Remember Me... (44 page)

‘It tickles me,' he said, ‘that it's so old-fashioned down there.' He smiled, still taken with the discovery. ‘You expect the South to be ahead of us, but it's like Wigton in the forties. It's quaint. There's still a Ladies' Only Snug. They come in, big women, half a porter, nicer people you could not meet. It needs a bit of work, but that's to be expected.'

‘I've made up my mind not to miss Wigton at all,' Ellen said, ‘otherwise I won't manage.'

‘They have a ladies' darts team,' said Sam, ‘the landlady has to captain it.'

‘You'd better start giving me lessons,' she said.

‘They're decent people, Ellen,' he said. ‘A lot like here.'

Joe had taken Charles, his agent, to the train. He walked back from the station under pinpoint-clear stars. He wished he could read them, although the wish was not strong enough for him to make the effort. His mother could do it but he had been too impatient to stand and be taught by her. Their presence was enough; the unknown sometimes being more attractive, he thought; perhaps to know would be to lose some of the provoking mystery; or so he reasoned in the euphoria of the evening. The late heat was always felt as a privilege by those from the North, a siren call from the warmer, easier South. The cigarette tasted good. The two or three glasses of wine over dinner sat comfortably, the taste and scent still a perfume, not yet a drug.

He had taken Charles to the train after a supper with five of their Kew friends that had gone exceptionally well. Charles, Joe had guessed, thought Kew a suburb in mind and class as well as location, but Anna's husband Harry had proved to be at Cambridge at the same time as Charles and off they had romped in the happy pursuit of mutual acquaintances. Claire had then confessed, during a conversation about the war in Vietnam, that her father had been a captain at Arnhem and won the Military Cross, which again reassured Charles. Joe watched Charles closely, wanting to impress this rather reserved upper-class stranger who had taken his career by the collar.

On the way to the station he had told Charles about Natasha's novel; he had told Charles about Natasha; he had told Charles too much and his conscience now twinged but it was only a twinge and the bigger fact was that Charles had been genuinely intrigued by her. Natasha, he said, was ‘quite simply the most intelligent woman I have ever met'. Joe had taken that totally at face value and practically exploded with pride.

She was, wasn't she? She is.

And beautiful, he thought, as he meandered back home under the silvery moon.

He was so very lucky, he thought, and regressed to adolescence when he used to make so many lists. He ticked off his blessings.

There was Natasha; there was their daughter; there was enough money to live the life they wanted; there were friends, friends in Kew, friends at the BBC, friends from Oxford, friends back in Wigton, Natasha's friends in France; he liked his job; his novel had been
accepted; he was English, in London in the middle of this young new noise. Oh, lucky man! Oh, Lucky Jim, he remembered, how we envy him.

As he reached the front door, what could well be the last aeroplane of the night whistled and screeched its way across the suburb, almost directly over his house. There were fewer at weekends, when the air controllers shared out the pain across West London and there were times like this when to look up was to see magic in the great bellied flying machine, lit up like a village. That was not without gain. And sky travel was the life of his time, the globe a mere journey, the heavens reached up to. So many lives to be lived was the reality of the bold and lucky ones in his generation.

He paused at the gate and let his proprietorial gaze sweep down the trim semi-detached avenue as if appraising Versailles. He thought of the wine – three bottles, and only half a bottle of the Yugoslav Riesling left. He thought of the pâté bought by Natasha, the French cheeses and the real coffee. He lit another cigarette and looked up at the universe as if inviting it to look down on him and administer a little pat on the shoulder. This was Living in Style! Who would have believed it?

Natasha had been too exhausted to go upstairs and so she gathered her strength in her usual armchair before the empty fireplace. Joseph came in glowing and immediately she felt better.

‘There's a bit of wine left,' he said, ‘want some?'

She shook her head. Joseph poured himself a full glass and took his usual seat opposite her.

‘What did you think of Charles?'

‘Oh, Joseph, I'm tired.' His disappointed expression made her rally. ‘I think he has beautiful manners and he likes your work and he likes you and that is quite enough for a first encounter.'

‘He was funny when he talked about Angus Wilson, wasn't he?'

‘But don't you like Angus Wilson?
Such Darling Dodos
, you made me read it.'

‘Yes. But he was funny about him.'

‘He was funny against him. English humour is sometimes funny only to the funny English, Joseph. It can seem rather cruel to the rest of us. I was surprised at you.'

‘Why?' Normally he would have felt a little dented by her disapproval but tonight he was on Cloud Nine.

‘Well. Angus Wilson is a novelist you admire and so why do you like stories which show him in a bad light? You are not English as Charles is English. That cast of humour is not your cast. You were imitating him.'

‘If you're saying he's a snob I couldn't disagree more.'

‘Of course he is a snob. Harmlessly and charmingly. And he is confident in a world to which you come as a stranger. Stay a stranger, Joseph. It has great advantages. Stay outside. Sometimes you sound as if you want to be an initiate.'

‘No I don't!'

She raised her right hand, as if to say ‘pax'. His benevolence untroubled, Joseph took across a cigarette and kissed her on the forehead.

‘That was really tremendous,' he said, ‘the meal. The pâté. The wine. The – everything. Do you think it went well?'

‘Of course.' He always wanted much more. She had found the formal dinner party rather a strain.

‘Claire was a turn-up, wasn't she?'

‘Claire is lovely. You make calf's eyes at Claire, Joseph!'

‘I don't.' He did.

‘You do. But it is you. You fall a little in love with everybody you like. Now it is Ross; now it is Charles; now it is Claire. It is an aspect of your character, Joseph, though sometimes I think it is a sort of giddiness like getting drunk too quickly on a few glasses.' She paused and looked at him with a tender seriousness. ‘It is as if you need somebody all the time to be the fresh ground for your feelings, always somebody new and receptive and sometimes you become a little dependent on them for a while in the process, as with Ross.'

Joseph recognised, reluctantly, that there was truth in this but his wine-fuelled mood would not let him pause or answer: self-examination, never at that stage in his life a rigorous practice, was certainly not an option on such a night.

‘You were wonderful,' he said, ‘Charles said so. Charles said you were the cleverest woman he had ever met.'

Joseph decided he might as well finish the bottle: there was barely a glass left in it.

‘Charles knows how to flatter. And by saying that he was flattering not me but you.'

‘He meant it.'

‘Of course.'

‘I told him how great your novel was, is.'

‘Joseph!'

Her annoyance was expressed and then withdrawn. He could be such a boy! Look at that ridiculous crushed-velvet suit.

‘I pressume he told you he liked your silly suit.'

‘As a matter of fact . . .'

‘Why did you spend the money on clothes? You have never given me a satisfactory explanation. You were never interested in clothes. I thought you would buy books. Why did it all go on clothes? And not just for yourself!'

‘She likes it.'

‘It's dreadful!'

‘She loves it. Especially the little gun. “Bang! Bang!” she says, “you're dead.”'

‘Why on earth did you buy her a cowboy suit?'

Because as a boy I'd always wanted one and there was no chance. Because I knew she'd love it and she does. Because it says ‘Wigton' and not ‘Kew Gardens', it says ‘Daft' and not ‘Tasteful', it says ‘fun' and not ‘fine'.

‘I couldn't think of anything else,' he said.

‘You haven't dared wear any of your new clothes for work yet.'

‘I will.' He made the decision. ‘On Monday. This suit. Want a bet?'

‘You don't have to finish the wine, Joseph.'

He looked. More than half a glass left. His head was becoming the first turn of the carousel. He put the glass down.

She waited until he was steady and then said,

‘You were so funny tonight, Joseph, when you talked about the Irish Horse Dealers in Wigton and mimicked them and then brought in James Joyce. It was very clever. We all loved it.'

‘Even Charles?'

‘Oh, Joseph. Especially Charles.'

‘And did you? Did you?'

He beamed a drunken beam and she smiled.

When Joseph had gone to bed, she let the exhaustion overwhelm her like a swoon.

A small group from the laboratory had driven from Brittany to Provence for François's funeral. Among them was Sylvestre, the boatman with whom François had gone out most weekdays to look for specimens. Sylvestre, late middle-aged, a salt-and-sun-worn face, broad-shouldered, was uneasy in his black suit but well used to funerals.

With some skill he had manoeuvred Natasha apart from the others after the funeral, after the food and the wine.

He held out a nondescript box.

‘I want you to have this, Miss Natasha,' he said. ‘It's not much. It's shells. Plenty of the really little ones, the ones you can hardly ever find. They take a lot of digging out. François used to look out for them on the beaches we went to. He would hunt for them for so long sometimes that he came back blue with cold. He loved doing that.' He looked around. This had to be private. ‘They're all washed and clean. Some of them are so small it was my wife who had to hold them to wash. She loved him too, Miss Natasha. We all did, you know. We want you to have them.'

It had taken Natasha some time to find a big enough jar, clear, solid, like the jars on the shelves of old-fashioned chemists. The shells filled the jar almost to the brim. At the top were the rather obvious ones, bleached beige-coloured, many tones of sand; below, those fugitive minute infinitely delicate little shells, so many shades of pale pink, a treasure, a wonder not broken.

She had put the jar on the oak chest between the two candlesticks. She could look at it for hours on end.

‘I looked at Chris still asleep,' Natasha had written in her novel, ‘death, I thought, gives you a taste for death, while life does not necessarily keep its grip on you. Love – and I looked again at the face of this man whom I had known for a bare six weeks and who slept so near – love does not necessarily have a hold on you either, provided you do not fear the absence of it.'

But I am beginning to think that I do fear its absence. Natasha sat back from the old typewriter and lit another cigarette. I do fear the absence of it, or rather the absence of Joseph which has become the same thing. I still do not fully understand how it all began with Joseph, with such a stranger. Was it an exhausted surrender? He took me over. Was there a moment? Moments? When was it clinched? Was it by him or by me? After Robert, did I merely see him as the receptacle into which I could pour myself and be safe?

So I need to watch him and watch over him, she thought. He must always be in my sights although he must never feel leashed. He must stay true to what I have found in him or both of us will be lost.

And now I can live for my own sake, she thought, and now I must, for her sake. I was becalmed in the shadows for so long they became my natural habitat. I liked to hide from the light, as if looking at the sun would burn me, as if exposure would reveal a terrible nakedness. I wanted to slip through the world in a shroud, as if constantly prepared for the end, even longing for it, drugged by the fumes from the corpses of my lost lives. Joseph led me out of that. He came into my underworld and took me from it but I was waiting for him, I must have been, I was ready to attempt to climb out of the darkness that had been made for
me and by me and try with all my strength to live unhidden out here, in the sun, in the light for this brief life.

I want that now, she thought, I want to live all I can and for that I must guard Joseph and for that I must face myself, she vowed, however hard that is, not be a coward, pick off the scabs and look at the wounds. Maybe writing will help. Maybe writing will be enough.

She shuffled through the pages of the novel. Joseph had given her the title. He had made a film about Tennyson's
In Memoriam
and when they had discussed the novel, he had suggested
The Unquiet Heart.
She loved it. She had typed out two verses as the epigraph. It always reassured her to read them.

I sometimes hold it half a sin

To put in words the grief I feel;

For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,

A use in measured language lies;

The sad mechanic exercise,

Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

‘To write like that!' he had said.

Joseph often used that phrase. Ever since she had met him he would read out a passage and smile at its accuracy or its beauty and shake his head and say, ‘To write like that!' She loved him saying that; the sense of awe, and of contest. And on he went. He plunged through setbacks as an animal in flight will plunge into a dangerous river, she thought, and then attempt to scale heights beyond his strength, dismayed, exhausted but always seeking the route. Joseph existed by saying yes. Sometimes she was fearful for him, but she would catch his fall. She was strong now, through her own life, through him. She trusted him utterly to take her as she was . . .