The Memory Box (27 page)

I strode down Scotch Street, which took me to a bridge crossing the River Eden, and then up a steep hill, past the College of Art, where my father had done a foundation course before deciding he really would rather be an architect, and so going on to Edinburgh. The river, I saw as I crossed the bridge, was almost at the point of overflowing its banks and ran swiftly, in a series of loops, carrying broken branches on its surface. There was a park on the north side of it and the road I walked along at the top of the hill was shaded with trees, so that although I was still within the city it felt like the country, it was so pleasantly rural. My father, I thought, could easily have settled here instead of Oxford and I wondered if he had ever considered it. Ashburner Close was off Tarraby Lane, which I came to after a mile or so. It surprised me by being an untarmacked road, indeed more of a lane, with grass growing down the middle of two ruts which were bedded with gravel. There was only one house in this close and that was Glebe House, the name painted on a white Victorian gate.

It had begun to rain soon after I’d crossed the river and since I had neither umbrella nor raincoat with me I was quite wet by the time I found the house. The rain fell so softly (it was what Charlotte used to call ‘good-for-the-complexion rain’) and was so light that I hadn’t realised the damage it was doing to my appearance until I hesitated at the gate. Glebe House was a very respectable house, one where the inhabitants would, I was sure, be suspicious of strange callers looking like drowned rats. It was not a large mansion, but in its own way imposing, a Jane Austen sort of house, two storeys, double-fronted and painted white, with a pretty porch at the front door. I could see pots of
hyacinths
, blue and white, standing on the shelves either side of it. The gate was set in a thick hedge of holly, which appeared to go right round the garden of the house and was high enough to obscure most of it, unless one was looking, as I was looking, through the gap where the gate was. I felt hesitant about opening the gate and going up to the porch. My hair was plastered to my head, my shoes squelched, and my sweater was wet enough to be clinging to me. I looked a sight, I knew, and it would not help anyone believe the preposterous tale I had to tell about a dead mother and an old address book.

But as I stood there, trying to force myself through the gate (because I am not a door-stepping person like Rory; I don’t have the nerve for it), the front door of the house, which I could just see through the glass door of the porch, opened. A man came out and stood for a moment putting something on his feet and then stepped out into the rain before putting up an umbrella, a large, blue golf-type umbrella which then obscured his face as he came down the path. He was tall, as tall as my father had been, and I had had time to see, before the umbrella went over his white hair, he was fairly elderly. For some reason, I’d been convinced a woman lived alone in this house and I was surprised enough still to be standing quite still as this man advanced towards me. I knew he hadn’t seen me and would be startled, so I coughed to give him warning, an absurd little bark of a cough, but he heard it and stopped and peered out from under his enormous, unwieldy umbrella. He wasn’t, in fact, at all alarmed. He smiled at me quite cheerfully and nodded, and I returned the smile and nod, and he gestured to show he’d like me to open the gate for him, which I did.

I hadn’t spoken but he didn’t seem to expect me to and went off walking down the lane with a half-wave of thanks. It struck me that he might have a wife in the house and that he’d imagined I was calling on her and he didn’t need to
ask
who I was, or what I wanted. But a similar thought must have struck him, and caused him some hesitation or concern, because he turned and walked back to me. ‘Have you come to see Mary?’ he asked. ‘Does she expect you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m a stranger. I don’t know her, or you, of course. It’s the house I’m interested in.’

‘Oh, it’s not for sale, my dear, goodness me, no.’

‘I wasn’t thinking that,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I think my mother once stayed here and I wanted to see it. Have you lived here long?’

‘All my life,’ he said, smiling. ‘I was born here, and so were my brothers, and Mary.’ Then he peered at me and said, ‘But you’re wet, soaked, and no coat or umbrella,’ and he extended the shelter of his own umbrella to me. We stood there, quite close together, and I was aware of being scrutinised. I met his eyes steadily and we stared at each other. He had dark brown eyes, like my father, so dark the pupils hardly stood out. ‘You said?’ he murmured encouragingly.

‘My mother,’ I said, ‘I think she stayed here once, a long time ago. You may have known her. It’s complicated …’

‘I’ve known a lot of people,’ he said. ‘Good gracious me, yes, I’ve known a lot of people in my life. You mustn’t be surprised if I don’t remember your mother’s name. What was it?’

Two minutes later we were in Glebe House. I’ve heard so often of people turning pale with shock, looking stunned, seeming struck dumb, but I’ve never heard of anyone doing the opposite, becoming animated and
laughing
. This man laughed when I told him Susannah’s name. He closed his eyes and laughed and said, of course, he remembered her and that I must come at once and meet Mary. I protested that he had been going out and that I didn’t want to delay him, but he said he was only going to post a letter and it could wait. Then he led the way back down the garden path to the porch. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about
being
wet – we have a dog and she makes far more mess than you could.’ And as soon as he opened the front door I could hear a dog barking and a woman’s voice telling it to stop. ‘It’s all right, Mary,’ the man shouted. ‘It’s me. I’ve got a young visitor with me.’ He walked ahead of me down a narrow passage with a stone-flagged floor and into a kitchen, where a woman of about his own age, I thought, was sitting at the table peeling potatoes, and a springer spaniel was racing round and round excitedly.

The woman, Mary, didn’t seem too pleased to see me, though she was polite enough and immediately offered me some tea. The man urged me to sit down, pointing out the chairs were plain wood and couldn’t be damaged by my wet clothes. It was he who put the kettle on and made the tea, Mary watching him all the time as though she didn’t trust him and saying, ‘The red mug, John,’ and, ‘Milk in the door of the fridge, John,’ as if directing someone quite unfamiliar with his surroundings. The tea made and in front of me, the man, whose name I’d now learned was John, settled himself opposite me and said, ‘You’ll never guess who this is, Mary.’

‘Of course I won’t,’ she snapped, ‘so you’d better stop playing games and tell me.’

‘It’s Susannah Cameron’s daughter!’ he said, laughing again, and spreading his arms wide as though he’d just won a prize. ‘Imagine! After all these years!’

I noted Mary’s hands stopped peeling the potatoes for a moment, and that her eyebrows went up, but there was no incomprehensible laughter from her, and she said nothing at all. I felt it was time to offer the explanation John hadn’t asked for, or shown any sign of wanting, and began to explain myself, reducing the story to as few words as possible, but obliged to mention how I’d come by the address book. I produced it when I got to this point and said, ‘On the “C” page it has your address, but no name. I couldn’t resist coming here, on the off chance.’

‘Now isn’t that extraordinary?’ John said. ‘Our address and no name. I wonder why.’

‘You wonder too much,’ Mary said, grim-faced. ‘That’s always been your trouble.’

John ignored her and turned to me. ‘You’re not a bit like her,’ he said. ‘She was blonde, you know – lovely long blonde hair and blue, blue eyes, heavenly eyes –’

Mary made a dismissive sound, which she covered up with splashing a peeled potato into a pan of water beside her.

‘– heavenly, lovely girl, slight, not very tall. I’d never have guessed you were her daughter.’

‘Tactless!’ said Mary.

‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’m used to it. It’s always been commented on, ever since I was a child, how unlike my mother I look. I’m like my father, like his side of the family, all tall and dark-haired and brown-eyed. But I am Susannah’s daughter all the same.’

‘But you never knew her,’ John said. ‘Very sad, very sad.’

‘Don’t be sentimental, John,’ Mary said, ‘the girl was only a baby. It wasn’t sad at all for her.’

‘Oh, I’m sure it was,’ John protested. ‘Losing a mother is always desperately sad. Look how sad we were when we lost Mother –’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ Mary said, clearly exasperated, ‘our mother was eighty-two when she died. It isn’t the same at all, you fool.’

‘Anyway,’ I said hurriedly, seeing this degenerate into a squabble between brother and sister when I had so much I wanted to find out, ‘this address is in the book, with no name. None of the addresses in it have names and most, but not all, are hotels or similar.’

‘How curious,’ John said. ‘Well, my name is very boring, it’s John Graham – ’

‘John Charles Henry Graham,’ said Mary.

‘– and there are scores round here called that, couldn’t be more ordinary or commonplace. And Mary’s name is just as common, Mary Graham, hundreds of them.’ I waited for Mary to contest this and reveal the middle names I was sure she must have, but she visibly tightened her lips and kept quiet. ‘Our parents were John and Mary too, and our branch of the Graham clan have been here for centuries. Our great-great-great grandfather – ’

‘Really, John,’ said Mary, slicing a potato in half viciously, ‘she doesn’t want to hear all this.’

‘I think it’s jolly interesting,’ he said, ‘families and their houses, and us being born in here. I like to tell people about it.’

‘You like to tell people far too much,’ Mary said, ‘and half the time they don’t like to tell you you’re a bore.’

‘I’m not bored,’ I said. ‘I love houses and their histories. I like to hear who’s lived in them. I always liked knowing about our house in Oxford, though it wasn’t old like this one and hadn’t always belonged to one family.’

‘Were you born there?’ John asked.

‘No. I was born in Edinburgh. Then after my mother died my father married again and we moved to Oxford when I was about eighteen months.’

‘Poor Susannah,’ John said, ‘she was lovely –’

‘He was in love with her,’ Mary said, and another potato was tossed noisily into the pan.

‘Yes, I was, oh dear me yes, I was,’ said John, smiling even more broadly, without a trace of embarrassment. His love for my mother had certainly not left any lingering residue of bitterness. He seemed perfectly happy, even proud, to recall his passion.

‘What happened?’ I asked, made bold by his cheerfulness and the absence of any sign that he had suffered.

‘Your father happened,’ he said. ‘We were all very young, you know, things changed, relationships, as they do.’

‘So it was just an affair?’ I pressed.

Mary tutted and was about to say something, but her brother got in first.

‘An
affair
?’ He was incredulous. ‘My dear girl! No, not an affair, if you mean what I take it you mean, what it means today, the full thing. It was the Fifties, we wouldn’t have dared, not in our part of the world. But we were in love, it didn’t mean we weren’t.’

‘
You
were,’ Mary said, ‘
she
wasn’t.’

John stopped laughing and looked hurt for the first time. ‘Oh, I think she was. I think Susannah was in love with me too, Mary. I certainly believed she was.’

‘You believed anything,’ Mary said. ‘You still do.’ She’d finished peeling the potatoes at last and got up from the table to take the pan to the sink, where she began emptying it and filling it with fresh water. I saw that she’d walked the few necessary paces with difficulty and must suffer from arthritis or some such complaint. Maybe her brusqueness could be explained by this, if she was in pain all the time. She had her back to me, but I badly wanted to ask her about Susannah, feeling her memory was sharper and less clouded by emotion, as John’s was bound to be if he had been so in love.

‘Did you know my mother too, Miss Graham?’ I asked, careful to address her respectfully and sure that no rings on her left hand would mean she had never married.

‘I met her,’ Mary said, without turning round, ‘but I wouldn’t say I knew her. She stayed here. She came home from some sailing holiday with John and we all met her, naturally. All the men were mad about her, even Father, a bit. George doted on her, and Frank too, though he was only fourteen. The whole lot of them eating out of her hand. It was ridiculous.’

‘You didn’t like her?’ I suggested, but Mary was immediately indignant, turning at last to stare at me.

‘Didn’t like her? I didn’t say that. You’re twisting my words. I wasn’t in love with her like my brothers, how could I be? But it doesn’t mean I disliked the girl. She seemed nice enough but a bit wild. She didn’t ignore me, like some of John’s other flames used to, but she wasn’t going to waste much time on me. I didn’t expect her to, why should she? I knew she wouldn’t last, and she didn’t.’

‘How did you know?’ I said, watching Mary carefully. Whatever she said, I deduced she had not liked Susannah and I wanted to know why.

‘Oh, I can’t remember, I just knew. She was clever, ambitious, I felt. John wasn’t her sort.’

‘I was clever,’ John objected.

‘But you weren’t ambitious, that’s the point,’ Mary said, returning to sit at the table, but seeming lost without the potatoes to fiddle with.

‘I jolly well was.’

‘No, you weren’t. You wouldn’t still be here if you’d been ambitious. It’s proof enough.’

‘I like it here.’

‘Quite.’

Once again, they were side-tracking me, enjoying their own bickering, and it was wasting time. ‘Did your mother like her?’ I asked Mary, to get her back on the subject of Susannah.

‘Yes, she did. She thought she was interesting, not empty-headed like most of John’s girls. She made her welcome.’

‘How did she come to stay, anyway?’

‘I invited her, of course,’ John said.

‘But where did you meet her? Did you study architecture too? Were you on the same course?’