The Memory Game

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 front 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.

The same hazy dissatisfactions niggled at me now. On an impulse I zipped up my jacket to my chin, stood up and hoisted myself into the lowest branch of the tree. I clambered from branch to branch until I reached a familiar perch. I gazed through the skein of twigs with their pale green leaves at the Stead. There was the house, bearing its invisible signs of disintegration. How do you recognise, when all the features remain the same, the moment that life passes from the face of a friend, or know, although you can point to nothing that has changed, that a house is abandoned? From where I sat I could not see the front door, although I could clearly remember seeing it from here as a child. I clambered down the branches and jumped clumsily onto the grass; sat down once more with my back against the ancient tree.

I picked up my old diary which I’d picked out of my case as I’d set out that morning and idly started leafing through its later pages. Some entries were like triggers that brought memories easily back : the candle that had set fire to Alan’s beard when he’d leant over greedily to scoop up the last of the potatoes; I had laughed so hard that the muscles of my stomach had ached. Sailing in the gravel pit reservoir nearby, being frightened as the boat had keeled and water slopped over the edge but not wanting to admit it – certainly not admitting it to Natalie or to Theo, who were always physically brave and were contemptuous of timidity. Getting up at four in the morning with Alan and the twins to hear the dawn chorus and coming back chilly, ravenous and euphoric.

But there were some entries – an argument with Mum, which I represented with sanctimonious lack of imagination, or a visit to a medieval mansion where Catholics hid under the floorboards during the Reformation – that stubbornly refused to yield their treasures. They were like the graves in Highgate Cemetery, grown over with ivy and nettles, unvisited and quite forgotten. Most of our lives lie underground.

The last entry had always been available to my recall – which wasn’t surprising since the day before Natalie’s disappearance had been like the defined rim around a black hole. I could summon up the party preparations without much difficulty : I remembered kissing Theo in the square of mud between the newly laid stone tiles where the last pieces of the barbecue would be built in time for the party and jumping up guiltily as we heard Jim Weston approach.

I shut the diary and rubbed my eyes. A few drops of rain fell heavily on the book’s cover. I felt as if I were staring at something through thick liquid; all the shapes I was trying to make out were distorting and breaking up. Kissing Theo in the earth made ready for the barbecue. The barbecue.

I stood up, stumbling in my haste, and ran in the increasing rain to where Natalie’s body had been found. It was still a livid scar of churned-up mud and rubble and a few shallow-rooting weeds. I jumped down into the mud and sunk my hands into it, digging around messily. I pulled out the leg of a doll, a rusted fork, its tines clogged, a beer bottle with a chipped neck; then a broken tile, a fragment of rusty grating. They were the remains of the barbecue. Natalie had been buried underneath the barbecue.

Heavily, I sat down at the edge of the hole, wiping my muddy hands on my muddy jeans. Rain fell steadily now, obscuring the landscape, and it was as if a curtain was being drawn across the Stead and all its secrets. Something was wrong. I couldn’t think straight; it was like trying to remember a dream but losing it in the process. Natalie was buried under the barbecue but the barbecue was built before she died. I spoke out loud :

‘So that’s why the body was buried there. It was an improbable place because it was an impossible place.’

I buried my face in my hands and stared through my fingers at the muddy hole. Rain slid down the back of my neck. I tried again :

‘Natalie was buried before she died.’

Or:

‘Natalie was buried underneath the barbecue; Natalie died after the barbecue was completed; therefore…’ Therefore what? I kicked a few fragments of tiles back into the hole and stood up. Kim would be wondering where I’d got to.