Remember Me... (60 page)

‘He swims like an otter,' he said to Isabel as they had their last drink before bed. The doors were still wide open onto the deep Southern warmth of Provence. The sound of the crickets cascaded into the room.

‘She is not happy, Alain.'

‘It will pass.'

‘How can you say that?'

‘The first forty years of marriage are always unhappy.'

‘Alain!'

‘Unhappiness may be our basic condition.'

‘She sees a psychoanalyst.'

‘That makes everyone unhappy.'

‘You are impossible! Joseph, also, sees a psychoanalyst.'

‘That,' said Alain and he paused, his tone changed, ‘is not good.'

‘You see!'

‘Not the two of them.' Alain took a sip of the whisky. ‘What did she tell you?'

‘Nothing serious. What do you expect? For someone of Joseph's type, London is a box of chocolates.'

‘He is young.'

‘I agree. So does Natasha. Basically she feels that he is doing so many new things and fears he may be out of control.'

‘He is having a success,' said Alain. ‘Natasha may find that difficult. History repeats itself. Look at her mother and Louis.'

‘I hadn't considered that,' said Isabel. She took another cigarette and shivered slightly. ‘I hadn't considered that at all.' She drew deeply on the cigarette. ‘Could you close the door, my sweet, soon there will be a breeze coming down from the mountains.'

At La Rotonde itself, the little fort on the peak of the village, Natasha and Joseph sat close and looked at the stars, bright, diamond, beguiling. It was time they meandered back down the hill but neither wanted to leave this Crusaders' rallying point. Joseph's mind was tired: it felt heavy as if he had a severe cold combined with a severe hangover; it felt deadened.

Natasha, the red tip of her cigarette the only point of light in the near darkness, was struggling against the feeling of loss at her absence from her analyst. She had not discussed this with Joseph. He did not take well to discussion of analysis but it would have helped if she knew that he too was suffering from this summer-vacation withdrawal. Her analyst had warned her she would, as on previous occasions, but it was worse this time. Natasha reasoned herself through it. They would be back in London in about a week and merely a week after that they would be back in analysis. One day at a time.

‘Remember when I said we should stay here and live here?'

‘Yes,' said Natasha. It had been circling in her mind too and she smiled at the coincidence: they could still be twin souls.

‘We should have done it,' he said.

‘Look at what you would have missed, Joseph.'

‘We should have done it.'

‘What do you say? “It's never too late.” ‘

‘But it is,' he said.

She could find nothing to say in reply.

The first time it hit him with its full force was on Shepherd's Bush underground station. He had been to see friends at the BBC to discuss the possibility of working on a new arts magazine programme. Lunch in the bar had been noisy, beery, full of gossip with old pals, worlds away from his solitudes. He envied what he might have been had he stayed in the BBC and left the bar cheerful at the prospect that he might in some way rejoin that communal part of his past.

Shepherd's Bush Central Line station was all but deserted on the autumn afternoon. He did not have long to wait for the train.

As he heard it come closer through the tunnel it was as if a massive magnetic force began to pull him towards the edge of the platform, drawing him towards the tracks, overwhelming his resistance, and as the noise grew louder the strength of the pull grew and he found himself swaying, helpless, about to be taken fatally forward by it and then the train broke out of the tunnel and charged towards him. He backed away, he had to push himself back, against nothing but air but it took all his will, all his might to back away until he met the wall and pressed himself against it as the train braked loudly to a stop. The doors opened. He could not move. The doors closed. He waited until the train had gone. Keeping close to the wall he found the exit and took the stairs. The grey light of day made him blink. He would find a bus. He looked around at the strange world which was the same as the world before he had gone underground.

That was how it began.

There was only one course of action and he had to take it. He held onto that. He waited for the bus, saw it draw up, made no move, saw it pull off and then began to walk into Central London.

The city air seemed uniquely oppressive. He stopped at every crossing and looked right, left, right again, remembering the childhood code, and then he would repeat the movements and only when it was completely clear would he cross the road, carefully, like an old man uncertain of his balance. He walked slowly up the gentle gradient to Notting Hill Gate and then the length of the Bayswater Road to Marble Arch. He thought he might go into Hyde Park in the hope that it might begin the healing he had ascribed to the effect of the countryside which he had sought as an adolescent when in similar fear of being unhinged. But the space was too alien. He might find himself isolated. He sheared away from that. Here in the streets there were people everywhere who could be called on.

He passed Tyburn and tried to re-activate his shocked mind by remembering who had been hanged there after having been drawn and quartered and dragged out of the city in the Elizabethan golden age, but he could not call up the energy. He walked on, the gentle gradient now downhill as he went the full length of Oxford Street, until he arrived at Tottenham Court Road tube station. There, without breaking step, he went down, back into the underground. Sam would have told him he had to do this.

It was difficult not to scream.

The platform was much busier than it had been at Shepherd's Bush and he stood pressed to the wall, protected by those in front. The same
complete draining of himself occurred as the sound of the train came out of the black tunnel and despite the protective cordon of travellers he felt compelled once more to hurl himself onto the tracks. It was as if his mind disintegrated. He could feel it inside his skull. But he held on and when the doors opened he prised himself from the wall and went into the lighted carriage. He stood, by the door, rather than take a seat though several were available.

Hampstead underground station is near the crest of the hill and was said to have the deepest lift shaft in London. He remembered that.

The lift was already full and he could have waited for the next one or taken the stairs which is what he most wanted to do. A sense of claustrophobia came out of the lift as pungent as a smell of sulphur. He had not to be a coward. He squeezed himself in.

As the lift clanked its interminable out-of-date way up the shaft and the silent crowd of people pressed it seemed more and more anxiously against each other Joe thought he might suffocate. He seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. The lift went up slowly and Joe feared it might stop. Then what could he do? His mouth snatched small bits of the air. The lift would never arrive at the surface. He felt he might drown in dizziness. It moved so very slowly. He caught someone's eye and immediately looked away. They might see into him. He looked down at his shoes, head bowed, an attitude of prayer.

Never was London pavement more welcome but he did not know where to go. He was afraid of everything and everywhere. The Heath was too dauntingly empty and natural and he might go mad in what at this moment seemed its vastness. A coffee bar or a pub were out of the question: someone might talk to him. He was not fit to go home. He trawled up and down the High Street and Heath Street, walking slowly, making sure always to be near people, hoping he would meet no one he knew.

Above all he had to conceal this condition. Yet the strain of both bearing it and concealing it could crush him into a collapse he knew he must avoid.

Time devoted to writing her novel had become a sanctuary. Her analyst had suggested it was entirely a therapeutic activity. Natasha demurred although unusually she could find no substantial arguments to back up her objection and certainly when she told the analyst in any detail what she had written the subsequent silence had a quality of QED.

‘Hector,' she explained, ‘shares a room with Clément in the asylum. He accepts that Clément is now Father Lointier and adopts him. He becomes a self-appointed protector to Clément and claims him as his best friend. Hector has been an officer in the navy and constantly makes meticulous drawings of ships, scores of them, brilliantly accurate. But he is also obsessed by his wife who, he believes, drove him into the asylum. You said I might read you a passage if I wanted to. I thought that you wanted to more than I did,' Natasha smiled, a smile unnoticed, and opened the notebook. ‘Hector has been talking about how at first he had missed his wife, and Clément – Father Lointier – says,' she read:

‘“You missed your wife, Monsieur Hector, that's sad.”

   ‘“Sad, no! It was pure imbecility. She admitted, once on a visit, that she missed me too. ‘Life isn't the same without you, I miss you, Totor,' she said, and it made me laugh. It isn't often that Coralie made me laugh, but that time, I laughed . . . Naturally, she could have been lying just to impress the nurse, but I think such considerations were well above her by then. I am fairly sure she missed me. No one to bully all day long, no one to persecute, well . . . she missed me and she absolutely hated me, so there we are . . . Nostalgia is just one of those human characteristics, which is not to say that Coralie was human . . . primates have human characteristics too, they peel bananas before eating them, for instance. Anyhow, that woman hated me and she missed me after packing me off to a loony bin, and I missed her although she had driven me out of my mind. Human failure, Father, that's what it is in my opinion. If you hate someone, they should disintegrate out of your consciousness altogether. If you hate a relationship, it should become a blank.”

“‘You shouldn't hate anyone,” Father Lointier said.

‘That's enough,' Natasha said. ‘I chose that passage especially for you!'

The analyst stayed silent for some time and in the silence Natasha thought she might have over-tempted providence.

‘Why did I read that to you?' she said. ‘I don't want to waste our time talking about Hector's babble. Now that I have read it I wish I had not. I wish I had kept it for myself alone. If we discuss it there will be nothing sacred to me alone and I need that. And yet it was I who brought it to you. I don't want you to talk about it. Yet I offered it to you. No one should know anything about it until it is finished and ready. I ask you not to talk about it. I have made a mistake.'

It was only rarely that the analyst permitted herself a question.

‘Why do you think you made a mistake?'

‘I think I used the wrong word,' said Natasha. ‘Not only the wrong word, the wrong explanation. It is a gift. I have brought you a gift, possibly the most precious I could bring you. And you will want to know why I have brought you this gift, or any gift, although you are unlikely to ask another question. Gifts are partly to placate but I do not think I need to placate you. Gifts are gratitude and I am grateful but that is taken care of in the fee you charge. Gifts can be evidence of the richness of the giver and that might be the answer, to show you that whatever I bring you there is more that is just mine, beyond this place, beyond us.' She paused. ‘I do not think any of those are right in this case,' she said. ‘I think this gift was to cheer you up, to answer the sadness in your voice, the burdens of others you carry. It is my way to help you.'

Just as the analyst could not have observed Natasha's smile earlier, so Natasha could not observe the expression near to tears on the face of the analyst. She took her time.

‘What you have said together with what you read to me are very important, Natasha.'

Natasha almost sat up and looked around. This was the first time the analyst had used her name.

‘I will respect what you say about your novel. But you have told me that you believe I need the help of a gift from you. An important line has been crossed here. In essence, we will talk about this further in the next session, in essence you are becoming the analyst. This is a
critical stage. You are now employing what you have learned in an apparently simple but a profound way in yourself but showing me directly how strong you are. This is a moment of turning. We have to be careful here. This is new and extremely fragile . . . I thank you for your gift . . .'

‘I spoke to the analyst about what had happened to me,' Joe told Marcelle, ‘but no one else. I felt that Natasha was burdened enough. More likely I was embarrassed, most likely ashamed of it. In some ways I still am, more than thirty years on.

‘Even to the analyst it was difficult to explain because the attacks quickly moved from being a series of incidents to become the prevailing condition of my mind. The specific and frightening incidents continued to happen: on the underground, or looking out of a window high up in a building, or sometimes walking along a traffic-heavy street, this tidal pull towards self-destruction. Each time it had to be withstood and battled through. Each time left me dizzy and weakened.

‘But the spread of it, the way it infected all that I thought and did every minute was even harder to endure. It was as if whatever it was that held and contained the brain and protected it even against the skull had wept away.

‘It would take another book, Marcelle, so let it rest on these points. The fear that I had forgotten how to breathe became more intense, especially at night. I would lie awake and force myself to breathe in and breathe out but that is not the whole picture, for the truth is that even when I forced myself there were times when nothing happened until a gasp of air would be inhaled or ejected by whatever that deeply planted biology within us is that will hold onto life until there is no hope at all.