The Memory Game

by Nicci French

  The brothers had lived at the Stead, of course, but Paul and I used to go there only at intervals, so we had our boxes. Martha and Alan had given them to us when we were small. They were packing cases with lids and they were for the possessions we had at the Stead, the things we put away at the end of the summer when we returned to the world and the boxes were stowed away in the loft. The first thing we would do when we came back from the world at the end of the following July, would be to run up and retrieve our boxes and extract the things that had got smaller because we had got bigger.

  The sight of the box was incongruous, almost indecent. It belonged in the Stead, in my past, and now it had been dumped on my doorstep by my ex-husband. When I tried to pick it up, I almost regretted not asking Claud in. My arms are too short to go around a packing case, so I had to drag it down the hall, making a sound like a fingernail on a window-pane and leaving a dusty white line that I suspected was now a permanent feature. I got it as far as the kitchen and parked it by the table.

  This was going to take time. I needed to be prepared, so I fixed myself a gin and tonic, took a fresh packet of cigarettes from a duty-free carton of Marlboro that Duncan had tolerantly bought me the previous week, lit the first and opened the box. It wasn’t quite like the boxes that I still have up in my own attic. There weren’t the bundles of old letters tied with ribbon, the old reports, the student cards, essays, certificates, school photos. It wasn’t a life. These were the fragments of the bits in between my life.

  I lifted out some old books, The Little White Horse, Anne of Green Gables, Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, Kim and some old Look and Learns, each of which I wanted to read through immediately but put aside for another evening. There were some utterly useless objects: old pens, batteries, flattened out tubes of glue, single earrings, lipstick tubes without lipstick. Why hadn’t I thrown them into the bin? Lots of oddities. A heart-shaped box full of cotton wool. What had it contained? Combs. A heavy painted stone, which I decided I would use as a paperweight. A funny little earthenware dish with a picture of a monkey. I’d forgotten all about that. I could use it for paper-clips, perhaps. Some old cassette tapes. I tossed a couple of pocket guidebooks to Greece and Italy straight into the bin. I’d bought the Greece guidebook and never got around to the actual holiday.

  Right at the bottom was a stratum of old notebooks. All of us, but especially Natalie and I, used to write and write, especially in those bits of summers that we suppress in later years, the times when it rained for day after day and we knocked around the echoey house. I took a cursory look through the books, the faded old drawings and stories, games of hangman and ghosts, doodles and letters. And the diaries that I used to keep almost every year. A thought struck me and I rummaged around until I found a dull red exercise book inscribed, ‘J. Crane. Journal. 1969’. I flicked through until I reached the last of the biroed pages. It was useless of course. There was no entry for the day after the party or even for the day of the party itself. Life had become too big, too emotional, to be written about in a diary. What had I felt and done in those last golden days? I turned back a couple of pages and read:

  24 July

  Theo Theodosius!! Natalie is being completely tedious and won’t talk to me, Paul is moaning all over the place, don’t know what’s got into him, Fred and Jonah are totally childish, Claud has been driven round the bend by organising the whole party and he looks ill and he says that he doesn’t know where the tent will go and who will put it up and whose idea it was to have the barbecue – on which everything depends – built virtually as the party’s about to start, and can anybody get in touch with Alan and Martha if there’s an emergency and he (Claud) looks completely ill. And Luke is hanging around looking miserable and Mum and Dad aren’t exactly in the pink either. With all this chaos, and everyone having nervous breakdowns, I feel more wonderful than I’ve ever felt in my whole life. It’s all starting, and it’s wonderful. As I’m writing this, it’s very late at night (Natalie is asleep – she looked really awful this evening but if she’s not going to be nice to me then I’m not going to bother about her). I’m holding a torch over the page and I’m so excited I can hardly hold my pen straight.

  Lots of Claud’s organising during the day – fetching food from Westbury, clearing up, deciding who was sleeping where and I hardly saw Theo at all. Then, after supper, when it was starting to get dark, we caught each other’s eye and met outside and took each other’s hands without even speaking and walked around the lawn and through the trees almost all the way to Cree’s Top. We sat down beside each other and kissed and touched. Theo unfastened some of my clothes and he touched my body through the clothes he hadn’t taken off and I touched his body with my trembling hands and I hoped he couldn’t feel the trembling and didn’t care anyway. I Can still feel ripples everywhere and if I close my eyes I can feel just where he touched me, every bit, every spot. We said we loved each other. We lay holding each other and I felt like I wanted to cry but didn’t. Then we walked back very slowly and it was the last crescent of the moon, the thinnest sliver you could imagine. Then we kissed very deeply and said good-night and I tiptoed up the stairs and wrote this and I know I won’t be able to sleep at all.

  July 25

  I was almost right. I lay for hours and then slept and was woken early by the birds at half past four and I’ve felt half asleep and half in a dream all day. Boring boring boring day. Lucky Alan and Martha just getting the party and not having to get it ready. Everybody miserable as per yesterday. With the addition of Mr Weston who came with the marquee and bricks and things for the barbecue and he was in a very bad mood. And Claud was telling Mr Weston what to do and then they were both in a bad mood. I couldn’t help giggling. (Natalie a complete misery, natcherly.) First Claud said get the barbecue prepared, then suddenly the tent needs to be put up, then by the end of the day the barbecue hasn’t even been done, Claud says first thing tomorrow will be okay, Mr Weston in a complete state et cetera, et cetera. Lots of shouting. Tomorrow is the party and will be total chaos with everybody going all over the place, about ten million people arriving, people staying in different places, the day beginning with all of us sent on errands to every corner of Shropshire by His Highness Claud of Martello. But these are all the boring bits. Theodore and I talked secretly about it and we are not going to go to the party at all (!!!). While Claud is serving hot dogs from the el nouveau barbecudos, Theo and I are going to slip away and go to the woods and I am going to give myself to him completely and I can’t bear it, I’m so happy and so scared.

  When I had read it, I wasn’t exactly crying, I don’t know what I was doing, but my cheeks were wet. I didn’t feel weak or anything. I had a deliberate five-minute howl, felt better, washed my face and rang up Caspar. When he answered, I was suddenly not entirely sure why I’d rung and I asked him if we could have a drink together, and he said yes, when?, and I said now, and he said that the problem was that he had a child asleep upstairs in bed and I suggested that I come over with a bottle of wine and I promised to be polite and well-behaved, not to make a scene, I didn’t want sympathy or advice and he said, stop, don’t make any more promises. All right. So I went.

  ‘You’re a patient man,’ I said to Caspar, when my bicycle was in his hall and my bottle of wine was on his kitchen table.

  ‘I’m patient with you,’ he said. ‘Don’t rely on it, though.’

  ‘I’ve been a trial to you, I know. I’m very sorry.’

  ‘I’m probably attracted to damaged women. It will be interesting to see how I cope with a happy Jane Martello.’

  ‘Happy?’ I said. ‘Let’s not get carried away.’

  I told him about my evening and described, in somewhat general and vague terms, my reading of the old diary.

  ‘Are you still looking for something, Jane?’

  ‘No, of course not, I’m putting it all behind me, but I suppose I hoped there would be some amazing confirming detail in there. It still seems so strange. I want something els
e, I want somebody to tell me it’s all right.’

  There was a long silence which I half hoped Caspar would fill with reassurances but he didn’t. He just smiled in a curious way and toyed with his glass, then took a sip of wine.

  ‘And yet,’ he said, ‘you turned down the chance to join that recovered memory support group. They were all there to support you. Why did you reject that?’

  I laughed and took my cigarettes out of my pocket, thought of Fanny upstairs and put them back.

  ‘A few reasons, I suppose. One of them was something you said.’

  ‘Me?’ said Caspar, raising his hands in mock alarm.

  ‘When we spoke that time before you came to the public meeting about the hostel… You said something about a study that showed that once people had made a public commitment to something, then even evidence that contradicted their stand would only make them more committed to it. That’s how it went isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I want to be reassured but I want to be right and reassured.’

  ‘Then I can’t reassure you.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  We both placed our glasses on the table and I don’t know who made the first move but we were against each other, kissing each other hard, running our hands over each other. I pushed open the buttons of his shirt, pop, pop, pop, and pulled my mouth from his and ran my lips in the soft down of his chest. He lifted my sweater over my head and pushed my bra up off my breasts without even undoing it.

  ‘Wait,’ I gasped. ‘Let me undo my boots.’

  My boots were fastened like Victorian stays. He shook his head and I felt his hands on my knees and then moving up my legs. No tights, thank God. He reached my knickers, took a double-handed grip and pulled them down, over my boots and off. I fell back on the sofa, my skirt above my waist and he was inside me.

  Later, we went to the bedroom and took off our entangled, twisted clothes and examined each other’s bodies all over in precise detail and made love again and I felt, almost for the first time, that sex was something I could become really good at. We lay together for hours, talking, until at about five Caspar murmured something about Fanny and I kissed him deeply and got up and got dressed, then kissed him deeply again and left. As I cycled in the dark early morning, I thought with sweet contempt of all the people who were in bed asleep.

  Thirty-Five

  The day before the trial, a couple of photographers had lurked outside my house and snapped at me as I’d come out to buy a carton of milk. I’d put my hand over my face, knowing as I did so how that would look in the next day’s papers. I could imagine the captions : ‘The hidden face of the accuser’, ‘The defiant daughter-in-law’.

  I didn’t attend the trial itself, such as it was. I knew that I would be summoned if required. On the morning it began and ended, I left for the office very early – before seven – to avoid any further press attention, but still a journalist managed to collar me. ‘Are you going to the trial?’ he shouted, and I blundered past him, pushing my bike, saying nothing.

  On the way home, I saw it on the news-stand in block capitals : NOVELIST : ‘I KILLED MY DAUGHTER’. I braked to a halt, and bought a Standard. An old handsome photograph of Alan dominated the front page. Sweat broke out on my forehead and my breath came in short, frantic gulps.

  I biked home, fumbled the Chubb lock. A package had been squeezed through my letter-box, and I recognised the handwriting : Paul’s. This must be his video. All I needed.

  The house was chilly, so I switched the heating on early and made my way to the kitchen. I put on the kettle and placed two slices of bread in the toaster. The answering machine was flashing messages at me but I didn’t play them back. I was pretty sure they’d be from journalists, asking for my comment. The paper, still folded in my bag, was like a magnet, but I resisted it at first. I spread bitter marmalade (given to me the year before by Martha) onto toast and poured boiling water over a tea bag. I sat at the table in my coat and took a gulp of weak tea.

  My eyes hopped through the text, trying to find the important details. Alan had pleaded guilty, refusing to make any plea in mitigation. The prosecution QC had made a brief evidentiary statement (much of which consisted of Natalie’s note, the circumstances of its finding and my memory). He concluded that, in the light of the psychiatrist’s report, the prosecution saw no reason to doubt that Alan Martello was sane. There was nothing about him having made Natalie pregnant. I didn’t know why. Before the judge passed sentence, Alan had made just one statement : ‘I am expiating a horrible crime which has haunted my family for decades.’ He refused to elaborate on this or to say anything else at all. The judge described the murder of a daughter by her father as one of the most heinous and primal of crimes and said that Alan’s refusal adequately to acknowledge what he had done or to co-operate fully with proceedings had only made matters worse. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with the recommendation that he serve at least fifteen years.

  There was a large photograph of the Martello brothers, grim-faced, all present at the trial. They had refused to make any comment to the press and the Standard called them ‘dignified, almost heroic’. Claud, apparently, had held Fred while he wept. There was a smaller picture of me, hand flung over my face, and a cropped portrait of Natalie which I’d never seen before. She looked younger than sixteen in it and conventionally pretty. Nothing threatening or sinister about that face. There was a two-page story under the heading, NATALIE’S SHORT LIFE AND BRUTAL DEATH. Under a slightly blurred photo of the seven Martellos all together and smiling ran a short piece starting : ‘They seemed such a happy family.’ There was another story about the police investigation; my own name flared up at me from the first paragraph but that story I didn’t read; couldn’t.

  The phone rang, and I froze, cupping my cooling tea in my hands.

  ‘Jane, it’s Kim. Come on, you can pick up the phone.’

  ‘Kim.’ I think I’d never been so glad to hear a voice. ‘Kim, thank God it’s you.’

  ‘Listen, we can talk later. I’ve booked us a room in a little hotel in Bishop’s Castle, on the Welsh Borders. I’m taking you away for the weekend. Can you be ready by half past five? I’ll pick you up.’

  I didn’t protest. ‘What would I do without you, Kim? Yes, I can.’

  ‘Right. Pack walking boots and lots of warm clothes. Bye.’

  I ran upstairs and threw some long-sleeved T-shirts, jumpers and socks into a large hold-all; dug out my walking boots, still caked with mud from a year before; found my cagoule wrapped up in itself at the back of the cupboard. A quarter to five. I lit a cigarette, and turned on the small TV at the end of the bed. Alan’s face again stared at me, all beard and fierce eyes, before the camera switched to the earnest face of an absurdly young reporter. ‘Passing sentence, the judge described the murder of a daughter by her father as one of the worst, and most unnatural crimes that could be imagined…’ I leant forward, in a panic, and shoved Paul’s video into the player. The young reporter disappeared abruptly. Through a curl of smoke, the Stead appeared on the screen as the title and credits rolled.

  Paul’s making of his film about the family had seemed so sporadic and arbitrary that in spite of having seen the final sequence I think I had expected something like a camcorder picture of a holiday. It wasn’t like that at all. Paul began by reading an extract from A Shropshire Lad:

  Into my heart an air that kills

  From you far country blows.

  What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

  The camera moved slowly over the Shropshire landscape around the Stead, skeletal in its winter garb, but still gorgeous. The sun glinted through the bare branches, and the old house sat rosy-stoned and welcoming. It was the house of my childhood and the land of my lost innocence.

  I sat entranced while my cigarette burnt down to my fingertips and gazed as Paul spoke intimately to the camera. Memory, he was saying, is intangible, a
nd die memories one has of childhood, which glow so vividly through all of our adult life, are seductive and nostalgic. And if one’s childhood is happy, then adulthood is like an exile from its joy. We can never return. More music, and the camera zoomed in on the door of the Stead. Alan walked out. My ash fell onto the duvet cover and I brushed it heedlessly away. He quoted something from Wordsworth, and spoke about love. He said, with all the old Alan bravado, that he had been a wild young man who had scorned the concept of family and kicked against its traces. But he had learnt that this – he gestured at the Stead – was where he could be himself. He talked about the family as the place where you could be most tormented, or most at peace. ‘For myself, I have found a kind of peace,’ he said. He looked, as he stood on the threshold, like a mass-produced wise patriarch that you might buy in a souvenir shop. I watched his broad hands as he gestured, and I shuddered. Martha, thin as a tree branch, came through the doorway carrying a broad basket and some secateurs, smiled strangely at the camera and walked off screen. The camera moved sideways, and came to rest on the site where Natalie’s body had been found. Paul stated the facts. Then came a series of stills of Natalie : as a baby, a toddler, a ten-year-old, a teenager; on her own, with her family. Then her tombstone.

  Claud appeared and now that I was his audience I saw how handsome he was, how serious. I sat like a coiled spring while I waited for him to talk about me, and our marriage break-up, but all he said was that ‘some things had not turned out as he had hoped’. I was shocked by the spasm of pity and love that jolted me. Cut to Robert and Jerome playing frisbee on Hampstead Heath. So young and carefree. Then Jerome, affectionately derisive on how the older generation was obsessed with the past. Fred, at home with his family on their well-tended patio. Alan again, drinking brandy and being expansive on the power of forgiveness. Theo comparing a family to a computer program.