Nicci French - The Memory Game

We sat at the kitchen table, and I poured two glasses of something cheap and red. I lit a cigarette, sucking the smoke cancerously deep into my lungs. At first we chatted about the boys, then about Natalie – and, surprisingly, this was contemplative and relaxed. I’d heard too many expressions of nostalgic affection. Claud talked about her mischief, her teasing, her capacity for finding out secrets, for making alliances. This was the real Natalie, not the girl who was safely dead and idealised. I’d forgotten about this Natalie. It revived my sense of her. Claud and I exchanged remembered moments and refilled our wine glasses. It was hard to reconstruct the sequence of events, but she hadn’t been so much with Luke in those final weeks. She had become bored with him and kept him at a distance to his rage and bafflement. He used to phone up and call round and end up talking to me or to Martha.

We talked about the famous party and my own hazy memories of the day after and Claud’s absolutely precise memory of the Air India flight to Bombay with Alec and the two months spent bumming around with nothing but – can it really have been just twenty pounds? Dust and dope and dysentery. I’d always meant to go. As we spoke, I remembered that Claud and I had planned to recreate his journey one day (in a more salubrious style) and I hoped he wouldn’t mention this. I fiddled with a small antique dish on the table. It was made by somebody famous, very expensive: one of us had given it to the other, but I could no longer remember who.

This wasn’t a good idea. Claud raised his glass and grinned at me wryly and I felt a hopeless, reminiscent stab of desire for this man. Before we’d separated, we’d often got on best when we were in other people’s company. I’d watch him across a room, and see him being charming, or watch an attractive woman clutch his arm or laugh at something he’d said that I couldn’t quite hear, and I’d realise how fortunate I was. Most of my friends adored him, and envied me for his good looks, his attentiveness to me, his fidelity. He never noticed when women flirted with him, or worse, which made him all the more disarming. I realised we were stuck in a lurching silence. I could see what was coming.

‘I know I shouldn’t say this,’ Claud began, and I knew he was delivering a prepared speech, ‘but this, all this,’ he gestured at the chaos around us, ‘it seems so wrong. One minute you were talking about our problems, and the next I found myself in a bedsit somewhere and I think we should try again.’ There was a terrible bright eagerness in his voice now. ‘I hate to say it but perhaps we could go to counselling.’

I couldn’t help being touched: Claud had always had a contempt for any kind of psychotherapeutic process.

‘No, Claud.’ I forced myself to stop, not to expand into an explanation with which he could argue.

‘But you’re not happy,’ he insisted. ‘Look at you: you’re chain-smoking, you’ve got all thin and pale. You know you’ve made a mistake.’

‘I’ve never said I was making myself happy,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got to live with what I’ve chosen.’

‘What did I do wrong? What did I do to you to make you want to choose this ?’ More gestures. At the room. At me.

‘Nothing. I don’t want to talk about this. It won’t do any good.’

‘Is it something else, something you’re not saying?’ he asked desperately. ‘Is it Theo? There, I’ve said it. Have I not measured up to your starry-eyed view of him?’

‘Don’t, Claud, you’re being ridiculous.’

‘There are things that I could tell you about Theo, things he’s done…’

‘I don’t think there are, Claud. And anyway, it has nothing to do with us.’

Suddenly he seemed to slump. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m so sorry but I miss you terribly.’ He leant his head in his hands and gazed through the cage of his fingers.

Sitting at the kitchen table with Claud, the way we’d sat for so many years, watching tears dribble through his hands and not moving to comfort him, I couldn’t remember why I’d ever broken up our marriage. I felt no connection with that anger, that whirling frustration, panic and sense of time dripping away. All I wanted was peace, friendship, routine, home. I’d built my life up brick by brick, then one day last September I’d pulled it down on top of me. I felt old and tired and defeated. For a moment, I thought I would go and kneel by Claud’s chair and hug him until he stopped quietly crying and bury my head in his lap, and feel his hands stroking my hair, and know myself forgiven. But I did nothing and the moment passed. After a minute or two he stood up.

‘I’ll come for these things another time.’

I still had the dish under my fingers. ‘What about this?’ I handed it to Claud.

‘This? It’s ours.’ He took it in two hands, and without any evident emotion or even a change of expression he snapped it in two and handed me one of the pieces. I was too shocked to move or even to speak but I saw that he had cut one of his fingers quite badly.

‘I’ll just take these.’

He put the fragment of china into one of the boxes. I opened the door for him, and a gust of rain blew into the house.

‘You disappoint me, Jane,’ he said. I could only shrug.

In the bedroom, I took off my jeans and grey cardigan, unhooked my ear-rings, brushed out my hair, and pulled on a dressing-gown. I had a thought. I went to the bathroom and rubbed soap around one of my fingers. I pulled hard and the ring slipped over the knuckle. I rinsed it and took it to my study, Jerome’s old bedroom, now cluttered with easels and sheets of graph paper and unanswered correspondence. I opened a small drawer in my desk, where I kept the wrist-tags the boys had worn in hospital when they were born, the champagne cork with FINALS written on it in biro, my mother’s last letter to me, wonky with pain, and the recently acquired photographs of Natalie. I put the ring in there, and closed the drawer. Then I went to bed and lay for a long time, waiting for oblivion.

‘Does it shock you?’

‘It shocks me most dreadfully,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I could even tell you the way it makes me feel.’

‘Tell me,’ said Alex.

I giggled. ‘Yes, that’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? I’m sorry, I was speaking in clichés. I was just automatically saying the sort of thing you’re meant to say about big emotions. That they’re inexpressible. It’s all too expressible. I suppose I feel cheated, except cheated is too small a word, because it shows that there was another side of Natalie that I didn’t know. I can put it even more clearly than that. We had a childish friendship, Natalie and I, that was almost like a game. We told each other that we were best friends and sisters. There were so many boys around, and we were the two girls. We used to talk about everything, especially at night-time, in her bedroom. That summer, in 1969, it began to be a bit different. We’d had things with boys before but her relationship with Luke seemed different, something I couldn’t share. And at the same time I was really smitten by Theo.’

‘Tell me about Theo.’

‘What do you mean? Then or now?’

‘Whatever.’

‘Theo’s still great. I love him. If you were to meet him today, I can guarantee you’d take to him. He’s tall and quite striking and balding now, but he’s bald like an artist, not like a bank manager with strands of hair combed across his head.’

‘That’s interesting,’ said Alex laughing. ‘We must explore your aversion to bank managers.’

‘I like my bank manager,’ I insisted. ‘He’s been very nice to me, however much I’ve provoked him.’