The Memory Game (16 page)

By twenty past eight I was back outside on the pavement, walking up and down to keep warm. Ten minutes later I saw him, on a bicycle. He was wrapped in a large coat, heavy gloves, helmet, but Luke's pale, thin face was unmistakable. As he approached the gate, he swung his right leg deftly back over the bike and rode the final few yards standing on the left pedal, swinging between the groups of pupils who were gathering. I had to run across the road to intercept him. I called his name and he turned his head. He didn't seem surprised and just gave a slightly sarcastic smile. He pulled off his helmet and ran a gloved hand through his long hair which was streaked with grey.

'Don't you have a job to go to?'

During the drive up, my mind had buzzed with things I wanted to learn from Luke. Now that I was here, it was difficult to think of what to ask.

'Can we talk?' I said.

'What are you doing here? What do you want?'

'I mean, can we talk
privately?
'

A vein throbbed in his temple. He flushed deeply and I thought he was going to shout at me, but then he looked around and made an obvious effort at self-control.

'Come with me,' he said. 'I can give you five minutes.'

Luke chained his bike to a stand and led me through a heavy swing door. We walked noisily down a school corridor whose grey aridity was relieved by paintings and collages on the walls.

'Have you seen the papers today?' he asked, without turning his head.

'No.'

'I could sue Alan, you know.'

'You might lose.'

Luke responded with a curt laugh and led me into a room that was so small that when we both sat down we were almost touching each other. We were surrounded by shelves with bright new exercise books and sheaves of drawing paper.

'Well?' he said.

'Did you co-operate with the police?'

Luke laughed again, in apparent relief.

'That's it?' he said. 'You haven't got anything, have you?'

'Well, did you?'

'I've been questioned by the police, my name has been in the papers. I'm afraid that I'm not very interested in talking to you about this. Look, I don't know what it is you're trying to discover, but if you're trying to prove something out of some girlish fantasy about Nat, just forget it.'

'If it wasn't your baby, whose could it possibly have been?'

Luke hardly seemed to be listening to me.

'I always liked you, Jane. The others, Nat's brothers, they looked down on me. I used to feel in my innocence that you didn't.'

'I was scared of you,' I replied. 'You seemed so sophisticated.'

'I was a year older.'

'Luke, give me some reason to believe it wasn't you?'

'Why should I?' He looked at his watch. 'Your five minutes are up. I hope I haven't been of help to you. I'll leave you to find your own way out.'

I sat in my car for a few minutes, then drove slowly towards the motorway until I saw a payphone. I rang Helen Auster in Kirklow and asked if I could meet her, now, as soon as I could get to her. She sounded puzzled but agreed. The day brightened as I drove west from Birmingham and as I entered Shropshire and drove along the top of the hills, my spirits lifted slightly. Kirklow police station was a large modern building just off the central market place. Helen met me at the front desk, wearing a long coat, and suggested we go for a walk. As we talked we strolled around the beautiful soft-stone buildings that made up the centre of the town. It was very cold and I wasn't sure why I was there.

'Are you all right?' Helen asked.

'I've just been to see Luke McCann,' I said.

'Where?'

'At his school in Sparkhill.'

'Why did you do that?'

'Have you seen the papers? Have you seen what happened with Alan at the ICA?'

Helen smiled thinly. Her pale skin was flushed in the cold and her cheeks were reddening.

'Yes, I saw that.'

'It was awful, but I think Alan is right and I feel desperate about it.'

'You mean about Luke.'

'Yes,' I said. 'That's why I went and confronted Luke. I didn't really know what I was going to say but he seemed shaken.'

'Isn't that understandable?'

'Look, Helen, I know that there's no scientific way of showing that Luke was the father of Natalie's baby but I've been racking my brains about what you could do to establish a connection. I thought I could go through the party list with you and identify all the people who might have known Luke. He might have said something to them. Have you talked to his parents? They might have something to say.'

Helen looked around.

'Let's go in here,' she said, and steered me into an empty tea room where we both ordered coffee. When it arrived, we sipped it for a moment in silence, cradling our chilled hands round the cups. Helen looked enquiringly at me.

'Who told you that it was impossible to connect Luke to the foetus?'

'Claud. He said that you wouldn't be able to do DNA fingerprinting because the DNA would have decayed and got contaminated.'

Helen gave a brief smile.

'Yes, he's right. One of the bases of the DNA oxidises and the strands crumble. And the DNA that was extracted from the recovered bones was 99 per cent contaminated.'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'It doesn't matter. DNA fingerprinting is no use for this case but there is another technique that's called polymerase chain reaction.'

'What's that when it's at home?'

'It's a way of amplifying very small amounts of human residue. Of course, the DNA strands are still broken up but there are a great many repeats in the DNA sequence. And these little repeat sequences are characteristic and they are inherited.'

'What does that mean?'

'It means that Luke McCann wasn't the father of Natalie's baby.'

I felt my cheeks flush.

'I'm terribly sorry, Helen. I've been stupid.'

'No, Jane, it was quite understandable. Mr McCann was never arrested or even questioned under caution. So he wasn't officially released, and so we didn't announce the results of the test. In the light of subsequent events, we've decided to issue a statement this afternoon.'

'Is the test reliable?'

'Yes.'

'God, Luke should have just said. It was my fault, though.'

We drank our coffee. Helen insisted on paying for herself. Then we walked across the square towards the police station. We halted outside and I prepared to say goodbye. Helen hesitated and spoke a little haltingly:

'You and Theodore Martello, you went out together, didn't you, that summer?'

'That's one way of putting it.'

'Why did it, I mean, how did it end?'

'Unhappily.'

'He talks about you a lot, Jane.'

'How would you know?'

'Oh, you know, when I've talked to him. I told you before, I've talked to him quite a lot. On and off.'

She looked awkward but eager, and a thought - a rather terrible thought - flashed across my mind. I stared at her, and she flushed a bright, hot red. But she didn't look away. I knew, and she knew that I knew; I wanted to say something, to warn her or tell her not to be foolish. But then, with a grimace, she turned rather clumsily and left me. I had a spare half hour on my parking ticket and used it walking around the centre of Kirklow, entirely heedless of my surroundings.

Fifteen

I found my life slipping - almost pleasurably - into a routine. The solid banks between which all the appointments and obligations and habits flowed were provided by the sessions with Alex Dermot-Brown. They had become as regular and unthinking as sleeping and eating. The morning bike rides along the canal, the weaving through the market to his house were now automatic. The visits accumulated in my memory and became comfortingly indistinguishable.

Session by session, I worked my way through what seemed to me to be everything about my life. I talked about my adolescence and Paul and my parents, but of course the story kept coming back to the Martellos, almost as if the Martellos constituted my story. They had always seemed to be at the centre of what was best about it. I described for Alex the childhood summer games. Other people had nostalgic, mythologised views of their early years: our shared childhood really was golden. I talked of my closeness with Natalie and Theo, and a great deal about Claud, as if I was trying to remake the relationship in my own mind, perhaps in a way that would justify my having left him.

It was hard to tell it as a narrative because our marriage hadn't so much broken up as faded away. I couldn't fasten on to any obvious reasons. There was no infidelity, certainly no violence, not even any obvious neglect. That wasn't Claud's style. In lots of ways I admired Claud more than I ever had. As I turned him into words, there in Alex's back room, I felt that I was in danger of making him seem almost irresistible, and of appearing to be talking myself out of what I had already done.

Claud had been in his mid-thirties when he got his consultancy at St David's and he'd turned out to be wonderful at the new responsibilities, all the committee work. Really wonderful. Apart from surgery, gynaecology is historically the area of medicine most dominated by men and Claud and I had always had subdued conflicts about the issue. But, as he might have said but never did, what could he have done as a senior registrar except make futile gestures and thwart his own career? Doctors who make trouble when they are young are the ones who somehow miss out on promotion. When Claud did become a consultant, this all changed. Of course, being Claud, it all seemed dour and unspectacular and it took time, most notably for his opponents, to see what was going on. What Claud was doing was instituting a committee on the role of female gynaecologists in the profession. When people cottoned on there was a real storm. There was a court case, there was an editorial in the
Daily Telegraph
or somewhere, but Claud was a match for them all.

When we were children, it was always Claud who knew what wire went where on the plug, and what time the last train left and all the things nobody else bothered about, and he showed the same grasp of detail at the hospital. Other people huffed and puffed while Claud didn't say very much at all, but at the crucial moment it was always Claud who had talked to the right people on the committee beforehand or who had somehow got the agenda immovably fixed according to some arcane rule that nobody else knew about. The result was that during the past seven years, every single gynaecological appointment at St David's had gone to a woman. He was a hero. And it was clever as well, because he had caught the mood that wasn't yet prevailing. He had got the bandwagon moving before jumping on it.

The odd thing was that Claud never once came to me and said 'I told you so'. He never explained to me that he had been keeping his powder dry all those years so that it could be used when it would be effective. I wish he had, but he was always rational and modest about his achievements, insisting that gynaecology had been wasting its resources and that he was only doing what was efficient. Besides, he said, under the new contract system, the female gynaecologists were more co-operative and flexible. Maybe Claud is the sort of person who accomplishes major reform, an instinctive conservative who admits change in order to save as much of the old system as he can. Maybe. But, in the evenings, there was no detectable difference between the Claud who had swung an entire department behind his proposals against all the odds and a Claud who had failed. This detachment served him brilliantly over the years but it came to repel me.

Claud's triumphs were part of what settled my feelings about him. If I felt nothing for him after what he had achieved, then our marriage really must be in trouble, I reasoned. How does a marriage go wrong? I almost wish I could say that I had caught him in bed with his secretary or one of his adoring female house officers. Claud would never have been unfaithful to me and I knew he would be a loyal husband until one of us died, if only because he had been witnessed signing a document to that effect in a registry office on 28 May 1973. It was all just little things and the lack of little things.

Sex, of course. See under 'Lack of'. When we were first married we had a passionate sex life and Claud was rather elegantly good at it. I don't just mean tactile manipulation but that he seemed to have the whole thing worked out. More than any man I'd ever slept with (a fairly small number, who could be counted on the fingers of two hands) Claud saw sex not just as an impulse but as a part of affection, friendship, humour, tenderness, consideration. I adored it and him.

For most of my teens, Claud had been what Jerome and Robert used to call a dork. He started wearing glasses when he was about three years old and he was always the serious one, without the charisma that Theo and later the twins displayed so effortlessly. He was dogged, painstaking but never the star. Then, in the awful year or so after Natalie disappeared, when it looked as if the Martello family might be broken up by the pain, we became close. That was dogged as well. Claud set out to charm me and his efforts were so transparent, but they worked. To like somebody is one of the good ways of making that person like you but it can just as easily have the opposite effect. Claud got it right. There was nothing sexual for a long time. I was going out with various boys and Claud became a good friend. We used to write to each other when he was away at medical school, long and interesting letters, and I was surprised to find myself telling him things that I kept from other people. We made no demands on each other, we didn't show off, and so when I was in my first year at university I was slightly startled to realise that he was my best friend. He started going out with a girl called Carol Arnott - the first proper girlfriend he had ever had, as he told me and told absolutely nobody else - and I was curious to find myself a little jealous.

It was 1971 and I remember it best in terms of clothes: crushed velvet, flares, cheesecloth blouses with dropped cuffs like a medieval minstrel, shades of purple that I wouldn't dare wear again until the early nineties. I was eighteen and Claud was twenty and I coolly set out to steal him from poor Carol, which I managed with no difficulty at all. Our first night together was in the narrowest of single beds in a bedsit in Finsbury Park which Claud shared with two other medical students. In a process so smooth that it must have seemed inevitable, we managed to decide to get married, which we did at the end of my second year. I wonder if we felt that we were healing the breach in the family. By 1975 I had Jerome and Robert and while still children ourselves we had to be grown up and juggle the childcare with our training and our careers. As I look back on it, I see two decades of frenzy and panic culminating in an autumn afternoon when I drove Robert up for his first term at college. I had a moment to think and the first thought that entered my head was the absolute conviction that I had to leave Claud. No debate, no counselling, no trial separation, just a line drawn under my life.