The Memory Box (10 page)

Meanwhile, I had to decide what to do. I had, at some point, to go back to my hired car and drive it the forty-odd miles to Carlisle to catch the train home. I couldn’t sit under this holly tree for ever ruminating. Going back the way I had come, I could be at the car in little over an hour. Going ahead, and round Melbreak, where I could see a clear path on the Ordnance Survey, would at least double the time. But I chose to do that, disliking the idea of retracing my footsteps and liking the prospect of the unknown ahead. I also felt quite liberated once I’d left the tree. I was free of Susannah’s instructions and making my own way and I enjoyed the vague feeling of defiance. And it was a beautiful walk, taking me round the end of Melbreak and through a wood until I came out on to a grassy path so smooth it looked as though someone had taken a lawnmower along it. All the way back to Buttermere I had the lake, Crummock Water, snaking ahead before me and the path stayed so high I had the illusion of flying over it. I had made a round trip and it felt satisfying and complete.

My legs ached by the time I reached the car and I was glad to sit down. The expedition had taken me four hours, but it was still only two o’clock – plenty of time to return the car and catch a train. I took a minor road, marked yellow on the map, over Newlands Haus to Braithwaite and from there skirted Keswick, then drove along the west flank of Skiddaw. I knew Skiddaw was the first of the real mountains my father had climbed, when he was absurdly young, four or five. He’d climbed them all by the time he met Susannah but, of course, she could never climb any with him. The walk round Melbreak to reach that holly tree would have been a triumph for her (was that cross and the exclamation mark to say so, to raise a cheer for her own achievement, never to be exceeded?). She’d never been strong enough for tough stuff. My father, according to my grandmother, had always tried to make her conserve her strength and energy,
but
she had sometimes resented his protectiveness and been wilful. Maybe the walk to the holly tree had been an instance of this. She’d perhaps wanted me to do that walk precisely for this reason, to show me she wasn’t always feeble, that once she had been able to stride out and had shaken off attempts to persuade her not to risk it. She wanted me to know she had pushed herself and relished the effort.

What she couldn’t have known was quite how much to my taste that walk would be. As I took another minor road to Carlisle, a wonderful winding road dipping up and down hills through Uldale and Caldbeck, unfenced for the most part and empty, and with sudden views of the Solway, I thought how what I had seen was imprinted visually on my mind and how I would be able to do that walk over and over again in my head for years to come. I had seen everything with a photographer’s eye, sharply, in a concentrated fashion, and it had been thrilling. Would she have expected me to have this kind of appreciation? She and my father were both architects, and she was an artist, if an amateur, so perhaps I was wrong and it was exactly what she had expected. She may have decided that unless there had been some mighty genetic muddle I was a child destined to have a highly developed visual sense. But that didn’t mean I would also like to walk. The two things don’t automatically go together, and I haven’t in fact done much walking in the way my father did. I never think of myself as athletic or the outdoor type, though I am perfectly fit and do spend a good deal of my working life out of doors. It struck me, as I dropped down from the fells on to the Eden plain, that I would like to walk more, to walk as my father had done. I would come back and plan longer walks and climb the mountains he had climbed, and I silently thanked Susannah for giving me the ambition to do so. Skiddaw, Helvellyn, Scafell – I’d do them all.

It was odd, in the circumstances, how very much I was
being
led to thinking about my father. This was his country she’d brought me to, not hers. It was his life, his early life, I was being drawn into, not hers. Why wasn’t she taking me to Scotland, or to places known only to her? I didn’t need to be told about my father. I knew all about him. I had to control myself, stop the tears coming, just thinking about how
nice
he was. If I’d heard a hundred times how happy Susannah was, I’d heard a thousand times how nice my father was. It used to annoy me, not because I challenged the truth of it (I knew it was quite true) but because ‘nice’ is such an anodyne word. It was a word our English teacher would not allow us to use. She said it was lazy, hardly an adjective at all, and certainly not one worthy of our using. And she was right, it doesn’t convey much. To call my father ‘nice’, to emphasise his niceness above all else, was to make him sound bland and insipid and he was neither. He was clever, kind, cheerful, good-tempered and had a horror of any kind of unpleasantness or confrontation – which is mostly what people meant when they labelled him ‘nice’. He got on with everyone and was always popular. But on the last stretch of that drive, blinking back the tears I couldn’t quite stop, I remembered something my grandmother had said. One day, when I was about six or seven and she was staying with us, as she often did (she and Charlotte getting on famously, thank God), she took me on her knee and said, ‘You have a lovely daddy, Catherine.’ I wriggled off, not liking any more to sit on anyone’s knee, and said, quite crossly I think, that I knew I had, and my grandmother said, ‘Look after him, won’t you? He doesn’t like to be alone. That’s the only thing he’s afraid of. He needed Susannah more than she needed him, he needs Charlotte more than she needs him, and one day he’ll need you more than you need him.’

I was far too young for this. It all sounded silly to me, and made me feel uncomfortable without knowing why.
But
remembering this strange little outburst, which was so unlike my sensible grandmother, I wondered if she had been trying to tell me that my father was not emotionally strong and that the women in his life had to be. Always, because of her health, I had seen the dead Susannah as weak beside my father, almost a burden on him. Yet my grandmother, her mother, had definitely said he needed her more than she needed him. She had been sure, it seemed, that he was dependent on her and not the other way round. I suppose I had gradually, without quite realising it consciously, seen that so far as Charlotte was concerned she was right. When he died, one of the first things my mother said was, ‘Thank God he went first.’ It embarrassed me, it seemed such a pious thing to say, and I wished she hadn’t said it. I never thought of asking why she had.

It was a relief to be on the train at last and able to slump. I didn’t read, just looked out of the window, soon seeing my own reflection as it grew dark. The rucksack with the map inside it was on my knee. I’d almost discarded them both in Carlisle station, dropped them into one of the capacious waste bins, deciding they were now of no use and not worth keeping for their own sakes, or at least the worn rucksack wasn’t. But at the last minute I’d held on to them, out of pure sentiment. They could go in a cupboard when I got back. But their numbers were ticked off – 1, 2 and 3, all attended to, to the best of my ability. Whether it had been worth it I wasn’t sure. The figure reflected in the window looked pretty morose, exhausted too, as though she had been through some kind of ordeal, which in a way was true. My high expectations had exposed me to it. I’d put myself through a process that had depended constantly on imagination and, more than that, having to interpret what it came up with. No wonder I felt drained. A kind of madness had set in and I was at its mercy, unable to stop now I had begun. All I could hope was that the rest of the
objects
left to me would make fewer demands and lead to more satisfying explanations. Frankly, that contentment I had briefly experienced on Whitehaven’s quayside, and the glow I had felt walking to the holly tree on Melbreak, had faded. I was left with that feeling I hated, of something being just out of reach, not quite within my grasp. I was trying too hard and didn’t know, as I travelled back to London, whether I had the heart to go on.

I slept for the last hour and dreamed of the shell.

RETURNING FROM THE
north, I seemed to fall into a woeful state of listlessness. I had intended, after I split up with Tony, to go abroad somewhere, but then came those two awful deaths, and day slid into day, week into week; and then there was the box and I’d done nothing about going any further than Cumberland. There was no pressure on me to do anything, that was the trouble. I had no commitments, no responsibilities, no one to demand I pull myself together. I could drift as long as I wanted. It was an enviable position to be in, and yet I found myself wishing I could lose myself in the demands made on a wife or mother. I started to blame Susannah, unfair though I knew this to be. If she’d left me alone, I’d have recovered from my mother’s death and at last gone away to revitalise myself. I needed some proper distraction, but I was too jaded, and too confused about the contents of the box, to go in search of it.

There was a message from Rory on my answerphone when I got back. He asked where the hell I’d got to and why I hadn’t turned up for that drink we were going to have, he was pissed off with me. I’d forgotten our arrangement, not exactly a firm one anyway, and knew I ought to ring him. But I didn’t want to, even though he was the only relative with whom I still had any regular contact, and certainly the only one for whom I felt any affection. Only
with
Rory did I feel completely at ease. The pattern of holidays changed after I was about seven and, instead of spending most of them surrounded in my own home by my mother’s nieces and nephews, I went to Edinburgh to stay with Rory. This, I gather, was my own choice. My parents were none too happy about it, but apparently I pleaded with them and they were as indulgent over this as they were in everything. But they thought Rory was a bad influence. He was by then well known to do silly things, sometimes quite dangerous things, and they worried I would copy him. They were right, I did, or if I didn’t exactly copy him I allowed myself to be led by him and admired his daring.

This was not so very extraordinary, but at the time it was thought bad enough. Once, when we were both eight, he took me hitch-hiking. We got a bus to the outskirts of Edinburgh, I don’t remember where, and then Rory marched me on to a main road where the city boundary gave way to countryside, and we stood and thumbed a lift, or rather I did. He’d made me wear a pretty dress, which I hated, a white thing with a Peter Pan collar and a sash, thin material covered with little blue flowers, saying cars would be more likely to stop for a girl dressed like that than for any boy. No car stopped as I stood self-consciously following Rory’s instructions, but a lorry did. It was a gigantic lorry with wheels so big they towered over us as it ground to a stop and the steps into the cabin were so impossibly high the driver had to get out and come round to lift us in. He asked where we were going and why we were on our own, and Rory came out with incredibly full details to do with sick grandmothers, broken-down cars, lost money and God knows what else. He said we were going to London, where we would be met by our uncle. I hadn’t known this and didn’t even realise it was all part of the lie. The lorry driver settled us in his cabin, which seemed like a house to us, full
of
all kinds of funny possessions, like a potted plant with a tiny watering can beside it, and two cushions embroidered in Rangers football club colours, and a tray set as if for tea, complete with a dainty net cap over the milk jug. He was a big man, his overall sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular arms tattooed with pineapples, and, though he talked to us all the time, we couldn’t make out a word he said above the noise of the engine.

Quite quickly, it all stopped being exciting and became very boring indeed. We were glad when after about half an hour the driver pulled into a service station for petrol. He said he was going into the café, when he’d filled up, for a cup of tea and an egg sandwich and would we like to join him. Rory said we hadn’t enough money (another lie – he had a ten-pound note but had been going to wait until this man was in the café and then we were apparently going to run away and find a more comfortable car to travel in). The driver laughed and said he’d treat us and without asking he lifted me out of his cabin, so Rory was obliged to follow. We all trooped into the café and he settled us at one of the red Formica-topped tables near a steamed-up window, then he went to get drinks and food. We couldn’t leave – not that I had any plans to, though Rory did – because he kept his eye on us all the time. We saw him tell the woman behind the counter what he wanted, and then he came back and said he had to ring his wife and he’d be back in a minute. Even then, we were never out of his sight because the telephone was at the end of the room and he faced us while he rang. We saw him talking, but of course there was too much noise for us to hear that he wasn’t ringing his wife, he was ringing the police.

By the time we’d finished eating, and he’d been told our names were Jimmy (which was what Rory had always wanted to be called) and Valerie (my fancied name), and that we were orphaned twins, the police had arrived. Half
an
hour and our real names and address later, so had my Uncle Hector and Aunt Isabella. Hector was absolutely furious. The lorry driver and the policemen were amused, but Hector saw no humour in the situation at all. He proceeded to do a very old-fashioned thing, there and then in the café, much impressing the lorry-driving clientèle. He took hold of Rory, who admittedly was slight for his age and offered no resistance, put him over his knee, pulled down his pants, and slapped his bare bottom hard several times. I remember there was a ripple of noise throughout the café, but I don’t know whether it amounted to a collective gasp of admiration or of horror. All I was worried about was whether my turn to be humiliated would come next. It didn’t. We were both taken home and put to bed after more shouting from Hector and a lecture from a tight-lipped Isabella. She felt obliged to ring my parents, and I heard the phrase ‘anything could have happened’ over and over again, plus repeated apologies for Rory’s disgraceful behaviour. I was sent home the next day.