The Memory Game

‘Those other women,’ I said at last, ‘what did they do?’

‘Most of them,’ Alex replied, ‘remembered being abused themselves, not witnessing an atrocity like you. We’re starting to discover that the mind is capable of a self-protective amnesia. But the hidden memories are not lost. They are like files in a computer which can be recovered with the right triggers. Some kinds of therapy can retrieve this information.’

‘Yes, but what did they do? After they knew.’

‘Some did nothing, of course, except cut themselves off from their abusers.’

‘And the others?’

‘They brought their injuries into the open. They confronted their abusers; they even went to the police. They refused to remain victims.’

I lit another cigarette and walked to the end of the garden. Alex made no attempt to follow me. He watched as I paced. Eventually I said:

‘So you think I should confront Alan?’

He said nothing, just looked at me.

‘Or go to the police?’

Still Alex said nothing. All at once I felt massively angry. Rage danced across my eyeballs. I felt itchily hot in the cold air.

‘You have no idea,’ I shouted into his face, ‘what you are asking me to do, no idea. This is my family we’re talking about here. My whole life. I won’t have anywhere I belong any more. I’ll be an outcast.’ My face stung with tears. ‘How can I just go to the police and tell them about Alan. He was like my father. I loved him.’

I stopped on a wail, and there was silence. A few gardens away I heard the thin gulpy scream of a baby who’s been crying a long time, and isn’t going to stop. I fumbled in my pocket for my cigarettes, lit one, and incompetently dabbed at my messed-up face with a soggy tissue.

‘Here.’ Alex gave me another one.

‘Sorry. I’m ravaging your tissue store.’

‘It’s all right. I have a tissue mountain. I get an EC grant for maintaining it.’

We turned back to the house. At the door, Alex stopped and put his hand on my shoulder.

‘I’m not asking you to do anything, you know. Of course you have to decide that for yourself. I’m just asking you if you can do nothing.’

Inside, Alex made us some more coffee, while I went to the bathroom to wash my face. I looked terrible. Mascara ran in rivulets down my face, my hair straggled out from under my hat and stuck to my snotty cheeks in strands, my eyes were puffy and my nose was red from the cold. ‘Pull yourself together,’ I muttered to the woman in the mirror, and watched a mirthless rictus spread over her grubby face. I whistled a tune: ‘You’ll never get to heaven.’ A song all of us used to sing at the Stead. Never mind, it had been a long time since I’d believed in heaven.

Alex had put a tin of biscuits on the table. I dunked a shortbread into my coffee and ate it ravenously. When I had finished, he picked up the cups and took them to the sink. The conversation was over.

‘Thanks Alex,’ I said as I got on my bike.

As I reached Camden Lock, I knew there was something I had to tell him, so I cycled back and knocked on the door. He opened it almost at once, with the smallest flicker of surprise.

‘I’ll go forward,’ I said.

He didn’t move, just gazed at me steadily. Then he nodded.

‘So be it,’ he said.

It sounded alarmingly biblical. I cycled away without another word.

Thirty

I had been ready for half an hour when the car horn sounded outside the house. It was snowing, beautiful snow that wafted down in large flakes, settled like feathers on trees and houses and parked cars. In the half-light, London looked pure and serene, and I sat by the window smoking and thinking. Rusting vans, dustbins, empty milk bottles had become clean white shapes. All sounds were softened. Even the security screens on the house across the road were a sparkling grid. Tonight it would be muddy slush. Tonight, Martha would be lying beside her only daughter. I was glad she was dead.

I put on the coat I had bought before going to kiss Caspar in Highgate Cemetery. I pulled on a brown felt hat and brown leather gloves, and went out to meet Claud. He had insisted on driving all the way down to fetch me. In this weather. He said he wanted to make sure I came.

We were silent at first. I smoked and watched London turn to countryside. He fiddled with tapes and drove at a steady seventy up the MI. The windscreen wipers methodically pushed snow into compacted lines of grime.

‘Well?’ I said, finally.

‘Well, what?’

‘You know.’

Claud frowned.

‘Alan has been ensconced up in his study the whole time I’ve been at the Stead. And when he’s not there, the door is firmly locked.’

‘Jesus,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry, Jane, together we can sort out something.’

I just grunted in assent, watched Birmingham with its sprawled blocks of flats pass by. Tried not to think about cigarettes. I hadn’t thought what I was going to say to Alan. I hadn’t even prepared myself for the sight of him. I fumbled in my bag and found a comb which I dragged through my hair before rearranging the felt hat. Claud glanced sideways at me.

‘Nervous?’

It occurred to me that Claud was the only member of the Martello family with whom I could now sit like this.

‘You’ve been good over all this,’ I said.

He stared ahead.

‘I hope so,’ he replied.

Under the thin spread of snow, Natalie’s grave still looked neat and new. There were spring flowers – snowdrops, aconites – pushed into the holes of a stone vase. I wondered if anyone would come to tend it now. Beside it was an ugly clay hole, agape. The last bitter snow fell into it like spittle.

A small crowd of mourners in dark clothes stood and watched as Martha’s four sons carried her coffin towards us. They looked sombrely handsome under their burden, generic grieving sons carrying the remains of their beloved mother. A man in front of me took off his hat, and I recognised him suddenly as Jim Weston, an improbability in a long dark coat. I’d last seen him at the side of another grave. Sort of grave. I took off my hat, too. Snow drizzled onto my hair. I placed myself right at the edge of the crowd of mourners to avoid any chance of encountering Alan. Later, he’d want to give me a long hard hug and mutter intimately into my ear about his loss. All that could wait. I felt a nudge beside me and turned. It was Helen Auster.

‘I just wanted to show my face,’ she said with a little smile.

I gave her a quick hug while the familiar words were being intoned once more.

I heard Alan before I saw him. As Martha’s coffin was lowered into the waiting pit, a howl ripped the air. All heads moved forward. Suddenly, through a gap, the scene became clear. Alan was leant over the coffin, roaring into it or at it. His greasy grey hair was whipped back in the wind; in spite of the chill, he was wearing no coat, and his