The Memory Game

by Nicci French

  I flushed red in embarrassment. Even my toes, under their layers of leather and cotton, must have been blushing.

  ‘What about you then?’

  ‘Isn’t Paul going to tell us?’

  Paul looked genuinely alarmed.

  ‘I didn’t promise anything,’ he said, gulping.

  ‘Come on, don’t be shy. You’re expecting everybody else to bleat about their private lives in your ridiculous telly programme.’

  ‘God, Alan, this is pretty juvenile, isn’t it? If you must know, I have probably had sex with about thirteen women, maybe fifteen. Are you satisfied?’

  ‘I win then,’ said Alan. ‘I would estimate that I have slept with something over a hundred women, probably over a hundred and twenty-five.’

  ‘Oh, well done, Alan,’ I said in my driest of tones. ‘Especially as you had the handicap of being married with children.’

  Alan was well into the claret now. ‘Ah, the true, the blushful Hippocrene,’ he said as he drank deep and then wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘It wasn’t a handicap. Do you know one of the good things about literary success?’

  Paul and I looked quizzical. We knew that no actual answer was required.

  ‘The women,’ said Alan. ‘When you write a successful novel and become a representative, however misleadingly, of a younger generation, you get rewarded by money and fame, of course, but also you get a lot of women whom you would not otherwise have got. It’s like this,’ he said, pushing his spoon into his bowl and lifting out some gobbets of flesh. ‘We’re meant to pretend not to like this sort of thing, aren’t we? The blood of the meat and the kidneys with their fine tang of faintly scented urine. And we’re supposed to whine and winge about the sufferings of animals. I like meat. I like veal. I love foie gras. Who cares about the calf growing up in the dark or how the goose was fed?’

  ‘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.

  Twenty-Three

  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. Cand
les 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.

  The plates were done, lined up in a gleaming row of white. Glasses done. I lifted a tray of disparate objects (matches, a set of keys, paper clip, pen, thimble, paper-knife, ear-ring, Remembrance Day poppy, screwdriver, black pawn from a chess set) and winced at the memory. Oh God, we’d played the Memory Game. Claud had organised it, of course, explaining the rules to a half-sozzled company (‘Memorise what’s on the tray, then I’ll cover it up, and you must write down everything you can, then we’ll uncover the tray and see who’s remembered the most objects’). It was a game we’d played a lot as children. One of the objects on the tray, staring up at a suddenly sober company, had been a photograph of Claud and me and the boys, taken years ago (By whom? I could no longer remember). Smiling, touching each other. That’s when Jerome had thrown over his chair.

  I poured out a glass of port in a thick purple glug and lit a final cigarette. The rest of the mess could wait till morning. I took off my shoes, my ear-rings. Yawned. Giggled suddenly at the memory of Kim and Erica. The phone rang.

  ‘Hello.’ Who would ring at this time of night?

  ‘Mum.’ It was Jerome and he still sounded angry. ‘Never do that again.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t have a good time? What a pity – I was thinking of reconvening at New Year’s Eve.’

  ‘This is exactly what I needed.’

  I was lying by green water, palm trees and thick plants all around, in a thick white towelling robe. We were drinking mango juice, and I was feeling more relaxed than I had done in a very long time. My muscles had unstrung, my bones felt supple, my skin soft, green light danced against my eyeballs. The winter sun, slanting in through the tall windows, stroked my bare legs. The echoey room was filled with low murmurs of women, like a harem without a master. I could feel my heart-beat smooth and comforting. Soon I would have a swim, then a massage. Then I would lie down again, and flick through women’s magazines, reading advertisements for sun lotion and lip gloss.

  Kim had called me the evening before, when I’d been feeling wearily sad. She’d bought two day passes for The Nunnery, a women-only health centre, and wasn’t asking but insisting that I came along. I’d protested, but feebly, and at the sound of her voice, so matter-of-fact and familiar, my eyes had filled with tears. I’d felt as if, at last, I were coming unravelled; all my seams undoing at once.

  When I’d put the phone down, it had rung again almost immediately. It was Catherine, from a payphone. Paul had come round, she said, and he and Peggy were quarrelling; they weren’t even bothering to keep their voices low. It was awful, awful, like the days before Paul had left the family for good. They were shouting at each other and it all had something to do with Natalie, and please please could I tell her what was going on. I couldn’t tell her because I didn’t know. I said something banal about Paul and Peggy loving her a lot, and she must never forget that, then realised that I was talking to her as if she were six, so stopped. But instead of being surly down the phone, Catherine started sobbing noisily. I imagined her leaning her beautiful skinny body against the grubby kiosk, and wiping her tears with her black T-shirt, her sharp knobbly elbows icy in the winter air. I muttered something, and she sobbed on. The money ran out on a gasping sniff.

  When Robert and Jerome had been little, it had been so easy to comfort them. Even now, I could vividly recall how their bunchy bodies could be gathered up, heads tucked into my neck, my chin on their smooth crowns, their determined legs wrapped fiercely round my waist; how I’d croon nonsense as I wiped away tears that smarted on their flushed cheeks… My little darling… it’ll all be okay… Mummy’ll protect you… there, pigeon, there, humdinger… don’t you fret, don’t fret a bit… Mummy’s here, my sweet love… my darling one.

  Then, slowly, they had stopped wanting me to touch them. One day, I’d realised they no longer got into bed with me in the mornings, that they closed the bathroom door. When something was wrong, they’d go to their rooms, and I’d have to fight against the urge to follow them, pretend that Mummy could still make it better. When Robert was bullied at school, and went around in a fog of mute shame, and it was only when I heard one little boy calling him sissy that with a punch in the gut I knew what was going on; when Jerome had his first sweetheart and sewed absurd felt hearts (so uncool) onto his jeans, and then she chucked him after one date, so we had to spend an evening unpicking them and he pretended to be indifferent, not to care, he winced at my sympathy; when Robert quarrelled with Claud about smoking, and neither of them could talk to the other for days, pompous gits, and I longed to shake them both, but instead I busied myself around them, and I thought, even then, what a waste of time this is. There were days when all I wanted to do was to hug them, touch them, my boys, my lovely sons – but they’d twitch embarrassedly, good humouredly: don’t be soppy.

  Ever since they’d been born, they’d been leaving me. I remembered Mum, just before she died, saying: ‘The best gift I could give you was your independence. But you were always in such a hurry to go from me.’ Children are always in such a hurry to go. I remembered Robert, aged five or so, at the beach. His shoe lace was undone and he was crying because we’d left him behind. He stood, a little blocky shape on a great expanse of sand. I ran back, stooped down to help, and he pushed me away: ‘I can do it.’ They practise being grown-up for such a long time, and then one day you notice that they really are grown-up. Where had all that time gone? How had it happened that I was middle-aged and on my own, and never again would I know the swamping joy of holding a child under my chin and saying: Don’t fret, it’ll be all right, I promise you it’ll be all right.

  I wept myself to sleep, great raw spasms of weeping, and felt as if something was breaking up inside me. In the morning – a great ice-blue sky and skeletal frost-covered branches – I pulled on a track suit, packed shampoo and Jane Eyre into a shoulder bag, a
nd went to meet Kim. Now, lying side by side, eyes shut in the white and green space, I spoke dreamily. Today, to Kim, I could say anything at all. Words floated in the air between us, clouds of explanation. Water lapped, and green ripples danced across my closed eyes. My body was water; my heart had dissolved; emotion was running softly through me, like a dreamy river.

  ‘I feel I’m in trouble, Kim.’

  ‘This is Natalie?’

  Kim held my hand, our fingers locked, our arms hanging between the sun-beds. Was this despair that I was feeling? Despair didn’t have to be vicious and hard; it could be like warm liquid filling up every crevice in my body.

  ‘It might have been a stranger, some random tragedy.’

  ‘Yes.’ My voice came out in a whisper.

  ‘Luke is probably the most likely suspect, even though he wasn’t the father of the baby. Maybe he killed her because he knew he wasn’t the father.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Whatever it is, it certainly isn’t your responsibility to find out.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘You couldn’t possibly have anyone else in mind? Darling Jane, you’re not going to make a fool of yourself.’

  We lay a little longer in silence. I still had my eyes shut; the only part of me that felt solid were my fingers, where they clasped Kim’s.

  I had a massage. A woman smelling of lemons, her dark blonde hair tied back in a smooth pony-tail, her feet bare, stood over me and dug her strong fingers into all my aches and pains. My last resistance was pushed up the channels of my body, out. My tears ran onto the couch, puddled against my cheek. I felt empty.

  I collected my car from the car-park on St Martin’s Lane – God, what an indulgence – and headed over to Charing Cross Road and north. I turned on the radio. I didn’t want music. I didn’t want to be trapped with my own thoughts, so I pushed the button until I found someone speaking.

  ‘What has not been taken on board by the sleepy Establishment that still rules this country is that the most valuable commodity in the world will soon be something that you can’t hold in your hands; it’s not oil or even gold, but information.’