Remember Me... (52 page)

He took Joseph's right hand inside both his, hugged it warmly and the big crinkled tanned heavy face emitted the smile which had charmed stars. Joe felt anointed. He ignored the large yellow teeth.

‘You look a little tired,' Saul said. ‘Where do you go in the winter?'

Without missing a beat, Saul realised that the question had no meaning for the young man and added, ‘Mid-winter is the only time you have to have a break. Some prefer St Moritz, others the Bahamas. We go for the sun. You and your wife must join us on the boat. She made a hit with Sophie. Those French women like to stick together.'

The waiter arrived and hovered.

‘For me the scallops and then the carpaccio as a main dish. Joseph?'

There had been time to make his selection.

‘Avocado and prawns and a steak, medium, please.'

‘We'll have a little wine.'

The waiter nodded, took the menus, bowed and went, leaving a pause while Saul surveyed the room, found acquaintances and inclined his head, a little smile. Then he concentrated on his guest, a concentration which Joe found rather hard to bear. It had something of the Inquisition about it, he thought; he was on trial. Saul recognised the nervousness and liked it. Nervousness was an indication of need, he thought, and ambition and modesty: he liked all three.

‘How much do you know about David? King David.'

‘David and Goliath?'

‘That David.'

Saul waited.

‘Well. Goliath of course and the sling and the pebbles from the river.' Joe remembered the stone fights he had had across the River Wiza in the Show Fields in Wigton, the boy gangs armed with pebbles sometimes collected by the girls, the day he had been struck so near his left eye he had nearly lost it and the bleeding which, it seemed, would never stop. David and his sling had been real then.

‘Then there's King Saul,' Joe grinned, ‘sorry about that, who wanted to murder him.'

‘Saul was no good,' the great producer beamed. ‘He had to go. Have no sympathy for Saul!'

‘The psalms.' He must have sung most of the psalms of David in the church choir over those ten years.

‘Wonderful psalms,' said Saul, gravely. ‘From about 1000
BC.
Your calendar.' The red wine came, decanted. The waiter poured a sip and Saul first put his nose deep into the glass, then sipped, then gave the most minimal of nods. ‘The tragedy is we have lost the music.'

A thousand years
BC,
Joe thought, he had never thought of it as baldly as that, psalms composed in the passion and heat of Judaea still sung reverently in the cool of Anglican North Britain three thousand years later.

‘Bathsheba?' Joe volunteered.

‘Adultery,' said Saul. ‘This is a problem. Are movie audiences ready for a hero who commits adultery?'

‘He murdered her husband, didn't he?'

‘Not proven. But her husband was killed, conveniently for David, this has to be admitted. I don't find that such a problem. Two jealous men, a beautiful woman, what the French call “
crime passionel”
. That can be worked on.'

Was this the reason for the meeting? The first course came and while the dishes were placed on the table with some ceremony, Joe took flight to Israel. Now it seemed a possibility that Saul might make him an offer which would take him there, he could think of nowhere he would more like to go. It would be like America, another adopted country. Just the places: Jerusalem, Jericho, Judaea, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Gethsemane, Galilee, and before that the wars of the Kings and the Chronicles. Israel would be his Old Testament as New York had been the New. He could scarcely contain the rocketing of anticipation.

‘I have hired a young Israeli writer,' said Saul, and named him. Joe had to shake his head in non-recognition of the name. He bent over his avocado. ‘He fought on the Golan Heights,' said Saul, with pride, as if the young man were his son. ‘What a victory, eh, Joseph? These boys will take over the world! At last the Jews are soldiers again – like David.'

He lifted his glass and indicated that Joe should do the same and they made a silent toast. He passed across the table the script he had brought with him.

‘I want you to read this,' he said. ‘Tell me what you could do with it.' Joe looked at the title.
The Virgin Queen.

‘Are you stuck with that title?'

Saul shook his head and then raised his hand almost imperceptibly and from across the room a waiter began to propel himself to be of service.

‘Is the movie audience ready for a virgin as a heroine?' said Joe, regrouping.

‘We give them nothing else.'

‘But one who died a virgin?' Joe asked.

‘That's the problem,' said Saul. ‘It's always the ending.' He smiled as the waiter bent to receive the whispered instruction to be carried to a far table. ‘With you, Joseph, I have problems with the ending.'

‘She did have suitors,' said Joe, wanting to help, wanting to work.

‘It's a fine line,' said Saul. ‘This feminism. It's strong in the States now. Maybe she would be an icon. Maybe better to reject all suitors. Die a virgin rather. And these men – they were weak.'

‘I think her childhood's the most interesting part,' said Joe. ‘She must have been terrified most of the time. And then she was so well taught, she spoke so many languages, she wrote poetry, she was probably the best-educated monarch we have had.'

‘“We”,' Saul smiled. ‘I like “we”. How do you know this?'

‘University.'

‘Oxford University,' said Saul, showing all the teeth.
‘Oxford.
Don't be embarrassed. Oxford University got you a job with Saul Elstein in the movie business.' He was delighted with this. ‘Why are you all growing your hair so long?'

Joe grimaced, shook his head, felt his hair flop and took one of Saul's minimal gestures as permission not to reply. He held up the script in both hands.

‘I'll read it and make notes and get back to you on Monday.'

‘Don't rush. This could be a big project. Dream a little, Joseph, think of this woman surrounded by men she could not trust and enemies at home and abroad who want to assassinate her. And she beat them all! That is a woman, Joseph, and an English woman. It is the Kremlin. It is the White House. How is the steak . . . ?'

The right move, Saul thought, as he strolled back down the street.
Jude the Obscure
had shown promise, Joseph's novel was well spoken of, the
script needed a fresh eye and he would not be expensive. It was the Young today who carried the guns, Saul thought, and stepped out a little.

He had asked again for Fräulein Edelman. She was twenty-three and her techniques were intriguing. His driver should have picked her up from the Paris plane about an hour and a half ago. She would already be in the private suite he kept next to his office.
The Virgin Queen
was not a good title.

Come on, he said to himself, after writing of Saul's peccadillo-infidelity habit. This cannot be a cover-up. This is not a Catholic confession, this is not revelation seeking absolution, but there has to be truth in the story and in the structure of Natasha's progress and there is an omission which could be of little account or it could be crucial.

According to Natasha infidelity was common among the dons in Oxford, taken for granted among the bourgeoisie in France, and not all that important, a sideshow, a minor digression, an unfortunate but assimilable fact of life, non-fatal, an admission that passing sex need not disrupt lasting love. That is what she said, although now, Joe thought, did she say it only to help me?

For Joe it was the descent into a pact with guilt which undermined him and could choke him with a sense of failure which tended to be released as anger at home. Innocence overthrown. It proved him weak, stained the undeniable love he had for Natasha and tied him in a knot; he knew it was of no importance and yet it could become the compulsive slaking of lust. It was greed or need or both and shame on both. It could be abandoned and replaced by their settled physical and domestic intimacy, but then it erupted again, needed like a fix. In no way was it ‘worth it'. In no way did he see it threatening a marriage or a family. It could seem harmless as the woman, too, was secure in a marriage and of no mind to leave or damage her own arrangement through these occasional afternoon encounters.

But it let in deceit.

The mistake would be to leave this out of the story, especially as it happened before Natasha went into analysis and it has to be possible
that the taint and web of lies, the disloyal tangle of feelings, the foreign element it brought to their marriage, the avoided look, the unanswered question, the fear of discovery, played a part, perhaps a key part, in her decision to go into analysis. Even though he would rush back to her after those occasions with his love for her heightened, beset by the fear he had damaged them irreparably and that she would leave him. Even though his affair ended a few weeks after she had entered into analysis.

It will not help to make it simple by constant breast-beating. Natasha sought analysis for her own reasons. She was always her own woman, was she not? A marital fracture may have triggered it but analysis and Natasha were like the
Titanic
and the iceberg. The tragedy can be seen as character, as destiny. Natasha needed to explore her past, and for that she wanted help, he thought, in desperate self-defence. No one could predict that the course of action she embarked on would lead to destruction. Yet why the betrayal, Joe asked himself, helplessly it seemed, when I had so much and valued what I had?

‘You talk about him more and more,' said the analyst. ‘You tell me you want him to be free because he must grow. But you fear what he will do when he is free.'

‘I don't fear anything for Joseph,' said Natasha. ‘I know how . . . I want him to understand he can change and make mistakes and he does not have to keep hold of his past and all its rigid values all the time. He refuses to grow away from it. After a while that has become very bad for him and for me also. He always wants to appear to me as a “good” man. He thinks that to admit being bad would rupture our world. Not to admit it could do that. I want to shake him and say, “Tell me everything, Joseph, don't be afraid, you can't be what you might become if you are afraid. I am not afraid of truth – not of my truth, not of your truth either” . . .'

The analyst made a note. She made very spare notes – three or four words – and expanded on them later. ‘Herself through J,' she wrote. ‘Again.'

‘His mother told me that even when he went to university his first letters were so homesick that she wanted to write and tell him to come home. Her husband, Sam, persuaded her not to write.'

‘I have to stop you there.'

‘It won't take long.'

‘I'm sorry.'

Natasha felt a weight on her. She had been about to shift something heavy from her mind and now she was left with it, a weight, too heavy to be held, a weight, straining until the next time so that she could continue . . .

‘Until Friday, then,' the analyst said.

‘Yes.' Natasha levered herself slowly from the couch and walked towards the door. She turned. ‘Sometimes,' she said, ‘I do not think this method works. It is too crude.'

‘In ten minutes I have another patient,' said the analyst.

Natasha took up the novel she had abandoned before writing
The Unquiet Heart.
Her analysis called on resources kin to those recruited for fiction. To go back and along a trodden way enabled her to work and she needed that. The analysis threatened to become a sole passion. She read around the subject of psychoanalysis and embraced its revelations as warmly as any other believer in their faith. Her mind was being fed by an oracle, her fears explained, her hopes strengthened. These were the words, the laws and the prophecies which would make her whole.

Yet Natasha realised the danger that too fierce an embrace with her old self could drown both old and new. Work, as she had observed in Joseph, could be a refuge. She needed it. The analysis increasingly left her feeling out of control which, the analyst explained, was good, was essential. It was also frightening because not only was she losing control of herself faced by this new army of memories, half-memories, possibly false memories, rediscovered pain, shards from incidents agonisingly just on the edge of recovery, she was also, remorselessly it seemed, handing over control of herself to her analyst.

She was becoming dependent and since she so longed to find light in that darkness within her she hurled onto this listening woman all that she was, had been, wanted to be. Good, said the analyst, this is not weakness though you feel weak, this is strong although you will only know that later. I will carry you now, soon you are about to enter into the underworld, in which you will stay for who knows how long, but I will be there, guiding you, and the measure of the re-emergence is found in the completeness of your surrender: Natasha believed this.

But she could control the novel, and it was like coming up for air. The people on the page were hers, she was in charge. When she sat down with them and went into their world, her own receded: there were stretches of time when she dropped into this imagined world and she found deep refreshment there.

She had written and corrected about a half of it in Finchley when François had lived with them. The rest was only sketched out. François's death had taken her elsewhere in her work. On reading the as yet untitled earlier book she found that it still had life in it and if she blew gently at first on the embers they could be stirred to flame.

The first half was located in Provence, in an area around La Rotonde which she chose not to name. To do that, she thought, would have tempted her to be more autobiographical than she wished to be. Above all, she sought in the novel for distance from her past. It was set in 1944 and in that first part described the life of a family, the Palmets, in which there were two brothers, Aimé and Clément, one of whom, Aimé, was in the Resistance, the other, Clément, a simpleton, one who could have been described as a Holy Fool.