The Memory Box Read online

  The best thing about Rory is that I don’t have to be careful, I don’t have to try in any kind of way. He’s known me all my life and I feel more comfortable with him than I ever have with any lover, which says something (though I don’t quite like to wonder what exactly). Familiarity in his case hasn’t bred contempt, but instead security. He knows me through and through, maybe the way a brother would have done if I’d had one. I can be rude and bad-tempered and offhand, and he isn’t offended. He lets me try to reform him in all kinds of ways and doesn’t hold my attempts against me, except to warn me not to try to be his mother when I push him too far. As if. My feelings about his mother, about his father too, are pretty much in agreement with his own. Hector is overbearing, humourless and disgustingly racist and homophobic; Isabella is prudish, cold and utterly self-centred. I would never try to be either of them. I don’t know how such people could have produced Rory (and frankly neither do they). There is no trace of either of them in their son. Our grandmother always swore there had been a mix-up somewhere and really he was Susannah’s – Isabella did not seem to find this offensive. She was always plaintively wondering aloud where Rory had come from (and in time she got some pretty crude answers from him).

  ‘So how’s Tony?’ Rory asked, once we were settled in the restaurant.

  ‘You know perfectly well I don’t hear from him, so shut up.’

  ‘Poor Anthony.’

  ‘Oh yes? I can’t think why he’s thought of as “poor”.’

  ‘You were horrible to him and he loved you so.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘You were. Vicious and nasty.’ He was laughing and making faces between mouthfuls of bread, but I knew he meant it. ‘The dear man adored you and you led him on and then you dumped him. Poor Tony.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. We were just wrong for each other in the end, that’s all, and I had to say so.’

  ‘In the beginning, more like, that’s what I’d say.’

  ‘Then you’d say wrong, Mr Smart-arse. Don’t be so stupid. Why would I have had him to live with me if I couldn’t stand him in the first place? You make these stupid remarks without thinking what you’re saying.’

  ‘I know what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that you knew damned well he wasn’t right for you, but you were attracted to him because he was like your father and you couldn’t resist him.’

  ‘I’m not speaking to you any more. You appal me.’

  ‘You amuse me.’

  ‘How sick.’

  ‘Any mention of your dad and you go all frigid and furious.’

  ‘Anyone would if the kind of silly comments you make were made to them.’

  ‘It wasn’t a silly comment. Tony looks like your dad. So did what’s-his-face, Ian thingy, the one before, and that foreign fellow before him. You only go for men who look like your dad and then when you find out they aren’t like him, you chuck them out.’

  ‘Did I ask for this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you’re drunk.’

  Suddenly, he leaned across the table, and taking hold of my hand, even though I tried to snatch it away, he pressed it hard and spoke differently, in an embarrassingly urgent, sincere way. ‘I’m not drunk,’ he said, ‘I’m worried about you. You’re messing up your life like I’ve messed up mine. What are you going to do? Thirty-something, career on hold so far as I can see, no lover never mind no husband or darling kiddies, a poor little rich orphan going potty over the ridiculous contents of a box …’

  I got up, flung some money on the table – we hadn’t actually eaten anything except bread so far – and left the restaurant.

  VI

  I WAS USED to thinking I never wanted to see Rory again. We were always having these scenes, one or the other of us storming off, one or the other of us feeling smug because we thought we’d come up with some searing home truth. What made me so furious that night was that what Rory had said, about both of us wasting our lives, was not true. How dared he make me out to be a sad cow, as hopeless as himself? It was unfair, a lie. I was a professional photographer, with work to prove it, and what was he? Nothing. A dealer in this and that. No wonder his parents despaired. I hated to think I agreed with them in any way, but when it came to considering Rory’s lack of career or respectable employment I was bound to. He had, like me, had such a good start in life, he had no excuse.

  Next morning I woke feeling ashamed of myself. There was, after all, some substance in Rory’s summary of my situation, even if he hadn’t got it right in every particular. Hadn’t I admitted to myself I was in the doldrums, tired of the way I was living, with my lack of enthusiasm for anything? It was the manner in which he said it that so angered me, the way he lumped me with himself, when our cases were quite different. And the stuff about my father and how I was attracted to those men who looked like him was true. I’d realised it myself, even if I liked to think the men never had. It’s common enough, for heaven’s sake, a cliché, girls wanting to love their fathers, but I’d resented all the rest Rory had come out with. I might have been attracted to Tony, and the others, because of their physical similarity to my father, but I never for one moment thought they were actually like him, so there was no disillusionment. I knew from the moment I met him that Tony, for example, was quite unlike my father. Tony is a very solemn person, very serious, whereas my father rarely had a smile off his cheerful face. And Tony didn’t talk much, whereas my father was a great chatterer – his idea of hell was being stuck in a railway carriage with someone who wouldn’t talk to him. Tony would’ve been that someone, buried in a book and not wanting to be disturbed.

  It hurt that Rory hadn’t seen how much I had thought I loved Tony, that he’d had the nerve to imagine my relationships were anything like his shallow, sexual encounters. Rory didn’t seem to have loved anyone, ever. It was nothing to do with his being gay; it was to do with being Rory – selfish, reluctant to commit himself to anything or anyone at all, greedy for what he was given and offering little or nothing in return. But I knew I was wrong to say to him, as I had often done, that he had no excuse. He did have an excuse, or at least there were extenuating circumstances to explain his attitudes. His parents had been good parents only in the purely materialistic sense, looking after his physical welfare faultlessly, clothing and feeding and housing and educating him to the highest standard. But emotionally they’d failed him. Rory says he always knew he was gay (though I don’t quite believe him) and by the time he was seventeen he had told them so. It was a brave thing to do, especially with parents like his. They’d not only been disgusted, they’d absolutely refused to believe he knew what he was saying. He’d been reading suggestive books, seeing suggestive films, mixing with the wrong sort. In a marvellously contradictory statement they told him at one and the same time he was wrong, and that he would grow out of it, and never to come to them again talking such nonsense. He never did.

  I’d been Rory’s champion then, outraged at my uncle and aunt on his behalf, but gradually I’d come to acknowledge that not everything about Rory’s instability could be blamed on their rejection of his sexual nature. They’d made him suffer, by denying he could feel as he felt and trying to force him into the mould they wanted, but he hadn’t helped himself. Everything he did from adolescence onwards looked like defiance: ‘Look at me, see how bad I can be!’ It was childish and went on being childish long after he was an adult. He said his parents didn’t love him and never had (though I never thought that last bit true) and then he seemed determined to make sure no one else would be allowed to. It didn’t make him happy, even though his nature was to be light-hearted and pleasure-loving. Underneath, and not so very far underneath, all the prattle there was a wistfulness for something more meaningful. Or so I thought.

  At any rate, I never stayed angry with him for long. I rang him up that day and got his answerphone, upon which I left a sharp message telling him he was an absolute pain but that if he wanted to come with me wherever I was going – not tha
t I knew where that would be – he could and I’d pay providing he didn’t come out with any more rubbish, any more of his wonky psychobabble. I felt better the moment I’d done it. He’d been right about another thing. Being on my own wasn’t, for once, the best thing for me. Whatever else, Rory had succeeded in making me think of Susannah’s box in a more rational way. I didn’t feel so challenged any more and was prepared to accept, if I had to in the end, the possible insignificance of its contents.

  But not without more effort to find the opposite. I had the urgent need to get away, and soon, and, without any job on at that moment to guide me, I had to decide myself where to go. It was almost November, the weather was turning cold, the nights drawing in, so it made sense to indulge Rory by going to the sun somewhere. Sun, blazing sun, is not good for my kind of photography, but then I wouldn’t be choosing the destination for that reason. I thought about Africa – Malawi or Mozambique maybe – but the thought of all the inoculations I’d need and the anti-malaria precautions put me off. Still turning over various possibilities in my mind, I went to pack. It didn’t much matter where I was going to go, I always took almost the same things, give or take a jacket or two. I often packed before I knew where I was going, sometimes as a sign of intent to myself – packed, I had to go, no dithering allowed. So I went to my bedroom and started selecting light trousers and shorts and several loose cotton shirts and a sweater and so on, and rolling them all up to shove in a bag, the sort that could go with me on any airline as hand luggage. Pulling stuff out of a drawer, I saw the address book I’d put back there after Rory had finished looking at everything.

  I hadn’t studied it thoroughly before, and Rory himself had hardly glanced at it. Picking it up again, it struck me how worn it was, which I hadn’t noticed. The pattern, the peacock feather pattern on the cover, was quite faded in parts, as though the book had been left out in the sun often. She must have taken it with her wherever she went. This puzzled me all over again. Susannah hadn’t been able to travel much, but maybe my father hadn’t known where she’d managed to go before she met him. What about her earlier student years? She hadn’t met him until their final year. I ran my finger down the index and saw several letters of the alphabet seemed to be missing. The ‘L’, the ‘P’, the ‘Q’ and the ‘R’ were all torn off. I looked at those pages first. There were no entries at all written on them. So why tear the letters off? I felt that rising irritation I’d felt before, a sort of agitation, because I might be making something out of nothing but I couldn’t know if it was nothing, if things like torn-off letters were meaningless. The book was old. Paper can be fragile. Tiny letters get bent and torn and come off an index such as this.

  Trying to control myself, to stop being on the lookout for signs, I turned to ‘E’. No names, of course, as I’d observed before, but there was no mystery here. The Edinburgh addresses here were known to me. One was Rory’s parents’, one my grandmother’s, one some Cameron relatives I remembered visiting even though I couldn’t remember their names. So she did put in personal addresses and not just hotels, as I’d first deduced. ‘W’ had my father’s old home address in it, so this book had still been in use when she met him. ‘V’ had an hotel in Venice which I knew of, and also another in Vienna, a city I hadn’t visited. Did she think I would trail round all these places in her wake, thirty years on? Surely not. This address book seemed to serve only as a record of all the places she’d visited. The places, not the people, were important. It was a diary of place, of memories in the form of places. How odd. Was she trying to show me once more that contrary to anything I might have been told she hadn’t always been an invalid, that once she had had energy and strength and had been around? Was she afraid I’d have the wrong fixed image of her?

  She hadn’t been far, though. Flicking through the book, I could see she hadn’t been out of Europe. Except there was one place name I didn’t recognise – Bequia. It sounded middle-Eastern, or perhaps African, but I’d never heard of it. No hotel was written above it. The entry just said. ‘The Cabin, Friendship Bay’. I didn’t think an hotel would call itself a cabin. But ‘cabin’ didn’t sound European. It sounded American or Canadian, but she’d never been across the Atlantic so far as I knew. I got out my old atlas, bought for me years ago by my father, and looked up Bequia in the detailed index. It wasn’t listed. No Bequia. There was a Beqaot in Jordan, and a Beqoa in Israel, but no Bequia. Intrigued by then, and praying it didn’t turn out to be some obscure town in the Balkans, I rang the travel agent I always used. She had no problem with Bequia. ‘It’s in the Grenadines,’ she said. ‘Bequia’, pronouncing it Beck-wee, ‘is a lovely little island, one of the prettiest in the Caribbean.’

  It couldn’t be. Susannah had never been to the Caribbean. I knew that for a fact. But did I? With my studied lack of interest in her history, I had never grilled my grandmother or my aunt about her early life. They had wanted to tell me but I hadn’t wanted to listen. Though I was sure that if I had been told tales of her going off to the Caribbean in her youth, that would have registered. She hadn’t had any money, so how could she have gone so far, especially in the Fifties? All these European cities in her address book, and there were not so very many, must have been visited by her when she went hitch-hiking with girlfriends. I’d heard about that, had it shoved down my throat that Susannah had had to work as a waitress to pay for her holidays, whereas I was spoiled. It was one of my Aunt Isabella’s running themes – Rory and I had never had to slog our guts out to travel abroad as she and Susannah had. Too true. But Isabella had never mentioned a trip to the Caribbean and I was convinced it would have been too big a thing not to be mentioned. I was suddenly excited, sensing at last a real mystery here for me to solve. Forget seagull feathers and rucksacks – this would surely yield more, this little entry in a battered address book.

  But then I cautioned myself. This address book was old. The Bequia address had been written down something like thirty-five years ago, maybe more. The trail (I couldn’t help thinking in such schoolgirl terms), if trail there was, was cold. If I was going to go off to this island it was no good expecting to find anything at all. I could use the address as an excuse to go there, but nothing more. Well, I thought that quite satisfactory. I wanted to go somewhere sunny and I’d never been to the Caribbean – frankly, it had a poor image in my mind, one of vulgar, flashy beach resorts and a lot of calypso singing. I didn’t even need to tell Rory why I’d fixed on Bequia, I could say my travel agent recommended it, he wouldn’t care.

  The atlas had the Grenadines all right. I was surprised and pleased to see they were so far south, almost off the coast of Venezuela, and nowhere near either Jamaica or Barbados (about which I knew next to nothing, but where my notions about the Caribbean came from). I went straight out and on my way to the travel agents stopped and bought a guidebook. The guide said Bequia was only seven miles long but that this made it the largest island in the Grenadines. It had quiet lagoons, good reefs and long stretches of nearly deserted beaches. A large percentage of the inhabitants were of Scottish descent (did that mean Susannah had known someone there?). There was one village, Port Elizabeth, on a bay known for its safe anchorage. This bay had been a haven for pirates in the seventeenth century, among them Captain Kidd. Rory would be ecstatic.

  He was. He came over again that evening, the unpleasantness of the night before forgotten, and we were both almost hopping up and down at the thought of jetting off to the West Indies (‘Don’t say Caribbean,’ Rory pleaded). It hadn’t been as simple to arrange as I’d hoped, which was annoying – I wanted to go there and then, without delay. We were going to have to wait two whole days before we could get a plane to Barbados, from where we could get a much smaller plane to Bequia. I said I’d meet Rory at Heathrow and he went off immensely pleased with himself to pack, under strict instructions to make sure he had only hand luggage. I knew Rory. Unlike me, for him holidays meant clothes, absurd amounts of them, and that meant a proper case which would have to go in th
e hold and slow us up horribly on every arrival. Once he’d gone, I rang Isabella. It seemed only logical. My father was dead, and might never in any case have known where Susannah had been before he met her, and so was my grandmother, who certainly would have done. That only left her sister, Isabella. It was worth a try.

  I always felt uncomfortable whenever I rang my aunt, or even when she rang me. Both were rare occurrences, and usually happened because one of us had some specific news. Either that, or it was New Year greetings or Happy Birthdays. Isabella was scrupulous about both. She always rang me on 1 January and on 12 June, my birthday. I’d thank her and we’d have a few minutes’ strained chat before hanging up. The last time I’d rung her it was to tell her Charlotte had died. She wasn’t close to my mother, and had always resented the fact that I insisted she was my mother, referring to her as ‘your stepmother’ whenever she mentioned her, but still, I felt I had to let her know as well as Charlotte’s own family. She was surprisingly sympathetic and told me I was welcome to come and stay with her any time in Edinburgh. ‘Treat our house as your home now,’ she urged, and actually sounded as if she meant it, though she must have known I’d never put her to the test. She didn’t come to the funeral, but then I’d said there was no need to. Plenty of Charlotte’s family were there and she would have been swamped by them and I’d have felt responsible for her. Rory himself looked lost among all the Fraser cousins, but it was his presence that meant most to me. I’d so lost touch with the Fraser tribe, whom I’d once adored, that I hardly knew how to talk to them. Fortunately, my silence was put down to grief, which was genuine enough.