Remember Me... (37 page)

Ellen's a girl again, Sam thought, she's the girl I courted, she's the young woman I married, she's the woman who flung herself into my arms when I came back from the war.

‘I want to go back right away. I would have stayed on but an aunt of hers was on the way from France. But I will go back as soon as I can.'

Sam thought she was going to dance around the kitchen. She was transformed.

‘And I decided. We have to be nearer. Not London. I couldn't tolerate living in London. But somewhere nearer. They are so far away, Sam, and so expensive to get to. You have to get somewhere nearer to them.'

‘Ellen! You? Leave Wigton?'

‘But, Sam,' she burst out in tears of happiness and relief and pride, ‘Sam – they're our family. She's our family!'

‘So here we are,' said Alain, reading once again from Natasha's letter, ‘“She is like a rosebud.
Voilà!
I cannot believe she is with us. I cannot believe I have done this.” You see! A triumph.'

‘I will go again in two or three months.'

‘You were right in what you did not say, Isabel. You were right to take the opportunity to say nothing.'

‘And always there is the fear that I do not do her justice,' he wrote, ‘and always there is the suspicion that I take the easy way and merely condemn Joe.' There were only two other tables occupied in the glass front area of the café. He thought, but could not be certain, that he and Natasha had come here on their first visit to Paris. He could spread himself. The coffee and cognac for old times' sake; the pen and pad; and on the other side of the glass, thronging the pavement on this Holy Thursday where once there would have been pilgrims, there were now tourists, their secular descendants, guide books for prayer books, souvenirs for relics, worship unbroken. He was waiting for their daughter. She wanted to take him to Vespers in Notre Dame. She had lived in Paris in a retreat for a month. Now it was over. He waited for her with something akin to the anticipation with which he had waited many years ago for her mother.

‘She is still here,' he wrote, ‘in 2005, more than forty years on from that first visit. Sometimes I feel the city cobwebbed in our memories. I look for the spot where we waltzed along the banks of the Seine and I sang “Under the Bridges of Paris”: it doesn't matter that I can't find the precise spot, it is the looking for it. I write this in a café in Rue des Ecoles next to the Sorbonne, and can see your mother arriving, as you will soon arrive, looking so like her now. You have matured into her, even similar gestures, how could you have picked them up so young? Your eyes lit with an inner delight or mischief, that rather long, rather serious face gentled into warmth by the flickering smile, the grace of you, of her, in Paris, in which we did not come to live . . . Should I have made that happen for her, for you, for me? I sit and wait for you and
write in a café like a philosophical Frenchman, and try again to find the truth of it for you.

‘Memory, Imagination and Language, those three, and the greatest of these? Together they make us what we are, perhaps even why we are, but the weak hold we have on them is never so exposed as when we try to write truth. Language, even that used by the best, is always an approximation to that changing, slithering, half-lit, half-understood complex of sensation and experience; grasping water. So many of these arbitrary expressions, perfect in their time, are eroded by time, by over-use, non-use, changed use, multiple use, burned out, quaint, dimmed, become opaque. Yet Language is at least accessible, through its nature. But Imagination? An almighty faculty which can take us back in thought to the beginning of the universe faster than the speed of light, which can lead us into ancient and alien cultures, into the hearts of strangers, into the minds of genius, and into those common sympathies which hold the world together, Imagination is like the ocean Newton saw undiscovered before him as he picked up a few pebbles of knowledge on the beach and which to understand, finally, might be to understand all things.

‘But of those three it is Memory, for me, now, reaching out to you, that is the most tormenting. There is no possibility and no point in trying to remember “everything” about Natasha; nor is strict remembering the way of it for me. It is too fragmented, too unreliable, unshaped, a landscape without the definition of final meaning, undermined by shame, veiled by guilt. Your mother has to be fiction and yet she has to be attached to some of my recollections which rise up from the sea bed like monsters, or erupt into an unready mind like volcanoes or are frustratingly near yet ungraspable as they are today in Paris, in this café, with spring aching to be born, but the leaves still furled, hidden in the bough.'

You materialised quite suddenly.

‘You were out of this world,' she said.

‘You're early.'

‘I don't want us to be late.' She smiled down on me. Her hair usually fell free and long: for this occasion she had braided it around her head. ‘What were you writing about?'

‘Mum. And me. And now you.'

You giggled. Once I had feared the sound, just a little, it felt too nervous to be good. Now I knew better; it was a ripple from that reservoir of joy you have made for yourself, despite everything, in defiance of everything, challenging everything.

‘When can I read it?'

‘When it's done.'

‘What if I don't like it?'

‘Then you will be its only reader.'

She nodded, rather gravely. In the silence our agreement was sealed.

‘Did you and Mum go to Notre Dame?'

‘Yes. But only once together. She hated it.'

But you loved it, didn't you? As I do and as I did so uniquely that Holy Thursday evening with you. You as an adult have found and deeply drunk in a faith I drowned in so happily, blindly as a boy and since have seen fade and drain away. But now and then it revives, sometimes fleetingly, even mockingly like the moon refusing to come out clean from behind the hills of clouds but sometimes plain, bold, as it was at Vespers in Notre Dame with you a few months ago.

I had never attended Vespers and so I expected it to be like the Anglican sung evensong observed in all the cathedral cities of Britain and executed by pupils from the cathedral choir schools, boys chosen for the beauty of their voices. Recently I had heard at evensong the choirs of Wells Cathedral and of York Minster and on both occasions been taken over by the song of the past and thoughts on the continuity and the mystery of things as those pure voices soared high into the stone ceilings, voices as they had been on these holy sites for centuries, plainsong uninterrupted in celebration and praise of God no matter what the assaults without or within the church, no matter even the indifference which produced a congregation on both those evenings fewer in number than the choir. Vast spaces of the cathedral were empty. Only the gallant few, as I saw them, huddled around the singers, as if for warmth, determined to bear witness.

By contrast, in Notre Dame even before the service began there was the full tide of a crowd. The area cordoned off for the Vespers congregation filled up steadily and you said we had better take care to find seats, which we did in, for me, the comfort of the back row. But as we waited what I was most aware of, more than the great rose windows or the candlelight which seemed to burnish the darkness, or the surge of the stone like a growth of nature, more than the animal whisper and shuffle of the tourists and non-worshippers in the darker regions of the cathedral, was your expression, which I glimpsed, I hope, without your noticing: stern and intent and enraptured.

The minister entered in his heavy white robes and his mitre and a junior cleric swung the incense which even reached out to us, about a quarter way up the nave. Then the organ began. I had not expected that. In our cathedrals it is often voices alone but here the great organ suffused the cathedral in sound made sacred by the place itself and I knew as I had done at times gone by that faith could be gained with no words spoken and music could be the voice of God.

And then she began to sing.

I had expected a choir. I had thought that the woman who stood alone and apart was about to read a passage from the Bible as, clad in a long blue cassock which looked like silk in the candlelight, she stood before a lectern which bore a book. But it was her book of songs. Her voice was crystal, single against the orchestra of chords from the organ, ringing to the vaults as might be of heaven, and she looked a little like you, more like your mother.

Soon I abandoned any attempt to translate the words and let the voice and the organ fill me with their sounds whose intention needed no translation. I saw, I believed, standing beside you in your belief, and seeing her sing, ‘seeing' Natasha, a messenger. I was taken over by the sacred sound, the intimations and revelations which seemed magnetised by this sound. Later I remembered, as an adolescent, standing on a cliff edge in West Cumberland, looking over the sea at a rainstorm far off, knowing it would soon reach the land on which I stood and feed the streams which filled the oceans which fed the rain clouds and that simple circularity, naïf as it might now appear, struck me then, fifty years ago, as a defining insight into the wholeness of life.

Here, in Notre Dame, beside you, for those moments, if ever in my life I did, I believe that, in my seventh decade, I may have had a similar glimpse into the heart of things. That it was impenetrable and incomprehensible did not matter. There had been a beginning and we were still part of it and it is in us. Wherever you look in the old creation myths there is this assertion, this confidence. And when you look into the new physics of it, what is there but the same? The same Nothing Known which is also the heart of all things: fundamental essential particles as unseen as angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. It was as if I soared, I flew, for those few minutes I was resurrected and so was Natasha and through sensation I understood . . .

And then the music stopped. Why could it not go on for ever was a childish but, to confess, a true reaction. Why could it not go on for ever?

I did not tell you any of this then because you had your own thoughts, your own feelings which you did not want to reveal to me. Best at some crucial times not to talk. Silently, we left Notre Dame and came out to an evening calm and free, a darkening sky, the Seine flowing swiftly and I had a sudden sharp desire to eat and drink.

On some days when Natasha went out wheeling first a pram and then a pushchair she caught a sight of herself in a shop window and wondered who this person was, so sedately pushing the child before her, so clearly one of the wife and child class of Kew Gardens, so irrevocably slotted into the expected pattern.

It was a club you joined and there was novelty in that for someone who had carved loneliness into a sort of self-sufficiency. But she was strange, this person reflected in the window of the butcher's shop, she seemed so calm and possessed, above all so complete, with the child, a woman fulfilled, surely? Yet what did it say about the Natasha who had just recently begun to feel confident on her own? Now she was two. Something had been given by her but something had been taken from her. What if the strongest of her had gone into the child, the best of her?

Her new friends in Kew had prepared her for the tiredness and the treadmill. Like all forewarnings, the reality had wiped the floor with the predictions and only now, more than a year on, was she beginning to recover her body fully, be more than a servant to its ceaseless demands. But they had not prepared her for this sometimes blankness of being. Who was the woman reflected in the big shop window? Was her time of being the individual she wanted to be over just as it had begun? She knew the thought was selfish but it was there and she was not going to duck it. Natasha felt that she had stepped through the glass into a different world. It was as if with and through the child she had set off on another journey entirely and discovered a way of life quite different, even alien to the one she had had, and there was no return. A solitary
life had been ended and for ever. And she looked ill, spots on her forehead, pasty skin, saggy body: that was no help.

But nor had they truly foretold the moments of sweetness, the glimpses of joy, the first words presented to Joseph, the first steps delighted in, the assuming of settled features, the knitting together of a mind, a smile, a gesture, later a question, an action. Natasha could be entranced and quite suddenly thrown high in the air as she witnessed the blind, universal process of growing. She sketched her – there was a period of months when catching the mood of the child in the sketches was her work. It was as if she had to know in every way she could what this child was like. As if her drawn record was essential lest she lose her. Or be lost to her. The intense preoccupation proved to be some counterweight to the downward plunge, sometimes it seemed the freefall of her self-confidence.

For underneath everything was the drowning fear of not knowing. The birth had brought into her world not only her child but her mother, the mother who had left just after her own birth. How could she let that happen, get that ill, let go, leave me? There was about her own child sometimes a dread reminder of her own childhood. Yet there was hope, too, as if the baby was a messenger from out there bringing her news of what had happened, if only she could decode it.

Joseph slept lightly now, beginning to be unsettled, as she had once been, by the relentless trail of aeroplanes over their house: so the night feed was something of a relief for him, an excuse to be awake, and it let him feel useful. He could change a nappy as neatly as she could. On weekends he took charge in the mornings and went out to the park, into the Gardens or along the river, leaving Natasha in the empty house to breathe easily and alone for a few hours. When he came home through the week, he went immediately to their daughter and Natasha was only faintly jealous, glad that the love between daughter and father seemed so intense. His love for their daughter gave her a growing conviction that she was stronger, that between them they would always hold him.