The Memory Box (24 page)

For years now Rory had maintained he didn’t care any more about the break with his parents. He claimed to have no feelings for them. The parental bond, especially the myth of the maternal bond, meant nothing to him. He thought of Hector and Isabella as weird strangers to whom he was connected by an accident of blood. He said he cared no more about them than I did about Susannah and that, like me, he denied he had anything of either of them in him. He was a freak, genetically independent. We were united, he said, in our repudiation of any link with our biological mothers. I’d struggled to protest that his case was different because Isabella had brought him up, as Charlotte had brought me up, and that this forged another and just as strong a bond, but he wouldn’t have it. Isabella, he said, had not wanted any bond. She’d worked hard, on the contrary, to keep him at arm’s length and had fought his own need for closeness. Hector he didn’t feel so bitter about – he was a man, not so much had been expected of him. Isabella had carried him in her body and given birth to him and fed him and he saw it as terrible that she had no love
for
him long before he put her to the test. Mothers, Rory said, giving the lie to his own dismissal of the maternal instinct, should love their children. Nothing else mattered to a child.

I fell asleep finally still troubled, worrying about whether Rory had been right, and determined to talk to Isabella properly if she would allow me to. I wasn’t, after all, here just to discover things about Susannah.

ISABELLA, THE NIGHT
before, had seemed different, but I’d reminded myself I hadn’t seen her in her own home since I was an adult. Maybe she’d always been hospitable and I’d just never appreciated it. She gave me a delicious dinner, cooked entirely by herself and very expertly, and was quite charming. Never in my life had I seen any vestige of charm in her before, but in her own home that night it was there and for the first time I saw Rory in her. She’d been to some committee meeting that day to do with her voluntary work for the aged, and she recounted to Hector and me with astonishing verve what had been said by the other members, imitating their various accents and intonations until she had us laughing out loud. I’d never known she was an excellent mimic – just like Rory. She had exactly his taste for spirited mockery and it was a shock. Even as I was listening to her, though, it had crossed my mind that Rory must surely know this, must have been aware of this other side of his mother.

The charm was not in evidence at breakfast. Isabella was back to being the curt, brisk woman I knew. She didn’t ask how I had slept or betray any concern about me at all, but merely said she had a busy day ahead and I must look after myself because she had no time to run after me. I said, of course, that I didn’t want her to bother about me and all I
wanted
was coffee and then I’d be on my way. We agreed we’d see each other in the evening and she issued an abrupt command to eat with her. ‘Hector is dining out,’ she said. ‘We’ll be cosy and have something on a tray.’ I said that would be fine. I made my coffee – she jumped irritably when I dropped the bottom part of the espresso machine and told me to be more careful (though since it was metal and undamaged I don’t know why) – and watched her getting ready to go. She sorted out her fearsomely large black handbag on the kitchen table and when she had it organised to her satisfaction and was holding her car keys at the ready she suddenly looked at me intently and said, ‘Do you remember those dancing classes?’ I said naturally I did, I’d adored them. ‘I still have the kilts,’ she said, ‘yours the red, his the green. I came across them just the other day. I kept them for … well, I kept them, in case.’ She did her jacket up, snapped her handbag shut, and said she’d be off. But still she stood there, looking at me, and I began to wonder if she had expected her remark about the kilts to call forth some other response from me, but what could that be? I’d said I recalled the dancing lessons and had loved them – what else was I meant to say? ‘Good times,’ she said at last, and then, turning away and walking to the door, ‘What a waste it all was.’

A waste? Did she mean the cost of those lessons? Surely not. They were held in a dusty church hall without any kind of special facilities and the teacher was a very ordinary middle-aged woman, hardly a professional dance teacher. She taught only Highland dancing – reels, strathspey, sword dances, that kind of thing. There were about twenty of us and we all wore kilts and soft black shoes called pumps. I only attended these classes in the long school summer holidays when I stayed with Rory, between the ages of five and ten, and it was impressed upon me how privileged I was to be allowed to join in for such a limited period. A special
case
was being made for me – normally Miss Wallace required diligent weekly attendance all the year round. I was excited to be included and had no problem with being grateful and thanking Miss Wallace ‘nicely’ as instructed. The lessons were madly energetic and noisy and a lot of fun, with our teacher throwing herself around with an abandon which belied her years (not that I knew what they were). During the few weeks I took part there happened always to be the annual display and Rory and I were selected every year, for three or four years, to demonstrate one of the dances. We loved being the centre of attention, especially Rory, and, I expect, made an attractive couple with Rory so blond and me so dark. Isabella enjoyed getting us ready, putting us into frilly-fronted-and-cuffed white shirts as well as the kilts, and I was aware she was showing us off when she led us, one on each hand, on to the floor to perform. Rory always behaved beautifully on these occasions, quite excelling himself, because for once he was doing something he liked and at the same time pleasing his mother, a rare state of affairs. He was a much better dancer than I was, too. Watching him do a Highland fling was quite something. He was so quick and nimble, his feet flashing from position to position in half the time it took mine, his toes pointed in a way mine never would, and his head held high, whereas I tended to droop. If it had been any other kind of dancing, ballet, say, tremors of unease at his pleasure in it might have coursed through his dear mother’s veins, but as it was Highland dancing she appeared to have no qualms – Highland dancing was manly.

Was that what she had been remembering, not anything as trivial as the cost, but her own pride in Rory’s talent? And was ‘the waste’ the realisation that it had never come to anything, like all his other talents? I wasn’t at all sure, but I suddenly saw how this subject she’d brought up herself could give me the opening I needed. I would tackle her that
evening
, when we were on our own, throwing back at her her own remark about ‘the waste’. As I drove through the Edinburgh traffic I was planning in my head what exactly I would say to her, but I soon had to concentrate so hard that I forgot about it. The trouble was I didn’t know where I was going. I’d told Isabella only that I was doing a job for the Tourist Board and wanted to find some remote moorland not too far away and she’d directed me to the Lammermuir hills – ‘Plenty of moorland there for you.’ I’d taken the road she told me to, but at some point I was going to have to trust to luck and turn off it on to a minor road to find what I hoped to find. I wasn’t foolish enough to imagine I’d discover a hillside exactly corresponding to Susannah’s painting, but considering that scene was pretty much of a nothingness I thought I stood a good chance of matching it well enough. But unfortunately it was raining, that light, misty rain so familiar in the Scottish hills, rain covering everything like the finest gauze, veils of it swathed across the hills. It made no sound on the car roof or the windows, merely bestowing its endless damp caresses silently mile after mile, but I had the windscreen wipers going full pelt and still I was obliged to go slowly and peer anxiously ahead. I could hardly see at all, never mind decide which turning looked the most promising. I soon had no idea where I was. Isabella had told me I’d been to this area on picnics with Hector and Rory, when I was young, as well as with my grandmother, but I had no memory of the countryside though I thought I could remember the picnics. It wouldn’t have much mattered anyway when visibility was so bad, nothing would have leapt out to trigger any deeply buried memories of being here before.

At least this time, this particular mad venture, would be justified by taking photographs, but I couldn’t take any in those conditions.
Hidden Scotland
, indeed – everything would be hidden. But after another half-hour of trundling along
the
little road I’d blundered on to, the sky did begin to lighten and the rain became intermittent. I began to get my bearings and see that I was certainly in the middle of moorland. No heather, of course, but then it was the wrong season. The ground either side of the narrow road still had traces of snow wiped in strands across it and the burns were full of melted ice, but it was spring all the same. I was looking for a track, the sort we used to look for when Hector took us on picnics. If I didn’t remember going with my grandmother, I recalled well enough going with Hector, but I suppose I was older. He liked to find a track so unused it took our sharp young eyes to spot it and then we’d drive up it, bumping along very slowly, and come to a halt when we could no longer see the road. Usually there’d be a stream, a burn, and Rory and I would be allowed to paddle, and Hector would be at his most indulgent, sitting in a collapsible chair he’d brought and nodding off behind a newspaper. Often we’d go off on our own, when we were sure he was asleep, and he’d wake up and panic because we’d vanished and then his roars would bellow out and we’d take our time answering, just to make him suffer more. When he took us home he’d complain to Isabella about our bad behaviour and say he wasn’t taking us again.

All this mundane rambling was filling my head, not thoughts of Susannah, as I looked for a track and found one. I chose it because, although I couldn’t see any cottage, I could see some large stones such as the ones in her painting, and the moorland rose up behind them as the hill did in it. It would do. It was a view as similar to the dull one she had chosen to paint as I was likely to find. Feeling glad that there was no one to see me, I parked the car and got out the bag with the paints and the painting in it. Then I filled a jar with water from the burn and, setting up a little camp stool I’d stuck in the boot, I self-consciously began to paint. I did more staring around than painting. It was all so bleak,
so
colourless. There was nothing to attract the eye and delight it. It seemed an event when a bird, one bird, flew languidly across the sky, barely flapping its wings. When it disappeared all was empty and still. I couldn’t see any sheep, but on the air I could hear a scratchy-throated coughing that I knew belonged to some ancient ewe. I was soon cold crouching there, though I was warmly clad, and wished I’d brought a flask of coffee. Impatiently, I dipped my brush in the water again and mixed grey to start on the sky.

The correct grey was still difficult to capture even with the sky helpfully above me. The longer I gazed at it, the more delicate the grey seemed, paler, softer, more white than grey. The board grew damp as I washed over it again and again – all this, for a dreary grey sky. I knew that at any moment I would become so furious with my hopeless efforts that I’d tear the wretched picture up, so I moved on to the greens and browns of the hillside, of the moorland. This was easier. I matched Susannah’s green quite satisfactorily, given that her paint was old and mine new, and it was fun stippling it with brown and occasionally a very small bit of dark yellow. There were all kinds of colours and tones in the grass, which gradually emerged the longer I looked, and I enjoyed adding minute touches of purple and dots of white. It took me a long time to achieve the effect I wanted – and not, perhaps, the effect Susannah had wanted – but I was pleased with the result, feeling I was improving her picture. It was beginning to look more interesting, its blandness livened up. Only the cottage, the croft, to do, and the stones. I hesitated. Without a croft in front of me to copy, I doubted if I could invent one, so I decided to paint over it, to obliterate her outline. I felt wicked, but it was quickly done because she’d only sketched it in and I only needed to paint over pencil and a very small attempt at shading. But I kept the stones since there were actual stones around to use as models. I grew bold, which was a mistake, and
made
the shapes too distinct, so that far from blending into the hillside, as they did, they stood out awkwardly in my painting.

But it was done, complete. I regarded my artistic effort critically. Not bad. A pretty little watercolour, not chocolate-box pretty, but now with what is called ‘a certain charm’, meaning pleasant, agreeable and maybe just a touch more than that, maybe a real suggestion of place. I felt the desolation of these hills had been evoked, the emptiness and loneliness yet the lack of grandeur or drama. I propped it up against the stool to dry properly and then went for a walk. I’d intended only to stretch my legs before getting back into the car, but I went on and on, even though the ground was sodden and my shoes soon soaked, and found myself climbing the hill I’d been trying to paint all this time. There was no actual point at which I felt I was at the top, no peak, but only a long, almost level plateau. The view ahead was of more moorland, miles of it, it seemed. But turning to go back, I was amazed to see the sea in the distance, the North Sea I supposed, off Cockburns, where we had sometimes driven with Hector. If only Susannah had walked up here how much more interesting the view would have been to paint. If, of course, this was the area she had come to. If, of course, I wasn’t stark raving mad to think it was.

I wandered slowly back and put my things in the car. I hadn’t thought of Susannah once while painting – she had gone right out of my head. If the object of this exercise had been for me to commune with her through resuming the painting of a picture she had painted, it had failed spectacularly. It hadn’t even seemed eerie any more, taking up where she had left off. I backed the car carefully down the track, feeling bemused. My mood deepened later as I drove back through Edinburgh’s suburbs, and mixed with it was a dash of the usual resentment. What on earth had she been
playing
at, leaving me that sinister painting? Because I’d decided that was what it was after all, not bland but sinister. Suppose I’d been given the box when I was young, what would it have done to me, to come on this kind of trail in order to find the setting for the painting? I saw everything in black and white then. I’d have forced my father to help me decide on, and find, the location, if he didn’t already know it, or bullied my grandmother, who almost certainly would have known it. And once there, wherever it was, I would have been wild with distress at the nothingness of it and frantic not to be able to make sense of its importance. Susannah should have thought of that. It shouldn’t have been left for me to struggle and worry about meanings. If I took everything too seriously, as Rory alleged, whose fault was it?