The Memory Game Read online

  ‘How could she have been pregnant?’

  ‘This is difficult for all of us, Jane.’

  ‘Who could the father have been?’

  Claud began to sound weary and impatient. ‘Jane, I’ve only this minute heard, I know nothing more than you do.’

  ‘The funeral isn’t going ahead now, is it?’

  ‘Yes, it is. The police have released the remains to us.’

  ‘But aren’t there examinations they can carry out? Couldn’t they find out who the father is with DNA tests and things like that? You’re a doctor, you must know.’

  This was Claud’s cue to assume his pedagogic tone. ‘I’m sure the forensic scientists have retained specimens, Jane. But as far as I understand it, DNA profiling won’t be possible. I believe that samples of blood or bodily fluid are required.’

  ‘Can’t you get DNA from bones?’

  ‘Is this really the time, Jane? Bone cells have nuclei, so of course they contain DNA, but so far as I know it degrades in skeletons and if it has been buried in soil, the DNA strands don’t just crumble, they also get contaminated. But this isn’t my area. You must address your enquiries about this to the proper authorities, as they say.’

  ‘It sounds hopeless,’ I said.

  ‘The situation is not good.’

  Pregnant. I felt sick, and the feeling of foreboding that had been closing in on me felt like a fist around my pounding heart.

  ‘Oh Christ, Claud, Claud. What are we all going to do?’ I sat heavily on the old green easy chair by the phone and rocked to and fro slightly.

  ‘Do?’ he replied. ‘We’re going to stick together as a family, as we have always done, and we’re going to get through this. I know it’s hard for all of us, but we’ve just got to help each other. And it’s hardest for Alan and Martha. It’s very important to them that you should be at the funeral tomorrow.’ His voice went soft. ‘Don’t desert us, Janie. We’re in this together. You’ll be there tomorrow, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I rang Helen Auster at her Kirklow direct line but she was too busy to say much. She said she’d be down in London in a few days and we could meet. What would I have asked her anyway?

  The coffin was slim and the sky was grey. There were no leaves on the trees but there were bright flowers on the shiny new gravestones with their synthetic green gravel and picture postcard inscriptions. The beautiful old worn stones had no flowers. I looked up at the church. Northern Romanesque, said a whisper in my ear. Claud, of course. If I had time afterwards, he told me, I must go and look at the Norman font. His voice was mercifully drowned out by bells.

  Her grave was an open wound in the ground. Soon the parcel of bones would be lowered into it, the mud flung over it. In a year, grass would have grown over the scar. It would become a site to visit occasionally, to lay flowers upon. At Christmas we would come with holly, and in the spring we would gather daffodils and blossom. Eventually, the grave would no longer look new and livid. It would merge into the melancholy landscape and children would play beside it. The small band of Sunday worshippers would walk by it unseeing. One day, there would be no one left to visit the place where Natalie lay. Strangers would pause beside the gravestone and run their fingers along the gouged dates, and say : she died young.

  When I saw Martha I thought my heart would break. She had aged ten years in the space of a few weeks. Her face was old with grief, her hair a colour beyond white. She stood quite straight in the icy wind and did not weep. I wondered if she had any tears left now. She didn’t believe in God, but I knew she would come every week to sit by her daughter’s grave. For the first time, I wondered how many years she had left. She’d always seemed immortal to me, and now she seemed frail and worn. Alan, too, looked ravaged. I thought he seemed suddenly smaller, hunched over in his greatcoat, clutching his stick. The four sons stood tall and still, handsome in their dark suits. The rest of us – wives and ex-wives, grandchildren and friends – stood back. Jerome (‘Got a class’) and Robert (‘Nah, don’t like funerals’) had not come, but Hana, unexpectedly, had turned up at my door at seven in the morning, dressed in a long mauve skirt and clutching a bacon sandwich, a Thermos flask and a bunch of jewellike anemones.

  ‘Just say, if you don’t want me to come,’ she’d said, but I did want her to come. I was glad that she stood beside me holding my hand, with the air turning her nose red and her absurd clothes flapping in the wind. A few feet away, a middle-aged man with a vaguely familiar face – beaky and intent – blew his nose loudly into a large handkerchief. There was no other sound. No birds sang.

  Into the chill air, the vicar awkwardly delivered his words of death and resurrection. The coffin with its pitiful double burden was lowered into its space. Martha stepped forward very slowly and dropped a single yellow rose onto the top of it. There was a low sob from behind me. No one else made a sound. Martha moved back and took Alan’s hand; they didn’t look at each other but gazed steadily at the hole in the ground which even now was being filled in. Claud stepped forward with a bunch of flowers, and one by one we followed him. Soon the raw earth was quite hidden by a heap of vivid colours. The family’s wound was exuberantly patched.

  The Stead looked different to my aching, itchy eyes. When I was a child I thought it the most welcoming house in the world. I remembered it as a place one came home to after long walks in the dusk : glimmering stone, the glow from the windows, wisps of smoke from the chimney, all promising warmth inside. Now, I thought it looked abandoned. The windows were dark. There were weeds around the front door. The weeping willow that hung over the driveway looked dank and untidy.

  Jane Martello, the flying caterer, had brought meringues, plump scones with unsalted butter and the jam I’d made the year before, and a Madeira cake. The night before the funeral, I’d baked until the early hours : the kitchen had been full of the smell of vanilla essence and lemon zest. As the cake had risen in the oven, I’d called Claud again.

  ‘Who’ll be there?’ I’d asked.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, and mentioned a few names.

  ‘Luke! Will Luke be there?’

  ‘Well, why not, Jane?’ Claud had replied a bit tetchily, and looking at the kitchen clock I’d realised that it was well past midnight : I’d probably woken him.

  ‘But Luke was her boyfriend. Natalie was pregnant and Luke was her boyfriend.’

  ‘Goodnight, Sherlock, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  As I arranged my spread on the long oak table in the Stead’s kitchen, I realised that the man who’d blown his nose was Luke. In a few minutes he’d arrive with all the others and we’d chat politely. The sharp graveside grief would dissolve into the boredom of sandwiches and dull talk. We should all have left separately, carried away our bereavement and dread and lived with it a bit. I slid the scones into the oven to warm them, and Hana arrived carrying the meringues. We didn’t say anything : she’d always known how to be silent.

  ‘Jane, my dear. Hana.’ It was Alan, but Alan without any bombast. His beard looked clumsily cut, or was it just unbrushed. I’d never let Claud grow a beard. ‘Martha’s gone upstairs, but she’ll be down in a minute. Can I do anything?’

  ‘No, Alan. Nothing.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll –’ he waved a hand vaguely, and shuffled out.

  I left Hana sorting plates, and went into the garden. Even before I lit a cigarette, my breath curled into the air. I could see groups of people straggling up the drive. I couldn’t quite face them yet and I wandered through the side gate and round the front to miss them. My food could stand in for me for a little while.

  ‘So what are you doing now?’

  This was just what I had feared. I looked at a respectable man in a sombre suit, badly pressed and not very clean. He probably wore it to work occasionally. But what I really saw was a slim boy with round metal glasses, a shock of long dark hair kissing Natalie, consuming her, cradling the back of her head in two tender hands. Natalie’s bit of rough. He seemed u
naccountably thrown by the question.

  ‘I’m a teacher,’ he said. ‘In Sparkhill. A secondary school.’

  Luke was thin and tall. He stooped over me as he talked, and with his long nose he looked a bit like a melancholy bird. But his eyes were sharp. Automatically, I said what I always said to teachers, about it being the most worthwhile profession and all that. Blah blah blah.

  ‘I’ll give you our address,’ he said, ‘and you can write off for our brochure.’ A glimmer of the old abrasive Luke, but his heart wasn’t in it. ‘Look, Jane, can we talk?’

  He grabbed me by the elbow and steered me through the groups of people to the door.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said, talking in a rushed whisper, as if he was in a hurry and might be overheard. He looked over my shoulder as he spoke to me, the way people do at parties when they’re looking for someone more interesting. ‘I heard – Theo told me – that Natalie was killed. Well, surprise, surprise. But then he said she was pregnant. And then I realised that I wasn’t exactly being welcomed back into the fold after all these years. Martha couldn’t even say hello to me. Theo, everyone, they all think it was me.’

  ‘Think it was you what?’

  I felt hard and merciless. All the angles of his face collapsed and he drew out his handkerchief again. I had an abrupt and brief memory of him sobbing as a boy, but it evaded me. I reflected that of all the men in Natalie’s life, he was the first I had actually seen weeping over her.

  ‘I loved her. I know I was only a stupid teenager, but I loved her. She was so sweet and so – so – ruthless.’

  ‘How do you know you didn’t get her pregnant?’ I asked, collecting the adjectives he’d just used and storing them away for later.

  He wasn’t crying now. He was looking hard into my eyes. ‘We didn’t,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t. There must have been somebody else.’

  ‘Who? When?’

  ‘How should I know? I promise you I’ve been trying to think of anything, anything at all. Once, God knows where it was, we were kissing, I was kissing Natalie. She had this beautiful golden down on her cheeks, even though she was so dark. I remember it on my lips. And I started touching her, caressing her, and she just pushed me away and said : “You’re just a kid, you know.” I was a whole year older than her. I couldn’t believe it, but that’s the sort of thing she did. You know. You knew her better than anyone.’

  I didn’t want to be having this conversation.

  ‘Okay, so why tell me about it?’

  ‘But do you believe me?’

  ‘Who cares what I believe?’

  ‘I do,’ Luke said and then muttered something I couldn’t hear. He made a visible effort to compose himself. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? You’re all closing ranks. I can see it’s convenient for you.’

  I turned and left him.

  ‘You’re making it easy for yourselves, you know,’ he said.

  I ignored him.

  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.