Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘How lovely for Chrissie to see an old schoolfriend. I’ve heard so much about you, Jane.’ I doubted that. ‘Tea? Or would you like something stronger?’

‘Tea would be fine, thank you.’

‘Right. Then I’ll leave you two lovely ladies to talk. You must have so much to catch up on.’

‘Ian’s a company director,’ said Chrissie, as if in explanation. We went into the house. I could hear a dutiful tinkling from a piano upstairs. ‘My daughter, Chloe. Leonore’s with a friend.’

We sat in the living room, among plumped up cushions and prints of flowers and landscapes. Chrissie didn’t offer me tea.

‘Why have you really come?’ she asked.

‘Have you heard about Natalie?’

She nodded.

‘That’s why I’ve come.’

Chrissie looked nervously round, as if her husband might be standing in the doorway. ‘I’ve nothing to say, Jane. That was over twenty years ago, and I don’t even want to think about it, let alone talk about it.’

‘Twenty-five years.’

‘Twenty-five years, then. Please, Jane.’

‘When did you last see Alan?’

‘I said I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to think about it.’

‘Does your husband know that when you were fifteen you had a sexual relationship with Alan Martello? Is he understanding about it?’

Chrissie started and looked me in the eyes. I felt sorry for her, but triumphant also because I could see that she was going to talk to me. She shrugged.

‘I haven’t seen Alan since Natalie disappeared. I don’t expect you to understand, but he was so… glamorous, if you can believe it. I was just a kid, and he was this famous man and he gave me things and told me how beautiful I was.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘It seems strange now, doesn’t it? When he wanted to sleep with me I didn’t stand a chance.’ She looked down at her perfect red nails and then said, almost smugly, ‘He nearly ruined my life. Why don’t you blame Alan, not me?’

‘Come on, Chrissie, don’t exaggerate. It was only sex. Didn’t you enjoy it at all?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think about it.’

‘So why did you tell Natalie?’

Chrissie looked surprised.

‘I didn’t. She followed us to the woods once. And she saw us, you know.’

Chrissie had an air of prim triumph.

‘Did you see that she was there?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what happened?’

‘What do you expect? Alan started sort of wailing. He crawled over to Natalie and he started tugging her skirt, and saying that she was his darling girl and how could she ever forgive her old dad, and you know what men are like, and how Martha would suffer. It was pretty embarrassing really.’

‘What did Natalie do?’

‘She just walked away.’

‘What did Alan do then?’

Chrissie looked straight at me. For the first time I could see the provocative heedless look of the adolescent Chrissie.

‘He pushed me back onto the ground and fucked me. I think it had excited him. That was the last time, though.’ There was a chilly silence. ‘Now you can tell my husband all about it.’

‘You went out with Theo after that, didn’t you?’

‘Ask him.’

‘What about Natalie? You know she was pregnant, don’t you?’

‘I’ve seen the papers.’

‘Who do you think was the father?’

‘I don’t know. Whatever his name was-Luke McCann, I suppose.’

As I left, Chrissie’s successful husband waved cheerfully. ‘Do come again soon, Jane, it’s always nice to see Chrissie’s old chums.’

From the car, I saw Chrissie, a middle-aged woman wearing too much lipstick, and I saw what must have been Chloe, the piano-playing daughter, standing at an upstairs window. She looked just like the Chrissie of twenty-five years ago. That must have been hard for Chrissie to bear. I drove away with an embarrassing screech of tyres, and all the way back to London I thought about sex and its strangeness and embarrassments.

Against all expectations, I felt that my analysis was making me less judgemental than I had been. Instead of brooding about Martha and about Chrissie, or conducting a sterile debate about it all in my mind, I could talk to Alex about it. He wasn’t shocked by the things I was telling him and he wasn’t pruriently interested and although he could be critical of me, scathing indeed, I never had to apologise to him. When it came down to it, I believed that he was on my side. I trusted him. Well, who else could I trust?

The day after returning to London, I arrived at Alex’s house with bundles of Christmas shopping, like a traveller passing through. I leant the bags against the couch. Occasionally, as I talked, I ran my fingers along their rumpled plastic, a sensation of normality. I needed it. When I told him about Martha and my father, I almost thought he might laugh, it seemed so excessive and sleazy and pathetic. But he didn’t and he didn’t offer any stupid sympathy. And when I described the encounter with Chrissie, I thought he might be irritated by this new example of my amateur detective work. I was a bit apologetic and defensive as I repeated what she had said about all the awfulness with Alan and Natalie and I was surprised when Alex only nodded with interest.

‘I’m not going to be able to dissuade you from this sleuthing, am I?’ There was a note of exasperation, but it was okay.

‘It’s not sleuthing, Alex. It’s just pottering around, really. I have this feeling I’m looking for something. I just don’t know exactly what it is.’

‘Yes.’ Alex sounded pensive. ‘I just wonder if you might be looking in the wrong place.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘You intrigue me, Jane. You have the technique of a magician. When you point me in one direction, I feel it’s a sleight-of-hand and the important thing is happening somewhere else.’

‘That all sounds too clever for me.’

‘You’re deceiving yourself as well, of course. Something is looming ahead and you both want and don’t want to find it.’

‘What do you mean, Alex? Do you think I’m on the right track?’

There was another of Alex’s long pauses. I could feel my own breathing and my heart like a ball bouncing inside my chest. Something was coming. When he spoke it was with great deliberation.

‘What I feel, Jane, is that you are on the right track in the sense that I think there is something definite to be found. But you’re looking for it in the wrong place. You’re going to talk to people who are never going to be able to solve your problem. Where you should really be looking is in there.’

I felt Alex’s cool hand on my brow and I almost jumped away from the couch. It wasn’t the first time he had ever touched me, but it felt startlingly intimate. Surely he had missed my point.

‘Alex, I’m not denying that your therapy is important and helpful. But when I’m talking to people, then, in my confused and pathetic way, I’m looking for something specific. I’m trying to find something that’s out there, the truth about something that actually happened.’

‘Do you think I’m saying any different, Jane?’

‘What are you talking about? Are you saying that I already know the answer? That I know who killed Natalie?’

‘ Know is a complicated word.’

I felt a sudden crawling sensation on my skin. ‘Are you accusing me of something?’

Alex laughed soothingly. ‘No, Jane, of course not.’

‘But if I knew, well, then I’d… er, know, wouldn’t I? I would remember.’

‘Would you? Wait a second.’

Alex got up and left the room and then returned with a battered yellow folder and a ring-bound notebook. ‘Let me take the initiative for a moment,’ he said as he sat down again. ‘I want to ask you a series of questions about yourself.’