The Memory Box (25 page)

When I arrived back at Isabella’s, tired and dispirited, I dropped the painting on to the kitchen table and made myself some coffee. It was a relief that she wasn’t back yet and I relished the peace and the lack of necessity to explain myself. But she came in before I’d finished and found me slumped at the table staring into space. She bustled about, reclaiming her territory as she liked to do, moving chairs a fraction of an inch, picking up the kettle and putting it down again, and in general fussing noisily until she was content. I hadn’t time to hide the painting. Inevitably, her own tea made, she sat herself at the table and drew the painting towards her. I made a half-hearted attempt to prevent her, but she had it firmly in her hand and it was too late. ‘Did you do this?’ she said. ‘I thought you were taking photographs, not painting.’ I couldn’t think what to say. ‘Well,’ I said, and then stopped. But one thing about Isabella, she could keep a conversation going all on her own, no bother. ‘Quite pretty,’ she said, holding it at arm’s length. ‘I didn’t know you were artistic like your mother. She painted, you know. Not that I ever thought she was much good but I must say others did.’ And out it came, the painting
exhibited
in the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy story. Telling this seemed to satisfy her, and she went off to get changed without asking any more questions. Like a lot of people of her type, she thought direct questions impertinent, both the asking and the being asked, so I counted myself lucky. If she was curious, she would consider it a loss of face to let me see she was – curiosity exhibited was vulgar. She was gone quite a while, long enough for me to wash and dry our cups and put the painting in my bag. When she came back, I hadn’t expected her to refer to it again, but she did. ‘Oh,’ she said, looking at the bare table, ‘where’s that painting? I’m sure it reminds me of somewhere. I’d like to look at it again.’

I could hardly stop her. When I gestured to the bag, she took the picture out and scrutinised it. Then, without speaking, she left the kitchen with it and came back carrying a framed photograph. ‘Look,’ she said. I looked. It was an old photograph. I recognised the young woman in the middle of it, with a little girl either side cuddling up to her, as my grandmother and behind her was a man I presumed to be my grandfather, who died before I was born. They were sitting on some rocks on a hillside and just visible in the background was a stone croft. ‘Jock took it,’ Isabella said, ‘that’s his croft, we were out to see him. Now, if the croft was there wouldn’t you say it was the place you’ve painted?’ I shrugged, and said it could be, but it could be scores of other similar places, and Isabella asked me where the place I’d painted was anyway, and I tried to tell her. ‘You weren’t too far off,’ she said. ‘Jock’s croft was south of Gifford. We used to visit him often. He was your grandmother’s cousin – she was fond of him. He was a gamekeeper. We used to go out there to see him, spend the day with him. We’d take our own food and he’d make us tea. We had grand times. Look, there’s me, and there’s your mother.’ She compared the photograph and painting once
more
, then said, ‘Maybe it isn’t so like. But your mother once tried to paint Jock’s croft, to please him. She was going to give it to him as a present. A great fuss she made about doing it. She’d just got the paints as a birthday present and was showing off. It ended in disaster.’

It seemed an open invitation to ask how, so I risked asking. Isabella said I should go into the sitting-room, where she’d lit a log fire, and ‘get comfortable’ while she heated some of her home-made soup and warmed some rolls and brought them through. It was the cosiness I’d been threatened with. But the room was attractive, in a faded chintzy sort of way, and the armchairs deep, and the fire blazed away and warmed me in more ways than the obvious. I felt quite content to sit there and wait for my aunt and didn’t dread the thought of the intimacy she was evidently aiming for. It struck me that perhaps she wanted the chance to talk to me every bit as much as I wanted to talk to her. She came in with a tray of food and I leapt up to take it from her and there was a bit of bustle as we settled ourselves with the soup. ‘Did you eat today, Catherine?’ she said. I shook my head, and she tutted. ‘You should eat. You’re too thin, way too thin. Now, tell me about your day and what you’ve been doing.’

I’d already mentioned the memory box to Isabella, when we had dinner at the Savoy, but she hadn’t said if she’d known about it. I asked her now, before I got on to the painting, and she said her mother had told her of it and she’d thought it ‘just like Susannah’. Precisely what she meant by that I wasn’t sure and didn’t pause to enquire. I said the painting, half-finished, had been in it, with the paintbox, but no explanation, but I didn’t say what else had been there. She knew already about the address book, so I said that had been in it too, without listing the other things. Somehow I couldn’t bear to involve Isabella any more than I needed to and I felt her expression of irritation at her
sister
’s eccentricity would only deepen if I did. I hated being in the position of asking directly for her help and was careful not to do that, but that was what I was in effect doing and should have done already. Isabella, after all, was the only one alive, as I had long ago realised, who had known Susannah and was likely to be able to throw at least some light on some of the things in the box. But it was humiliating to expose my own confusion and reveal how hard I was straining to interpret my curious legacy – I didn’t like her knowing.

Her expression had changed while I talked, the annoyance disappearing from her features to be replaced by a look almost of guilt. Carefully, she set her soup bowl aside and, looking not at me but into the fire, she said she was glad I’d come to her about the painting (though of course I’d done no such thing; it had all been an accident) to ask for her help because she knew about it. She reminded me, in a self-congratulatory manner, that the moment she’d seen it she’d felt she recognised the place and hadn’t she gone and got the photograph and wasn’t she now proved right? She gave a little purr of satisfaction. But now she knew it was Susannah’s painting originally she could tell me much more. She said this was the painting she thought had been destroyed, because of what happened while it was being painted; and, in fact, she could hardly credit it had survived all this time, more than forty-five years. Susannah had started it on one of those outings to visit cousin Jock, one of those days when she and Susannah and their parents had driven to his lonely croft up among the heather and spent the afternoon with him. It was, as she’d described, the first time her sister had used her paints, given to her the week before for her fifteenth birthday. Susannah had settled herself on a little stool and announced she was going to paint Jock’s croft from there and their father had said she was too far away and also that if she did the croft from the other side
the
view would be much more interesting with maybe a glint of the sea. But no, Susannah wouldn’t listen – ‘She was always stubborn,’ Isabella said – and remained where she was while the others went up to the croft, and Jock came out to greet them.

‘I don’t know how long went by,’ Isabella went on, ‘an hour perhaps. It wasn’t such a good day, there was no sun by then, it had clouded over after we left home and it was a wee bit chilly for September. It must have been September because Susannah’s birthday was the end of August; yes, September, the first week, I think. But it was quite cool up there and Jock had a fire going and he made tea and Mother had brought scones and we sat there and chatted and drank the tea, and then Mother said that Susannah would be frozen and I should go and tell her to come and get warm, she’d been painting long enough.’ Isabella paused, and stroked the arm of her chair as though it were a cat she was calming down. ‘They were always fretting about her health. If I had a cold, it was “Take an aspirin and go to bed with a hot-water bottle,” but if
she
had one, it was a big fuss. She was delicate, or so they said. I couldn’t see it, of course. I couldn’t see anything delicate about her. She seemed tough to me.’

She’d gone to bring her sister up to the croft and found her lying on the ground, paintbrush in hand, and she’d thought she was dead. She’d shouted for her father and ran panting back to the croft and everyone came rushing out and down the hill to the stricken Susannah. It had been ‘panic stations’ after that, with no possibility of calling an ambulance – Jock had no telephone and the nearest house was miles away – and yet the terrible fear that moving the girl would be harmful. ‘Father and Jock lifted her into the back seat of the car and covered her with a blanket. I crouched down in the gap between the back seat and the front, wedged in I was, and Mother squashed in beside Susannah and held her head, and Father drove with Jock
beside
him to direct the way to the hospital. I thought she was dead. Her lips were bluish, and around her nose, and I couldn’t hear her breathing. I don’t know which hospital we raced to. I stayed in the car. Mother said, “Stay here and don’t move,” and that’s what I did. I remember there were some sweets in the glove compartment and I ate them and then worried I’d be scolded because I ate the whole packet. They were wine-gums. I still thought she was dead but I couldn’t think what she’d died of.’ She paused and looked suddenly apologetic, and I wondered if she had been remembering that she’d wished this sister who didn’t like her was indeed dead, but that this was too awful a confession to make to me even now. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Father came out of the hospital eventually and said Susannah was going to be fine, but they were keeping her in for a while and Mother was going to stay the night. We took Jock home and then we went home ourselves. I remember it was almost dark and Father could hardly see to gather up all the stuff we’d just left scattered around, Susannah’s stool and easel and her paints. I suppose he picked the painting up and put that in with the rest. We went home and I went to bed and when I woke up I could hear him on the telephone and I thought, “She’s died in the night.” But she hadn’t, she was recovered and we went and got her and Mother. And then they had to tell me about her heart.’

It was the time for me to ask for a proper explanation of what was actually wrong with her heart, something I’d never done. I forced myself to do this and Isabella tried her best to give me the medical details, as they had been explained to her.

Susannah had been born, it appeared, with a genetic heart defect which went undetected until the collapse when she was visiting Jock with the rest of the family. She had a condition known as cardiomyopathy – Isabella spelled it out for me – which classically presents itself as a rhythm
disturbance
of the heart, but without a test like an electrocardiogram, which of course Susannah had never had, there are no easily recognised symptoms except for acute breathlessness, possible chest pains, and fainting. It was true Susannah did get very breathless, but this was put down to the way she was always so excitable as a child and was constantly over-exerting and pushing herself. She never fainted, until that day at Jock’s, and if she had chest pains she never complained of them. Once she had had an ECG and her condition was diagnosed, she was told to take great care, but at that time the drugs and pacemakers which today would have stabilised her heart rhythm were not available. ‘Mother would have wrapped her in cotton wool at once,’ Isabella said, ‘but she wouldn’t have it, she said she didn’t want to live as an invalid. She was given the only drug then available to regulate her heart and though it wasn’t nearly as efficient as drugs developed later, just a few years later, it had some effect. She went on living normally and she seemed to manage. But she started taking risks once she left home for university.

‘She said she didn’t want to think about her heart and she wasn’t going to,’ Isabella said. ‘And she seemed so strong to me, I never saw her collapse again, though I know from Mother and from your father that she did. She just pretended she was fine and did everything everyone else did, more than they did, just to show them. She should never have gone in for sailing. She weakened herself, Mother was sure – she was demented with worry every time Susannah went sailing or anything like that. And then she chose to have you, a baby … a death warrant.’

Isabella loved saying that. She looked at me directly then and I felt accused of matricide and all the old resentment surged up. ‘Wasn’t my fault,’ I said, childishly, and she said of course not and she hadn’t meant to imply this. I was feeling so upset, hearing everything she’d told me, but
instinctively
wanted to hide my distress, not wanting my aunt to know how affected I was by the sudden realisation of how
brave
my mother had been. She said we needed a drink after ‘all that’ and went off to get the whisky. She poured out a minute amount each into large cut-glass crystal tumblers and seemed to imagine a great rapport had been established between us, whereas I felt more distant from her and more uncomfortable than I had felt since entering her house the day before. I was faintly repelled by her dislike of her dead sister, which seemed to me to poison everything she told me about her. Why had she hated Susannah so much? Surely most women would feel sympathy for a sister suffering from a heart disease which couldn’t, in their day, be cured. Why the antagonism? Why her air of having been wronged? But I couldn’t bear to launch into all that with Isabella. It would, I was sure, take such patience and skill to unravel the tangled skein of their relationship and I hadn’t enough of either. Another puzzle Susannah could doubtless have solved for me, if she had lived, if we had sat beside a fire like this, being ‘cosy’, mother and daughter being intimate … On cue, Isabella said, ‘It’s so nice having you here, Catherine. It’s like having my own daughter.’

I put my glass down carefully. Never mind about the history of a painting, left to me, it would now seem, as a pathetic admission of a frightening illness first realised,
this
was what I should be exploring and trying to understand. ‘You’ve got a son, Aunt Isabella,’ I said, ‘just as good as a daughter.’ She frowned and said sons were not the same, no matter what they were like (said with emphasis), they couldn’t be as close, they couldn’t be woman-to-woman with all that this meant. I wasn’t sure what it did mean to her, but I knew it didn’t mean anything special to me. ‘I’d rather talk to Rory than any woman friend,’ I dared to say. ‘He’s better than any woman.’ I saw immediately how this had been interpreted and hurried to add that I’d meant Rory
was
interested in everything and so close to me, and that there had never been any barriers between us. ‘Is he happy?’ Isabella interrupted me as I launched into another paean of praise. ‘Do you think he’s happy, living the life he leads, running away from his family, causing such trouble and distress? Has it made him happy, doing what he wanted, thinking only of himself, selfish as ever?’ She spoke abruptly, but it was obvious she was suppressing strong emotions of some sort, anger mostly, I thought. I should know, I should be able to recognise it and see behind it and feel sympathy for someone as plagued as I am by this emotion. I’d always resisted the horrible idea that I am like Isabella in this respect, in how hard we both find it to control our anger, but there was plenty of evidence, over the years, to prove that it was true. I could never understand what my aunt had to be angry about, but then, until the death of my parents, I had had no cause either. We were both just made that way, given to sudden, unjustified feelings of rage out of all proportion to what had provoked them. It made me sad to see myself as others must see me when I witnessed Isabella’s struggle to keep a tight hold on her fury – and her failure to do so.