The Memory Box (21 page)

Driving back finally to London, on a cold afternoon with a threat of snow behind the dull sky hanging over the bleak countryside, I found myself wondering if that was after all entirely true. Did I really, still, want to move on all the time? Surely I was more centred on my home, my flat, than a true wanderer would be? And once I found a house that attachment would increase. Then I had a fleeting new thought about the memory box: it wasn’t a box reflecting a woman focused on domesticity. Not exactly a startlingly original observation, but it made me consider for a moment what kind of daughter Susannah would have wanted me to be. I was beginning to think she would have wanted someone different from the daughter Charlotte wanted me to be, that she would not have brought me up in the same way. I had never let myself think before that Charlotte as a mother was anything less than perfect – she was so kind and gentle, so wrapped up in my welfare, so determined always to put me first and forgive me anything. Love had never been more unconditional than the love she had shown to me. I felt I was betraying her in some way when it entered my head that maybe Susannah would have treated me differently and that it might have been better for me. Was Charlotte what I had needed, however great her devotion to me?

My father had not always thought so. Sometimes he had
criticised
her for what he called ‘over-indulging’ me (carefully avoiding that unpleasant but more accurate word ‘spoiling’). I’d heard him say of me, ‘She needs to learn not to be so selfish’, and, ‘She needs to discipline herself.’ He accused Charlotte, too, of letting me flit from one thing to another without her insisting on any kind of continuity or stability, and told her this was bad for me. That phrase – ‘bad for her’ – was said quite a lot when I was a child and not only by my father. My grandmother used it frequently. She also suggested to Charlotte that I needed a tougher approach: ‘Catherine needs to finish what she starts sometimes,’ she said. So far as I can recall, Charlotte never made any reply to either of them. She didn’t argue with them, or tell them, as she well could have done, to deal with me themselves if they didn’t approve of how she treated me, but I always had the sense that she didn’t agree with them. She never made me carry on doing anything I said I was bored with. My boredom was enough. She would always try to find me something more interesting to do and was never angry. ‘You give that child her head,’ my grandmother would say, ‘she’ll get out of control if you’re not stricter, she’ll think she never has to settle to anything.’

Did I ever get out of control? Not while my grandmother was still alive, but perhaps I came near it for a while later. I was expelled from one school for a ridiculously silly reason. All I did was spray paint on a wall. True, it was a newly whitewashed wall and, true, what I sprayed along it was vulgar and maybe a bit cruel, but at the time I saw no harm in it: I thought it was funny, and the cartoon I did at the end of what I’d written I thought quite talented. We had this games teacher called Miss Henn and a science master called Mr E. G. Gannon. We all hated both of them. Miss Henn was a bully who forced girls who had no athletic ability at all to try to do backward flips off a high box and regularly reduced them to tears, which she seemed to enjoy.
I
was never one of her victims but I couldn’t bear her malicious attitude. And Mr E. G. Gannon – he always wrote his name like that, complete with initials – was a bully of another sort. He liked to sneer at pupils, using heavy sarcasm to humiliate them, and we all dreaded his lessons. Well, it was known that Miss Henn and Mr E. G. Gannon went out together – they’d been seen walking in the Botanical Gardens, holding hands (which of course made all of us thirteen-year-olds feel sick because he was fat and she was ugly). I sprayed on the new white wall the words ‘
HENN LAYS E.G.G.
’ and I did a cartoon of the two of them with Miss Henn lying on top of Mr Gannon. She had very bushy, red, coarse hair and a big, powerful bottom so that was simple enough to caricature and he was bald and wore enormous horn-rimmed spectacles and had a droopy moustache, so there was plenty there to identify him. A stranger couldn’t possibly have recognised that my crude outline was a representation of those two teachers, but the whole school did.

When the headmistress asked me
why
I did it I remember shrugging and being unable to answer and I suppose that made my little crime more heinous than ever. ‘It was a joke,’ I said, which maddened her further. She said she would like this ‘joke’ explained to her because she failed entirely to see any humour in my actions. I had ruined a newly painted wall, and would most certainly have to pay for it to be repainted, and I had hurt two innocent teachers very much. ‘
They
hurt people all the time,’ I blurted out. But the headmistress didn’t want to hear my excuses. She wanted me to apologise profusely to the two teachers and then she might consider allowing me to remain in her school. I refused. My parents were angry with me, but I presented myself so convincingly to them as the champion of the underdog that they were not as furious as perhaps they should have been. My father did say, rather wearily, that writing rude words on a wall was no way to register any kind of protest, but
he
was so annoyed with the school for expelling me that he didn’t go on about it.

So, as I said, it was fairly silly. I got into another school without too much difficulty and behaved myself. But I went off to London the moment I finished ‘A’ Levels, and lived in a squat for a bit (not long), took drugs (not many) – I suppose all that kind of pretty normal late-teenage behaviour could be called getting out of control. (And becoming pregnant, of course, but nobody knew about that at home.) The whole of that period was in any case short-lived and I was no more wild than a good many of my contemporaries, and unlike most of them I never broke off with my parents. They always knew where I was, if not exactly what being where I said I was amounted to – the address they had sounded perfectly respectable and they would never have envisaged a filthy, boarded-up basement. I never fell out with my father and mother, nor made enemies of them, and even then I never let a week go by without ringing them up. I call that quite remarkably exemplary behaviour, in the circumstances.

But it is true that though I deny I was ever
out
of control I felt no one was
in
control of me, especially not myself. It scared me. I remember feeling dangerous, as though I might do anything and not be able to stop myself even if I wanted to. My life up to then had been so neat and tidy, so safe and secure and predictable, thanks to my parents. I’d never had to look after myself, except in the most trivial of ways, and suddenly I was among a group of people my own age who didn’t care about me and who couldn’t look after themselves, never mind me. Most of the time they weren’t even interested in me, whereas I was used to being the focus of a most intense and loving interest. This absence of attention did odd things to me. It excited me at first, it felt thrilling, but then I began to fear the freedom I’d snatched and had to pretend I didn’t. A lot of energy went into this pretence and it changed me. I’d always said what I thought in the
past
, but now I had to struggle not to say I hated the way we lived and despised most of the people I was with. I’d only landed in the squat because of a friend at school whose brother lived there. We’d gone to visit him one Saturday just after ‘A’ levels, and I’m sure he spotted my potential as a source of money – probably his sister had filled him in on the fact that I had plenty of pocket money and never needed a holiday job. But I wasn’t stupid, it didn’t really take me long, once I’d moved in, to realise I was being used. We all shared everything but I was the one, sometimes the only one, who had anything to share.

At first, I was quite proud of this. I had the money, I hadn’t done a damned thing to earn it; I was lucky, therefore it was only fair I should subsidise those less fortunate. I approved; I believed that single-handed I was righting some kind of wrong. And, of course, it made me popular – how generous I was, how liberal. But doubt set in pretty soon. I remember lying on a dirty mattress, barely able to see because the electricity was cut off and the last candle had been used, my head aching from lack of air and from the noise of heavy metal music playing at full blast in the room above us, where a whole band squatted complete with Alsatian dog. It was like being in a prison, and yet I knew I’d put myself there and that I
could
get out. All it took was will power, which for the first time in my life I didn’t have – because of the drugs, I suppose (though I was a cautious user, compared to the others, and never took heroin or LSD, nothing more than cannabis really). But I was not well and that, too, was such a shock to my system it made it harder yet to leave. After two months had gone by I felt ghastly most of the time – I distinctly remember the terror of trying to haul myself up from that disgusting mattress and finding I couldn’t, that I had to flop back, I was so dizzy and weak. ‘Poor baby’, that was what the boy I was with said, and not kindly – ‘poor little baby, all on her own without her
mummy
.’ I think I cried, with humiliation as much as anything.

What kept me there, apart from feeling ill and determination to pretend I was liking it, were the good days. The bright, sunny summer days when we went into the garden (completely overgrown of course but still a garden and really more attractive because the grass was thick and the trees unpruned and heavy with fruit) and for once someone had bought proper food and was cooking it on an open fire and we all sat in a circle round it and the music was just one guitar and we all sang. Sweet. Then there were other good days, when we would go out as a gang, to a festival, and everything seemed wonderfully free and easy and fun. Life in a comfortable suburban home such as that of my parents seemed ludicrous then – this was much better, it was what I wanted. My fears evaporated and I didn’t worry so much about feeling strange and complicated and having to hide this from the others because they wouldn’t understand. How could they, when I didn’t understand myself? I began, on those happier days, to think I could train myself to tolerate dirt and disorder and the lack of privacy and all would be well. But I never succeeded. I got pregnant, I had the abortion, survived the infection, and went home, shocked out of my inertia. My mother was pleased to see me. She hadn’t the faintest idea how I’d been living or what had happened. She said only that I was very pale and too thin and needed looking after. She didn’t pry, to my relief. I think she was afraid to. Charlotte was basically a timid person and was always determined to think everything was fine.

Would Susannah have done? Would she have been able to look beyond my pallor, my loss of weight? Would she have been able to tell how near disaster I’d been and how greatly I was in need of a different kind of comfort than good food and rest? Charlotte did pretty well after all, just by being there, ready to take me back and restore me to
health
. Why suppose Susannah could have done any better? Why suppose it would have been a good thing to do any better? I don’t know, at this distance of time, what precisely I mean by ‘better’ either. Talking. I think I must mean that with Charlotte there was no possibility of real talk. I wanted, always, to protect her from the uglier aspects of my life. Would I have wanted to protect Susannah? What difference would it have made that she was my biological mother,
she was me
, in a way Charlotte couldn’t ever be? Kind, trusting Charlotte, around whom I ran rings, may have been dangerous for me in ways I never suspected. I bewildered her with my fierce love for her and yet by my erratic behaviour, so different from her own. She defended me when I had no defence.

I wondered where all this was going. In the direction Tony had always wanted it to go, that was where, the direction I had always refused to take. Slowly, as another person emerged, with the aid of her box, from behind the image I’d had of her, I was falling into the trap of believing I was going to solve a problem I couldn’t even describe.

IT FELT LIKE
an act of pilgrimage, almost an apology, to go to Oxford again soon after my trip to the West Country. I’d thought I would never go back there. God knows why I was feeling apologetic, but it was something to do with the first wavering doubts I’d been having about Charlotte. I felt shabby and soiled by them and so, on what would have been her sixtieth birthday, I drove once more to Oxford and put some roses on her grave.

Charlotte, unlike my father, had not wanted to be cremated. She had time to think about such things and she was adamant. No matter how environmentally wrong it might be, she said she wanted to be buried. Her family would have had her taken back to Edinburgh and buried with her parents but, again, her long time dying had given her the chance to think about this too. She wanted to be buried in Oxford, where she had spent her happily married life and where she had been a stalwart member of so many organisations connected to her local church. She left all decisions about a gravestone to me, apart from telling me she would like one. My father had wanted to be blown out to sea, but she wanted to be tucked up, all neat and tidy, just like herself.

I’d chosen an angel, what else? Perhaps embarrassingly Victorian, but then there was something decidedly Victorian
about
Charlotte in that her virtues were more of that era. And she had liked slightly fussy things, a taste anathema to my father and therefore rarely indulged. The angel was moulded in white marble, a full-length figure with her arms crossed modestly across her chest. On the plinth of this statue I had had engraved the words ‘In memory of
CHARLOTTE
, beloved mother of Catherine’ and then her dates and the fact that she was my father’s wife. When she was buried, at the actual funeral, there was nothing of course for her family to see, and once the angel was in place I doubted if any of them had come to see it. They all lived too far away and it would be unlikely. So no one, so far as I knew, had read the inscription and taken exception to it. It was a lie in stone for someone, say, of Isabella’s way of thinking, but she would never see and be outraged by it. It had pleased me to have those words carved – ‘Beloved mother …’ The world should be told that some mothers are made mothers by the act of birth and some by their own dedication and overwhelming love for a child. Charlotte had always said that being my mother, becoming my mother, was the most fulfilling part of her whole life. All I had done was to pay tribute and acknowledge this.