The Memory Box by Margaret Forster Read Free Book Online

little was depicted. This unassuming hill with its cottage could be anywhere.
    The last package had been wedged with some difficulty in the very bottom of the box. It looked square, but when I opened it there was a cylinder of rolled-up papers within the strong cardboard box. I unrolled them. I was looking at reproductions of colour prints. Two of them cut out of some art book; good draughtsmanship, a bit sentimental, probably nineteenth-century, I guessed, but I didn’t recognise the artist. One showed a mother in a blue dress cradling and kissing a baby; the other a mother in a cream gown cuddling her baby. They might not be mothers, of course, I told myself: they could be nursemaids. But there was something about the way the babies – both naked – were held that suggested motherhood. I rolled them back up, disappointed.
    It was over and hadn’t proved traumatic after all. Such a lot of unnecessary angst over what had turned out to be a collection of harmless mementoes. Rather wearily, I stuffed all the wrappings back into the box and put the lid on. I wanted to put the box somewhere out of sight. My cupboards weren’t deep enough to hold it without the doors sticking open, but I found a place in my darkroom, under the sink, a compartment empty except for the stopcock taps, where I managed to wedge it. I felt much better when it had been hidden. Some of the objects themselves could stay on display. The hat was already a fixture on the glass head, the necklace in my mirror drawer (one of those wooden swivel mirror stands), the rucksack with the map inside hung on a hook in my bedroom behind the door, the shell sat on a bathroom shelf, the feathers I took out of their plastic bag and stuck in a bottle which also stood on the bathroom shelf. The silver hand mirror I wrapped in a cloth and put in a drawer full of sweaters together with the address book. This only left the rolled-up prints, the paint-box and the unfinished painting . I put them in a pine linen chest which was at the top of the stairs with only a spare duvet in it.
    I don’t know why, but I had made a list of everything in numerical order. I suppose I thought that once I’d unwrapped the packages I’d forget how they had been numbered and that it might be important. But looking at the little list I couldn’t see why the correct sequence should be important at all. Why were those feathers numbered I? And the prints 11, last? I wandered about for a bit, list in hand, restless and perturbed. I didn’t like being made to feel stupid, suspecting that I wasn’t spotting connections which someone brighter might make. I was tired too, and hungry, so eventually I put the list on my desk, made myself some pasta and ate it in front of the television, watching the news, but not taking it in. All the time I was looking at the screen I was seeing not the images actually flashing across it but all the things that had been in the memory box, an endless procession of them over and over again.
    In bed, it was worse. I was sleepy, but the moment I closed my eyes, ready to drift off, the wretched box was before me, so confident of its power over me. I told myself that now it was stuck under the sink in the darkroom, its contents revealed, it had no power any more. But this was not true. The after-effects of opening it were different but still powerful. The fear of some kind of horrible surprise had gone, and so had the terror of being swamped by emotions I hadn’t known I could feel, but nevertheless something threatened me still. Susannah had reached out to me through her box, as she intended to, and even if I did not fully understand what she was saying, she had succeeded in making a claim on me. I could no longer reject her. She had forced herself into my mind, where I had never wanted her to be. I had worked hard since I knew of her existence, knew she existed at all as my mother , scarcely to think of her. Now I lay in the dark obliged to think of myself as once