Remember Me... (33 page)

Jessica had been warm to Natasha from the moment they met. Joe had told her about Natasha's painting and Jessica, in her mid-thirties a few years older and key stages further on in her career, took equality
and a painterly comradeship so unpatronisingly for granted that Natasha, who had expressed doubts about joining them on the filming, found her doubts dissolve and even seem a little shameful, having prejudged someone to their disadvantage. Nevertheless she had followed only a small percentage of the filming, preferring to find a place of her own in which to sketch, or to read in the old-fashioned, oak-beamed lounge of the small distinguished hotel.

Joe brought back a double whisky for Alex, a large brandy for Jessica, nothing for Natasha who had merely sipped at her third glass of wine, and for himself a malt whisky, his first, a Glenfiddich recommended by the barman.

‘Here's to Jessica,' he said, and accepted her offer of a Black Sobranie.

‘Happy days,' said Alex, raising his glass and looking very directly at Jessica, ‘but for somebody like you, I expect every day is happy.'

‘Why's that?' Jessica took such a pull at her brandy that Joe feared she might want more.

‘Artists,' said Alex, shaking his greying head, ‘do what they want to do. Result – happiness.'

‘You're an artist,' she said, ‘are you happy?'

‘I just take the pictures,' he said, ‘the best that could be said is that it's a bit of a knack.'

‘I disagree,' she said, drank again and looked at Joe, who looked across at the barman who understood and brought another. ‘Photographers call themselves artists – look at Robert Frank, look at Cartier Bresson. And film cameramen do more than they do. But are you happy? If you are happy you can't be an artist. All artists have to be unhappy.'

‘Rubbish,' said Joe. He sipped the elatingly light malt whisky and considered the matter closed.

‘It is not rubbish,' said Jessica in a level tone recognised as anger by Natasha.

‘OK. We're all unhappy now and then. But to say an artist
has
to be unhappy, how can you generalise?'

‘Disturbed might be better,' said Jessica, finishing the brandy as the next arrived on the table, ‘or depressed, flawed in some way, or
wounded. Or all of them together, most likely. And the greater the flaws and the deeper the wounds the better the artist. Look at Van Gogh. Look at Kafka. Look at John Clare. Look at Nijinsky. Cheers.'

Natasha saw that Joe was drunk. She saw also a stubborn look about him now, a look, she feared, which indicated the clouding of reason through the poison of alcohol.

‘Look at Jane Austen,' he said. ‘Look at Henry Fielding. Look at Picasso if you want. And nobody said Shakespeare was “wounded” or “flawed” or “depressed”. He just got on with it.'

‘We know nothing about the private lives, the real lives of those people,' Jessica said, sitting bolt upright on her chair. She looks like a witch, Alex thought, a beautiful wicked witch. ‘Whenever we do find out anything about them we always discover that they have been traumatised.'

‘Not all.' Joe sipped again: it went down so sweetly. ‘Not all.'

‘All. All who are any good.'

‘What do you think?'

Natasha sought a neutral exit. She rather agreed with Jessica, but Joe was already becoming flustered.

‘She agrees with me,' said Jessica and gave Natasha a loving smile. ‘But she doesn't want to say so.'

Joe smiled at what he saw as flattery.

‘Natasha always says what she thinks,' he said.

‘I think,' said Natasha, as truthfully as she could, ‘that the roots of all creativity are so tangled and dark that any attempt to identify them, using a single method, is bound to be unsatisfactory.'

‘There you are,' said Joe.

‘She agrees with me,' said Jessica.

‘Couldn't both of you be right?' Alex turned to the bar and pointed to his empty whisky glass and also to Joe's much diminished malt.

‘You absolutely
know
I'm right, though,' Jessica said, ‘don't you, Natasha?'

‘Look,' said Joe, with only a slight slur, ‘you are absolutely not right. Not absolutely right. What about cathedrals? They're the best art. Or those Egyptian statues. Whoever was depressed building a cathedral or a sphinx unless he was a poor sod of a slave? Then he was just unhappy
with life, full stop. Because he was a slave. Not because he was an artist, which he was. It was being an artist that kept him going most likely, although he wouldn't be allowed to think of himself as an artist, not in those days, poor sod. And was the man in the Lascaux Caves traumatised? That's the question. Was he?'

‘Undoubtedly,' said Jessica, enjoying Joe's flailing.

‘Tripe. Anyway. Who knows? And who cares? I think his cave drawings are better than Picasso's. Picasso probably nicked them. You all do.'

‘Artists?'

‘Yes. Look how they robbed Africa. Modigliani. A man in Paris showed me the evidence years ago.' Natasha was puzzled at the surly tone of personal resentment.

‘I bet you think women should know their place as well.'

‘What place? What's women got to do with it? I like women.'

‘No you don't. Not strong women. Not women who argue back.'

‘What do you know? Anyway, what's it got to do with art? You just jump about.'

Jessica applauded. ‘Come to Cumberland to see the world in a nutshell!'

‘Why not? That's what you do, isn't it? Paint these hills to be all hills and all moods and all everything.' He reached out for his second malt and Natasha forced herself not to warn him off it. ‘A grain of sand, Jessica,' he waved the malt whisky, ‘remember that we see the world in a grain of sand.'

‘Blake was a depressive,' she said. ‘He was seriously unhappy.'

‘For Christ's sake! Was Turner, who is miles better than Blake, was Turner depressive?'

‘We don't know enough.'

‘That's always your cop-out.' Joe brooded for a few moments but inside the muddied stirrings of his mind the moments seemed an age of contemplation. ‘The trouble is you can say what you like because nobody knows and all I'm saying is that the opposite of what you say is just as true like most so-called famous generalisations: the opposite is always just as true.'

‘You're unhappy but you won't admit it,' said Jessica, whose slender body was fortified and steadied, it seemed at this stage, by alcohol. She swept back the second brandy.

‘Beddy byes?' said Alex, his hopes of a conquest deflated.

‘You are very, very unhappy,' said Jessica and she held his eyes in her gaze as intensely as a hypnotist. ‘And until you admit it you'll write nothing any good.'

‘Admit what?'

The bravado in his tone alerted Natasha.

‘Admit it,' said Jessica sotto voce. ‘We're twins, Joe. And polar opposites. Admit it.'

‘Admit what?'

This time it was more of a plea and Natasha remembered that her best friend and bridesmaid, Frances, now in America, had spoken of seeing the ‘shadows' around Joseph and she had dismissed the insight as merely part of Frances's psychic indulgence. But undoubtedly, now, the shadows were gathering over him. He was losing something of himself. It was unlike anything she had seen in him before.

‘Confess the suffering. Admit the pain.' Jessica beat her hands on the arm of the chair.

Natasha saw a face of Joseph which was new to her. It had loosened. There was some fear in it and an unmistakable violence. Even his voice had changed, thicker toned, coarser.

‘It's not fair,' he said, picking out the monosyllable with great care. ‘I mean – it's not true.'

But as he spoke particles of fracturing memories swirled through his mind and he was infested again by the distress of adolescent years when he was imprisoned in panic, distraught, when his consciousness drifted uncontrollably away from his body and took away the life of him, when he saw a spot of light which was him, his soul, his being, hover above him, threatening to leave him for dead.

He thought that had gone for good. Even now it was impossible for him fully to admit to himself, let alone articulate to anyone else, what had been a severe depression, a breakdown, which for almost two years had made him febrile, afraid of solitude, afraid of cracking into a howl of desperation, helplessly isolated in that small town just a few miles
away. But how could he call out? Be such a baby. Be such a coward. And who would listen or understand? Time, the shedding of skins through growing adolescent strengths, work. Rachel and now Natasha had cauterised that, he thought, he believed, he needed to believe.

He looked at Natasha, puzzled, holding on, breathing in shallow gasps, mouth slackening: he looked at Natasha for faith.

‘I can see . . .'

‘No!' Natasha held up her hand to Jessica and pushed it towards her as if she were physically warding off a curse. ‘No!' They held each other's look.

Suddenly Jessica relaxed. A sweet and gentle smile transformed her face to innocence. She blew Natasha a kiss. ‘Come to my room,' she said to Alex. ‘Bring brandy.'

And with another blown kiss to Natasha and a triumphant look at the downcast lolling head of Joe, she left them, quickly followed by a greatly confused Alex bearing brandy.

The barman came across with a large glass of water. Natasha nodded her thanks and indicated he should retreat. She waited for Joseph to look up. She knew something now that she had not previously known about him. She knew the fear that was all but suffocating him. When he did look up, so helpless, so ashamed, she could have wept. This was another Joseph, this was a different man, stripped bare.

‘In the first years, Kew Gardens was very good for us. Once your mother (as I came to think at tremendous expense of willpower) had overcome or repressed the fears triggered by the sound of the braking, descending aeroplanes, she found a mooring safe until the waters rose to a flood. She seemed happier for a longer period, her friends would say, than at any time in her life. The darkness was still in her but because I was away much of the day and because, I now realise, she saved up or at least waited for my return, to talk, to be together, to express all that spirit and vivacity that was hers, I did not see much of the darkness and when it revealed itself as fatigue or a clinging cold or a lustreless depression, I was always confident I could help her through it. I revelled in being able to help her, acting not as the flawed and disturbed man I knew myself to be but as someone whole, strong, further strengthened by helping one who was weaker. And I loved her so much.

‘I remember getting off the tube at Kew Gardens and stepping out to get home, longing to put the key into the door to hear her voice and see her walk towards me and me to her, that small hall made a trysting place night after night. We continued to dwell, on one level, in an atmosphere of idealism which, I now think, was not only unsustainable but carried the seeds of destruction within it; for any falling away came to seem to be a fundamental failing of the marriage. Yet one of the most powerful attractions between us was that the marriage allowed and encouraged this idealism, that was at its core, for her always and for me equally in the early years. And it was so good: it was so fine, our attempt to find and capture the best of life.

‘We continued to read out passages of our books to each other. We were austere and high-minded in our artistic tastes and judgements to
an extent that to outsiders might have hit caricature and been sneered at but to us was the only way to live. Our judgements on events, works, people, were unforgiving and although we disagreed often enough we were together inside our own bubble of exhilarated certainties which, again to outsiders, could have seemed arrogant and foolish but to us were goals to be pursued, truths to be grasped, the world as we found it to be thought through. In this she led.

‘There were other levels. Of course. There were two people boxed in together playing Blind Man's Bluff, bumping into the furniture of our old lives, grappling with the stranger who was often more evident than the lover. There were two uprooted exiles. I wanted her to remain my ideal, older, wiser, more stern, richer in history and character: she, I think, wanted me to become her project, younger, apparently malleable, innocent, responsive to guidance. I could make her laugh, both at me and with me. She could always make me smile in admiration.

‘Was our high-mindedness merely overreaching conceit? Did it become hubris? It was serious, believe me; it felt real. But maybe it was a fond falseness, tempting nemesis, too long sealed off, waiting to be exposed and crumble in the light.

‘We were convinced that reading great literature would lead us to great thoughts and teach us how to write great works ourselves; we, or rather Natasha, had that capacity of the refined intellectual to find in the most mundane exchange a key which would turn it into an abstract discussion. That was what mattered. We enjoyed adequate means and on that basis were mutually unworldly, not contemptuous of but uninterested in a life of getting and spending.'

‘It really was like that,' he told their daughter, knowing very well that overemphasis could be counter-productive, but wanting to make sure she knew at least how much it meant to him to tell her.

‘At that time we seemed to spin around each other closer and closer in perfect gravity.'

Julia had said on her first visit to Natasha, ‘London suburbs are all right for children – they know nothing else – both Matthew and I grew up in a London suburb. But for adults? I think not.' Natasha was pleased as the months went by to discover that her experience contradicted Julia's pronouncement. Perhaps she was reliving a missed part of her childhood. Perhaps, she thought, we all have to spend part of our adult lives filling in the unexperienced but necessary parts of our childhood in order to make us fit for present purpose. There was a feeling of tolerance and kindness in the Kew suburb and something of a child's dream landscape in the exotic amplitude of the Gardens. She drifted through them in the early months again and again, soothed by the fantasies of juxtapositions and lulled into a waking sleep by the eternal flow of the Thames.