The Memory Box (12 page)

‘Susannah never went to the Caribbean or the South Seas,’ I said. ‘She hardly went abroad at all. People didn’t, then.’

‘How do you know?’

‘My dad told me.’

‘But what about before she met him?’

‘She met him young. She hadn’t had time to go anywhere.’

‘Well, maybe not. You should check with my mum. But anyway, even if she didn’t go somewhere to bring back this shell for herself, someone else must have done. They gave it to her as a souvenir, that’s all. It hasn’t any other meaning – a pretty holiday memento she passed on to you.’

‘Depends who gave it to her.’

‘Now that really is looking for messages,’ he protested. ‘This will tire my poor little brain out. You are actually suggesting, my sweet cousin, that the point of this shell being left to you was that it was given to Susannah by someone she wanted you to track down? Don’t be so silly. It-is-only-a-shell. She liked it. She hoped you would like it. End of story.’

I was suddenly sure he was right, but instead of being
relieved
I was disappointed. Just a shell. A shell from some part of the world to which she had never been but had always yearned to go. Maybe leaving it to me signalled her yearning, maybe she hoped I would be able to go where she had not been able to go. Well, I had. I hadn’t been to the South Seas or to the Caribbean but I had travelled far and wide, as she had not, and I intended to visit many more countries. If she wanted, she could come with me in spirit and we’d find other shells like this and bring them back to join this one. I smiled to think of this sentimental fancy, and Rory, mistaking my own self-mockery for a new cheerfulness, which he credited himself with bringing about, said, ‘That’s better, that’s a good little girlie, now.’

He picked up the mirror next. ‘Nice mirror,’ he said. ‘Queen Anne, I think. I’ll give you fifty quid for it.’

‘So that means it must be worth at least two hundred pounds.’

‘Cheeky.’ He scrutinised the silver work on the handle and said, ‘I wonder where she got it from. There’s a mark here I’ve seen on some of my mother’s silver – look, see that curly C, round the stem of the ivy? It probably belonged to our grandmother. It’s probably a family heirloom and as much mine as yours.’

‘It was left to me, thank you.’

‘But maybe Susannah had no right to it. Anyway, you’ve always denied you’re a Cameron. You’ve always boasted about being a Musgrave: all your precious dad, with nothing of Susannah and the Camerons in you.’

‘Maybe, but I do have Cameron genes whether I want to acknowledge them or not.’

‘And you have their mirror.’

‘So? You’re not suggesting Susannah stole it, I hope?’

‘No. But if you don’t want it I should have it.’

‘Should?’

‘Just teasing.’ He was still holding the mirror when he
sat
down beside me and held it out in front of him so that it reflected both our faces. ‘Remember?’ he said, the teasing tone gone, ‘Granny screaming, when she saw me looking in the wardrobe mirror, that she thought my reflection was Susannah?’

I remembered. We were both staying with her. Rory had just turned five so I was a bit younger. We’d been dressing up, Rory as a girl and me as a boy. He’d put on a pink, frilly frock of mine which I hated and he adored, and he had a pink ribbon holding back his blond curls. We hadn’t been able to tie a bow properly in spite of laborious attempts and it hung down his back. His hair was still quite long then and very thick and he was thrilled because he made such a convincing girl. But seeing him in the mirror gave my grandmother such a fright – she nearly had a heart attack, believing him for a moment to be her own dead daughter. His likeness to Susannah as a child, already remarked on, was apparently uncanny. He had the same colouring, the same shape of face, the same eyes. My grandmother told Rory never, ever, to dress up as a girl again and give her such a shock. He took heed, but only to the extent of never letting her see him do it again. In fact, every time we were together for years and years after that the first thing we always did was dress up as the opposite sex. It went on until we were about eleven, when suddenly I was the one who refused to dress up at all and spoiled the game.

‘I remember,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure you don’t look like Susannah now, even if you dressed up as a woman.’

‘Shall I?’

‘No, you shall not.’

‘You are so mean.’ He held the mirror closer, fascinated by his own face. ‘I’m sure I still do look like her.’

‘No, your face is too plump.’

‘
Plump
? Don’t be gross.’ He peered anxiously at himself and felt his cheeks. ‘That’s bone,’ he said, ‘good, strong bone
structure
, not fat. Plump, indeed – the idea. I’ve just filled out rather charmingly. And anyway, Susannah only became thin-faced when she was ill. I’ve seen the photographs. Up to the last six months her face looked like mine does now, lovely. It’s the hair makes the real difference. If I had a wig, one of those pre-Raphaelite jobs, I’d look just like her still.’

‘Why would you want to?’

‘Well, she was beautiful. Everyone said so.’

‘But she’s dead.’

He put the mirror down and turned to look at me. ‘There you are,’ he said, smirking, ‘you’ve just realised. Yes, she’s dead. She’s been dead thirty-one years, sweetest, so why are you fretting over an old box?’

I ignored that. ‘Why do you think she put a mirror in it?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake …’

‘Please, humour me, Rory. Please.’

‘All right. Because it’s valuable. And because it is a family heirloom.’

‘Not because she wanted me to take a close look at myself, as she looked at herself, and see the resemblance between us, search for it?’

‘Have you any whisky?’

‘No.’

‘More wine, then, it’ll have to be more wine. You’re driving me to serious over-indulgence. Stop it.’

‘You over-indulge all the time, Rory. You’re so unhealthy – all this smoking and drinking, and you never take any exercise.’

‘I look healthier than you, dear –
I
haven’t got great black circles under my eyes, thank you.’

‘I haven’t been sleeping well.’

‘I’m not surprised. You’re driving yourself mad. Trouble is, with Tony gone and as you don’t seem to have much work on, you’ve got nothing else to do but brood over this
wretched
box. And you were all upset anyway. It came at the worst possible time.’

‘I know. I’m going to go away soon. I meant to, as soon as the house was sold.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘Don’t know yet.’

‘Who with?’

‘Nobody. By myself, of course.’

‘I could go with you, if you like. I fancy a bit of sun.’

‘I didn’t say I was going somewhere sunny.’

‘Then I’m not coming with you.’

‘You haven’t been invited. Why should I want you?’

‘Because it isn’t good for you to be on your own at the moment, and I’m your best friend.’

‘Like hell you are.’

But he was, he is. I’ve never been good at friendships. I don’t put enough into keeping them going. At school, I had plenty of friends but I was never really close to any of them; I didn’t go in for best friend pairing off. If I wasn’t on my own, I preferred a group. And then after school I didn’t make the effort to keep up with anyone. Same at St Martin’s. If anyone I’d been friends with there contacted me afterwards I always responded (I think), but I never made the first move myself, and people naturally notice that and get tired of it. So my only close friends came to be lovers and when affairs ended so did the close friendships, inevitably. I don’t suppose, for example, that Tony will think of me now as a friend. And with my parents dead (because they were definitely friends as well as parents) that does indeed leave Rory. It was quite like old times, our bickering, and I enjoyed it. ‘Come on, then, best friend,’ I said, ‘I’ll take you out for a meal and we can do some more bonding.’

I used to wonder if my lack of interest in close friendships was because my parents were too much my friends when I was young, and then later on, when there were
things
happening in my life that erected a kind of barrier between us, I had Rory. I might not see him often, and I might not always know how to reach him even, but the connection between us was so strong it could be resumed immediately. I’ve always felt comfortable with Rory, completely at ease. Maybe it amounts to a sort of conceit, but I think I know him in a way no one else does, or not to my knowledge. The Rory I know is not the person others see. He projects an image, quite deliberately, of someone flippant and careless, he proclaims his sexuality defiantly and even crudely, and though I have never understood why, I think I understand very well that this is a complicated challenge he’s issuing. He dares people to be repelled by him, by his own stridently camp representation of himself, and when they are he imagines he’s tested them and found them wanting and has nothing more to do with them. In a weird way I do much the same thing – I, too, like to project an image that tries people’s patience and I’m not satisfied until they’ve put up with my fierceness and hostility and general surliness and still want to know me. Just as Rory can stop acting a part, so can I. But there was something else, something Tony was near to realising. I think we were attracted to each other once, Rory and I. I think that on the very brink of adolescence, when we were eleven or twelve, there was an attraction between us which I may have mistaken for love (because I certainly hadn’t realised then that my cousin was gay). Nothing ever happened. It didn’t go anywhere. But when I say Rory is my best and only true friend to the exclusion of all others there is that element mixed up in it.

The best thing about Rory is that I don’t have to be careful, I don’t have to
try
in any kind of way. He’s known me all my life and I feel more comfortable with him than I ever have with any lover, which says something (though I don’t quite like to wonder what exactly). Familiarity in his case
hasn
’t bred contempt, but instead security. He knows me through and through, maybe the way a brother would have done if I’d had one. I can be rude and bad-tempered and offhand, and he isn’t offended. He lets me try to reform him in all kinds of ways and doesn’t hold my attempts against me, except to warn me not to try to be his mother when I push him too far. As if. My feelings about his mother, about his father too, are pretty much in agreement with his own. Hector is overbearing, humourless and disgustingly racist and homophobic; Isabella is prudish, cold and utterly self-centred. I would never try to be either of them. I don’t know how such people could have produced Rory (and frankly neither do they). There is no trace of either of them in their son. Our grandmother always swore there had been a mix-up somewhere and really he was Susannah’s – Isabella did not seem to find this offensive. She was always plaintively wondering aloud where Rory had come from (and in time she got some pretty crude answers from him).

‘So how’s Tony?’ Rory asked, once we were settled in the restaurant.

‘You know perfectly well I don’t hear from him, so shut up.’

‘Poor Anthony.’

‘Oh yes? I can’t think why he’s thought of as “poor”.’

‘You were horrible to him and he loved you so.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘You were. Vicious and nasty.’ He was laughing and making faces between mouthfuls of bread, but I knew he meant it. ‘The dear man adored you and you led him on and then you dumped him. Poor Tony.’

‘It wasn’t like that. We were just wrong for each other in the end, that’s all, and I had to say so.’

‘In the beginning, more like, that’s what I’d say.’

‘Then you’d say wrong, Mr Smart-arse. Don’t be so stupid. Why would I have had him to live with me if I couldn’t
stand
him in the first place? You make these stupid remarks without thinking what you’re saying.’

‘I know what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that you knew damned well he wasn’t right for you, but you were attracted to him because he was like your father and you couldn’t resist him.’

‘I’m not speaking to you any more. You appal me.’

‘You amuse me.’

‘How sick.’

‘Any mention of your dad and you go all frigid and furious.’

‘Anyone would if the kind of silly comments you make were made to them.’

‘It wasn’t a silly comment. Tony looks like your dad. So did what’s-his-face, Ian thingy, the one before, and that foreign fellow before him. You only go for men who
look
like your dad and then when you find out they aren’t like him, you chuck them out.’

‘Did I ask for this?’

‘No.’

‘And you’re drunk.’

Suddenly, he leaned across the table, and taking hold of my hand, even though I tried to snatch it away, he pressed it hard and spoke differently, in an embarrassingly urgent, sincere way. ‘I’m not drunk,’ he said, ‘I’m worried about you. You’re messing up your life like I’ve messed up mine. What are you going to do? Thirty-something, career on hold so far as I can see, no lover never mind no husband or darling kiddies, a poor little rich orphan going potty over the ridiculous contents of a box …’

I got up, flung some money on the table – we hadn’t actually eaten anything except bread so far – and left the restaurant.

I WAS USED
to thinking I never wanted to see Rory again. We were always having these scenes, one or the other of us storming off, one or the other of us feeling smug because we thought we’d come up with some searing home truth. What made me so furious that night was that what Rory had said, about both of us wasting our lives, was
not
true. How dared he make me out to be a sad cow, as hopeless as himself? It was unfair, a lie. I was a professional photographer, with work to prove it, and what was he? Nothing. A dealer in this and that. No wonder his parents despaired. I hated to think I agreed with them in any way, but when it came to considering Rory’s lack of career or respectable employment I was bound to. He had, like me, had such a good start in life, he had no excuse.

Next morning I woke feeling ashamed of myself. There was, after all, some substance in Rory’s summary of my situation, even if he hadn’t got it right in every particular. Hadn’t I admitted to myself I was in the doldrums, tired of the way I was living, with my lack of enthusiasm for anything? It was the manner in which he said it that so angered me, the way he lumped me with himself, when our cases were quite different. And the stuff about my father and how I was attracted to those men who looked like him was true. I’d realised it myself, even if I liked to think the
men
never had. It’s common enough, for heaven’s sake, a cliché, girls wanting to love their fathers, but I’d resented all the rest Rory had come out with. I might have been attracted to Tony, and the others, because of their physical similarity to my father, but I never for one moment thought they were actually like him, so there was no disillusionment. I knew from the moment I met him that Tony, for example, was quite unlike my father. Tony is a very solemn person, very serious, whereas my father rarely had a smile off his cheerful face. And Tony didn’t talk much, whereas my father was a great chatterer – his idea of hell was being stuck in a railway carriage with someone who wouldn’t talk to him. Tony would’ve been that someone, buried in a book and not wanting to be disturbed.