The Memory Box (32 page)

But did the artist matter? I still didn’t think so, but not knowing who had made these prints nagged away at me and I knew I had to investigate properly, just to be sure I was missing nothing. It was easy enough to visit the Courtauld Library, to find out who had: there was nothing difficult about identifying the artist, who turned out to be well known, if not to me. It was the American artist Mary Cassatt. There was plenty of information about her. Cassatt used the children, often babies, of relatives and friends as models and she had become famous as ‘the painter par
excellence
of mother and child scenes’. I discovered that in 1891 Mary Cassatt worked on a set of ten large colour prints, which included
Mother’s Kiss
and
Maternal Caress
– and there they were in reproduction. She’d gone from painting to print-making and become expert at it. The text I skimmed didn’t say why or how. It was surprisingly more concerned with her life. It startled me to learn that this woman, famous for painting mothers and babies, never had a child of her own. She had given no maternal caress. She was born in 1855, settled in Paris, remained single. Her portraits of maternity, whether paintings or prints, had been lauded for their feeling, but the emotion they captured had never been felt by her. All she had done was observe. She hadn’t painted from any personal experience at all. This struck me as extraordinary, proof that true art does not need to come from the personal, but as soon as I thought that I checked myself – this
was
personal. Mary Cassatt might not have had children, but her work spoke not of possession but of yearning. She could have yearned for the babies she didn’t have and this yearning, this ache, was what went into her pictures. A woman yearning for something she couldn’t have, something she was going to miss. The library was closing as I handed in the book.

Back home, I took what I promised myself should be a last look, for the time being, at the prints. I wondered what they would say to the casual observer who walked past them as they hung on a wall somewhere, or flicked through the book they had come from. Take away their significance for me, and what was there? Only, surely, what I’d originally thought: pretty pictures. If I chose to load them with grief and loss it must be because something had changed in the last few months. I’d been forced into admitting there
had
been loss, and with it pain. Susannah’s pain, the thing I hadn’t wanted to know about. And now my own, the pain of appreciating her agony of mind. I had mocked those who
had
tried to suggest, with such a solemn desire to be profound, that I had been cruelly robbed by the death of my ‘real’ mother before I could know her. Where had it sprung from, this determination to mock? Why had I fought so hard to keep this dead woman out of my life? Why be so violently opposed to being like her in any way?

At any rate, I was done with all that by the time I packed the prints away again. Susannah had finally become my mother, Charlotte my stepmother. It was possible that nobody except myself would know. To whom, after all, did I ever speak of either mother these days? Only to Rory, perhaps. And in the future to anyone who came into my life to whom I might be close. Tony maybe. It will, I suppose, become a kind of litmus test – if I love him, or anyone, enough to speak of my mother and mean Susannah, then I will be sure of him. I had made sense of it. I knew that the contents of the memory box, however much I had derided them, however much they had infuriated me, had revealed my mother to me in unexpected guises which had not been visible either in photographs or in the little snatches of oral history I had allowed to penetrate my defences. I’d be able to tell someone in the future that the astonishing thing is that I think she may have been quite like me. No, that
I
am quite like
her
. I’d be able to venture the opinion, diffidently, that we would probably have got on quite well. I would have to admit, if pushed, that, yes, it was sad that I had never known her and that, yes, there was a yearning in me now to have done so. I wanted her after all.

Well, I couldn’t and can’t have her. Even if I had felt and admitted this yearning years before, I would never have been able to have her. Think how bitter I might have become, pining for a dead mother, how wretched I could have made myself, how I could have convinced myself my life was completely blighted. It would have been hell for Charlotte. She could have spent her life trying to make up for what I
claimed
so desperately to miss. She’d always marvelled at how I gave her all my love and devotion, and that she had never been put in the unfortunate position of so many stepmothers, and this happy relationship had in turn bound me to my father, who never had to feel I was bereft of maternal love.

It struck me, as I packed the prints away, how odd it was that I had never enquired closely into how my father himself coped with my mother’s death. I knew the facts, what he’d actually done, how he’d managed, and all that, until my stepmother came along, but I didn’t know anything about his feelings during that time. We’d never talked about it. I hadn’t asked and he hadn’t volunteered the information. He wasn’t that sort of man. It had been hard enough for him to tell me my mother was not Charlotte but a woman who was dead. I was not quite five when he had to make a point of telling me – it was probably just before I was due to start school and, I suppose, he felt some duty to make sure I had the relationships straight. I have a feeling that he may have been bullied into it by Isabella because I remember she and Rory were staying with us the week before. Perhaps she had resented my open adoration of my stepmother, my arms forever round her neck, the kisses between us frequent and warm. Did Isabella want to spoil things? She certainly can’t have acted out of loyalty to the memory of a sister she had reason to hate.

But when my father started talking about ‘your real mother’, wanting to tell me something to make Susannah alive in my imagination, I leapt off his knee and ran screaming, ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’ through the house until I found Charlotte. I wouldn’t let her out of my sight for the rest of the day. My father didn’t come after me. He let Charlotte deal with my distress (which of course she did, very well). He never mentioned Susannah to me again for years and years and he never, ever, referred to her again as
my
‘real’ mother. I aided and abetted his wish to bury her completely by never asking questions about her and, if she came into the conversation, as she inevitably did when my grandmother was staying with us, walking out of the room.

How much had he loved her? I had only seen him happy with Charlotte and had no idea what he had felt about my mother. I had inhibited him, with my fierce repudiation of the very notion that Susannah had been my mother, but even so I think he should have, at some point, when I was grown up, tried to talk to me about her, about the two of them, their relationship. He couldn’t, by the time I was in my twenties, possibly have thought that any confession of his would affect my own love for Charlotte. But he never said a word. I only knew from her family how they met and when they married and where they lived and what they did. It was as though, like me, he wanted to obliterate her memory. But unlike me, he had known her and loved her and had some obligation, I would have thought, to treasure the memory of what they had been to each other. Did my mother know she couldn’t trust him to do that? Did she know very well that he was the sort of man who can only survive by blocking out tragedy, eliminating from his memory all things acutely painful?

I think now that perhaps my father forgot Susannah. I suspect he became embarrassed, even ashamed, as the years went by that he could hardly remember her. It may have alarmed him, this blank where once she had been, in which case it would have been wonderfully convenient that I never required him to tell me about her. Can you bring yourself, if you are a kind man like my father, to confess to your daughter that you can’t recall much about her mother? Difficult. But it occurs to me that there is a situation even more difficult: letting a daughter realise that her mother’s death might have been, from your point of view, a blessing in disguise, because it opened the way to finding another
woman
with whom you were far happier. But my father would never, of course, have let me realise any such thing, even if it had been true. There are plenty of reasons why he never unburdened himself to me, quite apart from the discouragement I gave him. He would be mindful all the time of how I might interpret anything he told me, and feel it was dangerous to try to describe his state of feeling so long ago. I doubt even if he were alive now that I could get him to do so. My mother, through her box, had made herself real to me, but she would have remained lost for ever to him.

At least I think so. It is all hypothesis, the sort of stuff it would have been good to discuss with Charlotte. She, for sure, would have been able to tell me more about how my father thought of my mother than he could himself. I regret so bitterly that she is not here for me to turn to – she would have been so glad, since she was the one never comfortable with the suppression of everything to do with my mother. Often, she’d tried to bring Susannah into the present, asking her own questions of my grandmother and of Isabella in my hearing, and it was she who kept her photographs around, finding and replacing them when I hid them. But how much had my father actually told her? She’d told me often enough that what first struck her about him was his lost look, his distracted air, which in a young and handsome man made him look so vulnerable. Yes, she’d wanted to mother him, that was her first instinct. When she’d learned that he was a widower with a baby daughter she’d felt so sorry for him and had assumed his bereavement was too recent for him to want to make new friends. She’d felt he stumbled through each day and that it was her duty (she was secretary to the senior partner in the firm for whom he worked) to help him in all the small ways she could. She would never have dreamed of asking him out after office hours nor did she think for one moment that he would
ask
her. She reckoned it would take him years to get over such a tragedy and when he did, if he did, he would not be interested in her. She had seen the photograph of his dead wife on his desk and knew that she could not compare – she was too ordinary, too plump, too plain to measure up against Susannah.

It was her boss who brought them together, a mere three months after my father had lost his wife. He had two tickets for a concert which he and his wife could no longer attend. My father was in his office showing him some drawings when this man said to both Charlotte, sitting there typing, and my father, ‘Why don’t you two use these tickets?’ Charlotte had blushed crimson and had been about to decline as quickly as possible to save my father from embarrassment, when he had said he would love to if Miss Fraser was willing. ‘It was as if he’d been waiting for an opportunity,’ she’d told me, and when, loving this story, I had teased my father, he had smiled and said it was exactly right, he’d been longing to ask Charlotte out but hadn’t had the courage. They went to the concert and that was more or less it. They were rarely apart afterwards and only delayed marrying out of a sense of decency. He fell in love with a woman already in love with him and was happy ever after.

Happier than he ever was with my mother, though? Maybe. I wondered whether I would discover, when I finally visited him next day, if George Senhouse had found someone else to be happy with too. At any rate, my father may have felt something for Charlotte he had never felt for my mother, whatever he had felt for her. And what would be wrong about that? Nothing. Isabella had once expressed disapproval (her forte) in my hearing as to how quickly my father had ‘got over’ my mother’s death. ‘She was barely dead before he took up with Charlotte,’ she’d said to my grandmother many years later, when an anniversary was coming up of their wedding and she was rambling on about her
memories
of it. My grandmother didn’t hesitate for a moment. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘I was glad. He needed someone. No point spending his life mourning.’ I wish she was still alive too, my grandmother. I could have talked to her. It would have made her so happy that I wanted, at last, to hear every detail about my mother. There was only Isabella left, and I had tried her. She was the wrong person to ask anything of. Long before the tragedy of her baby’s death, she was hostile to her dead sister for reasons I’d never fathomed, and which maybe had no real basis, but were only the sort of chemical reaction one sibling can have towards another. And she was never close to my father. Everything Isabella had to say was prejudiced. She could tell me anything she wanted about my parents and nothing could be disproved by me.

I recalled the words I had had carved on my stepmother’s gravestone, ‘Beloved mother of Catherine’. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Maybe it not only took something away from my mother but gave my stepmother something she had no need of. Maybe it was an insult to them both. Could the two exist together, on equal terms? I had never thought so, but knew it was the final thing I had to decide before letting the power of the memory box fade.

I FELT NERVOUS
setting off to visit George Senhouse in his nursing home and unsure that I should be going to see him at all. It might be embarrassing, for him, for me. I don’t like to embarrass people, whereas Rory loves to: he does it deliberately. I tried, on the train to Brighton – I’d had enough of driving after that long journey back from Scotland – to think of what I was going to say to Mr Senhouse, but I couldn’t seem to frame questions properly. I’d done the same, I remembered, on my way to meet Gracie Monroe in Bequia and then, when I’d got there, I had forgotten what I’d decided to ask. But this was different – this encounter called for specific enquiries. I always knew Gracie would be most unlikely to be able to tell me much, that the chances of her knowing who Susannah was were minimal and the whole idea was a bit ridiculous. This time I knew for a fact that the person I was going to see had not only known Susannah but had been close to her, for a short time at least. It made the starting point easier but the questions somehow harder.