Nicci French - The Memory Game

‘I gave a statement. Buthe confessed,’ I admitted. ‘He’s pleading guilty.’

‘How convenient,’ said Melanie. ‘Look, people can’t bear to admit that abuse is widespread, that it’s not just the evil maniac but the man next door – the man in the next room. It’s too terrible to contemplate. So we, the victims, are not supposed to remember – are blamed for remembering. Now we are speaking up. Soon other people will speak up as well and the systematic protection of these abusers will be revealed. The police and your family have tried to make you deny your own reality, to alienate you from yourself. We’re here to help you.’

After the workshop, Alex had other people he wanted me to see but I told him I wanted to leave. I said I would catch a cab but he insisted on driving me and making sure I was all right. I was silent for several minutes as we moved slowly in the early rush-hour traffic.

‘What did you make of Melanie’s group?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know what to say. I find it difficult to be rational about so much suffering.’

‘Would you be interested in joining?’

‘God, I don’t know, Alex. I once had to run a bring-and-buy stall at the boys’ school fête. That experience put me off joining anything. I can’t really cope with crowds.’

There was another long silence. I had two difficult questions to ask.

‘Alex,’ I said finally, ‘you’re a recovered memory specialist and it turned out that I had a memory waiting to be recovered. Isn’t that strange?’

‘No, Jane, it isn’t. Don’t you remember our first meeting? I didn’t think I could do anything for you. You talked about having a black hole somewhere in the middle of your golden childhood. That interested me. I looked for a hidden memory because I was already sure that it was there.’

‘You couldn’t have been wrong?’

‘You found it, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, I did. I wish I felt happier about it.’

‘Remember what Melanie said to you. It’s natural to feel guilt about a recovered memory. Life seemed simpler before, didn’t it? But it wasn’t you who killed Natalie.’

‘Alex, you didn’t tell a journalist about me, did you?’

With startling suddenness, Alex turned the car and brought it to a sudden halt by the kerb. Somebody hooted and shouted something.

‘Jane, I’m your doctor. That’s a terrible thing to say.’

‘It wasn’t exactly a secret at the conference.’

‘They’re a community of sufferers, Jane. They can help you, you can help them. You’re a strong and intelligent woman, a survivor. You have an opportunity to do a great deal of good.’

‘This is all happening too quickly, Alex. I can’t start making commitments to other people. I’m having difficulty looking after myself.’

‘You’re stronger than you know. If you wanted you could be a witness on behalf of a great cause. You might think of writing about your experience, if only as a form of therapy. Don’t say anything, just bear it in mind. If you needed any help, we could do it together.’

I shook my head. I felt the utmost weariness.

‘ Home, James.’

Of all the characters caught up in the ghastly drama, Claud was undoubtedly the hero. For months – years, if I’m honest – he’d hovered in the wings of my life before I’d tried to push him off the stage altogether. Now it was hard for me to imagine my life without him, although I was very careful not to see him too much, nor to lean on him when I did. Kim continually warned me.

‘Be kind,’ she said, ‘but think about what kindness means in this situation.’

There were days when I wanted him back, and couldn’t understand why I’d left him in the first place. On those days, I cooked and gardened and drank gin, and I tried to ignore the jittery, fluttery panics high in my stomach.

Claud, of course, had been warned about Alan in advance, but I am not sure ∗∗∗that that made the horror any less, or the pain easier. Over the next four months he reacted by taking on the part of the eldest son, the man of the family. I watched with bemused admiration as he dealt with the press, wrote letters, sorted Martha’s possessions. He seemed to have stopped sleeping, and was ceaselessly concerned to make everyone’s life run more smoothly. He looked younger; the deep lines running down from his mouth, which had given his face a look of middle-aged sorrow, faded; his eyes were brighter. While everyone around him, in one way or another, went to pieces, he seemed to cohere, be a more collected person than he’d been for a long time. He was charged with a sense of purpose; I thought maybe he was heading for a nervous breakdown.

He never blamed me. He seemed to me to be watching my every word and every gesture, always careful not to say anything that would hurt me. His niceness was unnerving, and reminded me of when we first started dating: how he would always hold open doors, arrive carrying flowers, never interrupt my sentences, make sure to compliment me on my clothes. He tried not to disagree with me, and when he did it was in a respectful, cautious kind of way that used to drive me mad. It had taken him a long time – well into our marriage, when we had two sons and a mortgage and a whole network of friends in common – to relax his guard, or take me for granted. I’m not sure that he ever did entirely. He was always too scared of casting me off and losing me. Perhaps he had lost me because he had never quite given himself up to me. He’d offered me his adoration and strength, but not his fears and failures. He had tried too hard. Now, in this reacquired solicitude, he diligently kept me informed about everything: how Theo and Jonah and Alfred were, how their wives and offspring had behaved over the whole business, even what they all said about me, although he was evasively informative about this: I could sense him editing out all the bitterness.

‘And Alan?’ I asked him on one of his early visits.

‘He won’t speak,’ replied Claud. ‘Not to anyone. Not a single word.’

The thought of Alan – who for as long as I’d known him, had never been able to stop himself speaking – retreating into silence, was somehow terrifying. I imagined his mind, like a great fish, thrashing just under the quiet surface.

As the prospect of the trial became more concrete I felt increasingly vulnerable and exposed. One day I was photographed unawares walking to the shops and the photograph was widely published: ‘The Memory Woman.’ There were legal constraints about what specifically could be said of me but that didn’t stop medical correspondents writing about recovered memory in the newspapers, columnists talking about the supposed issues involved and about families and the pressures on a famous writer as he grows old. I had wandered into a zoo and couldn’t get out.

Frantic efforts were made to persuade Alan to accept a lawyer but he refused legal representation of any kind. He insisted that he would plead guilty and would make no defence and allow no defence to be made on his behalf. There was some nervousness that this might be a perverse trick and that he might suddenly plead not guilty at the last minute. So I had two interviews in small chambers off Fleet Street in which a formally dressed young man and woman questioned me closely with particular attention to the means by which I had found the diaries and details of my sessions with Alex Dermot-Brown. Almost everything I said provoked whispers and serious expressions.

‘Is there a problem?’ I asked.

‘Admissibility,’ the young man said, ‘but that’s our problem, not yours.’

Claud behaved as if he could, by sheer willpower, make things ‘all right’ (‘It will be all right’ was a repeated phrase, mechanically hopeful). He was the only person still seeing all the brothers, and talking to Jerome and Robert, playing squash with Paul, maintaining the fiction that there was still this glorious entity made up of the Cranes and the Martellos. He went to see Dad several times, and I think that they managed to talk together in a way they’d never done while we were still together. Claud even visited Peggy, whom he had never really got on with, and answered her questions. ‘Just because she and Paul are divorced, it doesn’t mean that she should be excluded. After all, she knows Alan far better than Erica does.’