Remember Me... (47 page)

‘It was an old-fashioned company. Because of two Welsh women with high soaring voices, we always finished off with hymns – “Abide with Me”, “For Those in Peril on the Sea” and “Bread of Heaven”. Around closing time, the singing would draw in almost the whole bar although they were not as used to singing as we had been in the Blackamoor and there was no piano. Natasha was not as keen on the singing as I was. I itched to be down in the bar and help start it up. She would come down about half an hour from the end and drink little but in the end she did enjoy it, I'm sure of that. She grew to like the
company and they her, her strangeness, and I can see her smile as she listened to the talk. Looking back it seems a curious thing to have done, and so consistently, for a year or so.

‘Were these visits the need to reach out for a lifeline in my parents' marriage, something to hold onto? Or maybe it was a declaration of “Look; Kew Gardens is a lovely place, our new friends are fine, this life of theatres and mixing with the aspiring famous is OK, but it is here, in the pub, beside the canal next to the gasometers that I find lives to be part of, to be sustained by.” Or was I testing your mother? We could have gone into London on those Saturday nights for the cost of the train fares to Reading and the drinks in the pub. “We should have gone to the opera more often,” she said later, when we had separated.

‘Or perhaps at its root was the desire to repay my mother. She had moved south, out of the life which had protected her and she had come, I knew, to spend her time with and to help her grandchild. The least I could do was try to match her generosity.

‘It was on one of those visits that the photograph was taken. By me, I think, using my mother's camera which ate up about one roll of film a year.

‘I remember from that time a conversation I had with my father. More, in fact, a monologue.

‘He liked me to help him tidy up behind the bar before opening up on Sunday morning and I think I too liked it. It had seemed to be work when I did it with him as a boy; now it was play and I know it amused him that with my degree and what he called my “Rolls-Royce job” and the writing of which he was so proud, he could still tell me I had not wiped the bottles clean enough.

‘When we'd finished, we'd go out from behind the bar into the newly cleaned bar itself. My mother and Maude, who helped, and you, who got in the way to their intense pleasure, had moved on to attack the saloon bar. We'd sit and have a cigarette and he would burst with questions, believing that working for the BBC gave me access not only to everyone who mattered but the capacity to answer everything he wanted to ask. The force of it made me cringe or duck or it reduced me to shameful attempts at generalisations. I was not wise enough to
understand the hunger nor sufficiently loving then to return interest with interest.

‘This time, though, he spoke quietly. He still had about him that coiled, almost threatening single-mindedness which even then could make me physically afraid.

‘“You've a good life,” he said, “you've worked hard for it, nobody can take that away from you. You've got where you've got to on your own merits. Maybe there'll be more to come and it will get harder. You've some new friends, I like the people in Kew, very nice people. And your Oxford friends. You have a lovely house and most of all you have that child and there's Natasha. She's very special, Natasha.”'

He paused. He now looked at his son straight on.

‘I'll tell you this once. Natasha looks tired and she is not happy. I don't know what you're up to but whatever it is, you look after her. She needs help. I think she always will need help. And it's down to you. You didn't bargain for this but it's what you've got. And what she brings you – well, she's better than one in a million, Joe. There's nobody a patch on her. You look after her.'

And he looked hard at his son and forced him to meet the gaze and then he patted him on the shoulder.

‘The photograph shows me what I failed to recognise or chose to ignore then. Natasha is utterly directed inside herself. She sits in the garden of the pub, her right leg over her left, a fairly but not fashionably short skirt. Her hair is thick and simply pushed back. She has a cigarette in her right hand and she is not looking at the camera. She was not, I think, looking out at anything in particular. She seems full of sorrow in the photograph, full of disappointment, but alert, stiff-backed (probably against the pain), trying to work out where our life or her life was going wrong and why and where she could seek the resources to repair it. She seems trapped, wounded and failing to find the way out. Perhaps she was thinking she had made a terrible mistake and yet was in too deep. I had sensed that before. Her eyes are clouded, peering, searching into the light. She seems immobilised in sadness and what I did was to take a photograph.'

The money for writing the film was, he thought, unbelievable. Joe had been put on the bottom rung but after the agent's percentage was paid and the tax clawback put aside, he was still left with three thousand five hundred pounds, almost three times his annual salary: bonanza. He gave two thousand to his mother to turn the scullery in the Builder's Arms into a proper kitchen; he put five hundred pounds into a building society and then he took Natasha on a squandering spree.

It paralleled his splurge in New York where he had bought what she thought of as rather unsuitable, trendy clothes for her, clothes that he wanted to see her in, and bulky toys at Bloomingdale's, to be shipped home, for Marcelle, silk scarves for his mother, a heavy silver-plated lighter for his father and still the dollars would not go. There had been a fever in the spending in New York, as if he had to get rid of the wad wildly and fast to match the city. There had been a giddiness in it, a high, a need for Jack Daniels on the rocks when it was done.

London was more decorous. A fine coat imposed on Natasha who had to surmount a lifetime's opposition to this kind of gift, a seventeenth-century oak dowry chest bought in one of the streets off the Portobello Road, and cushions, chosen by Natasha from one of the new boutiques, Indian, elaborately worked; she wanted one. Joe bought four. For Marcelle there was a bright pillar-box-red tricycle. It had a bell whose sound became a daily cheerfulness. After the spree Joe insisted on the Ritz for dinner: he smoked a cigar. Natasha decided that the whole affair was in the end an entertainment but even her teasing could not undermine Joe's pleasure at so extravagantly overdoing it. The cigar was too strong and too long for him, but he persisted.

And there had to be a party for their friends. But how could you word the invitation so that it told people not to ‘bring a bottle'? It was always on the invitations for such herd parties. But the point on this occasion, as Joseph in his nouveau plutocratic mode explained to Natasha, was that bottles be not brought. He would supply the bottles. He had to supply the bottles. Good bottles. For their friends. That was the point.

Amused by the mixture of self-parody and benevolence, and this evidence that his naïf enthusiasm was intact, Natasha joined in and suggested that she would discreetly secrete the brought bottles and
Joseph could serve, without undue pride in the label, the inevitably more expensive wines he would import from the off-licence next to the station. She would also, she said, do more than nuts and crisps and olives for the buffet. ‘Push the boat out,' he said, ‘when it's gone it's gone.'

‘You want to get rid of it,' said Natasha. ‘You want to wash your hands of it. That's good.'

David always dropped them a card announcing his return dates in London and the party was arranged to suit him.

‘You want to show off to him,' said Natasha.

‘I don't! I like him, that's all. And he likes parties.'

‘You want to gossip with him afterwards.'

‘You keep telling me what I want to do.'

The invitation list was ambitious. All the new Kew friends, including Ross and Margaret; James, David, Bob, Roderick, Matthew and Julia from Oxford, Peter the politician and other new colleagues from the BBC, including from the World Service, Anthony and Victoria, Charles of course, and, after a deep breath, Tim Radley and his wife, a literary cluster including two literary critics he had met while doing a programme on L.P. Hartley, and an arts editor who had appeared in the programme he had made on David Jones. There was a novelist some years older already sporting a swagger reputation who had been sent an advance copy of Joseph's novel and, for reasons which Joseph could not quite trust, been keen to cultivate the younger man; there was the Irish writer already famous with a second novel which Joe thought was miraculously Chekhovian, the sculptor and his wife who lived locally, and finally an invitation to Saul Elstein, expecting an elegant refusal which came by return of post.

When they and a few others royally invited at the last minute piled into the small, overlit, semi-detached, furniture-cleared-to-the-walls, primed-for-party house, Joseph could have been Beau Nash supervising the great balls at Bath, he could have been hosting the salons patronised by Proust or feasting on the conversations of the elite at Garsington. He still took his wine too quickly and soon he was in that state just bubbling below full consciousness, a state of dreamily blurring euphoria.

Was it at this party that Natasha told the rather grand wife of the senior literary critic who held out her glass and said merely, ‘Another drink' to ‘Get it yourself, the wine's in the kitchen'? Was it on this occasion that Joseph had an overlong and damaging disagreement with the more junior literary critic, ‘a rising star', that middle-class people like him could never really understand either pop music or football however hard they tried and anyway why should they want to colonise working-class pursuits when they had so many of their own? It certainly was here that Bob Romford explained the art of fly fishing and in particular the art of making artificial flies to the Polish Head of the European Service in such detail that the man declared he would do a programme on the subject to prove what the English were still made of. James bumped into a radio producer who left with the promise that he would listen to the demo records and see if he could get airtime for them and he did.

Joseph floated on what he thought of as a river of key cultural references. The names bobbed up like corks in a bath: Picasso, Norman Mailer, Harold Pinter, Philip Larkin, John Updike, Dennis Potter, David Mercer, Narayan, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, John Cage, the latest story about Kingsley Amis, the latest Bacon exhibition – he was as drunk on the names as on the glasses of wine. The older novelist with the swagger reputation was never to forgive Natasha after she told him that she thought he was a negative influence on Joseph after his attempt to flirt with her. ‘It was the clumsiness,' she said, ‘and the lack of tact which is typical of your negativity.'

Tim got drunk, ‘like Jude', he said.

David helped with the washing-up and the three of them had a final glass.

‘Perfectly satisfactory,' said David, ‘it's so hard to give a really good party with such a quota of mere acquaintances if you know what I mean, but this one worked. The people from the World Service were distinguished and quite new to me, one doesn't meet them anywhere else. Matthew and Julia are stars of course and I liked Anthony, just outside my circle at Oxford. I know a little about his film-making, well spoken of. Only a couple from, as it were, the older families but they hardly seemed out of place at all. Charles is pukka and very personable.
Your Kew friends, charming, what else would one expect? Very glad to meet Tim Radley: disappointing in person but a real eye as a director. Ross McCulloch – much better than anticipated, much better, he listened, he did not seek to dominate, and your new television friends, fun, certainly. A good mix. As the only International Socialist present I can state that objectively.'

‘So we passed the test?' said Natasha, laughing. ‘Oh, David, you are so wonderfully absurd. Please don't ever change.'

David's return cannonade of laughter bounced around the room.

‘You make me feel so deliciously embarrassed,' he said.

‘And silly, I hope.'

‘Silly?' The swirl of the large dark expressive eyes, the hands thrown up in surrender, the laughter commanding. ‘For you, Natasha – silly.' He took a small sip of the Pouilly-Fumé. ‘But a good party is hard to give. Don't underestimate that.'

‘Do you really think so?' asked Joe, very near sleep and wanting only that the party be praised, interminably.

‘I do. I really think so.' David looked at his watch. ‘The last tube is at twelve-twenty. I've checked.'

‘Of course,' said Natasha.

‘You know me too well. I can't afford to miss it. Taxis to Kew are prohibitive.'

‘I thought it got better,' said Joe, finding a swollen tongue an impediment, ‘the longer it went on.'

‘That new media kinship class,' said David, ‘it's beginning to cohere. Perhaps around you two.'

‘No,' said Natasha, firmly, soberly; and repeated, ‘no. We don't want that.'

‘Don't we?' Joe shook his head. ‘Great crowd,' he said. ‘Peter's great, isn't he? He'll be Prime Minister. Wait and see.'

‘Some people go to these things every night of the week,' said Natasha. ‘How can they?'

‘Now, now, it was a good party.'

‘It was a very good party,' said Julia as they took their nightcap, even though the journey back from London meant that they were running about two hours late on their unobtrusively observed daily schedule.

‘I particularly enjoyed talking to the young poet – Edward Worcester. An intelligent man. He was up at Merton.'

‘I thought the Tim character was terrific,' said Julia. ‘So irreverent. He's making a film about
Jude the Obscure.'

‘Did you tell him your theory about the perfect balance between the two women?'