The memory box

(from Acklam R. Total English Upper Intermediate. // Richard Acklam, Araminta Crace – Pearson Education, 2005. – P. 69.)

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. They said she met life with open arms, ever positive and optimistic. I do not believe a word of this. How, after all, could she be happy, knowing she was likely to die soon, when she was merely 31 and I, her baby, was hardly 6 months old?

I have a feeling that the existence of the memory box may have troubled my father from the beginning. He didn’t give it to me until my twenty-first birthday even though it had been in our house all that time. Charlotte knew about it of course but neither she nor my father could bring themselves to mention it. I think they were both afraid of its significance. Also, I was highly imaginative child and they simply didn’t know how to introduce this memory box into my life.

Now, however, their nervousness makes me curious. What exactly were they afraid of? Did they think I might be shocked, and if so why? At any rate, both of them were visibly on edge, almost guilty when finally on the morning of my twenty-first birthday they told me about. It was clear they were relieved when I showed little interest in it. I said I didn’t want to open it, or even to see it.

This was a lie, yet not a lie. The box did, in fact, make me curious even if I found I wanted to suppress the feeling. Aged ten, I don’t think I would have been able to. I’m sure I would have been too excited at the thought that it might contain all sorts of treasures; and then around fifteen I’d have found it irresistibly romantic and would have been ready to weep on discovering dried roses pressed between the pages of meaningful poems. But at twenty one I was very self-centred; my curiosity was only slight and I could more easily deny it. In fact, I felt a kind of nausea, at the notion of a dying woman choosing what to put in a box for me.

Nevertheless, there was no doubt that it forced me to think of Susannah. Growing up, I could hardly have thought of her less, wanting Charlotte to be my mother. I was always furious if anyone referred to her as my stepmother. However, Charlotte herself would try to calm me by pointing out that, whether I liked it or not, that was exactly what she was.

After Charlotte died, the hardest thing I had to do was to go back into our old home. 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. This was, of course, how I found the box, even though I very nearly missed it. My attention might not have been caught if it had not been for an odd-looking pink label attached to the parcel. On the label, written in ink which had faded but which you could still read, was my own name – “For my darling Catherine Hope, in the future”.

c) In pairs discuss the questions below.

1) Can you think of a time when you were the happiest girl / boy in the world?

4) Can you think of a time which was the most embarrassing moment in your life?