Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘I’m surprised to see you so starry-eyed about restoration,’ Paul replied. ‘You always used to write about buildings in their social context. What’s the point of recreating a Victorian family house in the 1990s? Are you going to start riding around on a horse as well? My attitude to the past is to re-examine it in terms of today.’

‘Natalie,’ father said bluntly.

‘What?’ said Paul.

‘You know what,’ said father. ‘Natalie’s been dug out of the ground and you’re turning it into a TV documentary, and you’ll want us all to talk about how we feel about it, won’t you? I suppose you’ll want me to talk about your mother’s death as well. Who else will contribute? Your two wives? Poor old abandoned Claud?’ Now it was my turn to flush with anger and mortification. ‘And what about Alan and Martha? Martha won’t say much, she’s always hugged her griefs close; but Alan – I can just see it – the angry old man looks back on his life and reviews it. He’ll be good value all right. Is that what you want, Paul, a family of TV personalities?’

Paul looked shocked, but excited as well. He had caught a whiff of what his programme might be like. He replied in his best programme-proposal mode, ‘The programme will be made with the utmost respect and integrity.’

Father turned his back on Paul and began talking about opening and reconstructing a square pargeted brick flue. I wondered whether clay flue linings mightn’t be better but he brushed me aside.

‘I’m not giving up just because of an old man’s need to strike poses. Have you ever heard anything as ridiculous as that half-arsed restoration? Has Dad gone senile?’

Paul sounded quite belligerent as he sat in the pub fidgeting with his half-pint glass, but I knew he was feeling guilty.

‘Don’t just blow smoke out of your nostrils at me, Jane. It’s entirely legitimate for me to draw on my own experience for my work and my experience happens to consist of our two families. Just because Surplus Value is a hit, that doesn’t mean I can’t do anything but game shows.’

I was silent.

‘Well, does it?’

I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter what I think. I’m not going to put up money for the film.’

‘It’s important to me. Since that weekend all I’ve thought about is Natalie. Making a film about her and us would be good for everyone. A way of coming to terms with what’s happened.’

‘Television therapy,’ I said.

‘Well, that’s probably no worse than whatever it is that you’re doing now. We’re both just trying to help ourselves. What’s so wrong with that?’

I laid my hand on his sleeve, and he shook it testily away.

‘Paul,’ I said, ‘you want people to talk about their lives to you, but most of us don’t know our lives. What you’re doing is risky. You may trample all over people’s memories and dreams at the very moment they’re the most fragile. And these are people you’ve got to go on living with. I don’t want Claud to tell the world how he feels about me. Television is so seductive: people tell things to the camera they’d never dream of telling their best friends.’

I stubbed out my cigarette and reached for my coat.

‘It’s just going to be an honest piece of film-making. I can promise you that I won’t do anything that would be unworthy of Natalie’s memory.’

‘Save it for the Radio Times , Paul,’ I snapped, and felt guilty and then didn’t mind. We parted without saying goodbye.

My first session – my first real session – with Alex felt like the first day at a new school. I was nervous. I chose my clothes with unusual care and then felt insecure in them. Even Alex’s house felt different to me, but then I wasn’t taken down into the dark, warm, reassuringly messy kitchen but upstairs to a small back room on the first floor. I went in first while Alex went up another flight of stairs to fetch a notebook. I walked over to the window and put my hand on the cold glass. It overlooked a long narrow garden that led back to another long narrow garden proceeding from the house opposite, a mirror image of the one I was looking out of. Everything in the garden was pruned back hard in preparation for spring, which I felt as a rebuke to my own abandoned back yard. I was startled by the door closing behind me and turned round to find Alex.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘lie down.’

I hadn’t looked at the room properly, I had no sense of its contents or decoration or the carpet. I only saw the armchair and the couch beside it. I lay down on the couch and heard the strain of springs as Alex sat himself down behind me, beyond my vision.

‘I don’t know where I should begin,’ I said tremulously.

‘Why are you here? Start with that and go anywhere you want,’ said Alex.

‘Very well. At the beginning of September I told my husband, Claud, that I had decided we should separate and get divorced. It was very sudden and Claud and the whole family were terribly shocked.’

‘What do you mean by the whole family?’

‘I mean the whole extended family. Whenever I talk about “my” family, I’m not talking about the little Crane family but the big wonderful enviable Martello family.’

‘You sound a little ironic.’

‘Only a little bit. I may have reservations but I know it really is wonderful. We’re all terribly lucky. That was the word my father always used. When he left the army and went up to Oxford just after the war, he met Alan on his very first day. Of course, we’ve all read The Town Drain now and we know what to expect so it’s difficult to imagine what it must have been like for somebody like my dad – a scholarship boy all his life, very bright, very shy – arriving in Oxford, completely bemused and overawed and then meeting the prototype of Billy Belton. And if you think of the effect that he had on people just as the hero of a book, imagine him in person, incredibly funny, totally contemptuous of everything that you were meant to have respect for. They were almost in love at that time, I think.

‘Within a couple of years Alan and my father had both got married and the two families were almost like one family. Alan got very rich when The Town Drain became a bestseller and was filmed and all that and he bought the house and the land up in Shropshire and that’s where we spent our holidays. It was just the classic perfect place, and when you took people there they would be dazzled by this amazing family and the four handsome sons – and the beautiful daughter, of course. It was the centre of my life. Natalie was my sister and best friend. Theo was my first love. And it seemed natural, dynastic, when I married Claud.’

‘Was Theo the older brother?’

‘Claud is the oldest, then Theo, then Natalie, and Jonah and Alfred are the youngest. They’re twins.’

‘How did they react when you split up from Claud?’

‘That’s hard to say. One of the points of the weekend when Natalie’s body was found was to show that I was still a part of the family.’

‘Was it important for you to get their approval?’

‘Not their approval exactly. I didn’t want to be seen as smashing the family up.’

‘Did people ask you why you’d done it?’

‘Not really.’

‘Well, why did you do it?’

‘You know, I was thinking about this as I was cycling over here. I knew that I was going to have to give some sort of answer to that and I can’t. Isn’t that strange? Here I am, I’m forty-one years old and I married Claud when I was twenty, when I was still at university. I’ve thrown all that in the bin. And of course people have asked why. Claud was devastated and my sons were terribly upset and angry and they wanted a straightforward answer – to give them something to hold on to, I suppose – and I couldn’t give it to them. It’s not that I’ve got a reason which I wasn’t telling them about. All I could have said is that I think I did something blindly and when I woke up out of a long sleep and looked around me, and when Jerome and Robert were grown up and away from home, I decided I had to get out. I’m sorry that was long and probably not very comprehensible.’