The Memory Box (2 page)

It was a large house with plenty of room for everyone. My father had converted it himself, thinking of all kinds of ingenious ways to modernise it without destroying the more attractive features of its Edwardian character. From the outside, it was impossible to tell, unless you were
an
architect (as he was), how the dark rooms had been made light. I loved that house. Everyone else’s seemed dull or cramped by comparison, claustrophobic and fussy, whereas ours was all pale wood floors, and glass skylights and doors, and white paint. It was spacious and sparsely furnished, and full of greenery. Converted in the early Seventies, it was ahead of its time, or ahead of what became the fashion, in being Scandinavian in taste. My Scottish grandmother thought it was comfortless, cold and austere, but the cousins admired it. The top floor was turned into a kind of permanent dormitory for them, complete with bathroom and kitchen, and they could hardly bear to leave at the end of the holidays. I slept up there with them, excited at first to be part of a huge gang.

I don’t know what happened to that feeling. I don’t even know what happened to most of those cousins. The closeness, I now realise, was all Charlotte’s doing – she created the atmosphere in which those relationships flourished. Left to myself, I have not bothered to keep in touch with any of my cousins except Rory, and he was never part of that gang. Rory came to stay on his own or with his mother and had nothing to do with Charlotte’s side of the family. He was my sole cousin on Susannah’s side, the son of her sister, my Aunt Isabella. It was Rory who looked like Susannah, a fact our grandmother constantly remarked upon – ‘Sideways genes,’ she said, not that I knew what she meant. All I knew was that unlike my other cousins he didn’t go in for sport and noisy games, and I wasn’t in awe of him as I was of them. But it took a long time for me to feel more drawn to him than to them. By the time I was seven or eight years old, however, Rory’s so-called wickedness was already becoming deeply attractive and I was fascinated by him.

It was Rory who found a way into the attics. I had never been in the least curious about what lay under the roof of
our
house, though I knew well enough there was something above the top floor. From time to time bits of old furniture would arrive – things left in wills to one or other of my parents – and they would groan and look at each other and ask whether they should sell whatever it was, or put it in the attics. Usually they decided to wait a decent interval before getting rid of the item, and someone would come to help my father cart it up the stairs. Rory was intrigued by what was stored up there. He thought there might be hidden treasure we could discover. I jeered at him for getting silly ideas from reading ‘kids’ books (whereas I was very proud of reading practical how-to-do-this-and-that books). But he persisted in imagining what lay above our heads, and so persuasive was he that against all my strong common sense I almost came to believe there might indeed be wonderful things, long since forgotten and waiting to be discovered. Eventually I agreed it was worth looking and said I’d ask my father. But that was the last thing Rory wanted – he was all for secrecy and making an adventure of it and somehow he drew me into his plan.

He insisted we should go exploring at night. We were sleeping on the top floor. With just the two of us there it seemed quite echoey, we seemed lost among all the beds. But Rory liked that, he liked things to be a bit creepy. We slept next to each other and he said he’d wake me when it was time. But he didn’t need to; I didn’t sleep and longed for him to nudge me and say we should go. When eventually he did – he’d been waiting for the noises below that would indicate that my parents had gone to bed – I bounded up, excited in spite of myself. Rory exaggerated every movement, pausing dramatically to listen every few steps, and I remember I found my heart thudding ridiculously. He led the way to the end of the huge room and to the top of the stairs and then pointed upwards. There was a handle, painted white and quite distinct, in the middle of the wooden
ceiling
. He had earlier fetched a tall stool, and now I held it while he clambered up and pulled the handle. Smoothly, silently, a metal ladder unfolded.

We went up into two attics separated by a thin wall with a small door in it. I think this plywood wall corresponded with a valley in the roof. The wall itself was only about five feet high, and the door was tiny, so that we felt like Alice in Wonderland as we crawled through (I couldn’t imagine how an adult could have managed it, but maybe they didn’t; maybe the attics were always approached separately from different ends). Rory had a torch and shone it round each attic in turn. They were full of the old bits of furniture, mostly chairs, dark wooden things with velvet padded seats, and small tables with spindly legs. But there were chests and boxes too and we peered inside some of them, only to find they were packed with brocade curtains and musty old clothes. It was very disappointing and not even Rory could sustain my interest. I went back down the ladder on my own, to his annoyance, and left him to close the trapdoor, which he managed only after a great struggle.

But what we missed up there was the memory box, my box. It was in the further attic all the time, the one I hadn’t had the patience to inspect thoroughly. Rory had shone his torch round and all we had seen were books, dozens of big volumes stacked up round the walls, and lots of huge rolls of what looked like paper (and I now know were maps and architectural drawings). I only found the box, hidden behind these piles, when I came to sell the house. I had to force myself then to inspect the attics, as well as every other room, to make decisions about where everything should go.

And that was only a little over a year ago, a terrible year, too terrible to dwell on, so I won’t. My father, aged only sixty-five, and my mother – Charlotte, that is – only fifty-nine, both died within eight months of each other. The shock was agonising, my sense of outrage violent. This double
blow
seemed to me an injustice far more monstrous than the death of Susannah when I was a baby.

I don’t know which death hit me hardest. My mother’s, I think, because it took so long, and I had time to realise what was happening, but my father’s was the more unbelievable, and in some ways more painful. He died first, of a stroke, without any warning. My mother went on living in the family house in the brief interval between my father’s death and the onset of her own terminal illness. She had no desire to sell it, to leave and move somewhere smaller where there would be no reminders of him. She wanted to be reminded of him: in fact, she found every reminder a comfort, her only comfort apart from me. Perhaps eventually, as she aged, she would have been obliged to move. I might even have tried to persuade her to do so since the house was so very large for one person, but she didn’t have time to grow old. She died in hospital, slowly, and it was left to me to dispose of our beloved home and its contents.

There was always the option of living in the house myself, but I never considered this. It wasn’t anything to do with its size, there were other reasons. The house was in Oxford. I didn’t wish to live in Oxford, desirable though many people think it is. Being in that house after she and my father died was torture to me. The memories she wrapped round herself like a warm blanket pricked me like a hair shirt. Forced to enter it, to get things occasionally for my mother when she was in hospital, I had been overwhelmed by a longing to be back in my early childhood with my parents, loved by them and loving them. All the time I was fighting my way through crowds not of ghosts but of sensations. I felt slightly faint even putting my key in the lock, and once I was through the front door and had closed it behind me, hearing that distinctive click it made, and the light rattle of the brass letter box, I felt a kind of unpleasant excitement. The power
of
houses has always bewildered me – that mere bricks and mortar should possess such atmosphere is uncanny.

After my mother died, the hardest thing I had to do, far harder than organising her funeral, was go into our old home. I wept then as I had not done before. For a whole month, I was obliged to go there day after day until every bit of furniture, every object, every book and picture, every piece of clothing, every last curtain and cushion was sorted out and ready to be collected by all manner of people. Someone suggested that I should employ a house clearance company, but I saw it as my duty to Charlotte to do the job myself, and I did it. This was, of course, how I found the box, though I very nearly missed it. I left the attics until last, and almost succumbed to the temptation to let the owner of a second-hand shop nearby do this final part of the clearing out, since I knew, or thought I knew, there was only junk up there. But then I recollected that glimpse, so long ago, of what had looked like drawings or plans. They might be work of my father’s and if so I felt I should at least look at them.

I was very tired that last day, when I made myself go up there. The ladder didn’t glide down easily as it had done all those years ago for Rory. It was stuck through disuse, I suppose, and I had to yank it hard. I had difficulty, too, clambering up through the remarkably small gap and realised only when I’d hauled myself through that there must be a far bigger entry into the other attic or no furniture could ever have been taken up. I should have looked for another trapdoor. But once in the attics everything was as I remembered – chairs, little tables, chests of clothes. The second-hand dealer could come for them, his lucky day (because some might be of value). The rolls of paper were indeed old architectural drawings, though none was signed and I didn’t know if they were my father’s. I began pulling them along, covering myself with dust, ready to drop them
through
the trapdoor so that I could take them into the garden and make a bonfire.

My father could never throw anything away – he was a hoarder, everything had to be kept, either in case it came in useful (however unlikely), or simply because he was fond of whatever it was. He was very fond of all his old plans and drawings – the very paper seemed precious to him. When I was little, he used to let me help him roll up the huge sheets he worked on and I loved to do it. ‘Slowly now, Catherine,’ he’d say, and, ‘Keep it even, keep it even, don’t press too hard.’ I’d roll up the paper at one end, struggling to do it neatly and keep pace with his rolling at the other, and together we would achieve the perfect roll he wanted. I found it hard to be slow and methodical and careful. I was all rush, and wondered why I couldn’t be like my father. When I ‘helped’ him do such simple jobs he’d smile at me and say I’d done well. He knew, even then, when I was only five or six, that I was not like him and he made allowances for my clumsiness and impatience all the time. Later, when I used to get upset because I wasn’t the person I wanted to be, wasn’t like him or Charlotte, he’d comfort me and say nobody could help their nature, all they could do was try to curb what they didn’t like about themselves. My grandmother, if she was around and heard him, would sigh and say, ‘Some people have a lot of curbing to do,’ or, more puzzlingly, ‘Some people I knew never learned to curb their waywardness.’

But I couldn’t keep these dusty old rolls of crackly paper. And they were too personal to give away, even if anyone had wanted them, so I had decided I would have to burn them, however upsetting this proved to be. (I didn’t have time, though, in the end, and took them with me after all.) It was in moving these rolls that I found the box. What I actually saw was something that looked like a tarpaulin wrapped round a roughly cylindrical bundle and tied very
securely
. My attention might not have been caught if it had not been for an incongruous pink label attached to the cord knotted round this parcel. On the label, written in ink which had faded but was still decipherable, was my own name – ‘For my darling Catherine Hope, in the future’, it said.

I felt instantly cold. Cold, and also apprehensive. Yet there was nothing frightening in itself about this pretty pink label, which was decorated all round the edge with tiny drawings of flowers, the petals of each one carefully coloured in. It looked, this package, as if inside its wrapping there would be a present, to be uncovered and put under a Christmas tree or on a table with a birthday cake, and yet I was afraid of its innocence. I crouched down beside it in the dim light of the attic, wondering what I should do. I would have to take it with me and open it, but I was afraid not only of further grief but of pathos, which I dreaded even more. How could this not turn out to be a pathetic task? Whatever my indifference towards Susannah, I could not help but be affected by the sight of her box. I wished passionately she had not done this. Who had thought of it, or was it her own idea? And what had she imagined was the purpose of her legacy? To tell me about herself? To make some kind of statement? To try to share in my unknown future? But she must have known I would be surrounded by information about her, that I would have photographs and memorabilia, that my father and her family would talk about her. What she could not have guessed was that I hadn’t wanted to know very much. My extreme contentment with Charlotte might have hurt her – and thinking that suddenly made me wonder if there was another motive behind the leaving of this box. It could be a sort of weapon, to be used from beyond the grave. A way of combating my denial. Was it screaming, ‘I was your mother! Listen to me!’?

I knew I was being melodramatic. The box wasn’t screaming at all. It had been stuck quietly here, muffled by
its
shroud of thick material, for nearly thirty years. It had been silent all that time, exerting no influence whatsoever, except perhaps over my father. I imagine every now and again he remembered its existence and fretted about it. Fingering the label, I realised he must have detached it from the box itself and tied it on to the cord when he had wrapped the box in this protective covering. Why had he done that? To alert me, to make sure it could be recognised for what it was when the time came? I struggled to remember precisely what he had said that morning of my twenty-first birthday. He’d briefly described how Susannah had kept this memory box absolutely private. She had told him she was preparing it for me, ‘in case’, but he had had no part in it. She didn’t want to discuss it, nor did she want help in deciding what should go in it. It had occupied her when she was too weak to move much from her bedroom and he had never seen what went inside. He had urged me, unconvincingly, to try to think of it as a happy experience. Susannah wanted to be secretive, and since by then she had so little privacy left in her life he had not pried. After she died, and he went through the miserable business of clearing her things out, he had been surprised how heavy the box was. But he hadn’t looked inside. He’d sealed the edges with masking tape and wrapped it in waterproof material, and put it in the basement of their Edinburgh house until it was sold. It went with the rest of the furniture into storage during the time I lived with my grandmother and he lived in his flat, and then, when he married Charlotte and moved to his new job in Oxford, it went with them. Every now and again he and Charlotte had discussed when I should be told about the box, but for years the time had not seemed right.