The Memory Box

by Margaret Forster

  Mothers are like that. Charlotte was like that – she stood up for me whatever I did and would never believe I wasn’t as wonderful as she thought I was. Isabellas were rare, I thought as I travelled home. And Susannah? There she was, forcing herself into my head again. Impossible to tell how Susannah would have been. Devoted to me, I suppose, but perhaps not uncritical. I’d learned enough about her since I’d opened her box to question and challenge the image I’d been given of her as a sweet, gentle, sunny-natured idol. She was reckless, always doing things dangerous to her health. And she was capable of inspiring some degree of alarm, if not fear, in her sister, to whom she had been less than kind. She was ambitious, fiercely so, and this implied, I thought, an element of aggression completely lacking in my father. Even without learning any more from George Senhouse, I knew she’d had her secrets, maybe even her regrets: she was much more complicated than I’d ever been given reason to imagine. I wondered how different things might have been if I’d been old enough to see her dead. I’d seen Charlotte dying and dead. Susannah had always been just an idea, vague, lacking any substance. But if I’d visited her as I’d visited Charlotte, or even as I’d just visited Tony, if I’d seen her ill and in pain and then dead, would I have struggled so hard to deny her any place in my life? She had needed to be real before I could acknowledge any loss.

  I let myself into my flat and thought I should give my lie some substance. After I’d paid my visit to George Senhouse, I should go away again, on my own, not with Rory. There was still the Hidden Scotland job to do, but going to Scotland was not what I needed. I’d cancel it. I’d go to France this time and wander about for a while. But first I felt the time had come to dispose of the memory box itself, to have some sort of symbolic burning or tearing apart. It lurked in my darkroom, a constant reminder of someone I could never really find. Before I went away I would get rid of it. I went straight to it and pulled it out into my sitting-room. It looked very unthreatening – bright, cheerful and anodyne. I couldn’t believe I’d regarded it with such dread a mere six months or so ago. It seemed years since I’d unpacked it, excited in spite of myself. I stared at it now, and wondered how I could for one moment have believed this box had such power. The list of contents, neatly numbered, was inside it. I picked up a pen and carefully ticked them off, in a done that/been there mood. At number 11, I paused. I’d done no more than glance at number 11. It alone of all the contents was still in the box. I’d not so much forgotten about it as considered it not worthy of my attention. I’d put the cardboard tube back in the box after I’d taken it out of its other resting place, to show Rory, and never thought of it since.

  Number 11, two pictures, rolled up and put into a cardboard tube. Slowly, I unfurled them.

  XIV

  TWO PICTURES, BOTH of a mother and a baby. I’d taken one look, back in September, and never looked at them again. Now, re-rolling them to flatten them, I put them side by side on the table in front of me. Feeling the paper, I deduced that my original guess had been right – these were pages cut from an art book, or an expensively produced catalogue, an act of what my father would have called vandalism. The paper was thick and smooth, the colour reproduction excellent. These pages had been cut out very neatly. I could make out the faintest trace of pencil along the left-hand edge of one and the right-hand side of the other. Susannah had ruled a line before she did her cutting, either with scissors, or possibly a knife, even a razor. Still, the book or catalogue would have been ruined.

  My father had only let me look at his art and architectural volumes under his supervision until I was quite old. It was treated as a great privilege. I had to wash my hands thoroughly first, scrubbing them in hot water with a nail brush, and then I had to sit at a table. (I wasn’t allowed to hold these books on my knees.) I was even shown the way in which I must turn the pages, by holding the top corner of each page, using as little pressure as possible, and flipping it, not dragging it, over. My father said these books of his were not like other books. They were, literally, works of art and precious, and must be treated as special and valuable. When I was very young, five or six, being given permission to look at what he referred to as his ‘treasures’ had been thrilling. I had hurried to fill all the conditions and been only too eager to obey his command to sit up straight and not lean on the bigger volumes. But later, in early adolescence, I’d resented what I thought of then as the unnecessarily fussy strictures he’d imposed and I’d tried to flout them without his knowing. I’d go into the downstairs cloakroom next to his study and run the water, leaving the door open, and then say I’d washed my hands, when I hadn’t at all. For heaven’s sake, I’d think, I haven’t been down a coal mine, my hands are clean anyway, and I’d get a guilty but pleasurable frisson out of cheating. If my father left the room, I’d deliberately turn pages roughly and slouch over the books, not quite daring to inflict even minimal damage, but getting as close as I could to risk doing so. Later, I stopped wanting to look at them at all, if it was going to be such a performance. I went for cheaper offerings which were more user-friendly, though he pointed out their inferiority in every respect. Those ‘treasures’ were worth their exorbitant price and I knew it, really – any fool could see the difference.

  How had Susannah, the obedient wife, brought herself to violate an art book of the calibre these plates had obviously come from? But then I remembered that she had had her own collection of books, not very large, nothing like as extensive or impressive as my father’s, but her own. There had been a bookshelf in my father’s study which had held Susannah’s books as well as some of his. They were on the top three shelves, too high for me to reach without standing on something, and I was never interested enough to do that. But I knew they were her books and had some special significance or my father would not have kept them. When I was doing ‘A’ Level history of art, he mentioned them to me and suggested I have a look at them because they might be useful. Grudgingly, making a feature as I always did of not wanting anything to do with what had belonged to Susannah, I had a cursory look. The books were all concerned with women artists (so no wonder the collection was small). There was stuff there not only about the famous women – Gwen John, Rosa Bonheur – but much less well-known ones, and some I had never heard of like Emily Carr Osborn and Cecilia Beaux. I began secretly to use these books although I’d told my father, at my most offhand, that they weren’t much good. In fact, I did whole essays based on what I found in some of them and got very good marks.

  I suspected these pictures had come from a book in her own collection – well, it was fairly obvious – but I couldn’t search for it because I’d sold it, the entire collection. I’d been in such a hurry to get rid of anything to do with Susannah that I hadn’t even examined her books carefully. I think I regretted my haste very soon afterwards, but at the same time I was glad to have had them removed. It was a sort of betrayal to get rid of them like that, but then I’d spent a lifetime cutting all connection with her and it was just part of the same sort of rejection. But, confronted now with these plates cut from somewhere, I was ashamed to think I had had the means to identify them and had lost the opportunity through my own impetuous act. And my knowledge of women artists, assuming it was a woman I was looking for, was not sufficient for me to guess who had painted these portraits. It was a long time since that ‘A’ Level course and I hadn’t gone on to enlarge or consolidate the knowledge I’d absorbed. But it struck me, looking so hard at those two pieces of glossy paper, that the point might not be the artist who had made these prints (I had just enough knowledge to recognise them as prints rather than paintings). The point might just be what she had chosen to represent. The artist might be irrelevant. As usual, I was being too clever, imagining Susannah as devious when simplicity was the clue to tell me what had been meant.

  So, I tried to think simply. What was I looking at? In the first picture, a woman in a pretty, pale blue, flowered dress, a long full-skirted dress, was sitting on a chair, the padded back glimpsed be
hind her right shoulder, holding a naked baby on her lap and kissing it. She had dark hair, tidily pinned into a roll on top of her head. Her right hand cupped the baby’s bare bottom and her left, rather large and out of proportion, pulled the baby to her. If I’d drawn a line from the top left-hand corner to the bottom right the whole of the top triangle would have been virtually empty. The colours were pale blue and grey except for the flesh tone of the baby’s skin. The second picture showed another dark-haired woman, possibly the same one, but a different baby (fair-haired instead of dark). This one was wearing a cream-coloured gown, with faint patches of darker cream all over it. The chair she was sitting on was upholstered in a cream and apricot pattern and behind it there was what looked like a wooden bed made up with white linen. The woman was full face, the baby in profile. Again, she was holding the child tightly.

  Still trying to react simply, I noted how pretty the compositions were, after all, mother and baby in both cases carefully arranged. The colours were soft and seductive, the notion that everything in the pictures had been melded into a harmonious whole very strong. These were not complicated pictures – they were indeed perfectly simple and made a clear appeal to be taken at face value: a mother loving her baby. That was all. Yet as I went on looking I couldn’t help but look deeper and reject the superficial conclusion which had been so tempting. These were not just about a mother loving her baby, nor were they simply pretty-pattern effects. The baby in the first picture was surely struggling. It was resisting its mother’s kiss. The mother had her eyes closed in ecstasy over the kiss she was bestowing, but the baby’s eyes were open and its mouth pulling back. In the second picture, the opposite was true. There, the baby was doing the clinging, pressing its face eagerly into its mother’s cheek, and the mother, looking weary and forlorn, as though the baby weighed heavily in her arms and she longed to put it down, was merely enduring the kiss. Interesting. Two pictures, perhaps two points of view, or two sides of the same coin. I couldn’t be sure the two women were the same. Both had dark hair, worn in the same style, but the body language was different enough to suggest they were not. The first woman was confident and at ease, the second tense. It wasn’t possible to tell the sex of the baby, but I felt they were both girls, for no good reason. I couldn’t tell, either, how old they were. I see so few babies I had nothing to guide me, but remembering photographs of myself at that age I thought these two might be six months or so. The message was becoming, if anything, too simple after all. This was Susannah, this was me. She’d wanted to show me not only how she had loved me but how I had loved her. The second picture was particularly poignant, showing her weakness and distress as she tried to hold me, wriggling and lively in her tired arms. These were not to be dismissed as chocolate-box fodder. They were touching and painful and full of maternal feeling.

  But did the artist matter? I still didn’t think so, but not knowing who had made these prints nagged away at me and I knew I had to investigate properly, just to be sure I was missing nothing. It was easy enough to visit the Courtauld Library, to find out who had: there was nothing difficult about identifying the artist, who turned out to be well known, if not to me. It was the American artist Mary Cassatt. There was plenty of information about her. Cassatt used the children, often babies, of relatives and friends as models and she had become famous as ‘the painter par excellence of mother and child scenes’. I discovered that in 1891 Mary Cassatt worked on a set of ten large colour prints, which included Mother’s Kiss and Maternal Caress – and there they were in reproduction. She’d gone from painting to print-making and become expert at it. The text I skimmed didn’t say why or how. It was surprisingly more concerned with her life. It startled me to learn that this woman, famous for painting mothers and babies, never had a child of her own. She had given no maternal caress. She was born in 1855, settled in Paris, remained single. Her portraits of maternity, whether paintings or prints, had been lauded for their feeling, but the emotion they captured had never been felt by her. All she had done was observe. She hadn’t painted from any personal experience at all. This struck me as extraordinary, proof that true art does not need to come from the personal, but as soon as I thought that I checked myself – this was personal. Mary Cassatt might not have had children, but her work spoke not of possession but of yearning. She could have yearned for the babies she didn’t have and this yearning, this ache, was what went into her pictures. A woman yearning for something she couldn’t have, something she was going to miss. The library was closing as I handed in the book.

  Back home, I took what I promised myself should be a last look, for the time being, at the prints. I wondered what they would say to the casual observer who walked past them as they hung on a wall somewhere, or flicked through the book they had come from. Take away their significance for me, and what was there? Only, surely, what I’d originally thought: pretty pictures. If I chose to load them with grief and loss it must be because something had changed in the last few months. I’d been forced into admitting there had been loss, and with it pain. Susannah’s pain, the thing I hadn’t wanted to know about. And now my own, the pain of appreciating her agony of mind. I had mocked those who had tried to suggest, with such a solemn desire to be profound, that I had been cruelly robbed by the death of my ‘real’ mother before I could know her. Where had it sprung from, this determination to mock? Why had I fought so hard to keep this dead woman out of my life? Why be so violently opposed to being like her in any way?

  At any rate, I was done with all that by the time I packed the prints away again. Susannah had finally become my mother, Charlotte my stepmother. It was possible that nobody except myself would know. To whom, after all, did I ever speak of either mother these days? Only to Rory, perhaps. And in the future to anyone who came into my life to whom I might be close. Tony maybe. It will, I suppose, become a kind of litmus test – if I love him, or anyone, enough to speak of my mother and mean Susannah, then I will be sure of him. I had made sense of it. I knew that the contents of the memory box, however much I had derided them, however much they had infuriated me, had revealed my mother to me in unexpected guises which had not been visible either in photographs or in the little snatches of oral history I had allowed to penetrate my defences. I’d be able to tell someone in the future that the astonishing thing is that I think she may have been quite like me. No, that I am quite like her. I’d be able to venture the opinion, diffidently, that we would probably have got on quite well. I would have to admit, if pushed, that, yes, it was sad that I had never known her and that, yes, there was a yearning in me now to have done so. I wanted her after all.

  Well, I couldn’t and can’t have her. Even if I had felt and admitted this yearning years before, I would never have been able to have her. Think how bitter I might have become, pining for a dead mother, how wretched I could have made myself, how I could have convinced myself my life was completely blighted. It would have been hell for Charlotte. She could have spent her life trying to make up for what I claimed so desperately to miss. She’d always marvelled at how I gave her all my love and devotion, and that she had never been put in the unfortunate position of so many stepmothers, and this happy relationship had in turn bound me to my father, who never had to feel I was bereft of maternal love.

  It struck me, as I packed the prints away, how odd it was that I had never enquired closely into how my father himself coped with my mother’s death. I knew the facts, what he’d actually done, how he’d managed, and all that, until my stepmother came along, but I didn’t know anything about his feelings during that time. We’d never talked about it. I hadn’t asked and he hadn’t volunteered the information. He wasn’t that sort of man. It had been hard enough for him to tell me my mother was not Charlotte but a woman who was dead. I was not quite five when he had to make a point of telling me – it was probably just before I was due to start school and, I suppose, he felt some duty to make sure I had the relationships straight. I have a feeling that he may have been bullied into it by I
sabella because I remember she and Rory were staying with us the week before. Perhaps she had resented my open adoration of my stepmother, my arms forever round her neck, the kisses between us frequent and warm. Did Isabella want to spoil things? She certainly can’t have acted out of loyalty to the memory of a sister she had reason to hate.

  But when my father started talking about ‘your real mother’, wanting to tell me something to make Susannah alive in my imagination, I leapt off his knee and ran screaming, ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’ through the house until I found Charlotte. I wouldn’t let her out of my sight for the rest of the day. My father didn’t come after me. He let Charlotte deal with my distress (which of course she did, very well). He never mentioned Susannah to me again for years and years and he never, ever, referred to her again as my ‘real’ mother. I aided and abetted his wish to bury her completely by never asking questions about her and, if she came into the conversation, as she inevitably did when my grandmother was staying with us, walking out of the room.

  How much had he loved her? I had only seen him happy with Charlotte and had no idea what he had felt about my mother. I had inhibited him, with my fierce repudiation of the very notion that Susannah had been my mother, but even so I think he should have, at some point, when I was grown up, tried to talk to me about her, about the two of them, their relationship. He couldn’t, by the time I was in my twenties, possibly have thought that any confession of his would affect my own love for Charlotte. But he never said a word. I only knew from her family how they met and when they married and where they lived and what they did. It was as though, like me, he wanted to obliterate her memory. But unlike me, he had known her and loved her and had some obligation, I would have thought, to treasure the memory of what they had been to each other. Did my mother know she couldn’t trust him to do that? Did she know very well that he was the sort of man who can only survive by blocking out tragedy, eliminating from his memory all things acutely painful?