The Memory Box

by Margaret Forster

  I heard Hector come in and wished I’d gone to bed. I prayed he would not look in the room where I was still sitting and quickly put out both lamps to encourage him to think it was empty, but I was too late.

  ‘Ah, Catherine,’ he said, ‘enjoying the fire, eh? Looks cosy. Where’s Isabella? Gone to bed? Age, y’know, gets us all …’ He waffled on, and to my dismay joined me by the fire, a glass of whisky already in his hand. ‘Nightcap,’ he said, waving it about. ‘Want one?’ I said no, I’d had a glass. ‘Good stuff,’ he said, ‘good for sweet dreams.’ I smiled politely. ‘But you’re young,’ he droned on, ‘you don’t need any help with sleeping, eh?’ I said that was right. ‘Not like your mother,’ he said. ‘She was an insomniac even when she was young. Drove my Bella crazy. Bella likes her sleep, always did.’

  I felt the first stirrings of interest. ‘Were they very unalike, Susannah and Isabella?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes, goodness me, chalk and cheese, those two. Never got on. Drove their mother mad with all their bickering and worse.’

  ‘Worse?’

  ‘Screaming matches sometimes, and Susannah wasn’t supposed to get worked up: bad for her.’

  ‘What did they scream about, what kind of things?’

  ‘Boys, sometimes, usual stuff, jealousy and so on.’

  ‘They had the same boyfriends?’

  ‘Don’t know about that. One, they had a spat over one.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Before my time. Only heard about it from Bella before she took me home to meet her mother. Said her sister would be there and I wasn’t to speak to her because she wasn’t speaking to her. They’d had a God almighty row and weren’t speaking.’ He laughed. ‘Ridiculous, eh?’

  ‘Was it, though?’ I asked. ‘I mean, if Isabella’s never really forgiven her even though she’s been dead so long?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Hector said, ‘of course she’s forgiven her, ’course she has. They just didn’t get on. Then there was the baby.’

  ‘What baby?’

  ‘Said enough,’ Hector said – ‘off to bed now,’ and he hauled himself out of his chair. ‘All water under the bridge.’

  I almost pushed him back down. ‘Uncle Hector,’ I said, ‘what baby? What’s this about a baby? Whose? I want to know.’

  ‘Bella doesn’t like to talk about it.’

  ‘She isn’t here. I promise never to let her know you’ve told me a thing. What baby?’

  ‘Bella’s. Cot death. Terrible thing.’

  ‘Bella had another baby? Before Rory?’ He nodded, and I realised I’d get more out of him if I asked questions to which he could respond with a shake or nod of his head. ‘Was it a girl?’ Nod. ‘Was she very young?’ Nod. ‘Months old?’ Shake. ‘Weeks?’ Nod. But then a nod or shake wasn’t going to do. ‘How does Susannah come into this?’ He sighed, and rubbed his red old face with both hands and spoke from behind them. ‘Looking after the baby. Didn’t have one of her own, you see. Bella was sorry for her. Left her with the baby for the afternoon so she could play mother. Came back … Wasn’t to blame, of course. Doctor said these things happen, they happen. Both of them like mad women, screaming and crying … demented, both of them, ill, both of them. Bella blamed Susannah, said she’d kill her, Susannah said she’d kill herself … my God, it was terrible, terrible. Thought neither of them would ever get over it.’

  ‘Why did nobody ever tell me this!’ I shouted, and he jumped and looked agonised and then listened at the door, clearly afraid Isabella would appear and he would have to explain himself. ‘All these secrets!’ I wailed, ‘they poison everything. I should have been told long ago.’

  ‘Does no good, knowing,’ Hector said, wearily, and repeated his refrain of ‘water under the bridge’. ‘Off to bed now, Catherine, enough said.’

  I lay awake most of the night. Nothing in the memory box about this, oh no. It was surely the most traumatic incident in Susannah’s life, but she hadn’t wanted to give me her version. I tried to think of this reticence as a good thing – she was sparing me, she only wanted to call to mind, my mind as well as hers, happy things – but I couldn’t. I wanted there to have been some token in her box of her suffering over the death of her sister’s baby daughter. It would have made her real to me in a way none of the objects she’d left had. And suddenly, in the small hours of the morning, Isabella did not seem cold and curt and unloving. I wondered if Rory knew any of this – but of course he didn’t. Why not? Why hadn’t his parents told him? Why, and how, had they kept this tragic secret to themselves? Because it was too painful to share?

  I was in a state of absolute confusion before I fell asleep.

  XII

  I HAD SET my travelling alarm clock for five in the morning, anxious to leave without seeing either my aunt or uncle. I was sure Hector would not have told Isabella about his confession to me – he would be terrified she would find out about his indiscretion – and I did not trust myself to be able to hide what I now knew. It would show in my face, all the distress and compassion I felt for her, and she would be suspicious. One day, some other evening by a fire, I would try to get her to tell me herself what Hector had told me. If I had the courage. I saw how courage comes into it, how terrible things always need courage to be remembered and described. How could I blame all the adults in my family for not having this courage when I myself already doubted if I had sufficient? ‘Water under the bridge,’ Hector mumbled, and it was so tempting to agree and let it flow on uninterrupted.

  I left Susannah’s painting on the kitchen table, with a note saying I didn’t want it and that if Isabella didn’t either (and I was sure she wouldn’t) she was to destroy it. And I wrote down Rory’s latest telephone number, only just recorded on my answer phone before I’d left London. Then I drove out of Edinburgh quickly, choosing to head for the motorway coming from Glasgow by going through the Pentland Hills via Abington. I was in a daze at first, going over and over the implications of what Hector had told me and the implications it had for my understanding of Susannah, but the road was narrow and twisting and forced me to clear my head and concentrate on it. Once I’d joined the motorway, I began to feel tired and knew I could never manage to drive all the way home without regular stops. I’d eaten and drunk nothing, not wanting to risk disturbing my aunt and uncle by even the smallest sound, and I felt light-headed. I chose to stop for breakfast in Carlisle, remembering how I’d regretted, when I picked up my rented car there, to go to Whitehaven, that I hadn’t had time to look at the cathedral and castle. My father had been fond of Carlisle and had described both ancient buildings to me.

  I found a large car park just below the old west wall of the city where I could safely leave the car with my valuable photographic equipment locked in the boot (though I took my Pentax 42, never wanting to be entirely without a camera). Groping around the little compartment where I kept change to use for the ticket machine, my hand touched Susannah’s address book – God knows how it had got there: I’d no memory at all of what I’d done with it after Bequia. But it seemed a colossal hint, real hand-of-fate stuff again, and I couldn’t resist slipping it into my pocket. I knew perfectly well that there was a Carlisle address in it as well as one for Whitehaven and I thought I’d sit in a café after I’d bought a street map somewhere and look it up, for fun. It would almost certainly be an hotel, maybe somewhere Susannah had stayed on her way to Whitehaven when she visited her future mother-in-law.

  The tourist office was in the pretty, old Town Hall, which was painted terracotta and looking almost Italian, and I got a street map there. Then I wandered around the area in front of it for a while, thinking how surprisingly attractive it was, this spacious pedestrian centre with its sandstone bricks and great tubs of spring flowers. I could see the cathedral down a street just off it and, choosing to walk a roundabout way to it, down a narrow street, I came to a café in a sort of arcade beside some shops, and went in. The coffee was delicious and so was the toasted scone and I felt remarkably content sitting
there, a stranger in a city I did not know. It had come over me before, travelling around on jobs, eating or drinking in a city that was completely new to me, that odd sort of thrill which derives from being anonymous and unconnected. It panics some people, but I love it. It makes me look at the world in an entirely different way and some of my best work has come from plunging myself into new environments like that, especially towns and cities.

  Nobody had the slightest interest in me, or if they did they didn’t betray it. I felt furtive in a way, as though I were on the run, and of course I was, from Isabella, from the job I’d said I’d do, from the painting. It was silly not to have carried on up the coast to the Highlands, but I had just wanted to go home in a hurry and I was used to acting on such irrational whims. Maybe I wouldn’t do this Hidden Scotland project after all, maybe I’d keep out of Scotland. I hadn’t definitely promised I would, only said I was interested. In this mood of rumination I drank the coffee and took the address book from my bag. Nobody knew what I was looking at. It could be my own address book and I could be consulting the street map spread on the table in front of me to find the house of an old relative or to discover the location of some public building or office. Nobody was going to be in the least curious and this somehow generated excitement in me. My heart beat just a trifle quicker as I flipped over the pages to ‘C’. There were two addresses there for Carlisle and one for Calais. The Crown & Mitre was easy enough – I’d walked past it only minutes ago, the large hotel looking out on to the Town Hall. The other said Glebe House, Ashburner Close. I found Ashburner Close on the map at once, listed above Ashley Street and Ashness Drive. It didn’t look too far away. I decided to walk there. The route was simple enough and it would do me good, give me some welcome exercise before the five-hour drag back to London. It was only just after nine in the morning still; I had plenty of time.

  I strode down Scotch Street, which took me to a bridge crossing the River Eden, and then up a steep hill, past the College of Art, where my father had done a foundation course before deciding he really would rather be an architect, and so going on to Edinburgh. The river, I saw as I crossed the bridge, was almost at the point of overflowing its banks and ran swiftly, in a series of loops, carrying broken branches on its surface. There was a park on the north side of it and the road I walked along at the top of the hill was shaded with trees, so that although I was still within the city it felt like the country, it was so pleasantly rural. My father, I thought, could easily have settled here instead of Oxford and I wondered if he had ever considered it. Ashburner Close was off Tarraby Lane, which I came to after a mile or so. It surprised me by being an untarmacked road, indeed more of a lane, with grass growing down the middle of two ruts which were bedded with gravel. There was only one house in this close and that was Glebe House, the name painted on a white Victorian gate.

  It had begun to rain soon after I’d crossed the river and since I had neither umbrella nor raincoat with me I was quite wet by the time I found the house. The rain fell so softly (it was what Charlotte used to call ‘good-for-the-complexion rain’) and was so light that I hadn’t realised the damage it was doing to my appearance until I hesitated at the gate. Glebe House was a very respectable house, one where the inhabitants would, I was sure, be suspicious of strange callers looking like drowned rats. It was not a large mansion, but in its own way imposing, a Jane Austen sort of house, two storeys, double-fronted and painted white, with a pretty porch at the front door. I could see pots of hyacinths, blue and white, standing on the shelves either side of it. The gate was set in a thick hedge of holly, which appeared to go right round the garden of the house and was high enough to obscure most of it, unless one was looking, as I was looking, through the gap where the gate was. I felt hesitant about opening the gate and going up to the porch. My hair was plastered to my head, my shoes squelched, and my sweater was wet enough to be clinging to me. I looked a sight, I knew, and it would not help anyone believe the preposterous tale I had to tell about a dead mother and an old address book.

  But as I stood there, trying to force myself through the gate (because I am not a door-stepping person like Rory; I don’t have the nerve for it), the front door of the house, which I could just see through the glass door of the porch, opened. A man came out and stood for a moment putting something on his feet and then stepped out into the rain before putting up an umbrella, a large, blue golf-type umbrella which then obscured his face as he came down the path. He was tall, as tall as my father had been, and I had had time to see, before the umbrella went over his white hair, he was fairly elderly. For some reason, I’d been convinced a woman lived alone in this house and I was surprised enough still to be standing quite still as this man advanced towards me. I knew he hadn’t seen me and would be startled, so I coughed to give him warning, an absurd little bark of a cough, but he heard it and stopped and peered out from under his enormous, unwieldy umbrella. He wasn’t, in fact, at all alarmed. He smiled at me quite cheerfully and nodded, and I returned the smile and nod, and he gestured to show he’d like me to open the gate for him, which I did.

  I hadn’t spoken but he didn’t seem to expect me to and went off walking down the lane with a half-wave of thanks. It struck me that he might have a wife in the house and that he’d imagined I was calling on her and he didn’t need to ask who I was, or what I wanted. But a similar thought must have struck him, and caused him some hesitation or concern, because he turned and walked back to me. ‘Have you come to see Mary?’ he asked. ‘Does she expect you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m a stranger. I don’t know her, or you, of course. It’s the house I’m interested in.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not for sale, my dear, goodness me, no.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking that,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I think my mother once stayed here and I wanted to see it. Have you lived here long?’

  ‘All my life,’ he said, smiling. ‘I was born here, and so were my brothers, and Mary.’ Then he peered at me and said, ‘But you’re wet, soaked, and no coat or umbrella,’ and he extended the shelter of his own umbrella to me. We stood there, quite close together, and I was aware of being scrutinised. I met his eyes steadily and we stared at each other. He had dark brown eyes, like my father, so dark the pupils hardly stood out. ‘You said?’ he murmured encouragingly.

  ‘My mother,’ I said, ‘I think she stayed here once, a long time ago. You may have known her. It’s complicated …’

  ‘I’ve known a lot of people,’ he said. ‘Good gracious me, yes, I’ve known a lot of people in my life. You mustn’t be surprised if I don’t remember your mother’s name. What was it?’

  Two minutes later we were in Glebe House. I’ve heard so often of people turning pale with shock, looking stunned, seeming struck dumb, but I’ve never heard of anyone doing the opposite, becoming animated and laughing. This man laughed when I told him Susannah’s name. He closed his eyes and laughed and said, of course, he remembered her and that I must come at once and meet Mary. I protested that he had been going out and that I didn’t want to delay him, but he said he was only going to post a letter and it could wait. Then he led the way back down the garden path to the porch. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about being wet – we have a dog and she makes far more mess than you could.’ And as soon as he opened the front door I could hear a dog barking and a woman’s voice telling it to stop. ‘It’s all right, Mary,’ the man shouted. ‘It’s me. I’ve got a young visitor with me.’ He walked ahead of me down a narrow passage with a stone-flagged floor and into a kitchen, where a woman of about his own age, I thought, was sitting at the table peeling potatoes, and a springer spaniel was racing round and round excitedly.

  The woman, Mary, didn’t seem too pleased to see me, though she was polite enough and immediately offered me some tea. The man urged me to sit down, pointing out the chairs were plain wood and couldn’t be damaged by my wet clothes. It was he who put the kettle on and made the tea, Mary watching him all the time as thoug
h she didn’t trust him and saying, ‘The red mug, John,’ and, ‘Milk in the door of the fridge, John,’ as if directing someone quite unfamiliar with his surroundings. The tea made and in front of me, the man, whose name I’d now learned was John, settled himself opposite me and said, ‘You’ll never guess who this is, Mary.’

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ she snapped, ‘so you’d better stop playing games and tell me.’

  ‘It’s Susannah Cameron’s daughter!’ he said, laughing again, and spreading his arms wide as though he’d just won a prize. ‘Imagine! After all these years!’

  I noted Mary’s hands stopped peeling the potatoes for a moment, and that her eyebrows went up, but there was no incomprehensible laughter from her, and she said nothing at all. I felt it was time to offer the explanation John hadn’t asked for, or shown any sign of wanting, and began to explain myself, reducing the story to as few words as possible, but obliged to mention how I’d come by the address book. I produced it when I got to this point and said, ‘On the “C” page it has your address, but no name. I couldn’t resist coming here, on the off chance.’