The Memory Game (36 page)

There was a large photograph of the Martello brothers, grim-faced, all present at the trial. They had refused to make any comment to the press and the
Standard
called them 'dignified, almost heroic'. Claud, apparently, had held Fred while he wept. There was a smaller picture of me, hand flung over my face, and a cropped portrait of Natalie which I'd never seen before. She looked younger than sixteen in it and conventionally pretty. Nothing threatening or sinister about that face. There was a two-page story under the heading, NATALIE'S SHORT LIFE AND BRUTAL DEATH. Under a slightly blurred photo of the seven Martellos all together and smiling ran a short piece starting : 'They seemed such a happy family.' There was another story about the police investigation; my own name flared up at me from the first paragraph but that story I didn't read; couldn't.

The phone rang, and I froze, cupping my cooling tea in my hands.

'Jane, it's Kim. Come on, you can pick up the phone.'

'Kim.' I think I'd never been so glad to hear a voice. 'Kim, thank God it's you.'

'Listen, we can talk later. I've booked us a room in a little hotel in Bishop's Castle, on the Welsh Borders. I'm taking you away for the weekend. Can you be ready by half past five? I'll pick you up.'

I didn't protest. 'What would I do without you, Kim? Yes, I can.'

'Right. Pack walking boots and lots of warm clothes. Bye.'

I ran upstairs and threw some long-sleeved T-shirts, jumpers and socks into a large hold-all; dug out my walking boots, still caked with mud from a year before; found my cagoule wrapped up in itself at the back of the cupboard. A quarter to five. I lit a cigarette, and turned on the small TV at the end of the bed. Alan's face again stared at me, all beard and fierce eyes, before the camera switched to the earnest face of an absurdly young reporter. 'Passing sentence, the judge described the murder of a daughter by her father as one of the worst, and most unnatural crimes that could be imagined...' I leant forward, in a panic, and shoved Paul's video into the player. The young reporter disappeared abruptly. Through a curl of smoke, the Stead appeared on the screen as the title and credits rolled.

Paul's making of his film about the family had seemed so sporadic and arbitrary that in spite of having seen the final sequence I think I had expected something like a camcorder picture of a holiday. It wasn't like that at all. Paul began by reading an extract from
A Shropshire Lad:

Into my heart an air that kills
From you far country blows.
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

The camera moved slowly over the Shropshire landscape around the Stead, skeletal in its winter garb, but still gorgeous. The sun glinted through the bare branches, and the old house sat rosy-stoned and welcoming. It was the house of my childhood and the land of my lost innocence.

I sat entranced while my cigarette burnt down to my fingertips and gazed as Paul spoke intimately to the camera. Memory, he was saying, is intangible, and die memories one has of childhood, which glow so vividly through all of our adult life, are seductive and nostalgic. And if one's childhood is happy, then adulthood is like an exile from its joy. We can never return. More music, and the camera zoomed in on the door of the Stead. Alan walked out. My ash fell onto the duvet cover and I brushed it heedlessly away. He quoted something from Wordsworth, and spoke about love. He said, with all the old Alan bravado, that he had been a wild young man who had scorned the concept of family and kicked against its traces. But he had learnt that this - he gestured at the Stead - was where he could be himself. He talked about the family as the place where you could be most tormented, or most at peace. 'For myself, I have found a kind of peace,' he said. He looked, as he stood on the threshold, like a mass-produced wise patriarch that you might buy in a souvenir shop. I watched his broad hands as he gestured, and I shuddered. Martha, thin as a tree branch, came through the doorway carrying a broad basket and some secateurs, smiled strangely at the camera and walked off screen. The camera moved sideways, and came to rest on the site where Natalie's body had been found. Paul stated the facts. Then came a series of stills of Natalie : as a baby, a toddler, a ten-year-old, a teenager; on her own, with her family. Then her tombstone.

Claud appeared and now that I was his audience I saw how handsome he was, how serious. I sat like a coiled spring while I waited for him to talk about me, and our marriage break-up, but all he said was that 'some things had not turned out as he had hoped'. I was shocked by the spasm of pity and love that jolted me. Cut to Robert and Jerome playing frisbee on Hampstead Heath. So young and carefree. Then Jerome, affectionately derisive on how the older generation was obsessed with the past. Fred, at home with his family on their well-tended patio. Alan again, drinking brandy and being expansive on the power of forgiveness. Theo comparing a family to a computer program.

Me, that was me, red-faced in my kitchen. Oh God, Christmas - but the Christmas I watched as I waited for Kim to arrive was one of festive hilarity : laughter boomed out of the television; I smiled a lot and handed round wine (had I smiled a lot that evening? I couldn't remember). Erica and Kim looked like two extravagant birds of paradise in their purple and yellow get-ups. Dad was distinguished Old Age, and my sons fresh Youth. The power of editing - to splice images so that collective trauma becomes a display of boozy unity.

I smoked the last cigarette in the packet. In spite of being revolted by the film's message, smashed as it was into a thousand pieces by Alan's confession, I was half seduced by its melancholy insistence upon the past as a place of innocence and joy, the lost Eden in everyone. The music, the winter greenness of Shropshire, the faces that came and went on the television screen, as familiar as the palm of my hand, the way that Paul, somehow, had made even his most resistant interviewees talk with a kind of inner concentration so that they seemed to be discovering truths about themselves for the first time - these things filled me with rich sorrow.

The film was nearing its end now. Paul was walking along the Col, hands in his pocket. The brown water was swollen with all the recent rain. He stopped and turned towards the camera, held out his hands in a gesture of offering. Oh, God, he was reciting poetry again :

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

I was getting confused. Was the point of this documentary that you
could
go home again or that you
couldn't
But Paul was talking again. 'The family,' he said. 'Alan Martello called it torment and peace. Jane Martello, my sister, said that it is where we are our best and our worst selves.' [Oh, Christ.] 'Erica, my wife, calls it a haven and a prison - we can always return to it, but no matter how far we go from it, we can never escape it.' (Which Christmas cracker did she get
that
from?) Paul smiled with the wisdom of the ages and walked on, into the final sequence I had already witnessed, full circle back to the house and the site of the body.

I switched off the television, resolving to sell it. Or maybe a crack addict would break in and steal it while I was away with Kim. It was nearly five thirty. I buckled up my suitcase, then on an impulse I opened it once more and threw in my childhood diary. I quickly punched in Paul's number but was answered by a machine. After the bleep I said:

'Paul, it's me, Jane. I've just watched your film. It's very impressive - honestly, in spite of everything, it holds its own ground. I'm going away for the weekend with Kim, but I'll call you as soon as I get back. Well done.' I was going to replace the receiver but a thought struck me. 'Oh, and Paul - can you just tell me : which side of the river were you walking along at the end?'

As I put the phone down, I heard Kim's horn. I put on my leather jacket, picked up my bag and walked into the weather.

River Arms was a small white inn with low beams and a huge open fire in the bar. We had a double room, with a bathroom. Kim said that when we woke in the morning we'd be able to see the river and the mountains from our window. Now it was dusk and damp. I sat on my bed, feeling too tired to move.

'It's nine o'clock,' said Kim. 'Why don't you have a bath, and I'll meet you in the bar in half an hour. They do wonderful meals here, but we'll wait until tomorrow for that. Let's just have a snack by the fire tonight.'

'Fine.' I yawned and stood up. 'How do you know about this place?'

Kim giggled. 'My romantic past. It comes in useful sometimes.'

I had a deep warm bath, breaking open all the bath gels and foams. I washed my hair and dressed in leggings and a thick baggy cotton shirt. Downstairs, Kim had ordered two large gin and tonics, and had managed to secure a place by the fire. She raised her glass and chinked it against mine.

'Here's to better times,' she said.

My eyes filled with tears, and I took a long swallow of cold clean liquid.

'I've ordered our meal, as well,' Kim continued. 'Cold roast beef sandwiches, and a bottle of red wine. Okay?' I nodded; I was glad, today, of someone to take decisions for me.

'Tomorrow we can go for a long walk, somewhere high up, with thin air and fine views. If it doesn't rain. I've got Ordnance Survey maps in my bag; we can look at them at breakfast.'

We sipped our drinks and said nothing for a bit. There aren't many people you can be happily silent with. Then Kim said :

'Was it worse than you expected?'

'I don't know. I don't know what I expected. Pretty bad, though.'

The sandwiches arrived : thin slices of rare beef, horseradish sauce on the side; a bottle of shiraz rich and smooth enough to befuddle me into a kind of peace.

'Why did you and Andreas split up? You seemed so happy together.'

'We were. I thought we were.' Kim opened her bread and carefully spread a thin layer of horseradish over the beef. 'One minute he was talking about where we would go on holiday in the summer and what kind of house we would live in together, and the next he was telling me he and his old girlfriend had decided to give it another go. Sorry and thank you and I'll never forget you and you're wonderful and all that crap.' She topped up our wine glasses. 'I was too old. I can't have children. I'm past not future.' She raised her glass once more : 'Here's to growing old disgracefully.'

I leant over and gave her a hug.

'He was mad. He didn't know how lucky he was.'

Kim grinned a little crookedly.

'Life never turns out the way you think, does it? When we were at university together, if you'd asked me what I wanted from life I'd have said I wanted it all : a good lasting relationship, children, lots of children, a career, friends. I've got friends and I've got the career, though nowadays that doesn't seem to count for much with me. I can do it standing on my head. But I don't seem to be doing very well with the lasting relationship. And I'll never have children.'

What could I say? 'Life's cruel. I used to think you made your own luck but that's a very young thing to think, isn't it? Here are you, beautiful and witty and warm - and on your own. And here am I. I've always had more or less what I wanted and suddenly I'm living in a nightmare. Anyway' - I was a bit drunk now, garrulously mournful - 'we'll always have each other.' This time, I raised my glass. 'To us.'

'To us. I'm plastered.'

We ate hungrily.

'Did you know,' I said after a bit, 'that we're really quite near the Stead.'

'Actually,' replied Kim, 'I did know. Is it a problem?'

'Not exactly a problem. Do you mean you chose this place because it's near the Stead?'

'Kind of. I mean, I thought of it as a lovely place to come to, and then I also thought you might want to go there. To lay a few ghosts. Otherwise I thought it might come to hold a hellish power over you.'

I stared at her in astonishment.

'Kim, you're amazing. Ever since we arrived I've been thinking that I've got to go back there. I've got to go to where it happened, not just the Stead but the hillside. I can't explain it, but I feel as if it won't be over until I've revisited it. I've gone back there so many times in my memory; if I close my eyes I could describe the place inch by inch, each ditch and tree. But I've never, not ever, been back to it in person - not since Nat vanished. It became like a forbidden area to me. Well, I know why now, of course, but I also know that I can't escape from what I've done, so I've got to confront it. Walk through it, as it were. You do see, don't you?'

Kim nodded, and drained the last of the bottle into our glasses.

'Certainly. If I were in your shoes, I think I'd feel the same.' I started to speak, but she stopped me. 'Since I'm not in your shoes, I will go for a long walk tomorrow, while you return.'

We relapsed into silence once more, both staring into the flames, blurred by wine and fatigue.

'What are you thinking?' Kim asked.

'It wasn't the Memory Game, you know,' I said.

'What?'

'The game we played at Christmas, trying to remember the objects on a tray. It's not called the Memory Game. It's called Kim's Game.'

'My
game? What on earth are you talking about?'

'I found a copy of
Kim
, you know, Kipling's novel, in a box of my old stuff from the Stead that Claud brought round. I was browsing through it and when Kim is learning to be a spy, his memory is trained by memorising collections of random objects which are then hidden. Kim's game.'

'You want another glass of wine, Jane,' said Kim, smiling.