The Memory Box Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Forster

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A dying woman leaves a sealed box for her baby daughter. Years later, as a young woman, the daughter Catherine finds the mysterious box, addressed to her, full of unexplained objects – three feathers, an exotic seashell, a painting, a mirror, two prints, an address book, a map, a hat, a rucksack, and a necklace – and she finally starts to unpack, literally and metaphorically, the story of a woman whom she never knew but who has cast a long shadow over her life. Having a ‘perfect’, beautiful, dead mother has been a heavy burden to carry, and one she has tended to resent. But now she sets off on the trail of her ‘perfect’ mother, trying to unravel the truth about a woman who turns out to be more complex, reckless and surprising than her family have painted her. And Catherine has to face up to the truths about herself and the damage that guilt and silence have done to her own relationships. Only when she has come to terms with her dead mother, can she move on, to take up the challenges of her own young life.

  About the Author

  Born in Carlisle, Margaret Forster is the author of many successful and acclaimed novels, including Have the Men Had Enough?, Lady’s Maid, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Is There Anything You Want? and most recently Isa & May, as well as bestselling memoirs (Hidden Lives and Precious Lives) and biographies. She is married to the writer and journalist Hunter Davies, and lives in London and the Lake District.

  ALSO BY MARGARET FORSTER

  Dame’s Delight

  Georgy Girl

  The Bogeyman

  The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff

  The Park

  Miss Owen-Owen is At Home

  Fenella Phizackerley

  Mr Bone’s Retreat

  The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury

  Mother Can You Hear Me?

  The Bride of Lowther Fell

  Marital Rites

  Private Papers

  Have the Men Had Enough?

  Lady’s Maid

  The Battle for Christabel

  Mothers’ Boys

  Shadow Baby

  Diary of an Ordinary Woman

  Is There Anything You Want?

  Keeping the World Away Over

  Isa & May

  Non-Fiction

  The Rash Adventurer

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Significant Sisters

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Daphne du Maurier

  Hidden Lives

  Rich Desserts & Captain’s Thin

  Precious Lives

  Good Wives?

  Poetry

  Selected Poems of Elizabeth

  Barrett Browning (Editor)

  For Joan White, of Loweswater

  MARGARET FORSTER

  The Memory Box

  I

  SUSANNAH WAS APPARENTLY perfect, as the dead so often become. She was, it seemed, perfectly beautiful, perfectly good, and perfectly happy during her comparatively short life. It was that last bit which made me determined not to have anything to do with her. The idea of anyone being ‘perfectly happy’ struck me, even as a child, as absurd. How could anyone but a moron be perfectly happy? It made me picture her as someone with a fat smile on her smug face all the time. It made me squirm to imagine this happy-clappy woman, and I did not want to acknowledge her. She wouldn’t have liked me. No one was ever going to describe me as a perfect anything (except maybe a perfect nuisance) and certainly not as being perfectly happy. My face more often has a frown on it than a smile – ‘So serious,’ people say of me, as if being serious is a crime. And my nature, far from being sunny, is woefully cynical – ‘How suspicious you are,’ everyone tells me. True. I am suspicious, and lack spontaneity.

  Not Susannah. She was apparently a wonderfully spontaneous person. She was said to meet life with open arms, ever buoyant and optimistic. They told me she was happy right up to her death, that everyone marvelled at her serenity. I do not believe a word of this. I think it was an image made up in a misguided attempt to comfort me. How, after all, could she be happy, knowing she was likely to die soon, when she was a mere thirty-one years old and I, her baby, her only and much-longed-for child, barely six months old? Prove to me such a woman was happy then, and I will prove to you she was insane. But nobody has ever spoken to me properly of the circumstances of this distinctly unhappy death. These seem forgotten in the general overview of her life, which I suppose is some kind of tribute to her. Perhaps her death was too tragic for those who loved her to dwell on. It was not, as it turned out, all that tragic for me. I had only just over a year without a mother, and even then I had a grandmother and was not without mothering. I nearly always had a woman’s loving arms around me; I was kissed and cuddled and sung to by a comforting mother figure. I was never in the least deprived of maternal love.

  My father was lucky. He undoubtedly grieved for his young, happy wife, but he was young himself, and attractive and kind, and he very quickly fell in love again and married. I am sure that in terms of months and weeks and days and hours he suffered dreadfully, but he did not sink into absolute despair. Susannah’s mother, my devoted Scottish grandmother, looked after me, helped by her other daughter, my Aunt Isabella, and he managed to go on working and have some semblance of private life. He sold the house he and Susannah had lived in and rented a small flat in Edinburgh’s New Town. Weekdays he stayed there, weekends he came to be with me at my grandmother’s house. This system worked well, to everyone’s satisfaction, I gather, but in any case it was short-lived. He married Charlotte shortly after the first anniversary of Susannah’s death had passed and I was given another mother who adored me and whom I quickly adored. He was happy ever after and so far as anyone could tell, and I include myself, never yearned for his dead first wife.

  I have a feeling that the existence of the memory box may have troubled him from the beginning. He didn’t give it to me until my twenty-first birthday even though it had been in our house all that time, waiting for me to open it. Charlotte knew about it, of course, but neither she nor my father could bring themselves to mention it. I think they thought it would be morbid to do so, and they were afraid of its significance. Neither of them knew exactly what was in the box and though Susannah was so famous for being happy, and therefore could reasonably be counted upon not to have put anything in it which would be distressing, they could not be sure of how I would react to the legacy. I was a highly imaginative child, and they simply didn’t know how to introduce this memory box into my life. It was too big a thing to make light of, and yet if they didn’t make light of it, its importance might terrify me. Susannah had left no instructions as to when it should be given to me, at what age I should receive it. They thought it best to wait until I was grown up and give it to me on my eighteenth birthday. But I was not at home then, and so they put the presentation off.

  Their apprehension strikes me now as curious. What exactly were they afraid of? Did they think I might be shocked, and if so why? It suggests to me an unexpected lack of trust on the part of my father. Charlotte never knew Susannah, so she cannot be blamed for his hesitation. The box, or rather the contents of the
box, had, it seemed, been a secret. Susannah had kept them to herself, and maybe this had hurt and somehow alarmed him. She had apparently become obsessed with what she might put in it, almost feverish with a kind of awful excitement, or so my father told Charlotte, who later told me. She had pointed out that the box would have represented to Susannah the future of which she was being robbed and that therefore it was natural she should guard it fiercely, keep it entirely to herself. (Charlotte was good in that way, always trying to put herself into other people’s minds.) At any rate, both of them were visibly uneasy, almost guilty, when eventually on the morning of my twenty-first birthday they told me about it. It was clear they were relieved when I showed little interest in it. I said I didn’t want to open it, or even see it.

  This was a lie, and yet not a lie. I always sensed what would please my parents and whereas, when I was younger, I had often deliberately used my knowledge to torment them, by then I was more anxious to please and make amends for a tempestuous adolescence. I especially wanted to please my mother. I watched her face as I said I felt spooked by the idea of receiving a present from beyond the grave. I saw the tension in her eyes fade and felt I’d passed some kind of test. I was Charlotte’s and always had been and would not acknowledge Susannah’s claims. Even my father seemed relieved, though afterwards it struck me as just a little feeble that he did not attempt to persuade me – after all, he alone knew what the wretched box had meant to Susannah. But he was clearly glad to have the subject over with, and perhaps he thought he had been wise to wait until I was an adult before mentioning it at all. But if that’s the case, I am not sure he was right – not in the long term. The box did in fact arouse my curiosity even if I found I wanted to suppress the instinct. Aged ten, say, I don’t think I would have been able to. I’m sure I would have been too excited at the thought that it might contain all sorts of treasures; and then around fifteen I’d have found it irresistibly romantic and would have been ready to weep on discovering dried roses, or some such, pressed between the pages of meaningful poems. But at twenty-one I was very self-centred; my curiosity was only slight and I could more easily deny it. I did feel a kind of nausea, in fact, at the notion of a dying woman selecting what to put in a box for me. And besides there was something sentimental about the whole idea of the box that I found repugnant.

  But there was no doubt that it forced me to think of Susannah. Growing up, I could hardly have thought of her less, wanting Charlotte to be my only mother, and believing her to be so, against all the evidence. I was always furious if anyone referred to her as my stepmother, though Charlotte herself would try to calm me by pointing out that whether I liked it or not that was what she was. Luckily, this didn’t happen often because hardly anyone knew Charlotte was not my biological mother. When my father married her, he had also moved from Edinburgh to Oxford, and all those who came to know him there assumed Charlotte was indeed what I called her – my mother. It rarely came out that she was not, though no deliberate evasion of the truth was practised. If anyone had cared to look, they would have seen photographs of Susannah holding me, a few weeks old, in our house. If asked, my parents wouldn’t have hesitated to reply that this was Susannah, my father’s first wife, who had died tragically when I was a baby. I was the one who sometimes lied. ‘It’s some relation,’ I would say, and feel only vaguely ashamed.

  I never liked the constant reminders of Susannah which I was given, especially by my grandmother, when I was young. It irritated me to be told stories about her, or hear comparisons – ‘You’re just like Susannah, she used to laugh just like that.’ I would stop laughing immediately and consciously try to alter my laugh afterwards for as long as I remembered. The words ‘It’s odd, you’re nothing like Susannah’ were what I wanted to hear, or even better, ‘It’s odd, you’re so like Charlotte.’ What was truly odd was that for a while, when I was rather a plump child, before I grew tall and thin, there was an actual physical resemblance between Charlotte and me and none at all with Susannah. She was blonde, fair-skinned, blue-eyed and quite petite; I was dark, brown-eyed, and rather olive-skinned – just like Charlotte (though also, which I discounted, like my paternal grandmother and my father). I was quite triumphant when, shortly before she died, my grandmother was moved to say, rather sadly, ‘There’s nothing of Susannah in you, you’re all your father’s side.’ I was glad. I didn’t want to be like a dead woman. If I had to be ‘like’ someone in our family, I wanted it to be someone living.

  My father and Charlotte had no children. They had wanted them, in Charlotte’s case passionately, but they had none. They were sad about this, and so was I. Naturally (at least, I think it is natural) I wanted brothers and sisters, but I’d smirk with pleasure and feel proud whenever Charlotte said how lucky she was to have me. Looking back, as I am doing now, I see how brave and sensible she was about her own infertility. She didn’t make an issue of it. It was hard for her, when she had so wanted a large family, such as she herself belonged to, not to have even one child. But she had me from eighteen months and I believe that I was young enough for her to come to feel, as I felt, that she really was my mother. If I had rejected her, or if she had not been able to love me, it would have been different, but we bonded, as they say, perfectly. Even her own family seemed to forget I was not actually hers. She had two sisters and two brothers who between them had eleven children and I was absorbed effortlessly into this band of cousins. They all came to stay regularly. I think my father found these visits, some of them lengthy (one of the brothers was in the RAF and we had his children to stay for long holidays when he was stationed far away), a bit of a strain, but my mother loved the house to be full of children, and not just because it gave me companionship.

  It was a large house with plenty of room for everyone. My father had converted it himself, thinking of all kinds of ingenious ways to modernise it without destroying the more attractive features of its Edwardian character. From the outside, it was impossible to tell, unless you were an architect (as he was), how the dark rooms had been made light. I loved that house. Everyone else’s seemed dull or cramped by comparison, claustrophobic and fussy, whereas ours was all pale wood floors, and glass skylights and doors, and white paint. It was spacious and sparsely furnished, and full of greenery. Converted in the early Seventies, it was ahead of its time, or ahead of what became the fashion, in being Scandinavian in taste. My Scottish grandmother thought it was comfortless, cold and austere, but the cousins admired it. The top floor was turned into a kind of permanent dormitory for them, complete with bathroom and kitchen, and they could hardly bear to leave at the end of the holidays. I slept up there with them, excited at first to be part of a huge gang.

  I don’t know what happened to that feeling. I don’t even know what happened to most of those cousins. The closeness, I now realise, was all Charlotte’s doing – she created the atmosphere in which those relationships flourished. Left to myself, I have not bothered to keep in touch with any of my cousins except Rory, and he was never part of that gang. Rory came to stay on his own or with his mother and had nothing to do with Charlotte’s side of the family. He was my sole cousin on Susannah’s side, the son of her sister, my Aunt Isabella. It was Rory who looked like Susannah, a fact our grandmother constantly remarked upon – ‘Sideways genes,’ she said, not that I knew what she meant. All I knew was that unlike my other cousins he didn’t go in for sport and noisy games, and I wasn’t in awe of him as I was of them. But it took a long time for me to feel more drawn to him than to them. By the time I was seven or eight years old, however, Rory’s so-called wickedness was already becoming deeply attractive and I was fascinated by him.

  It was Rory who found a way into the attics. I had never been in the least curious about what lay under the roof of our house, though I knew well enough there was something above the top floor. From time to time bits of old furniture would arrive – things left in wills to one or other of my parents – and they would groan and look at each other and ask whether they should
sell whatever it was, or put it in the attics. Usually they decided to wait a decent interval before getting rid of the item, and someone would come to help my father cart it up the stairs. Rory was intrigued by what was stored up there. He thought there might be hidden treasure we could discover. I jeered at him for getting silly ideas from reading ‘kids’ books (whereas I was very proud of reading practical how-to-do-this-and-that books). But he persisted in imagining what lay above our heads, and so persuasive was he that against all my strong common sense I almost came to believe there might indeed be wonderful things, long since forgotten and waiting to be discovered. Eventually I agreed it was worth looking and said I’d ask my father. But that was the last thing Rory wanted – he was all for secrecy and making an adventure of it and somehow he drew me into his plan.

  He insisted we should go exploring at night. We were sleeping on the top floor. With just the two of us there it seemed quite echoey, we seemed lost among all the beds. But Rory liked that, he liked things to be a bit creepy. We slept next to each other and he said he’d wake me when it was time. But he didn’t need to; I didn’t sleep and longed for him to nudge me and say we should go. When eventually he did – he’d been waiting for the noises below that would indicate that my parents had gone to bed – I bounded up, excited in spite of myself. Rory exaggerated every movement, pausing dramatically to listen every few steps, and I remember I found my heart thudding ridiculously. He led the way to the end of the huge room and to the top of the stairs and then pointed upwards. There was a handle, painted white and quite distinct, in the middle of the wooden ceiling. He had earlier fetched a tall stool, and now I held it while he clambered up and pulled the handle. Smoothly, silently, a metal ladder unfolded.

  We went up into two attics separated by a thin wall with a small door in it. I think this plywood wall corresponded with a valley in the roof. The wall itself was only about five feet high, and the door was tiny, so that we felt like Alice in Wonderland as we crawled through (I couldn’t imagine how an adult could have managed it, but maybe they didn’t; maybe the attics were always approached separately from different ends). Rory had a torch and shone it round each attic in turn. They were full of the old bits of furniture, mostly chairs, dark wooden things with velvet padded seats, and small tables with spindly legs. But there were chests and boxes too and we peered inside some of them, only to find they were packed with brocade curtains and musty old clothes. It was very disappointing and not even Rory could sustain my interest. I went back down the ladder on my own, to his annoyance, and left him to close the trapdoor, which he managed only after a great struggle.