Remember Me... (70 page)

‘I do,' said Joe. They lay in the dark, cigarettes alight, the slackness of love made bodies apparently at one. ‘I do,' he repeated. He did.

‘I believe you,' she said and paused a while; then laughed very gently. ‘I am pleased,' she said, ‘that you feel you do not need to seek the same reassurance from me. Perhaps you want to be a bigamist,' she said, ‘that is not so unusual, neither in the past nor I guess today. But you will not permit that.' She turned away from him to stub out the cigarette. ‘Marcelle told me that she loved going fishing with you. So you see. There is always another perspective.'

Joe's sense of the artificiality of the situation was exposed. ‘I do love you,' he insisted.

‘I believe the words. I would like to see the actions.'

‘You said I could have time,' and the slackness in his body went away. He wished he were not there. He felt trapped – though it was he who had suggested it.

‘You have all the time you need,' she said and lit another cigarette. ‘I hope you are careful with it.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘She is young. Let us say she loves you. Let us say you tell her that you love her.' Joe froze. Natasha waited for a while and then relented. ‘You must be careful you do not make her pregnant or that she does not make you make her pregnant.'

He had no answer. His admiration for Natasha's brave clarity added yet more to the power of the unanswerable question – how could he treat her like this?

‘When we were at Oxford at Christmas,' Natasha said, ‘the children put on a play. They wrote it for themselves and they wrote a lovely part for Marcelle. And who was the star performer? Marcelle. She takes after you there. It is a shame you did not see her . . . It is so very good to be together, Joseph, and I try every hour to understand, to hold to my belief in your freedom and mine. But it is tiring and sleep is no longer my friend.'

‘They were in Marlow,' said Ellen, looking up from the postcard, ‘and they didn't tell us.'

‘I'm glad.' Sam picked up the river scene and read the brief note. ‘They need time together to sort it out.'

‘Will they?'

‘They should be able to.'

‘But will they?'

‘If anybody can, Natasha can.'

‘You haven't answered.'

‘There's no certainty in these matters, Ellen.'

‘I had a feeling even on their wedding day.'

‘What can you say? There's rough and smooth, thick and thin, there always was. We'll see what he's really made of now.'

‘And her. Not just him. Her as well.'

‘He can't let somebody like her go,' he said. ‘Nobody could. There's only one Natasha.'

Joe had been asked to do the screenplay for a novel set in Mexico and he went there for ten days' research. He had by this time been separate from Natasha for about nine months, and often he would tell her that he wanted to and intended to return. He had recently been sleeping most nights of the week with Helen, to whom he talked intimately much less but who understood that he was moving away from Natasha towards an eventually final separation. Each position seemed true when he was with each woman. Helen had endured Marlow though she had not been able to resist making a telephone call to him one evening when he and Natasha were in their room changing for dinner. She had supported his consistent visits to Kew and the weekend sightseeing trips into London that he now made with Marcelle.

He took Helen to Mexico half determined this would be the celebration of their union, half convinced that this would be the final few days with her, that by some process of reason she deserved this exotic trip: the paying of dues. He did not tell Natasha that they were going to Mexico.

They drove to Cuernavaca to look at the central location of the novel he had agreed to adapt. Their driver railed against the number of gods in Mexico – ‘god o' the sun, god o' the rain, god o' the mountain, god o' every damn thing'. He spent the return journey attempting to persuade Joe to buy a gun from a thoroughly reliable friend of his. They went to markets and Helen bartered to Joe's embarrassment: the prices were low enough, the sellers too poor to begin with. They went on the boats in Mexico City and spent a long morning in the Museum of Anthropology, Joe stunned and suffocated by the sullen compulsion of the sculptures. Joe went to the communion service in the colossal cathedral across the square from their hotel.

They ate to the accompaniment of Mariachi bands and bought cheap jewellery for each other, rings and medallions for Helen and also for Joe, who soon looked like a playboy tourist. Every night they had a
drink in a crowded piano bar with a long polished counter down which their glasses of tequila were skidded to them at high speed. Only towards the end of their stay did they realise that upstairs was a brothel. They drank too much tequila and suffered.

The climax of the visit for Joe was when they went to see the pyramids. He lingered over altars which had witnessed human sacrifice. Yet the most unexpected revelation was a central arena for ball games where, they were told, the finest young noblemen played for their lives. They found a sculpting of the Plumed Serpent and Helen took a photograph of him standing by it. She declined to have herself photographed there. Joe felt everywhere in Mexico pervaded and oppressed by both Aztec and Roman Catholic mysteries, Indian women squatting on the ground in markets, their eyes open wide but black, forbidding entry, and Catholic women in the cathedral, kneeling on the stone floor, their eyes closed in prayer, blind to the material world.

‘It is always difficult to know what feelings were being experienced so long ago,' he said to Marcelle. ‘But I remember strain in Mexico. I remember feeling betrayal that I was seeing pyramids with Helen and not with Natasha, but despite the loss that had bled so much from memory as well as from the life that followed it, I think Helen and I had some happiness there and we knew in some way we were trying to build a life there.'

Julia had challenged him. ‘Why is it that you want to be apart from Natasha? What is it?' And he had said that when he was with Helen he did not fear that the world would collapse inside his head all the time. ‘Then you have to hold onto that,' Julia had said. ‘You must hold onto that.' And then, ‘you ought to look after them.'

Yet at times he knew that by being with Helen and leaving behind Natasha who would have longed to be in Mexico he was doing the wrong thing. As he said it he meant it. What could explain this wrong course of action save love or weakness? But if there was something in him which simply would not do what was ‘right', could that not mean he was wrong about right and wrong? This brought temporary relief on several occasions but could not, would never eradicate the stake-hearted conviction that leaving Natasha and Marcelle was wrong however many the excuses, however hard the course; he had failed
himself and there would be no redemption. But he was with Helen. And despite all, he stayed with Helen.

Blind, blind, blind, he sent Natasha a postcard of the pyramids.

After lunch he had hoped to take Marcelle to Regent's Park where there was a children's boating pond next to a playground and the little girl could switch from one to the other. But August rain put paid to that. They went to a cinema in Oxford Street to see
The Yellow Submarine
. Marcelle called it ‘Sumbarine'. The mispronunciation became a private joke.

They arrived in Kew earlier than usual and Joe telephoned Natasha to tell her that he was taking Marcelle to the Garden Cafe for egg and chips and she was welcome to join them which she did.

She was dressed in a sari, perfect, she said, for summer. Her complexion, always pale, was white. She seemed preoccupied and said little and drank tea while Marcelle and Joe dealt with their simple meal. Joe always ate very quickly and was finished way before Marcelle.

‘Could I have one of your chips?'

‘One,' she said. He took one.

‘Hmm. They're really good. Can I have another?'

‘One,' she said, enjoying the game.

‘Hmm. They're really good. Can I have another?'

‘Don't let him, Marcelle. Don't let him take everything from you. Say no! Say no!'

A small cloud of embarrassment made a temporary settlement on other diners in the café.

‘It's just a game,' said Joe. ‘We play it all the time.'

‘I must take her home now. My back hurts.' Natasha picked up the cup, decided against the tea and put it down rather clumsily, not quite centring it on the saucer. Joe's eyes saw how fraught she was but there was that in him which refused to allow the observation to provoke help.

‘What was the song?' he said.

In a clear, confident voice, Marcelle sang,

‘We all live in a yellow sumbarine, a yellow sumbarine, a yellow sumbarine.'

Her struggle had begun in earnest and Natasha was aware of it all the time. In luxurious and dangerous dream-moods of fierce introspection she thought she was like a knight on a quest seeking to solve apparently insoluble riddles about herself, forced to encounter monsters, to meet with failure and to experience despair. Yet the quest could not be abandoned. Something that was essentially her needed to face these dark forces, never to be a coward, however ensnared and exhausted, never to give in.

She had thought that it would be painful but not too difficult without her analyst but that was a false dawn. She had been drawn into the sources of her fear by an analyst of great skill and experience sharpened to an even finer art by her own past and by her immediate and ever-deepening empathy with her patient. In one story inside Natasha's head the analyst could be seen as the temptress, who had lured Natasha by charms and spells into the centre of the labyrinth of the forest of her entangled memories, desires, rejections, pains, life traits. And then abandoned her. Natasha was the knight who had to rescue herself and there was no avoiding this task.

She noted this down as a summary of what was happening to her. But the story itself was all but lost in a haze, a veil made from random sensations and feelings which turned into not-quite-thoughts but were like innumerable spots of water which make up the swell of a sea, strong enough to move her to unnameable grief. Yet there was a voluptuousness too. Natasha could sit alone for hours, as she had done again and again in her adult life, locked into herself and though sad, not sorry for herself, though mourning, not self-pitying. At such times Natasha saw
this interior complexity to be the best and richest way to live, the finest way to meet the impenetrable fact of this single accidental and meaningless life.

By sinking into her own mind she was connected with the dominating darkness out there, and with the fathomless galactic swirl. Inside the mind was all existence and attempting to observe and track the movements inside a mind enabled her, she believed, to be much more closely connected with the cosmos which was made of what she was made of. Was that not a purpose? Maybe the mind was the microcosm of the universe and its intertwined messages, its infinite secrets of space and time and motion as unlimited as the vastness outside. There was some relief in thoughts like these.

But for the external world she lived in Natasha knew that was not enough and to the building of a new world for herself and Marcelle in their new home she applied herself with all the energy she could call on.

She painted feverishly. She used oils, bright colours, reds and yellows in particular, paint slashed onto the surface with bold violence. Abstract though they were these paintings seemed to be moving also towards shapes recognisably cosmic – spirals, whorls, black holes . . . she was convinced this was new and strong and had to be seen. There were a few small galleries in the Richmond area which she intended to approach if the gallery just off the West End in which Victoria showed her paintings turned her down. It felt good to think of herself as a woman of action. Joseph had over-protected her, she thought, and consequently enfeebled her.

The novel had been accepted and was on its unhurried road to publication. Yet she decided that poetry was more important. Like painting, she ought never to have put it aside. Joseph's novel writing had been too strong an influence. Poetry, she thought, was how words could be best arranged, feelings and ideas most memorably expressed, human nature divined.

She returned for a while to teach at the Barn Church Nursery School even though Marcelle had moved on to the recently built junior school less than five minutes' walk away. She made friends with the Kew bookseller who was much attracted to her. She looked after his shop on occasions when he needed to be away on a buying trip. He said that the
arrangement could be put on a more regular basis whenever she felt like doing so, but she did not follow it up.

Most visibly of all though, partly to show Joseph she could, was her success in forming a new circle. Her former friends in Kew were still close but, as if she wanted to show unquestionable proof of her new independence, her house became a meeting place for a number of artists or those aspiring to be artists. Natasha uncharacteristically, Joe thought, decided to embrace the current interest in Indian culture and mantras would be chanted, scented candles lit as they sat on the floor in a circle, cannabis would be smoked, hands linked. Those who attended what became soirees spoke of her Eastern perception and of being at the heart of things.

Joseph came across this new circle one Sunday evening when he brought Marcelle back rather later than usual. He resented them, all of them. He resented them being in Natasha's house. He was jealous of these strangers being so close to his wife. He hated the feeling they gave off that he was something of an intruder and certainly an outsider. He found it hard to cope when Natasha merely looked up, glanced at him, brought Marcelle into the circle, turned back to her company and let him stay or go as he pleased. He left the house in a confusion of anger. Why were they in that house? What did they all do there? Why was he so out of it?