The Memory Box Read Free Page B

petals of each one carefully coloured in. It looked, this package, as if inside its wrapping there would be a present, to be uncovered and put under a Christmas tree or on a table with a birthday cake, and yet I was afraid of its innocence. I crouched down beside it in the dim light of the attic, wondering what I should do. I would have to take it with me and open it, but I was afraid not only of further grief but of pathos, which I dreaded even more. How could this not turn out to be a pathetic task? Whatever my indifference towards Susannah, I could not help but be affected by the sight of her box. I wished passionately she had not done this. Who had thought of it, or was it her own idea? And what had she imagined was the purpose of her legacy? To tell me about herself? To make some kind of statement? To try to share in my unknown future? But she must have known I would be surrounded by information about her, that I would have photographs and memorabilia, that my father and her family would talk about her. What she could not have guessed was that I hadn’t wanted to know very much. My extreme contentment with Charlotte might have hurt her – and thinking that suddenly made me wonder if there was another motive behind the leaving of this box. It could be a sort of weapon, to be used from beyond the grave. A way of combating my denial. Was it screaming, ‘I was your mother! Listen to me!’?
    I knew I was being melodramatic. The box wasn’t screaming at all. It had been stuck quietly here, muffled by its shroud of thick material, for nearly thirty years. It had been silent all that time, exerting no influence whatsoever, except perhaps over my father. I imagine every now and again he remembered its existence and fretted about it. Fingering the label, I realised he must have detached it from the box itself and tied it on to the cord when he had wrapped the box in this protective covering. Why had he done that? To alert me, to make sure it could be recognised for what it was when the time came? I struggled to remember precisely what he had said that morning of my twenty-first birthday. He’d briefly described how Susannah had kept this memory box absolutely private. She had told him she was preparing it for me, ‘in case’, but he had had no part in it. She didn’t want to discuss it, nor did she want help in deciding what should go in it. It had occupied her when she was too weak to move much from her bedroom and he had never seen what went inside. He had urged me, unconvincingly, to try to think of it as a happy experience. Susannah wanted to be secretive, and since by then she had so little privacy left in her life he had not pried. After she died, and he went through the miserable business of clearing her things out, he had been surprised how heavy the box was. But he hadn’t looked inside. He’d sealed the edges with masking tape and wrapped it in waterproof material, and put it in the basement of their Edinburgh house until it was sold. It went with the rest of the furniture into storage during the time I lived with my grandmother and he lived in his flat, and then, when he married Charlotte and moved to his new job in Oxford, it went with them. Every now and again he and Charlotte had discussed when I should be told about the box, but for years the time had not seemed right.
    I could understand this. I wasn’t an easy child. All sorts of things upset me, even if on the surface I seemed strong and tough. I had nightmares regularly – I can’t recall what they were about, except there was a lot of blood in them – and was for years a poor sleeper, often ending up in my parents’ bed. It was natural that they should fear the effect of giving to me a box full of unknown objects left by a dying woman who very possibly was not always in her right mind. And then later, as a young adolescent, I was given to violent rages alternating with spells of studied gloom – all very typical, but hardly the best background