by Unknown
I sat entranced while my cigarette burnt down to my fingertips and gazed as Paul spoke intimately to the camera. Memory, he was saying, is intangible, and die memories one has of childhood, which glow so vividly through all of our adult life, are seductive and nostalgic. And if one’s childhood is happy, then adulthood is like an exile from its joy. We can never return. More music, and the camera zoomed in on the door of the Stead. Alan walked out. My ash fell onto the duvet cover and I brushed it heedlessly away. He quoted something from Wordsworth, and spoke about love. He said, with all the old Alan bravado, that he had been a wild young man who had scorned the concept of family and kicked against its traces. But he had learnt that this – he gestured at the Stead – was where he could be himself. He talked about the family as the place where you could be most tormented, or most at peace. ‘For myself, I have found a kind of peace,’ he said. He looked, as he stood on the threshold, like a mass-produced wise patriarch that you might buy in a souvenir shop. I watched his broad hands as he gestured, and I shuddered. Martha, thin as a tree branch, came through the doorway carrying a broad basket and some secateurs, smiled strangely at the camera and walked off screen. The camera moved sideways, and came to rest on the site where Natalie’s body had been found. Paul stated the facts. Then came a series of stills of Natalie : as a baby, a toddler, a ten-year-old, a teenager; on her own, with her family. Then her tombstone.
Claud appeared and now that I was his audience I saw how handsome he was, how serious. I sat like a coiled spring while I waited for him to talk about me, and our marriage break-up, but all he said was that ‘some things had not turned out as he had hoped’. I was shocked by the spasm of pity and love that jolted me. Cut to Robert and Jerome playing frisbee on Hampstead Heath. So young and carefree. Then Jerome, affectionately derisive on how the older generation was obsessed with the past. Fred, at home with his family on their well-tended patio. Alan again, drinking brandy and being expansive on the power of forgiveness. Theo comparing a family to a computer program.
Me, that was me, red-faced in my kitchen. Oh God, Christmas – but the Christmas I watched as I waited for Kim to arrive was one of festive hilarity : laughter boomed out of the television; I smiled a lot and handed round wine (had I smiled a lot that evening? I couldn’t remember). Erica and Kim looked like two extravagant birds of paradise in their purple and yellow get-ups. Dad was distinguished Old Age, and my sons fresh Youth. The power of editing – to splice images so that collective trauma becomes a display of boozy unity.
I smoked the last cigarette in the packet. In spite of being revolted by the film’s message, smashed as it was into a thousand pieces by Alan’s confession, I was half seduced by its melancholy insistence upon the past as a place of innocence and joy, the lost Eden in everyone. The music, the winter greenness of Shropshire, the faces that came and went on the television screen, as familiar as the palm of my hand, the way that Paul, somehow, had made even his most resistant interviewees talk with a kind of inner concentration so that they seemed to be discovering truths about themselves for the first time – these things filled me with rich sorrow.
The film was nearing its end now. Paul was walking along the Col, hands in his pocket. The brown water was swollen with all the recent rain. He stopped and turned towards the camera, held out his hands in a gesture of offering. Oh, God, he was reciting poetry again :
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
I was getting confused. Was the point of this documentary that you could go home again or that you couldn’t But Paul was talking again. ‘The family,’ he said. ‘Alan Martello called it torment and peace. Jane Martello, my sister, said that it is where we are our best and our worst selves.’ [Oh, Christ.] ‘Erica, my wife, calls it a haven and a prison – we can always return to it, but no matter how far we go from it, we can never escape it.’ (Which Christmas cracker did she get that from?) Paul smiled with the wisdom of the ages and walked on, into the final sequence I had already witnessed, full circle back to the house and the site of the body.
I switched off the television, resolving to sell it. Or maybe a crack addict would break in and steal it while I was away with Kim. It was nearly five thirty. I buckled up my suitcase, then on an impulse I opened it once more and threw in my childhood diary. I quickly punched in Paul’s number but was answered by a machine. After the bleep I said:
‘Paul, it’s me, Jane. I’ve just watched your film. It’s very impressive – honestly, in spite of everything, it holds its own ground. I’m going away for the weekend with Kim, but I’ll call you as soon as I get back. Well done.’ I was going to replace the receiver but a thought struck me. ‘Oh, and Paul – can you just tell me : which side of the river were you walking along at the end?’
As I put the phone down, I heard Kim’s horn. I put on my leather jacket, picked up my bag and walked into the weather.
River Arms was a small white inn with low beams and a huge open fire in the bar. We had a double room, with a bathroom. Kim said that when we woke in the morning we’d be able to see the river and the mountains from our window. Now it was dusk and damp. I sat on my bed, feeling too tired to move.
‘It’s nine o’clock,’ said Kim. ‘Why don’t you have a bath, and I’ll meet you in the bar in half an hour. They do wonderful meals here, but we’ll wait until tomorrow for that. Let’s just have a snack by the fire tonight.’
‘Fine.’ I yawned and stood up. ‘How do you know about this place?’
Kim giggled. ‘My romantic past. It comes in useful sometimes.’
I had a deep warm bath, breaking open all the bath gels and foams. I washed my hair and dressed in leggings and a thick baggy cotton shirt. Downstairs, Kim had ordered two large gin and tonics, and had managed to secure a place by the fire. She raised her glass and chinked it against mine.
‘Here’s to better times,’ she said.
My eyes filled with tears, and I took a long swallow of cold clean liquid.
‘I’ve ordered our meal, as well,’ Kim continued. ‘Cold roast beef sandwiches, and a bottle of red wine. Okay?’ I nodded; I was glad, today, of someone to take decisions for me.
‘Tomorrow we can go for a long walk, somewhere high up, with thin air and fine views. If it doesn’t rain. I’ve got Ordnance Survey maps in my bag; we can look at them at breakfast.’
We sipped our drinks and said nothing for a bit. There aren’t many people you can be happily silent with. Then Kim said :
‘Was it worse than you expected?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I expected. Pretty bad, though.’
The sandwiches arrived : thin slices of rare beef, horseradish sauce on the side; a bottle of shiraz rich and smooth enough to befuddle me into a kind of peace.
‘Why did you and Andreas split up? You seemed so happy together.’
‘We were. I thought we were.’ Kim opened her bread and carefully spread a thin layer of horseradish over the beef. ‘One minute he was talking about where we would go on holiday in the summer and what kind of house we would live in together, and the next he was telling me he and his old girlfriend had decided to give it another go. Sorry and thank you and I’ll never forget you and you’re wonderful and all that crap.’ She topped up our wine glasses. ‘I was too old. I can’t have children. I’m past not future.’ She raised her glass once more : ‘Here’s to growing old disgracefully.’
I leant over and gave her a hug.
‘He was mad. He didn’t know how lucky he was.’
Kim grinned a little crookedly.
‘Life never turns out the way you think, does it? When we were at university together, if you’d asked me what I wanted from life I’d have said I wanted it all : a good lasting relationship, children, lots of children, a career, friends. I’ve got friends and I’ve got the career, though nowadays that doesn’t seem to count for much with me. I can do it s
tanding on my head. But I don’t seem to be doing very well with the lasting relationship. And I’ll never have children.’
What could I say? ‘Life’s cruel. I used to think you made your own luck but that’s a very young thing to think, isn’t it? Here are you, beautiful and witty and warm – and on your own. And here am I. I’ve always had more or less what I wanted and suddenly I’m living in a nightmare. Anyway’ – I was a bit drunk now, garrulously mournful – ‘we’ll always have each other.’ This time, I raised my glass. ‘To us.’
‘To us. I’m plastered.’
We ate hungrily.
‘Did you know,’ I said after a bit, ‘that we’re really quite near the Stead.’
‘Actually,’ replied Kim, ‘I did know. Is it a problem?’
‘Not exactly a problem. Do you mean you chose this place because it’s near the Stead?’
‘Kind of. I mean, I thought of it as a lovely place to come to, and then I also thought you might want to go there. To lay a few ghosts. Otherwise I thought it might come to hold a hellish power over you.’
I stared at her in astonishment.
‘Kim, you’re amazing. Ever since we arrived I’ve been thinking that I’ve got to go back there. I’ve got to go to where it happened, not just the Stead but the hillside. I can’t explain it, but I feel as if it won’t be over until I’ve revisited it. I’ve gone back there so many times in my memory; if I close my eyes I could describe the place inch by inch, each ditch and tree. But I’ve never, not ever, been back to it in person – not since Nat vanished. It became like a forbidden area to me. Well, I know why now, of course, but I also know that I can’t escape from what I’ve done, so I’ve got to confront it. Walk through it, as it were. You do see, don’t you?’
Kim nodded, and drained the last of the bottle into our glasses.
‘Certainly. If I were in your shoes, I think I’d feel the same.’ I started to speak, but she stopped me. ‘Since I’m not in your shoes, I will go for a long walk tomorrow, while you return.’
We relapsed into silence once more, both staring into the flames, blurred by wine and fatigue.
‘What are you thinking?’ Kim asked.
‘It wasn’t the Memory Game, you know,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘The game we played at Christmas, trying to remember the objects on a tray. It’s not called the Memory Game. It’s called Kim’s Game.’
‘My game? What on earth are you talking about?’
‘I found a copy of Kim, you know, Kipling’s novel, in a box of my old stuff from the Stead that Claud brought round. I was browsing through it and when Kim is learning to be a spy, his memory is trained by memorising collections of random objects which are then hidden. Kim’s game.’
‘You want another glass of wine, Jane,’ said Kim, smiling.
‘The Memory Game is where you have cards face down and you try to pick out pairs. I don’t know how I forgot that.’
Kim stood up.
‘I forgive you,’ she said. ‘Come on. Bed-time.’
Thirty-Six
The Stead already looked as if it had been abandoned. As soon as I got out of Kim’s car and looked around I could detect the absence of Martha. She once told me that her books got illustrated somehow and the children brought themselves up, but she felt that her garden really needed her. There was a man who used to come from Westbury a couple of times a week but in my days at the Stead she seemed to be out in the garden for almost every minute, on her knees poking at the soil with a trowel, pruning, planting. She had been endlessly resourceful at a craft about which the rest of us knew almost nothing. When we noticed the flowers and the fruit and the vegetables, we adored them, we were glad to have them around, but we paid no attention to all the little battles that had been won and lost in their creation. Had anybody thought about how the garden could function without Martha? She had been absent from it – first in spirit and then in body – for less than six months, but it looked bereft. Canes stood in the beds with nothing attached to them, there were sprigs of dandelion in the lawn dotted among the mangy half-piles of leaves.
The house was closed up and I didn’t have a key. I’d never needed one. I peered through a window and saw empty rooms, bare boards, expanses of wallpaper with the pale rectangles recalling absent pictures. It was no longer ours and I took a bleak pleasure in seeing all signs of the Martello family stripped so brutally from the property. It was up for sale. Soon somebody else could move in their memories. My own were still cluttering up the place, like the crisp packets that blew down from the B road at the end of the drive. I turned away from the house. The dismal apology for a hole where Natalie had been found remained, half full of sludgy water. Was nobody ever going to fill it in?
But this was not what I had come to see. There was no point in messing around, there was nobody to bleat to. I just wanted to get this over quickly, see what I had to see. Then I would leave the Stead for ever, rejoin Kim, have a good meal, a good weekend, go back to London, get on with the rest of my life. I walked quickly across the shaggy lawn and felt the damp closing around my toes. Wrong bloody shoes. I reached the wood and to the left I could see Pullam Farm and to my right was the path that led along the wood and then back down and around to the Stead. Not today. Today, for the first time in a quarter of a century, I took the path into the wood that led to Cree’s Top and the River Col. It was a damp, misty morning, and I shivered even in my anorak. This wouldn’t take long. The path divided as I approached the rising ground which hid the river from sight and I took the right fork, which would bring me around the side of Cree’s Top to the path by the river.
The path was rarely used now and branches extended across it. After a few minutes of brushing them out of my face, I reached the edge of the Col and and the foot of Cree’s Top. I was back. One detail had started it all, attracted Alex’s interest, hadn’t it? Those funny little pubscent poems screwed up and tossed into the water as I’d sat here with my back to Cree’s Top and watched them float away down the Col. Would any of them have reached the sea? Or did they all snag in reeds round the first bend? I felt in my anorak pocket and extracted a menu from a local Indian take-away : Half-Price Madness. I screwed it into a ball and tossed it into the river.
The silliest thing happened, and it almost made me laugh. The river was flowing the wrong way. The scrunched up menu from The Pride of Bengal didn’t flow away from me and disappear round the bend. It flowed back past me. And, indeed, as I looked up the Col, against the flow, I saw that there was no bend in that direction for several hundred yards. What a stupid thing. I felt disoriented for a moment but it was quickly obvious to me what had happened. I quickly strode up Cree’s Top. The trees were thinned out now and when I reached the summit I could see that the mist had lifted and the view of the river and of the path proceeding along the side of it was clear. The Col curved slightly to the right and then back to its previous course, forming a reversed letter C. Fifty yards further on was the bridge from which Natalie had been seen that last time.
The path steepened sharply in front of me and I had to stop myself from trotting down the slope. When I reached the flat I sat down, with my back against the large rock at the foot of Cree’s Top. I felt in my pocket and found a credit card slip from a petrol station. If I were efficient I would file it somewhere and set it against something. I screwed it up and tossed it into the water. The sun was out now and the light blue paper was hard to pick out against the sparkling ripples but I focused intently on it as it picked up speed and disappeared round the grassy bend. Like a dream.
Thirty-Seven
We used to play by the copper beech tree, with its thick and grizzled trunk and its vivid flare of leaves. It stood in front of a dry stone wall, and if we stood on the wall the lower branches of the tree were near enough the ground to allow us to scramble up to what now seemed to me like dizzying heights. We could look down through the bronzed foliage at the Stead, watch the adults come and go through the porched fro
nt door, but no one could see us. We spent hours up there. We’d take dolls, then, when we were older, books and apples. Natalie and I would sit and talk while dappled light streamed through the leaves. We would watch scudding clouds and exchange secrets and the days seemed to pass slowly, so slowly. I hadn’t remembered this peaceful, happy Natalie enough. I hadn’t been a loyal enough friend to her after she had disappeared. If it had been me who had gone, suddenly and with no word of explanation, I knew that she would have furiously searched for me. She would have felt betrayed by my desertion and furious with adults who tried to comfort her. She would have been spitting mad. Whereas I – I had been passive and sorrowful, lying night after night in the room that had once been hers, dreaming of her and never once searching for her. Once, when Natalie and I had been playing hide-and-seek in the garden, I’d failed to find her, and after peering dismally behind large bushes and into garden sheds, I’d mooched into the kitchen where Martha had been making rock cakes. As I’d licked out the bowl, Natalie had burst into the room, ‘You give up too easily,’ she’d shouted at me. ‘I don’t know why I should bother with you when you just give up. I’ve gone off you, Jane Crane.’
I rubbed the bark with one finger. Martha had loved this tree too. She had planted crocuses and snowdrops around its base. I sat down and leant against the tree trunk, feeling its ridged age through my jacket.
When I was in my early twenties I had spent four months in Florence as an architectural assistant. I had adored the city and spent all my spare time wandering down narrow streets and into dark, incense-filled churches where statues of sightless madonnas stood in niches and old women burned candles for their dead.
I had gone back again ten years later, the map of the city still clear in my head, and soon discovered that I was slightly out of kilter. Roads were shorter than I remembered; where there should have been a view there was a tall building; the cafe where I’d drunk a daily espresso and eaten little rice cakes had shifted from the centre of the square to its corner. Claud had said calmly that you always had to rediscover places; the joy of travelling was that new meanings were always emerging and old ones altering. But I had felt obscurely cheated : I had wanted to step back into a past that was intact and where each site held its memories for me and instead I entered a city that had somehow grown away from me. Florence was no longer mine.
