was a lesbian you’d have left the room or yelled at me and told me not to be silly and all that?’ I shouted at him. My father stood his ground, and said no, but he’d have been upset and shocked and it would have taken him a while to adapt; he wouldn’t immediately have embraced me and said how lovely, I’m proud of you. I was so cross with him, and ready to work myself into a fine state of contemptuous rage, but he went on to say that no parent wants their child to have a life where belonging to a minority sets them apart and makes it more difficult than it already is to be happy. I said in that case it was up to society to change, not the minority, but he said I was missing his point, which was that parents want easiness above all for their children and they don’t want to feel separated from them by something beyond their comprehension. We argued half the night but my father wouldn’t budge. He maintained Hector and Isabella couldn’t control their shock and that they would come round when they got over it and saw it wasn’t as if their son had confessed to being a murderer.