Remember Me... (43 page)

There were three letters – all for Joe – from the Saturday delivery. After he had carried the cases upstairs and then carried the child up to her room and helped her into bed, and after Natasha had gone up to talk to her, as she did, in adult terms, which intrigued Joe, and he had put on the kettle for tea, made tomato and ham sandwiches and switched on the television, decided against it, found some music on the radio and flopped into one of the armchairs, only then did he open his mail.

He had been put into contact with a literary agency by Ross McCulloch. The agency had handed the unsolicited manuscript to one of the younger men. The two men had met in Soho for lunch. Eight weeks had passed since that encouraging lunch.

The letter said the novel had been accepted by a ‘small but very respectable publisher'.

Joe felt that if you could have a blow to the solar plexus that caused a sickness of pleasure rather than pain, this was it. He read the brief but exuberant letter again. And then again. And when Natasha came down into the room he read it once more just to make absolutely certain.

He poured out two cups of tea. Natasha did not take sugar. They sat across from each other at the small table which was quite big enough for the small kitchen, still painted in cream and brown, unredecorated like the rest of the house. He offered her a sandwich and she took it but out of politeness, he thought, not appetite. He passed her the letter.

She read it, looked up with a quick full smile which swept all the fatigue from her face and then she read it again. ‘It's good,' she murmured, over the letter, ‘it's so good, Joseph.' He too smiled now: it was becoming more real. It was good, wasn't it? She handed it back to him and with rueful honest envy said, ‘I've been writing for so much longer than you have. How did you do that?'

There was no appropriate response he could find and a vague guilt clouded his mind. If they lived in France she would have been published way before him. Writing in English handicapped her, yet her French style, she said, had become corrupted by the years of English speaking. ‘Sorry,' he said, meaning it.

She forced down the competitive reaction which she knew was unjust and could see threatened to spoil his moment. Her tone grew warmer and more passionate.

‘How can you be sorry? You must be very pleased. Aren't you?'

‘Yes,' feeling anything but.

‘It's wonderful,' she said.

‘I'm sure yours will do better.'

‘We have no wine in the house,' said Natasha.

‘I'll take you out tomorrow night,' he said. ‘Mary'll be back by tea time.'

‘Congratulations,' said Natasha, raising her cup. ‘Are you sure now that you like the title?'

‘Don't you?' Joseph raised his cup in acknowledgement.

‘Well . . .' she said, emphatically, ‘the first title was more poetic, I think . . .'

‘I'll change it back,' he said, smiling, relieved to give her something. ‘To both of us.'

‘No. To you, Joseph. To the success of
A Chance Defeat.'

The cups touched carefully at the lip and they drank the tea.

The advance on the novel was one hundred and fifty pounds. The agent took ten per cent. The remainder was payable in two halves, sixty-seven pounds and ten shillings on signature of contract, the second half on publication. The first purchase he made with the first half of the payment was to buy Natasha a pair of tall church candlesticks, sworn by the dealer in the Portobello Road to be seventeenth century or earlier, Venetian, possibly spirited away. The candlesticks were embellished with small mirrors of a thick glass, allegedly, the dealer claimed, among the earliest of their kind. He put them on the mantelpiece where they looked absurd, Natasha thought, much as she liked their worn grandeur.

And yet they soon settled into the clutter that Joseph was accumulating. Everything – save the glorious antique candlesticks – scooped from the back of a junk shop or the final knock-down price on a late afternoon stall, a Papuan harpoon, a damaged Egyptian necklace of real age, rows of leather-bound, mostly split-spined books, a large oak chest described as an armour coffer decorated with rudely drawn men in high bowler hats, a gilded mirror lacking a fair bit of its gilding, scuffed oils, a faded kelim rug which, Joseph thought, brought in the romance of the East.

It was almost a tribute to her father's house, Natasha thought; yet in some way it was not in imitation but in competition with her father's scrupulous and admired collections. He brought her father closer than ever before, she thought, but on his own terms. This all-purpose
unconscious competitiveness was an aspect of Joseph with which she could sympathise, though it annoyed him when she mentioned it. But from one or two of his remarks, she had also to consider that his collecting might be something else, an attempt, shoe-string as it was, to make a home in which she would feel at home. It had nothing of the cosy utilitarian efficiency of his own past. If this insight were correct, it was an homage; another example of his love, like the bunches of flowers, an attempt to treat her in a way which he thought befitted her.

What could she do? He got so much pleasure from these objects. To see his pleasure pleased her. To spurn these cheap but occasionally charming objects would be to spurn something in him. And yet it was again turning her towards a past she had thought herself well and for ever rid of. She put the candlesticks on the oak armour coffer. Joseph told her it made all the difference. She slung the kelim over the sofa: he said it made the room into a Turkish boudoir. His appreciation energised her. He insisted she hang some of her own paintings and covered the walls of the hall with her drawings of their daughter. She felt applauded. She painted the hall white, and then she painted the kitchen . . .

Joe had known from the beginning what he intended to do with the remaining thirty pounds of the first part of the advance. The certainty had arrived without forethought. It surprised him, it puzzled him, but he knew he would go through with it.

Often on a Saturday afternoon, Joe would head off alone. He went to the park with the child in the morning and after lunch walked on the towpath through Richmond, through Kingston, sometimes further, following the Thames upstream, boats passing by, a kindly English mystery about life on the river, its own world. This was the only time in the week he was fully alone. He would let himself rove for three or four hours and come back nicely tired, ready for an evening's writing or an outing. On Sunday afternoons they would go together all three into Kew Gardens, like the bourgeoisie of Paris, Natasha said, taking the air in the Bois de Boulogne. But Saturday afternoon had become his own time.

Recently his route had changed. He would catch the underground and go to Soho or Kensington or, most favoured, the King's Road in
Chelsea, an area still notable for its artists and bohemians but increasingly famous for its boutiques, its fashions, the new plumage, female and male plumage, which was tumbling onto the streets to the accompaniment of young cash in the pocket. Rock and roll and its progeny were on the jukebox and everywhere on the King's Road there was the mesmerising dazzle of a sudden power of Youth. The black and white of Joe's past was overlaid by this Technicolor; the establishment he had accepted was mocked or bypassed; the ubiquitous hat was increasingly discarded, replaced by ubiquitous hairstyles that were like hats. James had characterised it as the age of the poseur and the pill and of More: More sex, More liberty, More variety, More sensation, More music, More dancing, above all, More dancing.

Over the past few years, as this mushroomed around him in London though not in Kew Gardens, Joe had become infected by it, although ‘poisoned' would later seem a more suitable word. He was increasingly like the boy with his nose pressed to the big plate-glass window of a shop full of toys and treats he had been told he must never enjoy and could never afford, fatally consumed by longing. Now the glass was melting.

To Joe, often weak-headed, easily recruited by manly marching bands as a child, a hungry audience for choirs, for drama on film or on the stage, this new drumbeat was the gut call of his generation, and to ignore it would be to miss out on its siren promises; of sinless pleasure, harmless excess, anarchy without effort. Natasha stood apart from all this as did her friends in Kew Gardens. They were as unruffled as Joe was ruffled. Outwardly, still the checked sports jacket, the regular job, the obedient day; outwardly a balanced conformist. Inwardly, increasingly an appetite for what was new which longed to be sated. To be in and of this time, his time, which called him into its rhythm. Not to answer would be to miss the uniqueness of his generation. It involved no surrender. No decadence. Nothing more in fact than appearances, a few clothes.

So here he was, in the King's Road, having walked the length of it trying not to look too lingeringly at the erotically charged underdressed girls, plucking up the courage to go into one of those clothes shops which bore so little resembalance to the rationed clothes shops of his
youth. The sight and sound and smell of sex infested the city. Even shops were now, in this golden summer mid-afternoon, places of dark seductive disco dance-floor lights and the latest permissive hits from the charts, of crushed velvets and lace, brothels of dream garments.

He spun it out. He wandered from window to window, gazing at what were more costumes than clothes, disguises promising metamorphosis, a man could be made again merely by stepping through the door. It was as if in the sun-struck windows of the King's Road, Chelsea, London, England, a rebellion had announced itself and all you had to do to join in was to purchase one of the new non-uniform uniforms.

Did he see himself as freed from his past and unshackled, released into the air by changing in a cubicle? He could appear to change personality. He could become lawless. Perhaps the multiple opportunities of the metropolis demanded multi-personalities to meet and take up its challenges. That it might tempt him to invent a new, uprooted, liberated identity might also have stirred somewhere in his mind. But where would that take him? The apprehension which held him back would turn out, in retrospect, to be well founded. He ought to have averted his eyes.

There was something feverish about it, akin to the feelings he experienced in the Buckingham Club or when he became possessed by one of the new nerve-injecting pop songs; an atmosphere which called up impulses hitherto unknown or unacknowledged and produced a sensual and disturbing suffusion in his mind, a sensation without need of words, a freedom to change that dared him and stared him in the face. He had to enter. He knew he ought to walk away. This freedom had come too late for him. Married, treading softly into the thickets of middle-class England, with a child and a wife to support, mortgaged, with a steady job, with a pension, on the ladder, on the up. But there they were, the gears of change, respecting neither his conditioning nor his achievements nor his ordained ambition nor all the company of cautions. Did he realise that crossing this threshold would be his first infidelity?

Sam and Ellen sat together in the pub kitchen after closing hours, after the helpers had left, the last cup of tea, the last dip into the novel for Sam, for Ellen the last daydream in front of the fire as she sat on the low stool, almost the last time this scene would be played out in this place.

Sam folded down a page, put aside
The Quiet American
and said,

‘For one last time now, are you sure?'

‘Certain.' She did not turn to him but gave the word to the fire, like a quiet oath.

‘Remember when you came back after she'd just been born?'

‘I do.'

‘Well.'

‘I thought it would be seen as interfering if we'd moved down then,' said Ellen, still not turning to him, ‘it would seem that I didn't trust her. Natasha would have thought that.'

‘She's turned out a good mother, hasn't she? When I've seen them.'

‘Yes . . . yes . . . though she talks to her like a grown-up all the time. She'll explain things that I'm not sure a little girl can understand. Things that don't need explaining. They just need to be told – “That's wrong,” “That's dangerous” – but it's her way. It's Natasha's way.'

Sam's admiration for Natasha's patient explanations was unqualified. This, he thought, was the proper way to bring up a child, to pour in wisdom as early as possible, to take time to teach, to have nothing to do with the abrupt, imperious, unchallengeable cuffs and curt diktats of his own childhood and, to some extent, that of Joe.

‘Proof of the pudding,' he said.

‘Oh yes! She's lovely, isn't she? She's just lovely. There's nobody like her.' And now she turned to him and smiled deeply as images of her granddaughter came into her mind.

‘So why now?'

‘I've tried to tell you, Sam.'

Ellen's reply was an appeal. Sam heard it.

‘Reading's just about an hour to London on the train,' he said.

‘How far is the pub from the station?'

‘There's a bus at the top of the road. Or you could walk. Either way fifteen or twenty minutes and then there's the tube at the other end.'

‘An hour and a half, two hours at most.'

‘At the very outside.'

Ellen had shown little interest in either the pub he had been offered or the district in which it was located. Sam was not piqued by this. She had come back from her latest visit to Kew Gardens utterly resolved and he had loved her for the steel in it. She had to be near them, she said, the sooner the better.

His landlord contacts had taken him to Reading. His qualifications, the account books he had taken and the references from the Cumbrian brewery's manager who recognised a mind made up, had struck lucky with the imminent availability of a run-down Victorian pub, the Builder's Arms.

It was in a very working-class area of Reading, he had told Ellen, who had nodded with relief: she did not want to go out of her league. Rows and rows of small terraced houses, more like the North than the South, he said, all going down to the Kennet which ran into the Thames. The rivers marked two of its boundaries and cut it off from the city of Reading itself: many of the residents of the area rarely went into Reading. Small shops galore, a place sufficient to itself and quite prosperous, with many of the women working in the big biscuit factory which loomed, like a castle, above the huddled terraces. He even mentioned the gasometers at the bottom of the street. In time he would become very fond of their perfect cylindrical shapes, the sinking and rising of their surfaces.