The Memory Box (33 page)

Looking out of the train window, I wondered idly why George was in a Brighton nursing home (though actually it was five miles from Brighton). He was a Cumbrian and his sister still lived in Maryport – but then I knew nothing about him. Perhaps he’d moved south long ago and settled in
Brighton
. But I thought of John Graham, who must be about George’s own age, and how fit and lively he had been, both physically and mentally, and I thought again how strange it was that George appeared to live permanently in a nursing home. Something must have happened to him, and realising that I began to worry that he might not be in any state to tell me anything at all. I could be going to see a man wrecked by illness, whose memory and speech were both affected.

I got a taxi at Brighton station and enjoyed the ride along the coastal road to the nursing home. The sea was rough, great grey waves smashing on the shingle sending up sheets of spray which reached over the esplanade, drenching pedestrians. I thought of the Caribbean and its beautiful blues and greens and the tenderness of the creamy lines of foam at its edges. I wondered if George’s home looked over this sullen sea and if he, too, watched it and thought of that other ocean where he had sailed with Susannah. But when we reached Downside House I saw it had no windows facing the sea. It was a couple of miles inland and in a dip, surrounded by trees. The views would be of the downs. I’d imagined an old building, perhaps a converted manor house, but it was new and looked more like a modern hotel, which was a surprise. My head, I realised, had been full of Dickensian notions of nursing homes, which had made me think of them as workhouses.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. The entrance hall was light and airy, circular in shape, with a floor tiled in pretty green-and-white patterned tiles. There was a round pine table in the centre on which there was a large jug full of yellow tulips. As soon as I walked in a woman came out of a room to the right, smiling pleasantly and asking if she could help. I’d feared a dragon – more mistaken notions, though this one had been encouraged by the curtness of the woman who’d answered the phone when I made that first call. I said I’d come to visit George Senhouse
and
had checked that I could two days ago. She nodded and said he might not be back in his own room yet, he might still be finishing lunch in the dining-room, but she would take me along. I felt desperate to be forewarned of his condition, so as I accompanied her down a corridor leading off the hall, I asked how he was. ‘Just the same,’ she said. There seemed no point in pretending I knew what that meant, so I confessed I had no idea and asked point-blank, ‘Why is he in here?’

She knew it was odd, of course, that any visitor should have to ask what was wrong with the patient they were visiting, but she expressed no surprise and didn’t seem in the least suspicious of me. She told me George had had a serious accident several years ago in which he’d damaged his right arm so badly it was useless. The accident had been at sea, but she didn’t know the details. The reason he was living here, though, wasn’t because of what the accident had done to him but because soon after it he had had a stroke which left him paralysed on his right side. The paralysis had lifted partially, but his speech was still very indistinct and he was too incapacitated to live on his own. His wife had died long before all this happened and though he had two sons, both married, they lived abroad. ‘He gets very depressed,’ she finished. ‘He doesn’t get many visitors, so he’ll be delighted to see you.’

By this time she’d reached George’s room and led me into it. As she’d predicted, he wasn’t there, but she said he’d be back from lunch soon and I should make myself at home. I was glad when she left me, needing time to adjust to everything she’d told me. Clearly, this man wasn’t going to be anything like the healthy John Graham, and if his speech was impaired the chances of any kind of fruitful conversation were poor. This was all going to be a waste of time and I chided myself for not having checked up on George’s condition before ever I came. I stood hesitantly in the middle
of
the room, wishing I could run away without being seen, but I felt I was trapped. George would by now have been told of my arrival and common decency demanded I should stay for at least a few minutes. Uneasily, I paced about the room, noting how comfortably it was furnished. I thought probably the furniture was his own – it didn’t look institutional. There were a couple of armchairs covered in a rose-strewn chintz and a footstool with an embroidered top, and a small walnut desk, all of which looked somehow personal items. The room was L-shaped and in the smaller part there was a bed with a table beside it. I looked at the framed photographs on it, and on the window ledge. There was George, I presumed, on his wedding day. His bride looked haughty and stared defiantly at the camera with an air of refusing to smile. George wasn’t smiling either. He was very handsome, tall and athletic-looking. I thought of Susannah and felt a funny sort of flutter in my stomach.

There were no more photographs of his wife, but there were several of children I took to be his sons. They were all taken on boats and in these George was smiling and looking supremely contented with a son on either side. The last frame I peered at was the most recent of these photographs. It was of one of the sons’ wedding. George had aged well, very well. This event had obviously been before the accident and stroke because he looked so fit, still quite the sporting hero John Graham had described. His hair was white but there was lots of it and his face was more attractively weather-beaten than wrinkled. I’d picked the photograph up to study it more closely when I heard voices and the sound of what I guessed was a wheelchair being pushed, its wheels squeaking slightly on the floor. I put the photograph down hurriedly and turned to face the door. It was a shock to confront the man being wheeled in. I would never have recognised him from the photographs I’d just been scrutinising. Anyone, sitting in a wheelchair and recovering
from
a stroke would look different, of course, but the contrast was violent. Here was a once tall, powerful-looking man now so shrunken and thin that he appeared lost in his clothes and the skin of his face too loose for its size – it literally hung over the prominent cheekbones. Only his hair was the same, thick and plentiful, but even that told against him, because it was now much too luxuriant for the wasted face.

‘There we are, George,’ the young woman, who’d wheeled him in, said. ‘Here’s the visitor we heard about. Isn’t that nice? Now, are you going to get yourself into your armchair or do you want help?’

George ignored her. He was staring at me and frowning. I felt myself blushing, the heat rushing through me together with an obscure sense of guilt. Remembering that George was said to have difficulty speaking, and not wanting him to struggle to ask who on earth I was and what did I want, I said quickly, ‘Mr Senhouse, you don’t know me, but my name is Catherine Musgrave and I’m the daughter of someone you knew a long time ago. I’m Susannah Cameron’s daughter – maybe you remember her?’ Instantly, his expression changed. The frown lifted and he gave a little grunt. The nurse, who was still patiently waiting, said again, ‘Do you want a hand, George, then?’ and he shook his head and gestured, rather rudely I thought, for her to go. Then he put the brake on the wheelchair and began slowly to lever himself up, using his left hand only. It was painful to watch as he strained first to stand up, then to walk to an armchair, but finally he managed the two or three steps and sat down. ‘Sit down,’ he said to me, nodding at the other chair. To my relief the two words were enunciated perfectly.

We faced each other at a distance of a mere foot or so. I tried to smile and keep very still, realising he wanted time to inspect me. I knew he was checking off my features one by one and comparing them with Susannah’s, the way people who’d known her always did before delivering the
inevitable
verdict that I was not a bit like her. I waited for this, but George surprised me. He nodded and seemed to relax a little, or maybe he was simply making himself more comfortable in his chair. He took a deep breath, paused as though exerting some kind of control, or following an exercise he’d been taught and had to struggle to master, and then he said, ‘A look of her,’ and nodded again. I felt absurdly pleased and relieved.

‘People don’t usually tell me that,’ I said, smiling and realising that for the first time in my life I was happy to be told I had anything of Susannah about me. ‘They all say how
unlike
her I am –’

‘Not
like
,’ he interrupted, ‘look of her. Different.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Strong face,’ he said. ‘Same express –’

But he couldn’t manage the whole word ‘expression’ and it frustrated him. He tried again and I jumped in to say it for him, though worried that this was the wrong and tactless thing to do, but he accepted it. He looked so tired, with the effort of speaking, that I thought I should talk and answer those questions I felt he was bound to have but which he wasn’t able to ask without exhausting difficulty.

‘Mr Senhouse,’ I said, ‘you’ll want to know why I’ve come to see you like this, so suddenly, out of the blue.’ He nodded. ‘Well, my mother died when I was six months old …’

‘Heart?’ he asked.

I said yes, registering that this meant he had known about Susannah’s condition. He’d known and still taken her on that daring sailing trip all the way to the Caribbean. ‘You knew about her heart, then?’ I asked, and again he nodded. ‘And yet you took her with you to Bequia, sailing all the way to the West Indies?’ I tried not to sound critical but instead to suggest admiration.

‘She was –’ and the word sounded like ‘trimmed’. I guessed ‘determined’ quickly, and that was right. This was
awful
, I was subjecting him to such an ordeal, and I hurried on explaining the reason for my visit, passing over the memory box without listing its other contents and merely focusing on the address book and how curious I’d been about the addresses in it, which had led me first to Bequia and then to the Grahams and finally to him. ‘So really’, I finished, ‘I just wanted it confirmed that Susannah actually did sail to Bequia and that it was with you.’

He smiled and lifting his head up and stretching his neck back he said, ‘Wonderful, it was wonderful!’ Every word came out perfectly and he was so delighted he repeated ‘wonderful’ several times. I saw, as he went on beaming at me, that the right-hand side of his face didn’t smile like the left but was frozen, yet it was possible to glimpse what a great, generous smile he had once had. I was about to ask him about the cabin which I’d never been able to find, when he pointed to a chest of drawers in the corner of the room. ‘In top drawer,’ he said, slurring the words badly after his triumph with the previous ones, but I was still able to understand first time. ‘You want me to get something in the top drawer?’ He nodded, looking eager and even excited. I opened the drawer. It was full of photograph albums, a dozen or so of them arranged in two layers in the wide, deep drawer. ‘Dates,’ he said. I saw each album had a label with a year’s date on it. He had terrible trouble trying to tell me the date he wanted but finally I identified 1956.

I brought the correct album over to him and put it on his knee. It was a large, oblong album and on its cover was a small photograph of a boat under which the date was printed. Slowly, after gesturing that I was to stand and look over his shoulder, he turned the pages. There was no need for any commentary. Susannah and he were in every photograph, sometimes in a group, sometimes just the two of them. They always had their arms round each other and they were almost always laughing. Or kissing. They were
both
tanned and their hair bleached with the sun. They wore shorts or bathing costumes, Susannah’s a bright pink. I didn’t need to ask if they had been lovers – it was all so obvious. There were no photographs that I knew of which showed my father and Susannah looking as this couple in Bequia did. George came to the end of his album and stopped at the last photograph. I recognised where it had been taken – it was high up on the hill where Gracie Monroe lived. George and Susannah were facing each other, arms entwined round each other’s waists, her face slightly uplifted, his slightly lowered, so that they were looking into each other’s eyes. We both stared at this photograph for a long time, as though paying it our respects.

Finally, George closed the album. I sat down facing him again. His expression was odd. I couldn’t decide whether I should understand by it that he felt he had made some sort of statement by showing me the album and was waiting for a response, or whether it was telling me there was nothing more to say. I settled for feeling he wanted me to react. ‘So you and Susannah were lovers?’ I asked. He laughed and raised both his hands in what looked like exasperation at my idiocy – of course they were lovers. ‘So what happened?’ I said. ‘Why did she marry my father? Why were you kept a secret?’ He stopped laughing and sighed and picked up a notepad and pencil lying on the table beside him. He wrote something with his left hand, laboriously, and showed it to me. It said, ‘
Is your father dead too
?’ I said yes. This seemed to relieve him, and he began to write some more. I watched as he covered three sheets of paper, writing excruciatingly slowly, wishing so desperately that he could talk easily to me and tell me in minute detail all about his relationship with Susannah. He’d obviously been right-handed and writing with his left was almost as hard for him as trying to speak coherently. I felt I was asking far too much of him and that my very presence and my questions were a cruel
intrusion
on his memories. I really wasn’t entitled to put him through this.

But he looked calm enough after he’d read through what he’d written and handed it to me. I read it myself, twice, and said, ‘Thank you,’ and folded the sheets of paper carefully and put them in my bag. I stayed another half-hour, telling him everything I could think of about Susannah’s subsequent life after she married my father. I wasn’t sure how much he would know – it wasn’t clear from what he’d written if they’d severed all contact and completely dropped out of sight of each other, or whether perhaps mutual acquaintances might have kept them informed of each other’s lives. I told him properly about the memory box now, saying I was sure its purpose was to tell me things no one else would or could, and that I felt some sort of written explanation was probably intended but never got made and so I was left with a puzzle and he was a part of it. I said I was sure he had been of vital importance to her, and the trip to Bequia the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. It had been her great adventure, he had been her great romance. And I said that what I had just learned from him, from what he had written down, linked me to Susannah more securely than anything could ever have done.