The Memory Box Read Free

approached separately from different ends). Rory had a torch and shone it round each attic in turn. They were full of the old bits of furniture, mostly chairs, dark wooden things with velvet padded seats, and small tables with spindly legs. But there were chests and boxes too and we peered inside some of them, only to find they were packed with brocade curtains and musty old clothes. It was very disappointing and not even Rory could sustain my interest. I went back down the ladder on my own, to his annoyance, and left him to close the trapdoor, which he managed only after a great struggle.
    But what we missed up there was the memory box, my box. It was in the further attic all the time, the one I hadn’t had the patience to inspect thoroughly. Rory had shone his torch round and all we had seen were books, dozens of big volumes stacked up round the walls, and lots of huge rolls of what looked like paper (and I now know were maps and architectural drawings). I only found the box, hidden behind these piles, when I came to sell the house. I had to force myself then to inspect the attics, as well as every other room, to make decisions about where everything should go.
    And that was only a little over a year ago, a terrible year, too terrible to dwell on, so I won’t. My father, aged only sixty-five, and my mother – Charlotte, that is – only fifty-nine, both died within eight months of each other. The shock was agonising, my sense of outrage violent. This double blow seemed to me an injustice far more monstrous than the death of Susannah when I was a baby.
    I don’t know which death hit me hardest. My mother’s, I think, because it took so long, and I had time to realise what was happening, but my father’s was the more unbelievable, and in some ways more painful. He died first, of a stroke, without any warning. My mother went on living in the family house in the brief interval between my father’s death and the onset of her own terminal illness. She had no desire to sell it, to leave and move somewhere smaller where there would be no reminders of him. She wanted to be reminded of him: in fact, she found every reminder a comfort, her only comfort apart from me. Perhaps eventually, as she aged, she would have been obliged to move. I might even have tried to persuade her to do so since the house was so very large for one person, but she didn’t have time to grow old. She died in hospital, slowly, and it was left to me to dispose of our beloved home and its contents.
    There was always the option of living in the house myself, but I never considered this. It wasn’t anything to do with its size, there were other reasons. The house was in Oxford. I didn’t wish to live in Oxford, desirable though many people think it is. Being in that house after she and my father died was torture to me. The memories she wrapped round herself like a warm blanket pricked me like a hair shirt. Forced to enter it, to get things occasionally for my mother when she was in hospital, I had been overwhelmed by a longing to be back in my early childhood with my parents, loved by them and loving them. All the time I was fighting my way through crowds not of ghosts but of sensations. I felt slightly faint even putting my key in the lock, and once I was through the front door and had closed it behind me, hearing that distinctive click it made, and the light rattle of the brass letter box, I felt a kind of unpleasant excitement. The power of houses has always bewildered me – that mere bricks and mortar should possess such atmosphere is uncanny.
    After my mother died, the hardest thing I had to do, far harder than organising her funeral, was go into our old home. I wept then as I had not done before. For a whole month, I was obliged to go there day after day until every bit of furniture, every object, every book and picture, every piece of clothing, every last curtain and cushion was sorted out and ready to be collected by all manner of people. Someone