The Memory Game.

by Nicci French

To Edgar, Anna, Hadley and Molly

One.

I close my eyes. It's all there, inside my skull. Mist following the contours of the lawn. A shock of cold stinging in my nostrils. I have to make a conscious effort if I want to remember what else happened on the day we found the body; her body. The reek of wet, brown leaves.

As I made my way down the short slimy gra.s.s slope away from the house, I saw that the workmen were standing there ready. They were clutching mugs of tea and smoking and their warm, wet breath produced a cloud of vapour that rose up from their faces. They looked like an old bonfire that was being rained on. It was only October but this was early in the morning and as yet there was just the promise of sun, somewhere behind the clouds, over the copse on the far hill. I was wearing my overalls tucked a little too neatly into my wellingtons. The men, of course, were obstinately in the traditional rural proletarian costume of jeans, synthetic sweaters and dirty leather boots. They were stamping to keep warm and laughing at something I couldn't hear.

When they caught sight of me they felt silent. We'd all known each other for ever and now they were unsure how to react to me as their boss. It didn't bother me me, though. I was used to men on building sites, even the miniature, domestic variety of building site like this one, my father-in-law's soggy patch of Shropshire, the Stead, as it was absurdly called, a self-mocking joke about rural squireship that had become serious over the years.

'h.e.l.lo, Jim,' I said, holding out my hand. 'You couldn't resist coming yourself. I'm glad.'

Jim Weston was as much a part of the Stead as the treehouse or the cellar with its sweet smell of apples that lingered even at Easter. He was a.s.sociated with almost every man-made object on the property: he had replaced and painted the window frames, spent searing August days stripped to the waist on the roof dealing out tiles. There would be a crisis, a growth on a wall, an electricity black-out, a flood, and Alan would summon Jim from Westbury. Jim would refuse, too busy, he would say. Then an hour later he would creak up the drive in his rickety van. He would contemplate the damage, tapping out his pipe and shaking his head sadly, and mutter something about modern rubbish. 'I'll see what I can do,' he would say. 'I'll try to patch something together.'

It was a matter of local folklore that Jim Weston never bought anything at list price and wouldn't buy anything at all if he could obtain it through favour or barter or through even murkier means in his own contribution to Shropshire's black economy.

When Jim had seen my plan for the new house, his face had fallen even further than usual, as if an architect's drawing was some newfangled invention for the benefit of mollycoddled fools like me from London who'd never got their hands dirty. I'd given a silent prayer of thanks that he'd never seen my original idea. This small house, an overflow s.p.a.ce for the Stead, for all the children and grandchildren and ex-wives and so on that acc.u.mulate at the Martello gatherings, was the greatest offering I would ever make to the family, so I'd planned for them the dream house that I would have built for myself.

I had taken advantage of the relatively sheltered situation of the original site to conceive a structure of total clarity, nothing but beams, pipes, joists and plate gla.s.s, a functionalist dream: the most beautiful object I have ever drawn. I'd shown the plans to my soon-to-be-ex-husband, Claud, and he'd crinkled his brow and run his fingers through his thin brown hair and murmured something about it being really very interesting and well done, which meant nothing at all because this has been his reaction to virtually everything up to and including my announcement to him that I had decided that we should get divorced. I'd thought that his brother Theo at least might see what I was getting at. He'd commented that it looked like one of his old Meccano sets and I'd said, 'Yes, exactly, lovely, isn't it?', but he'd meant it as an insult. Then I had taken it into the presence of the Great Man himself, Alan Martello, my father-in-law, the patriarch of the Stead, and it had been a disaster.

'What's this? The metal frame? What about the thing that's going to be built around it? Can't you do a picture of that as well?'

'That is is the building, Alan.' the building, Alan.'

He'd snorted through his grizzled beard. 'I don't want something that's going to have Swedish architecture critics buzzing round it. I want a place for living in. Take that piece of paper away and build it in Helsinki or somewhere far away like that and I'm sure a publicly funded committee will give you a prize. If we've got to have some b.l.o.o.d.y building in this garden of which I'm far from being entirely convinced then what we're going to have is an English country house, with bricks or dry-stone walls or some decent local material.'

'This doesn't sound like the angry young Alan Martello,' I'd said sweetly. 'New styles of architecture, a change of heart, isn't that the sort of thing you've always been keen on?'

'I like old old styles of architecture. I'm not young. And I'm not angry any more, except with you. Replace that structuralist horror with something I'll recognise as a house.' styles of architecture. I'm not young. And I'm not angry any more, except with you. Replace that structuralist horror with something I'll recognise as a house.'

It was Alan at his most gruff, charming, flirtatious and I was grateful that he'd felt able to yell at me in the old affectionate way while I'd been in the process of divorcing his son. So of course I'd gone away and put together a plan of impeccably rural appearance, complete with a rather amusing gambrel roof. It was designed in the sense that you design the contents of your shopping trolley as you walk around Sainsbury's. The prefabricated frame construction house was Norwegian, though manufactured in Malaysia. Alan would at least have been grateful to know that the extraction of the raw materials probably involved the destruction of a small patch of rain forest.

'What's this up here, Mrs Martello?' Jim Weston had asked, jabbing at the plan with his pipe.

'Please call me Jane, Jim. They're the ridge tiles, set in mortar.'

'Hmm.' He'd replaced his pipe firmly in his mouth.

'What do you want to go messing about with mortar for?'

'Jim, we can't argue about this now. It's all arranged. It's bought and paid for. We've just got to put it together.'

'Hmm,' he'd grunted.

'We excavate here, just a few feet down...'

'Just,' Jim had muttered.

'Then the footings, here and here, and then the hard core, then the damp-course and the damp proof membrane, then concrete and then the tiled ground floor on top of that. The rest is a matter of just joining it together.'

'Damp-course?' Jim had said dubiously.

'Yes, unfortunately there was a Public Health Act pa.s.sed back in 1875, so I'm afraid we're stuck with that.'

Now, at the beginning of the first day of work, Jim looked more like something that was growing in the garden than a man who had come to supervise, or pretend to supervise, work in it. His face had been left outside in all weathers and had attained a complexion like the rear end of a toad. Hair sprouted from his nose and ears like moss on an ancient rock. He really was old now and his job consisted of telling his son and his nephew what to do. Their job consisted of ignoring what he said. I shook hands with them as well.

'What's this about you you digging?' Jim asked suspiciously. digging?' Jim asked suspiciously.

'Only a spadeful. I just said I'd like to dig the first spadeful, if that's all right. It's important to me.'

I've been an architect for nearly fifteen years now, and whenever I work on a building, I have a rule, which amounts almost to a superst.i.tion, that I must be there to see the first spade being dug into the ground. It's a moment of pure sensual pleasure, really, and I sometimes wish that I could do it myself with my own bare hands. After months, sometimes even years, of drawing up the plans and the specifications and obtaining tenders and calming the nerves of the client and bargaining with some functionary in the planning department, after all the compromises and the paper arguments, it's good to go outside and remind myself that it's all about dirt and brick and fitting the pipes together so they don't crack in the winter.

Best of all are the ten- or fifteen-metre excavations which precede the really big buildings. You stand on the edge of a site somewhere in the City of London and peer down at a couple of thousand years of fragments of other people's lives. You'll see the suspicion of an ancient building, sometimes, and I've heard all the rumours of the contractors surrept.i.tiously pouring concrete across an old Roman floor so that there's no nonsense about waiting for the archaeologists to give you the nod before the building goes up. We're constructing the s.p.a.ces for our own lives on the squashed remnants of our forgotten predecessors and in a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand years they'll be building on top of our rusting joists and crumbling concrete. On top of our dead.

This was to be the smallest of holes, a scratching of the surface. John, Jim's son, handed me a spade. I'd measured the area out on the previous day and defined it with cord and now I walked into the middle of the rectangular s.p.a.ce and pushed the blade into the ground and stood on it, forcing it into the turf.

'Mind your nails, girl,' said Jim behind me.

I pulled the handle of the spade down towards me. The turf crackled and split and a satisfying wedge of soil and clay appeared.

'Nice and soft,' I said.

'The boys'll just finish it off, then,' said Jim. 'If that's all right with you.'

A hand on my shoulder made me start. It was Theo. The Theo Martello in my mind is seventeen years old with shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, soft white translucent skin, full lips, with a prominent cupid's bow, that taste slightly of burnt tobacco. He is tall and thin and wears a long army-surplus greatcoat. I find his remembered figure hard to reconcile with this oh my G.o.d forty-something-year-old man standing in front of me with gaunt chiselled features, rough unshaven stubble, cropped greying hair, and hard lines around his eyes. He's middle-aged. We're We're middle-aged. middle-aged.

'We didn't see you last night,' he said. 'We arrived late.'

'I went to bed early. What're you doing up at this time?'

'I wanted to see you.'

He pulled me towards him and hugged me close for a long time. I held my favourite brother-in-law tightly.

'Oh, Theo,' I said, when he let me go. 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry about Claud.'

He smiled. 'Don't be. Just do what you have to do. It was brave of you to come up here and beard everyone in the family den. By the way, who is is coming?' coming?'

'Everybody, of course. All the Martellos. And all the Cranes too, for what we're worth. Dad and my brother and his lot aren't here yet, but, by the time they arrive, I count that there'll be twenty-four guests. The Royal family may be collapsing, and we may have lost the meaning of Christmas, but the annual gathering for the Martello mushroom hunt goes on undiminished.'

Theo raised his eyebrows. The lines around his eyes and mouth creased in a smile. 'You mock.'

'No. I'm nervous, I suppose. G.o.d, Theo, do you remember, years ago, some ferry was sinking and a rescue boat pulled alongside and the women and children couldn't get across. So this man lay across between the two boats and the women and children walked across him.'

Theo laughed. 'You were the worn-out human bridge, were you?' he said.

'I felt like it sometimes. Or at least Claud and I were. The weak link that held the Cranes and the Martellos together.'

Theo's expression hardened. 'You flatter yourself, Jane. We're all linked. We're one family really. And anyway, if there's one link, it's the friendship between our fathers that started it, before we were born. Let's give them credit for that at least.' He smiled again. 'At best you were just a secondary link. A supporting mortice or whatever?'

I couldn't help giggling. 'Do I hear a technical term? What, pray, is a supporting mortice?'

'All right, all right, you're the builder. I never did woodwork. And I'm glad you came here, even if it meant running the gauntlet.'

'I had to supervise this, didn't I? Now I feel like I'm going to cry over my drawings and smudge them.'

We went through the French windows into the kitchen and collected mugs of coffee. From upstairs there was the sound of bodies stirring, cups clinking, lavatories flushing in the house behind us as we stepped back out.

'Shut the door behind you, for f.u.c.k's sake,' somebody yelled from inside. 'It's freezing.'

'Okay, okay, I'm just stepping outside.' It was Theo's brother, Jonah.

'h.e.l.lo, Fred,' said Theo.

Jonah nodded in acknowledgement of the tired Martello joke. The point was that Jonah and his twin brother, Alfred, had been indistinguishable, as children at least. Theo had once told me that they had actually slept with each other's girlfriends (without the knowledge of the young women concerned), which I'd been too shocked to believe until I had seen the way they'd behaved in all other matters when they had grown up.

'The way to tell us apart, Theo,' said Jonah, 'is that Fred is the one with the red nose and without the sun tan.'

'Yes, I was going to comment on that, Jonah. Where was it this time?'

'Tucson, Arizona. A cosmetics conference.'

'Good?'

'There were some interesting possibilities floating around.' Jonah noticed Theo's smile. 'Now that everybody's teeth are so good we've got to think of other things to do with them.'

Theo bent over and sniffed the vapour floating up from Jonah's mug. 'Among them seems to have been the idea of toothpaste in the form of a hot drink,' he said.

'It's peppermint tea,' Jonah replied. 'I don't like starting the day with an unnatural stimulant.' Then he turned to me and his virtuous expression melted into a sort of sad smile. G.o.d, were they all going to smile like that at me this weekend? 'Jane, Jane,' he said, and hugged me in a gesture whose warmth was hampered slightly by having to balance the herbal tea in his mug at the same time. 'If there's anything I can do, just ask. That,' he continued, pointing down at the activity on the gra.s.s in front of us, 'that is a very positive step. It's a very good thing for you to have done that for all of us, for the family. I'm sure it's therapeutic as well.'

'Oh, yes, Jonah,' I responded, 'it was very relaxing in my time of need to consult with Alan and Claud and Theo and then redo everything and then go over it in sign language with Jim. I wish we'd stuck with my original plan.'

'Any carbuncle will be better than having to relive the sort of night I spent in my room last night with Meredith and the kids, who didn't sleep for more than three minutes at a stretch for the entire night. And Fred plus the bits of his famille famille that aren't at boarding school were next door. As far as I can tell, the only couples to get a room to themselves were Alan and Martha and your son and his bit of fluff.' that aren't at boarding school were next door. As far as I can tell, the only couples to get a room to themselves were Alan and Martha and your son and his bit of fluff.'

This last was aimed at me.

'Alan insisted insisted that Jerome and Hana have a room to themselves,' I protested. 'I think it gave him some sort of vicarious, predatory pleasure. I don't even know where my younger son ended up.' that Jerome and Hana have a room to themselves,' I protested. 'I think it gave him some sort of vicarious, predatory pleasure. I don't even know where my younger son ended up.'

'Or who with,' added Jonah. 'And far be it from me to breach the inviolable tradition which gives you Natalie's room to yourself. It sounds like a bedroom farce.'

I followed Jonah and Theo back into the kitchen but I didn't feel like food, or like joining what was now almost a throng of people fighting for access to the fridge or the stove. I could see no sign of either of my sons. Alan and Martha would exercise the privilege of the hosts and be down late, but almost everybody else seemed to be around. Claud, looking rumpled and pathetic after his night on the sofa, was stirring a large pan of eggs over the gas. Breakfast is the one meal of the day I've never been much interested in cooking, but since it is as much an organisational as a culinary matter, Claud has always excelled at it. He nodded amiably at me as he spooned the eggs out onto a large dish for Fred.

It was exactly a year since I had last seen the four brothers together in the same room. Here in their holiday clothes, their old jeans and sweaters or lumberjack shirts, they looked like students again, or even schoolboys, joshing each other and laughing. All except Claud who never quite got it right in casual clothes. He needed a uniform and strict rules. The twins, with their dark complexions and high cheekbones, would have looked more dissolutely s.e.xy after an uncomfortable night on a couch. Claud needed eight hours' sleep and a well-cut suit to look his best, but his best was very good.

I stole a banana from the fruit bowl and escaped outside again with my coffee. The mist was dispersing in the hollows. The sky was blue now and it was barely eight o'clock. It was going to be a bright day, though very cold, and my overalls weren't quite warm enough.

I suppose that most of us have a landscape of the mind, the one that we see when we close our eyes, and this rolling patchwork of fields and woods was mine. Every tree, every path, every fence had a.s.sociations which blended together in a mulch of memories from long summer weeks, and briefer weekends of snow or bare trees or new flowers, in which different years, even decades, were now indistinguishable.

The Stead was far from being an ancient house the stone over the front door bore the inscription '1909-P.R.F. de Beer', which was the name of the man who had had the house built but it had always seemed old to us. The front door, though we never thought of it as that, was round the other side of the house and the drive led from it to the B8372 which went to Wales if you turned left and Birmingham if you turned right. But from where I was now standing, in front of Pullam Wood, I was looking across a small depression to the real front of the house, the doors that led to the living room and to the kitchen, and above them, the windows of Alan's and Martha's bedrooms and of the spare bedrooms, and above them, on a floor of its own, Alan's workroom, his sanctum, with its absurd little wooden spire on top. It was a large house, yet it seemed intimate; it was solid, yet the wooden floors were rickety and the walls thin as paper.

I reached the fringes of the wood which I never go into and turned to the right, away from Pullam Farm, and made my way around and down to where the men were tinkering with the digger. I heard a car arrive, Paul's unmistakable top-of-the-range Saab, splendid but not so excessively as to be too much of a betrayal of some political principle or other. Dad gingerly got out of the far side. He didn't notice me and shuffled over to the house. Then Erica appeared, also from the far side. She must have been sitting in the back seat and she was carrying little Rosie, asleep in an almost theatrical slumber. She bustled quickly inside. Paul caught sight of me and we waved at each other. There was no one left to wait for.

At ten o'clock not very sharp everybody gathered on the lawn for the great mushroom expedition, the inviolable tradition of the Martello autumn. The gathering of the extended family was so large that with a few pink coats and a pack of dogs, it would have looked like the local hunt. All those brothers and their families, and in the case of my brother, Paul, previous family and current family. I thought of one of those unreadable chapters of the Old Testament. Alan begat Theo and Claud and Jonah and Fred. And Chris begat Paul and Jane. I counted twenty people, not including me or Jim's workers, bustling around and chatting and not looking as if they were going anywhere. The group was held up by the non-appearance of some of the younger generation, most notably Paul's three daughters by Peggy, his first wife. At about ten past, they finally strolled out, nonchalant, big-booted, long-haired, all in black, wearing one sarcastic expression that seemed to have been stretched across their three lovely faces. Because I was staying behind to oversee the building work, I stood slightly apart and was able to take in the whole scene. Christ, what a family. Everyone else was a mess of jeans and old sweaters but Alan and Martha were properly dressed. This was their day. Alan was wearing some ridiculously correct long jacket that would have kept him dry if he'd been standing under Niagara Falls. There was always the hint of theatrical camp about him, of the person who had been sent down to the costume department with instructions that he be kitted out as an ageing writer living the life of a country squire. He even had a staff that looked like the sort of thing that Errol Flynn used to battle with on fallen trees across streams. Martha looked lovely though: snow-white hair, slim as her granddaughters, and wearing much the same sort of black clothes, but not the Doc Martens. She wore a jacket that had been weathered on real walks and she carried the right sort of wicker basket for laying out mushrooms without mixing or decay. Almost everyone else had plastic shopping bags. I had once tried to explain to Martha that, contrary to legend, plastic bags were a good idea if you were going to eat the mushrooms on the same day, as we always did, because they softened them, made them go high, like game. But she hadn't listened.

Alan rapped his staff on the ground. I almost expected a peal of thunder.

'Forward,' he said.

It would have sounded ridiculous coming from anybody else.

It seemed to happen quickly after that. I went inside and sat at the kitchen table waiting to be needed again outside. I half read the paper and did a few clues in the crossword and there was a tap on the window and I looked up and saw Jim's face through the gla.s.s of the kitchen door. I was going to shout some comment but his face was pale and alarmed. He just gestured me forward and I felt a moment's reluctance, not wanting to go.

As I came out of the door, Jim shuffled back towards the hole and I saw it was almost completed and I wondered if this was just a pedantic way of telling me about it. The men were grouped around the digger. The small group parted as I approached.

'We found something,' said one of them, Jim's nephew. He looked almost shifty.

I looked down at their feet. At first it didn't seem as if there were all that much to see. Toffee-textured clay soil, some broken tiles. What were they? Oh, yes, that's where the old barbecue must have been. That seemed a long time ago. And, shockingly white, there were some bones, jaggedly projecting from the soil. I looked at the men. Did they want me to take charge in some sort of way?

'Could it be an animal?' I said. Ridiculously. 'A buried pet?'

Jim slowly shook his head and knelt down. I didn't want to have to look.

'There's bits of clothes here,' he said. 'Little bits. And a buckle. It must be her, mustn't it? It must be their little girl, Natalie.'

I had to look. I had seen one dead body in my life. I had sat holding my mother's hand in the final moments of her years of pain. I had seen death wipe the expression from her face and her racked body had relaxed back into the bed. I had pressed my lips against her still-warm face. A day later I had touched it again in the funeral parlour, waxy and cold, her hair brushed, in her best clothes, with a small bag clutched pathetically in her left hand. And this was the body of Natalie, my dear, dear friend, after a quarter of a century, for ever sixteen. I knelt and made myself look closely at the bones. From the legs they must be, large and thick. There were traces of clothing, black, thickly grimed. I felt suddenly detached and curious. No flesh, of course. No sinews. The bones that had been detached from the ground were entirely separate. The soil in which they lay was darker than the rest. Would the hair have decayed? The skull was still buried. I remembered her lean body. Brown that summer. I remembered the mole on her right shoulder, and her long simian toes. How could I have forgotten her for so long?

'Someone had better call the police.'

'Yes, Jim, yes. I'll do that now. I don't suppose we ought to do any more digging. Is there a police station in Westbury?'

There wasn't. I looked in the phone book and I had to phone the police all the way off in Kirklow. I felt rather foolish saying to someone I didn't know that we'd found a body and that it was rather old, about twenty-five years, that I thought it was probably the body of Natalie Martello who had gone missing in the summer of 1969. But they took it seriously and in a short time two police cars arrived and then a civilian car and then later an ambulance, or rather a sort of ambulance that looked like an estate car. It seemed strange to have an ambulance to pick up bones that were so long dead they could have been put into a small cardboard box. One of the policemen asked me some halting questions on which I could hardly concentrate. The ambulance didn't take the bones away immediately. A flimsy kind of miniature marquee was raised over most of the hole. There was a light rain falling.

I didn't want to go and look at what they were doing but I couldn't leave the scene and I sat on a bank near the kitchen door and looked down at the tent and across at the wood beyond. I wondered if people would be coming back soon. I had my watch on but I couldn't remember what time they had left and I couldn't even remember how long mushroom hunts take as a rule, though I'd been on so many. I just sat on the bank and finally I saw a small group emerging from the trees. We always separated on these excursions and came back in our own time. They would be able to see the police cars and the incongruous tent but I couldn't see if they were surprised. I stood up to make my way towards them to explain what had happened but my eyes were suddenly wet and I couldn't see who they were. It could have been anybody.