The Memory Box

by Margaret Forster

  It’s a wonder the Harrods assistants didn’t think I was some sort of terrorist as I lurked there looking, I should imagine, impossibly sinister and scowling at the clothes I was fingering with ludicrous distaste. I knew I was making faces to register my disgust, a one-woman pantomime with no audience except for them. Leaving the department, I found myself laughing idiotically as I entered the lift, recalling my eleven-year-old self hissing at Charlotte that I wanted to be a bag lady when I grew up and wear the same old clothes all the time and not have to fuss about weddings.

  I gave up on Knightsbridge and moved to Bond Street and tried to take an interest in boutiques, intimidating though they were. It was no good. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind, I didn’t have the right attitude. And then, passing one small shop near the top end of New Bond Street, I saw in the window a white trouser suit. It was very simple, almost severe, but the material looked soft. The pants were wide-legged and the jacket long, fastened with two buttons just on the bust, giving it a generous neckline. In my obsession with dresses like Susannah’s I’d overlooked this alternative and yet the town was full of such casual chic.

  Oh, the joy of finding the right clothes! The moment I put those pants and jacket on I felt terrific and bought them in five minutes flat, not caring in the least that they cost what amounted to my entire clothes budget for the last two years. Thank God, I was sorted. But once home, and standing in front of my long mirror with the suit on and the necklace, I realised I wasn’t. Clothes, fine. Necklace with said clothes, excellent. But hair? Disaster. I hadn’t been to a hairdresser for ages. It was a mess. I’d simply chopped bits off when the fringe grew too long and tied the rest back with an elastic band. Not good enough. I have thick, strong hair – there’s nothing wrong with my hair and it’s always in good condition, glossy, and the colour is fine, a deep dark brown – but with the white suit and the necklace it looked all wrong. My hairstyle, or lack of style, insulted the outfit. I picked up the silver hand mirror and turning away from the sight of all of me in the long mirror I looked at myself close up. Make-up, that was another lack. I wore none. Fine, in jeans and T-shirt, but dressed up in the new clothes my features seemed to vanish. I felt so bad-tempered, resenting what I knew to be the truth, that having faced the ordeal of shopping for clothes I’d now have to find a hairdresser and seek advice about bloody make-up. All this to please my aunt and uncle, whom I didn’t even like – what had I started?

  More than I’d been prepared for. I knew, when I set off to the Savoy, that the necklace had somehow taken me over and changed me, the necklace and all that had had to go with it. I didn’t feel myself. I was a stranger, hailing a taxi, and I saw in the cab driver’s eyes the kind of recognition I normally never received. I was suddenly a sophisticated woman who would be treated as such. I moved differently. My new garments didn’t feel awkward or uncomfortable but instead like a marvellous disguise hiding my imperfections, giving me supreme confidence in my own attractiveness. It was quite thrilling and I was almost in awe of this creature I’d made myself into. The necklace felt heavy and cold round my neck. I was acutely conscious of its weight, though it hadn’t felt heavy in my hands. The pendant, with its emerald glowing, seemed to cling to my flesh and I couldn’t help fingering it constantly, lifting it up and being surprised when I let it fall back and felt it on my skin. I wondered how long fingerprints last. Would Susannah’s still be on the pendant if she, too, had fiddled with it as I was doing?

  My hair was in an elaborate French pleat, pulled right back from my face, the fringe gone, my forehead visible for the first time in my life. I’d always had a long, thick fringe to hide behind and now I felt exposed. Make-up (only eye make-up) had made my face look strange to me. My eyes beneath my newly revealed forehead, odd in itself, were bigger and my nose appeared smaller. I felt my old face had melted and had hardly been able to look in the mirror before I left without wanting to go back to the self I could recognise. It occurred to me I did not have to go back to that self at all if I did not want to. I could look like this every day. Many women did, and do. They take time and trouble and of course spend money and they look beautiful and the world treats them differently. Susannah had looked like this. When I was first making a business of sticking to jeans, etc., just before my grandmother died she had said with sadness – and it was that sadness which hurt, not her words – ‘Your mother always dressed nicely, always. From a wee thing she loved clothes, she had the knack – and you won’t even try. Just look at yourself!’ I knew it had been commented on, when my father married Charlotte, that he had certainly gone for a different style of woman from his first wife. Charlotte never looked elegant in spite of her efforts. She looked cosy. She looked how I, as a child, liked her to look.

  But as my taxi battled its way down the Strand I reflected that the raw material was never there for Charlotte, whereas it was for me. She could never have looked like Susannah, however well dressed. She was short and dumpy and her cheerful face round and bland. But I, although not like Susannah, had a better chance of appearing elegant if I wished, as I had wished for that evening, than Charlotte ever had. I had height, I was slim, I had strong features (good cheekbones and a straight nose). I was worth dressing, as I had just proved. But what kind of woman had Susannah been that she had been famous for looking groomed even in a dressing-gown? We would have had such fights over how I chose to look, I was sure, whereas Charlotte and I never did, or only rarely, on those occasions she felt bound to register some mild protest at my more slovenly gear. Susannah might have wanted to turn me, her daughter, out in her own image, as a woman who could wear, with ease, the necklace she’d left. And yet she’d proved something by forcing this jewellery on to me. I was capable, after all, of relishing my own appearance.

  My aunt and uncle were astounded. They were sitting at a table by the window overlooking the river when I arrived and I had a long walk over to them. I saw them look towards me with that blank stare given to arresting strangers and then had the gratification of seeing them literally start and confer with each other – was this Catherine? Hector stumbled to his feet and embraced me rather more convincingly than usual, and Isabella kissed me on the cheek instead of pecking at the air to the right of it. Hector boomed that I looked splendid and called for champagne (though to toast his own success rather than any beauty of mine). The moment I was seated, I saw Isabella’s eyes were fixed on the necklace. I touched it, provocatively, while I studied the menu.

  ‘Your mother did that,’ Isabella said, frowning, ‘always playing with it. I never did.’

  ‘You wore it?’ I asked, surprised.

  ‘Of course. It wasn’t always hers. It was our mother’s. We both wore it, when we had occasion. Susannah just had more opportunities than I ever did. She wore it so many times I think she thought she owned it, but she didn’t. A little unfair, but there you are.’ She sniffed, and smiled a little too brightly and began whispering about Hector’s knighthood and telling me when it would be announced, reminding me to buy The Times that day. I ate my smoked salmon and my Dover sole and drank the champagne before moving on to the Chablis, and tried all the time to warm to these relatives of mine. They had aged since I last saw them, quite dramatically, especially Isabella, and I felt I should be able to call forth some sympathy for their grey heads and lined faces and slightly shrunken forms, but I couldn’t. They irritated me, as they always had done. I had nothing in common with Isabella except genes. I smiled politely as she prattled on and thought suddenly that this was even more weird than the realisation I possessed Susannah’s genes. I could see and hear and judge Isabella. Genetically, where did we touch? I longed to be told. I wanted someone to read our separate DNA codes and say there, and there and there. She is your mother’s sister, and there and there and there she is you, you are her.

  I felt more connection with Hector, as ever. At least he had not been indifferent to Rory, as Isabella had so often seemed to be. He had had some physical contact with him, if only of
a negative sort, taking hold of his arm to shake him, or pushing his hair out of his eyes because it annoyed him to see his son so tousled and wild. Isabella didn’t even have this minimal connection with Rory. She seemed, indeed, to move away whenever, as a child, he drew near and looked as if he were going to touch her. She recoiled from his runny nose, telling him to wipe it but not wiping it herself, as most mothers of a small child would do, and if he had dirty hands and made to hold her own hand she would literally step backwards. She always seemed to find him repugnant and yet he was such a very attractive child whom others loved to cuddle, the kind of sweet-faced, blond, blue-eyed boy who looks like a little cherub. Her attitude had always been bewildering: the only clue I had to her behaviour came when my grandmother once told me that Isabella had never got over wanting a girl. Rory himself, when he was old enough to appreciate what effect he appeared to have on his mother, also reckoned he had been doomed from birth not to be loved by her and that it wouldn’t have mattered what he’d been like.

  It wasn’t something I had ever been able to discuss with my aunt. I was never, in fact, able to discuss anything with her. Sometimes I even wondered if my hostility to the idea of Susannah being my mother stemmed in part from my dislike of her sister. And yet I knew they could not have been alike. On the contrary, from everything I had been told and pieced together they were opposites. Isabella envied her sister for being everything she was not and my birth had apparently been the final blow. Susannah had everything she wanted – but then, of course, she died. She did not have life. I had often wondered if that had made my aunt feel ultimately victorious and had dissolved her feelings of jealousy when it was too late, but that was utterly beyond discussion even now. I would never know. I would never learn the reality about Susannah from her sister, because she tried to mention her as rarely as possible. I would have to mention her name myself and it was still hard to do that. But as that meal went on, and the chat was all of charity organisation concerns and the weather and the purchasing of a new car and other banalities, I grew impatient with my own connivance. When Hector, at the end of the main course, and pudding having been rejected though we were waiting for coffee, left the table to make a phone call, I could curb my impatience no longer.

  Apropos of nothing, I suddenly said, ‘Why didn’t you like your sister? Why didn’t you and Susannah get on?’

  ‘Really, Catherine!’ Isabella protested, as though I had sworn at her. She flushed, too, and looked around as though worrying that anyone had heard me.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘It’s a reasonable question, isn’t it?’

  ‘We’re having a celebratory dinner,’ she said. ‘It isn’t appropriate.’

  ‘When would it be?’

  ‘Not here, not in public. Really, you’re spoiling Hector’s party. You’re usually so sensible, you’ve always been sensible about your mother’s death.’

  ‘Sensible?’

  Still Isabella was looking furtive and angry, and now she leaned over the table and in little more than a whisper, more of a hiss, said, ‘She had died, and you never carried on about it. You knew it was a blessing that you had no memory of her. You took to Charlotte and that was that. Sensible. Why start all this up now?’

  ‘Is it wrong?’ I said, determined to continue now I’d begun. ‘Why hold it against me that at last I’m interested in Susannah?’

  ‘It does no good.’

  ‘How do you know? How do you know it wouldn’t do me some good? Why not be pleased I want to know what I refused to know before? My grandmother would’ve been pleased.’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘That’s the trouble: everyone who could tell me anything is dead, except for you.’

  ‘There’s no point to it. You’ll only upset yourself.’

  ‘I’m not in the least upset, I just want to know more. I’m thirty-one, Isabella. Think about it: I’m her age, the age she was when she died. And I’ve just opened that box she left me – I expect you knew about it – a few months ago. Don’t you think it makes sense, it’s sensible, to ask you about my mother however much I’ve blocked her out all my life?’

  At that moment, Hector came back and coffee arrived. It was fortunate, really. I’d spoken much too sharply and that was no way to get anything out of Isabella. But as I drank the coffee, and the mundane conversation with Hector resumed, I was aware that my aunt was not as furious as I thought I’d made her. She seemed more shaken perhaps by the mention of the box than angry, and twice Hector asked her if she was feeling tired and had to be reassured she was not, or not excessively. We went to the ladies’ powder-room together and when I came out of the lavatory she was sitting before a mirror in the empty room, quite still, looking at herself. I asked, as Hector had done, if she was all right. ‘You’ve distressed me,’ she said; ‘you’ve ruined the evening.’ I said I was sorry, that I hadn’t intended to. ‘I don’t like to talk of Susannah,’ she said. ‘I never have done. It was a waste, a great waste.’

  ‘What? Her death?’

  ‘Oh, her death, of course, but what went before.’ She sighed and closed her eyes against the sight of herself. Suddenly, she looked even older and more frail. ‘She never liked me. She was my big sister, but she wanted nothing to do with me. I wanted her but she didn’t want me. It was as simple as that.’

  I didn’t speak. Frankly, I found it hard to believe my aunt had wanted to be close to anyone except maybe her dog. She’d never even seemed too keen on old Hector, though he was devoted to her. But there she was, making what for her rated as an intimate confession. She got up, turning away from the mirror, snapping her handbag shut. ‘But when she died’, I risked continuing as we walked towards the door, ‘did you feel differently? Did everything change, did you feel sorry …?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Isabella said. ‘No, I did not feel sorry. It was she who should have felt sorry, for the way she treated me, for what she did, never acting as a sister should.’ She crashed through the door, quite back to her old self. I tried to say I hadn’t meant was she sorry for how jealous she’d been, but that I’d been going to go on to say had she regretted things hadn’t been different between them, but there was no opportunity. She’d had enough of me, she wasn’t prepared to listen any more. We were back at our table and Hector was waiting and from there we swept to the door and parted company. I left them in the hotel and found my own taxi and sat in it all the way home feeling confused. I felt I’d been handed some kind of indictment against Susannah, the first attack I’d ever heard made on her. She hadn’t been a good sister, though there had been no clue as to her exact failings, and Isabella still burned with resentment all these years later. I wondered about her obviously high expectations of sisterhood. With no sister of my own I was hardly in a position to understand what she had experienced or expected. But I found, as I turned over in my mind my aunt’s words and how she had said them, that I wanted to defend Susannah without knowing why. Why should she have loved and been close to a sister like Isabella?

  Somewhere in Isabella’s head were millions of memories which would be of use to me in this struggle of mine to understand what her dead sister was seeking to do to me, but she had thrown away the key to unlocking them. Either that, or she was deliberately obstructing the flowing of memories she did not want me to share. I took off my finery, got into bed, and then lay for hours thinking once more about the nature of memory, only this time about how selective yet random the system of remembering was in my own case. I’d always been bothered by the recurring memories of what seemed absolutely banal. It was these kind of memories, which had no apparent significance, that puzzled me. I was always thinking of a certain corner in Edinburgh. Into my head would flash a wall, the side of a house, and the view of a cobbled street. I was certain nothing had ever happened to me on such a corner and, though I could not have led anyone to the exact place, I felt it was familiar. There was something ridiculous about how often I saw the wall, the cobbles, the blank emptiness of this harmless scene. Why had it b
een tucked away? And if my memory had salted away such an inane scene, what else had it got in there? Did I have somewhere memories of my first six months, of Susannah? Back to that again, to that wearying straining after lost impressions and all the time wanting to know was it simply that I could not retrieve them or that they weren’t there? It maddened me not to know.

  To steady myself, I moved on to trying to sort out my first definite memories. I’d always thought my first concrete memory was of dropping my doll on the garden path and screaming when I saw her china head was shattered. Charlotte had just married my father, so I was nearly two. She herself always remembered this incident because it was the first day she had had total charge of me on her own – my grandmother had gone home the day before after supervising the handover to her care. Charlotte was nervous, so this little mishap had seemed to her like a bad omen, but apparently I was easily comforted, the doll sent to be mended, and another accepted as a substitute. Everyone says two is too young to be sure a memory is ‘true’, and that it is more likely that what is recalled is an adult’s telling of the memory, but I believe mine to be what I myself do remember. But my next early memory is far more vivid and it involves Isabella. I was five. It was a summer’s day, in the garden of our Oxford house. Rory and Isabella were staying with us. I had a plastic teaset and I’d set it out on the paving stones at the back of the house (later replaced by mellow old bricks, but I can see those slabs of York stone quite clearly). Rory and I were sitting there cross-legged on the warm stone and I was pouring ‘tea’ for him out of the tiny red plastic teapot, which had a white lid with a little red knob on it, into cups so small and light that they tipped over easily and took hardly any liquid. Charlotte was somewhere in the house making lunch and my father and Isabella were sitting having a drink, their chairs, old-fashioned deck-chairs, some distance away from us. I can call up the dazzling light, the heat, the sound of water being poured, and I can even feel the sticky plastic handle of the fiddly teapot, so hard for me to hold securely in my podgy five-year-old hand. The scene is mundane but the reality of it extraordinary – I can always be ‘in’ it whenever I want.