The Memory Box (3 page)

I could understand this. I wasn’t an easy child. All sorts of things upset me, even if on the surface I seemed strong and tough. I had nightmares regularly – I can’t recall what they were about, except there was a lot of
blood
in them – and was for years a poor sleeper, often ending up in my parents’ bed. It was natural that they should fear the effect of giving to me a box full of unknown objects left by a dying woman who very possibly was not always in her right mind. And then later, as a young adolescent, I was given to violent rages alternating with spells of studied gloom – all very typical, but hardly the best background to cope with such a legacy in a balanced way. I don’t blame my parents at all for their hesitation. And I was sure that for years at a time they actually forgot about this wretched box – it was literally out of sight, out of mind, up here in this attic.

Now the box would have to go with me. I shrank from having to touch it at all, but finally grabbed the cord where it was knotted at the side and dragged it to the trapdoor. I’d left a pile of cushions at the foot of the ladder so that I could throw down on to them any fragile objects I might find which were worth keeping. So far, I’d only selected one rather pretty old lamp. There was plenty of room for the box. It fell through the gap satisfactorily, and I climbed down after it. I was in a hurry by then. The estate agent who was to sell the house was coming to collect the keys and he was due any minute. I wanted the handover to be rapid so I had to be ready to zoom off. My car was already laden with stuff, the boot and back seat entirely filled, and only the passenger seat next to me was empty. The box had to go there. I shoved it in, then secured it by using the safety belt strapped through part of the cord. Doing this – hurriedly, roughly – I dislodged the pink label. It lay on the gravel beside the front wheel of the car and my stomach lurched. I stared, mesmerised, at the piece of innocuous cardboard and willed myself to pick it up. I couldn’t leave it there, to flutter pathetically in the wind and be rained upon or trampled by some stray dog. I snatched it up and put it in my pocket, then slammed the door shut just as the estate agent turned into the drive.

I would never see our house again. I’d told the estate agent, untruthfully, that I was leaving the country and had given him full powers to sell the house as soon as possible to the first buyer who came up with the asking price (fixed by him). If it failed to reach that price, he was to reduce it as he thought fit – I wanted no consultations, I wanted nothing more to do with it. He would see to the final clearance. I think he was startled by my abruptness, and had been disposed to stay and chat. I left him standing on the front step looking bewildered and waving his hand slowly. I didn’t wave back. I didn’t look back through my mirrors either, and drove far too fast until I turned on to Woodstock Road. It was done. Our house was left abandoned and the sooner I got used to it the better. Better to think of it obliterated, with all it had meant to me in the past, than to imagine it inhabited by other people. I would destroy its power by annihilating its memory.

It wasn’t a long drive back to London, and it was a route with which I was very familiar, but that day the journey seemed unending. I hated driving with that sinister box lumped beside me. I thought about bombs and the comparison seemed appropriate until I realised I couldn’t have it both ways: the box could not be both explosive
and
pathetic. I was getting in a state on its account and, as Charlotte would sensibly have pointed out, making it the object of all my distress over leaving our house. I reminded myself I’d been miserable and depressed before ever I found it in the attic. I was alone, at the age of thirty-one, Susannah’s age when she died. That parallel was not lost on me. She could never have anticipated that I would be so old when I finally received her gift. It suddenly struck me that the box might be full of things suitable for a young girl, or a teenager. This cheered me a little. It would be easier to deal with the contents if they turned out to be toys or even mementoes of my babyhood. Perhaps all I would find would
be
my first rattle, my first bonnet, and so on. My common sense told me this was unlikely, Susannah had surely been too imaginative to want to fill a box with such sentimental tokens, but I found the idea strangely comforting.

I think I’d always known that she was imaginative, that she had left behind her many clues to this, which as a child I absorbed without understanding. There was my kaleidoscope, the first toy I remember loving. I had soft toys, the usual teddy bears and pandas, and dolls, but it is the kaleidoscope which I remember carrying round with me and hugging to myself when I was only about three or four. ‘She isn’t old enough for it yet,’ my grandmother had apparently said to my father. ‘She won’t be able to close one eye and look properly.’ But I could, and he knew I could. In that respect, if not others, I had the necessary patience and balance. He gave it to me. ‘Shake it,’ he said, ‘and look in the little window and you’ll see something pretty.’ I shook and shook, fiercely (as I did most things), and then, quite cautiously for me, I squinted through the glass opening and was dazzled by the myriad patterns which swirled before me. I shook and looked, and shook and looked, with such concentration that I developed a red ring round my right eye from pressing the kaleidoscope to it. My father took it away, but I screamed till I could have it back and finally some compromise was reached. Susannah made that kaleidoscope, actually made it, my father once told me, in a rare moment of nostalgia, when she was pregnant and well and happy. Other pregnant women knitted. Susannah made a kaleidoscope for a child who would not be old enough to use it for years.

Reaching Hanger Lane and becoming part of London’s ceaseless traffic dulled my senses in more ways than one. I relaxed into the stop-start halting progress round the North Circular Road and the highly emotional frame of mind I’d been in gave way to idle speculation as to where I would
choose
to live when the Oxford house (already I was thinking of it like that, as ‘the Oxford house’, not ‘our’ house) was sold. I was going to be rich. In my terms, anyway. The Oxford house was certain, or so I’d been told, to fetch what I thought of as a fortune, and there was a cottage in Cornwall which now belonged to me, as well as life insurance policies and a hefty sum in the bank. The inheritance tax would, I’d been warned, be substantial, but still I would have plenty of money. The news had given me little pleasure at first, but gradually I was adjusting to it. I would be able to buy a house of my own wherever I wanted and that realisation excited me. I cared about my surroundings. My flat had never been simply a roof over my head. I had loved decorating and furnishing it, and had spent time and taken infinite trouble making it as beautiful as I could. I was aware that I’d tried to imitate my father’s style, with the wooden floors I’d had laid and the use of cream and white paints and pale grey fabrics – the whole aim to give an impression of space and light. Every time I came back to my home I was soothed by the atmosphere I’d created.

But my flat was not perfect. For a start, it had no garden. It was a maisonette, two floors at the top of an ugly house in Crouch End. No garden and no views, except of other dreary houses and a long, narrow street crowded with parked cars most of the time. Now I would be able to buy a house somewhere green and leafy and set about making it truly beautiful. I would search for it thoroughly. It would give me a purpose in life and, sad to say, that is what I knew I had singularly lacked for a long time. Work had recently failed to excite me as it had once done, and my personal life was a disaster. What a contrast with Susannah’s happy, purposeful life at thirty-one. She had loved my father, and he had loved her, since they were final-year students. My birth was, according to my grandmother, in what I thought of as a sickly phrase, ‘the icing on the cake’. I’d never liked
thinking
of myself as icing, sweet and sticky. I’d had this image of myself melting slowly in someone’s mouth. Anyway, my arrival completed Susannah’s famous happiness. That, and the hanging of a picture she’d painted in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition the year before.

She wasn’t really an artist. Like my father, she’d qualified as an architect, which was how they met, and unusually for that time – there were not many women architects – she did well in the all-male practice she joined. In fact, she won a prize – something my father never did – designing a shopping centre. I always got the impression that she’d been much more ambitious than my father and that this had created a slight problem, or what would have become one if her poor health had not held her back. I’m not quite sure how I picked this up (though, when I think about it now, it is remarkable how much I did pick up considering I made such a thing of not asking direct questions). It must have been from Charlotte’s family, which is surely odd. I remember these aunts and uncles of mine, who of course were not really my relatives at all, sitting round the dinner table, when they brought the various cousins to stay, and one of them saying they’d been to ‘that shopping centre’ and my father saying how he admired it and had this aunt – no, I think it was an uncle – noticed how cleverly Susannah had solved the space problem, how ingenious she’d been. I must have been quite old because I remember asking what ‘ingenious’ meant and saying was it the same as ‘genius’. My father laughed and said that wasn’t a bad guess and then someone asked, ‘Was she a genius, Susannah?’ and there was a kind of silence while they waited for an answer. I don’t recall precisely what the answer was but I did register the praise it was full of and I was uncomfortable when my father added words to the effect that Susannah had been much more talented than he was and would have ‘risen to the top’. I thought of a cake, and laughed. If Charlotte was
there
, and she must have been, unless she was in the kitchen, she said nothing.

But Susannah never had the chance to rise to any top. Her health deteriorated and she had to work from home and, though the pretence was kept up that her career still flourished, it didn’t. She turned to painting and everyone was glad to see her do so – less tiring, less of a strain for her. She painted watercolours, mostly landscapes. The one chosen in the Summer Exhibition was of a meadow. It hung in my father’s study, though not in a prominent position. When I was a child, I could see nothing in it. It looked virtually blank to me, an expanse of flat green with a few dots in the background that might or might not have been cows. If I was told where this meadow was, I have forgotten. My father never commented on its merits, never passed any comment at all.

I sent it to be auctioned, together with all the other pictures I didn’t want to keep when I cleared out the Oxford house, and was quite surprised to learn later that somebody had paid £200 for it. Part of me had felt bad about selling it, but another, stronger part defiantly insisted the painting was of no special significance just because it was Susannah’s and had been hung in a Royal Academy Summer Exhibition – everyone knows that half of that is dross. There was nowhere in my flat I could have hung it and I had nowhere, no attics, in which to store it. I had done the sensible thing, but it was true I felt faintly guilty all the same, even though no one else knew what I’d done. I had salvaged too much as it was, and looked with despair at all the clutter I’d laboriously carried in from my car. My lovely rooms looked offended, strewn as they were with bags and boxes. It upset me to see this disorder and I couldn’t rest until I’d dragged the lot into my spare room and closed the door on it.

Except for the memory box. This I took into my sitting-room and put down on the floor in front of the sofa. The
sooner
I got the opening over, the better. I would need a knife or scissors to cut the cord – the knots looked far too corroded with age to undo easily. Pausing to wash my hands, as though I were about to perform a surgical operation and had to take meticulous care with hygiene, I hacked away at the cord with the bread knife and then cut through the tough waterproof outer covering. Then I got a surprise. I’d assumed that the box itself would be a wooden or strong cardboard crate, of the packing-case variety, but what I found was an old-fashioned hatbox. It was large and round, about two feet tall and eighteen inches or so in diameter, and was covered in a vivid fuchsia grosgrain material with purple ricrac round the lid and a purple satin ribbon tied in an ornamental bow on the top. It was the most marvellously vulgar and yet glamorous box. I found myself smiling. My grandmother, Susannah’s mother who had looked after me when she died, had had several boxes like this, though none quite so colourful or flamboyant. Rory and I used to play with them and try on the weird hats, all veils and feathers, carefully preserved but never worn.

For some reason, I still delayed the final act of opening, though I was feeling so much more relaxed about it. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine, wondering as I did so why my father had never described the brash appeal of this box. It would, I was sure, have helped me feel more kindly towards Susannah’s box and tempted me to want to see it. Slowly, I went back to contemplate it again. Experimentally, I pulled at the purple bow. It did not give. Carefully, I cut across the ribbon underneath the bow and when the lid still would not lift I saw that it was taped all round, and remembered my father had said he had sealed it. More delicate snipping with scissors and I felt the lid move a fraction as the pressure was released. I eased it off slowly, feeling a strange sort of breathlessness as I did so. Under the lid, flattened by years of being pressed
down
, were several scrunched-up layers of coloured tissue paper, white, yellow and green, all arranged to look vaguely like a flower. A pretty effect, and I sat admiring it for a moment before disturbing the paper. When I had lifted it all out, placing it inside the upturned lid, I expected somehow to find a note. Instead, there was another layer of covering, a thin disc of corrugated cardboard. It was tightly wedged and took some time to remove.