Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘Luke! Will Luke be there?’

‘Well, why not, Jane?’ Claud had replied a bit tetchily, and looking at the kitchen clock I’d realised that it was well past midnight: I’d probably woken him.

‘But Luke was her boyfriend. Natalie was pregnant and Luke was her boyfriend.’

‘Goodnight, Sherlock, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

As I arranged my spread on the long oak table in the Stead’s kitchen, I realised that the man who’d blown his nose was Luke. In a few minutes he’d arrive with all the others and we’d chat politely. The sharp graveside grief would dissolve into the boredom of sandwiches and dull talk. We should all have left separately, carried away our bereavement and dread and lived with it a bit. I slid the scones into the oven to warm them, and Hana arrived carrying the meringues. We didn’t say anything: she’d always known how to be silent.

‘Jane, my dear. Hana.’ It was Alan, but Alan without any bombast. His beard looked clumsily cut, or was it just unbrushed. I’d never let Claud grow a beard. ‘Martha’s gone upstairs, but she’ll be down in a minute. Can I do anything?’

‘No, Alan. Nothing.’

‘In that case, I’ll -’ he waved a hand vaguely, and shuffled out.

I left Hana sorting plates, and went into the garden. Even before I lit a cigarette, my breath curled into the air. I could see groups of people straggling up the drive. I couldn’t quite face them yet and I wandered through the side gate and round the front to miss them. My food could stand in for me for a little while.

‘So what are you doing now?’

This was just what I had feared. I looked at a respectable man in a sombre suit, badly pressed and not very clean. He probably wore it to work occasionally. But what I really saw was a slim boy with round metal glasses, a shock of long dark hair kissing Natalie, consuming her, cradling the back of her head in two tender hands. Natalie’s bit of rough. He seemed unaccountably thrown by the question.

‘I’m a teacher,’ he said. ‘In Sparkhill. A secondary school.’

Luke was thin and tall. He stooped over me as he talked, and with his long nose he looked a bit like a melancholy bird. But his eyes were sharp. Automatically, I said what I always said to teachers, about it being the most worthwhile profession and all that. Blah blah blah.

‘I’ll give you our address,’ he said, ‘and you can write off for our brochure.’ A glimmer of the old abrasive Luke, but his heart wasn’t in it. ‘Look, Jane, can we talk?’

He grabbed me by the elbow and steered me through the groups of people to the door.

‘That’s better,’ he said, talking in a rushed whisper, as if he was in a hurry and might be overheard. He looked over my shoulder as he spoke to me, the way people do at parties when they’re looking for someone more interesting. ‘I heard – Theo told me – that Natalie was killed. Well, surprise, surprise. But then he said she was pregnant. And then I realised that I wasn’t exactly being welcomed back into the fold after all these years. Martha couldn’t even say hello to me. Theo, everyone, they all think it was me.’

‘Think it was you what?’

I felt hard and merciless. All the angles of his face collapsed and he drew out his handkerchief again. I had an abrupt and brief memory of him sobbing as a boy, but it evaded me. I reflected that of all the men in Natalie’s life, he was the first I had actually seen weeping over her.

‘I loved her. I know I was only a stupid teenager, but I loved her. She was so sweet and so – so – ruthless.’

‘How do you know you didn’t get her pregnant?’ I asked, collecting the adjectives he’d just used and storing them away for later.

He wasn’t crying now. He was looking hard into my eyes. ‘We didn’t,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t. There must have been somebody else.’

‘Who? When?’

‘How should I know? I promise you I’ve been trying to think of anything, anything at all. Once, God knows where it was, we were kissing, I was kissing Natalie. She had this beautiful golden down on her cheeks, even though she was so dark. I remember it on my lips. And I started touching her, caressing her, and she just pushed me away and said: “You’re just a kid, you know.” I was a whole year older than her. I couldn’t believe it, but that’s the sort of thing she did. You know. You knew her better than anyone.’

I didn’t want to be having this conversation.

‘Okay, so why tell me about it?’

‘But do you believe me?’

‘Who cares what I believe?’

‘I do,’ Luke said and then muttered something I couldn’t hear. He made a visible effort to compose himself. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? You’re all closing ranks. I can see it’s convenient for you.’

I turned and left him.

‘You’re making it easy for yourselves, you know,’ he said.

I ignored him.

‘Here, these are all yours.’

I started dumping records in cardboard boxes. When Claud and I had met, he had had an extraordinary collection of LPs, arranged alphabetically within their various subject categories. I had had five; two of them were by Miles Davis and the other three by Neil Young, all too scratched to play on Claud’s deck. He’d had them as well, anyway. He’d bought music all the way through our marriage: classical, jazz, soul, punk. He was endlessly enthusiastic, endlessly tolerant. When Jerome or Robert had wanted to rebel they’d brought back the latest noise: house, techno, grunge, I’d never known which was which, and I’d obliged them by being ignorant and horrified. But Claud had learnt to like it all. He’d played rap songs about policemen being murdered that had shocked even Robert. He’d pontificated on the importance of extending the right to free speech to someone like Iced Tea, or whatever his name was.

Claud had played Guns ‘n’ Roses to me appreciatively, while his sons had watched him sulkily, and I had contemplated a cover illustration featuring a woman apparently being abused by a robot. Whenever his brothers had come round, they’d thumbed through the collection, pulling out this memory, or that, an appalling fifteen-minute drum solo that would apparently supply a Proustian recollection of some long-lost party or some poor deluded girl.

‘And these.’ I stacked CDs in neat piles beside the boxes. Claud gazed at me, wet-eyed. I did not respond. ‘I’ve gone through most of the books, but of course you should go through them as well, just to be sure. There are some it’s a bit hard to decide about. I’ve put them all together on this shelf.’

‘James Morris’s Venice .’ Claud’s voice was wistful. ‘Do you remember our time there?’

I did. It was in February, damp and misty and almost empty. We’d walked miles along grey paths, ignoring the sweet stench of the waters, exclaiming over the green peeling facades of ancient palazzi, wandering into churches where opulent art bloomed. We’d made love on hard wooden beds with bolsters, to the creak of shutters.

‘Mushrooms of Europe, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , Auden, Hardy’s poems, Birds of Great Britain.’ Claud was flicking his finger along the shelf. ‘One is Fun , I suppose I should take that. This one must be mine.’ He pulled out a slim Shell guide to England ’s country churches, and added it to his box. ‘We can give the shared books to the boys. That seems appropriate, somehow. And now can I have a drink?’

‘They don’t read books. We haven’t done the pictures, or the china; quite a lot of the furniture is yours.’

‘Jane, can I have a drink? Don’t be in such a hurry to clear every last trace of me out of the house.’