The Memory Game

Eleven

‘Does it shock you?’

‘It shocks me most dreadfully,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I could even tell you the way it makes me feel.’

‘Tell me,’ said Alex.

I giggled. ‘Yes, that’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? I’m sorry, I was speaking in clichés. I was just automatically saying the sort of thing you’re meant to say about big emotions. That they’re inexpressible. It’s all too expressible. I suppose I feel cheated, except cheated is too small a word, because it shows that there was another side of Natalie that I didn’t know. I can put it even more clearly than that. We had a childish friendship, Natalie and I, that was almost like a game. We told each other that we were best friends and sisters. There were so many boys around, and we were the two girls. We used to talk about everything, especially at night-time, in her bedroom. That summer, in 1969, it began to be a bit different. We’d had things with boys before but her relationship with Luke seemed different, something I couldn’t share. And at the same time I was really smitten by Theo.’

‘Tell me about Theo.’

‘What do you mean? Then or now?’

‘Whatever.’

‘Theo’s still great. I love him. If you were to meet him today, I can guarantee you’d take to him. He’s tall and quite striking and balding now, but he’s bald like an artist, not like a bank manager with strands of hair combed across his head.’

‘That’s interesting,’ said Alex laughing. ‘We must explore your aversion to bank managers.’

‘I like my bank manager,’ I insisted. ‘He’s been very nice to me, however much I’ve provoked him.’

Despite the bleak news, this session with Alex was more relaxed. I was conscious of a friendly, even a flirtatious, atmosphere. I felt liberated. I knew I was allowed to say anything I wanted.

‘Anyway, Theo isn’t a bank manager and he isn’t an artist either. He’s in some vague in-between area and it’s extremely difficult to pin him down to exactly what he does do. He’s a consultant about the management of information. Yes, you may well ask. He’s a businessman with some company based in Zurich and he’s also an academic with visiting professorships all over the place. It’s all very modern and post-managerial and very highly paid and all a bit abstract and philosophical and he’s always off to a conference in Toronto or superintending a merger in some schloss in Bavaria. People like me who live in one place and work nearby seem unimaginably old-fashioned. He’s dazzling, as he always was.

‘I had hardly seen Theo for a couple of years before that summer of ’69. He had been away at school and I had been going out with this young man who not only had a motorbike but he could take it to pieces and put it back together and there were no bits left over and that was impressive in its way, but we all gradually got together at the Stead at the end of July for Alan’s and Martha’s party and I was knocked out by Theo. He was six-two with long hair and he was in the sixth form doing about twelve science A levels but he was also reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire in the original and he could play the guitar, I mean really play it, not just strum but play individual notes so as to make moody Leonard Cohen sort of music and I was completely his. In a spiritual sense, for the most part.

‘Sorry, I got carried away. The point I was trying to make is that this was the summer that Natalie and I grew up in a way. The estrangement, to the degree that there was an estrangement, represented the fact that we became separate people, that we developed our own independent, private lives. How can I describe it? There was one moment I remember, about a week before she disappeared. I was in the nearby town, Kirklow, probably buying something for the anniversary party. I saw a group of young people sitting outside a pub in the square, drinking and smoking. Natalie was one of them. Her hair was swept back off her face, she was laughing at something someone had said and as she laughed she looked round and caught my eye. She half smiled at me and looked away, and I realised I wasn’t allowed to go over and join them. Looking back at that summer, I think that the pain of the terrible tragedy of Natalie’s death was heightened because it coincided with the moment that I was forced to stop being a child and go into all the confusion of being an adult.’

After I finished there was a vast silence which I felt no impulse to break. I didn’t feel afraid now of these hiatuses.

‘Well, that’s that then,’ said Alex and I was shocked by his sarcastic, flippant tone.

‘What do you mean, “that’s that”?’ I asked.

‘That’s extremely neat, Jane. You’ve sewn it all together. You’ve managed to face up to Natalie’s death and link it together with a positive development in your own life. She died, you grew up and became an architect. There we are. Analysis over. Congratulations.’

I felt crushed.

‘Why are you being so sarcastic, Alex? That’s horrible.’

‘Do you like reading, Jane?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I bet you like reading novels. I bet that when you go on holiday you read a novel every day.’

‘I don’t, actually. I’m quite a slow reader.’

‘Have you ever wanted to write a novel?’

‘Are you making fun of me, Alex? Just say what you want to say and don’t piss around with me.’

‘No, honestly, Jane, I think it’s something you ought to consider. I bet you’d be good at it. Only don’t do it here with me. You’re an intelligent woman, Jane, and what you’ve just told me is not at all an implausible arrangement of your experience. That’s what you’re good at. I’m sure that you could come into my office tomorrow and deliver another version of your life and interpret it in another, different way and that would be convincing as well. If you were perfectly happy with your life and everything was going nicely then you could be contented with that. That’s the sort of thing that most of us do, though most of us probably aren’t as good at it as you are. You invent neat interpretations of your life in the way that an octopus squirts out a cloud of ink and scuttles away behind it. Am I being unfair, Jane?’

I felt terribly disoriented, as if I’d drifted loose.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to say.’

Alex moved forward into my line of sight and knelt next to me. He looked more amused than disapproving.

‘You know what, Jane? I suspect that you’ve got your Penguin editions of Freud at home and though you’ve promised yourself that one day you’ll read it all, you’ve never quite got around to it, but you’ve dipped into it here and there. And you’ve read one or two books about therapy as well. One of the things you’ve learnt is that analysis is about talk and about interpretation. It’s not very concerned with facts and things, only with the value we place on them. Is that about right?’

‘I don’t know about that,’ I protested. I didn’t want to give in to him. He was so sure.

‘I want you to forget about all that,’ Alex continued. ‘I want to cure you – for a while, at least – of your considerable skill at turning your life into a pattern. I want you to grab hold of the things in your life, the things that really happened. We’ll leave the interpretation until later, shall we?’

‘I’m surprised that you think there are facts separate from interpretations, Doctor.’

‘And I know that you don’t really believe that. I can bullshit with the best of them and if that’s what you want we can sit here and play games for a couple of hours a week and split hairs about the meaning of meaning. Do you want that?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘So far, you’ve given me the standard coming-of-age-in-the-summer-of-love story.’ He stood up and moved back to his chair. ‘Tell me some of the awkward, unpleasant things that were going on.’

‘Isn’t it enough that Natalie was pregnant and then murdered? Do you need any more unpleasantness?’

‘But Jane, you’re giving me an account of this wonderfully idyllic summer spent with the family that everybody adored. Where’s the context for murder?’

‘Why should there be a context? She may have been killed by somebody who had nothing to do with the family, someone we’ve never even heard of.’

‘What are your thoughts on that, Jane?’

‘You mean emotions?’

‘No, thoughts. Ideas.’

I paused for quite a long time. ‘I’ve only got one, really. Maybe I’m just being stupid – that’s probably what the policewoman I talked to thought – but I keep bumping up against the obvious, the problem of where Natalie was found. Since her body stayed hidden for twenty-five years, and then was only stumbled on by accident, it was clearly an almost perfect hiding place but it’s so peculiar. I don’t know anything about murderers or what they do with their victims but I imagine that they bury them in remote forests or leave them on moorlands or in ditches. Natalie was last seen by the river. She could have just been thrown in there. But she was buried under our noses on the day after a huge party when the whole area was full of people. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but the one thing I am sure of is that it wasn’t some passing vagrant who attacked her and then buried her virtually on our front doorstep.’

‘So? What else have you got to say to me? There must be something,’ Alex insisted.

‘Oh, I don’t know. It was all such a long time ago. I feel that even by talking about some of these things you give them more importance than they really deserve.’

‘Test me.’

I gripped the couch, my fingers like claws.

‘There were problems, like all families have. In some ways ours may have been more accentuated because we were so close and saw so much of each other.’

‘Spare me all the excuses, just tell me.’

‘There were silly things. You’ve got to realise the ages we were because we were still young enough for these little differences to matter a lot. Natalie was just sixteen and Paul was eighteen and about to go to Cambridge and he was absolutely obsessed with her.’

‘Did they have any sort of relationship?’

‘Natalie completely rebuffed him. It’s hard to imagine now, but Paul was a very shy teenager, aggressively shy really, and he’d never had any sort of girlfriend before. I could almost see him plucking up his courage to make a move towards Natalie and once or twice, late at night, he tried to do things like put his arm round her and she was quite brutal about it.’

‘Unnecessarily brutal?’

‘I don’t know. How can one judge these things? If I am allowed to do a bit of interpretation, I remember that it sometimes seemed as if part of the attraction of Luke for Natalie was as a way of causing pain to Paul. And when she drifted apart from Luke, she played with Paul as a way of tormenting Luke.’

‘How did you feel about it?’

‘You mean, watching my older brother being humiliated by my best friend. I was upset, perhaps less than I should have been. Embarrassed mainly. And maybe I was a bit jealous; everyone, well boys at least, always noticed Natalie. She’d seem so indifferent to them, though of course she wasn’t, and she didn’t wear make-up like the rest of us did, and she didn’t laugh at their jokes, and she didn’t flirt except in an ironic kind of way. She often seemed contemptuous in fact, but it never mattered. Paul was out of his depth with her. But look, adolescence is all red in tooth and claw, isn’t it? I’m already making it sound a bigger deal than it really was.’

‘What did Paul feel?’

‘He has never talked about it, except as part of his golden youth which he is now going to turn into a television documentary.’

‘Do you think that is what he really feels?’

‘It may be what he feels now. I don’t believe he can have enjoyed it much at the time, at least not during that summer.’

‘Is that it?’

‘Yes.’

I could hear an impatient sigh behind me.

‘Jane, you’ve tossed me a bone. But that isn’t the real thing you were going to tell me.’

I was reminded of standing on a very high diving board as a child and the only way I dared to dive was to throw myself from it without preparation or forethought.

‘The difficult thing that summer – it was often difficult but it was especially difficult then – was Alan’s infidelity.’

‘Yes?’

Well, what did it matter?

‘It’s not exactly the world’s best-kept secret that Alan has been unfaithful to Martha as a matter of habit. It’s the old dreary cliché. Alan loves Martha and is utterly dependent on her. But he’s had lots of affairs for virtually the whole of their marriage, as far as I can make out. I suppose he would have been like that anyway but when The Town Drain happened and Alan became famous, then the young and available literary women needed beating off with a stick.’

‘Did Martha know about these affairs?’

‘I think she did in theory. It wasn’t flagrant. It just went on and on. The affairs weren’t talked about. They weren’t important, I think that was the basic cover story.’

‘Did she mind about them?’

‘I think people always do, don’t you? Martha is a wise woman and I suppose she saw from the beginning what Alan was like and realised that nothing could be done to change it. But maybe she was too wise and not bloody-minded enough. I’m sure she always suffered a great deal.’

‘Did you all know about it?’

‘Not really. In retrospect, there were things that only became clear once we cottoned on. It may be hard for you to understand, but there are ways in which you can know and not know things at the same time. Do you see what I mean?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Anyway, the truth about Alan’s behaviour became unavoidable. To cut the whole sordid story short, we discovered that the summer before Alan had been sleeping with a girl who was a friend of Natalie’s and mine. She was the same age as we were. She was called Chrissie Pilkington and she was a daughter of a local family, good friends of the Martellos, and she was at school with Natalie. It was awful.’

‘How did you discover?’

‘She told Natalie. Natalie told me. It was an odd thing, really, because we had this intense afternoon talking about it. I think I was more shocked than Natalie – she didn’t seem surprised, but she did seem, well, disgusted, I suppose. She was very cruel about him, about his beery breath and his paunch. I remember the way she imitated him being drunk. But then, after that, she never mentioned the subject again, and I didn’t either. I think that I knew it was forbidden.’

‘Did you say anything to Alan? Or to Martha?’

‘No, it never seemed the right time, really. But I told Theo. I guess that most of us younger lot must have known.’

‘What happened? What did you feel about all this?’

‘What happened? I don’t know, really, it sort of got lost in the chaos of Natalie’s disappearance. These things never lasted a long time for Alan and he probably used the awfulness over the disappearance as a way of making a break.’

‘And what did you feel about it?’

‘Different things. I always have where Alan is concerned. Sometimes I think he’s just an awful exploitative shit who would do anything, so long as it was what he wanted to do at a particular moment. And sometimes I think he’s just pathetic and weak and should be looked after or put up with. And sometimes I even think about him the way that people who don’t actually know him personally think about him : good old incorrigible Alan, a bit outrageous and flamboyant, but there’s nobody else quite like him and we’re lucky to have him. When I’m feeling close to Martha I feel most hostile, but then she’s probably quite stoical about it all.’

I was silent. My mind was a blank. I felt exhausted by it all. Alex was thinking too.

‘Sorry for being rude, Jane,’ he said.

‘You were a bit.’

He stood up and hauled his chair round so that I could see it. It was on castors. I could see the indentations in the carpet where it had stood. Was this the first time it had ever been moved?

‘Jane, we’re almost finished and I know you must be exhausted but I’d like us to try something. I had it in mind for later sessions, but it might just be worth a crack now.’

‘What?’

‘Bear with me for a moment, Jane. I want this process to be steered by you. I want to follow the clues that you leave for me. Now, we’ll be talking about lots of things, I hope, but I have this feeling that the black hole at the centre of it all is the day that Natalie disappeared, this conjunction, or near-conjunction, when you almost met.’

‘Yes. Well?’

‘It’s something I want to return to.’

‘I’m not sure there is anything more to go back to. It was a very long time ago.’

‘Yes, I realise that. But let’s try something. It’ll be good for you anyway. Let’s try a sort of exercise. I’d like you to lie back, really lie back, close your eyes and I’d like you to relax every bit of your body, starting with your feet and your legs, your body, down your arms and finally through your face and head. Does that feel good?’

‘Mmm.’

Alex’s voice was now almost like a hum in the background, like the buzzing of bees outside a window.

‘Now, Jane, without opening your eyes, I would like you to imagine that scene by the river on the day when Natalie disappeared. I don’t want you to describe it, I don’t want you to look at it. I’d like you to imagine yourself back there, sitting by the river. Put yourself back there. Can you do that?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sitting down, aren’t you, with the hill behind your back?’

‘Yes.’

‘Describe it to me.’

‘I can feel the stone of Cree’s Top behind my back. On my right is the wood. The wood that’s between the river and the Stead. The River Col is on my left. I can see it flowing away from me. I can tell because of the pieces of paper I scrunch up and throw in. They drift away from me and then just as they drift round the bend they start to bobble across the little rapids, well, just shallow water across stones really, then they’re out of sight.’

‘What is the weather like?’

‘Hot, really hot. Mid-afternoon. I’m in the shade under a line of elms which are on my right forming the edge of the wood. The stone behind me feels cool.’

‘Do you do anything?’

My mind went blank, I stuttered something.

‘That’s all right, Jane, open your eyes. We’ll leave it there.’

I started to raise myself up.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘am I supposed to know why Alan Martello’s novel is called The Town Drain? Is it a quotation or something?’

‘Haven’t you read it?’

‘It’s on my list.’

‘I thought everybody had read it. The title comes from something that the Reverend Spooner is supposed to have said to one of his undergraduates. It goes something like, “You have hissed all my mystery lectures and tasted a whole worm. You must leave by the town drain.” You know, the down train is the train from Oxford to London.’

‘I suppose the joke works if you’ve read the book.’

‘It’s not really a joke, it’s meant to stand for an anti-Brideshead sort of disenchantment.’

‘Well, thank you for the lecturette, Jane. Perhaps I should be paying you something.’

I raised an eyebrow.

‘Now that really is a joke,’ Alex added hastily.