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| Margaret Forster |
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Extract Susannah was apparently perfect, as the dead so often become. She was, it seemed, perfectly beautiful, perfectly good, and perfectly happy during her comparatively short life. It was that last bit which made me determined not to have anything to do with her. The idea of anyone being 'perfectly happy' struck me, even as a child, as absurd. How could anyone but a moron be perfectly happy? It made me picture her as someone with a fat smile on her smug face all the time. It made me squirm to imagine this happy-clappy woman, and I did not want to acknowledge her. She would not have liked me. No one was ever going to describe me as a perfect anything (except maybe as a perfect nuisance) and certainly not as being perfectly happy. My face more often has a frown on it than a smile - 'So serious,' people say of me, as if being serious is a crime. And my nature, far from being sunny, is woefully cynical - 'How suspicious you are,' everyone tells me. True. I am suspicious, and lack spontaneity. Not Susannah. She was apparently a wonderfully spontaneous person. She was said to meet life with open arms, ever buoyant and optimistic. They told me she was happy right up to her death, that everyone marvelled at her serenity. I do not believe a word of this. I think it was an image made up in a misguided attempt to comfort me. How, after all, could she be happy, knowing she was likely to die soon, when she was a mere thirty-one years old and I, her baby, her only and much-longed for child, barely six months old? Prove to me such a woman was happy then, and I will prove to you she was insane.................... (later) I took the memory box into my sitting room and put it down on the floor in front of the sofa. The sooner I got the opening over, the better. I would need a knife or scissors to cut the cord - the knots looked far too corroded with age to undo easily. Pausing to wash my hands, as though I were about to perform a surgical operation and had to take meticulous care with hygiene, I hacked away at the cord with the bread knife and then cut through the tough waterproof outer covering. Then I got a surprise. I'd assumed that the box itself would be a wooden or strong cardboard crate, of the packing-case variety, but what I found was an old-fashioned hat box. It was large and round, about two feet tall and eighteen inches or so in diameter, and was covered in a vivid fuchsia grosgrain material with purple ricrac round the lid and a purple satin ribbon tied in an ornamental bow on the top. It was the most marvellously vulgar and yet glamorous box. I found myself smiling. My grandmother, Susannah's mother who had looked after me when she died, had had several boxes like this, though none quite so colourful or flamboyant. For some reason, I still delayed the final act of opening, though I was feeling so much more relaxed about it. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine, wondering as I did so why my father had never described the brash appeal of this box. It would, I was sure, have helped me feel more kindly towards Susannah's box and tempted me to want to see it. Slowly, I went back to contemplate it again. Experimentally, I pulled at the purple bow. It did not give. Carefully, I cut across the ribbon underneath the bow and when the lid still would not lift I saw that it was taped all round, and remembered my father had said he had sealed it. More delicate snipping with scissors and I felt the lid move a fraction as the pressure was released. I eased it off slowly, feeling a strange sort of breathlessness as I did so. Under the lid, flattened by years of being pressed down, were several scrunched up layers of coloured tissue paper, white, yellow and green, all arranged to look vaguely like a flower. A pretty effect, and I sat admiring it for a moment before disturbing the paper. When I had lifted it out, placing it inside the upturned lid, I expected somehow to find a note. Instead, there was another layer of covering, a thin disc of corrugated cardboard. It was tightly wedged and took some time to remove. What met my, by then, eager eye was puzzling. |
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