Nicci French: The Memory Game

‘There’s bits of clothes here,’ he said. ‘Little bits. And a buckle. It must be her, mustn’t it? It must be their little girl, Natalie.’

I had to look. I had seen one dead body in my life. I had sat holding my mother’s hand in the final moments of her years of pain. I had seen death wipe the expression from her face and her racked body had relaxed back into the bed. I had pressed my lips against her still-warm face. A day later I had touched it again in the funeral parlour, waxy and cold, her hair brushed, in her best clothes, with a small bag clutched pathetically in her left hand. And this was the body of Natalie, my dear, dear friend, after a quarter of a century, for ever sixteen. I knelt and made myself look closely at the bones. From the legs they must be, large and thick. There were traces of clothing, black, thickly grimed. I felt suddenly detached and curious. No flesh, of course. No sinews. The bones that had been detached from the ground were entirely separate. The soil in which they lay was darker than the rest. Would the hair have decayed? The skull was still buried. I remembered her lean body. Brown that summer. I remembered the mole on her right shoulder, and her long simian toes. How could I have forgotten her for so long?

‘Someone had better call the police.’

‘Yes, Jim, yes. I’ll do that now. I don’t suppose we ought to do any more digging. Is there a police station in Westbury?’

There wasn’t. I looked in the phone book and I had to phone the police all the way off in Kirklow. I felt rather foolish saying to someone I didn’t know that we’d found a body and that it was rather old, about twenty-five years, that I thought it was probably the body of Natalie Martello who had gone missing in the summer of 1969. But they took it seriously and in a short time two police cars arrived and then a civilian car and then later an ambulance, or rather a sort of ambulance that looked like an estate car. It seemed strange to have an ambulance to pick up bones that were so long dead they could have been put into a small cardboard box. One of the policemen asked me some halting questions on which I could hardly concentrate. The ambulance didn’t take the bones away immediately. A flimsy kind of miniature marquee was raised over most of the hole. There was a light rain falling.

I didn’t want to go and look at what they were doing but I couldn’t leave the scene and I sat on a bank near the kitchen door and looked down at the tent and across at the wood beyond. I wondered if people would be coming back soon. I had my watch on but I couldn’t remember what time they had left and I couldn’t even remember how long mushroom hunts take as a rule, though I’d been on so many. I just sat on the bank and finally I saw a small group emerging from the trees. We always separated on these excursions and came back in our own time. They would be able to see the police cars and the incongruous tent but I couldn’t see if they were surprised. I stood up to make my way towards them to explain what had happened but my eyes were suddenly wet and I couldn’t see who they were. It could have been anybody.

The knife slid through the spongy layers into the beige flesh. I peeled off some slimy skin, tossed an edible chunk of cep into a large bowl. Peggy came in with another bucket full of mushrooms; she smelt of the woods, the mulchy earth. Her khaki trousers were stained; she’d taken off her boots in the hall, and now padded in thick grey socks.

‘Here you are,’ she said.

With my fingertips, I gently lifted the yellow, gilled chanterelles lying like waxy flowers at the top, and sniffed at their curved trumpet shapes. Apricots.

‘Who found these?’ I asked.

‘Theo, of course. Are you all right, Jane?’

‘You mean about Claud?’

‘No, about today.’

‘I don’t know.’

In the bucket there were warty, bulbous puffballs, horse mushrooms with a faint whiff of aniseed about them, and delicate white ink caps, fraying around their skirts. The kitchen smelt damply fungoid; wormy parasol mushrooms blocked up the sink, tatters of woody stalks lay on the working surfaces. I wiped my hands, which were still trembling, down my apron and pushed back my hair. The kitchen was brightly lit, but nothing seemed quite real to me – not the horror in the garden, nor this parody of normality in the clutter of the Martello kitchen, heart of their large house. Were we all insane, a houseful of shocked people trapped in ritual? I was losing myself in activity.

‘You did well,’ I said to Paul, who was passing through the kitchen clutching dusty bottles of red wine to his chest.

‘You should have seen them all: we could have picked twice as many. Some of them are useless though.’

He glanced at Peggy furtively on his way out. He looked harassed. We were each of us alone with our thoughts and private alarms. He had the additional burden of being stuck in a house with his ex-wife, current wife, and a sister who was divorcing his best friend. There was a necessity not to think too much.

I started chopping the mushrooms into thin slivers; the flesh was spongily resilient. I turned them and cut them smoothly along the grain. Pots bubbled. The effort of coordination soothed me. I opened the door of the oven and touched the oily red peppers with a fork; their skins were blistering. I drew in a deep breath.

‘Jane? Claud told me to give you these.’ My father held out three plump garlic bulbs. Turning to go – back to the crossword by the fire, probably – he suddenly said, ‘It’ll be all right, won’t it?’ and I saw that his eyes were puffy, as if he’d been weeping. I squeezed his shoulder.

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said, meaninglessly.

I peeled six garlic cloves and crushed them into a large pan on the stove. Peggy, who was stooped over the sink, patiently stripping the spongy layers off the remaining ceps, sung a snatch of song under her breath and then said abruptly, ‘I’m really sorry. It must have been horrible for you, finding it – her.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose so. But no worse, really, than for everybody else.’

I didn’t want to talk. I was saving up my emotions, I didn’t want to expend them here, while making dinner. Not with Peggy, but she was unstoppable.

‘You were all very brave. It’s funny really: for the first time, I feel excluded from this family. You all know how to deal with each other.’

I turned to her and took her hand. ‘Peggy,’ I replied wearily, ‘that’s not true. You know that we never exclude anybody. We’re the great extended family that starts with Alan and Martha and doesn’t end anywhere.’

‘I know all that, maybe it’s just that I never knew Natalie.’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Yes,’ said Peggy, ‘a part of the great legendary idyllic Martello childhood. You all share that, don’t you? It always reminds me…’ She stopped as she caught sight of something out of the window. ‘Look at them! I’ll kill them! Why can’t Paul deal with them? He is alleged to be their father.’

She hurtled from the room. Out of the window I could see her daughters standing conspiratorially behind a bush smoking cigarettes. They must have thought they were invisible. Peggy jogged noiselessly towards them, still shoeless. Jerome and Robert used to smoke in their bedroom, with the windows wide open, then come downstairs smelling of toothpaste, and I’d say nothing. I, too, was surreptitiously smoking, in the garden, late at night when I couldn’t sleep for pondering about my life. Later, they’d learnt to smoke in my presence, even to offer one to me. I’d been itching for a cigarette all day, fidgeting on the edge of the hole, wandering round the garden, waiting for everybody to get back and learn what I had learnt. I stirred the pale yellowing garlic around the pan. A little manageable span of time, a way of measuring out the evening ahead.