Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘Why do you need to feel confident?’

‘If I was dropping my car in to a garage to be repaired I would want to know that the mechanics were competent. I’d find out if the garage was any good. Before I give myself up to this therapeutic process I need to have some sense of what it’s going to do for me.’

‘Jane, this is the therapeutic process. In this room there is nothing outside the process. The way to feel confident about it is to trust it, give yourself up to it.’

They were all laughing around the table. It had seemed like a nightmare at the time but, as I described it, later that evening, it somehow mixed with the wine and the crême brulée and now the cheese, and it became a comic turn.

‘I was feeling that I couldn’t cope,’ I continued, ‘I was desperate for some sort of reassurance and I stumbled into this remedial class for deconstructionists. There was no way I was going to pin her down. Every time I asked a question she would be like Macavity the cat. She wouldn’t be there. She’d have dodged to the side and she’d be saying that the real thing we ought to discuss is why I felt the need to ask that question. I would have needed a.45 Magnum to get her to tell me the time.’

This was the sort of therapy I needed. I was at Paul’s and Erica’s opulent house across in Westbourne Grove, the exotic bit of London I never felt really at home in. Around the table for dinner was Crispin, who was one of Paul’s directors on his game show, Surplus Value , and his girlfriend, Claire. There was Gus, the obligatory eligible single man in whose direction I was being pushed. He was all right but I was much more attracted to the two other men, two Australian builders called Philip and Colin, either of whom would have been far better choices for my crying-for-help one-night stand than whateverhisname was, but unfortunately they were not only both gay, but living together. I wasn’t particularly drawn to their technical expertise but they had benefited in other ways from their time in the sun moving heavy objects around.

‘So you never managed to get through to her?’ Paul asked.

‘Yes, I did. In the end there was only one thing I could do: I stood up and said, “I’m going, and I mean that in the sense of walking out of the room and never coming back into it again.” To which she replied, she really did, “What is it that you’re trying to resist?” I suddenly saw myself trapped in this conversation for the rest of my life like someone being pulled into a whirlpool. So I’m sorry to say I finally told her to fuck off and stormed, it’s the only word for it, I stormed out of the room.’ I took a sip of wine and the most beautiful drag on a cigarette. ‘And the next thing I knew, I found myself here telling you this story.’

‘You should have thrown a bucket of water over her,’ said Paul. ‘She would have probably dissolved away into nothingness. Well done you, anyway.’

‘But why were you so resistant?’

There was a complete silence around the table. It was Gus, the hitherto silent teacher.

‘What?’ I said.

‘You didn’t give it a chance,’ he said. ‘Your young therapist had a point. If one of my pupils starts to ask me about why we need to learn about history I just tell him to shut up. The very fact of him being so young and not knowing history means he wouldn’t understand anything I told him. He can only answer the question by learning history.’

‘Well fuck you too,’ I said.

There was an awful silence but then Gus grinned and started to laugh which made it seem as if I had been witty rather than hysterically rude and a fairly good-natured argument about therapy ensued, with Erica and Gus guardedly in favour and Paul claiming that ‘they’ had proved that people who didn’t go into therapy recovered more quickly from their neurotic symptoms than people who did. Crispin and his girlfriend were across the table whispering between themselves about something. I began to reach for people’s bowls but Paul, who was sitting on my left, motioned to me to stay seated and spoke to me in an undertone.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m all right,’ I said guardedly. ‘Have you seen Claud?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I played squash with him this morning.’

‘And?’

‘He beat me three-one.’

‘I don’t mean that.’

‘What do you want me to say? It’s hard for him.’ He thought for a moment and then visibly took the plunge. ‘Jane, my darling, I shall say this just once. Or rather two or three things and I don’t want you to say anything in reply. First, you’re my sister and I love you and I will always trust anything you do. Claud is my best friend. Always has been, always will be. So it’s a little complicated from my point of view but it’s a minor problem. Second, I’m not going to say that Claud is a broken man, but the fact is that he’s bemused, frankly, about what’s happened to his life. He is genuinely baffled about why you suddenly broke up this dream marriage after twenty-one years.’ Paul held up his hand to silence me. ‘Please don’t say anything. I’m not accusing you or criticising you in any way. I’m not saying it or thinking it. You never need to justify yourself to me. Third…’ Now he paused and took my hand. I thought he might be about to cry, but when he spoke his voice was quite calm. ‘The family – our two families, Natalie, and those summers – have meant so much to me that I can hardly put it into words. What was that poem, the one that Dennis Potter used for that film when the grown-ups all played children, Blue Remembered Hills? How does it go? Hang on.’

Paul got up from the table and clattered down the stairs so that the floor actually trembled beneath us. I sat at a bit of a loose end, isolated from the discussion going on around me. Gus was getting up to go. I felt a bit abject. We weren’t going to be leaving together. We weren’t even going to be exchanging phone numbers. He leant across the table and offered his hand:

‘It was very nice to meet you, Jane,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry I said “fuck off” to you. I don’t normally say things like that at dinner parties.’

‘That makes it even worse,’ he said, but rather cheerfully. He was probably quite nice. Paul returned up the stairs, nodded at Gus who was going down, and spent too long rummaging through a book.

‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘“That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.” That’s what I feel.’

‘But you can come there again. You go there almost every summer. We’ve just been there.’

‘Yes, but I mean childhood and things like that. That’s what going back reminds you of. And finding Natalie, of course.’

He held my hand and I said nothing. It was Paul who broke the silence. ‘Oh, and there was something else I wanted to say.’ Suddenly he looked shifty. The nonchalance seemed studied. ‘That weekend, it made a huge impression on me. It seemed like one of those moments that changes your life. I thought I might make a film about the family.’

‘Paul, are you serious?’

‘Yes, I am. I started thinking about it when Alan made his speech. It’s the right thing to do now. I feel that I’ve got to confront this.’

‘You might have to – but do we have to confront it as well?’

‘No, it’ll be all right. It’ll be a good film as well. I want to get behind the camera again, get back to making documentaries. It feels right.’

‘Tired of making money, are you?’ I asked teasingly. Paul never found this subject amusing.

‘Look, Surplus Value runs itself now. Ask Crispin over there. It’s a foolproof formula. It just needs a prod every now and then. I need a challenge.’ He refilled his glass. He had drunk too much this evening. He began to speak in a low voice that was almost a whisper. ‘Finding Natalie is what did it. She meant so much to me. She still does. For me she represents a lost innocence, everything that slips through your fingers as you grow up, all the things you felt you ought to be and didn’t live up to.’