My father was refusing to have anything at all to do with the programme. Paul had begged and blustered, and even sent Erica round – bearing bulbs for Dad’s garden as her excuse – to put the case on his behalf. Yet it never occurred to me to turn Paul down.
I biked hurriedly through the damp air that was becoming thin drizzle to the Soho restaurant that Paul had selected. His research assistant was a young woman called Bella – very tall and skinny, with a halo of red hair and large, kohl-rimmed eyes that she kept fixed adoringly on Paul. She smoked acrid cigarettes lighting each one off the one before, drank mineral water and picked at a side salad.
Over poached eggs, I asked Paul who else he was seeing.
‘You know Dad’s not talking to me?’ I nodded. ‘But Alan’s being marvellous. I’ve already had two sessions with him. My God, he can talk. He’s grown his beard and hair longer, you know, and he’s looking gaunt and wild. He quoted poetry at me, and talked a lot about the weakest being the strongest, or something like that, and when he described our summers together it was like hearing a novel being read out.’
I pulled a face. ‘He’s spent the last couple of decades in pubs and restaurants like this, talking his novel away.’
Paul, dipping brown bread into his egg yolk and gulping red wine, took no notice.
‘He wouldn’t really talk much about Natalie, but he gave me some photographs. Martha didn’t exactly say she wouldn’t talk to me, but when I turned on the tape recorder and asked her questions, she just sort of smiled at me – this really sad, wispy smile – and shook her head. She doesn’t look a happy woman, Jane.’
‘She’s ill,’ I said, and then asked, ‘What about the others?’
‘They’ll all talk. Everybody wants to be on television. Theo considers himself real tele-guru material. Alfred and Jonah seem all set. Claud is being helpful.’ He glanced sideways at me and Bella also looked at me with curiosity. ‘It’s going to be interesting, Jane. And big too, I think. We’ll be like the Waltons.’
‘I think I will have some of that wine,’ I said. ‘What are you going to ask me then?’ Bella leant forward and clicked on the tape recorder.
‘Is that all right?’ she asked, but it was a rhetorical question. This was TV. What could I have against it?
It’s strange, alarming really, how we will talk to a tape recorder and a potential audience of anonymous unthreatening millions, the way we won’t, can’t, talk to a friend or a lover. Or a brother. Paul asked me about my memories of the Stead (‘Just tell me them at random, as they occur to you,’ he said), and as the spools on the recorder whirled, and Bella’s pen scratched busily in her notebook, I plucked forth memories I hadn’t known I’d kept. Croquet on the lawn; wild games of tag; expeditions through the woods with Claud being the leader, secret midnight feasts with food pilfered from the Stead’s generous larder, the dribbly, slack-mouthed retriever the Martellos used to have (was Candy his name?), who would jump clumsily into the stream for sticks; raspberries under a green net that we would pick on hot afternoons; jam-making days (gooseberry, blackberry, strawberry, loganberry, damson, plum), stinging sunburn when we would rub lotion into each other’s shoulders; loud lunches when we’d all show off and Alan would egg us on. I remembered early mornings, when the dew was still on the grass, and long evenings, when the grown-ups were eating their supper and we could hear the chink of knives on plates, the murmur of conversation, and we would pull wellingtons on over bare legs and run down the garden to the swing in the great copper beech tree. In these memories, we children moved as one group, the adults were always in the background, and it was always sunny. It wasn’t really what Paul wanted.
‘It’s interesting,’ said Paul, ‘that you’re only remembering when you were very little. What about later, when you were a teenager?’
Suddenly the wine turned sour in my mouth. Why was I going along with this? I wanted to stop it. ‘Do you want to talk about the summer when Natalie disappeared? Is that what you’re focusing on?’
‘Talk about it if you like.’
‘I remember your pain, Paul. I remember watching your humiliation by Natalie and wondering what to do about it and…’
‘What are you going on about?’ said Paul sharply, and Bella clicked off the tape recorder and laid down her pen. ‘What do you think you’re doing, Jane?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t play the innocent with me like that. You know, what I mean. You’re deliberately destroying the memory, aren’t you? Well, aren’t you?’
‘No,’ I replied. I pushed away my plate, sipped some more wine and lit a cigarette. I felt a bit more in control now, not so seduced by the gentle golden light of my imagined past. ‘Are you going to ignore your crush on Natalie and her cruelty towards you? It was complicated, wasn’t it? There was you and Natalie, and then Natalie and Luke, and me and Theo, and then me and Claud, and there were the twins who were so odd really, playing silly jokes, and there was Alan fucking girls while Martha cooked our meals and put plasters on our knees, and there was Mum being unhappy, and who knows what Dad felt about the whole thing?
‘And then I remember’ – I couldn’t stop now, words were spilling out of me – ‘I remember that when I was sixteen and you were eighteen, Natalie disappeared. You see this as the end of our innocence. It may be good television. Do you really believe it?’
At some point, Paul had switched on the recorder again. I could see that he was torn between personal confusion and professional interest. I was delivering the goods, all right. Then I said something terrible. The words were out of my mouth, and lying between us like a sword, before I’d even thought them:
‘When did
To my surprise, Paul didn’t react with hostility. He looked at me for a few seconds, considering me, and then rolled a pellet of bread between his fingers, before leaning towards the recorder and speaking directly into it:
‘I can’t remember. It was a long time ago.’
We had coffee and Bella and I smoked another cigarette: Paul sat between two bluish clouds of smoke and asked me other questions, but the real interview was over. Soon I put on my leather jacket, kissed Paul on the cheek, nodded at Bella and left. London was grey and shabby in the wet wind, and bits of paper lay over the pavements. A woman and her child asked me for money and I gave them five pounds and she asked me for ten. Wretched world.
Thirteen
‘There’s a little bit of Alan that’s enjoying all of this.’
I was cooking supper for Kim, who’d arrived from her surgery looking exhausted and clutching two bottles of wine and some squishy packets of cheese. The potatoes were mashed, a green salad was prepared, there were fresh flowers on the table: I had someone to cook for. Kim had taken off her shoes and was padding round the kitchen in a dazed fashion, lifting up pan lids, peering into my fridge. I’d been to the supermarket on my way home from work and the fridge was satisfyingly full: tomatoes that looked suspiciously off-red, fennel bulbs, some lettuce with a funny name, a slab of Parmesan, tubs of yoghurt, fresh pasta, a packet of smoked salmon. I had resolved to be good. No more of those dinners that only had to be lit and inhaled. Most mornings, I went swimming on my way into work; most evenings, I prepared myself a proper meal.
‘How do you mean?’
She pulled a cork and poured us a glass of wine each. I took a gulp, then threw some chopped onions into a pan and started to pull the snotty slime out of a squid with my finger.
‘Well, I suppose he’s devastated. But did you see that interview in the
‘There are no problems,’ said Kim sardonically, ‘only opportunities.’
‘That’s what you tell your patients, is it? Then the biggest opportunity of all is this thing at the ICA tomorrow evening, part of their “Angry Old Men” season; Alan Martello in conversation with Lizzie Judd. You know, the
