The Memory Box by Margaret Forster Read Free Book Online Page A

part of her. I must have been with her when she was choosing and wrapping and arranging the things in the box. I would have been in a cradle or cot beside her bed. She would have hung over me, perhaps talked to me, showing me what she was leaving me, telling me why she was doing it. I found myself, in my half-asleep state, straining to imagine her voice, to see her face looming over mine, to feel the tenderness of her touch …
    I sat up and switched on my bedside lamp. This was sick. It was also ridiculous. I reminded myself I had been only a few months old and could have no memory of Susannah. There was nothing to recall. But what is memory anyway? Could it be claimed nothing is forgotten, even a small baby’s impressions? Could I, in fact, have memories of Susannah embedded in my brain somewhere if only I knew how to log into them? Was the problem only one of retrieval? I slumped there in bed, wondering what happens to memories not remembered. I envisaged them in a kind of vast lost-property room, all jumbled together and crowding each other, clamouring to be let out. It seemed to me that if it is hard sometimes to remember, it is also hard to forget. Perhaps if I went to a psychiatrist, or a psychotherapist, my baby memories would resurface, but I had no intention of doing that. I swore to be stern with myself, sensible. The only important truth was that I remembered nothing and that this had always been a blessing. I had been protected from the pain of Susannah’s death. I hadn’t pined for her or cried out for her. I hadn’t even known she’d disappeared for ever, but had at once accepted my grandmother as a substitute and thrived until Charlotte came into my life.
    There was no way of being sure that this cheerful version, in which I had always believed implicitly, was absolutely accurate. Maybe I had missed her. The not crying, the easy transference to my grandmother’s arms, need not necessarily signify that I had not registered they were different. I remembered suddenly how my Aunt Isabella had once remarked, in tones almost of disapproval, how adaptable I had been, as though she felt it was neither natural nor right that I had been so docile and had not screamed at my deprivation. She’d seemed to think it shocking how happily I’d given up Susannah, who had loved me with such a fierce passion. Maybe she would rather I had been inconsolable, knowing instinctively what I had lost. I recalled what I’d felt when I first saw the box, that it might be a weapon. She might have wanted me to resent her death. This thought startled me – I had always assumed it must have been a comfort to her, knowing how young I was, thinking I would remember nothing and that therefore her death would not blight my own life. She knew she was going to desert me, but what if, rather than being glad I would not remember her, she had been angry? Perhaps rage had been packed between the layers of her box: ‘How dare you not remember me, how dare you say I mean nothing to you, how dare you never call me your mother?’ She was not, then, entertaining me or educating me. She was intent on making me examine my attitude to her. I was to take stock and include her in doing so.
    I got up, walked about, had a drink of water, went back to bed, but didn’t put out the light. Sleep was going to elude me for a while yet, I knew, so that the best thing to do was make myself comfortable and try to be calm. I’m always trying to be calm. ‘Calm down,’ has been said to me endlessly, by my parents, my grandmother, my teachers, my lovers: ‘Calm down , Catherine, for heaven’s sake!’ What is so wrong in being turbulent, volatile, I wonder. But of course I know perfectly well what’s wrong with it. It is tiring, wearing, for other people. They read into my agitation some sort of madness, I think, and it frightens them. They think I might explode and harm them. Or myself. But it runs through me like a stream of hot lava, this bubbling rage I