The Memory Game Read Free Page B

summer. I remembered the mole on her right shoulder, and her long simian toes. How could I have forgotten her for so long?
    'Someone had better call the police.'
    'Yes, Jim, yes. I'll do that now. I don't suppose we ought to do any more digging. Is there a police station in Westbury?'
    There wasn't. I looked in the phone book and I had to phone the police all the way off in Kirklow. I felt rather foolish saying to someone I didn't know that we'd found a body and that it was rather old, about twenty-five years, that I thought it was probably the body of Natalie Martello who had gone missing in the summer of 1969. But they took it seriously and in a short time two police cars arrived and then a civilian car and then later an ambulance, or rather a sort of ambulance that looked like an estate car. It seemed strange to have an ambulance to pick up bones that were so long dead they could have been put into a small cardboard box. One of the policemen asked me some halting questions on which I could hardly concentrate. The ambulance didn't take the bones away immediately. A flimsy kind of miniature marquee was raised over most of the hole. There was a light rain falling.
    I didn't want to go and look at what they were doing but I couldn't leave the scene and I sat on a bank near the kitchen door and looked down at the tent and across at the wood beyond. I wondered if people would be coming back soon. I had my watch on but I couldn't remember what time they had left and I couldn't even remember how long mushroom hunts take as a rule, though I'd been on so many. I just sat on the bank and finally I saw a small group emerging from the trees. We always separated on these excursions and came back in our own time. They would be able to see the police cars and the incongruous tent but I couldn't see if they were surprised. I stood up to make my way towards them to explain what had happened but my eyes were suddenly wet and I couldn't see who they were. It could have been anybody.

Two
    The knife slid through the spongy layers into the beige flesh. I peeled off some slimy skin, tossed an edible chunk of cep into a large bowl. Peggy came in with another bucket full of mushrooms; she smelt of the woods, the mulchy earth. Her khaki trousers were stained; she'd taken off her boots in the hall, and now padded in thick grey socks.
    'Here you are,' she said.
    With my fingertips, I gently lifted the yellow, gilled chanterelles lying like waxy flowers at the top, and sniffed at their curved trumpet shapes. Apricots.
    'Who found these?' I asked.
    'Theo, of course. Are you all right, Jane?'
    'You mean about Claud?'
    'No, about today.'
    'I don't know.'
    In the bucket there were warty, bulbous puffballs, horse mushrooms with a faint whiff of aniseed about them, and delicate white ink caps, fraying around their skirts. The kitchen smelt damply fungoid; wormy parasol mushrooms blocked up the sink, tatters of woody stalks lay on the working surfaces. I wiped my hands, which were still trembling, down my apron and pushed back my hair. The kitchen was brightly lit, but nothing seemed quite real to me - not the horror in the garden, nor this parody of normality in the clutter of the Martello kitchen, heart of their large house. Were we all insane, a houseful of shocked people trapped in ritual? I was losing myself in activity.
    'You did well,' I said to Paul, who was passing through the kitchen clutching dusty bottles of red wine to his chest.
    'You should have seen them all: we could have picked twice as many. Some of them are useless though.'
    He glanced at Peggy furtively on his way out. He looked harassed. We were each of us alone with our thoughts and private alarms. He had the additional burden of being stuck in a house with his ex-wife, current wife, and a sister who was divorcing his best friend. There was a necessity not to think too much.
    I started chopping the mushrooms into thin slivers; the flesh was spongily resilient. I turned them and cut them