Remember Me... (61 page)

‘So there must have been some hope. It did not feel like it, for time and again, when I was in a script conference or discussing the new television series or in a restaurant with a few friends or in a theatre I would be aware most of all of this terror clawing at me, pulling me into its belly, this threat of darkness, closing around my mind. What I said and did on those occasions was so distant from what I was, I truly don't
know how I endured it. Whatever else I was doing, my fullest effort was to survive. At any moment, I felt I could crack up.

‘Then there was another dimension. Time became so stretched, so unbearably extended. Five minutes could last an hour. This attack at night crawled like a snail. A night could take a month to pass by.

‘As I remember, the analyst talked a lot about total control and losing control: I'm sure he said more than that but I find it difficult to remember. It is as if the struggle to conceal this condition from everyone but him and to continue though with far less energy to do the work I did was so difficult that it wiped out most of the resources of memory. More possibly, like any other fierce pain, once surmounted, it fades so that we do not carry anything like the full weight of it even in recollection. We need to be lightened and freed to move on.

‘It went on at its most intense for months. Every day and most of the night. Years later when I was talking about this to James, who by then had become a psychotherapist, he said he thought that both of us, Natasha and I, around that time were in or verged closely on a state of what he called “clinical depression”.'

Flailing about him as he struggled to hold Natasha, Marcelle and himself together, Joe decided to work Natasha's first novel into a film script. No one had commissioned it and he did not tell her about it in case he failed to complete it.
The Glory of Elizabeth
was in production and Joe was on standby to rush to the location and adjust the lines, but there was ample free time. His wish to start a new novel was strong but so far he had made pages of notes without arriving anywhere near a point of departure. His state of mind was too wounded and depleted to allow him to reach down into the wells from which the fiction might be drawn. But he had to work. Indeed the greater the fears and pain the more urgently he needed the structure and diversion of work however he felt when it came to do it.
The Unquiet Heart
was the perfect project and he still wanted to please and to impress Natasha.

They lay in bed trying to sleep. The windows were open although the night was not very warm and the noisiest hour in the street tended to be this, the post-pub run. But Natasha insisted the windows stayed open – ‘This is where you moved and this is what you must live with,' she said, again.

Natasha lay on her back finding some comfort. The pain in her lower spine had not diminished and on some days she limped.

The comparative ease of her body seemed to release a flutter of thoughts, like a flock of rooks suddenly rising from a tree and spreading into the air. Her analyst had decided to take a longer summer holiday and broken the treatment earlier in the week. Natasha was already missing her and, as in much else, envied the better luck of Joseph whose analyst stuck to the old rules of vacation. She tried not to feel this longer break as a slight deliberately aimed at her and knew such a conclusion was foolish and yet she felt her resentment held some truth.

She tried to switch to thoughts on her novel. It would not be difficult to engineer the happy ending she wanted with Clément returning to the farm restored to his old self. Hector, she thought, could be her instrument in this. She must find something startling for him to do, something that would jolt Clément out of this adopted personality. He did not deserve an unhappy ending, he was too weak. Only the strong should suffer on their own account in fiction, she thought, tragedy was wasted on the frail.

These two lines of thought were not difficult to pursue. What most fascinated her were the little flashes of light – illuminations of memory or traces of insight, elusive, puzzling, each one a will-o'-the-wisp; a sheaf of lavender, the black swans in full sail, her father laughing with Isabel; but most of them so fleeting they did not even bring an image with them, mere pulses between the stars she could recognise, messages from the dark, infinitely small particles of energy which she longed to grasp and felt that once known could complete the puzzle of herself. Out of the dark, in the uneasy bedroom, Natasha said:

‘How can psychoanalysis claim to know how the mind works?' She paused to make sure she had caught Joseph's attention. ‘How can this one method with its few rules and systems based on so little logical
evidence be so arrogant as to demand we accept that it has the key to life?'

‘But we do accept it,' said Joseph, puzzled at her switch to arguments he had used against her zealotry. ‘For the time being anyway, we both accept it.'

‘Proust has a far better idea of how the mind works. Or the neuroscientists my father was telling us about.'

‘Why are you suddenly so angry about psychoanalysis?'

‘Why do you have to interpret an objection as anger?'

‘You are putting your life in its hands.'

‘That does not mean,' said Natasha, ‘that I cannot criticise it.'

Joseph laughed gently and said no more. The laughter made them feel a little closer to each other, a condition becoming more rare. He wanted to tell her about the film script of her novel but held back. He wanted to talk on. ‘When I was in Oxford Julia reminded me of the two paintings you did, for that exhibition, just after we met, the two you wouldn't sell.' He reached out for her hand.

‘The two best ones,' she said.

‘Yes. She still has them. Why didn't we ever pick them up?'

‘I like to think of them there,' said Natasha. ‘In that house. Like us. Like your head.'

‘I looked at them,' he said. ‘And I think that they've changed places.' Natasha waited.

‘The Icarus figure, sort of based on me, was also, I thought, supposed to be a warning to me. The other figure, based on you, being clawed into the depths was somehow your fears of the past. But it isn't like that any more.' He felt the closeness of her attention. ‘You are Icarus, you are the one always going for the truth, flying as high as you can, taking risks with yourself. While I feel I'm being clawed down by my past, whatever parts of it I can produce in the analysis.'

‘I disagree totally,' said Natasha. ‘They are still as they were and they are also only paintings, not biographies.'

‘But surely the meaning of a painting can change as circumstances change?'

‘Not those paintings.'

‘. . . it was just a thought.'

‘Before I die,' said Natasha, ‘I would like to know what thought is.'

The conversation was over.

Miraculously soon, it seemed to Joseph, Natasha's breathing became deep and even. He felt alone. His throat began to choke dryly but he did not want to cough and wake her up. He swallowed, but in doing that the muscles inside his throat seemed to seize up. He opened his mouth and told himself to catch the air, out of the darkness, it was in the darkness, how could this invisible darkness make him live? His head prickled with multiple stabs of anxiety . . . He looked at his watch. Still only ten minutes to twelve. A night could take so long and whenever he woke there was still far to go.

When at last the morning came for her to go back to her analyst, Natasha realised how hard it had been to hold out. The melting together of so many sensations, provoked by this summer separation, had become a lumpen mass of anger, grief, resentment, dismay, disappointment, fear, fear above all, and it grew inside her, a weight, a ravenous feeder on energy, something that had to be removed before it took the life out of her.

She was early. She had taken care with her appearance. She was excited. The large uncared-for hall and the stairs covered with a faded navy blue carpet were home. She ascended to the first floor, slowly, to squeeze every ounce of pleasure from this imminent reunion. There was so much she wanted to say, so much, she had realised on her journey into the city, that she had achieved alone in that tormenting period apart. She had survived it, that was the main thing. And although she carried this burden, it would be dissolved when they talked. There was even a sense, as she took the curve in the grand staircase in what had once been a wealthy and fashionable town house, that this would be the beginning of the end, that her course was nearly run, that one more year would see her through and free and whole and with all her life in her hands at last.

The notice was pinned to the waiting-room door with a brass tack. In clear neat handwriting it read, ‘Patients are asked to call . . .' followed by a number.

Natasha went down the stairs and onto the mid-morning early September London streets even relishing this delay. She was utterly calm, still buoyant in the mood of anticipated release. It was a dull
morning but the clouds were high and still and the light grey colour suited these formal streets, she thought, these terraces of riches so placid, an insulated island at the heart of the seething city. She loved too the quietness of the people as they walked or more often strolled with a purpose but with no unsettling urgency. She too strolled until finally she discovered a phone box and entered its small and isolated little space with keen curiosity.

When she came out she was breathing deeply and with difficulty. She leaned against the wall and thought on how to pull herself together. There was a rose garden in Regent's Park not far from the northern end of Harley Street. With slow steps, almost faltering, she made for it. When she got there she found a bench, sat down with deep weariness, took out a cigarette and would have appeared to any onlooker to be looking calmly, this distinguished woman, and rather curiously at the rose bushes on which so recently so many flowers had bloomed.

Tim insisted that Joe give him lunch at the Garrick Club. One of Joe's reservations lay in the existence of a strictly implemented club rule that no business be done on club premises. Tim was meeting him for business, business which had been initiated by Joe. Joe was nervous, not helped when Tim arrived without a tie and expressed over-loud thanks to the porter who produced three rather shrivelled specimens, one of which Tim declared to be ‘superb'.

They walked up the wide staircase to the bar and Tim insisted that Joe become guide and curator. He stopped in front of so many of the paintings that Joe feared they might arrive at the bar too late. The painting of ‘Master Betty' intrigued him most especially when Joe explained, he hoped accurately, that this boy actor had been such a prodigy at the end of the eighteenth century that both Houses of Parliament had adjourned to allow the members to attend a performance. ‘What a movie!' said Tim, and then insisted on looking at the cabinet of curios.

The bar was jostling full and friendly as always. Joe had entered the club not only at the bottom of the ladder but outside the pale. Now he
went in with sufficient confidence and the anticipation of courteous acquaintanceship from the fleet of Garrick lunchtime regulars. Tim ordered champagne because he had heard it was served in cool silver tankards. They were soon in conversation with a publisher and an actor whom Tim knew better than Joe did, as was the case with several of those they met. They talked the news of the day. Unconsciously, perhaps, the tradition of the original coffee house, which had begat this and other clubs like it two centuries before, was still carried on.

In the grand dining room, the Coffee Room, surrounded by Zoffany's portrayals of famous actors in famous plays of his day, they were taken to a side table. Down the middle of the room was the Long Table, glistening with polish like all the others, but reserved for members whose duty, Joe told a questioning Tim, was to talk to whoever they sat next to.

‘You can't smoke until two o'clock,' said Joe as they sat down and, still in the character of curator, ‘there has to be no sign of any business being done. No papers, nothing like that.'

‘So the script stays on the deck.'

‘Yes.'

‘Who am I,' said Tim, ‘to question the customs of centuries? But we can still talk turkey?'

‘Yes,' Joe said. ‘Hypocrisy is acceptable.'

‘I like that! More like the old you. You've been a bit down lately.'

There was always now a gallop of impatience in Joe's head these days when he was in company. He wanted it to be over. But he held on. It had been fine so far – the familiarity and the unthreatening distractions of the club, the precise knowledge of what he could do in the next couple of hours and the known quantity of Tim had helped him to keep the threats at bay. To be told that he looked ‘a bit down' threw him. No one must know.

‘I'm fine,' he said.

‘Probably not enough sex,' said Tim, newly hitched after his divorce. But Joe would not play. ‘Sex sorts you out like nothing on earth. I've always thought you needed more of it. Being you. As I know you, that is. I'll start,' he said to one of the Garrick's uniformed waiters, Jenkins, who stood unsmiling, ‘with your Morecombe Bay shrimps followed by your steak and kidney pie, all the trimmings.'

‘Smoked eel please,' said Joe, ‘and calf's liver. Thank you.'

‘The house red will do me,' said Tim.

‘A carafe of the club claret, sir?' Jenkins looked at Joe who nodded.

‘Isn't that the Foreign Secretary over there?'

Guardedly, Joe looked.

‘He's with that journalist, what's his name, from
The Times
, what's his name? Corridors of power, Joe, this is where it all happens.'

Does it? Joe did not want to engage. Did it?

Already there was the pull which drew him from even such amiable banter. He needed solitude to see this attack through, if indeed he ever could get through it. Yet he also needed company. Every path bifurcated before him.