The Memory Game

black suit was grubby and unbuttoned. Tears cascaded down his blotchy face unchecked and he lifted up his cane and shook it in the air like an unrehearsed King Lear.

‘Martha!’ he yelled. ‘Martha!’

The four sons closed in on him; they stood tall and straight around their fat, wild father, who was addled with grief and drink. Alan put his hands over his face; tears streamed through them as he groaned and wept. The rest of us remained silent. This was a one-man show.

‘Forgive me,’ he yelled. ‘I’m sorry.’

Claud put his arm around Alan, who leant against him and mumbled and wept. A woman next to me whom I’d never seen before started crying quietly into her demure hanky. Erica, standing back from the scene with Paul and Dad beside her, blew her nose noisily and gave a single hiccuping wail. For my part, I felt clear-headed and as cold as the day. I had already said my last goodbye to Martha. Now I was about to defy her last request to me. Look after Alan.

Cold pebbles of soil splattered onto the coffin. Martha and Natalie lay side by side, and Alan wept noisily on.

Helen put her arm through mine and we peeled away from the group, stepping off the path and among the gravestones.

‘You don’t look well,’ she said.

‘I haven’t been well. I think I’m better now, though. How are you doing?’

She smiled.

‘I wanted to tell you. We’ve found a use for one of our lists. We’re going to make an announcement on Monday. We’re asking every male person who was present in the environs of the Stead on the twenty-seventh of July, the day after the party, the day when Natalie was last seen, to give a blood sample for DNA fingerprinting.’

‘To find the father?’

‘Maybe.’

‘And the murderer?’

‘It wouldn’t be proof in itself.’

‘Still, it sounds a positive step.’

‘We think so.’

We walked along for a few more moments in silence. The graveyard was empty now except for us. I forced myself to speak:

‘But how are you, Helen?’

‘Me?’

She was obviously thrown.

‘You know, of course?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

Helen stopped and sat on the edge of a plinth bearing a stone urn half covered with a stone cloth. She looked up at me, almost a supplicant.

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Helen, I’m not looking for some sort of justification from you. My only concern is how you are.’

‘Me? I’m totally confused. My life has been turned upside-down.’ She took a tissue from her pocket, clumsily unfolding it in the cold, and blew her nose. ‘I’m behaving unprofessionally. I’m breaking my marriage up. I promise you I’ve never done anything like this before and I feel I’ll have to tell Barry – that’s my husband – about this soon. And it sounds awful, but I feel happy and excited as well. Of course, I needn’t tell you. You of all people know what Theo is like.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m suddenly thinking about things differently, seeing new possibilities. I feel a bit drunk with it all.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I keep planning different things. What will probably happen is that we’ll wait until this inquiry is over and then I’ll tell my husband and move out and then we’ll move in together.’

‘Is that what Theo has said?’

‘Yes.’ She glanced up at me again. ‘You don’t look as if you approve.’

‘It’s not a matter of approval.’ I sat down, very uncomfortably, on the edge of the plinth, next to Helen. ‘Look, I don’t want to give advice and you may be completely right in what you say will happen. I just think you ought to be wary of the Martello family. They’re fascinating and seductive and they draw people in and I think they can be deceptive.’

‘But you’re a member of the Martello family.’

‘Yes, I know, and all Cretans are liars.’

‘What?’

‘Never mind. I don’t know what I’m saying. Don’t go up without a parachute, something like that.’

‘But you loved Theo, didn’t you?’

‘How do you know?’

She was silent.

‘Just be careful about smashing up your life and career,’ I said.

She turned to me with an expression that reminded me unbearably of a sad small child.

‘I thought you would just say congratulations or good luck.’

Then she broke down and cried as I held her.

‘It’s so stupid and embarrassing I can hardly admit it,’ she said. ‘I had this fantasy of us being friends and being brought closer by this.’

‘But look, look,’ I said, holding her damp face, ‘it has brought us closer.’

‘No, I meant more than that. Almost like sisters.’

I hugged her.

‘I need a friend more than I need a sister,’ I whispered to the back of her head.

I need not have worried about how to meet Alan; he didn’t want to meet me, or anyone else. By the time I arrived back at the house, he had scuttled, like a giant crab with its old shell cracked, up to his study. ‘To write,’ he had said.

The kitchen and the living room were crowded with mourners; some I recognised and others I had never seen before. I thought I glimpsed the beaky nose and high cheekbones of Luke, but what would he be doing here? Jim Weston shuffled up, looking ill at ease in his tight wide-lapelled brown suit. It could almost have been his demob suit. He clutched my sleeve and murmured something, but I didn’t catch it. Conversations hummed around me, meaningless sounds. I saw mouths open and close. People were wiping their eyes. Laughing. Pushing sandwiches down their throats. Lifting delicate cups of tea between forefinger and thumb. Bodies jostled against me.

I was hot; my legs itched in their tights; my hands were sweaty; there was a nervous tic pulsing invisibly under my left eye. Pain flowered in my head. Theo was standing in front of me, frowning. Paul was holding me by the shoulder, saying something in my ear about Dad, and needing to leave soon. The vicar – a young man with an Adam’s apple jiggling nervously above his dog collar – shook my sweaty hand with his sweaty hand and spoke vaguely about peace at last. Luke – it was Luke – asked if I was all right and someone passed me a glass of water. Peggy was in grey and Erica was in navy blue. Dad sat in a chair near the patio door and occasionally a hat would bob down to his level and then come back to its own. He looked old and miserable and aggrieved.

I put my coat back on and walked briskly around the garden. I smoked the rest of my packet of cigarettes and returned to the house only when I saw people starting their cars and driving away.

We were a strange, temporary household, lacking our usual sense of common purpose. Paul and Erica drove back to London almost straight away. The next morning Jonah and his family left, and Theo drove Frances to the station. Fred and a worried-looking Lynn stayed on. And Claud, of course. What were we all doing there? The material remnants of Martha’s life didn’t need ordering. On the morning of the funeral we looked through her