The Memory Game

by Nicci French

  ‘Jane, you’re not in Narnia or Oz or some theme park where you can wander off in whatever direction you like. This is your own memory you’re exploring. You have to give yourself up to where it’s leading you. Don’t you feel that you’re almost there?’

  Alex Dermot-Brown was not the sort of person whom I would normally have considered to be my type. He was a scruffy man who lived in a scruffy house. His jeans were worn in the knees, his navy blue sweater was stained and dotted with fluff, it was obvious that the only styling his long curly hair received was when he frequently ran his fingers through it while in animated conversational flight. Yet I had become attracted to him, of course, because he was the person to whom I had opened up, the man whose approval I was seeking. I recognised all that. But now I realised with some excitement that he was as avid about my quest as I was, and as hopeful about its prospects. I felt a lurch deep in my belly at the same time. It reminded me of the early contractions I had had with Jerome, those little pre-shocks warning me that I was really going to have to give birth. Soon I was going to have to face up to something.

  A balding man in a grey suit stood up. He looked as if he had come to the hall straight from work.

  ‘Well I’ve got something to say.’

  Do you know those public meetings or discussions when the chair calls for questions and there is a long silence and nobody dares to say anything and it’s all rather embarrassing? This wasn’t like that at all. Everybody had something to say and most of them were trying to say it at the same time.

  We had realised from the start that the local residents would have to be involved, at least on an informal basis, in the setting up of the hostel. There’d been a meeting of the Grandison Road residents’ association to discuss the issue and they had demanded a public meeting with the authorities responsible for the hostel. It wasn’t clear quite what this demand meant, or whether it even needed to be acknowledged, but it was decided as a matter of tact to respond. Chris Miller of the council planning department was notionally in charge of the project and was going to chair it and Dr Chohan, a psychiatrist from the out-patients department of St Christopher’s hospital, was going to be there, and Pauline Tindall from social services and then at a very late stage Chris had rung me and asked if I could come along as well.

  I reluctantly agreed, if only to keep an eye on any rash spending commitments that Chris might make which would then duly come off my budget. This was an evening on which I had arranged to meet Caspar for a drink. I rang to cancel and apologise but when I mentioned to him what I was doing, he became interested and asked if he could pop along and sit in the audience. He said he wanted to see me at work. I told him not to bother and that it would be only a formality.

  ‘It won’t be a formality,’ he said. ‘These are people’s homes you’re dealing with. You’re going to be bringing mad people into their area. The only worse thing you could be proposing would be a veal factory or a vivisection laboratory. I don’t want to miss this, Jane. Public meetings like this are what the British do now instead of watching a bear being baited or a public hanging.’

  ‘Come off it, Caspar, this is a totally uncontroversial project.’

  ‘We’ll see. Meanwhile, you must remind me to show you an interesting study that was done a few years ago at Yale. It suggested that when people have made a public commitment to a position, then contrary evidence, however strong, only reinforces their commitment.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’

  ‘Don’t expect to convince anybody by rational argument.’

  ‘I don’t need a study from Yale University to tell me that. Maybe I’ll see you there.’

  ‘I might be lost in the mob but I’ll see you.’

  I locked my bicycle to a parking meter outside the community hall just five minutes before the meeting was due to start. When I entered I thought at first I must have come to the wrong occasion. I had expected a few old ladies who had come to get out of the rain. This looked more like a warehouse party or a poll tax demonstration. But there on the distant platform were Chris and the gang. Not only was every seat taken but the aisles were crammed and I had to squeeze my way through in a flurry of apologies in order to reach the platform where Chris was looking red-faced and nervous. He kept coughing and filling his glass with water from a jug. As I sat down on the municipal plastic chair reserved for me, he leant across and whispered hoarsely:

  ‘Big turn-out.’

  ‘Why?’ I whispered back.

  ‘There’s the Grandison Road lot,’ he said. ‘But there’s a whole lot from Clarissa Road and Pamela Road and Lovelace Avenue as well.’

  ‘Why are they all interested in a little hostel?’

  Chris shrugged. He looked at his watch and then, after a nod at Chohan and Tindall, he stood up and called for silence. The boiling hubbub settled down to a light simmer. Chris introduced us all and then said a few words about how this policy reflected the local council’s ommitment to make care in the community effective. It was to be hoped that this hostel would be the first of several in the borough, and that it would be a model of humane, practical and cost-effective treatment for recovering mental patients. Did anybody have any questions? There was a forest of hands but the balding man in the suit was the most assertive.

  ‘Before I ask a question,’ he said, ‘I would first like to express what I think is the mood of the meeting which is that we local residents are appalled that we were not consulted about this institution being placed in our area and that we consider it to have been done in a disgracefully underhand way.’

  Chris tried to protest but the man brushed him aside.

  ‘Please let me continue, Air Miller. You have had your say. Now it is time for us to have ours.’

  It was a speech rather than a question but the thrust seemed to be that it was quite unsuitable for a mental institution to be installed in a residential street. When he had finished, Chris took me completely aback by turning to me and asking for my comments. I said something about the hostel not being an institution. My entire brief had been to design a building for people who had no need of residential care. The only supervision that would be necessary would be, in certain cases, to ensure that prescribed medication was taken. That the hostel was another house in a residential area was the whole point.

  A woman stood up and said that she had four children, aged seven, six, four and almost two, and that it was all very well to talk about care in the community but she had her children to worry about. And for that matter there was the Richardson Road primary school which was only two streets away. Could the doctors absolutely guarantee that the patients in the hostel would be no danger whatsoever to local children?

  Dr Chohan tried to explain that these were not patients. They were people who had been discharged, just like a person who has left hospital after suffering a broken leg. And just as such a person might require a crutch for a few weeks, so some mental patients require some lightly supervised accommodation. Patients, people he corrected himself, who were a potential danger in any way at all would not be in this hostel.

  But what about this medication? How could the doctors guarantee that these mental patients would take their medication? Pauline said that this was at the heart of the way the hostel system functioned. She said that she understood local concerns and that they had all been addressed at the earliest stage of planning. Potentially dangerous people (of whom there were extremely few) and people who refused to take their medication would not be considered for a hostel of this type. Then Pauline made what seemed to me afterwards to be the fatal mistake. She concluded by saying that we mustn’t allow uninformed prejudices about the mentally ill to influence policy. If this was a tactic to shame the audience into accepting our position, it backfired disastrously.

  A man stood up and said that all the arguments about medical matters were one thing but this was also an issue of property values. There were people in this meeting, he said, living in houses for which they had saved their entire liv
es. There were people sitting on negative equity who had just seen the first signs of growth in the housing market. Why should these people sacrifice their homes to a trendy new dogma invented by sociologists who probably lived safely away in Hampstead?

  Chris, who sounded as if he were trying to speak while simultaneously swallowing his tongue, replied that he had hoped that the medical explanations would allay all fears of this kind. But the man stood up again. All the medical explanations were a bloody waste of time, he proclaimed. It was all very well for outsiders to talk about so-called prejudices. Whether they were true or not, house-buyers would be put off.

  Chris foolishly asked how he could possibly dispel concerns of that kind and the man shouted back that the local residents were not interested in concerns being dispelled. They wanted the hostel project to be abandoned, that was all. Then a good-looking man in a tweed jacket and an open-necked shirt stood up. Oh, God. It was Caspar.

  ‘I’d like to make a comment rather than ask a question,’ he said, blinking through his wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘I wonder whether it might be best for people here to imagine, as a sort of thought-experiment, that we are discussing a hostel that is going to be constructed in another British city altogether. Would we approve the project if we had no personal stake in it?’

  ‘You fuck off,’ said the property man to a startled Caspar. ‘Why do you think we’re here at all? If they want to build somewhere for these people that nobody wants, why don’t they do it on an industrial estate somewhere or in an old factory?’

  ‘Or perhaps in one of those closed-down Victorian lunatic asylums,’ suggested Caspar.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to put raw meat on things like this?’ asked Caspar. ‘Ow!’

  Caspar flinched as I dabbed his eye with cotton wool.

  ‘I’ve got to clean out the wound first. Anyway, I haven’t got any raw meat. All I’ve got are some sausages in the freezer.’

  ‘We could eat them,’ Caspar suggested hopefully, and then flinched once more. ‘Do you think there are any bits of glass in the wound?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The lens just broke into a few big pieces. The cut was caused by the frame. And that man’s fist, of course. And can I just say for one last time that I’m really, really sorry about what happened. I regard it as completely my fault.’

  ‘Not completely.’

  We were back in my house. Paul Stephen Avery of Grandison Road had been taken away between two large policemen. The meeting had broken up in disarray. Caspar had refused all medical treatment but had been unable to drive himself home because his spectacles had been damaged. So I’d pushed my bike into the back of his car and driven him to my house where I’d insisted on getting something to put on his eye.

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe in intellectual debate,’ I said, as he flinched once more. ‘Sorry, I’m being as careful as I can.’

  ‘In theory, I don’t. I intended just to look at you in action but when that man was talking I suddenly thought of the model that Rawls’s Theory of Justice was based on and felt I had to intervene. It may have been salutary in a way. You know, one has this fantasy that if at various crucial points of world history a linguistic philosopher had been on hand to make sure that everyone’s terminology had been consistent then the world would be a better place. It’s probably good to be punched in the face occasionally. Do you think I’ll get a black eye?’

  ‘You certainly will.’

  ‘Have you got a mirror?’

  I passed Caspar a mirror from my medicine box. He scrutinised himself with awe.

  ‘Amazing. It’s a pity I’m not going into college until Tuesday. They would be very impressed.’

  ‘Don’t worry. That black eye is going to mature like a fine wine. It’ll be even more spectacular by next week.’

  ‘So long as it doesn’t scare Fanny. Speaking of whom…’

  ‘I’ll give you a lift. In your car. Don’t worry. My bike is still in the back.’

  Twenty-Two

  ‘What do you want, Jane?’ Alan asked, staring at me over his half-moon spectacles.

  Characteristic blankness. ‘I haven’t made up my mind. Paul can go first.’

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘You know, I always have this existential problem with menus. I can never decide why I should order one dish rather than another.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Alan exploded. ‘We’ll all start with the smoked salmon. Anybody object? Good. Then I’ll have steak and kidney pudding. I recommend it if you want some decent old-fashioned food.’

  ‘All right,’ said Paul, rather shiftily.

  ‘Jane?’

  ‘I’m not really hungry. I’ll just have a salad.’

  Alan turned to the waiter. ‘Did you get that? And some rabbit food for the lady here. And just tell Grimley we’ll have a bottle of my white and a bottle of my red and I’ll start with a large Bloody Mary. The others will probably want some overpriced mineral water with a foreign name.’

  ‘I’ll have a Bloody Mary as well,’ I said impulsively.

  ‘Well done, Jane.’

  Alan handed the menu to the waiter, removed his spectacles and sat back.

  ‘Salad,’ he said in horror. ‘That’s the sort of thing that kept women out of this bloody place for so long.’

  This seedy ornate dining room south of Piccadilly Circus, with its third-rate old masters, its tired club architecture, the faded hangings, the smoke, the male chatter, this was Alan’s habitat: Blades, the club he had belonged to for over thirty years. Today he seemed ill at ease, prickly and depressed, and I didn’t feel that Paul and I were the people to snap him out of it. Paul was preoccupied with his programme. He had told me as we were walking down Lower Regent Street that Alan was the key to the structure, the bit that he had to get right and he wasn’t sure how to use him. As I sat at the table lighting one cigarette after another I felt I was looking at a callow fisherman dangling a fly in front of the nose of an ancient salmon. And me? Was I any good to Alan at that moment? The Bloody Marys and the mineral water arrived. Alan took a large gulp.

  ‘How did the lunch with your publisher go?’ I asked.

  ‘Waste of time,’ Alan said. ‘Can you believe that lunch used to be my favourite part of the day? When Frank Mason was my editor, we used to spend three or four hours over it. We once took so long that we went straight on to dinner in the same restaurant Yesterday I met this new editor called Amy. Wore some sort of suit. Drank water. Ate a first course and nothing else. I was going to really show her: gin and tonic to start, three courses, couple of bottles of wine, brandy, cigar, everything.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Paul asked.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Alan said with a shrug. ‘And do you know why? She thought I was a bore. Alan Martello, the reactionary old drunk who hasn’t produced a book since the seventies. Twenty-five years ago girls like her wanted to sleep with me. Queued up to get into my bed. Now they try to keep their lunches with me as short as possible. She was back in the office by two fifteen.’

  I took a sip of my drink, the vodka astringent under the tomato’s sweetness.

  ‘What did Martha think of those queues of eager girls?’ I asked.

  ‘Good old Jane, always talking about how people feel. Wanting to make everything smooth and perfect. The answer is that we muddled along like most people.’

  ‘She didn’t mind?’

  Alan shrugged. ‘She understood.’

  ‘How is Martha, Alan?’

  ‘Oh, she’s all right,’ Alan said distractedly. ‘Her treatment’s getting her down a bit, that’s all. She’ll be better when it’s over. It’s just those bloody doctors worrying her.’

  I felt a rush of emotion for this blustering, self-deceiving, famous man with his stained beard and his florid face and his novel he’d been working on since we were all children. A man who didn’t want to think about his dying wife, who didn’t want to be with her. But what emotion?

  ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about N
atalie lately,’ I said.

  Alan waved the waiter over and ordered two more Bloody Marys. I didn’t bother to protest.

  ‘I know,’ Alan said, after the waiter had gone. ‘And I hear you’ve been seeing one of these head people. All been a bit much for you, has it?’

  ‘Yes, I think it has been, in a way.’

  ‘And then snooping around. What are you doing? Trying to find out who killed my daughter?’

  ‘I don’t know. Trying to get things sorted out in my mind.’

  ‘Then you, Paul, and your programme. Haven’t either of you got a family of your own to mess around with?’

  The vodka was taking effect on Alan. I knew this mood. He would taunt us, probe for weak spots, try to goad us into losing our tempers. I sneaked a look over at Paul who smiled back at me. We were a match for him and, anyway, this wasn’t the old Alan, dominating, seductive. He only picked at the smoked salmon but he cheered up when the steak and kidney pudding arrived in its bowl, and the heavy opaque claret was poured into his large glass.

  ‘Salad, indeed,’ he said, tying his napkin around his neck like a bib.

  I’ve seen the old pictures of Alan, the angry young man, and in the early fifties he had a slim, austere look. Now he was overweight, florid. His dimpled, veined nose was a testimony to decades of over-consumption. But there were still those lively blue eyes, flirtatious and imperious. They held people, especially women, and even now I could imagine the fascination they would arouse and the impulse to sleep with him.

  ‘How many women have you slept with, Alan?’

  I couldn’t believe I’d said it, and I waited almost in horror to see what he would say. To my surprise, he laughed.

  ‘How many men have you slept with, Jane?’

  ‘I’ll say if you say.’

  ‘All right. Go on then.’

  Christ, it was my own fault.

  ‘Not very many, I’m afraid. About seven, eight maybe.’

  ‘And a quarter of them are sons of mine.’