The Memory Box (7 page)

That day, I made a plan. I studied the list of objects that had been in the box and resolved to try to trace them in the order in which they had been numbered. ‘Trace’ was not exactly what I meant, but I could think of no more appropriate word. I wanted to do a sort of study of each object which would involve trying to find out its possible significance first in its own right and then with regard to Susannah. If a trail leading somewhere was intended, then this, I was convinced, was how I would follow it. If there was no trail, if, in spite of the numbers, this was merely a random collection of mementoes meant to serve as the most tenuous of links with a dead woman, then it would be exposed as such.

I regretted having to start with the three feathers, really, because of all the objects they seemed so vague. There was nothing that I had been told about Susannah to connect her with birds. She hadn’t painted birds, there had been no books about birds amongst those belonging to her which I had sent to a dealer. A trip to the library next day and half an hour’s study of a pretty limited ornithology section taught me that the three feathers were neither rare nor exciting. They were the feathers of the common gull, found all along the sea coasts of Britain. It was unlikely that even an expert would be able to say where they had come from. So, straight away, I felt disappointed. Back home, I held the feathers in my hand, thinking hard. Where had Susannah got them? Was the number 1 to indicate some reference to her childhood? Or those sailing trips with my father? (I remembered only one ‘seaside’ photograph of her that had hung in my
father
’s study – on a boat somewhere, though no gulls that I could recall.) I got out the oldest of those photograph albums bequeathed to me by my grandmother. It was the sort with thick, black, cardboard-like pages on to which the mostly small square photographs were stuck with strong glue. No snaps of Susannah at the seaside, none at all. A few beside various lochs, but none actually at the coast.

The photograph albums covering Susannah’s life were all together. I’d packed them in one box, the two my grandmother gave me and the two dating from when my father had started taking photographs up to and including my own birth. As soon as I opened the first of the albums kept by my father, I found pages of photographs of Susannah taken by the sea. Too many, all too alike, which is probably why they’d barely registered before. He’d had a fixation about getting her in profile, in the foreground, so that the eye focused on the line of forehead and nose and chin and very little else. He must have had her sitting on a cliff top because the background was all sea and sky. And yes, there were gulls, seagulls, white dots, sometimes swarms of them, in this background, though none distinct. Because my father was a methodical and neat man, all these photographs were labelled. He’d written little captions, in italic handwriting, underneath – date, place, everything. These first few pages of pictures in the first of his albums were all from the summer he met Susannah, at the end of which he’d taken her home to meet his widowed mother who lived in Whitehaven. Some of them were taken on trips to places along the coast – St Bees, Allonby, Skinburness – but most at Whitehaven itself.

Did the feathers come from the Whitehaven coast? Well, was it a fair assumption or not? It seemed so to me. Susannah had begun not with any link to her childhood but with a link to my father. In a way, it was the most vital of links since it was to produce me. But it was hard, all the same,
to
see the relevance of leaving me three gulls’ feathers. Did she want me to go to Whitehaven on a kind of memory lane trip? The idea made me feel slightly queasy, but on the other hand I had never been to Whitehaven, or indeed to Cumberland (my father never called his county ‘Cumbria’). After his mother died, when I was too young to have any memories of her, though she apparently lived with us in Oxford during each of her last two winters, he never went back, for the reasons I have already guessed at. Cumberland was closed to him. If he’d still had relatives living in Whitehaven, especially a brother or a sister with a family, then I’m sure he would have got over whatever block he had and taken me there, but he was an only child, as bereft of family as Charlotte was blessed and burdened. In his rare mournful moods, he would tell me I was the last of an ancient line of Musgraves and recite poetry to me, lines I think from Walter Scott, in which our name was lauded.

I always liked having a regional surname even if I had never been to that region. ‘Musgrave’ doesn’t have a particularly attractive sound, in fact rather the opposite, but I fancied it went well with Catherine. I dropped the Hope entirely. Of all the things I was grateful to Charlotte for, I was most fervently grateful that she’d changed my name, or rather selected my other name for me to be known by. At birth, I was named Catherine Hope, to be called Hope. Susannah called me Hope. But Charlotte, when she became my mother, when I was still only a little over a year, asked my father if he could bear her to use my given first name of Catherine. My father said he preferred it, and then it turned out that my grandmother, whom he consulted with trepidation, was pleased. Catherine was her own name and she, too, had not approved of my being called Hope. Everyone, then, was glad to reject the name Susannah had chosen for me. Precisely. Hope, indeed. It was unbearable to think of, and when later – much, much later – I did think
about
it, I hated it. I didn’t want to be her hope, I didn’t want to think my name had been invested with such symbolism. I was her hope for the future and it had failed. Every form I ever filled out after the time I knew this gave my name as Catherine Musgrave.

I couldn’t really see any point in going to Whitehaven just because a few seagulls appeared in photographs of Susannah taken there, but on the other hand it was a town I’d always wanted to visit, if because of my father rather than her, and there was nothing to hold me back from going. I was a free agent. I had no ties. I needed a change. It was early autumn and the weather was pleasant, so I decided to go. But I didn’t drive there. I’m not a keen, or a particularly good, driver, and there was something wrong with my car. I didn’t want to wait until it was put right – my enthusiasm might fade within the forty-eight hours the garage needed – so I went by train, to Carlisle, and arranged to hire a car up there.

The best thing about train journeys as opposed to car journeys is, of course, that one can read. Tony was always surprised by how much I did read. He said I hadn’t seemed a bookish person when we first met. I took this as an insult, not a compliment, and demanded to be told precisely what he meant. Did he mean I seemed too empty-headed to be a serious reader? Too frivolous? Too stupid? He was patient and said no, none of those things, but rather that he thought I was more of a visual person who preferred pictures, films and television as stimulation. And he hadn’t thought I’d have the sheer patience that reading demands. I seemed always on the move, always rushing, and he couldn’t see me sitting still, turning the pages of any book. Well, he soon learned he was wrong. I read more than he did for pleasure and not what he would have called light stuff either. I love thick biographies and best of all, to alternate with these, volumes of classic short stories.

It was in thinking about what I would read that my mind took a sudden and surprising leap. As I went into my local bookshop I was thinking about how Susannah’s feathers would be a good subject, if I were a writer, for a short story – ‘The Feathers’ or ‘The Seagull Feathers’. And then I thought ‘The Seagull’, and that there
was
a short story, a famous one, with that name. I was wrong, but not so very wrong. It was not a short story I was thinking of, but a play, Chekhov’s play. I knew it was ridiculous, but this bizarre idea, that my gull feathers would somehow be explained in a play by a nineteenth-century Russian dramatist, fascinated me. My father had certainly had Chekhov – and Dostoevsky, and Turgenev – among his books. Who knew if Susannah, obliged to spend so much time resting, had read this play and tied it in with some obscure message she wished to convey?

I suddenly remembered that Susannah had at one time wanted to be an actress. This wasn’t one of my grandmother’s stories but told to me by my Aunt Isabella. She’d come to watch me in a school play – she and Rory were staying with us and came with my parents. It was
Toad Of Toad Hall
and I was the bombastic toad, a part I loved. I overdid Mr Toad’s cavorting about and shouted rather than spoke my lines, but I got a lot of laughs and was quite flushed with my success when I rushed to ask my family what they had thought. My parents were full of praise, as ever, but Isabella was tight-lipped and did not hang back from pointing out that she thought I’d been ‘showing off a little, just like Susannah used to’. My father quickly said Mr Toad
was
a show-off, it was that kind of part, but Isabella said all the same I’d upstaged the others at several crucial moments – ‘just like her mother’. It could all have got very ugly – I was on the edge of tears to be told I had been less than wonderful – but Charlotte smoothed things over and, though I never quite forgave my aunt, no real argument
resulted
. I think she must have felt a little guilty because later on that evening she said she thought I’d make a fine actress if I toned myself down a bit. ‘Your mother was going to be an actress once. She auditioned for RADA but didn’t get in and she gave the idea up, luckily. Our mother was relieved, she’d never approved of acting, she thought it brought the worst out in Susannah. And so it did.’

But maybe Susannah had still been interested in the theatre, maybe she’d read plays for pleasure and still had her little fantasies of being an actress, perhaps it was not so absurd that she’d tried, through leaving me the seagull feathers, to direct me to a play, because it said something about her.

There was no one to mock, no one to tell me how silly I was being, nobody to talk sensibly and tell me not to be preposterous. It was crazy enough to connect three ordinary bird feathers with a particular place and look for some revelation by going there, but to seek literary enlightenment through so forced a parallel was wilfully stupid. But I wanted to be stupid. And I had to have something to read, so why not a World Classics cheap copy of
Anton Chekhov’s Five Plays
? I was smiling when I bought it, hugging to myself the joke, but once settled on the 10.45 train from Euston and reading
The Seagull
the idea that this was a joke receded. Looking for meanings, I found them instantly. The first line Masha speaks, the second line in the play, is ‘I’m in mourning for my life, I’m unhappy.’ Then everything Nina says is meaningful in the context of Susannah’s situation – ‘My heart’s full of feelings for you’ … ‘What is to be, will be.’ She thinks she is like a seagull herself – ‘I’m a seagull’ … ‘Something seems to lure me … like a seagull.’ And then her final long speech before she runs out through the French window – ‘What a life it was – so serene and warm, so happy and innocent.’ My eyes were jumping from line to line, picking up odd words, refusing to read properly or to
make
sense of the play as a whole. I hardly knew what it was about, except that this woman Nina’s life appeared to have been somehow ruined when once it had been perfect. And the seagull, or a seagull, with whom she identifies, is killed.

End of my mad notion that Susannah had made a literary reference. I found myself blushing a little as I closed the paperback and stared out of the window. How dangerous it was, this game, because that was what it was turning out to be, a game, one without any rules of play and only the merest chance of an elusive prize at the end. My imagination was enjoying itself, conjuring up absurdity after absurdity, trying to make profound what was simple. I had let some kind of brake off and was freewheeling, my mind rushing down all kinds of strange alleys. Seagulls, feathers, visions of Susannah floated before me dizzily and I felt a kind of physical excitement I did not like. It was a relief when the dreariness of the Midlands gave way to the hills of the North-West and it soothed me to stare out at the smooth roundness through which the train was travelling. I was like a medium coming out of a self-induced trance.

By the time I got off at Carlisle I was sensible again. Which was fortunate, because the drive from there to Whitehaven was not the easy coastal meandering I’d expected, but a fraught business, which involved driving on a difficult, quite narrow road, with very few stretches of dual carriageway, among large lorries. There wasn’t much chance to look at the scenery and I had only a faint impression of mountains off to my left for a long way. It wasn’t until I was almost at Whitehaven itself, high up on a top road I’d somehow strayed on to from the main road in an attempt to escape the traffic, that I sensed anything glorious about the landscape that corresponded to my father’s memories. But then I saw the sea stretching away to a blue line of hills on the
Scottish
side and on my other side a great vista of soaring and dipping mountains, and I began to appreciate something of the hold his home county had had over him.

What I didn’t know, and pondered as I drove into the town down a long and winding road, was whether Susannah had shared his affection. She was a Scot, not a Cumbrian, and surely more loyal to her own hills. And unlike my father she hadn’t been a great climber and walker, not possessing, because of her heart condition, his stamina and strength. I didn’t even know how many times she had actually been in this area. There was that first summer, when he’d brought her home to meet his mother (not a success – she’d thought Susannah looked ‘delicate’ – too true), but after that? I didn’t know. I thought there must have been at least one other occasion, when they went walking, and there was their honeymoon and the photographs from that in a more southern part of the county, showing Susannah looking incredibly tanned and healthy and far from delicate. I had her map with me, and the rucksack, numbers 2 and 3, and had vague ideas of going on from Whitehaven to explore further if I felt like it.