The Memory Game

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.