Remember Me... (51 page)

‘Marcelle doesn't even notice them. None of the children do.'

‘That worries me. They should.'

‘I'm afraid this is classic displacement, Joseph. Those planes represent if not fear then a threat.'

‘To my sanity.'

‘It is not the planes themselves which represent a threat to your sanity.'

‘How do you know?'

‘And sanity is too strong a word.'

‘How do you know that, either?'

‘It would be better for you to examine what is inside you. Especially the anger.'

‘What do I do all day but examine what is inside me? Not much at the moment. Maybe not much, period. And anger. You can't examine anger. Anger just flares up and then it's gone.'

‘You cannot deny that anger has origins in your character.'

‘I don't want to know.'

‘Why not?'

‘I don't know.'

‘You must.'

‘Oh no I don't. There are things better not known – even if you could know, which I think you can't. I don't want to understand everything.'

‘What do you want?'

‘To find things out. Here comes another!'

Quite suddenly he stood, threw out the remains of the coffee from his cup and left, straight through the house, out, through Kew Gardens, onto the towpath, looking up to see what he was fleeing, the sky march of the planes, his head locked as in a cramp, everything wrong but why? everything out of kilter, why? as he pounded along beside the Thames as if driven by hornets. And why had she not asked him where he had been the other day? And why had he not told her he had gone to see Saul Elstein? And why was this novel no bloody good, would never be, who was to judge, whose judgement counted, how could they live on what this would earn, should that not matter? The heights, the calling? And what was Natasha trying to do to him?

Another plane crashed over his head as he passed two men fishing, oblivious.

‘I'm sorry.'

‘You look terrible.'

‘I really am sorry.'

‘What happened?'

‘Nothing . . . I just couldn't stand the noise, it's stupid, I really will try, the rest of you cope, it's just stupid.'

‘Don't look so depressed, Joseph. It is not a fault of character. It's not irresponsible.'

‘I found a place,' he said, ‘I walked to Richmond and then through the meadows and noticed that the planes don't go over the crest of Richmond Hill itself. So I went up there and wandered around until it was dark. There were no planes directly overhead. I could see them coming from Kew Gardens and see them heading over Richmond Green but they left the Hill alone, it's off the direct flight path, I asked the man. I rang up the airport authorities, they were very helpful.'

By now Joseph had sat down in the usual armchair. Natasha sat opposite him, considered but rejected bringing him a drink or making tea: she did not want to leave him alone. He had been out for hours; Marcelle had been in bed since seven; the autumn night was well under way.

‘I wanted a drink but I went to buy a paper first, on one of the roads leading up to the top of Richmond Hill. There were these Small Ads and while I was waiting I read one, offering a room, in that street, just a few yards down the road, the man said, just beyond the pub. The room to let is in a small terraced house. It looks out into a bit of a yard and a wall. It's pretty grim, really. There's a shilling-meter electric fire, the
carpet and the curtains are orange and grubby, there's a narrow bed, the whole place isn't much bigger than our kitchen but there's a kettle and a table I can work on so I'm going back tomorrow morning with my cheque book, two weeks in advance she wants. She's a rather shy old lady, she looks as if she's been very unhappy, and she didn't trust me an inch but she wants to let it to somebody, I assume, and it might as well be me. The thing is, there are no aeroplanes. I can work there in the day and then come back like I used to do from the BBC when the planes didn't affect me as much. I really am sorry.'

He got up and went into the kitchen, sank a cup of cold water, refilled it and brought it through.

‘I should have phoned,' he said.

‘It's all right.' She held out her cigarettes. He took one and then stood statue still and listened for the planes.

‘Where are they?'

‘They stopped,' said Natasha, ‘soon after you left,' and her sweet giggle which might have been nervous, or tender, or both, shot through Joseph's mind like an electric taunt.

‘They'll be back,' he said.

‘Whatever comes to mind,' said the analyst. ‘You must not feel you have to reach for the most significant things. They will reach for you. We must begin where you are now. We start from the now.'

‘It's difficult,' Natasha said. ‘I don't really know what the Now is.' She concentrated. ‘The more I concentrate the darker it gets. There isn't one level is there, even in the Now? Surely you don't want to know about the journey on the tube or the cup of coffee I had on the way here, I was early, at that place where they have the coffee grinders in the window. Or before that taking Marcelle to the nursery in the Barn Church. And am I thinking about that or just cataloguing it for you? You want to know what deep feelings there are. Now. The feelings are covered with frustration because I cannot feel them. The real feelings. They are just little lumps of autobiography like stones on the bed of a clear river. I can see them through the water but they are dumb. It's
making me angry trying to think what I am feeling, trying to find the feelings which will be of use to me. It's hard to think about me. Marcelle is so lovely in the mornings, she skips to the Barn Church. Joseph used to whistle when he woke up as a boy; Marcelle skips. He whistles. I want her to be like him. But he is troubled now.

‘He is changing and he does not want to change and yet he does want to change but he wants to change in the wrong way. That makes him unhappy. He has mentioned a breakdown (he does not use that word) when he was an adolescent – I don't know how severe it was – he only mentioned it and regretted he had mentioned it but I fear he is not at ease with himself at all, change is not something he wants, not inner change, yet if he does not take up that challenge there will be some sort of deadlock. In some ways there already has been. I am sure he has been tempted sexually and perhaps even yielded but in such a timid and guilty manner that any satisfaction immediately turned into self-flagellation. I think he blames himself for me being here with you. I want him to tell me everything so that I can convince him I do not care. I may be wrong. It is difficult to know the truth about Joseph because he does not know the truth about himself. He is utterly faithful in the way it matters. I do not know him wholly, even though he seemed so open and simple when we met, both of us were blinded by our past when we met . . .' She stopped and waited.

‘What you have told me,' the analyst said, ‘with relation to your daughter is that you love the innocence which reminds you of the child in Joseph whom you love also even though you did not know him then, perhaps
because
you did not know him then. Maybe there is envy of your daughter skipping to school. You did not skip to school and you had no mother to take you to school to watch you skip . . . About Joseph you say things which are very like yourself. I see you in your description of him and I see a projection which may carry a truth about Joseph but tells me about you and your fears of change and of taking up the challenge . . .'

Sometimes Natasha returned from her analyst in a brood of silence, leadened. These were exhausted returns and, occasionally, for she was now an unswering disciple, she was dismayed that so little had been said or uncovered. On this day, though, she came back light-hearted,
walking swiftly through the streets towards Oxford Circus, uplifted at the glimpse she had been given, of the sighting she had been privileged to witness, a sighting of herself, as Marcelle, as Joseph, as someone struggling to be reborn; good, that was good, and she wanted to be with them, at home, just to be with them, and at home.

The room lasted for two weeks. There was a meanness about it which Joe could not live with. He tried. He told himself that he was lucky to have a room of his own in which to write. He told himself it was his sole decision to be there. He heard no planes. He made instant coffee and bought sausage rolls and tomatoes for lunch. There was no phone to interrupt him, no Marcelle to divert him, no Natasha just to be there – and he missed all three. In theory it was ideal.

After two weeks he had had it. He did not admire himself for this surrender. He had attempted to gain some imaginative currency from the miserableness of the place. He had attempted to gain some moral credit by rising above it. He had attempted to write and failed.

It was a rewrite but now that he returned to it outside the Spartan routine he saw gaps and repetitions which needed new work. More surprisingly, the release from the drilled days allowed a surge of fresh thoughts from the original inspiration, fragments and whispers which enabled him to write more directly about the men out there in ‘occupied territory' as he had called it. Yet in that grim back parlour the fragments simply shrivelled up or he did, and without telling Natasha, he left.

He tried other locations. On some lunch breaks he had gone into the nearest pub and taken his pages and tried to get on with it as he had done, as so many did, in cafés in Paris. It did not work. He tried three pubs. None worked. He felt self-conscious in the pub and that made concentration impossible. It was in him or it was in the pub or it was in the customers or all three, but writing in an English pub did not work. English pubs cold-shouldered writing. Writers writing, not just drinking, were made to feel unpubby, doing the wrong thing in the wrong
place. Pubs were severely communal and whether or not you joined in to be so obviously apart was not acceptable.

He looked for cafés. The best was a Tea Room just inside Richmond Park. But even here he was hobbled by the sense of being not only out of place but showing off by being out of place.

Finally, in the capacious gardens which fell down to the river from Richmond Hill he claimed a bench. Behind him, above the gardens, rose the white cliff-high houses on the Hill; below and in front of him the fat lazy wending snake of the Thames, open fields, westward-facing, big skies, big sunsets. He bought a flask and told Natasha it was easier to make his own coffee at home. He wrapped up in his coat and scarf. When the autumn air proved too much he got up and stomped around or made for the river and followed the towpath for a while or went into Richmond Park and looked for the deer. For more than three weeks he was content, absorbed in the work, jealous of his bench, quite pleased to imagine people thinking of him as an oddball, an outsider. He breathed in the benefit of a width of countryside, a prospect of landscape he had not experienced as fully since his long solitary walks back home before university.

The revisions were finally done, cold fingers, cold feet, his outward breath competing with the cigarette smoke in the cold air, a splendid isolation, enough people to distract and study, a few boats on the river, the Constable clouds, the Turner sunsets, the huddle of himself inside the coat, the hard bench, the book getting a life, the secrecy, the deep delicious secrecy, carried home every night in the autumn dark and hugged close.

It was finished in early December, finished in the short days, even some frost, good bedding for
Occupied Territory
, and after it went to Charles the snow came for a few days, Oxford, Reading, Kew Gardens, where he pretended he could now tolerate the planes and with all the children of their friends they enjoyed what proved to be something of a postcard-merry Christmas, their last in Kew Gardens.

In the New Year Saul Elstein rang again.

‘I've been suppressing this for weeks now,' he wrote to their daughter, ‘but it recurs, it's like a good daydream that I want to recur, yet I don't know its value. You might find value in it.

‘I keep seeing Natasha smile. There are so many variations of that smile which so transparently showed the character. Maybe the smile is the expression of the soul. I really can see it now, plain as I write these words to you, my dear Marcelle. It was so many smiles – it could flicker lightly at the edge of her lips, it could be quick and witty, a smile of applause of sudden happiness, it could be wide and held, full of agreement with the world. It could be much more and although it played on the mouth the music was always written in the eyes, such an appetite for the surprise of life. It breaks my heart to see it now.

‘So how did I ever become separated from that smile, that soul? And how did I come to see the smile as mockery and the soul as a torment?'

Saul Elstein's offices were in Mayfair, in the middle of a street of shops trading in extravagant merchandise of impeccable pedigree, the envy of a Renaissance prince. When he walked along the exclusive street to the exclusive dining club Saul felt among the masters, his equals, a place in the sun for which he had fought hard; and he felt secure, no need to look over his shoulder, no police to ask for his papers, still now more than twenty-five years on from Vienna the wariness remained, the vigilance would never die. But this was London, a crystal-light day, films to be made, a young writer to lunch and a satisfying end to the afternoon assured. Saul was a heavy man, but his heels lifted sprightly from the pavements. As always he paused in front of the gun shop. Those who knew said it was here that you could purchase the finest sporting guns in the world. Saul liked to look at them and think, sporting guns, that was the England he loved, a place where the only guns you could buy were sporting guns and so well made.

‘Joseph,' he said as he was escorted to his corner table, so placed that eavesdropping was impossible, ‘punctuality I like. The courtesy of kings!'