Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘What do you want, Jane?’ Alan asked, staring at me over his half-moon spectacles.

Characteristic blankness. ‘I haven’t made up my mind. Paul can go first.’

‘Paul?’

‘You know, I always have this existential problem with menus. I can never decide why I should order one dish rather than another.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Alan exploded. ‘We’ll all start with the smoked salmon. Anybody object? Good. Then I’ll have steak and kidney pudding. I recommend it if you want some decent old-fashioned food.’

‘All right,’ said Paul, rather shiftily.

‘Jane?’

‘I’m not really hungry. I’ll just have a salad.’

Alan turned to the waiter. ‘Did you get that? And some rabbit food for the lady here. And just tell Grimley we’ll have a bottle of my white and a bottle of my red and I’ll start with a large Bloody Mary. The others will probably want some overpriced mineral water with a foreign name.’

‘I’ll have a Bloody Mary as well,’ I said impulsively.

‘Well done, Jane.’

Alan handed the menu to the waiter, removed his spectacles and sat back.

‘Salad,’ he said in horror. ‘That’s the sort of thing that kept women out of this bloody place for so long.’

This seedy ornate dining room south of Piccadilly Circus, with its third-rate old masters, its tired club architecture, the faded hangings, the smoke, the male chatter, this was Alan’s habitat: Blades, the club he had belonged to for over thirty years. Today he seemed ill at ease, prickly and depressed, and I didn’t feel that Paul and I were the people to snap him out of it. Paul was preoccupied with his programme. He had told me as we were walking down Lower Regent Street that Alan was the key to the structure, the bit that he had to get right and he wasn’t sure how to use him. As I sat at the table lighting one cigarette after another I felt I was looking at a callow fisherman dangling a fly in front of the nose of an ancient salmon. And me? Was I any good to Alan at that moment? The Bloody Marys and the mineral water arrived. Alan took a large gulp.

‘How did the lunch with your publisher go?’ I asked.

‘Waste of time,’ Alan said. ‘Can you believe that lunch used to be my favourite part of the day? When Frank Mason was my editor, we used to spend three or four hours over it. We once took so long that we went straight on to dinner in the same restaurant Yesterday I met this new editor called Amy. Wore some sort of suit. Drank water. Ate a first course and nothing else. I was going to really show her: gin and tonic to start, three courses, couple of bottles of wine, brandy, cigar, everything.’

‘So what happened?’ Paul asked.

‘I didn’t,’ Alan said with a shrug. ‘And do you know why? She thought I was a bore. Alan Martello, the reactionary old drunk who hasn’t produced a book since the seventies. Twenty-five years ago girls like her wanted to sleep with me. Queued up to get into my bed. Now they try to keep their lunches with me as short as possible. She was back in the office by two fifteen.’

I took a sip of my drink, the vodka astringent under the tomato’s sweetness.

‘What did Martha think of those queues of eager girls?’ I asked.

‘Good old Jane, always talking about how people feel. Wanting to make everything smooth and perfect. The answer is that we muddled along like most people.’

‘She didn’t mind?’

Alan shrugged. ‘She understood.’

‘How is Martha, Alan?’

‘Oh, she’s all right,’ Alan said distractedly. ‘Her treatment’s getting her down a bit, that’s all. She’ll be better when it’s over. It’s just those bloody doctors worrying her.’

I felt a rush of emotion for this blustering, self-deceiving, famous man with his stained beard and his florid face and his novel he’d been working on since we were all children. A man who didn’t want to think about his dying wife, who didn’t want to be with her. But what emotion?

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about Natalie lately,’ I said.

Alan waved the waiter over and ordered two more Bloody Marys. I didn’t bother to protest.

‘I know,’ Alan said, after the waiter had gone. ‘And I hear you’ve been seeing one of these head people. All been a bit much for you, has it?’

‘Yes, I think it has been, in a way.’

‘And then snooping around. What are you doing? Trying to find out who killed my daughter?’

‘I don’t know. Trying to get things sorted out in my mind.’

‘Then you, Paul, and your programme. Haven’t either of you got a family of your own to mess around with?’

The vodka was taking effect on Alan. I knew this mood. He would taunt us, probe for weak spots, try to goad us into losing our tempers. I sneaked a look over at Paul who smiled back at me. We were a match for him and, anyway, this wasn’t the old Alan, dominating, seductive. He only picked at the smoked salmon but he cheered up when the steak and kidney pudding arrived in its bowl, and the heavy opaque claret was poured into his large glass.

‘Salad, indeed,’ he said, tying his napkin around his neck like a bib.

I’ve seen the old pictures of Alan, the angry young man, and in the early fifties he had a slim, austere look. Now he was overweight, florid. His dimpled, veined nose was a testimony to decades of over-consumption. But there were still those lively blue eyes, flirtatious and imperious. They held people, especially women, and even now I could imagine the fascination they would arouse and the impulse to sleep with him.

‘How many women have you slept with, Alan?’

I couldn’t believe I’d said it, and I waited almost in horror to see what he would say. To my surprise, he laughed.

‘How many men have you slept with, Jane?’

‘I’ll say if you say.’

‘All right. Go on then.’

Christ, it was my own fault.

‘Not very many, I’m afraid. About seven, eight maybe.’

‘And a quarter of them are sons of mine.’

I flushed red in embarrassment. Even my toes, under their layers of leather and cotton, must have been blushing.

‘What about you then?’

‘Isn’t Paul going to tell us?’

Paul looked genuinely alarmed.

‘I didn’t promise anything,’ he said, gulping.

‘Come on, don’t be shy. You’re expecting everybody else to bleat about their private lives in your ridiculous telly programme.’

‘God, Alan, this is pretty juvenile, isn’t it? If you must know, I have probably had sex with about thirteen women, maybe fifteen. Are you satisfied?’

‘I win then,’ said Alan. ‘I would estimate that I have slept with something over a hundred women, probably over a hundred and twenty-five.’

‘Oh, well done, Alan,’ I said in my driest of tones. ‘Especially as you had the handicap of being married with children.’

Alan was well into the claret now. ‘Ah, the true, the blushful Hippocrene,’ he said as he drank deep and then wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘It wasn’t a handicap. Do you know one of the good things about literary success?’

Paul and I looked quizzical. We knew that no actual answer was required.

‘The women,’ said Alan. ‘When you write a successful novel and become a representative, however misleadingly, of a younger generation, you get rewarded by money and fame, of course, but also you get a lot of women whom you would not otherwise have got. It’s like this,’ he said, pushing his spoon into his bowl and lifting out some gobbets of flesh. ‘We’re meant to pretend not to like this sort of thing, aren’t we? The blood of the meat and the kidneys with their fine tang of faintly scented urine. And we’re supposed to whine and winge about the sufferings of animals. I like meat. I like veal. I love foie gras. Who cares about the calf growing up in the dark or how the goose was fed?’