The Memory Box by Margaret Forster

Author:Margaret Forster [Forster, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781446443491
Publisher: Penguin (UK)
Published: 1999-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

IX

AT THE END of January, I had to go down to Cornwall to clear out my parents’ cottage. I’d only been there once since my father died, to fetch things Charlotte had wanted, and not at all since she herself died. The cottage had never meant much to me, though it was pretty enough. It had only three rooms, perched one on top of the other in a slot of a building with a wooden deck at the back overlooking the Fowey estuary. This was where my father had come to sail and where he’d tried, and failed, to make a sailor of me. I only had to step on to a boat to be sick. He, of course, was a great sailor and so, I’d been told, was Susannah – genes on both sides which should have made me completely happy on water but which had failed to pass through to me.

There was the one good photograph of my father and Susannah on a boat. Most of those photos of them together in the early years of their relationship were small and blurry, unlike the studies taken of Susannah alone. Someone had used a cheap Brownie camera to snap them; but that one photograph which was clearly the work of a professional had hung framed in my father’s study for as long as I could remember. It was twelve by fifteen inches, black and white, glossy. Every detail was defined, the strands in the coiled rope lying on the deck of the boat they were on, the shine on the metal fittings, the grain of the wooden planks – all superbly visible. It had been taken for a yachting magazine for which my father had written an article, on the conversion of MFVs (Motor Fishing Vessels). He was in the forefront, beaming straight to camera, and Susannah was in the background, sitting with her back against the mast, legs drawn up, elbows on knees, head between her hands, looking very serious. All the time, even when that photograph was taken, her heart was clogging up and she was often breathless and tired. But my grandmother said she wouldn’t face facts, indeed simply denied them. She was a fighter. She was going to lead the life she wanted to lead. She was going to be normal.

She should never have had me, never have thought of having a baby. I’d heard that said as a child and had resented the insinuation that somehow I had caused her death. But they were fair enough, those words. Of course she should never have had me. She wasn’t fit enough. The pregnancy and then an agonisingly long-drawn-out birth (Isabella had once foisted the details on me until I’d walked out of the room) had weakened her when she was already weakening, or rather her heart was. She’d even breast-fed me for three months against all advice. She must have been mad. What did she think she was doing, risking her life, or at least her health, to have a baby? It can’t have been because my father persuaded her.

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