The Memory Game Part 7

'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 gla.s.ses, 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 unaccountably 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 h.e.l.lo 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.' 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, G.o.d 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 : cla.s.sical, 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 ill.u.s.tration 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.' Venice.' Claud's voice was wistful. 'Do you remember our time there?' 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.' Birds of Great Britain.' Claud was flicking his finger along the shelf. Claud was flicking his finger along the shelf. 'One is Fun 'One is Fun, I suppose I should take that. This one must be mine.' He pulled out a slim Sh.e.l.l 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 gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.ses. 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 b.u.mming 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 gla.s.s 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 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, friends.h.i.+p, 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 pa.s.sed. After a minute or two he stood up.

'I'll come for these things another time.'

I still had the dish under my fingers. 'What about this?' I handed it to Claud.

'This? It's ours.' He took it in two hands, and without any evident emotion or even a change of expression he snapped it in two and handed me one of the pieces. I was too shocked to move or even to speak but I saw that he had cut one of his fingers quite badly.

'I'll just take these.'

He put the fragment of china into one of the boxes. I opened the door for him, and a gust of rain blew into the house.

'You disappoint me, Jane,' he said. I could only shrug.

In the bedroom, I took off my jeans and grey cardigan, unhooked my ear-rings, brushed out my hair, and pulled on a dressing-gown. I had a thought. I went to the bathroom and rubbed soap around one of my fingers. I pulled hard and the ring slipped over the knuckle. I rinsed it and took it to my study, Jerome's old bedroom, now cluttered with easels and sheets of graph paper and unanswered correspondence. I opened a small drawer in my desk, where I kept the wrist-tags the boys had worn in hospital when they were born, the champagne cork with FINALS written on it in biro, my mother's last letter to me, wonky with pain, and the recently acquired photographs of Natalie. I put the ring in there, and closed the drawer. Then I went to bed and lay for a long time, waiting for oblivion.

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 cliches. 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 like my bank manager,' I insisted. 'He's been very nice to me, however much I've provoked him.' 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 professors.h.i.+ps 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-fas.h.i.+oned. 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. a.n.a.lysis 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 write a novel?' a novel?'

'Are you making fun of me, Alex? Just say what you want to say and don't p.i.s.s 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.