I leant over and gave her a hug.
‘He was mad. He didn’t know how lucky he was.’
Kim grinned a little crookedly.
‘Life never turns out the way you think, does it? When we were at university together, if you’d asked me what I wanted from life I’d have said I wanted it all : a good lasting relationship, children, lots of children, a career, friends. I’ve got friends and I’ve got the career, though nowadays that doesn’t seem to count for much with me. I can do it standing on my head. But I don’t seem to be doing very well with the lasting relationship. And I’ll never have children.’
What could I say? ‘Life’s cruel. I used to think you made your own luck but that’s a very young thing to think, isn’t it? Here are you, beautiful and witty and warm – and on your own. And here am I. I’ve always had more or less what I wanted and suddenly I’m living in a nightmare. Anyway’ – I was a bit drunk now, garrulously mournful – ‘we’ll always have each other.’ This time, I raised my glass. ‘To us.’
‘To us. I’m plastered.’
We ate hungrily.
‘Did you know,’ I said after a bit, ‘that we’re really quite near the Stead.’
‘Actually,’ replied Kim, ‘I did know. Is it a problem?’
‘Not exactly a problem. Do you mean you chose this place because it’s near the Stead?’
‘Kind of. I mean, I thought of it as a lovely place to come to, and then I also thought you might want to go there. To lay a few ghosts. Otherwise I thought it might come to hold a hellish power over you.’
I stared at her in astonishment.
‘Kim, you’re amazing. Ever since we arrived I’ve been thinking that I’ve got to go back there. I’ve got to go to where it happened, not just the Stead but the hillside. I can’t explain it, but I feel as if it won’t be over until I’ve revisited it. I’ve gone back there so many times in my memory; if I close my eyes I could describe the place inch by inch, each ditch and tree. But I’ve never, not ever, been back to it in person – not since Nat vanished. It became like a forbidden area to me. Well, I know why now, of course, but I also know that I can’t escape from what I’ve done, so I’ve got to confront it. Walk through it, as it were. You do see, don’t you?’
Kim nodded, and drained the last of the bottle into our glasses.
‘Certainly. If I were in your shoes, I think I’d feel the same.’ I started to speak, but she stopped me. ‘Since I’m not in your shoes, I will go for a long walk tomorrow, while you return.’
We relapsed into silence once more, both staring into the flames, blurred by wine and fatigue.
‘What are you thinking?’ Kim asked.
‘It wasn’t the Memory Game, you know,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘The game we played at Christmas, trying to remember the objects on a tray. It’s not called the Memory Game. It’s called Kim’s Game.’
‘My game? What on earth are you talking about?’
‘I found a copy of Kim, you know, Kipling’s novel, in a box of my old stuff from the Stead that Claud brought round. I was browsing through it and when Kim is learning to be a spy, his memory is trained by memorising collections of random objects which are then hidden. Kim’s game.’
‘You want another glass of wine, Jane,’ said Kim, smiling.
‘The Memory Game is where you have cards face down and you try to pick out pairs. I don’t know how I forgot that.’
Kim stood up.
‘I forgive you,’ she said. ‘Come on. Bed-time.’
Thirty-Six
The Stead already looked as if it had been abandoned. As soon as I got out of Kim’s car and looked around I could detect the absence of Martha. She once told me that her books got illustrated somehow and the children brought themselves up, but she felt that her garden really needed her. There was a man who used to come from Westbury a couple of times a week but in my days at the Stead she seemed to be out in the garden for almost every minute, on her knees poking at the soil with a trowel, pruning, planting. She had been endlessly resourceful at a craft about which the rest of us knew almost nothing. When we noticed the flowers and the fruit and the vegetables, we adored them, we were glad to have them around, but we paid no attention to all the little battles that had been won and lost in their creation. Had anybody thought about how the garden could function without Martha? She had been absent from it – first in spirit and then in body – for less than six months, but it looked bereft. Canes stood in the beds with nothing attached to them, there were sprigs of dandelion in the lawn dotted among the mangy half-piles of leaves.
The house was closed up and I didn’t have a key. I’d never needed one. I peered through a window and saw empty rooms, bare boards, expanses of wallpaper with the pale rectangles recalling absent pictures. It was no longer ours and I took a bleak pleasure in seeing all signs of the Martello family stripped so brutally from the property. It was up for sale. Soon somebody else could move in their memories. My own were still cluttering up the place, like the crisp packets that blew down from the B road at the end of the drive. I turned away from the house. The dismal apology for a hole where Natalie had been found remained, half full of sludgy water. Was nobody ever going to fill it in?
But this was not what I had come to see. There was no point in messing around, there was nobody to bleat to. I just wanted to get this over quickly, see what I had to see. Then I would leave the Stead for ever, rejoin Kim, have a good meal, a good weekend, go back to London, get on with the rest of my life. I walked quickly across the shaggy lawn and felt the damp closing around my toes. Wrong bloody shoes. I reached the wood and to the left I could see Pullam Farm and to my right was the path that led along the wood and then back down and around to the Stead. Not today. Today, for the first time in a quarter of a century, I took the path into the wood that led to Cree’s Top and the River Col. It was a damp, misty morning, and I shivered even in my anorak. This wouldn’t take long. The path divided as I approached the rising ground which hid the river from sight and I took the right fork, which would bring me around the side of Cree’s Top to the path by the river.
The path was rarely used now and branches extended across it. After a few minutes of brushing them out of my face, I reached the edge of the Col and and the foot of Cree’s Top. I was back. One detail had started it all, attracted Alex’s interest, hadn’t it? Those funny little pubscent poems screwed up and tossed into the water as I’d sat here with my back to Cree’s Top and watched them float away down the Col. Would any of them have reached the sea? Or did they all snag in reeds round the first bend? I felt in my anorak pocket and extracted a menu from a local Indian take-away : Half-Price Madness. I screwed it into a ball and tossed it into the river.
The silliest thing happened, and it almost made me laugh. The river was flowing the wrong way. The scrunched up menu from The Pride of Bengal didn’t flow away from me and disappear round the bend. It flowed back past me. And, indeed, as I looked up the Col, against the flow, I saw that there was no bend in that direction for several hundred yards. What a stupid thing. I felt disoriented for a moment but it was quickly obvious to me what had happened. I quickly strode up Cree’s Top. The trees were thinned out now and when I reached the summit I could see that the mist had lifted and the view of the river and of the path proceeding along the side of it was clear. The Col curved slightly to the right and then back to its previous course, forming a reversed letter C. Fifty yards further on was the bridge from which Natalie had been seen that last time.