Nicci French: The Memory Game

He was suddenly a sad old man at a loss. There was a boozy whisper in my ear.

‘What a bloody showman. He’s loving it, isn’t he?’

It was Fred. He was already very drunk. I told him to hush.

‘She was clever and beautiful and young; her life was just beginning.’ I heard a stifled sob, but couldn’t tell from whom it came. ‘She was stubborn and she was bolshie.’ Tears were rolling down Alan’s cheeks now; he didn’t bother to wipe them away but continued steadily. ‘She never liked goodbyes – even when she was a tiny little girl, she would push me away if I tried to hug her outside school. She would never wave from a bus; she always used to look straight ahead. That was my girl, she never looked back. But we can say goodbye to her now.’ Alan looked down at the glass in his hand, and then, more composed, he continued. ‘This is a new era of our life,’ he put an arm around Martha’s narrow shoulders, held rigid against grief. ‘Perhaps I can even write a proper book again,’ he added, with a half-laugh. ‘Anyway, I wanted to say to you that I am glad we are all here today. You all loved Natalie, and Natalie loved you.’ He raised his champagne glass, bubbles winking in the firelight. ‘I’d like to propose a toast. To Natalie.’

People looked at each other. Was this in good taste?

‘To Natalie.’

Before I could get the champagne into my mouth, half of it was spilled as Fred emotionally clutched me to him.

‘I’m sorry about your marriage, Jane,’ he said thickly, ‘and I’m sorry about your building. I’ve never seen one of your buildings and I was looking forward to sleeping in that one. But there’ll always be a ghost in it now, won’t there?’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘I would. I would say that,’ said Fred. ‘But the real question is this.’ Here he paused so long that I thought he had finished. I would have moved away if he had not been clutching my sleeve. ‘The question is, is it a happy ghost or a sad ghost?’

‘I don’t really know,’ I said, looking for a means of escape.

‘And what secrets does it have to tell?’

‘Yes, but it’s supper now,’ I said and raised my voice.

‘Supper, everybody.’

It was over. Pulpy rice with chewy-soft mushroom; pink herby lamb; chocolate soufflés puffed at their rims. Candlelight softened everybody’s faces; voices rose and fell like a rhythm. Even the young people, playing Boggle by the fire, spoke softly. Even Alan, twiddling the stem of his glass and declaiming on the state of the contemporary novel (rotten, of course, in his absence), didn’t raise his voice. Fred had buttonholed me again and told me that Claud and I should both hire his wife, Lynn, to arrange our divorce, but his development of this scheme was interrupted when Lynn realised what was going on and took him up to bed.

‘I must be pushed before I fall,’ he said as Lynn sternly led him up the stairs.

‘Is he all right?’ I asked Lynn when she came back down, alone.

Lynn was a handsome assured woman, immaculately turned out in a dark velvet skirt and jacket.

‘He’s involved in a restructuring of the trust,’ she said. ‘It’s been rather stressful.’

‘Sackings?’

‘Downsizing,’ she said.

I hoped she would elaborate but she started offering sympathy and I lost interest. As soon as I could, I left Lynn and joined Jerome, who was still looking sullen, and Hana. He responded to my questions in monosyllables. I moved across to Theo who was staring into the fire. I touched him on the shoulder and he started.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

He turned but hardly seemed to see me.

‘I’m thinking of the silliest things,’ he said. ‘When she was younger, eleven or twelve, we used to do cartwheels, in summer, when the grass was dry. The only way I could ever do cartwheels at all was to do them really quickly. She used to laugh at me and say that my legs weren’t high enough. She would do them and her skirt or dress would fall down, over her head sometimes, and we – I mean the boys – would laugh at her. But she could do them slowly, the way they’re meant to be done. Down on your hands, then one leg slowly up, then the other leg following it, like two spokes in a wheel. Then down. They were perfect and we were too proud to tell her.’

‘I don’t think she minded,’ I said. ‘She always knew what she was good at.’

‘And I remember when she used to sit reading, over there in the window seat, she always looked cross. That was what she looked like when she was concentrating. Cross. It was funny.’

I nodded, unable to speak. I wasn’t ready for all this.

‘You know that old cliché of coming back from school and finding your little sister has turned into a woman? It was a bit like that when she was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. I’d come back from school in the holidays and she’d be going out with people she used to play with. And then Luke, remember?’ I nodded. ‘I felt strange about it. Not good, in a way. It was the first time in my life that it had occurred to me that we’d all be growing up. And that I’d see Natalie grown up and a mother and all that and I never did.’

He turned towards me. His eyes were wet. I took his hand.

‘I remember that cross look,’ I said softly. ‘That awful summer when it rained all the time and she said she was going to learn how to juggle and she spent day after day with three of those bloody beanbags or whatever they were. She had that cross look and her tongue out of one corner of her mouth, day after day, and she did it.’ I was just inches away from Theo now. We were murmuring to each other like lovers. ‘I remember her lying in front of this fire. The flames in her eyes. I was next to her, right close up. And we’d giggle if anybody said anything to us. God, we must have been irritating.’

Theo smiled for the first time. ‘You were.’

The spell was broken. Claud was in the background somewhere opening a bottle of port. The thick purple liquid gurgled softly into a trayful of glasses. He held up a hand and the murmur in the room ceased. ‘To the cook,’ he said, and smiled ruefully at me across the meal’s debris. This dinner suddenly felt like a farewell. I wondered what would happen now, and I felt scared of the future.

‘To Jane,’ echoed everyone.

‘To Alan and Martha,’ added my father. I could tell from his voice, which slopped around its normally precise edges, that he was a bit drunk.

‘And to Claud who’s organised it all,’ shouted Jonah above the hubbub.

‘To Theo, who found the parasols,’ said someone at the back.

The sweet and melancholy spell was broken.

‘To us all,’ said Alan.

‘To us all.’

My car didn’t start at first. The morning was cold and the engine wheezed and died several times before coughing into life. I wound down the window. My sons were there, looking bleak. Robert was coming with me.

‘Bye, Jerome, bye, Hana. Ring me when you get back to London. Drive carefully.’

Hana came up and kissed me through the window. I blew a kiss at Rosie, who pointed a finger at me which she then inserted into one nostril. Paul was loading an improbable amount of luggage into their car. I called to him. He waved. Alan and Martha stood side by side to see me off. I leant out and took Alan’s hand and squeezed it.

‘Alan,’ I said, ‘shall we meet next time you’re in London?’

I felt awkward, as if I were asking if we could keep in touch. He ruffled my head as if I were still a teenager.

‘Jane,’ he said, ‘you’ll always be our daughter-in-law. Isn’t that right, Martha?’

‘Of course,’ she said, hugging me.

She smelt so familiar: powder and yeast and wood-smoke. Martha had always managed to be gloriously sexy and reassuringly homely all at once. There were tears in her eyes as she kissed me, and for a moment I wanted nothing so much as to undo everything I had started: the separation from her son, the wretched plans for the cottage which had uncovered the remains of her daughter. Then she squeezed my hand.