Finally, George closed the album. I sat down facing him again. His expression was odd. I couldn’t decide whether I should understand by it that he felt he had made some sort of statement by showing me the album and was waiting for a response, or whether it was telling me there was nothing more to say. I settled for feeling he wanted me to react. ‘So you and Susannah were lovers?’ I asked. He laughed and raised both his hands in what looked like exasperation at my idiocy – of course they were lovers. ‘So what happened?’ I said. ‘Why did she marry my father? Why were you kept a secret?’ He stopped laughing and sighed and picked up a notepad and pencil lying on the table beside him. He wrote something with his left hand, laboriously, and showed it to me. It said, ‘Is your father dead too?’ I said yes. This seemed to relieve him, and he began to write some more. I watched as he covered three sheets of paper, writing excruciatingly slowly, wishing so desperately that he could talk easily to me and tell me in minute detail all about his relationship with Susannah. He’d obviously been right-handed and writing with his left was almost as hard for him as trying to speak coherently. I felt I was asking far too much of him and that my very presence and my questions were a cruel intrusion on his memories. I really wasn’t entitled to put him through this.
But he looked calm enough after he’d read through what he’d written and handed it to me. I read it myself, twice, and said, ‘Thank you,’ and folded the sheets of paper carefully and put them in my bag. I stayed another half-hour, telling him everything I could think of about Susannah’s subsequent life after she married my father. I wasn’t sure how much he would know – it wasn’t clear from what he’d written if they’d severed all contact and completely dropped out of sight of each other, or whether perhaps mutual acquaintances might have kept them informed of each other’s lives. I told him properly about the memory box now, saying I was sure its purpose was to tell me things no one else would or could, and that I felt some sort of written explanation was probably intended but never got made and so I was left with a puzzle and he was a part of it. I said I was sure he had been of vital importance to her, and the trip to Bequia the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. It had been her great adventure, he had been her great romance. And I said that what I had just learned from him, from what he had written down, linked me to Susannah more securely than anything could ever have done.
Before I left, as tea was brought in, I said I would come again. I meant it. I had no intention of getting what I wanted out of George Senhouse then abandoning him. We shook hands and, on impulse, I bent down and kissed him, and he gripped my hand tightly and seemed touched. On the way out, I walked down the corridor with the woman who had first shown me in and took the opportunity to ask some more about George. She’d said he didn’t get many visitors and I wondered why he hadn’t moved to be near his sister. She said he’d been living in America before his accident, for years and years, she thought, and when it happened he was taken to hospital in Brighton. He’d only been in this country on holiday and had no residence here except for a cottage somewhere on this coast. Once the accident was followed by the stroke he was in no fit state to return to America and it was his sons who had made the decision about this nursing home. She didn’t know if he would have preferred to be in the north or not.
It seemed such a sad way to end his days. All the way back on the train I was thinking about George and wondering how I could fill in the gaps in his story. I thought it would be easy enough to get his sons’ addresses and write to them, or even to go and see his sister in Maryport, who would have all the history, but somehow I doubted if I ever would. That part of his history which concerned me most I now knew. I took out what he had written and smoothed the sheets out. Already I almost knew the words by heart. If only Susannah had told this tale in her words how much more they would have meant than poor George’s stumbling sentences all these years later. And yet he’d managed to give me the essential facts from which I could construe the rest, or fancied I could. It was an ordinary enough story after all, and it was quite easy to fill in the detail for myself. When they returned from Bequia by air, after selling the boat, Susannah believed herself to be pregnant. She was distraught at how her career would be ruined before it had begun – she would have to drop out of university – and at the thought of her mother’s distress, but never for one moment did she think of trying to get rid of the baby. He wanted to marry her anyway and was secretly glad that her pregnancy would force her to marry him then and not make him wait three years until she’d finished her degree. They agreed to marry at a register office and tell no one until it was over. And then, the morning of the day they were to be married, Susannah found she wasn’t pregnant after all. She refused to marry him, saying marriage was no longer necessary. He was furious. He hadn’t thought theirs was to be a marriage of mere convenience. They quarrelled. He was so upset and disappointed he said things he later regretted and he thought maybe she did too. At any rate, there was a lot of shouting and she left his room saying she never wanted to see him again. He never for one moment believed she really meant it, but was too proud and angry to go after her and she never phoned or wrote to him. He kept expecting to hear from her but never did. He knew he should go to her but he was hurt and felt humiliated, and he didn’t. Then he left to go to America to do a business course. She’d known he was going and he kept expecting that, as the date for his departure drew near, they would somehow make it up. But they didn’t. He left and was away a year. He did write then, but got no reply and wasn’t even sure she’d got his letter. When he came back she wasn’t at her home but on holiday ‘with friends’, her mother said. He thought John Graham might be one of these friends and contacted him, but he didn’t know where she was or who with. George went back to America to start a job and met and married Celia.
All this was written down in short, choppy sentences, betraying little emotion except for the last line. ‘We threw it away,’ he’d written. ‘My fault. Regretted it ever since.’ I supposed ‘it’ meant true love, or something similar. Clearly, George didn’t feel he’d found it again with Celia. Susannah had been luckier. She’d found my father and he was perfect for her, or so everyone had said: they were love’s young dream. Well, my grandmother had said so, but then what, after all, had she known? She hadn’t known about George Senhouse for a start, nor where her daughter really was when she’d said she would be working in America at a camp during the vacation. (George had told me about this subterfuge when I’d asked him how on earth Susannah had managed to conceal the Bequia jaunt from her mother.) Susannah, it turned out, had been incredibly devious and cunning and I’d reached the stage of beginning to question every single thing I’d been told about her. But, as I’d said to George, I’d also reached the stage of seeing myself in her more truly than I had ever done. She made mistakes. She loved George but she wasn’t prepared to marry him just to prove she did. She expected him to think as she did and when he didn’t she was sure he would in the end. All she had to do was leave and he would follow. He was in the wrong and she was not.
But did she love my father, in time, later, just as much? Was the bust-up with George a blessing in disguise? Back to questions again, of the maddening variety that no one could answer. Maybe Susannah had been luckier than George, but even if my father had still been alive, I doubt if he could have completely convinced me on that score. He wouldn’t know how he compared with a former lover she may never have mentioned to him. But of course he did make her pregnant and gave her me and made her happy in a way George had not, so she was luckier in the end. Except George had had children too – oh, it was too confusing, and too pointless, trying to sort out what I thought, how Susannah came out of all this. I longed to talk about it with someone clear-headed who would be able to assess all this in a way I could not and point out the real significance of what George had told me. Tony could do it. He’d enjoy the challenge. But he was ill and ought not to be bothered with my problems. His own were far more serious and p
ressing – how could he be expected to care about a muddle that had happened so far in the past? I shouldn’t even mention any of this to such a sick man.
But I did. The next time I went to see him Tony was out of intensive care and in a side room of his own. He was awake, his eyes were fully open, and he was propped up on his pillows. The tubes had gone, but not the bandages, and though he looked awful he was alert. He didn’t smile when he recognised me but instead made a grimace I remembered so well, a mock-mournful pulling down of the lips and a raising of the eyebrows which was meant to convey everything being too much for him. I couldn’t help but smile myself and kiss him, lightly, gently, on the side of his face. ‘Well,’ he said, his voice croaky and not like his at all, ‘surprise.’ I said I didn’t know why he was surprised, I’d left a note saying I’d come again, hadn’t I? Then I asked not how he was feeling but where it hurt, and he groaned and said everywhere, but that the damage wasn’t as bad as first thought. He’d had his spleen removed, and some of his ribs were broken, others cracked, but the main worry was his head. He’d had an operation ‘to clean something up’, as they’d put it, and now he was supposed to be all right, his brain wasn’t after all injured, ‘or not much’. But every bloody movement was agony and he had no energy. And the worst part was not the pain but lying thinking all the time of how the accident had been all his own stupid fault.
I’d thought that the last thing he would want to do would be to tell me what had happened, and I’d certainly had no plans to ask, but it seemed he desperately needed to go over it all. He insisted he’d been entirely responsible for the collision with the lorry. He’d misjudged the distance when turning from a side road into a main road and failed to estimate the speed of this approaching lorry. It was so unlike him – he was such a good and careful driver, as I knew – and he couldn’t credit he’d made such an error of judgement. The only consolation was that no one else was hurt.
‘Don’t think about it,’ I said. ‘It won’t help, brooding about what’s over. I know, I know, it’s stating the obvious, but that’s because it’s true.’
‘Can’t help it,’ he said. ‘My head’s full of it. I’ve nothing else to think about.’
So that was why I told him about my visit to George Senhouse and then, of course, to make sense of this had to work backwards to the finding of the memory box. I was afraid of tiring him, but he seemed to love the distraction and it was only towards the end of my little account that his eyes began to close. He struggled to stay awake but I squeezed his hand and said I must go, and when he said, ‘But you’ll come again?’ I said yes; it was impossible to refuse. I visited him three times that week and saw him get just a little stronger each day. He was able to concentrate more and though our conversation was full of pauses, when he drifted off occasionally, it became increasingly personal. I knew how dangerous the situation was becoming. Tony was growing more and more convinced, I could see, that my visits and concern for him meant we might get together again. There was an edge to his voice when he talked about Susannah and George, going over what I’d told him about what had gone wrong between them. ‘Poor George,’ he said. ‘I can imagine how he felt.’
‘He should have gone after her,’ I said. ‘He was to blame too.’ I knew what was coming as soon as the words were out of my mouth. But Tony didn’t say what I’d thought he would say, not then. He was silent, and we passed on to trivialities, as we very often did.
The next week, I arrived one day to find him out of bed, sitting beside it looking exhausted and frail but pleased with himself. He said he’d been told that in another couple of weeks, if he maintained this progress, he could go home. I didn’t ask if ‘home’ would mean his parents’ home. I didn’t want to think about his discharge at all. How could I say that when he was better I’d stop seeing him? I couldn’t, and anyway I didn’t know that I wanted to. I didn’t know any more how I felt about him. What I’d been feeling since I heard of his accident was, I reasoned, just common-or-garden sympathy, the sort anyone would feel for someone they’d once been close to. Sympathy, pure and simple. But it wasn’t either pure or simple. It wasn’t only sympathy I felt now but some of the old attraction that had once drawn me to him. Not physical attraction but some sort of emotional tie. I realised I had missed him and that my misery over my parents’ deaths had obscured how much. I’d missed his company. All the things that had grown to irritate me about him seemed suddenly of no importance. We might clash in personality, but that very clashing had fired something in me and without it I’d become deadened.
‘Remind me,’ he said one day, the day he actually walked to the end of the corridor with me, ‘remind me what happened. I’ve forgotten, honestly. Why did we split up? Remind me.’ I said nothing. We were at the lift and I prayed for it to come quickly. All my normal sharpness deserted me. ‘Come on,’ he urged. ‘What did I do, or not do? What happened to us? All I can remember is the shock of it.’
‘Nothing happened,’ I said. ‘It was me. I didn’t want anyone near me. I was in a state.’
‘And I couldn’t help.’
‘Nobody could. I just wanted to be by myself, to be miserable on my own, sort myself out.’
‘So are you sorted?’
‘A bit.’
‘And you’re happier on your own? Happy?’
‘Not exactly happy, but better. I’m not so messed up.’
‘No, that’s me now, the messed-up one.’
‘But that’s because of the accident. You’ll soon be back to normal and …’
‘Will I? Well, I don’t seem to want to be. What’s the point?’
The lift came. I kissed him and got into it, so relieved. He’d looked as though he might start to cry and I couldn’t bear it. The only way to cure his distress would be to suggest that we might live together again and I didn’t want to say that, not yet, not while he was still far from well. I wanted to wait and see how things went once he was out of hospital and back at work. I knew that by thinking this I was admitting I would see him once he was discharged, but that had become inevitable. He was the one who had refused just to be friends. If he thought that by constantly visiting him I was saying I wanted to be more than friends again I couldn’t help it. I would have to make him accept that friendship must come first and there could be no guarantees about the future beyond that. I did want him back in my life, that was all.
It was odd how comforting it was to acknowledge that and how happy it made me feel, whatever the problems ahead.
XVI
SO, IT WAS all over. I’d finished with the memory box.
Discussing the whole business with Tony soon after he was back in his own flat (not a very nice flat, but he said it was only temporary), I think I came at last to understand the effect my mother’s death had had on me. I never consciously thought anything as extreme as ‘If I have a baby I will die’, but there may have been something of that fear in my attitude.
I still believe I don’t want a child even if, against the odds, I could conceive, but I’m not scared of the thought any more. I don’t think I was ever meant to be a mother and it doesn’t disturb or distress me. I’ve heard, and read, often enough about the bliss of maternal love, but I’ve never been convinced. I’ve always doubted that it transcends all other kinds of love. Even Charlotte, to whom motherhood was all-important, would never have said, if put to the test, that her love for me was greater than her love for my father (ah, but she was not really a mother …). What I’ve always rejected is the notion that if I had had, or ever do have, a baby, I would succumb at once to being a slave to it. But does that merely show my lack of understanding? Maybe I do have to experience motherhood to appreciate what my own mother tried to tell me through her memory box.
I think of both my mothers, and what their passionate love for me, their baby, their child, gave them, and it all becomes so impenetrable. I may have precipitated my mother’s death, but from everything I have learned the price was never too high. And my stepmother, unab
le to have a child herself, said her life was made complete by me. So, if I remain childless, am I an incomplete woman? Is there, buried deep inside me, so deep I am not aware of it, a capacity to love as my mothers loved which I am cruelly stifling? Impossible to know, but I doubt it, and I don’t want to know. I will not allow myself to think such a monstrous suggestion could be true. It is not. I am certainly not incomplete. The memory box has shown me that, if nothing else. What Tony calls the missing link has been found. I am now connected to my mother and complete.
I think my mother chose the wrong things to leave in her box but there was nothing wrong with her motivation. She was not, as I’ve thought often enough during the last months, trying to control me from beyond the grave (as I liked, dramatically, to think of it, relishing the cliché). She did not resent the fact that I had a future which she did not. What she could hardly bear was the realisation that she would have no part in it and that she might be obliterated in my memory. She knew that I would have no memory except what others gave me and she preferred to try to ignite a spark herself. She couldn’t simply say goodbye to a baby who could not understand her words and then go. It was too hard, too painful. If she thought about my life after her death the agony and fear were so great she became bitter. It was far less cruel to allow herself to think that through the memory box she would be able to speak to me in her own voice and that, in time, because I was hers, I might learn to hear and understand.
The Memory Box Page 27
