So, as I said, it was fairly silly. I got into another school without too much difficulty and behaved myself. But I went off to London the moment I finished ‘A’ Levels, and lived in a squat for a bit (not long), took drugs (not many) – I suppose all that kind of pretty normal late-teenage behaviour could be called getting out of control. (And becoming pregnant, of course, but nobody knew about that at home.) The whole of that period was in any case short-lived and I was no more wild than a good many of my contemporaries, and unlike most of them I never broke off with my parents. They always knew where I was, if not exactly what being where I said I was amounted to – the address they had sounded perfectly respectable and they would never have envisaged a filthy, boarded-up basement. I never fell out with my father and mother, nor made enemies of them, and even then I never let a week go by without ringing them up. I call that quite remarkably exemplary behaviour, in the circumstances.
But it is true that though I deny I was ever out of control I felt no one was in control of me, especially not myself. It scared me. I remember feeling dangerous, as though I might do anything and not be able to stop myself even if I wanted to. My life up to then had been so neat and tidy, so safe and secure and predictable, thanks to my parents. I’d never had to look after myself, except in the most trivial of ways, and suddenly I was among a group of people my own age who didn’t care about me and who couldn’t look after themselves, never mind me. Most of the time they weren’t even interested in me, whereas I was used to being the focus of a most intense and loving interest. This absence of attention did odd things to me. It excited me at first, it felt thrilling, but then I began to fear the freedom I’d snatched and had to pretend I didn’t. A lot of energy went into this pretence and it changed me. I’d always said what I thought in the past, but now I had to struggle not to say I hated the way we lived and despised most of the people I was with. I’d only landed in the squat because of a friend at school whose brother lived there. We’d gone to visit him one Saturday just after ‘A’ levels, and I’m sure he spotted my potential as a source of money – probably his sister had filled him in on the fact that I had plenty of pocket money and never needed a holiday job. But I wasn’t stupid, it didn’t really take me long, once I’d moved in, to realise I was being used. We all shared everything but I was the one, sometimes the only one, who had anything to share.
At first, I was quite proud of this. I had the money, I hadn’t done a damned thing to earn it; I was lucky, therefore it was only fair I should subsidise those less fortunate. I approved; I believed that single-handed I was righting some kind of wrong. And, of course, it made me popular – how generous I was, how liberal. But doubt set in pretty soon. I remember lying on a dirty mattress, barely able to see because the electricity was cut off and the last candle had been used, my head aching from lack of air and from the noise of heavy metal music playing at full blast in the room above us, where a whole band squatted complete with Alsatian dog. It was like being in a prison, and yet I knew I’d put myself there and that I could get out. All it took was will power, which for the first time in my life I didn’t have – because of the drugs, I suppose (though I was a cautious user, compared to the others, and never took heroin or LSD, nothing more than cannabis really). But I was not well and that, too, was such a shock to my system it made it harder yet to leave. After two months had gone by I felt ghastly most of the time – I distinctly remember the terror of trying to haul myself up from that disgusting mattress and finding I couldn’t, that I had to flop back, I was so dizzy and weak. ‘Poor baby’, that was what the boy I was with said, and not kindly – ‘poor little baby, all on her own without her mummy.’ I think I cried, with humiliation as much as anything.
What kept me there, apart from feeling ill and determination to pretend I was liking it, were the good days. The bright, sunny summer days when we went into the garden (completely overgrown of course but still a garden and really more attractive because the grass was thick and the trees unpruned and heavy with fruit) and for once someone had bought proper food and was cooking it on an open fire and we all sat in a circle round it and the music was just one guitar and we all sang. Sweet. Then there were other good days, when we would go out as a gang, to a festival, and everything seemed wonderfully free and easy and fun. Life in a comfortable suburban home such as that of my parents seemed ludicrous then – this was much better, it was what I wanted. My fears evaporated and I didn’t worry so much about feeling strange and complicated and having to hide this from the others because they wouldn’t understand. How could they, when I didn’t understand myself? I began, on those happier days, to think I could train myself to tolerate dirt and disorder and the lack of privacy and all would be well. But I never succeeded. I got pregnant, I had the abortion, survived the infection, and went home, shocked out of my inertia. My mother was pleased to see me. She hadn’t the faintest idea how I’d been living or what had happened. She said only that I was very pale and too thin and needed looking after. She didn’t pry, to my relief. I think she was afraid to. Charlotte was basically a timid person and was always determined to think everything was fine.
Would Susannah have done? Would she have been able to look beyond my pallor, my loss of weight? Would she have been able to tell how near disaster I’d been and how greatly I was in need of a different kind of comfort than good food and rest? Charlotte did pretty well after all, just by being there, ready to take me back and restore me to health. Why suppose Susannah could have done any better? Why suppose it would have been a good thing to do any better? I don’t know, at this distance of time, what precisely I mean by ‘better’ either. Talking. I think I must mean that with Charlotte there was no possibility of real talk. I wanted, always, to protect her from the uglier aspects of my life. Would I have wanted to protect Susannah? What difference would it have made that she was my biological mother, she was me, in a way Charlotte couldn’t ever be? Kind, trusting Charlotte, around whom I ran rings, may have been dangerous for me in ways I never suspected. I bewildered her with my fierce love for her and yet by my erratic behaviour, so different from her own. She defended me when I had no defence.
I wondered where all this was going. In the direction Tony had always wanted it to go, that was where, the direction I had always refused to take. Slowly, as another person emerged, with the aid of her box, from behind the image I’d had of her, I was falling into the trap of believing I was going to solve a problem I couldn’t even describe.
X
IT FELT LIKE an act of pilgrimage, almost an apology, to go to Oxford again soon after my trip to the West Country. I’d thought I would never go back there. God knows why I was feeling apologetic, but it was something to do with the first wavering doubts I’d been having about Charlotte. I felt shabby and soiled by them and so, on what would have been her sixtieth birthday, I drove once more to Oxford and put some roses on her grave.
Charlotte, unlike my father, had not wanted to be cremated. She had time to think about such things and she was adamant. No matter how environmentally wrong it might be, she said she wanted to be buried. Her family would have had her taken back to Edinburgh and buried with her parents but, again, her long time dying had given her the chance to think about this too. She wanted to be buried in Oxford, where she had spent her happily married life and where she had been a stalwart member of so many organisations connected to her local church. She left all decisions about a gravestone to me, apart from telling me she would like one. My father had wanted to be blown out to sea, but she wanted to be tucked up, all neat and tidy, just like herself.
I’d chosen an angel, what else? Perhaps embarrassingly Victorian, but then there was something decidedly Victorian about Charlotte in that her virtues were more of that era. And she had liked slightly fussy things, a taste anathema to my father and therefore rarely indulged. The angel was moulded in white marble, a full-length figure with her arms crossed modestly across her chest. On the plinth of this statue I had had engraved the words �
�In memory of CHARLOTTE, beloved mother of Catherine’ and then her dates and the fact that she was my father’s wife. When she was buried, at the actual funeral, there was nothing of course for her family to see, and once the angel was in place I doubted if any of them had come to see it. They all lived too far away and it would be unlikely. So no one, so far as I knew, had read the inscription and taken exception to it. It was a lie in stone for someone, say, of Isabella’s way of thinking, but she would never see and be outraged by it. It had pleased me to have those words carved – ‘Beloved mother …’ The world should be told that some mothers are made mothers by the act of birth and some by their own dedication and overwhelming love for a child. Charlotte had always said that being my mother, becoming my mother, was the most fulfilling part of her whole life. All I had done was to pay tribute and acknowledge this.
It’s true what they say, about having a grave to visit being comforting and important, however ludicrous the idea. It didn’t make me shiver, to imagine Charlotte’s rotting body under the grass. On the contrary, it steadied me, to know what was left of her was there, quite dead. I sat on a bench for a few moments opposite her grave and wondered what I would have felt if Susannah had been buried and I had had a grave to visit. Would I have gone, now, and sat thinking about her there? It might have given me some feeling of reality about her. But it might have had another kind of effect, a harmful one. I thought again, sitting beside Charlotte’s grave, of the dying, of the pain and distress, and it was awful to recall even though I could remind myself it was long since over. If I had sat beside Susannah’s grave I would have been forced not to remember her dying, because I had nothing to remember and torture myself with, but forced to imagine what it had been like. I’d only begun to do that recently, in odd flashes of speculation, since opening the box, and I had quickly dampened them down. I felt shivers go through me whenever I thought about being with her at the moment of death. I’d been with Charlotte, but that was different. We’d said our farewells, I knew what was coming. But then, with Susannah, I had been a baby. I was not in her arms, my grandmother had said, but lying in a cot beside her bed. They found her dead, with her hand in mine, thrust through the bars of the cot, my tiny hand warm, clutching her dead fingers in my sleep, her face pressed up against the side of the cot to be near me, my breath making the strands of her hair flutter a little … it was horrible to me to think of the scene and so I never had done.
But I did then. I thought of Susannah straining to be near me, clinging on to me for dear life, and myself oblivious. No harm had been done to me, I knew nothing about the dying. I was told I did not even whimper as my hand was detached from hers. There was no possibility of my experiencing any kind of shock. In the Baby Book Susannah had kept (one of those cosy little volumes with a naked baby cooing ‘My Records’ on the cover) my grandmother had written for the second day after Susannah’s death ‘first tooth cut’. She’d tried to keep these pathetic entries going: and so my first tooth was of enough importance in the midst of her grief to have to write it down. So while Susannah was dying I was cutting a tooth – the juxtaposition struck me as farcical. This same book had been passed on to Charlotte in due course and she had seen no trace of the absurd about it. To her, it was like a holy book. I was nearly two before she started making entries herself, but once she did she was indefatigable. She had recorded my first clear sentence in red, with a line of exclamation marks – ‘Want choclick, Mama!’ The ‘Mama’ was underlined. Maybe I hadn’t said the word at all before that, or had I only said it to my grandmother? I’d hardly have known to call my grandmother granny, so presumably I’d called her ‘Mama’. But do babies only know the word from hearing mothers say it to them – are they just imitating what they are coaxed to say? My, the mysteries of motherhood. At any rate, finally some few weeks after the handover, I said the magic word to Charlotte and she was thrilled. She loved the mother word, all versions of it, Ma, Mama, Mum, Mummy, all of them. Yet I know I never used it as much as other children. Once I’d mastered her name, I liked to call her Charlotte, I suppose because I must have liked the sound and was proud of being able to say it. And perhaps because I was imitating my father and I wanted to call her what he called her. But I was aware, all the same, that Charlotte preferred Mummy. She always smiled delightedly whenever I raced across the playground towards her yelling, ‘Mummee – Mummeee!’ When I’d thrown myself into her eager arms and she was hugging me tight she’d say, ‘Mummy’s got you, Mummy’s got you,’ and I’d hear the pleasure in her voice. But she never stopped me calling her by her Christian name. She let me choose my own way.
I’d never called Susannah anything, that was for sure. What had she had from me? Gurglings, I suppose, and smiles. I imagined her face bending over that cot, pale and wasted, dark shadows under her eyes, and I heard her shallow breaths and, worst of all, I felt the sweat on her slippery fingers as they held my own … It was a tableau I had taken care never to reconstruct, and Charlotte’s graveside was no place to begin to do it, and yet as I got up from the bench and began to walk away it wasn’t the birds in the trees above I was hearing, or the crunch of the gravel on the path under my feet, but the creak of the cot as I moved and the whimper I was making in my sleep. I saw the room I had never seen, with the curtains drawn, the light dim, and this poor woman hovering over her baby and dying … Mawkish? Of course. I laughed at myself as I stumbled out of the churchyard, but I let the tears that had gathered in my eyes leak out down my face. I didn’t need enlightenment as to why I was wallowing in sentiment now, but I couldn’t work out how it connected with my earlier feelings about myself. All I felt was that it did. I was getting nearer to something important and I knew it had been a mistake to break off from concentrating on the memory box.
Still, the space I’d given myself through working again and enjoying it had made me a little more objective. Back in my flat, I realised there wasn’t much left that had been in the box to concentrate on. So many of the objects had been already dealt with – the feathers had been thrown into the sea, the red hat left on an aeroplane, the rucksack and map used. The shell? It still sat there but held no mystery any more now I’d walked on beaches full of similar ones. I’d worn the necklace, to great effect, and looked at myself in the mirror, and I’d followed up an address in the address book. The sum total of all this was not negligible, but nor had there been any blinding revelations, and I hadn’t reached any useful conclusion. All I had left, though, were those things I’d thought the least interesting – the paintbox, the incomplete painting, the prints cut out of a book or a catalogue.
They were still in the box. I got out the painting and paintbox and set them out on my bed. They were as uninspiring as I remembered. Was that why they were numbered almost last, 9, 10? Or was it because they were the most important? Guessing games again. I picked up the painting and propped it up, looking at it first from a distance and then scrutinising it closely. It was as unexciting as I’d first thought, showing a stretch of moorland with what looked like heather growing on it, and a hill behind with a stone cottage just visible, halfway up. The moorland in the foreground had been neatly painted, though the heather was clumsily suggested, but the hill was only sketched in, in pencil, and so was the building. What puzzled me was trying to decide what on earth it was that had captured Susannah’s imagination enough for her to want to paint it – for I was quite sure this half-finished effort was her own. There was no signature on the painting, but the whole style was reminiscent of the famous meadow watercolour. There was nothing particularly striking about it, nothing to make anyone wish it had been completed. It could be virtually anywhere in the British Isles, on any of the high ground in England, Scotland or Wales. There were no distinguishing characteristics to pinpoint the location. Even the heather didn’t pin it to Scotland – plenty of heather elsewhere. Why on earth had this unfinished watercolour been left to me?
Completely baffled, but at least calm, I turned to the paintbox itself. An ordinary W
insor & Newton paintbox containing the usual small blocks of paint, twelve of them, six either side of the slot for the brush, and the brush lying there, its bristles (good quality) cleaned of paint. The red paints had barely been touched. I touched them. I put my finger on them, rubbing it over the still shiny surface. They felt firm, solid. The browns, greens and yellows were worn down, as were the black and purple, corresponding to the colours already used in the painting. Not by much, though. She had been sparing with the paint. This painting of Susannah’s was on a real artist’s board. I turned it over and saw the name of an Edinburgh art shop stamped on the back. It seemed likely that this was a Scottish scene, one she had painted, perhaps, while she still lived at home, before ever she met my father. There were moors within easy reach of my grandmother’s house – I’d been taken to them by her myself as a child, with Rory, and heard tales of her taking her own children there.
So, an unfinished, not particularly well executed watercolour of an unmemorable country scene, probably in Scotland. Surely the most significant thing about it, then, must be its very unfinished state. Quite pleased with how cool and rational I was being, I put it to myself that something unfinished needed to be finished. Therefore it had been left to me with the hope that I would go ahead and finish it. Now, to do so I would need to locate this scene and go there and prop up my little easel and get painting. I was feeling quite the ace sleuth by then, basking in my own cleverness. But I wasn’t going to act on it. I’d had enough of tearing off on wild-goose chases, however enjoyable. Instead, I went and filled a jam jar with water, took the painting through to the kitchen, and dipping the brush into the water started to fiddle with the green paint. I dabbed a bit on and saw of course it was the wrong green, a mismatch made worse by its freshness. I played with the two greens on offer, mixing them on the lid, and added a bit of brown and a bit of yellow and a dab of black, and then I tried again. Better. Still not an exact match, but better.
The Memory Box Page 17