Remember Me... (64 page)

‘Dearest Joseph. You must face your anger with me without guilt. I know that once we have come through this all will be well and I will follow you to the ends of the earth . . .'

‘My dearest Natasha. I am not angry with you. I am angry. If I'm angry with anybody it's me for making so many mistakes. Why do you always tell me what I am? And I don't want to go to the ends of the earth! Here will do . . .'

‘Dearest Joseph. There was some humour there which is hopeful. All I want is for you to disentangle yourself from these complications of your past and the undigested pressures of the last few years. I like it that you are learning poetry by heart. I'm sure that's good but even with that you blame yourself because your “target” of one new poem a day has not been met! You must let life flow through you. A real life is like a river. If we interfere too much it becomes a canal . . .'

‘My dearest Natasha. I'm sorry I was so rude last night. Maybe I should go away for a while until all this stuff pours out of me but not all over you. But sometimes I fear that we are so far apart and maybe I shout and curse to draw attention and to call you back. I don't know. I have no idea about anything at all, Natasha. But I will try not to force myself to learn one new poem every one or two or even three days and I will, I promise, just be a river! Yet when I close the book and go through the poem and know that I have got it by heart I feel like someone who has been very ill and now takes a few unassisted steps. Of course I exaggerate . . .'

‘Dearest Joseph. It is to yourself that you are being hateful although I feel battered also. Are you trying to goad me or have I goaded you? Perhaps we should go north, to the countryside, and begin again . . .'

Joe had suggested this to his analyst. Why don't I just go back to Cumberland, he had said, to the village we stayed in? We could buy a cottage outright. Village life could suit all of us. There's a bit in the bank. We could write, we could walk, in the Lake District we could get away from all the temptations and the greed.

The suggestion had been left hanging in the air and Joe had concluded that it was no more than an attempt to break loose from the analysis which would be cowardly, a retreat, a failure under fire in London and that too could not be lived with.

‘My dearest Natasha. Maybe one day we will start again, in France, in Cumberland, somewhere free of this plague which poisons what should be, shouldn't it, a life of good fortune . . . or is our good fortune our bad luck?'

They wrote, sometimes two or three times a day, for dear life.

He had never drunk so much in a single evening and yet even when they got back home and he sprawled in the chair with a final whisky and a cigar, he felt not only calm but sufficiently clear-headed.

‘You look beautiful,' he said.

Natasha smiled. He had insisted that he buy her a new dress for the Gala Preview of
The Glory of Elizabeth
and she had gone for a simple classic line, had a hairdresser put up her hair, applied a little make-up and turned herself into –

‘Class,' said Joseph, heavily.

In his hired dinner jacket, velvet bow tie now loosed, a flop of hair on his forehead, the white silk handkerchief ballooning out of his breast pocket, whisky in one hand, cigar in the other, he was a pretender, he knew that, uneasily but arrogantly out of his class.

‘You look like a debauched young aristocrat,' she said, to tease him and to please him, and she was smack on the mark. He smiled uneasily, but also smugly. ‘One of those young men who sow their wild oats but, what is it? Buckle down in the end. Buckle down.'

‘Buckle down . . . you know . . . this is the best bit. This – talk. Now. This – is – the – best – bit.'

‘You seemed to be enjoying all of it.'

‘You see? You don't know me any more . . . It wasn't that I hated it. I didn't hate it. But I kept thinking I would explode like that puffed-up toad or shout obscenities especially when we were in the line and we all had to shake hands with Princess Margaret. Or when it started I thought I might be carried kicking and screaming out of the cinema – to be trapped in the middle of the row! – do you know that at every moment during the film, at every single moment, all I was thinking,
all
, was, how do I stop myself from going berserk? Calling up the poems.
Isn't that stupid? And sad? But it's true. Now is peace. But a couple of hours ago it was the worst ever. What's the analysis been for? My head just seems to crumble and bleed inside.'

‘But you don't show it,' said Natasha, seeing his need for calm. ‘Doesn't that make you feel good about yourself?'

He laughed. She was his analyst now. Maybe they were safe in those roles. He felt a sudden lift of confidence.

‘What did Saul tell me you said to him? You'd liked the film but it wasn't as good as my novels. And what did he say?'

‘He said, “You want him back, Natasha, all French women want their man under their control.”'

‘And you said?'

‘I said, “That is just another fantasy which serves the infinite male ego.”'

‘That's right. That's what he said. “The infinite male ego.” He liked that.'

‘I like Saul. I think I understand Saul.' I think, she did not add, I may understand him a little better than you do; your hero worship and over-eagerness to please rob you of insight.

‘Still, you shouldn't have said it. And you definitely shouldn't have told Tim's new lady that she was the spitting image of his wife.'

‘She is.'

‘There are things best left unsaid.'

‘Not to Tim.'

‘He likes you.'

‘No he doesn't. Nor do I want him to.'

‘Cheers,' said Joseph and felt the whisky sweet on the tongue. ‘Then the party after the film!' he said. ‘That was a bit better because I could move around.'

‘I didn't,' said Natasha.

‘I saw you sitting talking to that – who is he?'

She mentioned the name of a film critic.

‘What did he think of it?'

‘He liked it.'

‘But will he write that?'

‘I didn't ask.'

‘What did you talk about?'

‘Paris, mostly, he's a Francophile.'

‘You should've moved around.'

‘Why?'

‘That's what you do at parties like that. You move around. Was he interesting?' Why was this happening? Why had she not responded to his confession of an attack of madness?

‘Yes.'

‘So
you
were all right, then.'

‘Oh, Joseph!'

‘Oh, Joseph.'

‘What can we do to be happy again?' she asked and waited for an answer.

Joseph finished the whisky, made the decision not to have another and felt a welling of tears. He stubbed out the cigar.

‘I don't know, Natasha. I wish I did. I really wish I did.'

‘The film was good,' she said. ‘The dialogue was very good. I told that to Saul.'

‘Did you? Did you really? Anyway it's the acting that makes films. Not directors. I used to think that. Certainly not writers. The dialogue's . . . I don't know. A pastiche at best.' Suddenly he looked exhausted, she thought, too tired for the night, too tired for his years and for his life.

‘You think actors are in control because you can't bear not being in control. That's why you are really a novelist. Novelists can be rulers. But, Joseph, why don't you believe me? You are too strange. When we went to the theatre last week you were angry with me and later you told me it was because of a bad review in the
TLS
which I had not even read. What is it?'

‘I don't know,' he said. ‘I wish I did . . . the actors make it. They always do. I used to believe in auteurs when we met.'

‘You look like an actor,' she said, ‘in that dinner jacket.'

‘I wanted to be an actor once. Good place to hide.'

We are beginning to talk as we used to, she thought. Her yearning for him grew so strong she wondered that he could not feel the force of it across the silent sidelit room: but he was asleep.

For at least an hour Natasha sat and watched over him. She smoked. She scarcely took her eyes off him. She had to learn what had become of him and what he had become. He had become too important to her, she thought, and she must tread very cautiously not to scare him off. He was only a few feet away and yet miles apart from her. The task now was to reel him in. The task now was to meet again. Whatever the bruises she loved him. Whatever his faults and the casual woundings she saw her life in him. She examined him minutely and called up that which had been good between them, summoned up the successes of their past, felt less lonely than she had done for some time in this vigil, postponing and postponing again the time when she must wake him up.

‘No worst, there is none.' He had read the poem to her and it was this phrase that looped in her mind. No worst? What if that were true?

‘Much later,' he wrote to Marcelle, ‘Natasha's Kew friends were to say that she had told them that she had begun to like Hampstead. As well as joining up again with James and Howard we met Oliver, who lived in the next street, a friend from Oxford, a man with whom I had been on the university tour of
The Tempest
in Germany. He and his wife had a daughter the same age as Marcelle – that was sufficient for a reunion. Oliver's wife was Polish, a lecturer in East European Studies; he himself had gone into the Treasury. He was a tenor in the Parish Church choir, a trustee of the library. The four of us, or rather the six of us, could have made a unit, a nucleus, a beginning, the first building block, and Oliver, who had been born in Hampstead, was happy to take us into his relaxed, welcoming society.

‘The friends in Kew said that although Natasha could have a look of sadness, which was not new, she seemed after two or three months to be reconciled, ready to get to grips with a new life though pleased to keep contact with the old. They knew no more than I what had happened to her analyst. She had shouldered that alone. My own analyst, when he finally learned the truth, said it was “the worst thing an analyst can possibly do to a patient”. Yet Natasha found the strength to keep that to herself, which must have eaten away at her. The question recurs for ever. Why did she not let somebody know?

‘As for me, Marcelle, I have stressed the drunken oaf and he was certainly one of me. Another was the shivering isolated wretch trying to keep sane through the poetry of others. Another was the man drowning in a lost embrace. But work got done, not with the effectiveness of before, but it got done, and life went on, from the getting up in the
morning to the lying down at night, with Natasha beside me, often planets apart as we tried to rest in that bed, our lives on separate tracks and yet still side by side, still able to reach out and touch each other.'

‘Come along,' said Peter, ‘you might get some material.'

‘I've been out of things for a while now.'

‘It's exciting!' Peter Mills summoned his skills of persuasion, outstanding at Oxford when he had won the presidency of the Union, honed with the BBC where he edited a political programme, now finely tuned as he searched for a constituency in which he could stand as a potential Labour MP. But Joe was easily persuaded. He was wax to Peter's seal of purpose. It was as if his character was empty, waited to be animated. And this invitation promised protective company and a chance to slip out of the perpetual, exhausting, unmanly obsession with himself.

They had met outside Bush House where Joe had been recording the book programme on which he appeared intermittently, whilst Peter was revisiting his old department in which he had worked at the same time as Joe.

‘Happy days,' said Peter as they walked quickly down the Strand towards Whitehall. Joe nodded. Peter was happy days. They had met several times since he had left the BBC, he had even at one stage thought he might buy a cottage near Peter's tenanted family cottage in Derbyshire, so positive and untroubling and outwardly beamed was Peter's company, so invigoratingly one hundred per cent his engagement with the times he lived in, so infectious his twinkle-eyed enthusiasm, even on this short walk as he all but skipped along, as open to the big wide world as Joe over the past years had made himself all but closed to it.

‘We're off to tame the running dogs of capitalism,' Peter said, and giggled, with his rather goblin smile, which warmly split a long face made severe by the large nose. ‘We're trying to set up a Royal Commission to look into the future responsibilities of television and, you watch! We'll do it!'

By the time they arrived at the House of Commons, Joe felt he had begun to shed one or two of his self-absorbed skins. The meeting was to start at seven o'clock and Big Ben began the strokes. Peter always cut it fine. Life had to be squeezed dry.

‘They've given us one of the big committee rooms,' he said as they trotted through the St Stephen's entrance and along to the Central Lobby where they were directed to the broad stone staircase.

As they ran up the stairs, two at a time, Peter now muttering, ‘These meetings always start late, TV people are never punctual, they always start late,' Joe wanted to look around this palace of legislation, this mother of parliaments, this forum of democracy and do as Peter had invited him to do, take notes or at least let something sink in. But they were now in full gallop and the notes would have to wait.

The committee room was crowded with people of Joe's generation and he felt enlivened to be among them. He felt as if he had walked into a lighted room after too long in the twilight. This was where his lot lived out serious, energetic, extrovert lives, far from the brooding, self-consuming inwardness of his own existence which seemed by contrast misguided, out of touch. There was a buzz, there was a feeling of important activity, there was a murmur of appreciation for Peter.