Remember Me... (34 page)

She made three women friends, none of whom had an untroubled past, all of whom were in varying stages of quiet retreat, holding on, quick to appreciate Natasha as a soul mate, carefully coming to trust and love her and see that despite her high style, she too had lacunae, forbidden places, had seen an abyss. Through these women a network began to grow. Joe brought a couple of the fabled television people into play, and a neighbouring older sculptor and his wife, a potter, became friendly. The immediate neighbours invited them round for drinks. It was good that they arrived in Kew in a warm spring and set up house in a decent summer when people could move around for tea or more occasionally a drink in gardens which had once been orchards and sit under the fruit trees as the fruit began to move from green to ripeness.

Natasha did watercolours for a while and Joe suggested he ask the local bookshop if he would let her have an exhibition there, but she was not at all enthusiastic. It would, she thought, be too intrusive of her in this community which, she hoped, would eventually become hers. There needed to be caution. Any sort of local prominence would set her apart. And besides, she wanted to write, this had always been her first love, she told him.

She started for the first time to write fiction and put her poetry aside. The time needed to attend to it and the inevitable sinking into herself in order to find the images to meet the sound and the sense she wanted took her on her first constructive journey towards the remote radiation, the fission of her past. She could sit alone at the kitchen table half the
day and not write a word and yet feel that the life of the day had been unwasted. She decided to write in English.

To some observers when she came out to shop in the parade or sit and drink a coffee, generally alone, outside the station buffet which opened onto the parade, or when she drifted towards the Gardens and the river, she seemed abstracted, aloof, rather like the black swans, sometimes undrawn by the custom of the small polite passing smile,
nerveuse
, well skilled at concealing the pressures within, ethereal even, but someone looked out for, a remarked-on, complex figure in the easy English suburban landscape.

David had suggested they meet ‘just the two of us' before dinner, ‘any old pub will do very nicely, pubs have been a conspicuous gap in my life recently'. Joe fussed for a while and then settled for a pub on Kew Green beyond the Georgian church, beyond the picture-postcard cricket pitch. It was still warm enough to take their drinks outside on a deck overlooking the river.

‘Long time no see,' said David, hitting the first word with mocking emphasis. He raised his gin drowned in tonic, took a small sip and enveloped Joe in an intense gaze of greeting. He had led them to the edge of the deck. There was only one other table occupied and that some distance away. He accepted Joe's offer of a cigarette.

‘I'm glad you're drinking beer,' he said.

‘I'm only doing it to fit your stereotyping.'

‘Not a bad way to disguise oneself,' said David, ‘though not an option for me, I'm afraid. Not in England.'

‘No absinthe?'

‘Now, now.' He looked intently at Joe, to Joe's flattered embarrassment. ‘Rather strained. Be careful. You don't have to do everything at once. Natasha will tell you that. Excited with life. Life good?'

‘Life good. You?'

‘Agony, but one soldiers on.' He puffed on his cigarette as if he wished he did not really have to smoke. ‘Africa is every bit as marvellous as I knew it would be. The people there must be the most charming and luckless in the world. But all one can see in the future are disasters and corruption and
rip-offs by Western colonists in new capitalist clothing. It will get much worse. Everyone says that. Everyone who knows. Until the Africans take it in their own hands. And one is helpless. It will take generations.'

‘Have you been to South Africa?'

‘Inspirational. The anti-apartheid movement is so noble, Joe, it makes you almost proud to be human except that apartheid itself is so despicable it makes you ashamed to be human. I think a lot depends on what's happening in America with the Freedom Movement and Martin Luther King. If he can change America then it will be another shot that will ring around the world. The days of apartheid will be numbered. You ought to be there, Joe, it would open you up.' He smiled, that quick, wide Mephistophelean smile.

‘Do you really think so?'

‘Oh yes. But do
you
really think so? No. So let me not be tedious about it. Your turn.'

Joe delivered his update as quickly as he could, anxious to ask David more about Africa.

‘And the writing?'

‘I sent off a novel, to Nelson and Chapel.
The Metropolitan Line
.'

‘A distinguished publisher. A perfectly acceptable title. And?'

‘After six weeks,' Joe had told this to no one but Natasha, ‘it came back with a nice enough letter. Plot too thin, this good, that OK, the other not so good, politics too obvious and an intrusion, cannot publish it as it stands, if you want to discuss further please contact.'

‘Did you?'

‘No. He was right. It was an effort not a novel. I've started another.'

‘Set in the North.'

‘Wait and, I hope, see.'

‘I can “see” already. Ju-ju. I saw your little film on the two Northern painters. Quite good, I thought. I could have done without the arty bits, the Bergman and Renoir references and such. I rather prefer cinema verité, but this was made with love and well crafted.'

‘That was the cameraman. And the film editor. And the programme editor. He polished up the rough cut.'

‘Never mind. I saw you in it throughout and it had your name on it at the end. That will do. The overture has been played. The programme's
editor is Ross McCulloch, isn't it? He's rather famous. Was it he who gave you your job?'

‘Yes.'

‘That's a bouquet in itself.'

‘It was only because I told him I didn't want to work in television, I preferred radio, but the traineeship dictated I
had
to do some television and I said I would only do an arts programme. It made him laugh.'

‘Always a good ploy: laughter puts people off their guard. The Foreign Office ought to run courses in it.'

‘He lives near here. He has a big house on the river.'

‘I believe I met him once, years ago, at the Partons'. Do you know them? They have a truly astonishing collection of African art. Henry Moore was there. Who else do you see? Who have you met on your metropolitan line?'

Joe was only too pleased to answer and in passing to boast. He told David about Peter Mills, the older trainee, former President of the Oxford Union, and hell bent on a political career; of Edward, a poet, who had also overlapped at Oxford, now running a poetry magazine on the radio; Arthur, again from Oxford, already a staged playwright; Anthony, Oxford yet again, who was surely destined either to storm the West End theatre or just as surely become the rising new British director in Hollywood, and . . .

‘Let me interrupt,' said David. ‘I presume there are one or two more from Oxford and others from other universities, all met through the media network?' Joe nodded. ‘It's what I have christened “generational kinship”,' David continued. ‘I'm rather pleased with the phrase. You are attracted to each other not through blood or class or even those old school ties but through talent and attitude. These people and others like them will stay with you now for the duration. You knew none of these people when you were at Oxford – not that it matters but I knew all of them – but what is important is that this new medium is bringing about a sort of cadre with connections and recognitions and mutual similarities very like the more traditional tribes. What is exciting is that it has suddenly gained a critical mass, like the old aristocracy, the real old aristocracy, though of course not as significant, yet. Fascinating! And, Joe, there you are, caught up in it, and all through no fault of your own!'

‘Of yours.'

‘Very likely. How gratifying to have one's little theories proved. One can understand why Einstein always had a smile on his face. We must go now. Natasha will think us rude.'

‘She's quite . . .'

‘Not quite, very, good mannered. Which is one, only one, of the reasons I adore her. Quick, quick! How far?'

‘Fifteen minutes if we step on the gas.'

‘That far! I suppose the exercise will do me no lasting harm.' He put down his scarcely touched drink. ‘It's so good to see you, Joe.'

‘And you,' said Joe, with equal warmth.

‘Well, that's all right, then. Onward!'

David had brought them James Baldwin's
Another Country
– ‘which I cannot recommend highly enough. He writes beautifully and what he says is very important.' Joe felt challenged. ‘A friend of mine is trying to arrange for us to meet when I go back through Paris.'

‘Paris,' said Natasha.

‘Joe's very clever to hide you both away in Kew Gardens,' said David, ‘this is where exotic flora grow best, after all.'

In Oxford there had been one favoured cinema. In London there were many and they could ride the tube to the urban villages of Hampstead, Chelsea and Kensington and right into the dazzle of options in the West End. Their London was first mapped by its cinemas. As the masterpieces from Europe continued to roll in, idols discovered at Oxford and the directors or auteurs made up what was later seen as a golden age – Truffaut and Polanski vied with new films from Resnais, De Sica, Antonioni, Fellini, Bunuel, Renoir and Bergman.

It was at this time that Joe began to appreciate qualities of those shoals of American and English films he had in his youth seen so intensely, carelessly, the ‘flicks', and absorbed unselfconsciously. Was he perhaps the more directly affected because of that? He discussed this with Natasha. Perhaps unconscious education was the deepest, the purest. She too believed that primary and self-found images penetrated more strongly when there was no analytical barrier, nothing but the acceptance
of pure sensations, a direct feed to the unconscious. Joe saw some truth in that although he thought that in her case exactly the opposite obtained. And critical selection had to come in somewhere. But he recognised that for example the most fruitful factor in what might be called his musical education and certainly his love of music was not the hours spent under the unforgiving tutelage of Miss Snaith, the piano teacher, nor even his attempts at Oxford and since to try to assess the classics. It was those hours, daily, yearly, spent singing in various choirs as a boy, singing authentic plainsong and nineteenth-century anthems, singing psalms and hymns often of haunting melody, but basically just singing, letting the music directly take over his mind without filter and be returned to the air umoderated by anything but a basic, unthinking mechanical skill.

A key to the bounty of their lives in London was the BBC Arts Department's willingness to provide, on receipt of two modestly priced stubs, a full return on theatre though not cinema tickets. It was, as it would continue to be, Xanadu. In one year what they saw included
Uncle Vanya, John Gabriel Borkman
,
The Father
,
The Seagull
,
Six Characters in Search of an Author
,
St Joan
,
Othello and Hamlet
; they saw new plays by Beckett, Pinter, Orton, Osborne, Arden and Wesker; occasionally they went with new friends and would eat afterwards at the French Club just off St James's, a small, literary enclosure, aristocratically connected, to which they were introduced by Anthony, the television drama director, and his wife Victoria, a painter who became a friend of Natasha. Then back, a race to the underground and to domestic Kew, inflamed.

On nights in they would set aside time to watch television, and Joe became addicted to the drama, often worked on, directed and written by people he saw around the studios, which added a dimension of privilege to the viewing. Joe saw on the screen a British new wave which portrayed much of the society he had left behind. Natasha built up a picture of Britain whose humour and harshness were new to her; dramas whose anger activated Joseph's rage, comedies which would wring him dry of a laughter so infectious that she had to join in however foreign it could all still seem. He identified with so much of it!

At that time his undirected chameleon nature intrigued her. As he reached out blindly for his own voice, the powerful voices of others poached his mind again and again. He would come out of Chekhov
wanting to be true and lyrical and tragic all at once; he would come out of Beckett wanting to find the bare knuckle of his prose; he would come out of Strindberg blaming himself for being so lily-livered about basic passions – where was Greed? Where was Vengeance? Where were Lust, Envy, Power, the tectonic plates of our nature? He would come out of Ibsen looking around for the Great Moral Issues of the Day. He would come from the realistic drama on television wanting to join that conquering group of committed social dramatists. He would come out of Shakespeare thinking he ought to give up.

Every writer, on stage, in television, film and novels had a seasoning which Joe saw was their key individuality. He knew that all that mattered in the end was to find a way to express individuality, to give your own unique testament, your mind-print, whatever it turned out to be, otherwise what was the point of writing? But how did you seek it? Did you know when you had found it? And If and When you found it, would it be good enough? The novel he was now writing, set in Cumberland,
The Kingdom Was Lost
, could bring him to a fever of excitement but also to a sickness of anxiety as he wrote and, for the first time, grimly re-wrote, striving to put the sound in his head into words on the paper. He would come to bed late and want to wake her to talk and make love and Natasha knew he needed that.

Natasha seemed to have a much surer inner voice, he thought. There was far less struggle. She had finally decided to take the advice she had given to Joseph and she went back towards her own childhood – not to the roots of it, not to the private pain, skirting that pain, but to the time of the aunts, the breaks in the clouds when they took her up. She wanted to write about Isabel and Alain but they were too dear to her; she feared that she would hurt them by writing about them in the rather mocking way in which she described the provincial unease of her aunts. She laid a melodramatic plot, the preventable and deceitfully reported death of a child and the ending aimed to shock.