Nicci French - The Memory Game

I felt a voice, intimate in my ear:

‘You got there, Jane. You’re all right. You’re safe.’

I woke up in my own bed, didn’t know how I’d got there. Yes, Alex had brought me in his car. Had I made a scene and scared his children? My bike must still be locked to a parking meter outside his house. I picked up the alarm clock. Almost ten o’clock. Morning or evening? Must be morning. If it was night, it would be twenty o’clock. No, twenty-two. There was something on the edge of my consciousness not wanting to be thought about. I made myself think about it. I had to be quick to get to the lavatory. I leant into the bowl and retched and retched, bringing up nothing but a few hot, stinging splashes.

I washed around my mouth with a flannel. I was still wearing my clothes. I let them fall where I stood and stepped into the shower. Very hot water followed by very cold water. I dressed myself in jeans and an old corduroy shirt. My fingers trembled so much I could hardly fasten the buttons. I decided that I should eat something and went down to the kitchen. There were two bags of coffee beans in my freezer and I chose the darker ones. I filled a large cafetière. After hunting round a bit, I found an unopened packet of cigarettes in the pocket of the coat I’d been wearing the previous night. I emptied the cafetière, cup by cup, and smoked my way through the packet.

The phone rang a few times and I heard various voices on the answering machine. Duncan, Caspar, my father. I would deal with them later, some other day. When I heard Alex Dermot-Brown’s voice, I ran across the room and picked up the receiver. He was concerned about me. He asked if I was all right and then said he wanted me to come round. Straight away, if possible. I said I’d be there in an hour. It was cold outside but bright, sunny. I put on a long napping coat, wound a scarf about my neck, put a flat cap on my head and set off for the Heath. The wind blew about me in gusts and when I reached the top of Kite Hill, London was miraculously clear at my feet. I could see right across it to the Surrey hills beyond. I walked down and left the Heath at Parliament Hill and passed the Royal Free hospital. Claud had told me about a mental patient there who had been possessed by a neurotic compulsion to count the number of windows. Since he never achieved the same figure twice, it was an eternal task.

The things we do to give order to our lives. I had once read a poem about a man arrested for filling in the ‘o’s in library books. Did he think of all the ‘o’s that he had filled in, or all the ‘o’s that he hadn’t? It was a long, hard trek and I was out of breath by the time I knocked at Alex’s door. All the cigarettes. I almost laughed as I caught myself resolving to give up. Not yet. Not yet.

When the door opened, Alex surprised me, almost overwhelmed me, by taking me in his arms and holding me tight to him, murmuring comforting words in my ear as if I was one of his little children, scared of the dark. It was what I wanted more than anything else in the world. After the reassurance, his look turned serious as he asked me once more if I was all right.

‘I don’t know. I’ve been vomiting and I still feel sick. My head feels like somebody’s trying to inflate it with a bicycle pump.’

Alex smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s just what I would expect. It’s like a fever breaking. Think of it as your body trying to expel a quarter of a century of poisons and impurities that have been trapped inside you. You’re purifying yourself.’

‘Am I going mad, Alex?’

‘You’re becoming sane. You’re discovering the agony of a life without illusions.’

‘But Alex, can it be true? Can it really be true? Could a man like Alan have got his own daughter pregnant? Could he have killed her?’

Very gently, Alex held my face in his hands and looked closely in my eyes.

‘You’re the one, Jane, who has broken through all the barriers and lies to uncover this. You’ve made the journey, Jane. You tell me, do you think it’s impossible that he could have done this?’

It seemed an immense effort to reply. I stepped back and his hands dropped away from me. I slowly shook my head.

‘No,’ I said in little more than a whisper. ‘I don’t think it’s impossible.’

A couple of minutes later I was back on the couch and Alex was in his chair. I started trying to reconstruct the details of what had happened all those years before but Alex was firm. All that could wait, he said. Instead he talked to me softly, as he had so often before, and he took me back into my memory, back to the scene of the murder. During that session and again during another on the following day, and again on the day after that, he took me over and over the events and they became clearer and more precise. It was like a photographic image that already seemed satisfactory coming more and more into focus, bringing with it new details and nuances. I saw Natalie struggling, I could see what she was wearing, from that familiar braided hair-band to the black plimsolls that I always associate with her. I could see Alan, strong and heavy, holding her down, grasping her throat, tightening his grip until all movement ceased.

‘Couldn’t I have done something?’

‘What could you have done? Your mind saved you by shielding you from the horror of what happened. Now we’ve broken through that shield.’

I found the process of reliving the event unspeakably harsh. The crime was so vivid and violent, and I was so close – just metres away in the bushes – that I felt I could intervene, do something, maybe just shout. But I knew that I had not intervened and that it was now beyond my power and that there was nothing to be done. The shock and pain remained constant. There was no coming to terms, no catharsis, no getting beyond the pain or working my way through it. I achieved no distance from the events, I was not able to think about them in a balanced way. These were days of sobbing, retching grief, of smoking instead of eating, of drinking on my own at home.

Sprinkle some celery salt into the jug, followed by a few twists of black pepper, three splashes of Tabasco, an improbable amount of Lea & Perrins, the juice of half a lemon and a shake of tomato ketchup. Always begin with the cheapest ingredients. If you are using a whole litre carton of tomato juice, as I was, you will need a good tumbler of iced Russian vodka. Finally, the secret ingredient: half a wineglass of dry sherry. A handful of ice in your chunky tumbler and you have a drink substantial enough to replace dinner. A middle-period Bartok string quartet would have suited my mood but I listened to Rigoletto . Woman is mobile. This one wasn’t. I had gone inside myself and been horrified by what I had found. Outside was cold and dark. I would have to go out there soon and deal with things in the world. That was next.

When I had drained the last watery little puddle from my glass, I decided to go outside. Everything had to be done with utmost care. It was cold. I put on a sweater. I put on a coat and a hat. I found my keys and my purse and put them in the pocket of the coat. Outside, the icy air cleared my head a little. I had destroyed my marriage. I had done God-knows-what to my children. I had damaged my own mental health. I had uncovered horrors. People I loved were already appalled by my actions. What catastrophe was I now going to inflict on the family that meant more to me than anything in the world? The wind was blowing stingingly cold drops of rain into my face. Life had become horrible for me.

I was walking past shops now. A man, his hair in long matted ringlets, sat outside the supermarket with a mangy pathetic-looking dog of indeterminate breed. His hand was extended towards me. This was what happened to people who removed themselves from the world of family and society and work. I opened my purse and found a coin which I gave him, holding it precisely between two fingers so that I wouldn’t fumble it.