The Memory Box (22 page)

It’s true what they say, about having a grave to visit being comforting and important, however ludicrous the idea. It didn’t make me shiver, to imagine Charlotte’s rotting body under the grass. On the contrary, it steadied me, to know what was left of her was there, quite dead. I sat on a bench for a few moments opposite her grave and wondered what I would have felt if Susannah had been buried and I had had a grave to visit. Would I have gone, now, and sat thinking about her there? It might have given me some feeling of reality about her. But it might have had another kind of effect, a harmful one. I thought again, sitting beside Charlotte’s grave, of the dying, of the pain and distress, and it was awful to recall even though I could remind myself it
was
long since over. If I had sat beside Susannah’s grave I would have been forced not to remember her dying, because I had nothing to remember and torture myself with, but forced to
imagine
what it had been like. I’d only begun to do that recently, in odd flashes of speculation, since opening the box, and I had quickly dampened them down. I felt shivers go through me whenever I thought about being with her at the moment of death. I’d been with Charlotte, but that was different. We’d said our farewells, I knew what was coming. But then, with Susannah, I had been a baby. I was not in her arms, my grandmother had said, but lying in a cot beside her bed. They found her dead, with her hand in mine, thrust through the bars of the cot, my tiny hand warm, clutching her dead fingers in my sleep, her face pressed up against the side of the cot to be near me, my breath making the strands of her hair flutter a little … it was horrible to me to think of the scene and so I never had done.

But I did then. I thought of Susannah straining to be near me, clinging on to me for dear life, and myself oblivious. No harm had been done to me, I knew nothing about the dying. I was told I did not even whimper as my hand was detached from hers. There was no possibility of my experiencing any kind of shock. In the Baby Book Susannah had kept (one of those cosy little volumes with a naked baby cooing ‘My Records’ on the cover) my grandmother had written for the second day after Susannah’s death ‘first tooth cut’. She’d tried to keep these pathetic entries going: and so my first tooth was of enough importance in the midst of her grief to have to write it down. So while Susannah was dying I was cutting a tooth – the juxtaposition struck me as farcical. This same book had been passed on to Charlotte in due course and she had seen no trace of the absurd about it. To her, it was like a holy book. I was nearly two before she started making entries herself, but once she did she was
indefatigable
. She had recorded my first clear sentence in red, with a line of exclamation marks – ‘Want choclick, Mama!’ The ‘Mama’ was underlined. Maybe I hadn’t said the word at all before that, or had I only said it to my grandmother? I’d hardly have known to call my grandmother granny, so presumably I’d called her ‘Mama’. But do babies only know the word from hearing mothers say it to them – are they just imitating what they are coaxed to say? My, the mysteries of motherhood. At any rate, finally some few weeks after the handover, I said the magic word to Charlotte and she was thrilled. She loved the mother word, all versions of it, Ma, Mama, Mum, Mummy, all of them. Yet I know I never used it as much as other children. Once I’d mastered her name, I liked to call her Charlotte, I suppose because I must have liked the sound and was proud of being able to say it. And perhaps because I was imitating my father and I wanted to call her what he called her. But I was aware, all the same, that Charlotte preferred Mummy. She always smiled delightedly whenever I raced across the playground towards her yelling, ‘Mummee – Mummeee!’ When I’d thrown myself into her eager arms and she was hugging me tight she’d say, ‘Mummy’s got you, Mummy’s got you,’ and I’d hear the pleasure in her voice. But she never stopped me calling her by her Christian name. She let me choose my own way.

I’d never called Susannah anything, that was for sure. What had she had from me? Gurglings, I suppose, and smiles. I imagined her face bending over that cot, pale and wasted, dark shadows under her eyes, and I heard her shallow breaths and, worst of all, I felt the sweat on her slippery fingers as they held my own … It was a tableau I had taken care never to reconstruct, and Charlotte’s graveside was no place to begin to do it, and yet as I got up from the bench and began to walk away it wasn’t the birds in the trees above I was hearing, or the crunch of the gravel
on
the path under my feet, but the creak of the cot as I moved and the whimper I was making in my sleep. I saw the room I had never seen, with the curtains drawn, the light dim, and this poor woman hovering over her baby and dying … Mawkish? Of course. I laughed at myself as I stumbled out of the churchyard, but I let the tears that had gathered in my eyes leak out down my face. I didn’t need enlightenment as to why I was wallowing in sentiment now, but I couldn’t work out how it connected with my earlier feelings about myself. All I felt was that it did. I was getting nearer to something important and I knew it had been a mistake to break off from concentrating on the memory box.

Still, the space I’d given myself through working again and enjoying it had made me a little more objective. Back in my flat, I realised there wasn’t much left that had been in the box to concentrate on. So many of the objects had been already dealt with – the feathers had been thrown into the sea, the red hat left on an aeroplane, the rucksack and map used. The shell? It still sat there but held no mystery any more now I’d walked on beaches full of similar ones. I’d worn the necklace, to great effect, and looked at myself in the mirror, and I’d followed up an address in the address book. The sum total of all this was not negligible, but nor had there been any blinding revelations, and I hadn’t reached any useful conclusion. All I had left, though, were those things I’d thought the least interesting – the paintbox, the incomplete painting, the prints cut out of a book or a catalogue.

They were still in the box. I got out the painting and paintbox and set them out on my bed. They were as uninspiring as I remembered. Was that why they were numbered almost last, 9, 10? Or was it because they were the most important? Guessing games again. I picked up the painting and propped it up, looking at it first from a distance and
then
scrutinising it closely. It was as unexciting as I’d first thought, showing a stretch of moorland with what looked like heather growing on it, and a hill behind with a stone cottage just visible, halfway up. The moorland in the foreground had been neatly painted, though the heather was clumsily suggested, but the hill was only sketched in, in pencil, and so was the building. What puzzled me was trying to decide what on earth it was that had captured Susannah’s imagination enough for her to want to paint it – for I was quite sure this half-finished effort was her own. There was no signature on the painting, but the whole style was reminiscent of the famous meadow watercolour. There was nothing particularly striking about it, nothing to make anyone wish it had been completed. It could be virtually anywhere in the British Isles, on any of the high ground in England, Scotland or Wales. There were no distinguishing characteristics to pinpoint the location. Even the heather didn’t pin it to Scotland – plenty of heather elsewhere. Why on earth had this unfinished watercolour been left to me?

Completely baffled, but at least calm, I turned to the paintbox itself. An ordinary Winsor & Newton paintbox containing the usual small blocks of paint, twelve of them, six either side of the slot for the brush, and the brush lying there, its bristles (good quality) cleaned of paint. The red paints had barely been touched. I touched them. I put my finger on them, rubbing it over the still shiny surface. They felt firm, solid. The browns, greens and yellows were worn down, as were the black and purple, corresponding to the colours already used in the painting. Not by much, though. She had been sparing with the paint. This painting of Susannah’s was on a real artist’s board. I turned it over and saw the name of an Edinburgh art shop stamped on the back. It seemed likely that this was a Scottish scene, one she had painted, perhaps, while she still lived at home, before ever
she
met my father. There were moors within easy reach of my grandmother’s house – I’d been taken to them by her myself as a child, with Rory, and heard tales of her taking her own children there.

So, an unfinished, not particularly well executed watercolour of an unmemorable country scene, probably in Scotland. Surely the most significant thing about it, then, must be its very unfinished state. Quite pleased with how cool and rational I was being, I put it to myself that something unfinished needed to be finished. Therefore it had been left to me with the hope that I would go ahead and finish it. Now, to do so I would need to locate this scene and go there and prop up my little easel and get painting. I was feeling quite the ace sleuth by then, basking in my own cleverness. But I wasn’t going to act on it. I’d had enough of tearing off on wild-goose chases, however enjoyable. Instead, I went and filled a jam jar with water, took the painting through to the kitchen, and dipping the brush into the water started to fiddle with the green paint. I dabbed a bit on and saw of course it was the wrong green, a mismatch made worse by its freshness. I played with the two greens on offer, mixing them on the lid, and added a bit of brown and a bit of yellow and a dab of black, and then I tried again. Better. Still not an exact match, but better.

It was odd that she’d started with the foreground. Nobody ever does that. First thing we were taught in art lessons was to start at the top and work downwards. She should have begun with the sky, which would be grey. Any other colour would look wrong. A pale, misty grey, very difficult to capture. I stroked my cleaned brush over the white and then the black and applied it to the painting. Too deep. It needed more white. I put the brush down and stared again at the painting, now with my own inexpert marks upon it. One thing, I couldn’t really ruin it since it showed little talent.
And
yet I felt I was doing just that, ruining it, defiling whatever of hidden value had been there. I was rejecting what I had decided was her purpose in leaving it to me: to encourage me to seek this place out in order to complete the painting as faithfully as I could. I had to be
there
, where she had been. Anything else would be cheating.

Still I resisted the crazy idea of trailing round Scotland looking for a likely stretch of open moorland – good God, I’d be spoiled for choice. But then fate took a hand. I was asked to do a job for the Scottish Tourist Board, which involved taking photographs not for a gaudy colour brochure but for a specially commissioned book called something like
Hidden Scotland
. I was to search out places not on the usual tourist beat and try to capture ‘true wildness’, making the shots as dramatic as possible. They’d wanted Fay Godwin, but she wouldn’t even consider it – she did her own books and had her own projects – so I felt flattered to be next in line after someone whose work I’d admired so much. If ever I were good enough to have my own exhibition I’d want it to match her superb ‘Presences of Nature’.

Tony always said how unexpected it was that I lacked that kind of ambition (to have an exhibition, he meant). He maintained that on the surface I seemed the ambitious type – opinionated, even aggressive in manner. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t channel my energies into getting together a body of work which would justify some kind of public display and through being exhibited would raise my status, not to mention my bargaining power. He thought I frittered my talents away on commercial jobs unworthy of them. In fact, I take only those assignments that appeal to me and, as he well knew, the money is irrelevant. There was nothing wrong, that I could see, in working for commercial concerns.

So, I have no ambition in the sense that Tony wanted me to have. I never said so to him, but my only ambition is to
keep
on doing what I like and get nearer to satisfying myself. That’s the hardest thing to do, satisfy myself. I’m always just missing, not exactly perfection – I don’t think perfection exists, or even that one should expect it to – but missing what I had intended to capture. Sometimes it’s just a question of a shadow here, a darkening where there should have been more light, or of a very slightly wrong angle – something technical like that. Technique is important and mine isn’t of the highest standard. I understand the technicalities – I am not one of those photographers who haven’t been trained properly in the use of a camera – but I am too impatient to profit from my understanding. I tend to rush, to follow my eye too quickly. This captures mood and atmosphere, but it damages the standard of the result. One day, I always tell myself, I will take time and try harder and I will be satisfied. But I never do.

I didn’t think I would do it on the Scottish Tourist Board job either, but I was quite confident I could satisfy them, if not myself, and that was enough. I thought I would start off around Edinburgh and base myself there. So it was a logical next step to ask Isabella and Hector if I could stay with them. Isabella was as surprised to hear my request as I was to find myself making it. I hadn’t been near their house for a long time, a fact much resented by my aunt. Once Rory had left home, there was no attraction. I still went to stay with my aunt and uncle so long as he came home in the school holidays, but when they were over, that was it. Rory left school at seventeen – he refused to stay any longer – and after that he came and stayed with us sometimes in Oxford. My grandmother was dead by then, so there was nothing to take me back to Edinburgh. Probably this upset Isabella and seemed like a calculated insult as well as siding with Rory, but I didn’t see it like that. I couldn’t really believe she wanted me to visit her anyway when we had never really got on and she was surely as conscious of
this
as I was. The odd phone call, the obligatory Christmas and birthday cards with maybe a note inside, and that was enough in my opinion.