Nicci French - The Memory Game

Despite the bleak news, this session with Alex was more relaxed. I was conscious of a friendly, even a flirtatious, atmosphere. I felt liberated. I knew I was allowed to say anything I wanted.

‘Anyway, Theo isn’t a bank manager and he isn’t an artist either. He’s in some vague in-between area and it’s extremely difficult to pin him down to exactly what he does do. He’s a consultant about the management of information. Yes, you may well ask. He’s a businessman with some company based in Zurich and he’s also an academic with visiting professorships all over the place. It’s all very modern and post-managerial and very highly paid and all a bit abstract and philosophical and he’s always off to a conference in Toronto or superintending a merger in some schloss in Bavaria. People like me who live in one place and work nearby seem unimaginably old-fashioned. He’s dazzling, as he always was.

‘I had hardly seen Theo for a couple of years before that summer of ’69. He had been away at school and I had been going out with this young man who not only had a motorbike but he could take it to pieces and put it back together and there were no bits left over and that was impressive in its way, but we all gradually got together at the Stead at the end of July for Alan’s and Martha’s party and I was knocked out by Theo. He was six-two with long hair and he was in the sixth form doing about twelve science A levels but he was also reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire in the original and he could play the guitar, I mean really play it, not just strum but play individual notes so as to make moody Leonard Cohen sort of music and I was completely his. In a spiritual sense, for the most part.

‘Sorry, I got carried away. The point I was trying to make is that this was the summer that Natalie and I grew up in a way. The estrangement, to the degree that there was an estrangement, represented the fact that we became separate people, that we developed our own independent, private lives. How can I describe it? There was one moment I remember, about a week before she disappeared. I was in the nearby town, Kirklow, probably buying something for the anniversary party. I saw a group of young people sitting outside a pub in the square, drinking and smoking. Natalie was one of them. Her hair was swept back off her face, she was laughing at something someone had said and as she laughed she looked round and caught my eye. She half smiled at me and looked away, and I realised I wasn’t allowed to go over and join them. Looking back at that summer, I think that the pain of the terrible tragedy of Natalie’s death was heightened because it coincided with the moment that I was forced to stop being a child and go into all the confusion of being an adult.’

After I finished there was a vast silence which I felt no impulse to break. I didn’t feel afraid now of these hiatuses.

‘Well, that’s that then,’ said Alex and I was shocked by his sarcastic, flippant tone.

‘What do you mean, “that’s that”?’ I asked.

‘That’s extremely neat, Jane. You’ve sewn it all together. You’ve managed to face up to Natalie’s death and link it together with a positive development in your own life. She died, you grew up and became an architect. There we are. Analysis over. Congratulations.’

I felt crushed.

‘Why are you being so sarcastic, Alex? That’s horrible.’

‘Do you like reading, Jane?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I bet you like reading novels. I bet that when you go on holiday you read a novel every day.’

‘I don’t, actually. I’m quite a slow reader.’

‘Have you ever wanted to write a novel?’

‘Are you making fun of me, Alex? Just say what you want to say and don’t piss around with me.’

‘No, honestly, Jane, I think it’s something you ought to consider. I bet you’d be good at it. Only don’t do it here with me. You’re an intelligent woman, Jane, and what you’ve just told me is not at all an implausible arrangement of your experience. That’s what you’re good at. I’m sure that you could come into my office tomorrow and deliver another version of your life and interpret it in another, different way and that would be convincing as well. If you were perfectly happy with your life and everything was going nicely then you could be contented with that. That’s the sort of thing that most of us do, though most of us probably aren’t as good at it as you are. You invent neat interpretations of your life in the way that an octopus squirts out a cloud of ink and scuttles away behind it. Am I being unfair, Jane?’

I felt terribly disoriented, as if I’d drifted loose.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to say.’

Alex moved forward into my line of sight and knelt next to me. He looked more amused than disapproving.

‘You know what, Jane? I suspect that you’ve got your Penguin editions of Freud at home and though you’ve promised yourself that one day you’ll read it all, you’ve never quite got around to it, but you’ve dipped into it here and there. And you’ve read one or two books about therapy as well. One of the things you’ve learnt is that analysis is about talk and about interpretation. It’s not very concerned with facts and things, only with the value we place on them. Is that about right?’

‘I don’t know about that,’ I protested. I didn’t want to give in to him. He was so sure.

‘I want you to forget about all that,’ Alex continued. ‘I want to cure you – for a while, at least – of your considerable skill at turning your life into a pattern. I want you to grab hold of the things in your life, the things that really happened. We’ll leave the interpretation until later, shall we?’

‘I’m surprised that you think there are facts separate from interpretations, Doctor.’

‘And I know that you don’t really believe that. I can bullshit with the best of them and if that’s what you want we can sit here and play games for a couple of hours a week and split hairs about the meaning of meaning. Do you want that?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘So far, you’ve given me the standard coming-of-age-in-the-summer-of-love story.’ He stood up and moved back to his chair. ‘Tell me some of the awkward, unpleasant things that were going on.’

‘Isn’t it enough that Natalie was pregnant and then murdered? Do you need any more unpleasantness?’

‘But Jane, you’re giving me an account of this wonderfully idyllic summer spent with the family that everybody adored. Where’s the context for murder?’

‘Why should there be a context? She may have been killed by somebody who had nothing to do with the family, someone we’ve never even heard of.’

‘What are your thoughts on that, Jane?’

‘You mean emotions ?’

‘No, thoughts. Ideas.’

I paused for quite a long time. ‘I’ve only got one, really. Maybe I’m just being stupid – that’s probably what the policewoman I talked to thought – but I keep bumping up against the obvious, the problem of where Natalie was found. Since her body stayed hidden for twenty-five years, and then was only stumbled on by accident, it was clearly an almost perfect hiding place but it’s so peculiar. I don’t know anything about murderers or what they do with their victims but I imagine that they bury them in remote forests or leave them on moorlands or in ditches. Natalie was last seen by the river. She could have just been thrown in there. But she was buried under our noses on the day after a huge party when the whole area was full of people. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but the one thing I am sure of is that it wasn’t some passing vagrant who attacked her and then buried her virtually on our front doorstep.’

‘So? What else have you got to say to me? There must be something,’ Alex insisted.