The Memory Box (6 page)

Tony was the only person who succeeded in helping me to be calm when I was angry or upset. He was calm himself, this man I used to love not so very long ago, not so many weeks before the memory box came into my life to disturb me. Tony lived with me for over a year, the year that ended with Charlotte’s death. He helped me through my father’s death and then through Charlotte’s illness. He helped me stay sane, by loving me and tolerating my rage and understanding the misery that was fuelling it. It was Tony who taught me tricks other people had tried to teach me and which I had rejected. I had always been so insulted to be told to take deep breaths, or to close my eyes and count to ten when I was furious about something and letting rip. Tony didn’t come out with rubbish about deep breaths and counting, but he did introduce me to yoga and practised it himself with me. I jeered, I sneered, but grudgingly I let him teach me and, though it didn’t stop me exploding from time to time, it did make me calmer in general. So did his
ideas
for making my bedroom a soothing place into which I could retreat. Tony put new lighting in and together we chose a carpet to cover the plain boards: the room became a softer place, less stark, less bare. We painted the white walls a pale apricot and left them bare except for the wall opposite the bed. This was to hold what he solemnly referred to as my ‘calming picture’. I humoured him and after great deliberation chose a print I’d always loved.

It’s a Cartier-Bresson photograph, ‘En Brie’, taken in 1968, a classic in black and white. It’s the one showing a road leading between fields of what might be lavender, a road broad in the foreground and narrowing to pass through a long avenue of trees, the sort of road so common in the French countryside. The line of trees curves to the left, fading into the horizon. Half the picture is sky. No clouds, just smooth, grey sky. No people or buildings. Many a night, in the half gloom of my bedroom I’ve stared at that photograph and followed the clear yet mysterious road. Usually, it helped me travel to sleep but that night it had the opposite effect. I felt suddenly alert. I began to turn over in my mind what I would leave in a memory box. Would I put this photograph in it? And if I did, what would I intend it to convey, and what might it signify to the person to whom I bequeathed it? I saw how it would help to think about this. The only way to make sense of Susannah’s legacy might be to put myself in the position of leaving a similar one myself. Instantly, I realised the dangers. Presented with a print of this Cartier-Bresson photograph, what might a recipient think? Surely, they would home in on the
place
. They would decide that wherever this road was, I had walked or driven along it and that it was somehow of great significance to me. They would feel bound to find it and then wait for enlightenment to dawn. But it wouldn’t. The place, the road itself, was of no importance and going there would have told them nothing about me. I had never been to Brie. It
meant
nothing to me. What meant something was purely the art of the photograph. It would have been left as a marker of my taste.

What else would I leave? I tried to think of myself, of what I had become, what I was, of my life in general. What would I want the unimaginable daughter to know? What would it pain me to realise that photographs and the testimonies of others had not told her? Susannah had left a husband, a mother, a sister and several uncles, aunts and cousins, who had not only tried to keep her memory alive but who had in their possession a whole archive of material about her. If I had wished, I could have been swamped in it. (My grandmother in particular had seemed determined to tell me what I didn’t want to hear – there was no stopping her, and I grew to dread the words ‘Susannah used to’.) Hers were all stories in which this Susannah won things, it seemed to me – prizes galore for the best handwriting, the best-decorated Easter egg, the fastest crossword-puzzle solver, the best singer, the best verse speaker – on and on went the litany of praise. She used to work so hard, try so hard, think so hard; she used to smile so winningly, make friends so easily, charm people so completely. All my grandmother wanted, of course, was to bring her
alive
for me, but that was the very thing she could not do. Maybe if she had told me just one story, given me just one example, of Susannah being naughty or spiteful she would have succeeded, but she never did. As a child, I assumed there were no such detrimental tales to tell, and only now do I realise my grandmother may have been censoring Susannah’s past, if with the best of motives.

No child of mine would have had all that. There were no grandparents to be keepers of my flame; most of my cousins had faded out of my life. There was only Rory who had truly known me and who was still close. And he would not be trustworthy. Any box of mine would be far more
significant
than Susannah’s – it would have to speak for itself and compensate for the almost entire lack of other voices and evidence. And there would be no husband to safeguard it …

That was a stupid thought. If I had had a child there would have been a father if not a husband. I thought about this, getting deeper and deeper into absurd speculation, moving further and further away from my original starting point. I saw I was obstinately refusing to answer properly my own crucial question: what would I put in a memory box if I had to leave one? Good God, it was simple enough. Then I saw why I was being so evasive. It wasn’t because I couldn’t think what I would need to communicate, but that I was ashamed of what that was. Susannah had had plenty to be proud of. Happy things. Good memories. I did not. I had to confront the fact that I had made a mess of much of my life. I had done things with which I did not particularly care to acquaint those who did not know. Only my childhood, especially my early childhood, was worth trying to encapsulate, my first supremely fortunate ten years or so. I would have liked a child of mine to have known of this happiness, hoping the knowledge of it would please them. But how could I pass it on, if I was obliged to, in the shape of some object to go in a comparatively small box? I thought of our house in Oxford, my lovely childhood home, and I remembered the model my father had once made of it, a doll’s house given to me on my seventh birthday, the most beautiful object. I still had it, sitting in a broad alcove halfway up the stairs. But it was too big to go into a hatbox, or indeed a crate. The doll’s house could not be part of my memory box. It could only be a memory in itself.

Yet somehow having thought of starting with this house I felt less agitated. It reassured me, the reminder that of course I had something worth communicating of my life however it had turned out. This box business was only, after
all
, about communication, nothing else. There was no justification for regarding anything Susannah left for me as sinister. I didn’t need to sweat and strain for deep meanings. And then I slept.

I WOKE LATE
the next morning, a Sunday, feeling cheerful. Taking my coffee into the sitting-room, I looked at the red hat on the glass head, the sunlight glancing off it just as I had known it would, and prepared to think differently about what had been in the memory box. I told myself this was, after all, like a treasure hunt, though not the sort Rory had liked to romanticise about, and that I should regard it as fun. I would treat each of the eleven objects as a clue and following these clues, in search of Susannah, I would have a sense of purpose. Indeed, it was a welcome diversion for me even if she could not have known I would need it.

What did I need a diversion from? It was embarrassing to admit the answer even to myself: life, my own life. I needed a respite from life in the manner I was increasingly living it. It wasn’t that I was suicidal – suicide never entered my head. I was just tired, jaded. I could find little pleasure or satisfaction in anything I did and I was angry with myself for feeling like this when I had so much to be grateful for. Everything seemed flat and when real tragedy happened, when both my parents died one after the other so unexpectedly, this seemed only to point up how little happiness I had been enjoying anyway before I had real reason to be unhappy. It had been almost a relief to have cause for my vague feelings of despair. What a sorry, un-Susannah-like
state
of affairs. I had no idea exactly how this had come about. Everything had been so promising but then had just collapsed, and I found myself at thirty-one looking back with disbelief at myself at eighteen, nineteen, so confident and determined.

I hadn’t looked ahead much then, didn’t have precise plans, but then not many eighteen-year-olds do, except the fortunate few who have always wanted to be doctors or lawyers and see their paths clearly marked. I just assumed … I don’t, in fact, remember what I assumed. That things would happen, I suppose, that I needn’t worry about the future, it would come to me. I never had worried. I never had had reason to worry. Occasionally, my father would enquire, in a mild sort of way, if I’d thought what I would like to do in life. I remember being surprised that he should need to ask at all. Surely he knew that I’d go to some sort of place where I could learn more about photography and then I’d be a photographer. I wasn’t interested in anything else, but of course I hadn’t thought it out, I hadn’t the slightest idea how one became a photographer by profession – I just liked taking photographs. Wasn’t that enough? My father didn’t think so. He thought I should have a more general education, and either go to university or art college to do a foundation course then a degree. I refused to go to university and only agreed to the basic foundation course because I had heard everyone had a good time doing it (and at St Martin’s in London I had a very good time indeed).

There wasn’t much photography in the course then, but that didn’t bother me. I took photographs anyway, pleasing myself, without a thought about earning a living. I saw no need to. Ever since my parents had given me a good camera, a Pentax, on my tenth birthday, I’d known I was hooked. I taught myself the obvious way, through trial and error, taking endless photographs, and the only help I had was in learning how to print them. Luckily, my school had an
excellent
art department with photography as one of the options in the sixth form, and I was a quick learner. My father fitted out a little room that had once been a coal cellar as a darkroom for me and he was quite happy to finance what he thought of as my hobby. He bought me a Leica on my eighteenth birthday, more extravagance. But it wasn’t a hobby, it was a passion, and I think he was amazed how it came to absorb me. I was soon entering competitions and winning some, and as far as I was concerned that was it, that’s what I’d do. Patiently, my father pointed out that winning competitions was one thing, but paying one’s bills another. Bills? I don’t think I even knew what he meant. You could say that it was his own fault: he and my mother had been over-indulgent. They had never made me realise the value of money. I had never had to work at menial jobs in the holidays to earn pocket money as most of my friends did. They gave me a generous allowance and I actually thought my expenditure modest, on the grounds that I rarely bought clothes or records, failing to appreciate what I cost them in other ways (cameras, films, equipment). A case could be made out (not that I would make it) for my parents being responsible for much that happened simply through being too generous. The curious thing to me now is how little shame or guilt I felt at being the only, spoiled child of well-off parents. I took it all as my due. I seemed to think it was my birthright to be so cosseted, and had no qualms about it.

They financed me through St Martin’s and then bought me my flat. As if that wasn’t enough, they gave me an income until such time as I could earn enough to support myself. It took me four years and never once did either of them remonstrate and say I would have to get some kind of other job if I couldn’t make photography pay. They were utterly, completely supportive and it didn’t concern me in the least. All I can say in mitigation of my bland acceptance
is
that I loved them and showed it. I didn’t move away from them, they were never a burden to me, as so many of my friends find their parents (and as Rory with equal cause for gratitude certainly finds his). I loved them, I liked them, I phoned them almost every day and visited them every other weekend. They shared in everything I did and the warmth between us never cooled, or only very slightly. Over men, the two before Tony. My choice of men friends, of lovers, did produce not so much a cooling of the affection between us as an anxiety which had never been noticeable before, even if it had existed (as I’m sure it had). They became a little tense; it made them uneasy when certain men moved into my flat. They were always visibly relieved to hear they had moved out.

Maybe it was men I was tired of, not life. There hadn’t been many. Only a few. Only two of any importance. I wasn’t good at relationships, that was the trouble. I always grew restless and felt claustrophobic a few months into a relationship, however much I loved the man. It made me wonder, of course, how much I loved them. Could what I felt
be
love, if a great deal of the time I wished they were not there? Didn’t being in love mean you couldn’t get enough of the loved one? My father and Charlotte loved each other. They never seemed to want to be apart longer than a day. And the happy Susannah had been the same, with my father, so far as I knew, her only lover. Perhaps I am simply a bad judge both of men and of what love is. In any case, my personal life was very far from rich and satisfying and I couldn’t seem to sort it out. I preferred being alone.

I realised, though, that morning, how much I wanted Susannah’s legacy to touch and change me, to work magic. I knew it was foolish to have such expectations, but I felt that unless I forced myself to make an effort and be optimistic, I would waste these gifts left to me with such love. And there
was
love there, whatever else, I was sure of that.
Everything
had been wrapped with such care and packed so tenderly. But maybe it was the thought of this love which I had always instinctively feared. If I felt the love, I would feel, too, its withdrawal. Perhaps I had unconsciously been clever all these years to refuse this posthumous love. It could fill me with a resentment and a rage against fate which I had been spared.