The Memory Game

Ten

‘Here, these are all yours.’

I started dumping records in cardboard boxes. When Claud and I had met, he had had an extraordinary collection of LPs, arranged alphabetically within their various subject categories. I had had five; two of them were by Miles Davis and the other three by Neil Young, all too scratched to play on Claud’s deck. He’d had them as well, anyway. He’d bought music all the way through our marriage : classical, jazz, soul, punk. He was endlessly enthusiastic, endlessly tolerant. When Jerome or Robert had wanted to rebel they’d brought back the latest noise : house, techno, grunge, I’d never known which was which, and I’d obliged them by being ignorant and horrified. But Claud had learnt to like it all. He’d played rap songs about policemen being murdered that had shocked even Robert. He’d pontificated on the importance of extending the right to free speech to someone like Iced Tea, or whatever his name was.

Claud had played Guns ‘n’ Roses to me appreciatively, while his sons had watched him sulkily, and I had contemplated a cover illustration featuring a woman apparently being abused by a robot. Whenever his brothers had come round, they’d thumbed through the collection, pulling out this memory, or that, an appalling fifteen-minute drum solo that would apparently supply a Proustian recollection of some long-lost party or some poor deluded girl.

‘And these.’ I stacked CDs in neat piles beside the boxes. Claud gazed at me, wet-eyed. I did not respond. ‘I’ve gone through most of the books, but of course you should go through them as well, just to be sure. There are some it’s a bit hard to decide about. I’ve put them all together on this shelf.’

‘James Morris’s Venice.’ Claud’s voice was wistful. ‘Do you remember our time there?’

I did. It was in February, damp and misty and almost empty. We’d walked miles along grey paths, ignoring the sweet stench of the waters, exclaiming over the green peeling facades of ancient palazzi, wandering into churches where opulent art bloomed. We’d made love on hard wooden beds with bolsters, to the creak of shutters.

‘Mushrooms of Europe, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Auden, Hardy’s poems, Birds of Great Britain.’ Claud was flicking his finger along the shelf. ‘One is Fun, I suppose I should take that. This one must be mine.’ He pulled out a slim Shell guide to England’s country churches, and added it to his box. ‘We can give the shared books to the boys. That seems appropriate, somehow. And now can I have a drink?’

‘They don’t read books. We haven’t done the pictures, or the china; quite a lot of the furniture is yours.’

‘Jane, can I have a drink? Don’t be in such a hurry to clear every last trace of me out of the house.’

We sat at the kitchen table, and I poured two glasses of something cheap and red. I lit a cigarette, sucking the smoke cancerously deep into my lungs. At first we chatted about the boys, then about Natalie – and, surprisingly, this was contemplative and relaxed. I’d heard too many expressions of nostalgic affection. Claud talked about her mischief, her teasing, her capacity for finding out secrets, for making alliances. This was the real Natalie, not the girl who was safely dead and idealised. I’d forgotten about this Natalie. It revived my sense of her. Claud and I exchanged remembered moments and refilled our wine glasses. It was hard to reconstruct the sequence of events, but she hadn’t been so much with Luke in those final weeks. She had become bored with him and kept him at a distance to his rage and bafflement. He used to phone up and call round and end up talking to me or to Martha.

We talked about the famous party and my own hazy memories of the day after and Claud’s absolutely precise memory of the Air India flight to Bombay with Alec and the two months spent bumming around with nothing but – can it really have been just twenty pounds? Dust and dope and dysentery. I’d always meant to go. As we spoke, I remembered that Claud and I had planned to recreate his journey one day (in a more salubrious style) and I hoped he wouldn’t mention this. I fiddled with a small antique dish on the table. It was made by somebody famous, very expensive : one of us had given it to the other, but I could no longer remember who.

This wasn’t a good idea. Claud raised his glass and grinned at me wryly and I felt a hopeless, reminiscent stab of desire for this man. Before we’d separated, we’d often got on best when we were in other people’s company. I’d watch him across a room, and see him being charming, or watch an attractive woman clutch his arm or laugh at something he’d said that I couldn’t quite hear, and I’d realise how fortunate I was. Most of my friends adored him, and envied me for his good looks, his attentiveness to me, his fidelity. He never noticed when women flirted with him, or worse, which made him all the more disarming. I realised we were stuck in a lurching silence. I could see what was coming.

‘I know I shouldn’t say this,’ Claud began, and I knew he was delivering a prepared speech, ‘but this, all this,’ he gestured at the chaos around us, ‘it seems so wrong. One minute you were talking about our problems, and the next I found myself in a bedsit somewhere and I think we should try again.’ There was a terrible bright eagerness in his voice now. ‘I hate to say it but perhaps we could go to counselling.’

I couldn’t help being touched: Claud had always had a contempt for any kind of psychotherapeutic process.

‘No, Claud.’ I forced myself to stop, not to expand into an explanation with which he could argue.

‘But you’re not happy,’ he insisted. ‘Look at you : you’re chain-smoking, you’ve got all thin and pale. You know you’ve made a mistake.’

‘I’ve never said I was making myself happy,’ I said. ‘But I’ve got to live with what I’ve chosen.’

‘What did I do wrong? What did I do to you to make you want to choose this?’ More gestures. At the room. At me.

‘Nothing. I don’t want to talk about this. It won’t do any good.’

‘Is it something else, something you’re not saying?’ he asked desperately. ‘Is it Theo? There, I’ve said it. Have I not measured up to your starry-eyed view of him?’

‘Don’t, Claud, you’re being ridiculous.’

‘There are things that I could tell you about Theo, things he’s done…’

‘I don’t think there are, Claud. And anyway, it has nothing to do with us.’

Suddenly he seemed to slump. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m so sorry but I miss you terribly.’ He leant his head in his hands and gazed through the cage of his fingers.

Sitting at the kitchen table with Claud, the way we’d sat for so many years, watching tears dribble through his hands and not moving to comfort him, I couldn’t remember why I’d ever broken up our marriage. I felt no connection with that anger, that whirling frustration, panic and sense of time dripping away. All I wanted was peace, friendship, routine, home. I’d built my life up brick by brick, then one day last September I’d pulled it down on top of me. I felt old and tired and defeated. For a moment, I thought I would go and kneel by Claud’s chair and hug him until he stopped quietly crying and bury my head in his lap, and feel his hands stroking my hair, and know myself forgiven. But I did nothing and the moment passed. After a minute or two he stood up.

‘I’ll come for these things another time.’

I still had the dish under my fingers. ‘What about this?’ I handed it to Claud.

‘This? It’s ours.’ He took it in two hands, and without any evident emotion or even a change of expression he snapped it in two and handed me one of the pieces. I was too shocked to move or even to speak but I saw that he had cut one of his fingers quite badly.

‘I’ll just take these.’

He put the fragment of china into one of the boxes. I opened the door for him, and a gust of rain blew into the house.

‘You disappoint me, Jane,’ he said. I could only shrug.

In the bedroom, I took off my jeans and grey cardigan, unhooked my ear-rings, brushed out my hair, and pulled on a dressing-gown. I had a thought. I went to the bathroom and rubbed soap around one of my fingers. I pulled hard and the ring slipped over the knuckle. I rinsed it and took it to my study, Jerome’s old bedroom, now cluttered with easels and sheets of graph paper and unanswered correspondence. I opened a small drawer in my desk, where I kept the wrist-tags the boys had worn in hospital when they were born, the champagne cork with FINALS written on it in biro, my mother’s last letter to me, wonky with pain, and the recently acquired photographs of Natalie. I put the ring in there, and closed the drawer. Then I went to bed and lay for a long time, waiting for oblivion.