The Memory Game Read online

  Paul looked shocked, but excited as well. He had caught a whiff of what his programme might be like. He replied in his best programme-proposal mode, ‘The programme will be made with the utmost respect and integrity.’

  Father turned his back on Paul and began talking about opening and reconstructing a square pargeted brick flue. I wondered whether clay flue linings mightn’t be better but he brushed me aside.

  ‘I’m not giving up just because of an old man’s need to strike poses. Have you ever heard anything as ridiculous as that half-arsed restoration? Has Dad gone senile?’

  Paul sounded quite belligerent as he sat in the pub fidgeting with his half-pint glass, but I knew he was feeling guilty.

  ‘Don’t just blow smoke out of your nostrils at me, Jane. It’s entirely legitimate for me to draw on my own experience for my work and my experience happens to consist of our two families. Just because Surplus Value is a hit, that doesn’t mean I can’t do anything but game shows.’

  I was silent.

  ‘Well, does it?’

  I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter what I think. I’m not going to put up money for the film.’

  ‘It’s important to me. Since that weekend all I’ve thought about is Natalie. Making a film about her and us would be good for everyone. A way of coming to terms with what’s happened.’

  ‘Television therapy,’ I said.

  ‘Well, that’s probably no worse than whatever it is that you’re doing now. We’re both just trying to help ourselves. What’s so wrong with that?’

  I laid my hand on his sleeve, and he shook it testily away.

  ‘Paul,’ I said, ‘you want people to talk about their lives to you, but most of us don’t know our lives. What you’re doing is risky. You may trample all over people’s memories and dreams at the very moment they’re the most fragile. And these are people you’ve got to go on living with. I don’t want Claud to tell the world how he feels about me. Television is so seductive: people tell things to the camera they’d never dream of telling their best friends.’

  I stubbed out my cigarette and reached for my coat.

  ‘It’s just going to be an honest piece of film-making. I can promise you that I won’t do anything that would be unworthy of Natalie’s memory.’

  ‘Save it for the Radio Times, Paul,’ I snapped, and felt guilty and then didn’t mind. We parted without saying goodbye.

  Eight

  My first session – my first real session – with Alex felt like the first day at a new school. I was nervous. I chose my clothes with unusual care and then felt insecure in them. Even Alex’s house felt different to me, but then I wasn’t taken down into the dark, warm, reassuringly messy kitchen but upstairs to a small back room on the first floor. I went in first while Alex went up another flight of stairs to fetch a notebook. I walked over to the window and put my hand on the cold glass. It overlooked a long narrow garden that led back to another long narrow garden proceeding from the house opposite, a mirror image of the one I was looking out of. Everything in the garden was pruned back hard in preparation for spring, which I felt as a rebuke to my own abandoned back yard. I was startled by the door closing behind me and turned round to find Alex.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘lie down.’

  I hadn’t looked at the room properly, I had no sense of its contents or decoration or the carpet. I only saw the armchair and the couch beside it. I lay down on the couch and heard the strain of springs as Alex sat himself down behind me, beyond my vision.

  ‘I don’t know where I should begin,’ I said tremulously.

  ‘Why are you here? Start with that and go anywhere you want,’ said Alex.

  ‘Very well. At the beginning of September I told my husband, Claud, that I had decided we should separate and get divorced. It was very sudden and Claud and the whole family were terribly shocked.’

  ‘What do you mean by the whole family?’

  ‘I mean the whole extended family. Whenever I talk about “my” family, I’m not talking about the little Crane family but the big wonderful enviable Martello family.’

  ‘You sound a little ironic.’

  ‘Only a little bit. I may have reservations but I know it really is wonderful. We’re all terribly lucky. That was the word my father always used. When he left the army and went up to Oxford just after the war, he met Alan on his very first day. Of course, we’ve all read The Town Drain now and we know what to expect so it’s difficult to imagine what it must have been like for somebody like my dad – a scholarship boy all his life, very bright, very shy – arriving in Oxford, completely bemused and overawed and then meeting the prototype of Billy Belton. And if you think of the effect that he had on people just as the hero of a book, imagine him in person, incredibly funny, totally contemptuous of everything that you were meant to have respect for. They were almost in love at that time, I think.

  ‘Within a couple of years Alan and my father had both got married and the two families were almost like one family. Alan got very rich when The Town Drain became a bestseller and was filmed and all that and he bought the house and the land up in Shropshire and that’s where we spent our holidays. It was just the classic perfect place, and when you took people there they would be dazzled by this amazing family and the four handsome sons – and the beautiful daughter, of course. It was the centre of my life. Natalie was my sister and best friend. Theo was my first love. And it seemed natural, dynastic, when I married Claud.’

  ‘Was Theo the older brother?’

  ‘Claud is the oldest, then Theo, then Natalie, and Jonah and Alfred are the youngest. They’re twins.’

  ‘How did they react when you split up from Claud?’

  ‘That’s hard to say. One of the points of the weekend when Natalie’s body was found was to show that I was still a part of the family.’

  ‘Was it important for you to get their approval?’

  ‘Not their approval exactly. I didn’t want to be seen as smashing the family up.’

  ‘Did people ask you why you’d done it?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Well, why did you do it?’

  ‘You know, I was thinking about this as I was cycling over here. I knew that I was going to have to give some sort of answer to that and I can’t. Isn’t that strange? Here I am, I’m forty-one years old and I married Claud when I was twenty, when I was still at university. I’ve thrown all that in the bin. And of course people have asked why. Claud was devastated and my sons were terribly upset and angry and they wanted a straightforward answer – to give them something to hold on to, I suppose – and I couldn’t give it to them. It’s not that I’ve got a reason which I wasn’t telling them about. All I could have said is that I think I did something blindly and when I woke up out of a long sleep and looked around me, and when Jerome and Robert were grown up and away from home, I decided I had to get out. I’m sorry that was long and probably not very comprehensible.’

  There was a long silence and I began to cry. I was furious with myself but I couldn’t stop and the tears ran down my cheeks. I was surprised to feel Alex’s hand on my shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I burbled snottily. ‘It’s just that I feel terrible about what I’ve done and now I’m being stupid and weak. I apologise.’

  Alex walked across the room and came back with a handful of tissues. ‘Here,’ he said.

  I blew my nose and wiped my face. Alex surprised me by squatting down in front of me instead of returning to his chair. As the film of tears in my eyes dispersed, I could see that he was scrutinising me with great concentration.

  ‘I’m going to say a couple of things to you,’ he said. ‘You already know that there’s nothing wrong with crying in this room. In fact, you can do anything you want, so long as it doesn’t stain the couch. There’s something more important than that, as well. During all the time that you come and talk to me, I’m going to try to be as open and straightforward with you as I can be. I want to begin by telling you that I think you
’re not weak and that you shouldn’t be feeling remorseful because you aren’t able to give some easy motivation for why you left your husband. That takes courage. In fact, if you were giving me some glib reason for what you’d done, then our first plan would be to get rid of that and see what’s behind it. You’re not letting yourself off the hook and that’s a positive sign. Now, are you feeling better?’

  I sat up to blow my nose and scrunched the tissue up self-consciously and put it in my pocket. I nodded. Alex tapped my shoulder reassuringly and then began to stride up and down the room, as I could see was his habit when he was deep in thought. Apparently having made up his mind, he sat down in the chair once more.

  ‘I’m certainly not going to start providing answers. That will be your job. What I need to do is to keep some sense of the direction in which we should be moving. If you’re unhappy with anywhere I try to push you, well, then you must say that, but I’d like you to trust me if you can. My first thought is that what you are telling me is that you haven’t just ended your marriage but that you have cut yourself off from an important part of your past and your childhood. The impulse of many people in a situation such as yours would have been to escape from their family and it interests me that your own instinct was to return and look for their acceptance. I feel that what we must do is not so much talk of the details of your divorce but almost go away from them and back into this family. Do you agree with this?’

  I gave a sniff. I felt composed again and able to speak. ‘If that’s what you think.’

  ‘Because, Jane, one of the things I want to do for you is take the different forces that are overwhelming you and put them back under your control. One of the ways to do that is to look for the hidden patterns and see if we can recognise them. You’ve come to me, Jane, saying that you want to talk about your divorce, and that’s important and we will deal with it, but one of the crucial problems is to decide what it is that you are asking for and I would like to suggest something. What I’m going to suggest is that it is no coincidence that your best friend, almost your twin, has been discovered buried in the ground, disinterred, dug up, and you have, for the first time in your life, decided to look for help, to dig up your own past, to disinter your own secret. Does that make sense to you, Jane?’

  I was startled and a little disconcerted at first.

  ‘I don’t know. It was obviously a terrible shock to us all. But that’s just a tragic external event. I don’t see what there is to talk about there.’

  Alex was calm and unwavering. ‘I’m interested by the words you use. It was a shock to “us all”. Yet it was an “external” event. Was it really external? You know, I sometimes think that the areas that people don’t want to talk about are often the best places to start. Your divorce is a matter of opinion, emotion, attitude. Natalie’s death was a fact. Her discovery and disinterment are facts. I think that is where we should begin.’

  I had always distrusted the therapeutic talk about emotion, its distrust for the reality of events and I was very impressed by Alex’s practicality. I was won over by it.

  ‘Yes, I agree. I think you’re right.’

  ‘Good, Jane. Talk to me about when Natalie disappeared.’

  I settled myself back down on the couch. I pondered where to begin. ‘It’s awful but even though it was a terrible tragedy and every detail should be unforgettable, so much of it seems vague and long-ago. It was a quarter of a century ago, after all, in the summer of 1969. Natalie disappeared just after a big party out at the Stead – the Martello house in Shropshire. The party was to celebrate Alan’s and his wife Martha’s twentieth anniversary. Perhaps it was that there was nothing like a sudden event, the discovery of a body or something, which would have crystallised it all in my mind. What I vividly remember is that the last time Natalie was seen was on the day after the party, by a man from the village.’ I paused. ‘The odd thing is that I was there.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t exactly there, of course, but I was just near. I must have been the closest person to her, apart from the man who saw her, and then, maybe, the person who… well, you know.’

  ‘The person who killed Natalie.’

  ‘Yes. Maybe I should describe the place to you. Is that all right?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Natalie was last seen by the Col, which is a small river or a large stream that runs along one boundary of the Martellos’ land. There’s a little path from Westbury, the local village, that crosses the Col and then goes through Alan’s and Martha’s land, and passes by the house. The man was walking along the path to deliver something to the Stead, or collect something, I can’t remember, and he saw Natalie standing on the track by the water at the bottom of the slope of Cree’s Top. He even waved at her, but she didn’t notice him. That was the last time anybody saw Natalie alive.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘On the other side of Cree’s Top. It sounds like the summit of a mountain, or something, but really it’s just a bit of raised ground that the stream winds around.’

  I closed my eyes.

  ‘I haven’t been back there since that day, I could never bear the idea of it, I never even walk in that part of the grounds, but I can picture every detail. If Natalie had walked away from the bridge, along the track that goes beside the south side of the Col, Alan’s and Martha’s side, it would have taken her up the pebbly path through a few trees on the top and then she would have been able to look down at me. We were no more than two or three minutes’ walk away from each other.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘That is the one thing I do remember clearly. Every detail. I was a moody sixteen-year-old girl. I don’t think you would have liked me much. I was a bit in love and a bit forlorn and during that summer I was either with Natalie, though not so much as I had been, for various reasons; or with Theo; or on my own. That day, it was early afternoon, I was feeling particularly gloomy. So I took the sole existing manuscript copy of the love poems that I had been writing during the summer and I went down to the Col and lay there, right on the edge of the stream, against a boulder down at the beginning of the slope of Cree’s Top. I sat there for a couple of hours reading through these poems and writing another one. Then, on an impulse, I tore the poems out of the book one by one, and screwed each one up so that it looked like a little white carnation and threw it into the stream and as I sat there I watched them float down the stream away from me until they were carried out of sight. Look, I don’t think there’s any point in going on about this.’

  ‘Please, Jane, humour me.’

  ‘If you say so. The problem I have with this process, what I distrust about it, is that I feel I’m being encouraged to indulge, maybe even increase, emotions that aren’t particularly valid or positive.’

  ‘What emotions?’

  ‘I didn’t mean any emotions in particular. But to take the situation I’ve just been describing. For years I felt this intense guilt that I could have done something to prevent what happened. I was so close and if things had been just a tiny bit different, if I had decided to walk over Cree’s Top, it might never have happened, I might have been able to save Natalie. At the same time I always knew that that was ridiculous and that you could reason like that about almost anything.’

  ‘You felt an intense guilt.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right, I think we’ll stop there.’

  Alex helped me up off the couch. ‘I think you’ve done wonderfully,’ he said.

  I felt myself blush, the way I used to when I was singled out for praise at school and I felt a little cross at my own susceptibility.

  Nine

  There were bones among the bones. Natalie had been pregnant when she was strangled. The police told Alan and Martha, Alan called his sons, and Claud called me the day before the funeral. At first, I couldn’t take in what his soothing voice was telling me. As always when Claud assumed his professionally calm manner, I became babblingly
irrational. I could only think in unordered questions.

  ‘How could she have been pregnant?’

  ‘This is difficult for all of us, Jane.’

  ‘Who could the father have been?’

  Claud began to sound weary and impatient. ‘Jane, I’ve only this minute heard, I know nothing more than you do.’

  ‘The funeral isn’t going ahead now, is it?’

  ‘Yes, it is. The police have released the remains to us.’

  ‘But aren’t there examinations they can carry out? Couldn’t they find out who the father is with DNA tests and things like that? You’re a doctor, you must know.’

  This was Claud’s cue to assume his pedagogic tone. ‘I’m sure the forensic scientists have retained specimens, Jane. But as far as I understand it, DNA profiling won’t be possible. I believe that samples of blood or bodily fluid are required.’

  ‘Can’t you get DNA from bones?’

  ‘Is this really the time, Jane? Bone cells have nuclei, so of course they contain DNA, but so far as I know it degrades in skeletons and if it has been buried in soil, the DNA strands don’t just crumble, they also get contaminated. But this isn’t my area. You must address your enquiries about this to the proper authorities, as they say.’

  ‘It sounds hopeless,’ I said.

  ‘The situation is not good.’

  Pregnant. I felt sick, and the feeling of foreboding that had been closing in on me felt like a fist around my pounding heart.