The Memory Game (23 page)

But what about this medication? How could the doctors guarantee that these mental patients would take their medication? Pauline said that this was at the heart of the way the hostel system functioned. She said that she understood local concerns and that they had all been addressed at the earliest stage of planning. Potentially dangerous people (of whom there were extremely few) and people who refused to take their medication would not be considered for a hostel of this type. Then Pauline made what seemed to me afterwards to be the fatal mistake. She concluded by saying that we mustn't allow uninformed prejudices about the mentally ill to influence policy. If this was a tactic to shame the audience into accepting our position, it backfired disastrously.

A man stood up and said that all the arguments about medical matters were one thing but this was also an issue of property values. There were people in this meeting, he said, living in houses for which they had saved their entire lives. There were people sitting on negative equity who had just seen the first signs of growth in the housing market. Why should these people sacrifice their homes to a trendy new dogma invented by sociologists who probably lived safely away in Hampstead?

Chris, who sounded as if he were trying to speak while simultaneously swallowing his tongue, replied that he had hoped that the medical explanations would allay all fears of this kind. But the man stood up again. All the medical explanations were a bloody waste of time, he proclaimed. It was all very well for outsiders to talk about so-called prejudices. Whether they were true or not, house-buyers would be put off.

Chris foolishly asked how he could possibly dispel concerns of that kind and the man shouted back that the local residents were not interested in concerns being dispelled. They wanted the hostel project to be abandoned, that was all. Then a good-looking man in a tweed jacket and an open-necked shirt stood up. Oh, God. It was Caspar.

'I'd like to make a comment rather than ask a question,' he said, blinking through his wire-rimmed spectacles. 'I wonder whether it might be best for people here to imagine, as a sort of thought-experiment, that we are discussing a hostel that is going to be constructed in another British city altogether. Would we approve the project if we had no personal stake in it?'

'You fuck off,' said the property man to a startled Caspar. 'Why do you think we're here at all? If they want to build somewhere for these people that nobody wants, why don't they do it on an industrial estate somewhere or in an old factory?'

'Or perhaps in one of those closed-down Victorian lunatic asylums,' suggested Caspar.

'Aren't you supposed to put raw meat on things like this?' asked Caspar. 'Ow!'

Caspar flinched as I dabbed his eye with cotton wool.

'I've got to clean out the wound first. Anyway, I haven't got any raw meat. All I've got are some sausages in the freezer.'

'We could eat them,' Caspar suggested hopefully, and then flinched once more. 'Do you think there are any bits of glass in the wound?'

'I don't think so. The lens just broke into a few big pieces. The cut was caused by the frame. And that man's fist, of course. And can I just say for one last time that I'm really, really sorry about what happened. I regard it as completely my fault.'

'Not completely.'

We were back in my house. Paul Stephen Avery of Grandison Road had been taken away between two large policemen. The meeting had broken up in disarray. Caspar had refused all medical treatment but had been unable to drive himself home because his spectacles had been damaged. So I'd pushed my bike into the back of his car and driven him to my house where I'd insisted on getting something to put on his eye.

'I thought you didn't believe in intellectual debate,' I said, as he flinched once more. 'Sorry, I'm being as careful as I can.'

'In theory, I don't. I intended just to look at you in action but when that man was talking I suddenly thought of the model that Rawls's
Theory of Justice
was based on and felt I had to intervene. It may have been salutary in a way. You know, one has this fantasy that if at various crucial points of world history a linguistic philosopher had been on hand to make sure that everyone's terminology had been consistent then the world would be a better place. It's probably good to be punched in the face occasionally. Do you think I'll get a black eye?'

'You certainly will.'

'Have you got a mirror?'

I passed Caspar a mirror from my medicine box. He scrutinised himself with awe.

'Amazing. It's a pity I'm not going into college until Tuesday. They would be very impressed.'

'Don't worry. That black eye is going to mature like a fine wine. It'll be even more spectacular by next week.'

'So long as it doesn't scare Fanny. Speaking of whom...'

'I'll give you a lift. In your car. Don't worry. My bike is still in the back.'

Twenty-Two

'What do you want, Jane?' Alan asked, staring at me over his half-moon spectacles.

Characteristic blankness. 'I haven't made up my mind. Paul can go first.'

'Paul?'

'You know, I always have this existential problem with menus. I can never decide why I should order one dish rather than another.'

'Oh, for God's sake,' Alan exploded. 'We'll all start with the smoked salmon. Anybody object? Good. Then I'll have steak and kidney pudding. I recommend it if you want some decent old-fashioned food.'

'All right,' said Paul, rather shiftily.

'Jane?'

'I'm not really hungry. I'll just have a salad.'

Alan turned to the waiter. 'Did you get that? And some rabbit food for the lady here. And just tell Grimley we'll have a bottle of my white and a bottle of my red and I'll start with a large Bloody Mary. The others will probably want some overpriced mineral water with a foreign name.'

'I'll have a Bloody Mary as well,' I said impulsively.

'Well done, Jane.'

Alan handed the menu to the waiter, removed his spectacles and sat back.

'Salad,' he said in horror. 'That's the sort of thing that kept women out of this bloody place for so long.'

This seedy ornate dining room south of Piccadilly Circus, with its third-rate old masters, its tired club architecture, the faded hangings, the smoke, the male chatter, this was Alan's habitat: Blades, the club he had belonged to for over thirty years. Today he seemed ill at ease, prickly and depressed, and I didn't feel that Paul and I were the people to snap him out of it. Paul was preoccupied with his programme. He had told me as we were walking down Lower Regent Street that Alan was the key to the structure, the bit that he had to get right and he wasn't sure how to use him. As I sat at the table lighting one cigarette after another I felt I was looking at a callow fisherman dangling a fly in front of the nose of an ancient salmon. And me? Was I any good to Alan at that moment? The Bloody Marys and the mineral water arrived. Alan took a large gulp.

'How did the lunch with your publisher go?' I asked.

'Waste of time,' Alan said. 'Can you believe that lunch used to be my favourite part of the day? When Frank Mason was my editor, we used to spend three or four hours over it. We once took so long that we went straight on to dinner in the same restaurant Yesterday I met this new editor called Amy. Wore some sort of suit. Drank water. Ate a first course and nothing else. I was going to really show her: gin and tonic to start, three courses, couple of bottles of wine, brandy, cigar, everything.'

'So what happened?' Paul asked.

'I didn't,' Alan said with a shrug. 'And do you know why? She thought I was a bore. Alan Martello, the reactionary old drunk who hasn't produced a book since the seventies. Twenty-five years ago girls like her wanted to sleep with me. Queued up to get into my bed. Now they try to keep their lunches with me as short as possible. She was back in the office by two fifteen.'

I took a sip of my drink, the vodka astringent under the tomato's sweetness.

'What did Martha think of those queues of eager girls?' I asked.

'Good old Jane, always talking about how people feel. Wanting to make everything smooth and perfect. The answer is that we muddled along like most people.'

'She didn't mind?'

Alan shrugged. 'She understood.'

'How
is
Martha, Alan?'

'Oh, she's all right,' Alan said distractedly. 'Her treatment's getting her down a bit, that's all. She'll be better when it's over. It's just those bloody doctors worrying her.'

I felt a rush of emotion for this blustering, self-deceiving, famous man with his stained beard and his florid face and his novel he'd been working on since we were all children. A man who didn't want to think about his dying wife, who didn't want to be with her. But what emotion?

'I've been thinking a lot about Natalie lately,' I said.

Alan waved the waiter over and ordered two more Bloody Marys. I didn't bother to protest.

'I know,' Alan said, after the waiter had gone. 'And I hear you've been seeing one of these head people. All been a bit much for you, has it?'

'Yes, I think it has been, in a way.'

'And then snooping around. What are you doing? Trying to find out who killed my daughter?'

'I don't know. Trying to get things sorted out in my mind.'

'Then you, Paul, and your programme. Haven't either of you got a family of your own to mess around with?'

The vodka was taking effect on Alan. I knew this mood. He would taunt us, probe for weak spots, try to goad us into losing our tempers. I sneaked a look over at Paul who smiled back at me. We were a match for him and, anyway, this wasn't the old Alan, dominating, seductive. He only picked at the smoked salmon but he cheered up when the steak and kidney pudding arrived in its bowl, and the heavy opaque claret was poured into his large glass.

'Salad, indeed,' he said, tying his napkin around his neck like a bib.

I've seen the old pictures of Alan, the angry young man, and in the early fifties he had a slim, austere look. Now he was overweight, florid. His dimpled, veined nose was a testimony to decades of over-consumption. But there were still those lively blue eyes, flirtatious and imperious. They held people, especially women, and even now I could imagine the fascination they would arouse and the impulse to sleep with him.

'How many women have you slept with, Alan?'

I couldn't believe I'd said it, and I waited almost in horror to see what he would say. To my surprise, he laughed.

'How many men have you slept with, Jane?'

'I'll say if you say.'

'All right. Go on then.'

Christ, it was my own fault.

'Not very many, I'm afraid. About seven, eight maybe.'

'And a quarter of them are sons of mine.'

I flushed red in embarrassment. Even my toes, under their layers of leather and cotton, must have been blushing.

'What about
you
then?'

'Isn't Paul going to tell us?'

Paul looked genuinely alarmed.

'I didn't promise anything,' he said, gulping.

'Come on, don't be shy. You're expecting everybody else to bleat about their private lives in your ridiculous telly programme.'

'God, Alan, this is pretty juvenile, isn't it? If you must know, I have probably had sex with about thirteen women, maybe fifteen. Are you satisfied?'

'I win then,' said Alan. 'I would estimate that I have slept with something over a hundred women, probably over a hundred and twenty-five.'

'Oh, well done, Alan,' I said in my driest of tones. 'Especially as you had the handicap of being married with children.'

Alan was well into the claret now. 'Ah, the true, the blushful Hippocrene,' he said as he drank deep and then wiped his mouth with his napkin. 'It wasn't a handicap. Do you know one of the good things about literary success?'

Paul and I looked quizzical. We knew that no actual answer was required.

'The women,' said Alan. 'When you write a successful novel and become a representative, however misleadingly, of a younger generation, you get rewarded by money and fame, of course, but also you get a lot of women whom you would not otherwise have got. It's like this,' he said, pushing his spoon into his bowl and lifting out some gobbets of flesh. 'We're meant to pretend not to like this sort of thing, aren't we? The blood of the meat and the kidneys with their fine tang of faintly scented urine. And we're supposed to whine and winge about the sufferings of animals. I
like
meat. I like veal. I love foie gras. Who cares about the calf growing up in the dark or how the goose was fed?'

'I'm sorry, Alan,' I interrupted, 'but is this all because I ordered a salad for lunch? I wasn't making a political gesture. I'm having a big meal tonight.'

He continued as if I hadn't spoken.

'When I meet a woman, any woman, I imagine what she'd be like in bed. All men do, but most of them never dare to act on it. I did. If I met a woman and I was attracted to her, I'd invite her to bed. A lot of the time they'd accept.' He pushed a large spoonful of steak and kidney pudding into his mouth and chewed it vigorously. 'People aren't supposed to say things like that, are they?'

'Any woman at all?' I asked.

'That's right.'

'Like Chrissie Pilkington?'

'Who?'

The steaming spoon halted half-way between bowl and mouth. Dead flesh in grease. Alan's brow was furrowed with the effort of memory.

'You don't remember them all by name?'

'Of course not.'

'She was a schoolfriend of Natalie's. Long curly silver hair, like a model for a pre-Raphaelite painting. Freckles. Small breasts. Tall. Fifteen years old.'

'Yes, I remember,' Alan said wistfully. 'She was probably sixteen, wasn't she?' he added with a note of prudence.

'Girls are beautiful at that age, don't you think?' I said.

'Yes, I do,' Alan replied. He looked wary. He liked to be in control of the conversation. He didn't know where this was going.

'Their skin is unblemished. Their bodies are firm, especially their breasts.'

'That's right.'

'And they've got a particular sexual attraction. I could even see it in the girls that Jerome and Robert used to bring home. They're still a bit like children but they've got adult bodies. And I bet they're sexually submissive, and eager as well. I bet they'll do almost anything you want and be grateful for it. Isn't that right?'