The Memory Game

Eight

My first session – my first real session – with Alex felt like the first day at a new school. I was nervous. I chose my clothes with unusual care and then felt insecure in them. Even Alex’s house felt different to me, but then I wasn’t taken down into the dark, warm, reassuringly messy kitchen but upstairs to a small back room on the first floor. I went in first while Alex went up another flight of stairs to fetch a notebook. I walked over to the window and put my hand on the cold glass. It overlooked a long narrow garden that led back to another long narrow garden proceeding from the house opposite, a mirror image of the one I was looking out of. Everything in the garden was pruned back hard in preparation for spring, which I felt as a rebuke to my own abandoned back yard. I was startled by the door closing behind me and turned round to find Alex.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘lie down.’

I hadn’t looked at the room properly, I had no sense of its contents or decoration or the carpet. I only saw the armchair and the couch beside it. I lay down on the couch and heard the strain of springs as Alex sat himself down behind me, beyond my vision.

‘I don’t know where I should begin,’ I said tremulously.

‘Why are you here? Start with that and go anywhere you want,’ said Alex.

‘Very well. At the beginning of September I told my husband, Claud, that I had decided we should separate and get divorced. It was very sudden and Claud and the whole family were terribly shocked.’

‘What do you mean by the whole family?’

‘I mean the whole extended family. Whenever I talk about “my” family, I’m not talking about the little Crane family but the big wonderful enviable Martello family.’

‘You sound a little ironic.’

‘Only a little bit. I may have reservations but I know it really is wonderful. We’re all terribly lucky. That was the word my father always used. When he left the army and went up to Oxford just after the war, he met Alan on his very first day. Of course, we’ve all read The Town Drain now and we know what to expect so it’s difficult to imagine what it must have been like for somebody like my dad – a scholarship boy all his life, very bright, very shy – arriving in Oxford, completely bemused and overawed and then meeting the prototype of Billy Belton. And if you think of the effect that he had on people just as the hero of a book, imagine him in person, incredibly funny, totally contemptuous of everything that you were meant to have respect for. They were almost in love at that time, I think.

‘Within a couple of years Alan and my father had both got married and the two families were almost like one family. Alan got very rich when The Town Drain became a bestseller and was filmed and all that and he bought the house and the land up in Shropshire and that’s where we spent our holidays. It was just the classic perfect place, and when you took people there they would be dazzled by this amazing family and the four handsome sons – and the beautiful daughter, of course. It was the centre of my life. Natalie was my sister and best friend. Theo was my first love. And it seemed natural, dynastic, when I married Claud.’

‘Was Theo the older brother?’

‘Claud is the oldest, then Theo, then Natalie, and Jonah and Alfred are the youngest. They’re twins.’

‘How did they react when you split up from Claud?’

‘That’s hard to say. One of the points of the weekend when Natalie’s body was found was to show that I was still a part of the family.’

‘Was it important for you to get their approval?’

‘Not their approval exactly. I didn’t want to be seen as smashing the family up.’

‘Did people ask you why you’d done it?’

‘Not really.’

‘Well, why did you do it?’

‘You know, I was thinking about this as I was cycling over here. I knew that I was going to have to give some sort of answer to that and I can’t. Isn’t that strange? Here I am, I’m forty-one years old and I married Claud when I was twenty, when I was still at university. I’ve thrown all that in the bin. And of course people have asked why. Claud was devastated and my sons were terribly upset and angry and they wanted a straightforward answer – to give them something to hold on to, I suppose – and I couldn’t give it to them. It’s not that I’ve got a reason which I wasn’t telling them about. All I could have said is that I think I did something blindly and when I woke up out of a long sleep and looked around me, and when Jerome and Robert were grown up and away from home, I decided I had to get out. I’m sorry that was long and probably not very comprehensible.’

There was a long silence and I began to cry. I was furious with myself but I couldn’t stop and the tears ran down my cheeks. I was surprised to feel Alex’s hand on my shoulder.

‘I’m sorry,’ I burbled snottily. ‘It’s just that I feel terrible about what I’ve done and now I’m being stupid and weak. I apologise.’

Alex walked across the room and came back with a handful of tissues. ‘Here,’ he said.

I blew my nose and wiped my face. Alex surprised me by squatting down in front of me instead of returning to his chair. As the film of tears in my eyes dispersed, I could see that he was scrutinising me with great concentration.

‘I’m going to say a couple of things to you,’ he said. ‘You already know that there’s nothing wrong with crying in this room. In fact, you can do anything you want, so long as it doesn’t stain the couch. There’s something more important than that, as well. During all the time that you come and talk to me, I’m going to try to be as open and straightforward with you as I can be. I want to begin by telling you that I think you’re not weak and that you shouldn’t be feeling remorseful because you aren’t able to give some easy motivation for why you left your husband. That takes courage. In fact, if you were giving me some glib reason for what you’d done, then our first plan would be to get rid of that and see what’s behind it. You’re not letting yourself off the hook and that’s a positive sign. Now, are you feeling better?’

I sat up to blow my nose and scrunched the tissue up self-consciously and put it in my pocket. I nodded. Alex tapped my shoulder reassuringly and then began to stride up and down the room, as I could see was his habit when he was deep in thought. Apparently having made up his mind, he sat down in the chair once more.

‘I’m certainly not going to start providing answers. That will be your job. What I need to do is to keep some sense of the direction in which we should be moving. If you’re unhappy with anywhere I try to push you, well, then you must say that, but I’d like you to trust me if you can. My first thought is that what you are telling me is that you haven’t just ended your marriage but that you have cut yourself off from an important part of your past and your childhood. The impulse of many people in a situation such as yours would have been to escape from their family and it interests me that your own instinct was to return and look for their acceptance. I feel that what we must do is not so much talk of the details of your divorce but almost go away from them and back into this family. Do you agree with this?’

I gave a sniff. I felt composed again and able to speak. ‘If that’s what you think.’

‘Because, Jane, one of the things I want to do for you is take the different forces that are overwhelming you and put them back under your control. One of the ways to do that is to look for the hidden patterns and see if we can recognise them. You’ve come to me, Jane, saying that you want to talk about your divorce, and that’s important and we will deal with it, but one of the crucial problems is to decide what it is that you are asking for and I would like to suggest something. What I’m going to suggest is that it is no coincidence that your best friend, almost your twin, has been discovered buried in the ground, disinterred, dug up, and you have, for the first time in your life, decided to look for help, to dig up your own past, to disinter your own secret. Does that make sense to you, Jane?’

I was startled and a little disconcerted at first.