Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘I’m sorry, Alan,’ I interrupted, ‘but is this all because I ordered a salad for lunch? I wasn’t making a political gesture. I’m having a big meal tonight.’

He continued as if I hadn’t spoken.

‘When I meet a woman, any woman, I imagine what she’d be like in bed. All men do, but most of them never dare to act on it. I did. If I met a woman and I was attracted to her, I’d invite her to bed. A lot of the time they’d accept.’ He pushed a large spoonful of steak and kidney pudding into his mouth and chewed it vigorously. ‘People aren’t supposed to say things like that, are they?’

‘Any woman at all?’ I asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘Like Chrissie Pilkington?’

‘Who?’

The steaming spoon halted half-way between bowl and mouth. Dead flesh in grease. Alan’s brow was furrowed with the effort of memory.

‘You don’t remember them all by name?’

‘Of course not.’

‘She was a schoolfriend of Natalie’s. Long curly silver hair, like a model for a pre-Raphaelite painting. Freckles. Small breasts. Tall. Fifteen years old.’

‘Yes, I remember,’ Alan said wistfully. ‘She was probably sixteen, wasn’t she?’ he added with a note of prudence.

‘Girls are beautiful at that age, don’t you think?’ I said.

‘Yes, I do,’ Alan replied. He looked wary. He liked to be in control of the conversation. He didn’t know where this was going.

‘Their skin is unblemished. Their bodies are firm, especially their breasts.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And they’ve got a particular sexual attraction. I could even see it in the girls that Jerome and Robert used to bring home. They’re still a bit like children but they’ve got adult bodies. And I bet they’re sexually submissive, and eager as well. I bet they’ll do almost anything you want and be grateful for it. Isn’t that right?’

‘Sometimes,’ Alan said, laughing uneasily. ‘That was all a long time ago.’

Paul looked uneasy as well. He was wondering what sort of private fight he had wandered into and what he should do about it.

‘It was all so perfect, wasn’t it? It was 1969 and the little girls were on the Pill and suddenly it wasn’t adultery or seduction any more. It was sexual liberation. Unfortunately it didn’t always work out. Like with Chrissie. Natalie found out. And she told Martha. And for once Martha didn’t get cross with you, or do nothing. She had an affair with my father. What did you think of that?’

‘What?’ said Paul, deeply shocked.

Alan’s steak and kidney pudding was finished. He noisily scraped the last streak of gravy from around the inside of the pie dish and licked it off his spoon. He used to say that this insistence on finishing every last particle of his food was a legacy from wartime. He couldn’t sustain his tirades the way he once had and he looked tired.

‘I thought it was a pathetic gesture,’ he said. ‘If Martha wanted to fuck someone…’ He wasn’t shouting but this was loud enough to make one or two of the pin-striped lunchers on adjacent tables turn their heads. Oh, it was that writer fellow being outrageous again. ‘If she wanted to fuck someone she should have gone and done it and had a really good fuck. Instead, she wanted to make a gesture, so she seduced your poor father. I don’t think your mother ever got over it. I think that Martha behaved contemptibly.’ Paul’s head was in his hands now.

‘Not only that,’ I added. ‘Natalie was threatening the family, that beautiful protected world that you had built up between the Martellos and the Cranes, just to make a stupid little point. I would have been angry if it had been me.’

Alan drained his glass. He no longer looked like a man who could manage a four-hour lunch.

‘I was angry,’ he said, but he was speaking in a muted tone now.

‘What did you do about it, Alan?’

He laid his spoon gently down into his bowl. ‘I think we’ve talked enough about sex for one lunch,’ he muttered.

‘You started it,’ I said, but he was too preoccupied to listen.

‘Our family – and I mean you as well – was a wonderful thing,’ Alan said. ‘It was terrible to put all that at risk just to hit out at me. Unforgivable. And in the end, the only person who was hurt was Felicity. Do you ever think about that, Jane? Darling, gentle Martha and your spiritual sister, Natalie, did that terrible thing to your mother.’

‘Natalie was hurt as well.’

Alan’s reactions had slowed down now. He had the befuddled look of an old man roused from sleep.

‘Natalie? It was Martha, really, not Natalie.’

‘It all came to a climax in the same summer, didn’t it? Chrissie and you, the revelation about Martha and my father, then Natalie. That’s going to be a lot to get into a sixty-minute film, Paul. Won’t you need a series?’

Paul pushed his pie dish aside. It was still half full.

‘What is it you want, Jane?’ he said quietly.

‘And what is it that you want, Paul,’ interjected Alan, always eager to toss petrol on the flames.

‘Alan, I love you, I love you all, that’s what I want to capture on film.’

‘We shall see,’ said Alan wearily. ‘Hurry up, Jane, we want our pudding.’

I prodded a tired quarter of tomato with my fork. The thought of food in my mouth made me want to gag.

The water in the sink was scummy with dark brown goose fat (‘Why are we having goose?’ Robert had complained, sounding about eleven. ‘We always have turkey!’). I pulled the plug, lifted out the greasy plates and stacked them neatly on the side. Bits of red cabbage and a couple of cigarette butts – mine, I supposed – lay at the bottom of the sink, along with a whole arsenal of cutlery. I swilled down the dirt, put the plug back in, and filled the sink with hot and very soapy water. Then I went back to the dining room to assess the damage.

A chair still lay on its side where Jerome had thrown it before storming out (‘You’ve gone too far this time, Mother !’), dragging Hana with him, listing gracefully on her thin black heels. I picked it up and sat down heavily on it. Candles guttered in the centre of the table, casting flickery light over the debris. A capsized half-demolished Christmas pudding lay, as unappetising as a ruptured football, among a smeary array of wine glasses, tumblers, port glasses, empty bottles. How much had we drunk? Not enough – not enough to blank out the memory, which anyway had been relentlessly filmed by the TV crew.

I picked up a green paper crown and stuck it on my head, then lit a cigarette. This was nice, being alone again. As I smoked, slowly, I shovelled the empty crackers together, and threw them on the glowing fire, which briefly flared, then returned to gold-speckled ash. A cracker joke caught my eye. ‘How many ears does Davy Crockett have? – Three: a left ear, a right ear, and a wild front ear.’ Oh, how Kim – in a stinging yellow gown – and Erica (roaring purple) had giggled. They’d giggled most of the evening, unexpected allies, mad molls in their absurd finery. They’d laughed at all the usual cracker jokes (‘What did the policeman say to his tummy? – You’re under a vest’; ‘Knock, knock. – Who’s there? – Boo. – Boo who? – Ah don’t cry.’); at Andreas, who clearly disapproved of Erica and this new-model Kim; at Paul’s directorial solemnity; at the cameras themselves. They’d sat on either side of Dad (who had gone into slow motion as everyone else had speeded up) and flirted with him outrageously, until he’d given grudging half-smiles, charmed by their loony girlishness.

I stubbed out my cigarette and carried the glasses to the kitchen. I washed the crockery and cutlery, rinsed it. Lovely silence. What a lot of shouting there had been: Paul at Erica (‘Are you trying to ruin my film?’), Andreas at Kim (‘You’ve had quite enough to drink’), Kim to Andreas (‘Piss off, you old fart, it’s Christmas and I’m not on call’), Jerome at Robert (‘If you can’t be polite to Hana, get out’), Robert at me (‘Still trying to make everyone one happy family?’). Dad hadn’t shouted, but then he’d hardly spoken. Claud hadn’t shouted, but he had followed me into the kitchen and hissed: ‘Who’s Caspar, Jane?’ I hadn’t shouted until the cameraman, backing away from a long take of Erica and Kim singing ‘Oh Little Town of Bethlehem’, had bumped into my precious green-glass decanter, knocking it to the floor.