Part 8 (1/2)

'You know what, Jane? I suspect that you've got your Penguin editions of Freud at home and though you've promised yourself that one day you'll read it all, you've never quite got around to it, but you've dipped into it here and there. And you've read one or two books about therapy as well. One of the things you've learnt is that a.n.a.lysis is about talk and about interpretation. It's not very concerned with facts and things, only with the value we place on them. Is that about right?'

'I don't know about that,' I protested. I didn't want to give in to him. He was so sure.

'I want you to forget about all that,' Alex continued. 'I want to cure you for a while, at least of your considerable skill at turning your life into a pattern. I want you to grab hold of the things in your life, the things that really happened. We'll leave the interpretation until later, shall we?'

'I'm surprised that you think there are facts separate from interpretations, Doctor.'

'And I know that you don't really believe that. I can bulls.h.i.+t with the best of them and if that's what you want we can sit here and play games for a couple of hours a week and split hairs about the meaning of meaning. Do you want that?'

'No, I don't.'

'So far, you've given me the standard coming-of-age-in-the-summer-of-love story.' He stood up and moved back to his chair. 'Tell me some of the awkward, unpleasant things that were going on.'

'Isn't it enough that Natalie was pregnant and then murdered? Do you need any more unpleasantness?'

'But Jane, you're giving me an account of this wonderfully idyllic summer spent with the family that everybody adored. Where's the context for murder?'

'Why should there be a context? She may have been killed by somebody who had nothing to do with the family, someone we've never even heard of.'

'What are your thoughts on that, Jane?'

'You mean emotions emotions?'

'No, thoughts. Ideas.'

I paused for quite a long time. 'I've only got one, really. Maybe I'm just being stupid that's probably what the policewoman I talked to thought but I keep b.u.mping up against the obvious, the problem of where Natalie was found. Since her body stayed hidden for twenty-five years, and then was only stumbled on by accident, it was clearly an almost perfect hiding place but it's so peculiar. I don't know anything about murderers or what they do with their victims but I imagine that they bury them in remote forests or leave them on moorlands or in ditches. Natalie was last seen by the river. She could have just been thrown in there. But she was buried under our noses on the day after a huge party when the whole area was full of people. It doesn't make any sense to me, but the one thing I am sure of is that it wasn't some pa.s.sing vagrant who attacked her and then buried her virtually on our front doorstep.'

'So? What else have you got to say to me? There must be something,' Alex insisted.

'Oh, I don't know. It was all such a long time ago. I feel that even by talking about some of these things you give them more importance than they really deserve.'

'Test me.'

I gripped the couch, my fingers like claws.

'There were problems, like all families have. In some ways ours may have been more accentuated because we were so close and saw so much of each other.'

'Spare me all the excuses, just tell me.'

'There were silly things. You've got to realise the ages we were because we were still young enough for these little differences to matter a lot. Natalie was just sixteen and Paul was eighteen and about to go to Cambridge and he was absolutely obsessed with her.'

'Did they have any sort of relations.h.i.+p?'

'Natalie completely rebuffed him. It's hard to imagine now, but Paul was a very shy teenager, aggressively shy really, and he'd never had any sort of girlfriend before. I could almost see him plucking up his courage to make a move towards Natalie and once or twice, late at night, he tried to do things like put his arm round her and she was quite brutal about it.'

'Unnecessarily brutal?'

'I don't know. How can one judge these things? If I am allowed to do a bit of interpretation, I remember that it sometimes seemed as if part of the attraction of Luke for Natalie was as a way of causing pain to Paul. And when she drifted apart from Luke, she played with Paul as a way of tormenting Luke.'

'How did you you feel about it?' feel about it?'

'You mean, watching my older brother being humiliated by my best friend. I was upset, perhaps less than I should have been. Embarra.s.sed mainly. And maybe I was a bit jealous; everyone, well boys at least, always noticed Natalie. She'd seem so indifferent to them, though of course she wasn't, and she didn't wear make-up like the rest of us did, and she didn't laugh at their jokes, and she didn't flirt except in an ironic kind of way. She often seemed contemptuous in fact, but it never mattered. Paul was out of his depth with her. But look, adolescence is all red in tooth and claw, isn't it? I'm already making it sound a bigger deal than it really was.'

'What did Paul feel?'

'He has never talked about it, except as part of his golden youth which he is now going to turn into a television doc.u.mentary.'

'Do you think that is what he really feels?'

'It may be what he feels now. I don't believe he can have enjoyed it much at the time, at least not during that summer.'

'Is that it?'

'Yes.'

I could hear an impatient sigh behind me.

'Jane, you've tossed me a bone. But that isn't the real thing you were going to tell me.'

I was reminded of standing on a very high diving board as a child and the only way I dared to dive was to throw myself from it without preparation or forethought.

'The difficult thing that summer it was often difficult but it was especially difficult then was Alan's infidelity.'

'Yes?'

Well, what did it matter?

'It's not exactly the world's best-kept secret that Alan has been unfaithful to Martha as a matter of habit. It's the old dreary cliche. Alan loves Martha and is utterly dependent on her. But he's had lots of affairs for virtually the whole of their marriage, as far as I can make out. I suppose he would have been like that anyway but when The Town Drain The Town Drain happened and Alan became famous, then the young and available literary women needed beating off with a stick.' happened and Alan became famous, then the young and available literary women needed beating off with a stick.'

'Did Martha know about these affairs?'

'I think she did in theory. It wasn't flagrant. It just went on and on. The affairs weren't talked about. They weren't important, I think that was the basic cover story.'

'Did she mind about them?'

'I think people always do, don't you? Martha is a wise woman and I suppose she saw from the beginning what Alan was like and realised that nothing could be done to change it. But maybe she was too wise and not b.l.o.o.d.y-minded enough. I'm sure she always suffered a great deal.'

'Did you all know about it?'

'Not really. In retrospect, there were things that only became clear once we cottoned on. It may be hard for you to understand, but there are ways in which you can know and not know things at the same time. Do you see what I mean?'

'Absolutely.'

'Anyway, the truth about Alan's behaviour became unavoidable. To cut the whole sordid story short, we discovered that the summer before Alan had been sleeping with a girl who was a friend of Natalie's and mine. She was the same age as we were. She was called Chrissie Pilkington and she was a daughter of a local family, good friends of the Martellos, and she was at school with Natalie. It was awful.'

'How did you discover?'