Remember Me... (21 page)

When he telephoned Natasha at lunchtime, as he did every day, and thought of her in the hallway at that payphone, and felt close because he could ‘see' every detail, the red and grey squared lino, the chipped banisters of the staircase, the dark varnish on the doors, he spilled over with the news of the morning and the brilliance of those for whom he worked: Konrad Syrop, Ludwig Gottlieb, Tosca Fyvel, world aware and alert to all its nuances of political climate, readers of journals in German, Polish, French, Italian and Czech. Joe could scarcely believe that he was in such company, and every one a published author, he told her, more than once, bookmen all. They were not allowed into the secret of his own writing ambitions but there they stood before him, examples.

He basked in the uninhibited love these immigrants had for England. You must not write about it as a worn-out, merely historical place, they said, entertained by his enthusiasm; this is a fine and free country, this is an important example so many other countries look to. It was as if to them he was an heir to all this and must be well advised of its qualities. They became his wise guardians. His own patriotism was encouraged and justified, by men of harrowing experience and foreign intellectual vigour. He was on ether.

Every two or three days when he thought they needed refreshing he bought Natasha a small bunch of cheap flowers at Charing Cross Station from an old scarlet-faced, multi-layered flower seller, beside whose small stall was a card: ‘An Original Cockney Flower Girl'. He tried to protect the offering on the journey home while absorbed in a novel, as the train rattled under the city making for the open air of the northern suburb. He was at once drained by the day and full of it, longing to see Natasha and tell her everything. Sometimes as he came through the door, before he kissed her, he sang out, ‘Shantih, shantih, shantih.'

He came into the flat, she wrote, ‘like a burning bush'. His face had been smacked into colour by the rapid march from the station in the darkening autumn air; his eyes devoured her with delight. Most days she had spoken to no one save him on that one telephone call since he had left the cold flat in the morning. He always made for the kitchen. The two bars of the electric fire in the smallest and warmest of the rooms seemed, she thought, a mere accompaniment to his warmth. He laid his day at her feet, retailing the ways of the world outside to a lover confined, and in doing so the walls of the flat dissolved and Natasha allowed herself to be captured by this bigger picture he brought to her as a tribute which not to receive with pleasure would have been unkind. For it meant so much to Joseph, she saw that clearly. And he wanted it to mean as much to her. Any demur was overwhelmed by the ardour of his reports. These evening disgorgements were, she came to think, in their way, his love letters.

‘I would like to show you Paris,' she said one night. She was dreamy-eyed at the prospect of taking him along the Seine, through the intricate innocent Left Bank streets of a curtailed childhood and youth which in truth had allowed her little space to roam, but the vision of the two of them dawdling arm in arm through the city, her city, suddenly captivated her. ‘It's something I could give to you,' she said, and saw that he too was ensnared: it was so simple to ensnare him.

Joe was within a moment of reminding her that he had spent weeks in Paris before going to Oxford, that he had raked the museums and raided the churches, that he had sat in a café in the Boulevard St Germain and written – only a letter to his girlfriend, true, but still written in a café like a true French writer, Disque Bleu, cognac and all, and that he had even witnessed in the Bois de Vincennes one night a peppering of gunfire between Algerian rebels and the police. But she had spoken of Paris in a tone which claimed it as hers and just in time he drew back and let it be: and already he anticipated seeing it through her eyes.

‘My father has written a letter,' she said. It was a few days old now; she was uncertain what to do about it. ‘I think you have made a big impression on both of them, Joseph.' She smiled and he was reassured that she meant what she said. ‘I think both of them are anxious to send François to l'Ecole Normale here in London, as soon as possible. It is
not working out with him. He is such a sweet little guy. They persecute him! Why does he have to pass exams? Why do they make him miserable? Who cares about exams!'

Her sudden vertical take-off into anger was impressive.

‘He wants us to go to see them at Christmas. Why should I go back there? I hate them!'

‘Not your father.'

‘No.'

‘Nor all the others save . . .'

‘For Her! But she kills me.'

‘We enjoyed La Rotonde.' He had told Natasha at the time that he had found her stepmother sympathetic. And, he could have added, I thought she was perfectly pleasant to you.

‘We did. But . . .' Why should she tell him of the wounds that had opened up? He did not deserve that. This marriage in this strange new place was a good start; she wanted to hold onto that.

‘You want to go to Paris,' she said, accusingly, forgetting her earlier invitation.

‘I could meet your Paris friends. You've said a lot about them. They sound terrific.'

‘Yes.' She was suddenly deflated by his clever diversion. ‘And they want to see you. Joseph,' she said, and then, taking in a sharp breath, ‘I think that I should look for an art college.'

‘Why?'

‘To keep up with my drawing. You need a life class for that.'

‘But you know how to draw. And you were at the Ruskin for years. You can paint here. You can have that front room to yourself.'

She noted the tremor of panic under his voice.

‘I could meet other people and painters.'

‘We meet people.'

‘Your friends.'

‘Our friends.'

‘People I meet at art college could be our friends too.'

‘You write here as well as paint.'

‘I could find a college in London and we could travel together on the tube and meet for lunch and travel back together.'

Joe nodded but with no enthusiasm and she knew again that she had hit the nerve of his jealousy. She would come back to this plan, she assured herself, although she wanted to avoid hurting him.

‘I bought sausages,' she said. ‘They look disgusting but you have said so much about your sausages.'

‘Cumberland sausages?'

‘These are Finchley sausages. Cumberland was too far to go.'

As they made supper he chattered his way through the day as if nothing had disturbed the evening and she complimented his memory and slyly provoked him to more mimicry. The kitchen table boasted four chairs but two of them had early on been relegated to the cold, heavy and rarely used front room. Joe insisted that the sausages were grilled to the point of Boy Scout charcoal and she stood back, unapologetically amused at his unselfconscious scraping off a layer of the charcoal. There was a small mound of frozen peas and cauliflower bought for want of any more appetising-looking vegetable. They drank water. Joe tucked in as he always did with no other comment than ‘This is good.' He accepted two of her three sausages but only after he was convinced when she told him that she had eaten too much at lunch.

‘James is coming round tomorrow,' he announced; he had saved this up. ‘With Howard. They were at school together in Hampstead. They edited the school magazine there and they want to start up a little magazine.' He pushed the empty plate away and sank the water. ‘James wants me to write for it and' – this was the best of it – ‘they want you' – he did not say that he had suggested it – ‘to design, do a painting for, whatever, the cover
and
' – this was the knockout – ‘let them publish your poems!'

Natasha loved him.

‘What will you contribute?'

‘I don't know. We're discussing it. Film reviews? A sort of diary from Bush House? I don't know.'

‘Your stories.'

‘Oh no! They don't know I write short stories. Only you know that. Please don't tell them.'

‘Let me read them.'

‘No. Please. Please don't tell anyone.' He offered her a cigarette as if asking her to sign a treaty. She took it and his panic passed. Soon she would make real coffee and the table would be cleared for writing and life would be almost unendurably perfect. ‘
La Règle du Jeu
's on at the Academy in Oxford Street,' he said. ‘I thought we might see it again; we could go on Saturday for the five o'clock. Peter' – Peter Mills, a colleague at Bush House, much admired by Joe, another winner of a traineeship, a man whom Joe had seen at a distance at university when he was an unapproachable president of the Oxford Union – ‘has invited us to a bottle party in his flat in Paddington.'

‘I like Paddington.'

‘Because you could just jump on a train to Oxford?'

‘Yes.' Her smile was a little rueful. ‘And because it is in the middle of London.'

‘Peter says it's a hole.'

‘Peter is a politician.'

‘Peter says what we have here is exactly what we need.'

‘How can Peter possibly know that? But he has an opinion. You see – he is already a politician.'

‘He will be,' said Joe, rather grimly. ‘At Oxford they said he could even become Prime Minister.'

‘All your geese are swans, Joe.'

After they had washed up, they wrote. At first, Natasha had employed a second-hand and stubborn typewriter but Joe could not bear the noise of it and had moved to the front room. There was no argument but she had put the typewriter aside after two days. He moved back into the kitchen with her.

This was their best time. The kitchen was small and snug, barely furnished, a haven, she thought. Just them. Joseph worked at a story she would not be allowed to read: she worked at a poem he would nag her into reading aloud. Sometimes he would read poetry to her, Eliot, Yeats, Lawrence . . .

The autumn deepened. There would be many nights like this. They were in a boat, she thought, the two of them, in a lighted place in the dark, drifting purposefully though with no dominating ambition, drifting in the dark of London, of England, of the world itself and
sufficient together, she thought, building up the mutual strength which would protect them from all invaders. The silence and the private worlds shared, brought out the best in them, she believed, gradually expelling all that had harmed them, finding and making a unique contentment.

‘Read it to me, then,' he said, tired now, past eleven, but not wanting the evening to be over.

‘I can't finish it.'

‘I know you did something, though. Didn't you?'

‘I began to translate a poem of Rimbaud. You remember my father asked you to read to us in English from
Hamlet
? That is why I chose this poem.'

‘Go on, then. In French first.'

She smiled at his eagerness, his love, her certain intuition that this, for him, was all that it was and for ever.

Sur l'onde calme et noire où dorment les étoiles

La blonde Ophelia flotte comme un grand lys
,

Flotte très lentement, couchée en ses longues voiles . . .

On entend dans les bois lointains des hallalis.

‘It's difficult,' she said, ‘to find English rhymes.'

They were so close to each other now that he caught in her reading an intimation of the fine shading of regret, that she had stepped outside her own language, that she, who loved to talk and write, was for ever committed now, through him, to a foreign tongue. Though it had been her decision, he could see it as his fault, even his guilt. What a loss, he sensed, a distant chord that would grow in time as he realised that the loss of language was the loss of a world.

‘So . . . ?'

On the tranquil dark water, where the stars drown,

Ophelia floats white as a lily

Floats gently, slowly, in her long gown . . .

From the distant woods you hear the sound of
‘les hallalis'.

‘“Hallalis
” is so good – I can't find a good English word.'

‘Why do you need to?'

‘It should be “sleep” not “drown”.'

‘Drown's better,' he said. ‘It's beautiful.'

There was something wild in his gratitude, she thought. She must protect him yet let him be free. She looked at him carefully and then said, as if extracting a solemn promise,

‘This is it, isn't it, Joseph? This is enough.'

‘Oh yes,' he said. ‘This is everything. Just this.'

In the late December dusk of Paris, seated defiantly out of doors, like many others of their age, at the big café next to the Pont St Michel, they could have been taken for just another couple of students who had spilled down from the Sorbonne at the end of the day to relax and take in the first night-lighting of the city, to postscript gossip to another academic day. But Natasha would now never study in the university so beloved of her father, nor would her half-brother François, she had concluded. Her half-brother sat with his pastis and Gitane, blissfully vacant, exempt from effort by the presence of Natasha. François did not need conversation.

The figures that criss-crossed by, the lights on the Seine and the growls of the traffic were more than enough to line his mind with contentment. He was with a sister he loved and the sole person in his family and among his friends, as she realised, who did not look at him and say in that look, ‘Why are you a failure?' ‘Why do you not make greater efforts?' ‘Why do you so miserably let down your parents and humiliate them?' ‘What happened to that Prévost boy?' But Natasha's eyes said, ‘I like being with you, François. Just as you are. Let's have a drink or go to a movie and talk, if at all, aimlessly.' To be alone with Natasha was, for this bewildered teenage boy, physically undersized, something strained about his poor skin, to be alone with his bold sister Natasha was a balm and all he wanted was to sit there, time without end, and watch the daylight finally drain away and take with it the unacknowledged welts and bruises of a constantly criticised life . . .