The Memory Box (35 page)
I think my mother chose the wrong things to leave in her box but there was nothing wrong with her motivation. She was not, as I’ve thought often enough during the last months, trying to control me from beyond the grave (as I liked, dramatically, to think of it, relishing the cliché). She did not resent the fact that I had a future which she did not. What she could hardly bear was the realisation that she would have no part in it and that she might be obliterated in my memory. She knew that I would have no memory except what others gave me and she preferred to try to ignite a spark herself. She couldn’t simply say goodbye to a baby who could not understand her words and then go. It was too hard, too painful. If she thought about my life after her death the agony and fear were so great she became bitter. It was far less cruel to allow herself to think that through the memory box she would be able to speak to me in her own voice and that, in time, because I was hers, I might learn to hear and understand.
I burned the box itself in the end. I burned it in the garden of the house I bought before I went to France. Tony helped me. I had a proper bonfire, before the builders moved in.
The
box itself was never worth anything and I felt no sense of betrayal burning it. I am not so clear about what its contents, its funny jumble of objects, were worth. Sometimes I think the little discoveries I made through them are significant, sometimes I think they were worthless. Sometimes, thinking about what was in that box, I am flooded with emotion, sometimes I feel blank. I find I can think of the box as deadly serious, on the one hand, and as unimportant on the other. It gave me a hard time, whichever way I look at it, and I
don’t think
my mother really intended this. She had no energy for games. She always had to conserve her energy for important things. Only her brain was wildly energetic in those last weeks as she grew weaker and weaker, concentrating ferociously on me.
It has all been returned, this intense concentration. I concentrated on her over last winter to the virtual exclusion of everything else. Except for Rory, and briefly Isabella and Hector, I kept myself to myself and associated with no one. My work brought me only minimal contact with anyone else and never interfered with constant thoughts of my mother. It has not been a particularly healthy state of affairs. I haven’t slept well, I haven’t eaten well. I’ve become quite thin and drawn. Tony says we are both convalescents. I’ve neglected the friendships I have (few enough) and given up most activities. I didn’t go to a theatre or a cinema all winter, I have a small heap of invitations to which I have not replied and my answerphone has mostly had its messages wiped off without being attended to. I haven’t wanted to be reached. All that is so negative, it sounds pathetic, but out of it has come something much more positive. I have moved on, bought my house, finally emerged from the numbness which afflicted me after my parents died – I can feel again. It is as though a point of crisis has been passed, a point brought about and then negotiated through the memory box. The past, my mother’s past, about which I knew
virtually
nothing (nor wanted to), instead of being put behind me, has been put in front of me and dealt with. It feels right.
I was telling Rory this the other day. He is still in London – there was no miraculous reunion with his parents but he has grudgingly agreed to keep in touch – and naturally has his eye on my lovely new home with what he meaningfully calls ‘plenty of spare rooms’. I told him I’d burned the box and with it my resentment and suspicion of my dead mother. I told him I want to have some memorial to her. My stepmother has a gravestone (and I will let the inscription stand), but my mother hasn’t. I went back recently to the crematorium where she was cremated. I deliberately went on the day she had died because I’d been told a Book of Remembrance was always open, listing all the people who had been cremated, day by day. Her name was not among the twenty-three names (evidently a popular time to die). I enquired about this and was informed there was no record of Susannah Musgrave, or Cameron, because none had been requested and paid for. My father obviously hadn’t wanted it. I agree with him. But still, I craved some sort of appropriate memorial.
I thought, and still think, of planting a tree in her memory and having a plaque put in front of it, but where? I intend always to live in this house, but who knows – I may move and then the tree in this garden would be left behind, perhaps uprooted, or chopped down by strangers. I even thought of a seat, a wooden bench, inscribed with her name. That would be movable, but it seemed like an old man’s memorial. And yesterday I thought of it – a box. I could have a box specially made, hand-crafted out of silver, not too big, so that it would be easy to take with me wherever I go, not too small so that it might get lost. About the size of a jewellery box, say, eight inches by three; and on the lid, no inscription. I’d have it lined with emerald velvet, the
softest
I can find, and keep her necklace in it. When people admired it I would say, ‘Mm, my mother left the box.’ No one need know it wasn’t this box. There would be a slight mystery about it; but if pressed, and few I thought would press me, I would be able to talk about her as I have always talked about Charlotte.
Romantic? Perhaps. Sentimental? Probably. Comforting? Certainly. And that is all that matters to me, as it mattered to my mother, the comfort of it. Her box served its purpose. For her. Mine will serve mine. For me. And neither of us will have ever been quite sure what that purpose was, beyond soothing pain and striving to communicate.
Is there a better one?
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Copyright © Margaret Forster 1999
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First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Chatto & Windus
First published in paperback in Great Britain in 2000 by Penguin Books
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