The Memory Box (18 page)

‘Your mother did that,’ Isabella said, frowning, ‘always playing with it. I never did.’

‘You wore it?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Of course. It wasn’t always hers. It was our mother’s. We both wore it, when we had occasion. Susannah just had more opportunities than I ever did. She wore it so many times I think she thought she owned it, but she didn’t. A little unfair, but there you are.’ She sniffed, and smiled a little too brightly and began whispering about Hector’s knighthood and telling me when it would be announced, reminding me to buy
The Times
that day. I ate my smoked salmon and my Dover sole and drank the champagne before
moving
on to the Chablis, and tried all the time to warm to these relatives of mine. They had aged since I last saw them, quite dramatically, especially Isabella, and I felt I should be able to call forth some sympathy for their grey heads and lined faces and slightly shrunken forms, but I couldn’t. They irritated me, as they always had done. I had nothing in common with Isabella except genes. I smiled politely as she prattled on and thought suddenly that this was even more weird than the realisation I possessed Susannah’s genes. I could see and hear and judge Isabella. Genetically, where did we touch? I longed to be told. I wanted someone to read our separate DNA codes and say there, and there and there. She is your mother’s sister, and there and there and there she is you, you are her.

I felt more connection with Hector, as ever. At least he had not been indifferent to Rory, as Isabella had so often seemed to be. He had had some physical contact with him, if only of a negative sort, taking hold of his arm to shake him, or pushing his hair out of his eyes because it annoyed him to see his son so tousled and wild. Isabella didn’t even have this minimal connection with Rory. She seemed, indeed, to move away whenever, as a child, he drew near and looked as if he were going to touch
her
. She recoiled from his runny nose, telling him to wipe it but not wiping it herself, as most mothers of a small child would do, and if he had dirty hands and made to hold her own hand she would literally step backwards. She always seemed to find him repugnant and yet he was such a very attractive child whom others loved to cuddle, the kind of sweet-faced, blond, blue-eyed boy who looks like a little cherub. Her attitude had always been bewildering: the only clue I had to her behaviour came when my grandmother once told me that Isabella had never got over wanting a girl. Rory himself, when he was old enough to appreciate what effect he appeared to have on his mother, also reckoned he had been
doomed
from birth not to be loved by her and that it wouldn’t have mattered what he’d been like.

It wasn’t something I had ever been able to discuss with my aunt. I was never, in fact, able to discuss anything with her. Sometimes I even wondered if my hostility to the idea of Susannah being my mother stemmed in part from my dislike of her sister. And yet I knew they could not have been alike. On the contrary, from everything I had been told and pieced together they were opposites. Isabella envied her sister for being everything she was not and my birth had apparently been the final blow. Susannah had everything she wanted – but then, of course, she died. She did not have life. I had often wondered if that had made my aunt feel ultimately victorious and had dissolved her feelings of jealousy when it was too late, but that was utterly beyond discussion even now. I would never know. I would never learn the reality about Susannah from her sister, because she tried to mention her as rarely as possible. I would have to mention her name myself and it was still hard to do that. But as that meal went on, and the chat was all of charity organisation concerns and the weather and the purchasing of a new car and other banalities, I grew impatient with my own connivance. When Hector, at the end of the main course, and pudding having been rejected though we were waiting for coffee, left the table to make a phone call, I could curb my impatience no longer.

Apropos of nothing, I suddenly said, ‘Why didn’t you like your sister? Why didn’t you and Susannah get on?’

‘Really, Catherine!’ Isabella protested, as though I had sworn at her. She flushed, too, and looked around as though worrying that anyone had heard me.

‘What?’ I said. ‘It’s a reasonable question, isn’t it?’

‘We’re having a celebratory dinner,’ she said. ‘It isn’t appropriate.’

‘When would it be?’

‘Not here, not in public. Really, you’re spoiling Hector’s party. You’re usually so sensible, you’ve always been sensible about your mother’s death.’

‘Sensible?’

Still Isabella was looking furtive and angry, and now she leaned over the table and in little more than a whisper, more of a hiss, said, ‘She had died, and you never carried on about it. You knew it was a blessing that you had no memory of her. You took to Charlotte and that was that. Sensible. Why start all this up now?’

‘Is it wrong?’ I said, determined to continue now I’d begun. ‘Why hold it against me that at last I’m interested in Susannah?’

‘It does no good.’

‘How do you know? How do you know it wouldn’t do me some good? Why not be pleased I want to know what I refused to know before? My grandmother would’ve been pleased.’

‘She’s dead.’

‘That’s the trouble: everyone who could tell me anything is dead, except for you.’

‘There’s no point to it. You’ll only upset yourself.’

‘I’m not in the least upset, I just want to know more. I’m thirty-one, Isabella. Think about it: I’m her age, the age she was when she died. And I’ve just opened that box she left me – I expect you knew about it – a few months ago. Don’t you think it makes sense, it’s
sensible
, to ask you about my mother however much I’ve blocked her out all my life?’

At that moment, Hector came back and coffee arrived. It was fortunate, really. I’d spoken much too sharply and that was no way to get anything out of Isabella. But as I drank the coffee, and the mundane conversation with Hector resumed, I was aware that my aunt was not as furious as I thought I’d made her. She seemed more shaken perhaps by the mention of the box than angry, and twice Hector asked
her
if she was feeling tired and had to be reassured she was not, or not excessively. We went to the ladies’ powder-room together and when I came out of the lavatory she was sitting before a mirror in the empty room, quite still, looking at herself. I asked, as Hector had done, if she was all right. ‘You’ve distressed me,’ she said; ‘you’ve ruined the evening.’ I said I was sorry, that I hadn’t intended to. ‘I don’t like to talk of Susannah,’ she said. ‘I never have done. It was a waste, a great waste.’

‘What? Her death?’

‘Oh, her death, of course, but what went before.’ She sighed and closed her eyes against the sight of herself. Suddenly, she looked even older and more frail. ‘She never liked me. She was my big sister, but she wanted nothing to do with me. I wanted her but she didn’t want me. It was as simple as that.’

I didn’t speak. Frankly, I found it hard to believe my aunt had wanted to be close to anyone except maybe her dog. She’d never even seemed too keen on old Hector, though he was devoted to her. But there she was, making what for her rated as an intimate confession. She got up, turning away from the mirror, snapping her handbag shut. ‘But when she died’, I risked continuing as we walked towards the door, ‘did you feel differently? Did everything change, did you feel sorry …?’

‘Sorry?’ Isabella said. ‘No, I did
not
feel sorry. It was she who should have felt sorry, for the way she treated me, for what she did, never acting as a sister should.’ She crashed through the door, quite back to her old self. I tried to say I hadn’t meant was she sorry for how jealous she’d been, but that I’d been going to go on to say had she regretted things hadn’t been different between them, but there was no opportunity. She’d had enough of me, she wasn’t prepared to listen any more. We were back at our table and Hector was waiting and from there we swept to the door and parted
company
. I left them in the hotel and found my own taxi and sat in it all the way home feeling confused. I felt I’d been handed some kind of indictment against Susannah, the first attack I’d ever heard made on her. She hadn’t been a good sister, though there had been no clue as to her exact failings, and Isabella still burned with resentment all these years later. I wondered about her obviously high expectations of sisterhood. With no sister of my own I was hardly in a position to understand what she had experienced or expected. But I found, as I turned over in my mind my aunt’s words and how she had said them, that I wanted to defend Susannah without knowing why. Why should she have loved and been close to a sister like Isabella?

Somewhere in Isabella’s head were millions of memories which would be of use to me in this struggle of mine to understand what her dead sister was seeking to do to me, but she had thrown away the key to unlocking them. Either that, or she was deliberately obstructing the flowing of memories she did not want me to share. I took off my finery, got into bed, and then lay for hours thinking once more about the nature of memory, only this time about how selective yet random the system of remembering was in my own case. I’d always been bothered by the recurring memories of what seemed absolutely banal. It was these kind of memories, which had no apparent significance, that puzzled me. I was always thinking of a certain corner in Edinburgh. Into my head would flash a wall, the side of a house, and the view of a cobbled street. I was certain nothing had ever happened to me on such a corner and, though I could not have led anyone to the exact place, I felt it was familiar. There was something ridiculous about how often I saw the wall, the cobbles, the blank emptiness of this harmless scene. Why had it been tucked away? And if my memory had salted away such an inane scene, what else had it got in there? Did I have somewhere memories of my first six
months
, of Susannah? Back to that again, to that wearying straining after lost impressions and all the time wanting to know was it simply that I could not retrieve them or that they weren’t there? It maddened me not to know.

To steady myself, I moved on to trying to sort out my first definite memories. I’d always thought my first concrete memory was of dropping my doll on the garden path and screaming when I saw her china head was shattered. Charlotte had just married my father, so I was nearly two. She herself always remembered this incident because it was the first day she had had total charge of me on her own – my grandmother had gone home the day before after supervising the handover to her care. Charlotte was nervous, so this little mishap had seemed to her like a bad omen, but apparently I was easily comforted, the doll sent to be mended, and another accepted as a substitute. Everyone says two is too young to be sure a memory is ‘true’, and that it is more likely that what is recalled is an adult’s telling of the memory, but I believe mine to be what I myself do remember. But my next early memory is far more vivid and it involves Isabella. I was five. It was a summer’s day, in the garden of our Oxford house. Rory and Isabella were staying with us. I had a plastic teaset and I’d set it out on the paving stones at the back of the house (later replaced by mellow old bricks, but I can see those slabs of York stone quite clearly). Rory and I were sitting there cross-legged on the warm stone and I was pouring ‘tea’ for him out of the tiny red plastic teapot, which had a white lid with a little red knob on it, into cups so small and light that they tipped over easily and took hardly any liquid. Charlotte was somewhere in the house making lunch and my father and Isabella were sitting having a drink, their chairs, old-fashioned deck-chairs, some distance away from us. I can call up the dazzling light, the heat, the sound of water being poured, and I can even feel the sticky plastic handle of the fiddly teapot, so
hard
for me to hold securely in my podgy five-year-old hand. The scene is mundane but the reality of it extraordinary – I can always be ‘in’ it whenever I want.

I visited this memory again that night, enjoying it as I always did. It ended, as ever, with Isabella saying, ‘The image of mother, it’s so unfair.’ And my father saying, ‘She isn’t an image.’ All the times this memory had flashed unbidden into my head, rather than being called up by me, I had disliked what Isabella had said and liked my father’s reproof, or what I took to be a reproof. It pleased me to have him correct her. I liked to hear him say I was my own self and not an image of anyone else, especially someone dead. But that night, after what Isabella had said hours before, I found myself halting and checking the familiar memory. Something was wrong, something jarred. I began at the beginning again … stones … heat … teapot … voices … It made me sweat to try so hard to catch a meaning I’d never thought of. ‘The image of mother …’ But was that it? Had Isabella said ‘the image of
her
mother’ or ‘the image of mother’? I’d always taken her meaning to have been ‘
her
’ mother, but I’d never remembered that she’d said ‘her’. Did she? Again and again, I went over it. No, she had not said ‘her’. She had said ‘the image of mother, it’s so unfair.’ I felt panicky, realising this; the whole memory was slipping and sliding out of control, Rory’s face was hidden, the light was dimmed, the heat receding … and yet why on earth did it matter?

I’d been told that when Susannah died, Isabella had wanted to adopt me. She’d thought not only that my father should be grateful but that it was her right to claim me. It was my father, not my grandmother or Isabella herself, who told me this when I was grown up, with some indignation as well as amusement. My father said she had brought considerable pressure to bear, pointing out that a man on his own with his living to make was in
no
position ‘to rear’ (as she’d put it) a baby girl. When he had vehemently rejected her offer, which had sounded more like a demand, he’d pointed out that her mother, my grandmother, had said she would be more than happy to have me live with her during the week when he was working and he’d take over at weekends. He could afford a nanny and she would do all the actual looking after. But Isabella had gone on the offensive at once, saying that he was taxing her mother’s strength and that at seventy-two she was not up to the demands made on her by a baby and then toddler even if there was a nanny as well. The responsibility would be hers and my father was taking advantage of her and asking too much. Her health would suffer and her life would be shortened. There had been a horrible argument only resolved by my grandmother discovering what Isabella had been saying and more or less telling her to mind her own business. Then, of course, within a very short time, Charlotte had come along, solving everything.