Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘I kept expecting to hear the front door open, and Claud come in.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’ Kim was looking at me strangely.

‘In a way. I mean, he was nice, I got pleasure. Kind of. But, well, I suppose that the next day I felt a bit odd about it. I still feel a bit odd, as if it happened to someone else.’

‘Come on, Jane.’ Kim got to her feet. ‘I’m taking you home.’

I made coffee, and Kim made a fire. She’d always loved building fires, even when we were students. We’d shared a house in my second year at university, and Kim had often spent hours gazing into the flames, feeding them with wood, sometimes even with old essays, like a provincial version of La Bohéme. As if she knew what I was thinking, Kim said:

‘Do you realise, Jane, that we’ve known each other for more than half our lives?’

I tried to say something, then stopped. Kim crouched by my chair, took both my hands, and gazed at me.

‘Look at me, Jane,’ she said.

I stared into her intelligent grey eyes. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped away the tears that were streaming down my cheeks.

‘Your mascara’s run everywhere,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to attract men looking like that, unless you want to go out with a zebra.’

‘I don’t know why I’m crying,’ I sobbed. There was a block of grief in my chest, my nose was snotty. ‘I just feel so tired. Honestly, I’m just tired, Kim, it’s been an emotional few weeks.’

‘My darling Jane,’ she said, ‘listen to me now. You’ve stopped eating. You chain smoke. You drink more than usual. You work ten, twelve, hours a day. You can’t sleep properly. You go out every night as if you’re on the run. Look at yourself in a mirror: you’re not tired, you’re completely exhausted. You’ve left Claud, your boys have left you, you found Natalie’s body lying in a hole. In the space of a few weeks, your whole life has turned upside-down, and it’s more than you can bear, so don’t try so hard to bear it. Don’t be so brave. If you were one of my patients, I’d advise you to seek professional help.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think you’d benefit from counselling,’ Kim said. ‘You’re in shock. It might help you to talk to someone.’

I blew my nose and wiped my face, and I lit another cigarette, then we sat with a pot of tea and some shortbread biscuits and played a game of chess, which I lost, of course. Then I cried again, great gulps of misery, and I wailed that I missed Claud, I missed my boys, I didn’t know what to do with my life, and at last Kim put me into my bed like a child, and sat beside me until I fell asleep.

She was younger than I expected. And she was a she. And it must have shown on my face.

‘Is everything all right?’ she asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was probably expecting an old man with a white beard and a Viennese accent.’

‘Do you mean a Jew?’

‘No, I don’t mean that.’

‘Do you feel uncomfortable with a woman?’

‘Well, I haven’t even had a chance to sit down yet, Dr Prescott.’

Dr Prescott was at least six feet tall which lent force to what was already a most striking appearance. She was pale, almost transparent-skinned, with a long, thin artistic nose. Her wavy brown hair was deftly arranged so that only a few strands fluttered around her neck, giving her the appearance of a Brontë sister. A robustly healthy Brontë sister. A robustly healthy Brontë sister who power-dressed. I was stopping in on my way from Waitrose to the proposed hostel site and I felt faintly shamed by her crisp business suit. And then rather ashamed of being shamed. Did I expect female therapists to wear cheesecloth and light joss sticks?

‘Should I fill out a form or something?’

‘Jane – is it all right if I call you Jane?’ Dr Prescott shook my hand but then maintained her grip as if she were weighing it. ‘Does it feel important to you to make this a formal occasion?’

‘Is this part of the therapy?’

‘How do you mean?’

I paused for a long time and breathed with slow deliberation. I was still standing up. My new analyst was still gripping my hand.

‘I’m very sorry, Dr Prescott,’ I said with elaborate calmness. ‘I’m living rather a chaotic life at the moment. And a friend of mine, who is a doctor, and whom I trust more than anybody else in the world, has told me that she thinks I’m at a moment of crisis. And I’m having a rather chaotic day as well. I was at Waitrose when it opened and then I dashed home and unloaded everything, although, now I think of it, I haven’t put the ice-cream in the freezer, and then I dashed over here. When I’m finished here I have to drive to the site of a building I’ve designed. I’m going to meet an assistant planning officer, and she is going to tell me that changes have to be made to my plan using money that doesn’t have any prospect of being forthcoming and that’s only the beginning of a project that is close to my heart and that’s going to make me very miserable.

‘Now I’m here in your office and I had some hopes that it would be something of a refuge from what I think of as my troubles. I suppose I thought we could begin by discussing what a course of therapy might be able to achieve for me. We could discuss ground rules, establish what sort of things we are going to talk about, that sort of thing. But just at this very moment I want to sit down and get going in some sort of sensible way.’

‘Then sit down, Jane.’

Dr Prescott gestured towards the battered couch over which an eastern-looking rug was draped. I quickly looked around the room. It was obvious that every detail had been planned. There was an armchair at the head of the couch. There was a Mark Rothko poster on the wall that would be invisible to the recumbent patient. On the window ledge behind the armchair there was a small abstract sculpture with a hole in it, carved in, I think, soapstone. The walls and the ceiling were painted a supposedly neutral white. There was nothing else.

‘Should I sit or lie down?’

‘Whichever you feel like.’

‘It’s a couch.’

‘Whichever you feel like.’

I huffed and lay down on the couch and stared at the wood-chip paper, a product of a shoddy eighties’ conversion. God knows what was under it. If she bought after ’87, Dr Prescott was stuck with negative equity. She sat down behind my left shoulder.

‘Can’t we have a straightforward transaction about anything at all?’

‘Why do you choose the term “transaction”?’

‘No, no, no, no, no, I don’t want to talk about why I chose the term “transaction”. Dr Prescott, I feel that we’ve got off to the wrong sort of start. At this rate we’re going to spend an hour without having reached “Good Morning”.’

‘What do you want to do?’

I felt a prickling in the corner of my eyes as if I was going to cry. ‘I would like to smoke a cigarette. Is that all right?’

‘I’m afraid it isn’t.’

‘Why are you afraid?’

‘It’s just an expression.’

I forced my neck rather painfully around so that I was able to meet Dr Prescott’s eyes. ‘Just an expression?’

She was unamused. ‘Jane, what do you want?’

‘I suppose I was expecting that you would ask what my problem was and I’d talk about what was on my mind, the pressures that I’ve been under, and we’d take things from there.’

‘So talk.’

‘Dr Prescott, can I ask you something?’

‘You can say – or ask – anything you like.’

‘Are you experienced at this? I’m in a ragged, vulnerable state. Perhaps we should talk about how I can feel confident about entrusting myself to you.’