The Memory Box (16 page)

Gracie’s face grew calm, almost blank in expression, when I asked her if this meagre address meant anything to her. She seemed to have withdrawn from me and I didn’t know what to do to bring her back again, or even if I should try to do so. I hesitated, and then said something about how I thought Susannah may have come to Bequia, the theory that she’d sailed here in the late Fifties, and somehow stayed on. At this, Gracie opened her eyes again and frowned and said that struck a chord, but she didn’t know why. She held her head for a moment, as though listening, and then shook it and sighed. ‘It was a long time ago,’ she murmured. ‘Lots of young folk came in their boats – it’s a great place for the boats – but we didn’t see them up here. There was just us, and the German man with the hut.’ I didn’t dare interrupt her to ask if ‘us’ simply meant herself and a maid, but stayed quite still and let her remember whatever she wanted to
remember
, relevant or not. ‘He was a German man, but who was before him in that hut? Poor whites, a family of them, locals, but Bequians look down on them, they don’t mix, they never did, the black Bequians and the poor whites … The German man left. When?’ (I hadn’t asked when. I wasn’t interested in any German). ‘Oh, I don’t recall. Then there was a soldier, yes, there was, after the war was over in Europe. I knew him. He introduced himself, he was a gentleman, but I can’t mind his name. He had a boat, the soldier. He married a Bequian girl – now, what was her name? – names are the devil … she had a baby …’

On and on Gracie rambled, her voice low and monotonous but perfectly distinct. I strained to identify anything in what she said which might relate to Susannah, but there seemed to be nothing at all. She’d never heard of Susannah, or of a cabin. It was all hopeless. I sat there feeling numb and miserable, and somehow ashamed that I’d come at all to harass this sweet old woman, but trying to stay alert. She was still describing the soldier and his wife and children when for the first time I heard the word ‘cabin’. ‘The hut burned down,’ she was saying, followed by details of the fire, recalled astonishingly vividly, ‘and he built a proper cabin, he built it himself.’ (Yet when I’d asked her she’d said she’d never heard of any cabin up here. Had I planted the word in her head?) ‘He’d lost his money and they had to make a living somehow and they took in visitors in the nice new house … Not many … It was a long way for visitors to come. They stayed down in the port … it didn’t pay much … But they looked after them well in their house, the beds were clean and the food good … They went to England in the end … They said they’d come back to visit but they never did … Too far, it was too far … I had Christmas cards from them for years, mind.’ I risked asking, ‘And their cabin?’ ‘Cabin?’ Gracie said. ‘Their house?’ ‘Oh, their house burned down, just like the hut had done …
caught
fire, nobody knew how … the blaze was spotted too late … my house is stone …’

She stopped, and this time did fall asleep, deeply enough to snore. Should I just go? But I didn’t want to tiptoe away without thanking her and without saying goodbye. I got up and walked very quietly down the steps of the terrace, slipping off my sandals so that I would make no sound. The garden I’d been facing for the last hour was not so much a garden as, I now realised, a fenced-off area of open hillside with little distinction between what grew inside and outside it. I recognised bananas growing wild and other fruits, fruits that looked something like pineapples but were too small. There was a slight breeze blowing not from the sea but towards it, carrying the scent of herbs of some kind. When I had walked to the furthest extent of Gracie’s land, almost to where the hillside rolled down to the sea, I had a magnificent view stretching all the way to some smudgy-blue outline of another island far off. I stood there so transfixed I was unable to get out my camera, though the sight cried out for it – all that dazzling sea, all that enormous sky, and that thumbprint of another island. I tried instead to fold away into some deep recess in my memory what lay before me, looking hard, hard, and imprinting everything on my mind instead of on film so that I could take it out when I was back in grey, dismal London. And as ever, in a way that was becoming automatic, I wondered if Susannah had done this. Lying on her bed, weak and ill and afraid, had she conjured this up to console herself? Maybe. Maybe not. It didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that I had seen this, I would treasure it.

I walked back to the terrace, resolved to find the maid and leave her with my thanks to pass on to Gracie, but Gracie was awake and waving her hand, though she could not have seen me until I had mounted the steps. I slipped my sandals back on, and said how beautiful I found her
garden
and how lovely the view over the sea was, and how I envied her. I said it as a compliment, not thinking how she might interpret ‘envy’, but I saw I had said the wrong thing. ‘Ah, I’m not to be envied,’ Gracie said, suddenly sad, ‘I’m not to be envied by you, no, I’m not. You’ve all your life ahead. There’s the envy.’ To my alarm, I saw tears squeeze out of her eyes and she dabbed at them with the edge of her sleeve. ‘Oh please,’ I said, ‘don’t cry, Gracie, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to …’ But I couldn’t think what it was I hadn’t meant to do or say and was reduced to holding her hand anxiously. The few tears were soon over, though, and my hand pressed, to show me I was forgiven, I felt, for whatever I’d said, and after a while I thought it safe to begin to say my goodbyes and express my appreciation of her allowing me to talk to her. She ignored this and said, ‘Your mother died?’ I said yes, a long time ago. ‘Do you cry for her?’ she asked. I said I didn’t, I hadn’t known her and I’d loved my stepmother and there had never seemed anything to cry about. ‘You don’t cry for your mother?’ Gracie repeated, seeming incredulous. I said no again, firmly.

I thought she had probably forgotten the little history I’d given her, and certainly forgotten all about the box and what had been in it, but she then said, ‘I’m thinking what your mother was meaning with her box. It would be the pain of knowing she was leaving you. I watched my Douglas, and he knew he was leaving, and the pain was something awful. He couldn’t bear to talk of it to me, but he didn’t need to, I saw it plain.’ Her own expression became one of pain as I watched her, silent myself partly through embarrassment and partly respect for what she was struggling to say, her eyes tightly shut and screwed up. ‘It’s a terrible thing to be with someone you love when they’re dying,’ she said. ‘Terrible, Terrible … he held my hand so tight … he found no peace in the going, no comfort in everlasting peace … he was desperate to live, he wouldn’t believe anything was
his
God’s will.’ More tears bumped down her wrinkled skin and I hunted for a tissue in my pocket and pushed it into her hand. But she didn’t seem to want to use it, only to let the tears run their course. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I didn’t mean to bring back sad memories.’ She opened her eyes then and smiled, even gave a little laugh. ‘Oh, you weren’t bringing them back,’ she said. ‘They never leave me. I’m a silly old fool, I like to have them. I keep Douglas living that way, you see, thinking about him, thinking about the good days as well as the bad. I cry, but it’s better than feeling nothing, it keeps him here, with me.’

I left soon after this, feeling faintly nauseous and disturbed. The maid had come out with another young woman and between them they had helped Gracie to her feet and she half walked, was half carried, into the house. Upright, she was taller, even though bowed, than I had guessed and I saw that once she had been a big, strong woman. I didn’t know her age, but suspected she was well over eighty. How many years, then, had she been keeping Douglas alive? Fifty? Sixty? I’d forgotten to ask her when she first came to Bequia and how old she had been then. It was horrible to think about, her determination to go on remembering a man dead so long, and I realised as I walked back to the car how lucky I had been that my own father had not behaved like that. He’d found Charlotte, maybe
allowed
himself to find her, and Susannah had not been kept alive in the way Gracie kept her Douglas alive, clinging on to him because she had nothing else, and now never would have. The dead have to die, they have to be let go. I was sure of it. And yet I hadn’t myself let either of my parents go. I thought about them every day still, many times a day. It was only Susannah, whom in my conscious memory I never had known, that I was happy to surrender to death. But now she was fighting to come back, to fill my head with images of her I had never had and had not wanted to have,
and
any moment I was running the risk of feeling the pain of loss Gracie still felt for Douglas and which I had never felt for Susannah.

Driving slowly back the short distance to Port Elizabeth, I thought about this other pain Gracie had described, not of the loss itself but of being with a person who knows they are dying and who refuses to be reconciled to this because they have someone to live for whom they cannot bear to leave. Me. Susannah couldn’t bear to leave me. I tried to imagine the situation Gracie had conjured up – me in my cradle, Susannah holding my hand and willing herself to live
for me
. Torture. And myself, a baby, oblivious to it, doing nothing to comfort her, as Gracie had tried to comfort Douglas. My father had once said Susannah never, ever admitted she knew she was likely to die, not in so many words. Her memory box was the only form of admission and even then she never actually said what it was she was preparing it for – the future, my future, ‘in case’, but not necessarily a future after her death. Pretence had been the name of the game and my father had played it with her, refusing to acknowledge she was likely to die, just as she had wanted. What had it done to her, this knowing and yet refusing to know? I wondered whether, if she had had a disease to which a time limit could be given (cancer, say, when a prognosis of terminal within a certain number of months could be given) she would have acted differently, or would she have refused to accept that prognosis too? It was impossible to know and yet these kinds of questions nagged away at me.

I was beginning to change my mind yet again about the motive behind the memory box. Maybe it was a sort of insurance policy: if I prepare for leaving my baby I will never have to. That was why there was no written explanation of the contents and why they seemed so haphazard. They were haphazard, selected in panic, however carefully
wrapped
and numbered and packed. She was clutching on to solid things as a kind of ballast against screaming hysteria. This wasn’t a treasure hunt, there was no treasure to be found at the end of it, it was a piling up of defence mechanisms, the building of a bulwark against terror. And I was now pulling it apart, tearing it down, exposing the great hole it had hidden, and I was falling into it. I was letting this dead woman possess me. She had been, in the midst of her fear, so clever. She was emerging to tell me I was half hers, to show me that if she could not live herself she would live in me. However hard I tried to deny it, my genetic inheritance was hers. I might not look like her, I might not act like her, but sure enough there were genes in me that were hers. It was a question of cells. She was in me, somewhere, and she had known she would be. I was the one who, until lately, had refused to admit this. I was doing the pretending, as I had done for over thirty years.

I felt shaken, and once I had parked the car, I walked along the boards beside the sea, not wanting to see Rory yet. I wished I knew about the science of genes, how many cells, or letters, or whatever they are called, go to make up the DNA alphabet. I was ignorant. But I recalled vaguely from school science lessons that women carry more genetic information than men. Susannah would have bequeathed more to me than my father, whatever the physical evidence to the contrary. I knew too, or thought I knew, that characters are not inherited even if families think they are, think some offspring is exactly like a parent in personality. We’d all been surprised by this at school, which is how I’d remembered it, and been somehow relieved. And relieved as well to be assured by our teacher, who for once had us attentive, that environment acted
with
genes and so genes could not entirely dominate. I had wanted only my father’s to determine what I was, hating to think of that other inheritance because it couldn’t be Charlotte’s.

So, how was I like Susannah? Or rather, what, genetically, had been her influence – no, was still her influence – on the map of myself she had made of me with my father? Did it matter? I had never wanted to find out. If I, in turn, had had my own child, maybe I would have wanted to. Susannah would have been passed on through me to him or her and I think I might then have been curious to know what I was passing on. Not that anybody could tell me, unless it was some measurable disease or defect. A heart defect. I knew I didn’t have one. There had been a great deal of neurotic checking of this when I was a child, which, although I hadn’t understood then what it was about, I’d sensed was connected with the dead Susannah. There was always such relief on my father’s face when the doctor pronounced me perfectly sound, and I’d hear him apologising for bringing me to be examined yet again and the doctor would reassure him with words like ‘in the circumstances’ and ‘I understand, what with her mother …’ My grandmother, too, was always looking at me anxiously – did I tire easily? Was I very pale? Did I get short of breath? Did I have a blue tinge round my nostrils? … No, none of them. That part of my genetic inheritance was sound and nothing to do with Susannah.

I was moody and difficult the next couple of days and began to plan to leave Bequia. ‘We can’t stay here for ever,’ I snapped at Rory. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said. I told him I wasn’t made of money and that he had exaggerated notions of my supposed wealth. He retorted that we were living on Bequia far, far more cheaply than in London and he could probably get work here and fend for himself. I sneered at the use of the word ‘work’ by him. He didn’t understand the meaning of it. What would he do? Wash dishes, wait at tables? He said he’d be quite prepared to do either or both if he could support himself like that. I told him to go ahead, but I’d bet he would need a work permit before long. In the end, he came back with me, though swearing he now had
an
ambition in life and would return under his own steam, for ever. We had a last day swimming from our favourite beach and to please him, and to make up for being so edgy, I took his photograph. He loves having his photograph taken and is always complaining because I’m not interested in portraits – ‘I’d make such a wonderful subject.’ He posed himself on a rock on the hillside not far from Gracie’s house and didn’t guess I was moving him so that I would get more of the background – the trees, the great sweep of ocean below, that same distant smudge of an island I’d seen earlier – than of him. I wanted it as a memento of where Susannah might have been.