The Memory Game Read online

  ‘Lots of words have different meanings. For some people fanny does mean vagina; for me, Fanny now means a five-year-old girl who’s a traveller. When I was at school, people used to chant “Plain Jane Crane”.’

  Caspar stood up and said to Fanny, ‘Come on, then. Bedtime for you. We’ll read a chapter of Pippi and leave our guests on their own for a few minutes, shall we? You know where the wine.’

  She held up her arms, starkly vertical, and he hoisted her onto his shoulders.

  ‘More wine, Jane?’

  ‘Half a glass.’

  I put up a hand to signal it was enough and our fingers met. I could not breathe. My stomach turned to water and my heart flipped like a fish.

  ‘So how did you meet Caspar?’ the man next to me asked: Leonard, who worked in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases and had just come back from Angola.

  ‘I sat next to her at a public meeting and she shouted at me,’ interrupted Caspar.

  ‘And then he came to a residents’ association meeting I was involved in, and he got punched in the eye.’

  ‘For such a pacifist,’ said Carrie from across the table, ‘you get in an awful lot of fights. Weren’t you hit by a down-and-out for trying to give him money?’

  ‘It was a misunderstanding.’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Eric with the red hair and bitten nails, ‘and that old lady in the supermarket when you walked off with her shopping trolley. You can still see the scar in the right light.’

  It had been a lovely evening, full of frivolous talk. Caspar’s friends had smiled at me as if they’d heard about me in advance. Occasionally, when I looked at him, I caught him watching me. With everything I said or did, I was aware of him across the room. Happiness rose up, whoomph, in my throat, taking all my breath away. I jumped up.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise the time. I’ve got to get home.’ I aimed a smile around the room. ‘It was a lovely evening, thanks.’

  Caspar held out my coat and I shrugged my arms into it, careful not to touch him. He opened the door, and I stepped out into air that held the promise of snow.

  ‘Thank you, Caspar, I had a lovely time.’

  ‘Good-night, Jane.’

  We stood quite still. For a moment I thought that he would kiss me. If he kissed me I would kiss him back, wrap myself up in his long body. But then a laugh wafted out through the front door, upstairs a child coughed. I went home.

  ‘Sorry, Jane Martello isn’t here, but please leave a message after the bleep.’

  ‘Hello, this is Paul, on Thursday evening at, ur, 10.30. I’m calling to say that my programme is being broadcast on the twenty-first of February. I’d be really pleased if you could come round to our house to celebrate it. And watch it, of course. Let me know as soon as possible.’

  How could the programme possibly be ready? I mean, I’d seen Paul wandering around taking notes and things, and there was that disastrous Christmas, of course, but I’d thought it was all still in embryo. In fact, I’d secretly assumed it would never actually be broadcast at all.

  ‘Hi, Jane, it’s Kim, just wanted to know that you’re all right.’

  ‘It’s me, Alan.’ He sounded pissed. ‘Please ring.’

  I was right: Alan was drunk. When he talked about Martha he cried down the phone. ‘Oh Jane, Jane,’ he wailed and I shuddered at his clumsy, childish need and my sophisticated and furtive betrayal.

  ‘She thinks of you as her daughter.’ Not quite, but I knew what he meant. I, too, thought of her as my not-quite mother.

  ‘Is there no hope for you and Claud? It would make her so happy.’ No, no hope, no hope at all. Martha knew it was over and done.

  ‘I’ll never write again, never. I’m an old man and done for, Jane.’

  I pulled out my packet of cigarettes.

  ‘Don’t desert us, Jane.’

  He was gabbling about Natalie – such a gorgeous child – so loving – why did she get so hostile in the last years? – they’d tried to be good parents, hadn’t they? – what had they done so wrong? – he knew he’d been weak with women, but surely that couldn’t explain – once she’d spat at him – memories are a terrible thing, a terrible thing, a terrible thing.

  Twenty-Five

  I rang Caspar. I thought about him all day and then in the evening I rang him.

  ‘It’s Jane. Will you meet me at Highgate Cemetery on Sunday?’

  ‘Yes. What time?’

  ‘Three o’clock, by George Eliot’s grave.’

  ‘How will I find it?’

  ‘It’ll be the one with me standing next to it at three o’clock.’

  ‘All right. I’ll be the one carrying a copy of Daniel Deronda with half of the pages unread. Uncut, in fact.’

  That was it, two dozen words, and the most erotic phone conversation I’d ever had. I baked two Madeira cakes, three loaves of brown bread, and a plain sponge cake for the freezer. I drank four glasses of red wine, smoked eight cigarettes, listened to unromantic Bach. On Saturday I cleaned the house from top to bottom. Really cleaned it, taking books off shelves and washing them down. I put up some pictures that had been standing in my study for months, I tore down posters of old churches that Claud had left curling on the walls. I stuck photographs from the last year into the photo album. They were all of buildings, except for one of Hana with a cloche hat obscuring her face. In the afternoon, I went to Hampstead and bought a coat. It didn’t cost anything. I just paid for it with a credit card. I pushed all thought of Natalie out of my mind. This was my weekend.

  In the evening I made a rice salad, and ate it with half a bottle of red wine left over from not that long ago. I pulled a box down from the attic, lit a candle, and browsed through Claud’s love letters to me. Almost all of them dated from the year before and the year after our marriage. After that, nothing except the odd postcard from a conference: ‘Missing you.’ He probably was.

  The letters were in meticulous script. On some, the ink had faded. ‘My sweetest Jane,’ he wrote, ‘you were lovely in your blue dress.’ ‘My darling, I wish I were with you tonight.’ The earliest letter was dated October 1970 – a few months after Natalie had disappeared. Odd that I’d forgotten it: it was a kind, grown-up letter saying how the family was holding together. ‘She’ll come home,’ he had written, ‘but of course nothing will ever be the same again. The first part of our life is over.’ He was right. I thought of him in his tidy flat, with his books about churches and his correspondence arranged alphabetically. I wondered if he still hoped that I would change my mind and if he’d walked through the door at that moment, the evening before my date with Caspar, I believe that I would have let him stay. I’ve never been good at partings.

  He was there on time, but so was Fanny, hair in wild curls around her face and wearing jeans about two sizes too big for her wiry little frame. She uncurled her gloved fist to show me the stones she’d collected while they’d waited. Her face was blotchy with cold and smudged with dirt.

  ‘The friend she was going to spend the day with is ill,’ explained Caspar.

  ‘I’m glad to see her again,’ I lied. ‘Come this way, Fanny, and I’ll show you an obelisk with a dog’s snout set in it. The dog was called Emperor.’

  ‘What’s an obelisk?’

  ‘A pointy thing.’

  We wandered off the main gravelled path. Brambles caught at our legs.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ said Caspar, ‘how many children are buried here. Look, little Samuel aged five here, that’s the same age as Fanny, and there’s a baby of eleven months.’ We stopped at a family gravestone: five names, all under ten. On some neat gravestones there were flowers. Most were overgrown with nettles and ivy; moss sank into the lettering, obscuring it.

  ‘Look at that,’ I said. A few yards away, through a thicket of trees, a headless angel stood guard over a buried slab. ‘We’ve forgotten how to mourn, haven’t we? How to remember. I’d like a monument like that. But people would say it was kitsch, or morbid.’

 
; Caspar smiled. ‘Morbid? To be planning your funerary sculpture at the age of forty? The thought never entered my head.’

  ‘I’m forty-one. Look.’

  Four dreamy pre-Raphaelite heads clustered mournfully in a circle of stone.

  ‘Where are the pets buried, Jane?’ Fanny ran back from her detour through a line of toppled graves.

  I pointed up the path. ‘There. A bit further on.’

  She rushed off, her scarf trailing its fringes behind her.

  ‘Come here, Jane.’

  I made my way through the thickets to where Caspar stood. I walked very slowly. Nothing would ever again be as good as this moment. I stopped a foot away from him and we looked at each other.

  ‘Plain Jane Crane,’ he said. With one forefinger he traced my lips. Carefully, as if I were precious, he cupped the back of my skull. I took off my gloves, dropped them among the nettles, and slid my hands under his coat, jersey, shirt. He smelt of wood smoke. I could see my face in his eyes, and then he closed his eyes and kissed me. So many layers of clothing; we leant into each other. My body ached.

  ‘Caspar! Caspar, where are you? Come and see what I’ve found. There you are. Why are you hiding? Jane, Jane you’ve dropped your gloves. Come on. Hurry.’

  When I found myself in my remembered world again, the first stones of Cree’s Top hard against the curve of my spine, I felt cold and afraid. As soon as I had mounted my bike and free-wheeled down Swain’s Lane leaving Caspar and Fanny holding hands on the pavement, the kiss in the cemetery had seemed like a dream and I was returning to what was real. The holiday was over and I was going back to school.

  Alex and I hardly spoke. We made no eye contact. I lay on the couch and as he spoke the ritualistic few words, I felt the room slip away from me and I was back where I had to be. The surface of the River Col on my left rippled sickeningly, as if it were thick oil rather than flowing water. It moved heavily away round the bend. I stood and turned, shivering a little in my gym shoes and thin cotton dress, black like the one that Natalie had worn so often that summer. The breeze blew it back and it outlined my firm young body, the body I had given to Theo just the day before, caressed and peeled and finally penetrated out in the shadowed woods with the laughing and the music of the party humming in our ears. I had taken my notebook, with my silly girlish fancies and fantasies, and ripped them from the book one by one. Their childish illusions repelled me now and it was with a sense of burnt bridges that I’d screwed them up and tossed them one by one into the water where they’d lost themselves in the broken surface of light and ripples which disguised where air ended and water began. I was a woman now, wasn’t I?

  I turned round to face Cree’s Top. A wave of dread flowed through me and I felt giddy, so that my legs would scarcely bear me. The elms on my left swayed and tipped, or it might have been that they were still and I that was swaying. I began to make my way up the narrow and steep path that was familiar and so long lost. I could see the sludgy water of the stream down through the bushes to my right but this time I made an effort not to look anywhere but up the path, this path of my own shuttered mind. Branches brushed against me, snagging my dress, thorns against the flesh of my bare arms and calves, as if I was being held back. I strode through them unheeding. I was now directly on the summit of Cree’s Top, though the visibility was obscured in all directions by the thick gorse bushes that covered it. The peak was very small and after just a few steps I began to descend.

  I stopped and listened. Now I knew. Movement was visible through the bushes ahead, glimpses of something. Sounds also, muffled and indistinct. It was there. It was there. Things I had buried in my own mind for a quarter of a century and all I had to do was step forward, through the barriers I had erected for myself. When I opened my eyes and blinked, unseeing at first, at Alex, it was not with the fear of before but with an icy resolve. It was there. But I wasn’t quite ready. Not quite.

  Twenty-Six

  I woke on the morning of Wednesday 15 February with a sense of imminence. There had been rain for days – the lawn was bloated with it – but the weather was suddenly cold and bright. From my back window the spire and the television mast on Highgate Hill looked unnaturally clear. The everyday objects in my kitchen were different, charged with meaning. My skin prickled. It was as if every object that I looked at was illuminated from behind, its outline accentuated and made harder, more vivid. Myself, too. I felt capable, precise. I needed to do things.

  I had shopped the day before and was partly prepared. On the table I placed my heavy scales and weights, a bag of wholemeal flour and a bag of strong white flour, small polythene bags of pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and sesame seeds, yeast like soft modelling clay, sea salt, vitamin C powder in an orange medicinal pot, a plastic bottle of grapeseed oil, a bag of hard, thick muscovado sugar. This was a process I could go through in subconscious bliss. The yeast awoke with jewelled bubbles. I forked the salt into the sandy wholemeal flour, then added everything else with the beery puddle of yeast. I smoked cigarettes in the garden for half an hour, not thinking of anything, then returned and mashed and kneaded the two large patties of dough, leaning on the heels of my hands, folding and folding. Cut, rolled, pushed into four tins. of ring binders and the clatter of filing cabinets. We were now only a day or two from achieving perfect order, like Pompeii. It would be almost a pity to disturb the taxonomic perfection with any new work.

  Duncan was engrossed with the technicalities of the espresso machine, one of our major capital expenditures in the boom days of the late eighties. He brought me over a thimbleful of coffee which gave me an almost instantaneous jolt of caffeine as I despatched it in a single, tiny gulp. He told me of his new scheme which he was discussing with the council for putting homeless families (‘homilies’ he camply called them) into derelict houses and enabling them to restore the buildings themselves. I nodded with enthusiasm. It was extremely cost-effective (except for us), practical, socially beneficial, had little to do with architecture in any traditional sense, and was almost certain to be rejected out of hand by the housing department. An ideal CFM project. Then we moved on to my hostel.

  ‘I read about the torchlight procession of local residents in the local paper,’ Duncan said. ‘Your allaying of the anxieties of the community obviously wasn’t a total success. Does that mean that the hostel scheme has been abandoned?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘A council lawyer has come up with a slightly underhand way of pushing it through. Because of the fight at the meeting and the arrest that followed it, there’s a court hearing coming up. The ruse is, as far as I can understand it, that the matter is all sub judice, which means that we can’t respond to questions on the issue. Or at least that’s what we’ll say. Meanwhile, the plans are moving towards completion. The objectors will end up having to deal with a hostel that is up and running and that will bring its own problems. Local residents attacking arrogant council officials and a modernist architect is one thing. That would go down well in the local press. Nimbys assaulting the mentally ill who have been returned to the community is another. Anyway, that’s the grand strategy.’

  ‘Did you explain to them that if these people weren’t in their back yards, they would be on their pavements and in their shop doorways and public benches?’

  ‘No. Events intruded.’

  The meeting was adjourned in fairly good spirits and I returned to my desk where I smoked cigarettes and tapped my phone with my pencil and realised I wasn’t doing anything and that maybe I had better leave. I had the conviction that I was seeing everything with extreme clarity and that I had other places to be and other things to do. Gina asked after my health but I was unable to pay proper attention to what she was saying and I left, without even saying goodbye to Duncan. I would explain everything later.

  Back at home, I opened a bottle of red wine and I stood on a chair and looked through a cupboard and found some salted cashew nuts and a rolled-up quarter of a bag of pistachio nuts and a little packet
of scampi-flavoured somethings that were a bit like crisps. That would do for my supper. I drank the wine and ate these bits of crisps and watched TV and flicked between channels. There was a quiz show with questions I found elusive, a local news broadcast, an American science fiction show that I assumed must be Star Trek but turned out not to be, not even the new Star Trek. There was a programme about albatrosses, the long journeys they take navigating on the trade winds and the lifelong devotion the albatross shows to its mate, and a comedy show set in an American high school, and then another news programme.

  After I had watched too many of these programmes, I switched the sound off and rang up the Stead because I wanted to talk to Martha but somebody else answered and took me by surprise. It was Jonah and he spoke in a very calm official sort of voice and told me that Martha had sunk into a coma in the morning and then had died very quietly that afternoon. I tried to ask some questions, not wanting to break the connection, but Jonah said he was sorry but he had to go. On the television I saw a man in a grey suit silently opening and closing his mouth like a fish in a bowl. I had to phone somebody. I rang Claud and got an answering machine. I rang Caspar and a woman answered and I hung up. And I rang Alex Dermot-Brown and Alex answered. He was surprised and said at first that we had a session the next day and asked if it couldn’t wait but after I had talked a bit he told me to come straight over and asked if I was all right about getting over on my own or should he come and get me. I insisted and cycled over without a hat or gloves, though there was already rime on the car windows.

  Alex looked very slightly different when he opened the door. Although this was where I had always seen him and he never dressed up, I felt like a schoolgirl calling on her teacher at home, illicitly, after hours. He greeted me with obvious concern. He spoke quietly and I could hear voices from the kitchen downstairs. I dimly realised that I might have interrupted something but I wasn’t in a position to care. He led me up to his room. I asked something about the children. He said that they were asleep, way up at the top of the house and I didn’t need to think about them. He put the light on and it dazzled me. With the darkness outside and the brown cosy illumination in the hall and on the stairs, it seemed clinical and interrogative. I lay on the couch and he sat behind me.