Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘Oh, I don’t know. It was all such a long time ago. I feel that even by talking about some of these things you give them more importance than they really deserve.’

‘Test me.’

I gripped the couch, my fingers like claws.

‘There were problems, like all families have. In some ways ours may have been more accentuated because we were so close and saw so much of each other.’

‘Spare me all the excuses, just tell me.’

‘There were silly things. You’ve got to realise the ages we were because we were still young enough for these little differences to matter a lot. Natalie was just sixteen and Paul was eighteen and about to go to Cambridge and he was absolutely obsessed with her.’

‘Did they have any sort of relationship?’

‘Natalie completely rebuffed him. It’s hard to imagine now, but Paul was a very shy teenager, aggressively shy really, and he’d never had any sort of girlfriend before. I could almost see him plucking up his courage to make a move towards Natalie and once or twice, late at night, he tried to do things like put his arm round her and she was quite brutal about it.’

‘Unnecessarily brutal?’

‘I don’t know. How can one judge these things? If I am allowed to do a bit of interpretation, I remember that it sometimes seemed as if part of the attraction of Luke for Natalie was as a way of causing pain to Paul. And when she drifted apart from Luke, she played with Paul as a way of tormenting Luke.’

‘How did you feel about it?’

‘You mean, watching my older brother being humiliated by my best friend. I was upset, perhaps less than I should have been. Embarrassed mainly. And maybe I was a bit jealous; everyone, well boys at least, always noticed Natalie. She’d seem so indifferent to them, though of course she wasn’t, and she didn’t wear make-up like the rest of us did, and she didn’t laugh at their jokes, and she didn’t flirt except in an ironic kind of way. She often seemed contemptuous in fact, but it never mattered. Paul was out of his depth with her. But look, adolescence is all red in tooth and claw, isn’t it? I’m already making it sound a bigger deal than it really was.’

‘What did Paul feel?’

‘He has never talked about it, except as part of his golden youth which he is now going to turn into a television documentary.’

‘Do you think that is what he really feels?’

‘It may be what he feels now. I don’t believe he can have enjoyed it much at the time, at least not during that summer.’

‘Is that it?’

‘Yes.’

I could hear an impatient sigh behind me.

‘Jane, you’ve tossed me a bone. But that isn’t the real thing you were going to tell me.’

I was reminded of standing on a very high diving board as a child and the only way I dared to dive was to throw myself from it without preparation or forethought.

‘The difficult thing that summer – it was often difficult but it was especially difficult then – was Alan’s infidelity.’

‘Yes?’

Well, what did it matter?

‘It’s not exactly the world’s best-kept secret that Alan has been unfaithful to Martha as a matter of habit. It’s the old dreary cliché. Alan loves Martha and is utterly dependent on her. But he’s had lots of affairs for virtually the whole of their marriage, as far as I can make out. I suppose he would have been like that anyway but when The Town Drain happened and Alan became famous, then the young and available literary women needed beating off with a stick.’

‘Did Martha know about these affairs?’

‘I think she did in theory. It wasn’t flagrant. It just went on and on. The affairs weren’t talked about. They weren’t important, I think that was the basic cover story.’

‘Did she mind about them?’

‘I think people always do, don’t you? Martha is a wise woman and I suppose she saw from the beginning what Alan was like and realised that nothing could be done to change it. But maybe she was too wise and not bloody-minded enough. I’m sure she always suffered a great deal.’

‘Did you all know about it?’

‘Not really. In retrospect, there were things that only became clear once we cottoned on. It may be hard for you to understand, but there are ways in which you can know and not know things at the same time. Do you see what I mean?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Anyway, the truth about Alan’s behaviour became unavoidable. To cut the whole sordid story short, we discovered that the summer before Alan had been sleeping with a girl who was a friend of Natalie’s and mine. She was the same age as we were. She was called Chrissie Pilkington and she was a daughter of a local family, good friends of the Martellos, and she was at school with Natalie. It was awful.’

‘How did you discover?’

‘She told Natalie. Natalie told me. It was an odd thing, really, because we had this intense afternoon talking about it. I think I was more shocked than Natalie – she didn’t seem surprised, but she did seem, well, disgusted , I suppose. She was very cruel about him, about his beery breath and his paunch. I remember the way she imitated him being drunk. But then, after that, she never mentioned the subject again, and I didn’t either. I think that I knew it was forbidden.’

‘Did you say anything to Alan? Or to Martha?’

‘No, it never seemed the right time, really. But I told Theo. I guess that most of us younger lot must have known.’

‘What happened? What did you feel about all this?’

‘What happened? I don’t know, really, it sort of got lost in the chaos of Natalie’s disappearance. These things never lasted a long time for Alan and he probably used the awfulness over the disappearance as a way of making a break.’

‘And what did you feel about it?’

‘Different things. I always have where Alan is concerned. Sometimes I think he’s just an awful exploitative shit who would do anything, so long as it was what he wanted to do at a particular moment. And sometimes I think he’s just pathetic and weak and should be looked after or put up with. And sometimes I even think about him the way that people who don’t actually know him personally think about him: good old incorrigible Alan, a bit outrageous and flamboyant, but there’s nobody else quite like him and we’re lucky to have him. When I’m feeling close to Martha I feel most hostile, but then she’s probably quite stoical about it all.’

I was silent. My mind was a blank. I felt exhausted by it all. Alex was thinking too.

‘Sorry for being rude, Jane,’ he said.

‘You were a bit.’

He stood up and hauled his chair round so that I could see it. It was on castors. I could see the indentations in the carpet where it had stood. Was this the first time it had ever been moved?

‘Jane, we’re almost finished and I know you must be exhausted but I’d like us to try something. I had it in mind for later sessions, but it might just be worth a crack now.’

‘What?’

‘Bear with me for a moment, Jane. I want this process to be steered by you. I want to follow the clues that you leave for me. Now, we’ll be talking about lots of things, I hope, but I have this feeling that the black hole at the centre of it all is the day that Natalie disappeared, this conjunction, or near-conjunction, when you almost met.’

‘Yes. Well?’

‘It’s something I want to return to.’

‘I’m not sure there is anything more to go back to. It was a very long time ago.’

‘Yes, I realise that. But let’s try something. It’ll be good for you anyway. Let’s try a sort of exercise. I’d like you to lie back, really lie back, close your eyes and I’d like you to relax every bit of your body, starting with your feet and your legs, your body, down your arms and finally through your face and head. Does that feel good?’