The Memory Game (41 page)

'And you were prepared to sacrifice Alan for your own survival. Was the note you planted really by Natalie or did you fake it?'

'It was a note Natalie sent
me.
I only had to tear the paper to remove the "Dear Claud" or words to that effect at the beginning. I wasn't sacrificing Alan. You've always talked about his theatrical nature. I saw the way events were moving and gave them a small nudge. He embraced the role by confessing. And from what you tell me, I assume he has never been happier. I'm not proud of it, though, if that's what you mean. I'm afraid I saw it as a way of getting you back and that may have blunted my powers of reasoning. That was the flaw, wasn't it? You realised that if Alan was innocent then I must have planted Natalie's note in his diary.'

Claud leant forward and his voice dropped to little more than a whisper.

'Do you want to hear my one regret, Jane?' I didn't reply and made no movement. 'If you had discovered this when we were still married...' Claud frowned and shook his head. 'I don't mean married, I mean when we were together, really together, then you would have understood. No, don't say anything. I know that you would. There's just one more thing I want to say to you, because I know that you'll never come to see me again. That's all right, Jane. I don't mind any of this. All that matters is that I still love you. You haven't said what you think of me, and maybe that's the best I can hope for from you. Just remember, Jane, the family and our two boys, that's my gift to you. You will always live in the world I made for you.'

I touched my name tag. As Barry led me out, I avoided catching Claud's eye. Neither of us spoke.

Griffith led me back through the corridors to the front door. He held out his broad hand.

'Goodbye Mrs Martello. If it's of any consolation to you, I...'

'Goodbye. Thank you.'

I stepped outside, and the door swung shut behind me, closing with a muffled click. While I had been inside, the day had changed. The sun shone in a sky that between its strips of clouds was almost turquoise. The few dry leaves that still hung on the small trees fringing the path gleamed. I pushed my hair back with both hands, and tipped my face towards the light, and stood with my eyes closed in the warm air. After a few seconds the roaring in my head quietened. 'That's it, Natalie,' I said out loud. 'That's finished.' Then, 'I wish you were still here with us. My sister. My friend.'

Slowly, I walked down the shallow paved steps, between the low hedges and neat, empty flowerbeds, then stopped again. In the car park a tiny figure in a bulky dufflecoat, with a pointed hood like a pixie's, was twirling in a shaft of sunlight. She stopped, tipped, then sat down abruptly while her world went on spinning. A young man with shaggy blond hair and a thick sweater hanging down under his beaten-up leather jacket ran towards her, picked her up, and threw her high into the air. Fanny squealed with laughter, her hood falling back and a cloud of bright hair flying loose. Robert threw her up again, then lowered her gently onto the tarmac, and stood holding her by the shoulders.

Caspar and Jerome walked towards them; they were talking earnestly, and at one point Caspar stopped and put his hand on Jerome's arm. They joined the other two, and Fanny slipped her hand into Caspar's, tilting her pale solemn triangle of a face up to his, saying something. Jerome pulled her hood back over her wild hair.

Then they saw me and stopped talking. They turned towards me and waited: three tall men and a little girl. I took a deep breath, and I walked down the steps to join them.

Nicci

French

about Nicci and Sean

about
The Memory Game

the recovered/false memory
controversy

top tens

Jane Martello's recipes

the books

about Nicci and Sean

Nicci Gerrard
was born in June 1958 in Worcestershire. After graduating with a first class honours degree in English Literature from Oxford University, she began her first job, working with emotionally disturbed children in Sheffield.

In the early eighties she taught English Literature in Sheffield, London and Los Angeles, but moved into publishing in 1985 with the launch of
Women's Review
, a magazine for women on art, literature and female issues. In 1987 Nicci had a son, Edgar, followed by a daughter, Anna, but by the time she became acting literary editor at the
New Statesman
her marriage had ended. She moved to the
Observer
in 1990, where she was deputy literary editor for five years, and then a feature writer and executive editor. It was while she was at the
New Statesman
that she met Sean French.

Sean French
was born in May 1959 in Bristol, to a British father and Swedish mother. He too studied English Literature at Oxford University at the same time as Nicci, also graduating with a first class degree, but their paths didn't cross until 1990. In 1981 he won
Vogue
magazine's Writing Talent Contest, and from 1981 to 1986 he was their theatre critic. During that time he also worked at the
Sunday Times
as their deputy literary editor and television critic, and was the film critic for
Marie Claire
and deputy editor of
New Society.

Sean and Nicci were married in Hackney in October 1990. Their daughters, Hadley and Molly, were born in 1991 and 1993.

By the mid nineties Sean had had two novels published,
The Imaginary Monkey
and
The Dreamer of Dreams
, as well as numerous non-fiction books, including biographies of Jane Fonda and Brigitte Bardot.

In 1995 Nicci and Sean began work on their first joint novel and adopted the pseudonym of Nicci French. The novel,
The Memory Game
, was published to great acclaim in 1997.
The Safe House, Killing Me Softly, Beneath the Skin, The Red Room, Land of the Living, Secret Smile, Catch Me When I Fall, Losing You
and
Until It's Over
have since been added to the Nicci French CV.
The Safe House, Beneath the Skin
and
Secret Smile
have all been adapted for TV, and
Killing Me Softly
for the big screen.

But Nicci and Sean also continue to write separately. Nicci still works as a journalist for the
Observer
, covering high-profile trials including those of Fred and Rose West, and Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr. Her novels
Things We Knew Were True, Solace
and
The Moment You Were Gone
are also published by Penguin. Sean's novel
Start From Here
came out in spring 2004.

about
The Memory Game

This was your first book as a team. Why did you decide to write together?

Nicci:
It's hard to say now (hard to remember) how something that for a long time had been a vague and slightly mad idea became a reality. Because when we met we were already writers - and obsessive readers - we had talked about what made a 'voice' in a book, and wondered whether it would be possible for two people to create one, seamless voice. We used to say that one day, when we had time, we would try to write a book together, to see if it was possible. And then one day - when we had no time, no money, four tiny children, a life of clutter and chaos - we came across this idea for a book that seemed new and exciting. And we just thought that if we were ever going to do it, now was the time. It began almost like a literary experiment, and then quite soon it took us over.

So how did you actually go about it?

Sean:
We spent weeks and months around the kitchen table with glasses of wine and gin and tonics sketching out the story and even, in the case of
The Memory Game
, drawing a detailed map of the Martello property. But when it came to writing the book, we wrote separately. One of us would write a section, then hand it to the other who was permitted - in theory, at least - to cut, add, rewrite without fear of retribution.

Nicci:
It sounds simpler than it is, less messy and quarrelsome. We're often asked if we argue and the answer is that of course we do. We argue quite a lot (actually, I argue and Sean doesn't, which is extremely irritating). But it's not over the things you'd expect - not over large ideas, or over the changing of words. It's more like a version of marital bickering: couples rarely argue over big issues, but over things like who does the washing up. More than arguing, however, we struggle and disagree with each other, and I've come to think that our novels are born out of those disagreements: we often want to write about the things we can't quite settle on, the things that bother and disquiet us and we can't let go of, but come back to over and again.

We thought, after
The Memory Game
, that we'd found a way of doing it, but that turned out to be nonsense. Maybe writing can never be easy and maybe it never should be. There are days when things go right, and then there's a kind of magic about the way that writing leads you, and you follow it in order to find out what you are thinking - and then there are days when it's painful and slow and your head feels like glue. We have very few rules together. One is that we never tell anyone - not even our family, not our children who are always asking, who wrote which bit (people try and guess and they're right about fifty per cent of the time). The other is that we'll change each other's words privately, not face to face, otherwise it's brutal.

Did you decide in advance who would write which bit - for instance, who would write about recovered memory and the therapy sessions?

Nicci:
Absolutely not. We both do all the research (in this novel, and in all the subsequent ones), and then whoever's turn it is to write will do so. It's imperative that we each own every bit of the book - every piece of research, every word that's written.

Why did you choose the name Nicci French?

Sean:
We were always felt the book should be published under a single name. We felt that two names on the cover are a distraction - when you read fiction, you want to hear a single voice talking to you.
The Memory Game
had a female narrator, so it seemed natural to choose a female name. We played around with lots of possibilities but in the end we just gave up and contributed a name each. The only other name I remember, which we quite liked and everybody else hated, was 'Alice London'. As a private joke, we reversed one of the 'n's and made Alice Loudon the heroine of our third book,
Killing Me Softly.

There's a lot in
The Memory Game
about families - is any of that autobiographical?

Sean:
Since this is a family history featuring crimes varying from murder to incest and culminating in two prison sentences, we were rather alarmed that our families claimed to recognize themselves in the book.

Nicci:
When our families first read it, Sean's thought it was based on them and on his crowded summers in Sweden with all his cousins, and my family thought it was based on them. Both of them, for instance, recognised the mushroom hunt at the start of the novel - because both Sean and I had experienced that. Part of the impulse behind the novel was our shared sense that every close, happy family is also unhappy and full of secrets, and that memory is unreliable, slippery and seductive. The past is a shadowy country; you can get lost there.

the recovered/false memory controversy

In the early 1990s reports began to emerge in the United States of horrific crimes. Patients undergoing analysis were recovering memories of horrific abuse committed against them years earlier in childhood. These ranged from sexual abuse by close relatives to baroque accusations of satanic rituals and human sacrifices. Families were torn apart by the revelations and there were even arrests, convictions and long jail sentences based solely on the evidence of these recovered memories. There then ensued a ferocious battle between those - mainly therapists - who insisted that the victims must be believed and those who doubted the basic trustworthiness of recovered memory.