The Memory Box (20 page)

I was surprised how often I found myself thinking of Tony while I was working on that trip. Something similar had happened with another man, years before, when I’d got to the same point of telling him, but after we parted I’d
hardly
given him another thought. I forgot him, and couldn’t believe I’d felt about him as I must have done to tell him something so intimate. But I hadn’t forgotten Tony. I thought of him a lot, wishing we were at least friends. He’d said, very quietly, that being ‘just friends’ would make a mockery of what there had been between us, and could still be, if I had not been so pig-headed and stupid. The parting had been painful to him, and he had never understood why I’d broken things up, and the only way he could deal with it was by never seeing me again, so I shouldn’t talk to him about being ‘friends’. I’d told him not to be so melodramatic, that it didn’t suit him and wasn’t like him, it wasn’t reasonable and civilised, and he’d said that was how he felt, I could label his feelings how I liked. There were limits, he said, even to his tolerance.

I admired his attitude in a way. I like decisive people, and Tony was always that. He had a lot of other qualities, too, which I admired and I kept thinking of them on the long drives I was making. Tony had principles but he wasn’t self-righteous or dogmatic. He loved his work – he is a solicitor, in a practice handling mainly legal aid defence cases – and had a sense of purpose about it, something which I, of course, lacked. I worked only because I liked to. Pleasure and fun took the place of purpose, and any satisfaction was always merely personal – not for a moment do I ever think my photographs serve much purpose. We used to argue about what Tony called my aimlessness, the way I was never striving towards a goal but was apparently the complete hedonist. It irritated him that I didn’t, as he alleged, put my talents to better use. He thought that by choosing to photograph landscapes I was choosing the soft option. Photographs, he argued, should have more than beauty about them. They should make some moral point. I used to jeer at him, and tell him his high-mindedness was a pain, but I quite liked his efforts to direct me into raising my
standards
and thinking more carefully about what I was doing. He maintained that inside the I-only-do-what-I-like Catherine there was another person, one who would welcome being made to do more than that. He said I insisted on being superficial and that I needed something to anchor me, to stop me drifting about.

I thought more and more of what Tony would have made of Susannah’s box. He wouldn’t have scoffed, like Rory; he wouldn’t have said the contents were of no significance, just junk. He would have gone the other way and probably driven me mad with his theories and the intensity of his concentration. Puzzles appealed to him. He liked things to be complicated and even when they were not, had a habit of making them so. It used to infuriate me when he deliberately turned something simple and straightforward into a nightmare of possible hidden meanings. But apart from being intrigued with what was in the box the best thing about it, from his point of view, would have been that it forced me at last to think about Susannah. He had been fascinated (unnaturally so, in my opinion) by the fact that my ‘real’ mother had died when I was six months old. He said it could not have helped but affect me profoundly and would not accept that I hadn’t been affected at all, that Charlotte was my mother and the dead Susannah a blank.

He’d met Charlotte, of course. While we lived together, it was inevitable he would meet the parents who were so much part of my life. We went to stay with them in Oxford for the weekend before my father died and they were successful visits. Charlotte liked Tony and got on better with him than my father did; she was more drawn to his seriousness, whereas my father found it a bit daunting and was perhaps perplexed as to why it appealed to me (though he never said so). Charlotte thought he had ‘lovely manners’ and ‘listened properly’, not the most flattering reasons to give for liking someone but, since manners and paying
attention
to what others said counted for her, not trivial either. But Tony thought Charlotte dull. He said she was quite sweet but boring and that never in a million years could she have been my mother. Even if he hadn’t known she was not, he swore he would have guessed. I was annoyed and told him not to be so ridiculous, the world is full of daughters who resemble their mothers not one bit either in looks or character, and I immediately reeled off a list of those we both knew. But he was adamant. Somewhere, if you knew them well enough, you could always see at least a glimmer of the mother in any daughter. I denied this, and then I turned to asking what his point was anyway. He said that in my case it meant there was a missing link and always would be and it was of great importance to his understanding of so many things he didn’t understand about me.

He liked to look at photographs of Susannah and then study my face and compare them. I hadn’t, at that time, photograph albums in my possession, but he saw the photograph in my father’s study, the one with Susannah in the background on the boat, and that started him off; then he found a couple of others around the Oxford house (Charlotte had always made a point of having them displayed quite naturally with all the other family photographs). No one among all the people who had known her had ever seen any resemblance between Susannah and me, but Tony found one after his diligent study. Only he saw what he claimed to be identical shaped ears, pointing solemnly to our well-shaped, round lobes and then to my father’s lack of any lobes at all. It was nothing, but he acted as if it were something. Ear lobes, for heaven’s sake. But he did have to concede that in general I did not look at all like Susannah. Unfortunately, he chose to say this in front of my father and to go on to ask him how he thought, looks apart, I might all the same be like her. My father didn’t like this. He replied, quite curtly for him, that he
had
no idea. He said Susannah had died many years ago and he couldn’t remember enough about her now to be sure of comparing anything about me with her.

Tony didn’t believe him. He said my father must be reminded all the time of his dead wife and that it must be natural to look for a mother in a daughter. I defended my father vigorously and pointed out that since, apart from not looking in the least like Susannah, I had not grown up with her and had not automatically picked up her mannerisms, and had instead inevitably adopted many of Charlotte’s, how would he be reminded of her? I reminded him that Susannah had had a Scottish accent and that I did not, so my father couldn’t hear her in me either. Environment, in my case, had won the contest with heredity. But Tony wouldn’t accept this. Confronted with how disturbed I became over the memory box, I knew he would have felt vindicated. What was all my angst about if not a long-put-off search for my ‘real’ mother? And why, Tony would’ve asked, did I want to find her
now
, at this point in my life, when my other mother had just left me? In his opinion, it would all have been obvious and satisfyingly neat. I struggled, knowing this, hearing Tony in my head so irritatingly clearly, to articulate, if only to myself, what was coming out of dealing with the box. I was not looking for my ‘real’ mother, I absolutely rejected that, but I was looking for myself, that was true. He would have liked that. I was glad not to be saying this out loud, when I would certainly have stumbled over the words, but instead imagining the conversation I might have had with him. In my own head, I could try, and try again, to grasp what I meant. I had some kind of impression – I took this slowly – that something in me had never properly connected. With what? I didn’t know. An ugly simile came into my mind: I was like a plug looking for a socket and until I found it the current couldn’t flow. Tony would have
really
liked that.

On that headland in Whitehaven, beside the holly tree on Melbreak, putting on the red hat in the aeroplane, what had I felt? Plugged in? Nothing so plebeian. What, then? A
frisson
, an excitement, a sensation not unlike vertigo, of being shaken and turned upside down. I had shivered on all those occasions, I had felt disembodied for a few seconds, and when this inner upheaval had subsided there had been a sense of disappointment that some profound truth about myself had evaded me. I would never have said this aloud to Tony, but it struck me that for some strange reason I might have said it to Rory. He had always empathised with my restlessness and sense of disconnection from life. Tony had never known what I was talking about. Tony never felt restless or disconnected; he was never waiting for something to rescue him from waiting. And he had no missing link. He knew exactly who he was and where he came from. He’d been so eager to introduce me not only to his parents (his father, a solicitor, his mother a schoolteacher), but to his brother and his two sisters and even to various aunts and uncles – he belonged, like Charlotte, to one of those tribe-like families and he was proud of it. Such families seem to me smug. I couldn’t wait to get away from Tony’s clan and it offended him. He accused me of being standoffish and said I hadn’t tried to fit in. Quite right, I hadn’t. Why should I want to fit in to a group I found alien?

Tony’s mother never did like me. She would deny it, naturally, but I think she made her mind up about me before ever she met me. She had liked the woman with whom he had had a five-year relationship before he met me, someone who had gone to school with him and whose family lived in the same county. This woman had been ideal in his mother’s eyes, a teacher, like herself, an infant teacher in a local school. Then I came along and spoiled everything, including the conventional marriage everyone had anticipated for him. But I tried so hard, I know I did. I didn’t want to meet
Tony
’s mother, but he was so devoted to her it had to be done. I dressed up for the occasion. I got out of my jeans and jumper and wore a dress, just a simple summer dress, a plain cream-coloured thing. I wanted to look as innocent and unthreatening as possible. Demure, that’s how I thought I should try to look. His mother was trying hard too, I think, determined to smile and welcome me warmly, but I saw the doubt in her eyes. Afterwards, I found out that Sarah, the girl before, had been a Susannah-like creature – slight, blonde, very pretty – and there was I, as tall as Tony, and, in spite of my cream dress and well-brushed hair, not at all demure. She couldn’t bring herself to say how lovely it was to meet me. Instead, she said how much she’d heard about me and, to me, in my paranoid state, that sounded as though she had heard things she didn’t like. I wasn’t a nice, safe, worthy teacher like Sarah, but a freelance photographer which sounded arty and unstable. And I hadn’t known Tony at school and my family hadn’t mixed with his all their lives, with our mothers meeting at parents’ evenings. I didn’t have the kind of background Mrs Crowther was familiar with. She was probably as nervous as I was but it didn’t show. ‘How did you and Tony meet?’ was her first direct question and when I said in an aeroplane, that he’d picked me up somewhere over the Channel on the way back from Paris, I knew I’d said the wrong thing. The truth, but wrong. Her Tony did
not
pick people up. He was a gentleman, who wouldn’t do anything so vulgar. She didn’t, of course, say any of that, but she stopped smiling and raised her eyebrows and was visibly taken aback. ‘Not quite a pick-up, Mum,’ Tony said, carefully. ‘We just were sitting next to each other and got talking. All quite natural.’ If I had left it at that things might have been OK, but I didn’t, I had to jump in and say, ‘Of
course
it was a pick-up! You even accidentally-on-purpose knocked my bag over to give yourself an excuse to pick everything up and talk to me.’

Oh God. The tone was set and I had set it. My real awkward, prickly self broke through at once in spite of all my vows to be sweet and gentle. Who could blame Mrs Crowther for thinking her darling son had been ensnared by an ill-mannered, abrasive hussy? I tried desperately to make up for this unfortunate beginning, but it was no good. I failed to fit in. Maybe if, that first time, I had just had to cope with the parents I would have managed to redeem myself, but there were so many other relatives there, all invited to Sunday lunch to meet me. My only small success was playing football with Tony’s nieces and nephews in the garden – it was a relief to get outside and I dashed about energetically in spite of my too-tight dress and I think the children liked me, I
think
they did. It rained later in the afternoon and we played Scrabble and I did quite well, surprising Mrs Crowther with a wider vocabulary than I think she’d given me credit for. She queried my ‘shandrydan’ and when I said it was some sort of old, rickety carriage with a hood and that I’d come across it in a caption to a photograph she raised her eyebrows and picked up the dictionary. There was a rather tense silence while she looked it up and though she said, ‘Clever girl, you’re right,’ I felt I hadn’t been clever at all: I’d been a show-off.

I was exhausted by the time we left, and depressed. I couldn’t understand how quiet Tony could come from such a family, all so hearty and noisy, so jolly and extrovert. I never liked visiting them and it never got any easier. I sent Mrs Crowther flowers after that first time, and always wrote and thanked her after each visit, but I was only doing what Charlotte told me to do. I simply couldn’t connect with Tony’s mother and he could never understand why.

I was thinking as I drove into Hampshire what a relief it had been, once Tony and I had parted, when I’d realised that I need never see the Crowthers again. I expect they felt the same way about me. I didn’t stay long in Hampshire,
only
a day and a night, and I suspected the photographs wouldn’t be as good as the others I’d taken in Dorset. I hadn’t felt confident taking them and even began wondering, in a fanciful way, if it was because I didn’t like being on Tony’s patch. He always said he’d leave London in a few years’ time and go back to where his parents lived, or near there. I’d been appalled to hear it. Long before we had reason to split up I’d heard a warning signal: don’t get serious because you could never be a country solicitor’s wife. It would have driven me mad, that kind of settled, safe, cosy existence. I like to move on, move around, all the time.