The Memory Box (31 page)

Now I did take his hand, timidly, placing mine over his, lightly, covering it rather than holding it. He was hot, the skin on the back of his hand burning. I exerted the slightest of pressures and his eyes opened fractionally again. ‘Tony?’ I murmured. His lips parted a little and his eyes opened a little further, but he frowned and looked in pain and I was afraid to repeat his name. I felt strangely breathless and kept trying to swallow, over and over again, as though I were practising to say something. But there was nothing I could say even if any words were capable of reaching him. I could lean over and whisper in his ear that it was me, Catherine, and that I loved him. Except I wasn’t sure that I did, or even that I ever truly had – not as he wished me to, not enough to link myself with him for ever and let myself be absorbed into his life. All I wanted him to know was that I had come because I was sorry for what had happened to him, sorry to see him in this state, and I cared about him, and had always wanted to remain friends. It wouldn’t be enough.

The nurse came back and I lifted my hand from his and turned and left the unit with her. I thought myself completely composed, but she must have thought otherwise because she urged me to take a seat for a moment in the corridor and brought me a glass of water. ‘He’s improving,’ she said. ‘He’s stable now, doing well. He’ll probably be moved into the ward tomorrow and be more alert.’ I nodded and thanked her, and asked if I could leave a note. She brought me a Biro and a piece of paper and then tactfully left me to write whatever I wanted.

I sat for ages, wondering what I did want to write. All I wanted was for him and his mother to know that I’d been, but for neither of them to get the wrong idea. Finally, I wrote only a couple of lines, saying I’d come to say how sorry I
was
to see him so ill but that I’d been told he was stable and improving and I hoped he would soon be better. I said I would come again, when he was feeling better. And I signed it ‘Love, Catherine’. Anything less would have sounded too cold, too harsh in the circumstances – even for me. There wasn’t an envelope available, so I folded the paper over and made a little packet of it, and printed Tony’s name on the front. I didn’t care if anyone else read it; it wasn’t private.

My definition of happiness is coming out of a hospital. The moment I leave one, no matter what I have left behind, I feel giddy not only with the release of tension but with joy that I am alive and well and able to walk away unhindered. God knows, Gower Street is a noisy, ugly street and walking round to Tottenham Court Road nothing improves, but I felt exhilarated, thrilled to be striding out and breathing air which, though heavy with petrol fumes, did not carry the smells of disease and disinfectant upon it. I’d done what I needed to do, I’d gone to see Tony, and I’d been lucky in more ways than one. If he’d been fully conscious, if we’d had to have any dialogue, things might have disintegrated into some sort of distressing scene and I’d have been trapped by my own emotions, forced perhaps to agree that I cared about him more than I found I did. But none of that had happened. I’d been, I’d left evidence that I’d been, and I’d signalled that I would come again, without saying when.

As I travelled home it occurred to me that, when he came to, Tony might even be angry that his mother had called me, and she would have to defend herself by telling him he’d asked for me himself. He might deny that he had, it would amount to such loss of face to him, or say she ought to have realised he was in agony, or drugged, and didn’t know what he was saying. I thought how lucky I’d been in a trivial way, too, choosing to visit the hospital so early in the morning. The nurse had told me Tony’s parents had
rarely
left his side until the day before and that they would be back very soon. I didn’t like to think of an encounter with his mother, who would have been blaming me for months for his unhappiness and who would have found it impossible to credit that any woman could resist her son.

Mothers are like that. Charlotte was like that – she stood up for me whatever I did and would never believe I wasn’t as wonderful as she thought I was. Isabellas were rare, I thought as I travelled home. And Susannah? There she was, forcing herself into my head again. Impossible to tell how Susannah would have been. Devoted to me, I suppose, but perhaps not uncritical. I’d learned enough about her since I’d opened her box to question and challenge the image I’d been given of her as a sweet, gentle, sunny-natured idol. She was reckless, always doing things dangerous to her health. And she was capable of inspiring some degree of alarm, if not fear, in her sister, to whom she had been less than kind. She was ambitious, fiercely so, and this implied, I thought, an element of aggression completely lacking in my father. Even without learning any more from George Senhouse, I knew she’d had her secrets, maybe even her regrets: she was much more complicated than I’d ever been given reason to imagine. I wondered how different things might have been if I’d been old enough to see her dead. I’d seen Charlotte dying and dead. Susannah had always been just an idea, vague, lacking any substance. But if I’d visited her as I’d visited Charlotte, or even as I’d just visited Tony, if I’d seen her ill and in pain and then dead, would I have struggled so hard to deny her any place in my life? She had needed to be real before I could acknowledge any loss.

I let myself into my flat and thought I should give my lie some substance. After I’d paid my visit to George Senhouse, I should go away again, on my own, not with Rory. There was still the
Hidden Scotland
job to do, but going to Scotland was not what I needed. I’d cancel it. I’d go to
France
this time and wander about for a while. But first I felt the time had come to dispose of the memory box itself, to have some sort of symbolic burning or tearing apart. It lurked in my darkroom, a constant reminder of someone I could never really find. Before I went away I would get rid of it. I went straight to it and pulled it out into my sitting-room. It looked very unthreatening – bright, cheerful and anodyne. I couldn’t believe I’d regarded it with such dread a mere six months or so ago. It seemed years since I’d unpacked it, excited in spite of myself. I stared at it now, and wondered how I could for one moment have believed this box had such power. The list of contents, neatly numbered, was inside it. I picked up a pen and carefully ticked them off, in a done that/been there mood. At number 11, I paused. I’d done no more than glance at number 11. It alone of all the contents was still in the box. I’d not so much forgotten about it as considered it not worthy of my attention. I’d put the cardboard tube back in the box after I’d taken it out of its other resting place, to show Rory, and never thought of it since.

Number 11, two pictures, rolled up and put into a cardboard tube. Slowly, I unfurled them.

TWO PICTURES, BOTH
of a mother and a baby. I’d taken one look, back in September, and never looked at them again. Now, re-rolling them to flatten them, I put them side by side on the table in front of me. Feeling the paper, I deduced that my original guess had been right – these were pages cut from an art book, or an expensively produced catalogue, an act of what my father would have called vandalism. The paper was thick and smooth, the colour reproduction excellent. These pages had been cut out very neatly. I could make out the faintest trace of pencil along the left-hand edge of one and the right-hand side of the other. Susannah had ruled a line before she did her cutting, either with scissors, or possibly a knife, even a razor. Still, the book or catalogue would have been ruined.

My father had only let me look at his art and architectural volumes under his supervision until I was quite old. It was treated as a great privilege. I had to wash my hands thoroughly first, scrubbing them in hot water with a nail brush, and then I had to sit at a table. (I wasn’t allowed to hold these books on my knees.) I was even shown the way in which I must turn the pages, by holding the top corner of each page, using as little pressure as possible, and flipping it, not dragging it, over. My father said these books of his were not like other books. They were, literally, works of art
and
precious, and must be treated as special and valuable. When I was very young, five or six, being given permission to look at what he referred to as his ‘treasures’ had been thrilling. I had hurried to fill all the conditions and been only too eager to obey his command to sit up straight and not lean on the bigger volumes. But later, in early adolescence, I’d resented what I thought of then as the unnecessarily fussy strictures he’d imposed and I’d tried to flout them without his knowing. I’d go into the downstairs cloakroom next to his study and run the water, leaving the door open, and then say I’d washed my hands, when I hadn’t at all. For heaven’s sake, I’d think, I haven’t been down a coal mine, my hands are clean anyway, and I’d get a guilty but pleasurable
frisson
out of cheating. If my father left the room, I’d deliberately turn pages roughly and slouch over the books, not quite daring to inflict even minimal damage, but getting as close as I could to risk doing so. Later, I stopped wanting to look at them at all, if it was going to be such a performance. I went for cheaper offerings which were more user-friendly, though he pointed out their inferiority in every respect. Those ‘treasures’ were worth their exorbitant price and I knew it, really – any fool could see the difference.

How had Susannah, the obedient wife, brought herself to violate an art book of the calibre these plates had obviously come from? But then I remembered that she had had her own collection of books, not very large, nothing like as extensive or impressive as my father’s, but her own. There had been a bookshelf in my father’s study which had held Susannah’s books as well as some of his. They were on the top three shelves, too high for me to reach without standing on something, and I was never interested enough to do that. But I knew they were her books and had some special significance or my father would not have kept them. When I was doing ‘A’ Level history of art, he mentioned them to
me
and suggested I have a look at them because they might be useful. Grudgingly, making a feature as I always did of not wanting anything to do with what had belonged to Susannah, I had a cursory look. The books were all concerned with women artists (so no wonder the collection was small). There was stuff there not only about the famous women – Gwen John, Rosa Bonheur – but much less well-known ones, and some I had never heard of like Emily Carr Osborn and Cecilia Beaux. I began secretly to use these books although I’d told my father, at my most offhand, that they weren’t much good. In fact, I did whole essays based on what I found in some of them and got very good marks.

I suspected these pictures had come from a book in her own collection – well, it was fairly obvious – but I couldn’t search for it because I’d sold it, the entire collection. I’d been in such a hurry to get rid of anything to do with Susannah that I hadn’t even examined her books carefully. I think I regretted my haste very soon afterwards, but at the same time I was glad to have had them removed. It was a sort of betrayal to get rid of them like that, but then I’d spent a lifetime cutting all connection with her and it was just part of the same sort of rejection. But, confronted now with these plates cut from somewhere, I was ashamed to think I had had the means to identify them and had lost the opportunity through my own impetuous act. And my knowledge of women artists, assuming it was a woman I was looking for, was not sufficient for me to guess who had painted these portraits. It was a long time since that ‘A’ Level course and I hadn’t gone on to enlarge or consolidate the knowledge I’d absorbed. But it struck me, looking so hard at those two pieces of glossy paper, that the point might not be the artist who had made these prints (I had just enough knowledge to recognise them as prints rather than paintings). The point might just be what she had chosen to represent. The artist might be irrelevant. As usual, I was being
too
clever,
imagining
Susannah as devious when simplicity was the clue to tell me what had been meant.

So, I tried to think simply. What was I looking at? In the first picture, a woman in a pretty, pale blue, flowered dress, a long full-skirted dress, was sitting on a chair, the padded back glimpsed behind her right shoulder, holding a naked baby on her lap and kissing it. She had dark hair, tidily pinned into a roll on top of her head. Her right hand cupped the baby’s bare bottom and her left, rather large and out of proportion, pulled the baby to her. If I’d drawn a line from the top left-hand corner to the bottom right the whole of the top triangle would have been virtually empty. The colours were pale blue and grey except for the flesh tone of the baby’s skin. The second picture showed another dark-haired woman, possibly the same one, but a different baby (fair-haired instead of dark). This one was wearing a cream-coloured gown, with faint patches of darker cream all over it. The chair she was sitting on was upholstered in a cream and apricot pattern and behind it there was what looked like a wooden bed made up with white linen. The woman was full face, the baby in profile. Again, she was holding the child tightly.

Still trying to react simply, I noted how pretty the compositions were, after all, mother and baby in both cases carefully arranged. The colours were soft and seductive, the notion that everything in the pictures had been melded into a harmonious whole very strong. These were not complicated pictures – they were indeed perfectly simple and made a clear appeal to be taken at face value: a mother loving her baby. That was all. Yet as I went on looking I couldn’t help but look deeper and reject the superficial conclusion which had been so tempting. These were not just about a mother loving her baby, nor were they simply pretty-pattern effects. The baby in the first picture was surely struggling. It was resisting its mother’s kiss. The mother had her eyes closed
in
ecstasy over the kiss she was bestowing, but the baby’s eyes were open and its mouth pulling back. In the second picture, the opposite was true. There, the baby was doing the clinging, pressing its face eagerly into its mother’s cheek, and the mother, looking weary and forlorn, as though the baby weighed heavily in her arms and she longed to put it down, was merely enduring the kiss. Interesting. Two pictures, perhaps two points of view, or two sides of the same coin. I couldn’t be sure the two women were the same. Both had dark hair, worn in the same style, but the body language was different enough to suggest they were not. The first woman was confident and at ease, the second tense. It wasn’t possible to tell the sex of the baby, but I felt they were both girls, for no good reason. I couldn’t tell, either, how old they were. I see so few babies I had nothing to guide me, but remembering photographs of myself at that age I thought these two might be six months or so. The message was becoming, if anything, too simple after all. This was Susannah, this was me. She’d wanted to show me not only how she had loved me but
how I had loved her
. The second picture was particularly poignant, showing her weakness and distress as she tried to hold me, wriggling and lively in her tired arms. These were not to be dismissed as chocolate-box fodder. They were touching and painful and full of maternal feeling.