Nicci French - The Memory Game

For most of my teens, Claud had been what Jerome and Robert used to call a dork. He started wearing glasses when he was about three years old and he was always the serious one, without the charisma that Theo and later the twins displayed so effortlessly. He was dogged, painstaking but never the star. Then, in the awful year or so after Natalie disappeared, when it looked as if the Martello family might be broken up by the pain, we became close. That was dogged as well. Claud set out to charm me and his efforts were so transparent, but they worked. To like somebody is one of the good ways of making that person like you but it can just as easily have the opposite effect. Claud got it right. There was nothing sexual for a long time. I was going out with various boys and Claud became a good friend. We used to write to each other when he was away at medical school, long and interesting letters, and I was surprised to find myself telling him things that I kept from other people. We made no demands on each other, we didn’t show off, and so when I was in my first year at university I was slightly startled to realise that he was my best friend. He started going out with a girl called Carol Arnott – the first proper girlfriend he had ever had, as he told me and told absolutely nobody else – and I was curious to find myself a little jealous.

It was 1971 and I remember it best in terms of clothes: crushed velvet, flares, cheesecloth blouses with dropped cuffs like a medieval minstrel, shades of purple that I wouldn’t dare wear again until the early nineties. I was eighteen and Claud was twenty and I coolly set out to steal him from poor Carol, which I managed with no difficulty at all. Our first night together was in the narrowest of single beds in a bedsit in Finsbury Park which Claud shared with two other medical students. In a process so smooth that it must have seemed inevitable, we managed to decide to get married, which we did at the end of my second year. I wonder if we felt that we were healing the breach in the family. By 1975 I had Jerome and Robert and while still children ourselves we had to be grown up and juggle the childcare with our training and our careers. As I look back on it, I see two decades of frenzy and panic culminating in an autumn afternoon when I drove Robert up for his first term at college. I had a moment to think and the first thought that entered my head was the absolute conviction that I had to leave Claud. No debate, no counselling, no trial separation, just a line drawn under my life.

There. That was what I presented Alex with. That was where I now was, bemused, tearful, out of control. What would he make of it? Although I was anxious to guard myself against it, I already caught myself caring about Alex’s judgement on what I said. Perhaps I was even trying to impress him. I became curious about his life. I noticed his clothing, the differences from day to day. I liked the metal-rimmed spectacles he sometimes wore, always with an air of casualness as if they had been tossed on, and the long hair which he constantly pushed off his forehead with his hands. Sometimes he was strict with me. He surprised me by disapproving of my detective work.

‘I thought you wanted me to deal with facts,’ I protested, a little hurt.

‘That’s right,’ said Alex, ‘but the facts that we’re interested in at the moment are the ones that are inside your own head. There’s plenty of work there, hard work. We need to distinguish between the things you’re telling me that are true and those that aren’t. Then there are the things that are true and are not true that you aren’t telling me. That will be more difficult.’

‘There’s nothing I’m telling you that isn’t true. What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about this golden childhood stuff. Look, Jane, I told you from the start that I would try to be frank about the way my thinking was going, so maybe I should talk a bit about the way I’m feeling at the moment.’ Alex paused for thought. He always gave the impression of immense deliberation before speaking, not like me, gabbling away. He made thinking seem almost like a matter of engineering, a practical skill. ‘You’ve been saying two contradictory things to me, Jane. You’re clinging on to the happy childhood as if it were a talisman against something. At the same time you’ve been talking of this body that was buried at the heart of it. Now I might just say that the two were independent. Somebody can come from the outside and murder a member of the happiest of families. The world is full of cruel bad luck like that. But that’s not what you say. It’s you who insists that this is impossible.’

‘What are you saying, Alex? What do you want me to do?’

‘You’re trying to hold up two heavy weights and you won’t be able to manage it. You have to let one side go, Jane, and face up to the consequences. You have to think about your family.’

This was one of those moments in the sessions when I felt like a hunted animal. I would find some bit of cover somewhere and feel safe, then Alex would track me down and drive me out into the open again. I described the image to Alex and he laughed and laughed.

‘I’m not sure I’m happy with the idea of you being a beautiful fox while I’m some brutal red-faced squire on a horse. But if it means that I can stop you skulking in some false paradise then I suppose I can live with it. Now, over to you. Even if it’s only an experiment, Jane, I want you to strip away your picture-book account of your family. Start thinking of it as a family in which a murder could happen, and let’s see where that gets us.’

‘What are you talking about? What do you mean, “a family in which murder could happen”?’

When Alex replied, I detected a harder tone which I had never heard from him before.

‘I’ve just been listening to you, Jane. You must take responsibility for what you say to me.’

‘I haven’t talked about any murderer in the family.’ I felt a sour, sick taste in the back of my mouth.

Alex remained firm. ‘It was you, not me, who talked of the oddity of where Natalie’s body was found.’

‘Yes, well it was odd, wasn’t it?’

‘What did you mean by that if you weren’t implicating your family in some way?’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘All right, calm down.’

‘I’m perfectly calm.’

‘No, what I mean is that even if the idea is a shock, you should treat it as an experiment.’

‘What do you mean, an experiment?’

‘It’s simple, Jane. Sometimes these ideas in therapy can be treated like hypotheses. Imagine, if you can, that you didn’t come from this ultra-perfect family that everybody admired and wanted to join. Imagine it was a dangerous family.’

Had I been wanting Alex to say this to me, to say this for me? I made a token attempt to protest but Alex interrupted me and continued.

‘I’m not asking you to make accusations or be disloyal. It’s just a way of re-orienting yourself, to allow yourself a new freedom.’

It was one of those moments when I craved a cigarette as a means of thinking clearly. Instead, I told Alex about my evening at the ICA and the colossal, shaming, harrowing awfulness of Alan’s behaviour. When you are the daughter-in-law of Alan Martello, a good deal of your work is done. He’s been famous since his twenties and, independently of his own efforts, he has been a free-floating symbol. A youthful radicalism was pinned on him once, now this has been replaced with an equally odd anarchic conservatism. He has been at various times, often at the same time, a little Englander, a satirist, a class warrior, a liberator, a reactionary, a professional iconoclast, a conformist, a rebel, a bore, a sexist exploiter. I sometimes wonder what I would make of him if I were encountering him for the first time, but I’ve always adored him in a mixed-up way. I’ve seen him put himself in the most indefensible positions, I’ve witnessed or heard of behaviour that I totally deplored, he has heedlessly hurt people, especially my beloved Martha, but I’ve been on his side. He was the person who presided over that wonderful Martello household, his vitality fuelled it, he was the centre of it all, its symbol. Was it just because of that that I couldn’t reject him? Even at the ICA, in the middle of all the shambles, I felt a perverse loyalty but that time it really did feel perverse.