Michael Ridpath - Amnesia

He couldn’t see any deer, but as he scanned the sky, he spotted a large bird wheeling above the stand of pines near the Lodge. It was too close to see its colouration, but he could tell from the splayed ‘fingers’ at its wingtips that it was a golden eagle.

He stopped and stared at the magnificent bird. He loved eagles.

And then, suddenly, he remembered another eagle a continent away, several continents away. They were in the outback somewhere in WA, three hundred kilometres from Perth. Him and Mike. Mike was a young guy, in his thirties, Alastair’s next-door neighbour. He was studying wedge-tailed eagles. He needed to trap them to tag them, and that was very difficult. He and Alastair had discussed the problem one evening over a beer on Alastair’s veranda, and Alastair had come up with a solution. The eagles were so big that they needed a run-up to take off. So if you built a wire cage, open at the top, which was big enough for them to swoop down into, but did not give them enough space to take off, you might catch one.

Mike had taken Alastair out to try the idea, and it had worked! They had caught a young male. Problem solved! Mike was overjoyed.

Alastair smiled at the memory. Slowly his life was coming back to him.

When he had woken up in hospital, the realization that he didn’t know who he was had scared the hell out of him. As the fuzziness in his brain had receded over the next couple of days, the emptiness that was his life had taken on a kind of awful clarity. Without memory, could there be life? How could he be a person if he didn’t know who he was? What was existence — I forget therefore I’m not? How could he remember Descartes when he couldn’t even recall his own wife’s name?

And then there was the dread. The fear that he didn’t want to remember his life, that his memories would horrify him, terrify him. And if his life was too dreadful to remember, perhaps it hadn’t been worth living? He had been tempted to withdraw, to curl up in a dark cave of forgetfulness.

But Clémence had come and taken him away from the hospital and slowly, slowly he was getting back in control.

He could remember some things clearly. His childhood: the grey stone house on the edge of Pateley Bridge overlooking the River Nidd; Riggs Moor and Fountains Abbey; his mother and father; his little sister Joyce; Porky Bakewell; his boarding school at the head of another dale many miles away; his school friends Greenhalgh and Murray and Simpson Minor; playing rugger; the exhilaration of scoring a try against Ampleforth.

And now he had remembered Sophie at Honfleur, he remembered Wyvis, he remembered the eagles in Australia. With patience and effort more of it would come back. Perhaps he would even remember his wife — Helen they said her name was. It was very odd not to be able to remember your wife. He assumed she was dead; she must be, otherwise he would have heard from her. How had she died? Had he been heartbroken? Would he be heartbroken again when he eventually recalled it? Or maybe he hated her or she hated him — they had divorced after all. Whose fault was that, his or hers?

The dread had receded, thank God. Alden’s death had been bad; they should definitely have reported what had really happened to the police, but it was a long time ago, and he could forgive himself. Especially since it wasn’t actually he who had killed the man.

If he was ever going to break out of this limbo, this half life of half memories, he had to find out more. He had been tempted to pick up the book while Clémence was out and read the next chapter to himself, but he couldn’t find it. She must have hidden it in her room somewhere, and he couldn’t bring himself to search her stuff for it. Anyway, he preferred to read the novel with her. It seemed safer to have her company unearthing these lost memories — he didn’t want to do it alone. And she had a lovely soft voice; she was a good reader.

Something was wrong, though. She had lost her initial friendliness of the day before. She must disapprove of what he had done, what they all had done, with Alden. It was a shame. She was only young, but Alastair didn’t want her disapproval.

He was now down by the loch and Wyvis Lodge. The lodge was large enough for a decent-sized house party. Luxury in the midst of isolation, and all in the name of massacring deer. He turned away and followed the track along the loch. He soon came to a wooden boathouse with a metal roof, which stretched out from the shore on pilings. That he definitely remembered.

Just beyond it, the trees came down to the loch, and a path led up through the woods to Culzie.

He stopped and looked up the boulder-strewn slope, with its twisted grey tree trunks and their tangled branches, fingers in mossy gloves clutching and fidgeting all around him, pointing at him, accusing him. Of what? He was tired, and his right knee was stiffening up. He wasn’t sure he had the energy to get up there.

Suddenly, the dread that had released him from its grip clutched at his chest. He turned to the boathouse.

The memories came crashing over his head, like a tidal wave erupting from the loch. Night. Sophie. An owl. Sophie.

‘No!

‘No, no, no!’

He turned and stumbled up the path, pursued by memories of that other night when he had stumbled up the same path and his life had been changed for ever.

Antibes, June 1939

A blast of mid-afternoon Mediterranean heat struck me as I stepped out on to the unshaded platform. I turned my face up to the sun, high in a pale-blue sky, savouring the freedom from countless hours cooped up in railway carriages. I was hot, I was tired, I was sweaty, but the strong direct sunlight invigorated my Yorkshire soul.

‘Angus!’

I turned to see the tall figure of Stephen ambling towards me in an open-necked shirt and sunglasses.

‘Good to see you, old man! Let me take that.’

Stephen grabbed my scratched suitcase and led me out to his car, a two-seater electric-blue Railton with the top down.

Stephen had spent nearly two weeks in France already, driving out from London in his sports car. He had attended the wedding at the de Parzacs’ chateau just south of Orléans, and then driven down to the Riviera to stay with his mother. The plan was to meet me there, and then drive through Italy to Tony Volstead’s villa on the island of Capri, where the newly married couple would stay for the last week of their honeymoon.

The newly married couple were Nathan and Madeleine.

When I had opened Nathan’s letter telling me they were getting engaged, I was so surprised I had had to read it twice. Nathan and I had corresponded regularly since we had left Oxford two years before. I was aware that Alden’s will had been a mess. Alden had intended to leave his French property to his wife, and his considerable stake in Wakefield Oil to his favourite nephew, Nathan. The trouble was that the will had been drawn up by an American lawyer friend on holiday in Paris, who had failed to take proper account of French inheritance laws. Madeleine’s lawyers had taken aim at Nathan’s lawyers and war had ensued. However, the more the two principals saw of each other, the less belligerent they became, until, as Nathan put it, he had suggested the perfect solution. And, amazingly, Madeleine had agreed. So now they were married.

Stephen drove me through the lazy palm-lined streets of Antibes with the Mediterranean sparkling over to our left. We would set out for Italy in the morning; in the meantime there were cocktails to be drunk and a pool to be swum in at his mother’s villa. This was small and white, but right by the sea, with a terrace overlooking the swimming pool, and beyond that, the Baie des Anges.