The Memory Box (26 page)

There was no point in inflaming her further, so I said that no, I didn’t think Rory was happy (and she gave a small smile of what I presumed was gratification), but I didn’t agree he was either entirely selfish or that he’d wilfully run away from her and Hector. ‘Oh?’ she said, sharply, sitting up very straight. ‘And what do you think he did, then? I can’t think of any other description to give it. He ran away. He stole money, then he ran away. And in all these years,
all
these many years, we’ve seen him precisely twice. Twice. At funerals. He has telephoned only when he wants something. He has not, and does not, behave like a son to whom parents have been devoted. There. That’s your Rory, Miss.’

Her fury was not so much frightening (though I did feel, ridiculously, slightly afraid) as inhibiting. It’s so hard to talk
rationally
with someone almost unhinged with anger, and I felt I had to wait a few moments and then be very, very gentle. None of the things I’d been going to say seemed possible while she was so agitated – I’d only make her more aggressive and nothing would be achieved. I began, finally, by suggesting, timidly, that perhaps just as she thought Rory hadn’t behaved like a son maybe he could be forgiven, just possibly, for thinking she’d let him down as a mother when he most needed her? I let myself sound in doubt, when of course I was not, but my careful tone didn’t pacify her much.

‘Let him down?’ she said. ‘
He
let us down, you forget that, you forget how he behaved – he was
always
letting us down, making us ashamed of him.’

‘He couldn’t help being gay,’ I murmured.

She winced at the word ‘gay’, but shook her head and said vehemently, ‘It was nothing to do with that, his constant bad behaviour, nothing to do with what he says he is –’

‘Don’t you believe him? Don’t you believe he is gay?’

‘I don’t know anything about that and I don’t want to know. My point is –’

‘Aunt Isabella,’ I said, ‘that
is
the point. It’s why Rory acted as he did, why he was so unhappy; he couldn’t be himself and it got worse and worse having to hide what he was from you and –’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! It’s only
sex
, all this
fuss
, it’s got nothing to do with anything. Why on earth he wants to shout it from the rooftops, as though it makes any difference –’

‘But it
does
make a difference. It isn’t just sex, it’s about all his life, it influences all of it, it’s what he
is
.’

‘Nonsense! You think you know everything, and you don’t. We gave Rory all our time and attention and he –’

‘But what about love?’

‘Love? Love? What would you know about that, Madam? You’re cheeky, you’ve got above yourself, just like your
mother
after all – you think you know everything about everyone and you do not. Have you had children? No. Well then, be more careful what you say.’

‘But I’ve been a child,’ I said. ‘I know what it feels like to
be
loved. Charlotte loved me in a way Rory never felt you loved him, even if he was wrong. And that matters, doesn’t it, what he felt?’

‘Feelings!’ Isabella sneered. ‘He was as loved as any other child.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do say so.’

‘But you walked out of the room, that night he told you and Hector he was –’

‘Oh, we’re not back to that, are we?’ She stood up, pulled down her sweater and said briskly, ‘Right, time for bed, I think, Catherine. I don’t know what got into you, but you seem to have spoiled our evening to your satisfaction. You seem to have a talent for spoiling things. I don’t want to quarrel, but I think I’ve had enough, so if we’re going to part friends tomorrow I’ll be off to my bed now. Put the lights out when you leave this room. Thank you. Goodnight.’

And off she went, or so I thought. I was sitting there feeling slightly stunned, trying to recollect exactly where I’d fouled things up, when suddenly I heard the door open again and her voice saying, ‘You’re making too much of that silly box. Susannah wasn’t in her right mind, that’s all.’ I got up and turned to look at her, but she hadn’t come right into the room. She was standing in shadow behind the opened door. ‘Do you mean she was mad?’ I said, hating not being able to challenge her, to look her in the eye. ‘Not at all, not at all,’ the reply came, ‘not mad, just not in her right mind, Mother said. That box was a bad thing. Mother thought it should have been destroyed, that’s all. Susannah didn’t know what she was doing. All I mean is you have to remember that.’ The door closed. I went on sitting there,
feeling
numb. ‘Susannah didn’t know what she was doing …’ Was it true? And why was Isabella always so bitter and resentful speaking of her sister, even now, all these years later, when death should have wiped out all memory of trivial feuds? But was it trivial, whatever had happened? It was so stupid for these kind of family secrets to be kept.

I heard Hector come in and wished I’d gone to bed. I prayed he would not look in the room where I was still sitting and quickly put out both lamps to encourage him to think it was empty, but I was too late.

‘Ah, Catherine,’ he said, ‘enjoying the fire, eh? Looks cosy. Where’s Isabella? Gone to bed? Age, y’know, gets us all …’ He waffled on, and to my dismay joined me by the fire, a glass of whisky already in his hand. ‘Nightcap,’ he said, waving it about. ‘Want one?’ I said no, I’d had a glass. ‘Good stuff,’ he said, ‘good for sweet dreams.’ I smiled politely. ‘But you’re young,’ he droned on, ‘you don’t need any help with sleeping, eh?’ I said that was right. ‘Not like your mother,’ he said. ‘She was an insomniac even when she was young. Drove my Bella crazy. Bella likes her sleep, always did.’

I felt the first stirrings of interest. ‘Were they very unalike, Susannah and Isabella?’ I said.

‘Oh yes, goodness me, chalk and cheese, those two. Never got on. Drove their mother mad with all their bickering and worse.’

‘Worse?’

‘Screaming matches sometimes, and Susannah wasn’t supposed to get worked up: bad for her.’

‘What did they scream about, what kind of things?’

‘Boys, sometimes, usual stuff, jealousy and so on.’

‘They had the same boyfriends?’

‘Don’t know about that. One, they had a spat over one.’

‘Who?’

‘Before my time. Only heard about it from Bella before
she
took me home to meet her mother. Said her sister would be there and I wasn’t to speak to her because
she
wasn’t speaking to her. They’d had a God almighty row and weren’t speaking.’ He laughed. ‘Ridiculous, eh?’

‘Was it, though?’ I asked. ‘I mean, if Isabella’s never really forgiven her even though she’s been dead so long?’

‘No, no, no,’ Hector said, ‘of course she’s forgiven her, ’course she has. They just didn’t get on. Then there was the baby.’

‘What baby?’

‘Said enough,’ Hector said – ‘off to bed now,’ and he hauled himself out of his chair. ‘All water under the bridge.’

I almost pushed him back down. ‘Uncle Hector,’ I said, ‘what baby? What’s this about a baby? Whose? I want to know.’

‘Bella doesn’t like to talk about it.’

‘She isn’t here. I promise never to let her know you’ve told me a thing. What baby?’

‘Bella’s. Cot death. Terrible thing.’

‘Bella had another baby? Before Rory?’ He nodded, and I realised I’d get more out of him if I asked questions to which he could respond with a shake or nod of his head. ‘Was it a girl?’ Nod. ‘Was she very young?’ Nod. ‘Months old?’ Shake. ‘Weeks?’ Nod. But then a nod or shake wasn’t going to do. ‘How does Susannah come into this?’ He sighed, and rubbed his red old face with both hands and spoke from behind them. ‘Looking after the baby. Didn’t have one of her own, you see. Bella was sorry for her. Left her with the baby for the afternoon so she could play mother. Came back … Wasn’t to blame, of course. Doctor said these things happen, they happen. Both of them like mad women, screaming and crying … demented, both of them, ill, both of them. Bella blamed Susannah, said she’d kill her, Susannah said she’d kill herself … my God, it was terrible, terrible. Thought neither of them would ever get over it.’

‘Why did nobody ever
tell
me this!’ I shouted, and he jumped and looked agonised and then listened at the door, clearly afraid Isabella would appear and he would have to explain himself. ‘All these secrets!’ I wailed, ‘they poison everything. I should have been told long ago.’

‘Does no good, knowing,’ Hector said, wearily, and repeated his refrain of ‘water under the bridge’. ‘Off to bed now, Catherine, enough said.’

I lay awake most of the night. Nothing in the memory box about this, oh no. It was surely the most traumatic incident in Susannah’s life, but she hadn’t wanted to give me her version. I tried to think of this reticence as a good thing – she was sparing me, she only wanted to call to mind, my mind as well as hers, happy things – but I couldn’t. I wanted there to have been some token in her box of her suffering over the death of her sister’s baby daughter. It would have made her real to me in a way none of the objects she’d left had. And suddenly, in the small hours of the morning, Isabella did not seem cold and curt and unloving. I wondered if Rory knew any of this – but of course he didn’t. Why not? Why hadn’t his parents told him? Why, and how, had they kept this tragic secret to themselves? Because it was too painful to share?

I was in a state of absolute confusion before I fell asleep.

I HAD SET
my travelling alarm clock for five in the morning, anxious to leave without seeing either my aunt or uncle. I was sure Hector would not have told Isabella about his confession to me – he would be terrified she would find out about his indiscretion – and I did not trust myself to be able to hide what I now knew. It would show in my face, all the distress and compassion I felt for her, and she would be suspicious. One day, some other evening by a fire, I would try to get her to tell me herself what Hector had told me. If I had the courage. I saw how courage comes into it, how terrible things always need courage to be remembered and described. How could I blame all the adults in my family for not having this courage when I myself already doubted if I had sufficient? ‘Water under the bridge,’ Hector mumbled, and it was so tempting to agree and let it flow on uninterrupted.

I left Susannah’s painting on the kitchen table, with a note saying I didn’t want it and that if Isabella didn’t either (and I was sure she wouldn’t) she was to destroy it. And I wrote down Rory’s latest telephone number, only just recorded on my answer phone before I’d left London. Then I drove out of Edinburgh quickly, choosing to head for the motorway coming from Glasgow by going through the Pentland Hills via Abington. I was in a daze at first, going over and over the implications of what Hector had told me
and
the implications it had for my understanding of Susannah, but the road was narrow and twisting and forced me to clear my head and concentrate on it. Once I’d joined the motorway, I began to feel tired and knew I could never manage to drive all the way home without regular stops. I’d eaten and drunk nothing, not wanting to risk disturbing my aunt and uncle by even the smallest sound, and I felt light-headed. I chose to stop for breakfast in Carlisle, remembering how I’d regretted, when I picked up my rented car there, to go to Whitehaven, that I hadn’t had time to look at the cathedral and castle. My father had been fond of Carlisle and had described both ancient buildings to me.

I found a large car park just below the old west wall of the city where I could safely leave the car with my valuable photographic equipment locked in the boot (though I took my Pentax 42, never wanting to be entirely without a camera). Groping around the little compartment where I kept change to use for the ticket machine, my hand touched Susannah’s address book – God knows how it had got there: I’d no memory at all of what I’d done with it after Bequia. But it seemed a colossal hint, real hand-of-fate stuff again, and I couldn’t resist slipping it into my pocket. I knew perfectly well that there was a Carlisle address in it as well as one for Whitehaven and I thought I’d sit in a café after I’d bought a street map somewhere and look it up, for fun. It would almost certainly be an hotel, maybe somewhere Susannah had stayed on her way to Whitehaven when she visited her future mother-in-law.

The tourist office was in the pretty, old Town Hall, which was painted terracotta and looking almost Italian, and I got a street map there. Then I wandered around the area in front of it for a while, thinking how surprisingly attractive it was, this spacious pedestrian centre with its sandstone bricks and great tubs of spring flowers. I could see the cathedral down a street just off it and, choosing to walk a roundabout way
to
it, down a narrow street, I came to a café in a sort of arcade beside some shops, and went in. The coffee was delicious and so was the toasted scone and I felt remarkably content sitting there, a stranger in a city I did not know. It had come over me before, travelling around on jobs, eating or drinking in a city that was completely new to me, that odd sort of thrill which derives from being anonymous and unconnected. It panics some people, but I love it. It makes me look at the world in an entirely different way and some of my best work has come from plunging myself into new environments like that, especially towns and cities.

Nobody had the slightest interest in me, or if they did they didn’t betray it. I felt furtive in a way, as though I were on the run, and of course I was, from Isabella, from the job I’d said I’d do, from the painting. It was silly not to have carried on up the coast to the Highlands, but I had just wanted to go home in a hurry and I was used to acting on such irrational whims. Maybe I wouldn’t do this
Hidden Scotland
project after all, maybe I’d keep out of Scotland. I hadn’t definitely promised I would, only said I was interested. In this mood of rumination I drank the coffee and took the address book from my bag. Nobody knew what I was looking at. It could be my own address book and I could be consulting the street map spread on the table in front of me to find the house of an old relative or to discover the location of some public building or office. Nobody was going to be in the least curious and this somehow generated excitement in me. My heart beat just a trifle quicker as I flipped over the pages to ‘C’. There were two addresses there for Carlisle and one for Calais. The Crown & Mitre was easy enough – I’d walked past it only minutes ago, the large hotel looking out on to the Town Hall. The other said Glebe House, Ashburner Close. I found Ashburner Close on the map at once, listed above Ashley Street and Ashness Drive. It didn’t look too far away. I decided to walk there.
The
route was simple enough and it would do me good, give me some welcome exercise before the five-hour drag back to London. It was only just after nine in the morning still; I had plenty of time.