Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘You may not even achieve anything. I make no claim at all that after, I don’t know, six months or a year, you will be happier or better able to deal with the practical problems in your life. You’ll still be living in a world where people die and have irreconcilable conflicts. But I can guarantee at least something. Your life at the moment may seem like a collection of rough notes and impressions. Perhaps I can enable you to turn them into a narrative that will make sense to you. ‘That may help you to take responsibility for your life, even, perhaps, to gain an increased control over it.

‘That’s something at any rate, and it’s the least we can hope for. There are other possibilities as well. Let me give you one speculative example. I’m intrigued by the way you talk about your sister-in-law having been buried there, at the heart of the landscape of your childhood. That’s a telling image. Some of us may have bodies in our minds, hidden, waiting to be discovered.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t worry about it, it’s just a thought, an image.’

‘What about the practicalities? What do we actually do?’

‘Good. Now it gets straightforward. I want to see you twice a week for an hour which actually lasts fifty minutes. My fee is thirty-eight pounds a session, payable in advance at the beginning of each week. As I have said, it would be entirely understandable for you not to go into therapy at all. I can assure you almost a hundred per cent that without any therapy or treatment at all, you will be feeling substantially better in a year or so. The pain of your sister-in-law’s reappearance will have receded and you will be used to your new life. If you do decide to go ahead, and I hope you do, then you have to make a commitment. By that I mean that the sessions are sacred, not to be missed because of work, illness, sexual opportunity, disenchantment, tiredness or anything. If you break your leg, come here on your way to A and E. Naturally, you are perfectly free to stop the therapy at any time, but I think you ought to make a private commitment to stick it out for something like four or five months at the very least. And also a mental promise that you’ll give it a chance. I mean emotionally and intellectually. I know you’re smart and that you’ve probably read Freud more recently than I have. If you come in here and start wanting to discuss transference, which I don’t believe in anyway, then we’ll both be wasting our time and you’ll be wasting your money. There. Have I said everything?’

‘Will it be like this?’ I asked. ‘Sitting in your kitchen, drinking coffee and chatting?’

‘No. As you say, this is just a chat and we’re deciding on the rules. When we begin we’ve got to, as it were, run out on the pitch and start to play. In my view, if this is going to work properly it has to be ritualised, it has to be something outside your normal social life. So, if you want to go ahead, then the next time you come it will be different. It will be in the room that is used for therapy.’ He used the word ‘therapy’ as if it were an unwieldy term that had been foisted on him. ‘It won’t be a social occasion. We won’t be drinking coffee, we won’t really be chatting. You’ll lie on a couch, not because that is a psychoanalytic prop, but exactly because it shouldn’t feel the way we are today, comfortable, getting on, looking face to face. Now, I’d like you to think about what you want to do, and then phone me.’

‘I know what I want to do. I want to go ahead. If I’m not happy with what’s going on, then I assure you I’ll stop.’

Alex smiled and held out his hand.

‘I suppose that’s as much of a commitment as I’m going to get from you. All right, it’s a deal.’

From signing divorce papers in triplicate at my solicitor’s and rejecting the idea of marriage counselling, I cycled on a cold clear day north through London to the site of my hostel, the very thought of which already caused me a pang. The original idea had been for an entirely new building which would house fifteen Section 117s, that is, mentally ill patients discharged from hospital but still requiring some sort of supervision, if only to make sure they took their medication. I’d provided an elegant, functional and cheap design which, to my not very great surprise, had been rejected out of hand. If my career continued like this, I’d soon have designed as many unbuilt buildings as Piranesi, or Hitler. Plan B was to convert a building that had been a squat and had spent the last two years without a roof.

When I arrived, two men and one woman in suits were already standing outside. My friend, Jenny, from Social Services, was looking harassed, as usual. She introduced me to Mr Whittaker from Health and Mr Brady from Housing.

‘How much time have you got?’ I asked.

‘About minus ten minutes,’ said Jenny.

‘All right, you get the quick tour. Things would be made easier, by the way, if I didn’t see new faces every time I had a meeting.’

I took them up to where the roof wasn’t and we worked our way down, all the way from the putative trussed rafters to the redeemed basement, sketching out the primary reconstruction, the basic repairs, the fire escape on the rear elevation and the deft adaptations I had made to the common spaces and passageways to give the house what amounted to an extra floor.

‘There we are,’ I said, as we stood on the front step, ‘not only a work of genius and practicality but a work of genius and practicality that will virtually pay for itself.’

Mr Brady smiled uneasily. ‘You may have a point there, and I only wish the auditors’ calculations took your argument into consideration.’

‘Don’t worry, Mr Brady,’ I said, ‘we’ll all be rewarded on Judgement Day.’

Mr Brady and Mr Whittaker exchanged glances. There’s something disconcerting when planning officers start looking younger and better dressed than you do.

‘Jane, it’s an ingenious design. We’re very pleased. There is one problem, which is that we’re facing a fifteen per cent cut across the board, which we’re having to enforce uniformly on all our projects, so we hope that you’ll be able to incorporate that. Apart from that it’s absolutely satisfactory.’

‘What do you mean, “apart from that”? You’ve got a bargain basement scheme already. You accepted our tender.’

‘Subject to, you know… et cetera et cetera.’

I took on my official tone. ‘Mr Whittaker, you will surely confirm that this hostel will be a net saver of money once you stop fifteen people at a time going into bed-and-breakfasts or staying in long-term beds.’

‘You know as well as I do, Jane, that that is theoretically true but irrelevant in our accounting terms.’

‘Shall I just leave the roof off for the next fiscal year? After all, spring isn’t all that far away. On the other hand, why bother with a house at all? Perhaps I could arrange for a skip to be delivered to the road outside. If there’s any money left over, you could paint your new council logo on the side and the crazy people could stay in that. You could send their medication by mail. What do you say about this, Jenny?’

Jenny looked fraught. I realised I was behaving like one of her clients.

‘Jane, this isn’t helpful,’ said Mr Brady. ‘There’s no point in trying to score points against us. We’re all on the same side. The simple, hard fact is that the choice is not between producing a compromised version of your plan and your original. It’s between the compromise and nothing, and even that may be a struggle. You should see what’s happening in other departments. Tressell Primary School up the road may only be opening four days a week next term.’