The Memory Box (8 page)

All the time I was trying to find my way round the town (and I seemed to go in circles, realising I was passing certain buildings twice), I was straining to imagine my urbane father coming from such a place. I couldn’t see him belonging at all, and the feeling increased once I’d parked the car in a little turning off the quayside. I tried to see him as a boy, playing on the miserable, muddy patch of dark sand I could make out beyond the wall of an inner harbour, and failed. Then I walked down a sad shopping precinct full of shoe shops with wire baskets of cheap trainers standing outside until I came to a small market place, where the tourist office was housed in a pretty painted old building. It was a relief to reach it. They gave me a street map there, and I followed its directions to Washington Square, where I knew my father
had
been born and brought up. It wasn’t a square at all, but a triangle in the middle of narrow streets and connected to others by a cut. Now here I
could
see my father, sitting sketching perhaps on the bench in the square, drawing the five little trees quaintly lined up on the cobbles, or copying the mural of the George Washington sailing ship, dated 1732, which adorned the brick wall of a house backing on to it. It was so strange to come from the shabbiness of the shopping area, with its dispirited air, and from the forlorn harbour, into this charming enclave and I felt pleased. I stood and stared up at the house where my father had lived, its three windows stacked neatly one above the other, as he had described, with the top window that of his room. It didn’t seem to be a private house any more, none of these houses did. There were plaques on the outside of most of them stating hours of business and none had curtains at the windows. But there was still an air of faded gentility around, which was unexpected and soothing.

It was distracting to be conjuring up images of my father when I was here to think of Susannah. I saw how Whitehaven would have confused her, coming as she did from a fairly affluent Edinburgh family who lived in a solid, stone-built house among others the same, in an area where there was no mistaking general prosperity. She’d never lived cheek by jowl with obvious poverty as my father had done here, hidden from it but part of it. This house, his house, in Washington Square was an elegant, Georgian residence but I knew that inside it had been sparsely furnished and always cold, unlike her own overstuffed, overheated home. My paternal grandmother had had very little money after her husband died when my father was sixteen, and she herself had never worked, so she had sold most of the furniture, anything that fetched a decent price, and lived a spartan existence. I thought about knocking on the door and asking to see round it,
but
didn’t. It wouldn’t look the same; there was no point.

Instead, I walked along Queen Street a bit and turned down the next corner into Cross Street. There were several houses in its short length with bed-and-breakfast signs in their windows and I chose one for the cheerful geraniums hanging in a basket outside. The woman who answered the door was not at all cheerful. She stared blankly at me and had to think for a long time before agreeing she had a room vacant and that she could provide me with an evening meal. She told me where I could park my car for the night and once I’d done this I returned immediately because ‘evening’ apparently meant five-thirty and it was nearly that. Having the meal was a bit embarrassing. There was only the woman, a Mrs Robinson, and me. She didn’t eat. I sat at a table laid with an embroidered cloth and she pottered between kitchen and table waiting on me. I was given bacon and egg, which I don’t much care for, toast and cake and a large pot of tea. She stood and watched me eat as though I were a creature from outer space and I began to feel like one. All attempts to engage her in conversation failed, or rather petered out quickly. She said, ‘You’re not local,’ a statement so obviously true I couldn’t think of a reply. I said my father had lived here, round the corner, and at the name Musgrave she took a brief interest. Yes, she knew the name. Plenty of Musgraves around still. She didn’t ask me why I was here, betraying no curiosity whatsoever, so I didn’t tell her (though I realised I’d quite wanted to). The moment I’d finished the bacon and egg and nibbled at the toast, she whipped my plate away, saying she was going to choir practice and must get the dishes washed first.

By then it was dark, though only seven o’clock. I was tired, so went to my room, thinking I would have a bath and read until I fell asleep. The bathroom was next to my room, at the front of the house. After my bath, I stood wrapped in a towel, drying my hair with another while I
looked
out of the clear panes above the frosted glass. The seagulls were everywhere, silvery white in the dark, gleaming in the dull light of the few street lamps. There was one on the window sill, its beak hawked and its legs longer than I had ever thought they would be. The noise they made was not so much a screeching as a high-pitched whistle and it was insistent. I wondered, as I went back to my room – enough to give me vertigo with its swirling patterned red carpet and curtains of pink and yellow stripes – how long the birds would keep this up. Were they governed by the tides? Did they sleep? Would they soon all swoop off and leave the square suddenly silent?

I think they must have done. It was quiet enough, at any rate, when I woke briefly in the night. But then in the morning there was a different noise, rain, heavy rain, lashing against the window and a moaning wind coming through the gap I had left open. The room was cold and I shivered getting out of bed and rushed to pull on jeans and a thick sweater. Mrs Robinson offered more bacon and eggs – I could smell the bacon already frying – and was put out when I declined. I asked if by any chance she had coffee and she was aggrieved, saying of course she did. A large mug of instant coffee was triumphantly produced and I made the best of it. Who did I think I was, coming here with my hoity-toity metropolitan ways and expecting real coffee, black and bitter? She asked if I would like a flask filled to take out with me. At first I said no, but then changed my mind. It looked as if I was going to get drenched. I might never find a café. Watery Nescafé might at some point taste like nectar.

At least I’d come well equipped. I was no novice when it came to being out in exposed places in horrible weather, and had all the right clothing: lightweight but waterproof leggings and jacket, with a hood, and wellingtons. I had a case, for my camera and tripod, which was completely
watertight
, and I carried a large and, unfortunately, heavy golfing umbrella which I used as a shield when taking photographs in such conditions. Crazy to attempt to take shots at all in such poor light, but I’d had some remarkable successes all the same, some dramatic results in similar conditions. I didn’t know why I was thinking of taking photographs that day – it was just automatic, it was what I did, my job. Wherever I went I had a camera with me; it was part of me, sometimes the only part in which I had any pride. Taking pictures had always seemed to help me feel real, to steady myself when I felt I was wavering. The photographs were solid proof that I had been where I thought I had been and seen what I thought I had seen.

And yet I had always known not to trust the camera in this way. I soon learned its limitations, its tricks. Every time I looked at a photograph I had taken I saw the deceit. It was not what was in the photograph that gave the lie to it, but rather what was outside the frame, what was missing. I knew very early on, without being able to articulate it, that photographs are made, not taken. They are created, formed by the photographer, who can persuade the onlooker to see what she wants them to see. As Cartier-Bresson made me see that road in France as a fluid, peaceful surface, enticing me along it in a dreamlike way until I failed to register where the road might be coming from or going to, it didn’t matter to him. I knew I would have made a different photograph and might not even have seen the seductive curve he used to such soporific effect. He made something calming and beautiful out of a scene I might turn into something sinister and harsh. It happens all the time, the photographers’ emotions as well as their vision forming the photograph.

I wondered often why I had always distrusted photographs of Susannah. Portraits, after all, ought to be safest from the photographer’s interpretation – people, straight to camera,
where
is the room for interpretation? But they are not. Photographs of people are always, to me, sentimental in no time at all. Before the film is even developed, a kind of death has taken place in the subject. The person has changed, they will never be as they were in that photograph again. I look at Susannah, posed so carefully by my father to her best advantage, and all I see is death. Those photographs make me shudder. I don’t think, How lovely she looked, how fine her eyes were. Instead, I think, This is a reminder of a life over. So I don’t take people, ever. I take landscapes only, and always black and white. Colour is less true, more subject to exaggeration. I automatically distrust a colour photograph. Looking at Susannah’s eyes and hair in my father’s photographs I think, No, they were not that shade of blue, that shade of gold – that is the colour of the film, of the print, and what can be seen is a mere approximation. Blue eyes, blonde hair, yes, but where is the subtlety? Colour blanks it out.

Trudging through the sodden streets of Whitehaven that morning I took a grim pleasure in my preference for black and white pictures – looking for colour, I would have been dismayed. There was none. Once I was out of the town and climbing a track leading from the quayside to a headland, there was no colour anywhere – grey leaden sea, black gusts of rain, sullen grey sky weighted with huge dark clouds. And everywhere the seagulls, great blurs of palest grey tossed into the sky. Yet for no reason I could think of, I began to feel exhilarated.

HOURS I LAY
there, hours and hours all the long, wet day, on my front, barely sheltered by the umbrella, stuck up to the top of its handle in the grass and yet threatening all the time to blow away. I watched the sea through half-closed eyes, the rain driving into the side of my hood, stinging my right cheek even though it did not penetrate the waterproof fabric. The material stuck to my skin, cold and clammy, but I dared not ease it away. The sea before me, far below, was ugly, black and bitter, the tops of the heaving waves a dun brown, like beer, and the white foam and spume not white at all but more a filthy ivory. Every now and again I had another look through the lens of my camera, as protected as I could make it by a smaller transparent umbrella within the larger one, and saw the same – thick clumps of seagulls travelling so swiftly no shutter could cope with the movement and produce more than a blur.

There were hundreds of gulls, driven in great angry gusts back from the sea. They were tossed high above the waves, which kept up a ceaseless crashing on the shingle, all along the battered shoreline. I had never seen anything like this violence of wind and water, full of such fury and menace. The birds seemed at the mercy of these dramatic elements and yet they could not be subdued – again and again they were hurled towards the land, then forced yet higher into
the
air, only to turn and strain towards the horizon, when their effort would begin again. I couldn’t imagine why they did not fly inland and find shelter until the storm was played out. Or let the wind take them where it wanted to. They seemed heroically determined to fly out to sea and would not give up, staying close together, striving as a group, not a stray to be seen. I wondered if they were shrieking in protest but it was impossible to hear them. There was no sound except the roar of the wind and the thudding of the waves. The birds were silenced so long as the gale blew.

There were no boats out there at sea. Behind me, in the harbour, all the bays were full, crammed with boats of every size jostling and jangling in their shelter together. There were no people either. Trudging up on to this headland I had seen no one. I had been granted a privacy and sense of isolation I had rarely known. I was frozen and the rain had found a way into my boots, which were slowly filling with it. But I went on lying there, inert, wondering if this was how people died of exposure, died on mountains or in the wilderness because they became too apathetic to move, because they gave themselves up to those particular forces of nature which threatened to overwhelm them – and were in the end pleased to do so.

In my inner pocket, beneath the layers of waterproof, were the three feathers. It could not have been a day such as this when Susannah found them. The beach below might, for all I knew, be littered with seagull feathers, but nobody could possibly pick them up in these conditions. No sane person would be outside at all. I was not acting in a sane way myself. Any nearer the edge and I could be blown off, sent plunging down into the greedy sea. I knew I had taken no photographs worth having. I hadn’t captured anything of what lay beyond the camera even if I had caught a fleeting impression of the turmoil. Everything on film would be flat, unable to record what I felt: a sort of awful fear. I found
myself
clutching the grass and imagining I was sliding down the slope.

I had never before allowed myself to imagine Susannah’s fear, but lying there, reduced to such a pitifully feeble state myself, merely through exposure for a prolonged period to cold and rain, an image began to steal over me. She had surely been afraid. She had known that her heart muscles were failing, they had been failing for years, and that at any moment the main pump of her heart might stop (as it did) without further warning. My grandmother endlessly mourned the fact that, a mere five years later, a heart bypass could have saved her, but at that period nothing could and she knew it. It was a matter of time before she grew weaker and weaker. The fear would have grown, fear of death, fear of the process of dying, fear of leaving me. I felt suddenly paralysed with her imagined fear and ready to weep at the thought of it. I’d never once before felt sorry for her.