Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘What’s this about you digging?’ Jim asked suspiciously.

‘Only a spadeful. I just said I’d like to dig the first spadeful, if that’s all right. It’s important to me.’

I’ve been an architect for nearly fifteen years now, and whenever I work on a building, I have a rule, which amounts almost to a superstition, that I must be there to see the first spade being dug into the ground. It’s a moment of pure sensual pleasure, really, and I sometimes wish that I could do it myself with my own bare hands. After months, sometimes even years, of drawing up the plans and the specifications and obtaining tenders and calming the nerves of the client and bargaining with some functionary in the planning department, after all the compromises and the paper arguments, it’s good to go outside and remind myself that it’s all about dirt and brick and fitting the pipes together so they don’t crack in the winter.

Best of all are the ten- or fifteen-metre excavations which precede the really big buildings. You stand on the edge of a site somewhere in the City of London and peer down at a couple of thousand years of fragments of other people’s lives. You’ll see the suspicion of an ancient building, sometimes, and I’ve heard all the rumours of the contractors surreptitiously pouring concrete across an old Roman floor so that there’s no nonsense about waiting for the archaeologists to give you the nod before the building goes up. We’re constructing the spaces for our own lives on the squashed remnants of our forgotten predecessors and in a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand years they’ll be building on top of our rusting joists and crumbling concrete. On top of our dead.

This was to be the smallest of holes, a scratching of the surface. John, Jim’s son, handed me a spade. I’d measured the area out on the previous day and defined it with cord and now I walked into the middle of the rectangular space and pushed the blade into the ground and stood on it, forcing it into the turf.

‘Mind your nails, girl,’ said Jim behind me.

I pulled the handle of the spade down towards me. The turf crackled and split and a satisfying wedge of soil and clay appeared.

‘Nice and soft,’ I said.

‘The boys’ll just finish it off, then,’ said Jim. ‘If that’s all right with you.’

A hand on my shoulder made me start. It was Theo. The Theo Martello in my mind is seventeen years old with shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, soft white translucent skin, full lips, with a prominent cupid’s bow, that taste slightly of burnt tobacco. He is tall and thin and wears a long army-surplus greatcoat. I find his remembered figure hard to reconcile with this – oh my God – forty-something-year-old man standing in front of me with gaunt chiselled features, rough unshaven stubble, cropped greying hair, and hard lines around his eyes. He’s middle-aged. We’re middle-aged.

‘We didn’t see you last night,’ he said. ‘We arrived late.’

‘I went to bed early. What’re you doing up at this time?’

‘I wanted to see you.’

He pulled me towards him and hugged me close for a long time. I held my favourite brother-in-law tightly.

‘Oh, Theo,’ I said, when he let me go. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry about Claud.’

He smiled. ‘Don’t be. Just do what you have to do. It was brave of you to come up here and beard everyone in the family den. By the way, who is coming?’

‘Everybody, of course. All the Martellos. And all the Cranes too, for what we’re worth. Dad and my brother and his lot aren’t here yet, but, by the time they arrive, I count that there’ll be twenty-four guests. The Royal family may be collapsing, and we may have lost the meaning of Christmas, but the annual gathering for the Martello mushroom hunt goes on undiminished.’

Theo raised his eyebrows. The lines around his eyes and mouth creased in a smile. ‘You mock.’

‘No. I’m nervous, I suppose. God, Theo, do you remember, years ago, some ferry was sinking and a rescue boat pulled alongside and the women and children couldn’t get across. So this man lay across between the two boats and the women and children walked across him.’

Theo laughed. ‘You were the worn-out human bridge, were you?’ he said.

‘I felt like it sometimes. Or at least Claud and I were. The weak link that held the Cranes and the Martellos together.’

Theo’s expression hardened. ‘You flatter yourself, Jane. We’re all linked. We’re one family really. And anyway, if there’s one link, it’s the friendship between our fathers that started it, before we were born. Let’s give them credit for that at least.’ He smiled again. ‘At best you were just a secondary link. A supporting mortice or whatever?’

I couldn’t help giggling. ‘Do I hear a technical term? What, pray, is a supporting mortice?’

‘All right, all right, you’re the builder. I never did woodwork. And I’m glad you came here, even if it meant running the gauntlet.’

‘I had to supervise this, didn’t I? Now I feel like I’m going to cry over my drawings and smudge them.’

We went through the French windows into the kitchen and collected mugs of coffee. From upstairs there was the sound of bodies stirring, cups clinking, lavatories flushing in the house behind us as we stepped back out.

‘Shut the door behind you, for fuck’s sake,’ somebody yelled from inside. ‘It’s freezing.’

‘Okay, okay, I’m just stepping outside.’ It was Theo’s brother, Jonah.

‘Hello, Fred,’ said Theo.

Jonah nodded in acknowledgement of the tired Martello joke. The point was that Jonah and his twin brother, Alfred, had been indistinguishable, as children at least. Theo had once told me that they had actually slept with each other’s girlfriends (without the knowledge of the young women concerned), which I’d been too shocked to believe until I had seen the way they’d behaved in all other matters when they had grown up.

‘The way to tell us apart, Theo,’ said Jonah, ‘is that Fred is the one with the red nose and without the sun tan.’

‘Yes, I was going to comment on that, Jonah. Where was it this time?’

‘ Tucson, Arizona. A cosmetics conference.’

‘Good?’

‘There were some interesting possibilities floating around.’ Jonah noticed Theo’s smile. ‘Now that everybody’s teeth are so good we’ve got to think of other things to do with them.’

Theo bent over and sniffed the vapour floating up from Jonah’s mug. ‘Among them seems to have been the idea of toothpaste in the form of a hot drink,’ he said.

‘It’s peppermint tea,’ Jonah replied. ‘I don’t like starting the day with an unnatural stimulant.’ Then he turned to me and his virtuous expression melted into a sort of sad smile. God, were they all going to smile like that at me this weekend? ‘Jane, Jane,’ he said, and hugged me in a gesture whose warmth was hampered slightly by having to balance the herbal tea in his mug at the same time. ‘If there’s anything I can do, just ask. That,’ he continued, pointing down at the activity on the grass in front of us, ‘that is a very positive step. It’s a very good thing for you to have done that for all of us, for the family. I’m sure it’s therapeutic as well.’

‘Oh, yes, Jonah,’ I responded, ‘it was very relaxing in my time of need to consult with Alan and Claud and Theo and then redo everything and then go over it in sign language with Jim. I wish we’d stuck with my original plan.’

‘Any carbuncle will be better than having to relive the sort of night I spent in my room last night with Meredith and the kids, who didn’t sleep for more than three minutes at a stretch for the entire night. And Fred plus the bits of his famille that aren’t at boarding school were next door. As far as I can tell, the only couples to get a room to themselves were Alan and Martha and your son and his bit of fluff.’