Remember Me... (69 page)

‘Yes . . .' What was stopping him doing it now?

‘But, Natasha, I'm sorry, it's stupid, the planes, it's impossible. I'm sorry.'

‘Well, until we are together again it will be somewhere for Marcelle and me to live. It would be so nice to have a home and not be with friends or in that flat with others. I know it is a lot of money.'

‘I can manage. I'll remortgage Hampstead. Anyway, half of Hampstead is yours.'

‘Could you . . .' and there entered into her tone and her expression a desperation and an embarrassment which Joseph had never seen or heard before, ‘could you buy it all at once? So that we can be safe here. Is it possible to do that?'

‘Yes.' Please don't plead, my darling Natasha, he wanted to say. Please don't try to get round me. Just ask. Why to God are we standing in this forsaken room discussing this and not together as we were and should be for always I don't understand, Natasha.

‘I could pay for the changes. The alterations. I still have a little money left.'

‘No. I'll . . . It'll be OK. I'm sure. Anyway.' He continued, ‘But won't this make it more difficult for us? Wouldn't it be better if you stayed in that flat for a while longer until I sort it out?'

‘I thought of that at Christmas when I was in my old room in Oxford.' Still the intent look, painfully expectant, ‘and I thought, well, he has had several months now and I am very tired. I must be practical. I have my own work to do. Marcelle needs a base. We are safe in Kew, among our friends, we are safe here. And then I found this little house. Pissarro lived in this street when he came to London. So you see?'

He nodded. He could no longer trust himself to speak. How could he leave her when she needed him so much?

Fear of what would happen if he stayed. Fear of survival. Fear. Something was happening that would make an irreversible change; it was as if he could see a most terrible storm approaching but he felt paralysed. Why could he not find a compromise now, this day, this hour?

Suddenly she looked away from him and began picking at a white handkerchief she was holding. He realised what all this was taking out of her and went across to hold her. They stood as one.

‘I miss the warmth of you,' she said. ‘Just this.'

‘It will be fine,' he said. ‘Honestly, Natasha. I want it to be fine for us.'

‘I know,' she said, ‘I know . . . But for now, just hold me . . . Just let us be like this.'

‘Take whatever you want,' Joseph had said. ‘I can be out all day if that will help. Take whatever you want.'

Natasha walked up the gentle hill from the station, Hampstead Heath to her right and on her left a row of Georgian cottages bright-white-faced in the mid-morning, mid-winter sun. She peered at the long lawned gardens which led to the pavement on which she walked. The triangle of pastoral playground reserved for younger children in which Marcelle had played, the tranquillity of the streets which led from the station up into the centre of Hampstead, the charm of this hilly colony made up a place which given time and peace she felt she could have come to like. Or was this sentimentality? She had made a hard decision. She had to steel herself to keep it.

Even their street was redeemed by the fine grey morning light and Natasha, who had not experienced the stain of Ellen's puzzled shame which had so unnerved Joseph, could find for the sad decline of an aspiration to gentility a certain melancholy affection. Morning light and absence laid many of the demons.

She went up the steps and found that her hand trembled as she put the key in the door. She twisted it one way and then the other without sufficient force and for a brief moment she feared that she had been for ever locked out. She saw herself as if in a painting on the top of five stone steps, a nervous woman in a long, black, rather Russian coat Joseph had bought her, a red woollen scarf slung around her neck, hair hastily brushed but appearing to be stylishly cut. Barred out? Breaking in? It could be a painting by one of the Camden School which would be appropriate, she thought, here in the Borough of Camden, and as she
experienced the thought the key clicked, the door opened and she stepped into the narrow hall and shut the door very quietly behind her. Quiet was all around her. She let the brief and sad history of the house settle on her as she tried to slough off the feeling of being a trespasser. Would Joseph be there? She wanted him to be there.

‘Joseph?' It was no more than a whisper.

Where to go first?

She walked towards the stairs and carried on up to the first floor and then up to the two small slope-roofed attic rooms. In one of them she had hoped to set up her studio. It was about a third the size of her attic room at Oxford but attics for Natasha were always a haven. Joseph had bought her a couple of posters. One of them was from the Tate Gallery, advertising the paintings of Turner and showing
Morning among the Coniston Fells
which, as well as being the Lake District and by the British painter Joseph most admired, showed, he told her, an ascent to paradise in a working landscape and she smiled at the memory of how he had deeply hugged to himself that combination of ordinariness and sublimity. The other poster carried a few lines from Wordsworth, printed big and in black against a hard blue sky streaming with white cloud.

No motion has she now, no force,

She neither hears nor sees

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course

With rocks and stones and trees.

She stared at it for a while and then reached out and took it down and rolled it up carefully. She thought she could hear him recite those words. Once upon a time he had liked to speak poetry aloud to her. It was a performance wrapped in self-satisfaction but nonetheless truly felt and she had been feted by it. There was a terrified emptiness in her. What was she to do? Who would help her now? This house had been hers, his, theirs. There was a desperate hollowness, but what could she do, orphaned by infidelity.

She had already taken the easel and paints. There was nothing more she wanted to take from that room, nothing she wanted to mark for the removal men.

At the bedroom door she stood for some time but did not enter. The bed was neatly made, Joseph would have made it, but unslept in, she thought, for some time. She conjured up a picture of Joseph and herself asleep in that bed and shivered, she could not decide why. At the loss? At the memory of pleasure? Of pain? At the pretence of a love in marriage? It was such an ordinary bed. There was a pair of nineteenth-century French gilt mirrors on the wall, each bearing two candle holders; their elegance had caught her eye and their state of disrepair had made them affordable. Joseph had loved them and once or twice he had lit the candles and brought wine to bed. She had intended to take them but they made the room. She had not the heart to do it.

In Marcelle's room she marked all the furniture. But when she went downstairs to the living room the mood she had experienced in the bedroom caught her again. She tried to fathom it. It was as if the house had become a sacred spot, she thought, that was as near as she could get even though in her secular mentality the word ‘sacred' made her uneasy. Yet here were the things Joseph had been so proud to amass: things which meant so much less to her; things, in truth, she could discard without a single backward pang of regret.

She went to lie as she had so often done on the long sofa, to ease her back. As she examined the room she appreciated more fully than ever before that Things, especially the Things with which he had furnished their home, meant a very great deal to Joseph. It was not to show off his money – some of the objects and the books were clearly inexpensive, even cheap. Nor were they to show off his taste – some of the objects were so naïf they made her smile – the homely hodge-podge was more like an eccentric pocket museum than any thought-through collection. But it worked, she thought, because it was Joseph and she could sense still the enthusiasm in the purchases. He was the integrating factor, it was Joseph plucking at new worlds and old, eager for all things, and at last these things were special for her because they were him. She left the room as she had found it.

She had not meant to go into his study. As soon as she entered it she knew why. Her apprehension had nothing to do with Joseph, despite the study revealing a yet more essential part of his life. She sat down and wished she had not come to the house at all. The memory of that final realisation in this room of the consequences of her analyst's death
returned. She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them, widely. Inside her head was a vertigo. Natasha knew that the loss and the passionate sense of being abandoned had not been resolved. Indeed it was intensifying. Thoughts of Joseph mingled with thoughts of the woman who had been there to heal her as she felt weakness possess her.

She ordered herself to stand up. On the mantelpiece Joseph had laid out his fragments from the ancient world. She went across and made herself examine them closely even though she knew them and even though such close examination was hardly necessary. She picked up the chipped and battered Egyptian necklace. Joseph had been told it was almost four thousand years old. It was the years rather than the object which entranced him. He had told her that one day they would go to Egypt and now she longed for that journey, just Joseph and herself. Her father had talked so much about Egypt, the Sphinx and the Valley of the Kings, Luxor and Nefertiti's Tomb, Champollion and the Rosetta Stone. He had made it seem the most desirable place on earth. This, too, was Joseph, she realised. Images of him as he had been, of them as they might have been. Why did she not stay and wait for him? Why did she not stay? He would surely return.

‘Natasha is extraordinary,' said Julia. ‘She's only had the house for ten minutes and she turned what I saw as a tip into an utterly charming little sort of salon and artist's studio combined. She's painted everything white. The furniture is from junk shops but it looks just right, far better than the clutter of the other place. She paints away and writes away and tells me she is meeting new people all the time. And Joe was there! He had come to help move in the last of the furniture and take Marcelle for an afternoon's outing which I thought rather sad but she then announced they were all three going off to Marlow for a few days!'

‘We've talked about Marlow,' he wrote to her. ‘Remember? At a time when you thought you could remember nothing at all about your
mother, we talked about Marlow and you thought you could remember something. I wanted us all to have a holiday together. You would be just over five, you'd started in the junior school in Kew Gardens and I bought you a fishing net. Everything was so strained and out of joint that I play-acted as hard as I possibly could at being natural. It did not come easily. Perhaps you sensed as much in this over-hearty dad strolling along the banks of the Thames looking for a suitable fishing point, two fishing nets slung over his shoulder as if out for a hardened day's fly fishing, you with the jar for the hopeful catch, your mother trailing us, observing us, this Happy Family. Did you sense it was false and block it out?

‘What you think you remember are the tiddlers. We struck gold in the Thames and shoals of tiddlers competed to be in our nets. Soon the jar we had brought was black with the tiddly fishlets fighting for water. We tipped them back into the river and then once again harvested those kamikaze tiddlers. And once again we tipped them back all in a high heat of daddy-daughter delight which for you I pray was real but for me looked, as your mother pointed out that evening, like an impersonation.'

Joe had gone to Marlow partly because Tim had recommended a fine riverside hotel which catered for children. ‘There's two sorts of kids' hotels,' Tim said. ‘One looks after the kids and is rubbish for us. The other looks after us and is rubbish for kids. This one does both. Don't ask me how.'

What it meant essentially was that couples could have dinner together while staff patrolled upstairs. Marcelle slept in a room connected to their own.

The dining room was full, low volume, and over-splendid for Natasha's taste. They had a window table overlooking the river now in full spring spate. Natasha ordered so quickly that Joe correctly concluded she had no interest at all in the meal. He was nervous on this, their first night, and he took his time.

‘Wine, sir?' The waiter was old and bored, the shoulders of his dinner jacket powdered with dandruff.

‘Number seventy-three.'

‘A very good choice, sir, if you don't mind my saying so.' He bowed at Joe and bowed again at Natasha. ‘Welcome to the Marlow Hotel,' he said.

‘Do you remember Felix Krull?' said Joe after he had left. ‘I've often thought it could be intriguing to be a waiter.'

‘If you are Felix Krull. And if you are a creation of Thomas Mann,' she said. ‘And if you meet a convenient prince.'

‘A waiter is always playing a part,' he said. ‘Slightly different to each table, different again, I imagine, in the kitchen. Always on parade.'

‘Why should you like that?'

‘Don't you sometimes want to lead the lives of others?'

‘No. My own is difficult enough.'

‘But your own life isn't one-faced, is it? We are all several people in one. We all contain multitudes.'

He talked on in this manner and she answered but her thoughts were a parallel monologue. Why are you behaving like this, Joseph? Why are you once again impersonating, this time an affectionate husband casually at ease with his wife? How can you? How dare you? Why do you want to preen here in public when at last we are away together for a few days on neutral ground and we could talk truth? You are frightened of the truth, Joseph. Perhaps you always have been. You insisted on buying me this silly dress in Marlow this afternoon and you do not realise that I conceded only because Marcelle was excited about it but the inexplicable thing is that you seem to think that it matters. What matters is us. Why do you evade that? You act as if nothing has changed. Everything has changed. You are across the table. You pour wine into my glass. We will go to bed together. You say you love me?