Part 1 (1/2)

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 Shrops.h.i.+re, the Stead, as it was absurdly called, a self-mocking joke about rural squires.h.i.+p 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 Shrops.h.i.+re'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.'