The Memory Box Read online

  She wasn’t really an artist. Like my father, she’d qualified as an architect, which was how they met, and unusually for that time – there were not many women architects – she did well in the all-male practice she joined. In fact, she won a prize – something my father never did – designing a shopping centre. I always got the impression that she’d been much more ambitious than my father and that this had created a slight problem, or what would have become one if her poor health had not held her back. I’m not quite sure how I picked this up (though, when I think about it now, it is remarkable how much I did pick up considering I made such a thing of not asking direct questions). It must have been from Charlotte’s family, which is surely odd. I remember these aunts and uncles of mine, who of course were not really my relatives at all, sitting round the dinner table, when they brought the various cousins to stay, and one of them saying they’d been to ‘that shopping centre’ and my father saying how he admired it and had this aunt – no, I think it was an uncle – noticed how cleverly Susannah had solved the space problem, how ingenious she’d been. I must have been quite old because I remember asking what ‘ingenious’ meant and saying was it the same as ‘genius’. My father laughed and said that wasn’t a bad guess and then someone asked, ‘Was she a genius, Susannah?’ and there was a kind of silence while they waited for an answer. I don’t recall precisely what the answer was but I did register the praise it was full of and I was uncomfortable when my father added words to the effect that Susannah had been much more talented than he was and would have ‘risen to the top’. I thought of a cake, and laughed. If Charlotte was there, and she must have been, unless she was in the kitchen, she said nothing.

  But Susannah never had the chance to rise to any top. Her health deteriorated and she had to work from home and, though the pretence was kept up that her career still flourished, it didn’t. She turned to painting and everyone was glad to see her do so – less tiring, less of a strain for her. She painted watercolours, mostly landscapes. The one chosen in the Summer Exhibition was of a meadow. It hung in my father’s study, though not in a prominent position. When I was a child, I could see nothing in it. It looked virtually blank to me, an expanse of flat green with a few dots in the background that might or might not have been cows. If I was told where this meadow was, I have forgotten. My father never commented on its merits, never passed any comment at all.

  I sent it to be auctioned, together with all the other pictures I didn’t want to keep when I cleared out the Oxford house, and was quite surprised to learn later that somebody had paid £200 for it. Part of me had felt bad about selling it, but another, stronger part defiantly insisted the painting was of no special significance just because it was Susannah’s and had been hung in a Royal Academy Summer Exhibition – everyone knows that half of that is dross. There was nowhere in my flat I could have hung it and I had nowhere, no attics, in which to store it. I had done the sensible thing, but it was true I felt faintly guilty all the same, even though no one else knew what I’d done. I had salvaged too much as it was, and looked with despair at all the clutter I’d laboriously carried in from my car. My lovely rooms looked offended, strewn as they were with bags and boxes. It upset me to see this disorder and I couldn’t rest until I’d dragged the lot into my spare room and closed the door on it.

  Except for the memory box. This I took into my sitting-room and put down on the floor in front of the sofa. The sooner I got the opening over, the better. I would need a knife or scissors to cut the cord – the knots looked far too corroded with age to undo easily. Pausing to wash my hands, as though I were about to perform a surgical operation and had to take meticulous care with hygiene, I hacked away at the cord with the bread knife and then cut through the tough waterproof outer covering. Then I got a surprise. I’d assumed that the box itself would be a wooden or strong cardboard crate, of the packing-case variety, but what I found was an old-fashioned hatbox. It was large and round, about two feet tall and eighteen inches or so in diameter, and was covered in a vivid fuchsia grosgrain material with purple ricrac round the lid and a purple satin ribbon tied in an ornamental bow on the top. It was the most marvellously vulgar and yet glamorous box. I found myself smiling. My grandmother, Susannah’s mother who had looked after me when she died, had had several boxes like this, though none quite so colourful or flamboyant. Rory and I used to play with them and try on the weird hats, all veils and feathers, carefully preserved but never worn.

  For some reason, I still delayed the final act of opening, though I was feeling so much more relaxed about it. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine, wondering as I did so why my father had never described the brash appeal of this box. It would, I was sure, have helped me feel more kindly towards Susannah’s box and tempted me to want to see it. Slowly, I went back to contemplate it again. Experimentally, I pulled at the purple bow. It did not give. Carefully, I cut across the ribbon underneath the bow and when the lid still would not lift I saw that it was taped all round, and remembered my father had said he had sealed it. More delicate snipping with scissors and I felt the lid move a fraction as the pressure was released. I eased it off slowly, feeling a strange sort of breathlessness as I did so. Under the lid, flattened by years of being pressed down, were several scrunched-up layers of coloured tissue paper, white, yellow and green, all arranged to look vaguely like a flower. A pretty effect, and I sat admiring it for a moment before disturbing the paper. When I had lifted it all out, placing it inside the upturned lid, I expected somehow to find a note. Instead, there was another layer of covering, a thin disc of corrugated cardboard. It was tightly wedged and took some time to remove.

  What met my, by then, eager eyes was puzzling.

  II

  THERE WAS NO letter, no note, not a word of explanation in the whole box. I kept expecting to find something written. I searched thoroughly, shaking the tissue paper out piece by piece in case some message was hidden in its folds, and I examined the linings of the box and its lid to see if anything might have been secreted there. Nothing. The contents were obviously meant to be self-explanatory. Staring at them arrayed before me, I wondered if my father was supposed to hold the key to all this. Susannah couldn’t have known he would be dead, too, before I opened her box. But on the other hand if she had been as secretive about it as he had said, would she have depended on his explaining to me? I didn’t think so. I was meant to understand the significance of these miscellaneous objects myself.

  They were all individually wrapped in different kinds of decorative paper. Such a lot of care had gone into the wrapping, and I had a sudden vision of Susannah selecting the papers, looking for unusual patterns and combinations of colours. Some were stencilled by hand – her hand? – gold crowns on a white background, purple butterflies on pink. When everything was unwrapped and all the papers smoothed out and piled up I saw I had enough to wrap presents for years ahead, except that it might feel blasphemous almost, to use them for any lesser purpose. I told myself that was what I had to remember. Susannah was not playing, she had a purpose. Nothing in her box had been selected randomly, nothing wrapped with the first bit of paper that came to hand. She had apparently had such confidence that her gifts would mean something that she hadn’t felt the need to leave any written coda. But she had left numbers. On each parcel there was a coloured circle of sticky paper with a number written in black ink in the middle. I took everything out very slowly, turning each object over before unwrapping it, and so I had time to notice that the numbers were not in order. On the very top were parcels numbered 8, 4 and 1, all lying side by side, forming a complete layer. Once I had unwrapped everything, I realised the fragile items were on the top, so the numbers were presumably to alert me to the need to examine everything in order and not as they came out of the box. But was this assumption wrong? All I could think was that the numbering was too clear and deliberate not to have a point.

  I felt I had to try to do what I had always resisted, which was to imagine myself,
knowing I was going to die within months, maybe weeks, assembling a memory box for my baby daughter. But, however hard I strained to do this, such a feat of empathy was beyond me. I did not have a baby daughter. I had never had a baby, girl or boy. The emotional field of maternal love was so far closed to me. But there was another obstacle. Not only could I not imagine Susannah’s feelings, neither did I relate to what she had done. I couldn’t imagine wanting to leave such a box, whatever my state of mind. Why would I want to? To tell my daughter what I was like, give her some flavour of myself? But I would know she would have that in abundance. She would have the testimony of her loving family. She would be in no doubt of what I was like, just as I was in no doubt about Susannah. My father bought a cine-camera in the Sixties and later he had his old films transferred to video so I could watch them and see Susannah walking and moving if I wanted. I think I watched one film, once, and that was enough. The movements were jerky, the focus poor, and it seemed an hour of tedium, with the odd comic moment. But I had seen the living, breathing Susannah, as she must have known I would be able to. I had even heard her voice – light, rather high – on a couple of tape recordings. And my grandmother gave me her schoolgirl diaries, which I had glanced through, cringing at how banal they were, and I had her school reports and certificates for everything from cycling proficiency to diving. I had more information than I could possibly want about her and I hadn’t wanted any of it.

  Now there were these objects to burden me further and bewilder me. If she had something private and special to say, I wondered why she hadn’t said it in writing, in a letter easily read and unmistakable in intention. Apparently that was too simple. Or was it, on the contrary, too impossible? Did she not trust words enough? Did she prefer to place her trust in solid things? At any rate, there was her decision, bequeathed to me in the shape of these eleven objects. I contemplated them once more, starting with the one I had unwrapped first, number 4, on the top. It was a shell. A very large shell, about ten inches long and almost the same width across its broadest point. It had two big prongs, sticking out like arms without hands, and on the closed part there were eight spiral prongs in a circle, rising in a cone effect. The ear, or fan part, was fluted, with a delicate wavy edge. The colour was a dirty cream with faint black patches all over the back, and on the inside of the ear there was a faint apricot blush. The outside was very rough to the touch and there was a straw-like substance clustered round the prongs.

  I had never seen such a big shell of this type and yet it looked ordinary enough, without any exquisite beauty of its own such as some shells have. What was it supposed to tell me? That Susannah liked shells? So do most people. Or was there something significant about this shell that I was missing? Was the important thing the place, the sea or shore, it came from? I knew I could always go to a library and find a book about shells in which it could be identified and its origin described. Maybe it was so rare I’d find it could only have come from one place in the world; maybe this shell would lead me to a place Susannah wanted me to visit for some secret to be revealed. And thinking along such romantic lines I smiled. How easily I was allowing myself to be carried away. A shell was only a shell. A pretty thing, something decorative for a daughter to find in a box left to her by her mother, nothing more.

  Beside the shell, next to it on the top layer, and numbered 8, was another mystery. It was a silver-backed mirror, shaped like a diamond with a long handle. I turned it over to examine it, looking as ever for clues to what it signified. The silver work was elaborate and intricate, a complicated raised design of leaves and stems. The silver did not shine but was heavy and dull, and dust was caught between some of the bumps. The glass was not perfect. It was a little loose in its setting and there was a small chip out of one of the points, where the glass was kept in place by a delicate network of fine silver strands. I held it up, as it was meant to be held, and looked at myself, at arm’s length. How hard I was frowning, how cross I looked, the crease between my eyes horribly evident. I tried to relax my expression. The crease stayed there. I wasn’t in the habit of staring at myself in mirrors, in fact I rarely look in them, and I suppose I am proud of my lack of vanity. Was the message of this mirror to do with vanity, then? And if so, whose – mine or Susannah’s? But maybe I was missing the point entirely. Was the point of the mirror its value? Was it perhaps an heirloom, left by Susannah to link me to my heritage? Funny, I liked the idea of that, and it was possible. Her family were all proud of their Scottishness, especially on her father’s side, especially the Camerons. My grandmother was forever telling me tales of her dead husband’s brave ancestors, going right back to great-great-great uncles and cousins who had fought at Culloden. But there was nothing obviously Scottish about this mirror. The pattern was of ivy, if anything (it was hard to be sure), and not thistles. It was old, that was all I could tell, but how old I would have to find out – more visits to a library, more looking up in books. I’d end up an expert on shells and silver mirrors, but what good would that do me?

  I was becoming exasperated as I picked up the last parcel which had been on the top layer. This was a thin folder, very light and fragile-seeming to touch. It was labelled number I and had rested between the shell and the mirror, protected by their bulk. Inside the blue tissue paper I found a plastic, see-through bag in which there were three feathers, lying side by side. They were all white, each about eleven inches long, with dark grey markings along one edge, light grey on the other. They looked freshly plucked, the quill points sharp and very clean. I didn’t take them out of their bag, but merely turned the bag over, then put it down. What was going on here? By the time I began unwrapping what had been in the middle layer, I was beginning to feel I was being made a fool of. I could hardly bear to open number 7, though when I did it was something of a relief. I recognised it. It was a necklace, and I’d seen Susannah wearing it in photographs and heard my grandmother describe it. Her own father had brought it back from India, where he served in the army, for her mother, and it had been handed down first to her, then to Susannah. It was a beautiful, ornate piece of jewellery, the setting silver and the stone pendant a large emerald. Susannah had worn it on her wedding day and I was told her unusual dress had been designed to compliment the necklace and that the fern among the roses she carried was the exact shade of the emerald. My grandmother had apparently expected my father to give it to me when I was eighteen, the age Susannah had been when it was given to her. When he didn’t, she’d later asked him about it in my presence, after I came home and she was staying with us for what turned out to be the last time. Some whispering had gone on and she had seemed disturbed by whatever he had told her, but she said nothing to me and I didn’t question her. I suppose my father had been telling her he couldn’t find the necklace. Perhaps he even told her he suspected it was in the memory box.

  My father had given me some of Susannah’s other jewellery by then, though, and some of her clothes. Over the years, once I was thirteen, he’d marked each birthday with gifts of them until I asked him not to. I had never liked being given her things. I didn’t want anything that had been worn by a dead woman. It made me squirm to think of putting in my ears the pearl studs that had once been in hers – I couldn’t help it. I always thought of Susannah as dead, dead, dead, and the fact that she had been as alive as I was when she wore these earrings was irrelevant. They were reminders to me only of death and I didn’t want them. I put the studs in once, to please him, and my ears immediately felt thick and heavy and I had to take them out. And I never did like jewellery. When other girls were into collecting silver rings and bracelets, I was more interested in old posters and sepia or black and white postcards. Being given Susannah’s clothes was even worse, but at least my mother understood that and made my father realise he was mistaken in thinking I would treasure what Susannah had once worn. He was dissuaded easily enough, probably because he’d only been offering these things out of a vague sense of guilt that he hadn’t worked harder to keep Susannah’s
memory alive. Once he’d had his efforts rejected, he gave up with relief.

  The other objects from the middle layer were bulky but not heavy. There was a hat, rolled up; a small, soft rucksack; and a map. The map was the first thing that made any sense at all and I opened it out eagerly. It was an ordinary Ordnance Survey map, two and a half inches to a mile, of the north-western area of the Lake District. I love maps, all maps. My father loved them too and was delighted I grew to share his interest. He used to make maps for me and Rory, just of the immediate area around our Oxford house at first. He did them all properly, using signs that appear on Ordnance Survey maps, and gradually weaned us on to sheets 164 and 165 covering the Oxford area. He’d drive us to a certain spot, show us where we were on the map, and then say he’d pick us up at the end of a route he’d marked. No wonder we both excelled at geography, or that side of it, at school. Rory, in time, stopped enjoying these jaunts but I never did. I made my own routes and though Charlotte worried about my being on my own my father encouraged me. I joined the YHA with a friend and we went off to Wales and trekked around. We were thirteen, I think: it was just before I rejected the whole idea of youth hostelling as embarrassingly naff, so we never did it again. Maybe my father would have pointed me in the direction of the Lake District if I’d kept it up. He knew I didn’t stop enjoying maps and that I spent ages in his study scrutinising them, ‘reading’ them like books.