‘Now isn’t that extraordinary?’ John said. ‘Our address and no name. I wonder why.’
‘You wonder too much,’ Mary said, grim-faced. ‘That’s always been your trouble.’
John ignored her and turned to me. ‘You’re not a bit like her,’ he said. ‘She was blonde, you know – lovely long blonde hair and blue, blue eyes, heavenly eyes –’
Mary made a dismissive sound, which she covered up with splashing a peeled potato into a pan of water beside her.
‘– heavenly, lovely girl, slight, not very tall. I’d never have guessed you were her daughter.’
‘Tactless!’ said Mary.
‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’m used to it. It’s always been commented on, ever since I was a child, how unlike my mother I look. I’m like my father, like his side of the family, all tall and dark-haired and brown-eyed. But I am Susannah’s daughter all the same.’
‘But you never knew her,’ John said. ‘Very sad, very sad.’
‘Don’t be sentimental, John,’ Mary said, ‘the girl was only a baby. It wasn’t sad at all for her.’
‘Oh, I’m sure it was,’ John protested. ‘Losing a mother is always desperately sad. Look how sad we were when we lost Mother –’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ Mary said, clearly exasperated, ‘our mother was eighty-two when she died. It isn’t the same at all, you fool.’
‘Anyway,’ I said hurriedly, seeing this degenerate into a squabble between brother and sister when I had so much I wanted to find out, ‘this address is in the book, with no name. None of the addresses in it have names and most, but not all, are hotels or similar.’
‘How curious,’ John said. ‘Well, my name is very boring, it’s John Graham – ’
‘John Charles Henry Graham,’ said Mary.
‘– and there are scores round here called that, couldn’t be more ordinary or commonplace. And Mary’s name is just as common, Mary Graham, hundreds of them.’ I waited for Mary to contest this and reveal the middle names I was sure she must have, but she visibly tightened her lips and kept quiet. ‘Our parents were John and Mary too, and our branch of the Graham clan have been here for centuries. Our great-great-great grandfather – ’
‘Really, John,’ said Mary, slicing a potato in half viciously, ‘she doesn’t want to hear all this.’
‘I think it’s jolly interesting,’ he said, ‘families and their houses, and us being born in here. I like to tell people about it.’
‘You like to tell people far too much,’ Mary said, ‘and half the time they don’t like to tell you you’re a bore.’
‘I’m not bored,’ I said. ‘I love houses and their histories. I like to hear who’s lived in them. I always liked knowing about our house in Oxford, though it wasn’t old like this one and hadn’t always belonged to one family.’
‘Were you born there?’ John asked.
‘No. I was born in Edinburgh. Then after my mother died my father married again and we moved to Oxford when I was about eighteen months.’
‘Poor Susannah,’ John said, ‘she was lovely –’
‘He was in love with her,’ Mary said, and another potato was tossed noisily into the pan.
‘Yes, I was, oh dear me yes, I was,’ said John, smiling even more broadly, without a trace of embarrassment. His love for my mother had certainly not left any lingering residue of bitterness. He seemed perfectly happy, even proud, to recall his passion.
‘What happened?’ I asked, made bold by his cheerfulness and the absence of any sign that he had suffered.
‘Your father happened,’ he said. ‘We were all very young, you know, things changed, relationships, as they do.’
‘So it was just an affair?’ I pressed.
Mary tutted and was about to say something, but her brother got in first.
‘An affair?’ He was incredulous. ‘My dear girl! No, not an affair, if you mean what I take it you mean, what it means today, the full thing. It was the Fifties, we wouldn’t have dared, not in our part of the world. But we were in love, it didn’t mean we weren’t.’
‘You were,’ Mary said, ‘she wasn’t.’
John stopped laughing and looked hurt for the first time. ‘Oh, I think she was. I think Susannah was in love with me too, Mary. I certainly believed she was.’
‘You believed anything,’ Mary said. ‘You still do.’ She’d finished peeling the potatoes at last and got up from the table to take the pan to the sink, where she began emptying it and filling it with fresh water. I saw that she’d walked the few necessary paces with difficulty and must suffer from arthritis or some such complaint. Maybe her brusqueness could be explained by this, if she was in pain all the time. She had her back to me, but I badly wanted to ask her about Susannah, feeling her memory was sharper and less clouded by emotion, as John’s was bound to be if he had been so in love.
‘Did you know my mother too, Miss Graham?’ I asked, careful to address her respectfully and sure that no rings on her left hand would mean she had never married.
‘I met her,’ Mary said, without turning round, ‘but I wouldn’t say I knew her. She stayed here. She came home from some sailing holiday with John and we all met her, naturally. All the men were mad about her, even Father, a bit. George doted on her, and Frank too, though he was only fourteen. The whole lot of them eating out of her hand. It was ridiculous.’
‘You didn’t like her?’ I suggested, but Mary was immediately indignant, turning at last to stare at me.
‘Didn’t like her? I didn’t say that. You’re twisting my words. I wasn’t in love with her like my brothers, how could I be? But it doesn’t mean I disliked the girl. She seemed nice enough but a bit wild. She didn’t ignore me, like some of John’s other flames used to, but she wasn’t going to waste much time on me. I didn’t expect her to, why should she? I knew she wouldn’t last, and she didn’t.’
‘How did you know?’ I said, watching Mary carefully. Whatever she said, I deduced she had not liked Susannah and I wanted to know why.
‘Oh, I can’t remember, I just knew. She was clever, ambitious, I felt. John wasn’t her sort.’
‘I was clever,’ John objected.
‘But you weren’t ambitious, that’s the point,’ Mary said, returning to sit at the table, but seeming lost without the potatoes to fiddle with.
‘I jolly well was.’
‘No, you weren’t. You wouldn’t still be here if you’d been ambitious. It’s proof enough.’
‘I like it here.’
‘Quite.’
Once again, they were side-tracking me, enjoying their own bickering, and it was wasting time. ‘Did your mother like her?’ I asked Mary, to get her back on the subject of Susannah.
‘Yes, she did. She thought she was interesting, not empty-headed like most of John’s girls. She made her welcome.’
‘How did she come to stay, anyway?’
‘I invited her, of course,’ John said.
‘But where did you meet her? Did you study architecture too? Were you on the same course?’
‘Heavens, no. I was older. I read law at Durham, a few years before. No, I met her on a boat, up beyond Ullapool. Do you know it, north-west coast of Scotland? A friend’s boat, twelve of us invited. I knew him from school, he was at St Bees too, and Susannah met him through another friend. It was a class II ocean yacht, the boat –’
I tried to interrupt, ‘Which friend – ?’ but he was off for the next five minutes describing every detail of the boat his friend had had. There was no stopping him, and I had to wait as patiently as I could, longing now for his sister to shut him up, but she seemed to enjoy all the irrelevant (to me) detail. I thought how very relaxed he looked, sitting as my father used to like to sit, sideways on to the table, his right leg crossed over his left and his hands clasped behind his head. He was wearing beautifully polished brown brogue shoes and a tweed jacket and fawn-coloured cords – every inch the small-town solicitor I’d by now deduced he’d been. It was somehow disc
oncerting to see him so very undisturbed by my surely fairly dramatic visit – he was almost too benign, too untroubled. I wasn’t, after all, uncovering the tale of smouldering passion I half wanted, but something more banal, and he was part of the banality.
‘There were eight of us men and four girls and your mother was one of them. I’d been at school with George Senhouse and so had two of the others, but the rest were all students he’d met at Edinburgh. His father owned the boat … now what was her name –’
‘John, the name doesn’t matter,’ snapped Mary; ‘she doesn’t care about it.’
‘ – Carita! Yes, she was called Carita. Lovely old boat. A bit heavy, but dependable. We sailed her right round the Scottish islands and up to the top of the mainland coast. And afterwards I asked Susannah if she’d like to come and stay and she accepted. I was jolly flattered, I can tell you.’
‘I can’t think why,’ Mary muttered. ‘Nothing to be flattered about.’
‘I don’t think her family knew,’ I said. ‘Her sister, my Aunt Isabella, says she didn’t know about a trip –’
‘Oh, her mother knew,’ Mary said. ‘It was all very proper. Mother wrote to her mother and had a nice note back. People had manners in those days, believe me.’
‘How long did you say she stayed?’
‘A week,’ John said at the same time as Mary said, ‘Ten days. Came on the Friday, left a week on the Monday.’
‘What did you do together?’ I asked John, wanting Mary to stop interrupting now, but he turned to her and said, ‘What did we do, Mary?’
‘Played tennis a lot,’ said Mary. ‘We had a grass court in those days. But she got tired easily, it was odd.’
‘We went for walks,’ John said, ‘in the park, along the river. And I borrowed Father’s car and took her out to Wetheral, and that sort of thing.’
‘I think she was bored,’ Mary said. ‘I used to think she looked bored when she came in.’
‘She was not bored in the least,’ John said, indignant, his perpetual smile fading for once. ‘We got on so well, we never stopped talking – we had lots in common. I missed her like anything when she left.’
‘You moped,’ Mary said.
‘I wrote to her and she wrote back, sweet letters. She said staying here was the nicest holiday she’d ever had.’
‘Nicest!’ said Mary.
‘Yes, nicest. I wonder if I kept those letters …’
‘If you did, you’ll have lost them. You lose everything.’
‘I invited her to come again, in the next long vac, but the next thing I knew I had a postcard from somewhere abroad, I forget where. She’d gone off with young Senhouse again, in another party. I wasn’t asked to join it, I’m afraid.’
I wanted to pick up on this Senhouse character, but now Mary was in full spate. And perhaps he meant nothing.
‘He was jealous.’ Mary said, ‘George Senhouse was always jealous of you, right through school.’
‘I never heard from her after that.’
‘Yes, you did,’ Mary said. ‘You got a Christmas card and you were so upset you tore it up.’
‘Did I?’ said John, and I wasn’t sure whether or not he was pretending he couldn’t remember. If he was, he was quickly reminded, because his sharp sister could remember every detail.
‘You flung the torn card down and stamped out of the room in a paddy, and Mother and I put it together, so we would know what had upset you so much, and it said she wished you a happy Christmas and that she was going to have a very happy Christmas herself, because she had just got engaged to be married to a man who was from your part of the world, from Whitehaven, an architect like her, or hoping to qualify as one, and they’d marry when they had both finished their degrees. And she said she hoped to see you again one day. Mother and I reckoned that was what had made you specially furious. Well, you got over it. Silly boy, getting so upset.’
Mary said ‘silly boy’ not at all contemptuously, which was how she seemed to say most things to her brother, but affectionately. It was obvious that she cared deeply for him and probably hadn’t disliked Susannah at all, but only what her defection had done to John.
‘My heart was broken,’ John said.
‘Rubbish. You hardly knew the girl. Three weeks on a boat, ten days here, a couple of letters and a postcard – how could your heart be broken? You don’t know how silly you sound.’
‘I know what I felt,’ John said. ‘You can’t know how I felt.’
‘Maybe. But I know you got over it and had another crush soon after – that red-haired girl, Beatrice –’
‘Oh, Beatrice. That was nothing. She –’
‘So “nothing” you got engaged to her. Correct me if I’m wrong, do.’
I couldn’t hold back any longer. When John looked as if he would indeed correct her I blurted out, ‘George Senhouse, was he Susannah’s boyfriend too?’
‘He was a friend,’ John said. ‘Must have been, to ask her to sail with him, don’t you think?’
‘But was he …?’ and I suddenly stopped, feeling awkward in front of this pair, too embarrassed to ask if a man I’d never heard of until now was my dead mother’s lover. ‘Was he more than that?’ I said, lamely.
‘Haven’t the foggiest,’ said John, rather stiffly.
That was it. I could see I wasn’t going to get anything more about Susannah or Senhouse out of either of them. This would be one of the addresses Susannah would have thought I would never arrive at. I’d been there nearly forty-five minutes and there was no point in lingering, but when I thanked them for talking to me, and for the tea, and got up to leave, John said he’d walk to the road with me and post that letter. I thought how strange it was that neither he nor Mary had asked me about myself – they were obviously of the same breed as Isabella, believing the asking of direct questions to be impertinent – but as I walked along with John I couldn’t resist asking some myself. I wanted to know if he had ever been married – no, never. And neither had Mary. The other two brothers had married and had families, but they had stayed together in their family home and been ‘quite happy’. I couldn’t help speculating in my head as to what ‘quite happy’ meant. Happy, but missing something? Happy, and not feeling the lack of anything? John wasn’t the man to discuss such things with. He must have bored Susannah to death: Mary had been right.
The rain had stopped and a weak, watery sun was struggling to force its way through the greyness as we strolled slowly down Ashburner Grove to the road. John said he was turning left, to the postbox, and I was turning right, to go back into town. We stood for a minute on the corner. John shook my hand and said it had been interesting meeting me and I thanked him again for listening to me. Still he stood there, clearly wanting to say something but apparently unable to find the words he wanted. ‘She went back to Edinburgh by train,’ he said, at last. ‘We walked the way you’re going to walk. She didn’t want me to call for a taxi and Father was out in the car.’ I nodded, saying nothing, though badly wanting to say ‘So?’ His smile had gone and he was frowning hard and suddenly looked much older than he had done before. ‘She died giving birth to you, you said?’
‘No,’ I corrected him, ‘she died when I was six months old, of heart disease. She’d had something wrong with her for a long time.’
‘That’s sad’, he said, ‘for you never to have known your mother, very, very sad.’ I almost wished Mary was there to tell him again not to be so silly. But he still hadn’t finished. At last, a small hint of curiosity was betrayed. ‘Your father,’ he said, ‘did she meet him on that long trip abroad, the one she went on with Senhouse? Was he one of the party then?’
‘No, I don’t think so. She didn’t meet him until afterwards. My father said they met in a lecture. They’d been going to the same lectures all year but he’d never seen her before. That was his story, anyway.’
‘Ah.’ He coughed, and fidgeted a bit. ‘I think Senhouse was smitten with her, I think he had designs on her. He might have been her
– er – boyfriend. There’s no knowing now, is there? He was always boasting about that trip, you know. Every time I met him afterwards he’d go on about it. It took them three months. Sailed off somewhere right across the Atlantic, then sold the boat and flew back. I wish I had that postcard, I wish I could remember where they went.’
‘What was Senhouse like?’
‘Oh, sporty. He wasn’t clever. He was rich, though, very. Good-looking, I suppose.’
I kept my voice casual: ‘Do you know where he lives?’
‘Good heavens, no. Lost touch centuries ago …’
Eventually, he shook hands with me yet again and we parted. I walked away, thinking of this George Senhouse character, rich and sporty, good-looking, smitten with Susannah, enticing her away on an exciting trip to the other side of the world, and then losing her all the same to my father. But why hadn’t she told her mother and sister about this thrilling voyage? How could she have just vanished for three whole months? Some kind of deception must have gone on to account for her absence, but why deceive her mother, to whom she was devoted? I decided, as I walked on, that the answer to that was that she wanted to shield her mother from worrying. As I’d shielded Charlotte from knowing about my abortion, she’d shielded her mother from worrying not just about the dangers of the sailing but about her fragile health. And maybe she did have a fling with George Senhouse. She’d have wanted to shield my morally rigid grandmother from that.
I was halfway along Tarraby Lane when I realised I’d left behind my car keys. I remembered that I’d taken them out of the pocket of my trousers when I sat down at the Grahams’ kitchen table – they were tight-fitting trousers and the keys made an uncomfortable bump. Stupidly, I’d put them not on the table in front of me but on top of my camera case on the floor and they must have slipped off, or the dog knocked them off. It was embarrassing to have to go back, but obviously I did have to. I ran. I wanted to collect the keys before John got back from posting his letter. I was panting as I turned in at the gate of Glebe House, hoping Mary herself hadn’t gone out, but as I ran up the path she was standing at the front door, dangling the keys. ‘Silly girl,’ she said. I gasped my thanks and reached for the keys, but she held on to them. I thought maybe I hadn’t apologised enough and began to say sorry for disturbing her again, but she stared at me and said, ‘George Senhouse?’
The Memory Box Page 22