The Memory Game (17 page)

There. That was what I presented Alex with. That was where I now was, bemused, tearful, out of control. What would he make of it? Although I was anxious to guard myself against it, I already caught myself caring about Alex's judgement on what I said. Perhaps I was even trying to impress him. I became curious about his life. I noticed his clothing, the differences from day to day. I liked the metal-rimmed spectacles he sometimes wore, always with an air of casualness as if they had been tossed on, and the long hair which he constantly pushed off his forehead with his hands. Sometimes he was strict with me. He surprised me by disapproving of my detective work.

'I thought you wanted me to deal with facts,' I protested, a little hurt.

'That's right,' said Alex, 'but the facts that we're interested in at the moment are the ones that are inside your own head. There's plenty of work there, hard work. We need to distinguish between the things you're telling me that are true and those that aren't. Then there are the things that are true and are not true that you
aren't
telling me. That will be more difficult.'

'There's nothing I'm telling you that isn't true. What are you talking about?'

'I'm talking about this golden childhood stuff. Look, Jane, I told you from the start that I would try to be frank about the way my thinking was going, so maybe I should talk a bit about the way I'm feeling at the moment.' Alex paused for thought. He always gave the impression of immense deliberation before speaking, not like me, gabbling away. He made thinking seem almost like a matter of engineering, a practical skill. 'You've been saying two contradictory things to me, Jane. You're clinging on to the happy childhood as if it were a talisman against something. At the same time you've been talking of this body that was buried at the heart of it. Now
I
might just say that the two were independent. Somebody can come from the outside and murder a member of the happiest of families. The world is full of cruel bad luck like that. But that's not what
you
say. It's
you
who insists that this is impossible.'

'What are you saying, Alex? What do you want me to do?'

'You're trying to hold up two heavy weights and you won't be able to manage it. You have to let one side go, Jane, and face up to the consequences. You have to think about your family.'

This was one of those moments in the sessions when I felt like a hunted animal. I would find some bit of cover somewhere and feel safe, then Alex would track me down and drive me out into the open again. I described the image to Alex and he laughed and laughed.

'I'm not sure I'm happy with the idea of you being a beautiful fox while I'm some brutal red-faced squire on a horse. But if it means that I can stop you skulking in some false paradise then I suppose I can live with it. Now, over to you. Even if it's only an experiment, Jane, I want you to strip away your picture-book account of your family. Start thinking of it as a family in which a murder could happen, and let's see where that gets us.'

'What are you talking about? What do you mean, "a family in which murder could happen"?'

When Alex replied, I detected a harder tone which I had never heard from him before.

'I've just been listening to you, Jane. You must take responsibility for what you say to me.'

'I haven't talked about any murderer in the family.' I felt a sour, sick taste in the back of my mouth.

Alex remained firm. 'It was you, not me, who talked of the oddity of where Natalie's body was found.'

'Yes, well it
was
odd, wasn't it?'

'What did you mean by that if you weren't implicating your family in some way?'

'I wasn't.'

'All right, calm down.'

'I'm perfectly calm.'

'No, what I mean is that even if the idea is a shock, you should treat it as an experiment.'

'What do you mean, an experiment?'

'It's simple, Jane. Sometimes these ideas in therapy can be treated like hypotheses. Imagine, if you can, that you didn't come from this ultra-perfect family that everybody admired and wanted to join. Imagine it was a dangerous family.'

Had I been wanting Alex to say this to me, to say this
for
me? I made a token attempt to protest but Alex interrupted me and continued.

'I'm not asking you to make accusations or be disloyal. It's just a way of re-orienting yourself, to allow yourself a new freedom.'

It was one of those moments when I craved a cigarette as a means of thinking clearly. Instead, I told Alex about my evening at the ICA and the colossal, shaming, harrowing awfulness of Alan's behaviour. When you are the daughter-in-law of Alan Martello, a good deal of your work is done. He's been famous since his twenties and, independently of his own efforts, he has been a free-floating symbol. A youthful radicalism was pinned on him once, now this has been replaced with an equally odd anarchic conservatism. He has been at various times, often at the same time, a little Englander, a satirist, a class warrior, a liberator, a reactionary, a professional iconoclast, a conformist, a rebel, a bore, a sexist exploiter. I sometimes wonder what I would make of him if I were encountering him for the first time, but I've always adored him in a mixed-up way. I've seen him put himself in the most indefensible positions, I've witnessed or heard of behaviour that I totally deplored, he has heedlessly hurt people, especially my beloved Martha, but I've been on his side. He was the person who presided over that wonderful Martello household, his vitality fuelled it, he was the centre of it all, its symbol. Was it just because of that that I couldn't reject him? Even at the ICA, in the middle of all the shambles, I felt a perverse loyalty but that time it really did feel perverse.

Alex hardly followed up the things that I expected would interest him. Sometimes it seemed almost a matter of pride, as if he had to demonstrate his independence. He listened with concentration to the account of my wavering attitude towards Alan but then he went back yet again to my memories, or non-memories, of the river bank on the afternoon when Natalie was last seen. This time I actually showed some impatience. He was insistent.

'I'll follow you in whatever you want to talk about,' he said. 'But I would like you to indulge my interest in this. Something you said to me very early on interested me. You said, "I was there.'"

'I don't remember if I used those exact words, but it's not such a big deal. All I meant was that I was on the river bank close to where Natalie was last seen. You can't read all that much into it.'

'I'm not reading anything into it. I'm listening to you. That's what you pay me for. "I was there. I was there." An interesting choice of words, don't you think?'

'Not really.'

'I think it is.'

Alex got up and paced around the room as he always did when he was being theatrically excited. Being behind me and out of sight wasn't enough at moments like these. He wanted to be higher than I was, to dominate me.

'You're being woolly, just because we're dealing with words and emotions. You wouldn't be like this in your work, would you? If you had a plan of a house twenty metres wide and a site fifteen metres wide, you wouldn't just go ahead and build the building and hope that it would somehow work out along the way. You would redesign the building to fit the space. It may be that all we need to do is iron out the discrepancies in what you've said to me. You've said that you come from a perfect happy family and yet one of the family was killed and you say it couldn't have been someone from outside. How can we make those statements fit together? You tell me that you were there, and yet you weren't there. How can that make sense? Were you in reality
not
there, or do we have to get you there?'

'What do you mean, "get me there"?'

'You have come to me with a story with strange dark holes in it, with walls that need to be breached. Let's strike a bargain, Jane. I'm going to stop being a bully, I promise. We'll talk about the things you want to talk about, for the time being at any rate. However' - he held up a finger - 'there will be one exception. I want us to stay with this scene by the river, I want you to go back into it, to inhabit it, to explore it.'

'Alex, I've told you everything I can possibly remember about that afternoon.'

'Yes, I know. And you're doing well, perhaps better than you realise. What I want you to do now is stop trying to remember. You can free yourself from all that. I'd like to try to repeat the exercise we did the other day.'

So we went through that process. I closed my eyes and relaxed and Alex talked soothingly to me and I tried to put myself back by the river, leaning against the stone, there on that summer afternoon. I was better at it now. The first time the scene had appeared like one of those supposedly three-dimensional photographs. They give an illusion of depth but it's not a depth you can put your hand into. This was different. I could yield to it. I was in a space I could walk through, a world in which I could lose myself. Alex's voice seemed to come from outside. I described to him what I experienced. I was sitting down, my back resting on the dry mossy stone at the foot of Cree's Top, the river on my left flowing away, the last screwed up pieces of paper floating round the curve ahead of me. The elms on the edge of the wood on my right.

Alex's voice from outside my world asked me if I could stand up and I could without any difficulty. He asked me if I could turn round. Yes, I could. I told him that the river was now on my right flowing towards me and away behind me, the elms and the wood were on my left. Now I was looking up the little hill of Cree's Top. Alex's voice told me that he didn't want me to move or to do anything. All he wanted to know was, could I see the path? Of course I could. There were thick bushes by the side, and it occasionally disappeared from view as it snaked its way up the slope, but I could see almost all of it. Very good, said Alex. All he wanted me to do now, he said, was to turn round once more and sit down in my original position. No problem. Very good, he said. Very good.

Sixteen

Days were up and down, but I surprised myself by coping. Take a typical example, a sunny Monday morning early in December. It was one of those days that occur every so often on which women are encouraged to bring a schoolgirl to work with them in order, supposedly, to make their jobs seem less alarming. I couldn't help feeling that anybody who contemplated my working life would suddenly find herself attracted to the kitchen and nursery, but I decided I must make the gesture. So I rang up Peggy, whom I always felt I never rang up quite often enough. Evidently, Emily, the middle girl of Paul's previous family (she's almost sixteen), was slowest in thinking up a plausible excuse and she was offered up to me for the day.

Just after nine o'clock in the morning she slouched down her garden path, Peggy waving unnoticed behind her. She was dressed in black like a Greek widow, though with the rings through her nose she was unlikely to be mistaken for one. She sat in the passenger seat, switched
Start the Week
off and we headed east from Kentish Town. I asked after Peggy and Emily grunted something and asked about Robert. I muttered a non-committal pleasantry and said he seemed to be getting on well with his new girlfriend. I feel protective about my nieces where my predatory youngest son is concerned and I've talked to him, and to Jerome as well, about their duty to look after their younger cousins. I was edgy, mainly because I would normally have been smoking but Emily would have probably wanted to join me and so I had decided in advance to give up for a morning.

I love my sons but when they were growing up the house did sometimes feel like a sports changing room. Perhaps in reaction to this I have always felt a special pang of affection for the three bolshy Crane girls. I sometimes worried that I might try too hard with them and put them off me but as we stopped and started along York Way, Emily chatted with what - for her, at least - was remarkable fluency. I asked her if she had heard anything about Paul's documentary. Emily rolled her eyes, as she did in response to almost anything to do with her father.

'Silly man,' she said.

I felt obliged to be soothing.

'No, Emily, I'm sure it'll be very interesting.'

'You
want
to be on telly, do you, with everybody knowing about your family?'

'No, not really.'

'We're all refusing to be in it. Dad got really cross. Cath called him a voyeur.'

'Well, at least Paul must be pleased to hear her using a French word. If only she'd called him an auteur.'

We giggled together. We arrived, late as always, at the hostel where there were two council employees waiting, neither of whom I'd met before. Pandora Webb, an intermediate treatment officer. And Carolyn Salkin, a disability officer. In a wheelchair. At the foot of the steep concrete steps leading to the front door. Carolyn's hair was cut very short, giving her the air of a fierce sprite. She was the sort of person I would have taken to immediately if I had met her anywhere but in front of my precious project. She came bluntly to the point.

'There is evidently no wheelchair access in your plans, Ms Martello.'

'Please call me Jane,' I panted. 'And this is my niece, Emily.'

'There's no wheelchair access, Jane.'

'The issue was never really raised,' I replied, incredibly feebly, but it was Monday morning and I was feeling self-conscious in front of my niece.

'I'm raising it now.'

I needed to go away and think this through but it didn't seem possible.

'As far as the brief went, this is a hostel where highly independent recently discharged people can stay briefly with light supervision. I agree, Carolyn, that ideally every building should have full wheelchair access but with my alterations this is now a narrow four-storey house. Surely it would be better if wheelchair-bound patients, or, indeed, employees, were directed to premises that would be more suitable.'

The two women exchanged glances. They looked ironic, contemptuous. Pandora was clearly not on my side, but she was obviously happy to leave the talking to Carolyn.