Willa stares hard at Liv. “She was just a child. She’d be a grown woman now, thirty-five. She would have changed a lot, of course.” She gives a high, humorless laugh. “The awful thing is, I could pass her on the street and not even recognize her. She could be anyone.” Her gray eyes dart around the group, then land again on Liv. “I mean, she could be you.”
There is a moment of stunned, horrible silence.
A bell chimes from the hallway.
“They’re here,” Cat says, rising rapidly from the table, “Finally. Thank Christ for that.”
***
Nate, apologetic, loud, shaking off the cold night air like a cat, strides into the kitchen. He’s tall, with closely cropped hair, dark freckled skin and a wide mouth that breaks easily, fluidly into smiles. He drops the hand of the woman he’s with to hug first me and Cat, then Michael and Liv. Then he makes to move toward Jamie and Willa, but Cat touches his arm and shakes her head. Jamie is talking to Willa quietly by the back door, holding her close, and secretly I’m relieved to see him stepping up to comfort her. It’s obviously what she needs. We give them some space.
“Eh voilà,” Nate says, “je vous présente ma magnifique Claudette, ma petite amie.” He introduces his girlfriend to Cat and translates his sister’s warm welcome into French. Based on past experience, Claudette is not the woman I’d expected him to bring: most of Nate’s previous girlfriends looked like models. Claudette isn’t tall; rather, she’s my height or shorter, with a lithe, impish body and cropped, boyish hair, a strong nose and a full mouth. Her clothes—black jeans, white blouse and a thin orange chiffon scarf draped loosely round her neck—are worn with the sort of easy chic that I’ve always envied in the French. Behind tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, her eyes move evenly around the room, taking in my brother and Liv, me, then glancing at Jamie once, and then again, where he still stands at the back of the kitchen with his arms folded protectively around Willa.
“And Robyn,” Nate says, turning to me, “I’m right in thinking you speak some French, right?”
I nod with as much enthusiasm as I can muster. “I can certainly give it a go,” I say, turning to Claudette and smiling; and then, with some hesitation, “Bienvenue, Claudette, je suis ravie de te recontrer.”
“Moi de même,” she says, talking rapidly, gesturing with her hands. “Je suis désolée d’arriver en retard. La circulation était chaotique, mais je pense que l’on a pris une mauvaise route.”
She’s lost me completely. Something about poor circulation maybe? I think I heard the word “circulation” in there somewhere. And possibly something about eating? And mauvaise—she’s been sick perhaps? She had food poisoning?
“Oui,” I say, putting a hand to my lips, “um—” I turn to Nate for help and realize that he is almost crying with silent laughter, as is Cat.
“Claudette speaks excellent English, Robs,” Nate says. “She’s practically fluent.”
I look at my wife, then back at Claudette, who shrugs and says in perfect, if softly accented English, “Thanks for having us and I’m really sorry we’re late. That honestly wasn’t my idea.”
“You were in on this,” I say, turning to a grinning Cat. Nate’s arm is slung around her shoulders, the siblings delighting in the thrill of their guile. “I hate you all. Come and eat before I throw the lot of you out. And that,” I say to Cat, “includes you.”
While everyone finds their seats, Cat and I load dishes on to the table—crab cakes and steamed red snapper with Thai basil and lime, bowls of pickled cucumber sprinkled with tiny red chilies, vegan curries of varying spiciness, vegetables tossed in coriander and soy, sticky rice and lots of bright, fragrant dips. We top up our guests’ wine and water glasses and, to my relief, the room is filled with talk. No one is sitting where I’d planned.
Nate’s positive energy is a joy. He talks about their life in Paris, his work teaching music, his band, their gigs, the project that has brought him to London. He describes how Claudette was teaching his yoga class, the months it took him to persuade her to go on a date. Claudette raises her eyebrows, cocks her head on one side and looks more amused than flattered. Cat and I exchange a look. This is a first: to our knowledge, Nate never chases anyone. It fits that she’s a yoga teacher, I think: she’s completely self-possessed, the picture of studied serenity. I can totally imagine her in the lotus position, eyes shut, meditating. I steal glances at her and I realize she’s doing the same—I see her looking carefully at Cat, at me, at Liv, angling her head down the table to where Willa sits at the other end. Her focus is fascinating. When she talks, and when she listens, she gives each person her full, undivided attention, as if they’re the only person in the room. I watch her take small portions of the various curries. She doesn’t touch the wine.
“What’s your thesis about, Liv?” Cat says, as later we clear the table of the main course and bring out a long wooden platter filled with slices of mango, strawberries and watermelon scattered with mint.
“I’ve been looking into the corruption of memory,” Liv says, “by which I mean how memory can be changed, altered with time. I’m a psychologist.”
“Oh,” I say, genuinely surprised. I had somehow just assumed that Liv worked in the Zoology Department with Michael.
Michael looks at me and smiles. “Go on,” he says, “say it. You thought she’d be studying the sex lives of limpets.” I laugh. He knows me far too well.
“Interesting stuff,” says Claudette, turning dark, tranquil eyes toward Liv.
“It is,” Liv says. “It really is. I’ve been looking into false memories. It’s truly extraordinary how easily the human brain can be tricked into believing it remembers something that didn’t happen. You’d be amazed.”
She has our attention now. We all sit up a little.
“Even on a simple level, we can have wildly differing memories of a single event, where you’d be right in thinking that everyone experienced the exact same thing. Take this supper party, for instance. If in six months’ time, I asked you individually to recall tonight in as much detail as possible, it’s more than likely that you’d each give me a slightly, perhaps even a wildly different account—with variations in everything from what everyone was wearing and the order in which people arrived, to what we ate, what we discussed and who said what.”
“I don’t really see how that would work,” Jamie says; “we’re literally sitting around the same table.”
“You’d be surprised,” Liv says.
“Do it, then,” Jamie says, “six months from today. Count us in.”
“But if we knew we were going to be asked to recall everything, wouldn’t that fact alone alter the way we processed tonight’s events? People would be actively trying to remember everything as it happened,” Nate says.
“Definitely,” Liv says.
“More than that,” Cat says, “wouldn’t it even alter the way we acted tonight? Right down to what we said? We’d all become hyper self-aware. Nobody would want other people remembering that they were the one who’d come out with something stupid. We’d all be trying to outdo each other with our fierce wit and intelligence.”
“Totally,” Liv says, “no doubt about it.”
Now Willa joins in. “So what factors influence how we actually remember events?”
“Good question.”
“Drugs, alcohol,” Jamie says.
“Sure,” Liv says, “they’re a given.”
“Dementia, aging,” says Claudette.
“Yes. And there’s some fascinating research being done in that area. But now we’re really crossing into neurology, because we’re talking about irreversible changes to the brain’s structure. Similarly with brain injury. Also, there’s your general health and we know the quality of your sleep affects memory too, not to mention other environmental factors such as distractions—physical, mental, what’s going on around us. Also, prior events, whether they’ve been consciously noted or not.”
The yellow light from the candles plays on our faces and I find myself taking a mental snapshot of the scene, each of us trapped like insects in amber, leaning into the center of the table, absorbed in the discussion and in each other. Michael looking at me. Cat and Jamie looking at Liv. Willa looking at Claudette.
“Then we get on to other factors: state of mind, wish fulfillment, stress. Embarrassment. Humiliation. Guilt.”
