The Memory Game Part 28

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 c.r.a.p.' She topped up our wine gla.s.ses. 'I was too old. I can't have children. I'm past not future.' She raised her gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s. '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 h.e.l.lish 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 gla.s.ses.

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

'I found a copy of Kim 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 gla.s.s of wine, Jane,' said Kim, smiling.

'The Memory Game is where you have cards face down and you try to pick out pairs. I don't know how I forgot that.'

Kim stood up.

'I forgive you,' she said. 'Come on. Bed-time.'

Thirty-Six.

The Stead already looked as if it had been abandoned. As soon as I got out of Kim's car and looked around I could detect the absence of Martha. She once told me that her books got ill.u.s.trated somehow and the children brought themselves up, but she felt that her garden really needed her. There was a man who used to come from Westbury a couple of times a week but in my days at the Stead she seemed to be out in the garden for almost every minute, on her knees poking at the soil with a trowel, pruning, planting. She had been endlessly resourceful at a craft about which the rest of us knew almost nothing. When we noticed the flowers and the fruit and the vegetables, we adored them, we were glad to have them around, but we paid no attention to all the little battles that had been won and lost in their creation. Had anybody thought about how the garden could function without Martha? She had been absent from it first in spirit and then in body for less than six months, but it looked bereft. Canes stood in the beds with nothing attached to them, there were sprigs of dandelion in the lawn dotted among the mangy half-piles of leaves.

The house was closed up and I didn't have a key. I'd never needed one. I peered through a window and saw empty rooms, bare boards, expanses of wallpaper with the pale rectangles recalling absent pictures. It was no longer ours and I took a bleak pleasure in seeing all signs of the Martello family stripped so brutally from the property. It was up for sale. Soon somebody else could move in their memories. My own were still cluttering up the place, like the crisp packets that blew down from the B road at the end of the drive. I turned away from the house. The dismal apology for a hole where Natalie had been found remained, half full of sludgy water. Was n.o.body ever going to fill it in?

But this was not what I had come to see. There was no point in messing around, there was n.o.body to bleat to. I just wanted to get this over quickly, see what I had to see. Then I would leave the Stead for ever, rejoin Kim, have a good meal, a good weekend, go back to London, get on with the rest of my life. I walked quickly across the s.h.a.ggy lawn and felt the damp closing around my toes. Wrong b.l.o.o.d.y shoes. I reached the wood and to the left I could see Pullam Farm and to my right was the path that led along the wood and then back down and around to the Stead. Not today. Today, for the first time in a quarter of a century, I took the path into the wood that led to Cree's Top and the River Col. It was a damp, misty morning, and I shivered even in my anorak. This wouldn't take long. The path divided as I approached the rising ground which hid the river from sight and I took the right fork, which would bring me around the side of Cree's Top to the path by the river.

The path was rarely used now and branches extended across it. After a few minutes of brushing them out of my face, I reached the edge of the Col and and the foot of Cree's Top. I was back. One detail had started it all, attracted Alex's interest, hadn't it? Those funny little pubscent poems screwed up and tossed into the water as I'd sat here with my back to Cree's Top and watched them float away down the Col. Would any of them have reached the sea? Or did they all snag in reeds round the first bend? I felt in my anorak pocket and extracted a menu from a local Indian take-away : Half-Price Madness. I screwed it into a ball and tossed it into the river.

The silliest thing happened, and it almost made me laugh. The river was flowing the wrong way. The scrunched up menu from The Pride of Bengal didn't flow away from me and disappear round the bend. It flowed back back past me. And, indeed, as I looked up the Col, against the flow, I saw that there was no bend in that direction for several hundred yards. What a stupid thing. I felt disoriented for a moment but it was quickly obvious to me what had happened. I quickly strode up Cree's Top. The trees were thinned out now and when I reached the summit I could see that the mist had lifted and the view of the river and of the path proceeding along the side of it was clear. The Col curved slightly to the right and then back to its previous course, forming a reversed letter C. Fifty yards further on was the bridge from which Natalie had been seen that last time. past me. And, indeed, as I looked up the Col, against the flow, I saw that there was no bend in that direction for several hundred yards. What a stupid thing. I felt disoriented for a moment but it was quickly obvious to me what had happened. I quickly strode up Cree's Top. The trees were thinned out now and when I reached the summit I could see that the mist had lifted and the view of the river and of the path proceeding along the side of it was clear. The Col curved slightly to the right and then back to its previous course, forming a reversed letter C. Fifty yards further on was the bridge from which Natalie had been seen that last time.

The path steepened sharply in front of me and I had to stop myself from trotting down the slope. When I reached the flat I sat down, with my back against the large rock at the foot of Cree's Top. I felt in my pocket and found a credit card slip from a petrol station. If I were efficient I would file it somewhere and set it against something. I screwed it up and tossed it into the water. The sun was out now and the light blue paper was hard to pick out against the sparkling ripples but I focused intently on it as it picked up speed and disappeared round the gra.s.sy bend. Like a dream.

Thirty-Seven.

We used to play by the copper beech tree, with its thick and grizzled trunk and its vivid flare of leaves. It stood in front of a dry stone wall, and if we stood on the wall the lower branches of the tree were near enough the ground to allow us to scramble up to what now seemed to me like dizzying heights. We could look down through the bronzed foliage at the Stead, watch the adults come and go through the porched front door, but no one could see us. We spent hours up there. We'd take dolls, then, when we were older, books and apples. Natalie and I would sit and talk while dappled light streamed through the leaves. We would watch scudding clouds and exchange secrets and the days seemed to pa.s.s slowly, so slowly. I hadn't remembered this peaceful, happy Natalie enough. I hadn't been a loyal enough friend to her after she had disappeared. If it had been me who had gone, suddenly and with no word of explanation, I knew that she would have furiously searched for me. She would have felt betrayed by my desertion and furious with adults who tried to comfort her. She would have been spitting mad. Whereas I I had been pa.s.sive and sorrowful, lying night after night in the room that had once been hers, dreaming of her and never once searching for her. Once, when Natalie and I had been playing hide-and-seek in the garden, I'd failed to find her, and after peering dismally behind large bushes and into garden sheds, I'd mooched into the kitchen where Martha had been making rock cakes. As I'd licked out the bowl, Natalie had burst into the room, 'You give up too easily,' she'd shouted at me. 'I don't know why I should bother with you when you just give up. I've gone off you gone off you, Jane Crane.'

I rubbed the bark with one finger. Martha had loved this tree too. She had planted crocuses and snowdrops around its base. I sat down and leant against the tree trunk, feeling its ridged age through my jacket.

When I was in my early twenties I had spent four months in Florence as an architectural a.s.sistant. I had adored the city and spent all my spare time wandering down narrow streets and into dark, incense-filled churches where statues of sightless madonnas stood in niches and old women burned candles for their dead.

I had gone back again ten years later, the map of the city still clear in my head, and soon discovered that I was slightly out of kilter. Roads were shorter than I remembered; where there should have been a view there was a tall building; the cafe where I'd drunk a daily espresso and eaten little rice cakes had shifted from the centre of the square to its corner. Claud had said calmly that you always had to rediscover places; the joy of travelling was that new meanings were always emerging and old ones altering. But I had felt obscurely cheated : I had wanted to step back into a past that was intact and where each site held its memories for me and instead I entered a city that had somehow grown away from me. Florence was no longer mine.

The same hazy dissatisfactions niggled at me now. On an impulse I zipped up my jacket to my chin, stood up and hoisted myself into the lowest branch of the tree. I clambered from branch to branch until I reached a familiar perch. I gazed through the skein of twigs with their pale green leaves at the Stead. There was the house, bearing its invisible signs of disintegration. How do you recognise, when all the features remain the same, the moment that life pa.s.ses from the face of a friend, or know, although you can point to nothing that has changed, that a house is abandoned? From where I sat I could not see the front door, although I could clearly remember seeing it from here as a child. I clambered down the branches and jumped clumsily onto the gra.s.s; sat down once more with my back against the ancient tree.

I picked up my old diary which I'd picked out of my case as I'd set out that morning and idly started leafing through its later pages. Some entries were like triggers that brought memories easily back : the candle that had set fire to Alan's beard when he'd leant over greedily to scoop up the last of the potatoes; I had laughed so hard that the muscles of my stomach had ached. Sailing in the gravel pit reservoir nearby, being frightened as the boat had keeled and water slopped over the edge but not wanting to admit it certainly not admitting it to Natalie or to Theo, who were always physically brave and were contemptuous of timidity. Getting up at four in the morning with Alan and the twins to hear the dawn chorus and coming back chilly, ravenous and euphoric.

But there were some entries an argument with Mum, which I represented with sanctimonious lack of imagination, or a visit to a medieval mansion where Catholics hid under the floorboards during the Reformation that stubbornly refused to yield their treasures. They were like the graves in Highgate Cemetery, grown over with ivy and nettles, unvisited and quite forgotten. Most of our lives lie underground.

The last entry had always been available to my recall which wasn't surprising since the day before Natalie's disappearance had been like the defined rim around a black hole. I could summon up the party preparations without much difficulty : I remembered kissing Theo in the square of mud between the newly laid stone tiles where the last pieces of the barbecue would be built in time for the party and jumping up guiltily as we heard Jim Weston approach.

I shut the diary and rubbed my eyes. A few drops of rain fell heavily on the book's cover. I felt as if I were staring at something through thick liquid; all the shapes I was trying to make out were distorting and breaking up. Kissing Theo in the earth made ready for the barbecue. The barbecue.

I stood up, stumbling in my haste, and ran in the increasing rain to where Natalie's body had been found. It was still a livid scar of churned-up mud and rubble and a few shallow-rooting weeds. I jumped down into the mud and sunk my hands into it, digging around messily. I pulled out the leg of a doll, a rusted fork, its tines clogged, a beer bottle with a chipped neck; then a broken tile, a fragment of rusty grating. They were the remains of the barbecue. Natalie had been buried underneath the barbecue.

Heavily, I sat down at the edge of the hole, wiping my muddy hands on my muddy jeans. Rain fell steadily now, obscuring the landscape, and it was as if a curtain was being drawn across the Stead and all its secrets. Something was wrong. I couldn't think straight; it was like trying to remember a dream but losing it in the process. Natalie was buried under the barbecue but the barbecue was built before she died. I spoke out loud : 'So that's why the body was buried there. It was an improbable place because it was an impossible place.'

I buried my face in my hands and stared through my fingers at the muddy hole. Rain slid down the back of my neck. I tried again : 'Natalie was buried before she died.'

Or: 'Natalie was buried underneath the barbecue; Natalie died after the barbecue was completed; therefore...' Therefore what? I kicked a few fragments of tiles back into the hole and stood up. Kim would be wondering where I'd got to.

Thirty-Eight.

Kim was lying on her bed in our room when I got back, studying a map. She sat up.

'You've been ages. Christ! Look at your face : have you had a mudbath or something? What's the matter?'

'What? Nothing. I don't know.' I went into the bathroom, washed the mud off my grubby face and hands. When I returned to the bedroom, Kim was pulling on her boots.

'Do you want something to eat?' she asked.

'No. Go ahead if you want something.' Then, abruptly : 'Can we go for a walk?'

'Of course; I've found one of nine miles that starts just down the road from here, so we should be able to finish it before it gets too dark. Lots of hills and valleys. I should think in this weather it'll be a bit muddy.'

I looked down at my jeans.

'I think I can cope with that.'

I didn't say anything for the first couple of miles and anyway we climbed up the narrow rocky path so swiftly that I probably wouldn't have had the breath to walk and talk at the same time. Brambles tore at my clothes, and rain dripped from wet leaves. Eventually the path widened out and we reached the top of a rise. In fine weather there would have been a view.

'It's all jumbled up in my mind,' I began.

'What do you mean, jumbled up?'

'At first it seemed clear, everything was as I'd expected. I mean of course it was I know the Stead almost as well as my own house. I just mooched around for a bit; you know, all those old memories.' Kim nodded but said nothing. 'Then I went back to where it happened.' It was strange how I still found it difficult to say baldly 'where Alan murdered Natalie'. 'I haven't been there for nearly twenty-six years.' I stepped over a tree that lay across the path, and waited for Kim to draw level with me again. 'I started to walk towards it. But Kim, it was all wrong. I remembered it wrongly.'

'What's so surprising about that? You say yourself that you hadn't been there for years. Of course you didn't remember it.'

'No. I remembered remembered it but I remembered it wrongly. Don't you understand, Kim, I've walked through that landscape so many times in my memory with Alex, but when I actually went there it was all back to front. The wrong way round. Oh s.h.i.t, I don't know.' I took out a damp packet of cigarettes from my jacket, and lit one as I walked along. it but I remembered it wrongly. Don't you understand, Kim, I've walked through that landscape so many times in my memory with Alex, but when I actually went there it was all back to front. The wrong way round. Oh s.h.i.t, I don't know.' I took out a damp packet of cigarettes from my jacket, and lit one as I walked along.

'Let me get this straight, Jane. Are you saying that the walk that you pieced together with Alex was inaccurate?'

'No, no, I'm not. It was accurate, all the details were there if you see what I mean, just the wrong way round.'

'I'm a bit confused. What does it mean?'

'I don't know. I feel completely bemused, Kim. And that's not all.'

'What's not all?' Kim's voice went up one notch more in exasperation.

'It's not just that the walk was the wrong way round, I worked something else out I can't think why no one's worked it out before. Now it seems blindingly obvious.'

'What's obvious? Come on Jane, don't be so f.u.c.king gnomic with me; spell it out, will you?'

'Okay. Listen then. You know I've been re-reading my diary, the one Claud brought me, which takes us right up to the day before Natalie died?'

'Yes.'

'Well, in the last entry which was on the day before Natalie was killed I wrote about the unfinished barbecue; the barbecue that Jim Weston was getting done in time for the party.'

'So?'

'That's where Natalie was buried, Kim. Under that barbecue.'

I watched as very slowly Kim's face turned from blankness to bemus.e.m.e.nt.

'It's not possible. It means...'

'It means that Natalie was buried under bricks that were laid before she died.'

'But...'

I counted off the points on my fingers.

'Look, number one : we know that she died the day after the party. She was seen the day after, and by someone trustworthy, who had no involvement with the family. Two : we know that Alan killed her I remember it and he's confessed. But Alan didn't arrive at the Stead until after the barbecue was finished. Three : Natalie was buried under the barbecue.' I was striding along now, with vigour borne of frustration. Kim had almost to run to catch up with me.

'If what you say is true, you should go to the police, Jane.'

I stopped dead.

'What on earth could I say? Why would they accept this new twist to my memory? Anyway, it doesn't make any difference to the result. Alan killed Natalie and he's in prison. I just want to know how.' how.'

I kicked a bramble out of my path and dug in my pocket for another cigarette.

'Oh Christ, Jane, can't you stop this?' Kim asked. 'Why is it so important to know? Think about it. You know the big thing about Natalie's death you know who killed her. And now you want to know all the smaller things as well. And then if you find those out, you'll want to ferret around and fret and smoke dozens more of those cigarettes of yours until you've pieced together all the tiny details. But you'll never know everything about this, Jane. Do you want to hear what I think?'

'Go on then; you're going to tell me anyway.'