Free The Memory Box by Margaret Forster

identifies, is killed.
    End of my mad notion that Susannah had made a literary reference. I found myself blushing a little as I closed the paperback and stared out of the window. How dangerous it was, this game, because that was what it was turning out to be, a game, one without any rules of play and only the merest chance of an elusive prize at the end. My imagination was enjoying itself, conjuring up absurdity after absurdity, trying to make profound what was simple. I had let some kind of brake off and was freewheeling, my mind rushing down all kinds of strange alleys. Seagulls, feathers, visions of Susannah floated before me dizzily and I felt a kind of physical excitement I did not like. It was a relief when the dreariness of the Midlands gave way to the hills of the North-West and it soothed me to stare out at the smooth roundness through which the train was travelling. I was like a medium coming out of a self-induced trance.
    By the time I got off at Carlisle I was sensible again. Which was fortunate, because the drive from there to Whitehaven was not the easy coastal meandering I’d expected, but a fraught business, which involved driving on a difficult, quite narrow road, with very few stretches of dual carriageway, among large lorries. There wasn’t much chance to look at the scenery and I had only a faint impression of mountains off to my left for a long way. It wasn’t until I was almost at Whitehaven itself, high up on a top road I’d somehow strayed on to from the main road in an attempt to escape the traffic, that I sensed anything glorious about the landscape that corresponded to my father’s memories. But then I saw the sea stretching away to a blue line of hills on the Scottish side and on my other side a great vista of soaring and dipping mountains, and I began to appreciate something of the hold his home county had had over him.
    What I didn’t know, and pondered as I drove into the town down a long and winding road, was whether Susannah had shared his affection. She was a Scot, not a Cumbrian, and surely more loyal to her own hills. And unlike my father she hadn’t been a great climber and walker, not possessing, because of her heart condition, his stamina and strength. I didn’t even know how many times she had actually been in this area. There was that first summer, when he’d brought her home to meet his mother (not a success – she’d thought Susannah looked ‘delicate’ – too true), but after that? I didn’t know. I thought there must have been at least one other occasion, when they went walking, and there was their honeymoon and the photographs from that in a more southern part of the county, showing Susannah looking incredibly tanned and healthy and far from delicate. I had her map with me, and the rucksack, numbers 2 and 3, and had vague ideas of going on from Whitehaven to explore further if I felt like it.
    All the time I was trying to find my way round the town (and I seemed to go in circles, realising I was passing certain buildings twice), I was straining to imagine my urbane father coming from such a place. I couldn’t see him belonging at all, and the feeling increased once I’d parked the car in a little turning off the quayside. I tried to see him as a boy, playing on the miserable, muddy patch of dark sand I could make out beyond the wall of an inner harbour, and failed. Then I walked down a sad shopping precinct full of shoe shops with wire baskets of cheap trainers standing outside until I came to a small market place, where the tourist office was housed in a pretty painted old building. It was a relief to reach it. They gave me a street map there, and I followed its directions to Washington Square, where I knew my father had been born and brought up. It wasn’t a square at all, but a triangle in the middle of narrow streets and connected to others by a cut. Now here I could see my father, sitting sketching perhaps on the bench in the square, drawing the five little