The Memory Game (7 page)

'Now I'm here in your office and I had some hopes that it would be something of a refuge from what I think of as my troubles. I suppose I thought we could begin by discussing what a course of therapy might be able to achieve for me. We could discuss ground rules, establish what sort of things we are going to talk about, that sort of thing. But just at this very moment I want to sit down and get going in some sort of sensible way.'

'Then sit down, Jane.'

Dr Prescott gestured towards the battered couch over which an eastern-looking rug was draped. I quickly looked around the room. It was obvious that every detail had been planned. There was an armchair at the head of the couch. There was a Mark Rothko poster on the wall that would be invisible to the recumbent patient. On the window ledge behind the armchair there was a small abstract sculpture with a hole in it, carved in, I think, soapstone. The walls and the ceiling were painted a supposedly neutral white. There was nothing else.

'Should I sit or lie down?'

'Whichever you feel like.'

'It's a couch.'

'Whichever you feel like.'

I huffed and lay down on the couch and stared at the wood-chip paper, a product of a shoddy eighties' conversion. God knows what was under it. If she bought after '87, Dr Prescott was stuck with negative equity. She sat down behind my left shoulder.

'Can't we have a straightforward transaction about anything at all?'

'Why do you choose the term "transaction"?'

'No, no, no, no, no, I don't want to talk about why I chose the term "transaction". Dr Prescott, I feel that we've got off to the wrong sort of start. At this rate we're going to spend an hour without having reached "Good Morning".'

'What do you want to do?'

I felt a prickling in the corner of my eyes as if I was going to cry. 'I would like to smoke a cigarette. Is that all right?'

'I'm afraid it isn't.'

'Why are you afraid?'

'It's just an expression.'

I forced my neck rather painfully around so that I was able to meet Dr Prescott's eyes. 'Just an expression?'

She was unamused. 'Jane, what do you want?'

'I suppose I was expecting that you would ask what my problem was and I'd talk about what was on my mind, the pressures that I've been under, and we'd take things from there.'

'So talk.'

'Dr Prescott, can I ask you something?'

'You can say - or ask - anything you like.'

'Are you experienced at this? I'm in a ragged, vulnerable state. Perhaps we should talk about how I can feel confident about entrusting myself to you.'

'Why do you need to feel confident?'

'If I was dropping my car in to a garage to be repaired I would want to know that the mechanics were competent. I'd find out if the garage was any good. Before I give myself up to this therapeutic process I need to have some sense of what it's going to do for me.'

'Jane, this
is
the therapeutic process. In this room there is nothing outside the process. The way to feel confident about it is to trust it, give yourself up to it.'

They were all laughing around the table. It had seemed like a nightmare at the time but, as I described it, later that evening, it somehow mixed with the wine and the creme brulee and now the cheese, and it became a comic turn.

'I was feeling that I couldn't cope,' I continued, 'I was desperate for some sort of reassurance and I stumbled into this remedial class for deconstructionists. There was no way I was going to pin her down. Every time I asked a question she would be like Macavity the cat. She wouldn't be there. She'd have dodged to the side and she'd be saying that the real thing we ought to discuss is why I felt the need to ask that question. I would have needed a .45 Magnum to get her to tell me the time.'

This was the sort of therapy I needed. I was at Paul's and Erica's opulent house across in Westbourne Grove, the exotic bit of London I never felt really at home in. Around the table for dinner was Crispin, who was one of Paul's directors on his game show,
Surplus Value
, and his girlfriend, Claire. There was Gus, the obligatory eligible single man in whose direction I was being pushed. He was all right but I was much more attracted to the two other men, two Australian builders called Philip and Colin, either of whom would have been far better choices for my crying-for-help one-night stand than whateverhisname was, but unfortunately they were not only both gay, but living together. I wasn't particularly drawn to their technical expertise but they had benefited in other ways from their time in the sun moving heavy objects around.

'So you never managed to get through to her?' Paul asked.

'Yes, I did. In the end there was only one thing I could do : I stood up and said, "I'm going, and I mean that in the sense of walking out of the room and never coming back into it again." To which she replied, she really did, "What is it that you're trying to resist?" I suddenly saw myself trapped in this conversation for the rest of my life like someone being pulled into a whirlpool. So I'm sorry to say I finally told her to fuck off and stormed, it's the only word for it, I stormed out of the room.' I took a sip of wine and the most beautiful drag on a cigarette. 'And the next thing I knew, I found myself here telling you this story.'

'You should have thrown a bucket of water over her,' said Paul. 'She would have probably dissolved away into nothingness. Well done you, anyway.'

'But why
were
you so resistant?'

There was a complete silence around the table. It was Gus, the hitherto silent teacher.

'What?' I said.

'You didn't give it a chance,' he said. 'Your young therapist had a point. If one of my pupils starts to ask me about why we need to learn about history I just tell him to shut up. The very fact of him being so young and not knowing history means he wouldn't understand anything I told him. He can only answer the question by learning history.'

'Well fuck you too,' I said.

There was an awful silence but then Gus grinned and started to laugh which made it seem as if I had been witty rather than hysterically rude and a fairly good-natured argument about therapy ensued, with Erica and Gus guardedly in favour and Paul claiming that 'they' had proved that people who didn't go into therapy recovered more quickly from their neurotic symptoms than people who did. Crispin and his girlfriend were across the table whispering between themselves about something. I began to reach for people's bowls but Paul, who was sitting on my left, motioned to me to stay seated and spoke to me in an undertone.

'Are you all right?'

'I'm all right,' I said guardedly. 'Have you seen Claud?'

'Yes,' he said. 'I played squash with him this morning.'

'And?'

'He beat me three-one.'

'I don't mean that.'

'What do you want me to say? It's hard for him.' He thought for a moment and then visibly took the plunge. 'Jane, my darling, I shall say this just once. Or rather two or three things and I don't want you to say anything in reply. First, you're my sister and I love you and I will always trust anything you do. Claud is my best friend. Always has been, always will be. So it's a little complicated from my point of view but it's a minor problem. Second, I'm not going to say that Claud is a broken man, but the fact is that he's bemused, frankly, about what's happened to his life. He is genuinely baffled about why you suddenly broke up this dream marriage after twenty-one years.' Paul held up his hand to silence me. 'Please don't say anything. I'm not accusing you or criticising you in any way. I'm not saying it or thinking it. You never need to justify yourself to me. Third...' Now he paused and took my hand. I thought he might be about to cry, but when he spoke his voice was quite calm. 'The family - our two families, Natalie, and those summers - have meant so much to me that I can hardly put it into words. What was that poem, the one that Dennis Potter used for that film when the grown-ups all played children,
Blue Remembered Hills?
How does it go? Hang on.'

Paul got up from the table and clattered down the stairs so that the floor actually trembled beneath us. I sat at a bit of a loose end, isolated from the discussion going on around me. Gus was getting up to go. I felt a bit abject. We weren't going to be leaving together. We weren't even going to be exchanging phone numbers. He leant across the table and offered his hand:

'It was very nice to meet you, Jane,' he said.

'Yes,' I said. 'I'm sorry I said "fuck off" to you. I don't normally say things like that at dinner parties.'

'That makes it even worse,' he said, but rather cheerfully. He was probably quite nice. Paul returned up the stairs, nodded at Gus who was going down, and spent too long rummaging through a book.

'Here we are,' he said. '"That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again." That's what I feel.'

'But you
can
come there again. You go there almost every summer. We've just been there.'

'Yes, but I mean childhood and things like that. That's what going back reminds you of. And finding Natalie, of course.'

He held my hand and I said nothing. It was Paul who broke the silence. 'Oh, and there was something else I wanted to say.' Suddenly he looked shifty. The nonchalance seemed studied. 'That weekend, it made a huge impression on me. It seemed like one of those moments that changes your life. I thought I might make a film about the family.'

'Paul, are you serious?'

'Yes, I am. I started thinking about it when Alan made his speech. It's the right thing to do now. I feel that I've got to confront this.'

'You might have to - but do
we
have to confront it as well?'

'No, it'll be all right. It'll be a good film as well. I want to get behind the camera again, get back to making documentaries. It feels right.'

'Tired of making money, are you?' I asked teasingly. Paul never found this subject amusing.

'Look,
Surplus Value
runs itself now. Ask Crispin over there. It's a foolproof formula. It just needs a prod every now and then. I need a challenge.' He refilled his glass. He had drunk too much this evening. He began to speak in a low voice that was almost a whisper. 'Finding Natalie is what did it. She meant so much to me. She still does. For me she represents a lost innocence, everything that slips through your fingers as you grow up, all the things you felt you ought to be and didn't live up to.'

'That's a lot to represent,' I said warily.

The last thing I wanted was an argument about who Natalie meant most to, but Paul just looked solemnly down into his glass. People started to move around the table and Crispin's girlfriend, Claire, sat down on my right. She grinned at me. She had a bob of dark hair, half-way between Louise Brooks and a Beatle, and a round face like a teddy bear, made rounder by her granny glasses.

'When's it due?' I asked.

'God, is it that obvious?'

'No, not really. I didn't dare say anything at first. One of the worst experiences of my life involved congratulating a woman on being pregnant and it turned out that she was just fat. But if the woman who looks a bit pregnant is also wearing loose-fitting dungarees and she doesn't drink or smoke anything for the entire evening, or touch the cheese, then I can take the risk of congratulating her.'

'Bloody hell, I didn't know I'd spent an evening sitting across the table from Sherlock Holmes. What else do you know about me?'

'Nothing. Except that you look very well.'

'I'm afraid you get a point deducted for that. I've been throwing up every day. I thought it was meant to stop after the first trimester.'

'There's no guarantee,' I grinned. 'A friend of mine was suffering from morning sickness while she was in labour.'

'Thanks,' said Claire. 'That makes me feel
really
sick.' She edged a little closer. 'Look, I'm really sorry about this awful thing with your sister-in-law and everything else that's been happening with you. It must be terrible.'

'It's all right, but thank you.'

'And you were being very funny about that woman you saw but I thought she sounded horrid.'

'I don't know about that, but she isn't what I need just at the moment. I think you would need to be in perfect psychological health to cope with Dr Prescott.'

'You seem quite robust to me, Jane. You just need someone to talk to about it all. Look, you don't really know me, and please just ignore this if it's an irritation, but we do know this therapist who is the most lovely man. He might be just the sort of person you need.'

I must have looked doubtful because Claire became alarmed.

'Alex isn't a guru, or anything out on the fringe, Jane. He won't be doing things with crystals. He's a proper doctor, he's got letters after his name and all that. The main thing is that he's just great, a really nice guy. Let me give you his number. Which I haven't got of course. Crisp, love, have you got Alex Dermot-Brown's number?'

Crispin was deep in conversation with Paul about some technical matter and only heard the question when it was repeated.

'What for?'

'Don't you think he might be a good person for Jane to talk to?'

Crispin thought for a moment, then smiled. 'Yes, I suppose so. Be nice to him, though. He's an old friend.' His Filofax was open on the table and he flicked through it and found the number.

'Here,' he gave me a slip of paper. 'Should your mission fail, Jane, we will of course deny any knowledge of you.'

Six

The following morning I wrote a letter to Rebecca Prescott enclosing a cheque for the session and saying that I had decided not to proceed. Then, feeling foolish, I rang the number that Crispin had given me. The phone was answered and somebody said something unintelligible.

'Hello, can I speak to Dr Alexander Dermot-Brown, please?'

More unintelligible speech.

'Hello, is your mummy or your daddy there?'

This achieved something at any rate as the gibberish became the comprehensible 'Dada, Dada'. The receiver was apparently snatched away from the first speaker who gave a high-pitched scream.