Remember Me... (42 page)

As she made a bowl of coffee she realised how little she understood
and did it help, even the little she understood? Or was the best way just an acceptance inside the inevitable?

She went into the garden, carrying the coffee, like a libation to the dawn; she could understand libations to the dawn. The rising of the sun must not have seemed inevitable on many a dark night. She went beyond the garden and further into the pines. She left behind her, in the wooden chalet, the four people she loved most in the world: Joseph, their daughter, her father, François – how could the one word, love, describe the nuances and the differences? Yet it served, she did not know how, to embrace tenderness, passion, respect, admiration, protectiveness, dependency, constancy.

There was the sea, calm on this morning of the Fête des Filets Bleus. The beaches were empty, the gulls held the rocks. Out there, when she narrowed her eyes, there were as always the small boats trailing the blue nets in the dark water. Soon enough the bands would arrive and the parade would begin, her heart would swell a little at the simple demonstration of continuity and victory over long voyages in unsafe waters, of the women looking out to sea, waiting for the homecoming, of the small community on this short strip of shore on the edge of the Atlantic celebrating its unity and survival. Joseph would romanticise about that.

He would also romanticise about the sea which was now beginning to sparkle as the sun's face moved higher from the east. He could go into states of almost instant exhilaration where she could not follow. Either in his nature, from his birth, or from those fractured boyhood experiences there had grown a religious, even a mystical feeling about the vastness, the unknowability, the interconnectedness of life and what sustained it, what moved it, a feeling almost entirely foreign to Natasha. Sometimes she could dream herself into a luxurious self-hypnosis, looking at the stars, looking out at the sea, but she was never far away from a more powerful sense of being puzzled or, more often, an overwhelming impulse to find out how it all worked. She was content with that, content as now with the fact that this was the sea and the morning light on the sea was beautiful in her eyes though to the fishermen it would just be work, to others an obstacle to cross or, as used by Joseph when he swam out to the rocks like an otter, a facility to turn happiness into health. What was really out there she did not know
and such intimations as she had were no more than scattered showers on the fathomless indifference.

They would all be stirring soon. She took a final sip of the coffee, poured the remainder on the ground and walked back quickly, suddenly eager to be in the house, with them, with all of them.

Natasha kept clear of the main flow of the procession which took place under the midday sun, first along the coast road then marching into the town and finally across the causeway where troupe after troupe, pipes and drums skirling, walked between the waters into the narrow streets to the arena whose thick walls fronted the Atlantic. She took care never to let go of her daughter's hand. She had encouraged Joseph to go off with François and his friends whom she categorised as ‘just like your friends in Cumberland'. Her father had said he would go his own way. Even on the day of the Fete he wanted to spend some hours in the laboratory and making arrangements on such a day of flux was pointless, he said. But, Natasha thought sadly, the other woman would share his time.

She remembered the day as a series of impressions. She knew the work of the Impressionists who had painted in Brittany near by. The broken daylight on the sea had provided the perfect subject. But so had the crowds, and those painters' interest in the movement of crowds could be both understood and realised, Natasha thought, in the gaudily clad marchers, the thronging spectators in holiday mood, the common open air, the constantly moving complex of light and people, of sky, sea and the gulls swooping along the shore.

Monique was in the procession and waved and both of them waved back, Natasha holding the child high in her arms. The tall Englishman in the white suit was joined by an equally tall young woman also in white and they stood on a wall, above the crowd, as if taking the salute. She saw Joseph several times, intent, smiling, shot through she could tell with the drama and the music, sometimes with François and his friends, sometimes alone. Her father was there at one point with Mademoiselle Benoît. She linked Louis's arm in an open companionable way.

Natasha eavesdropped on bits of the local broadly accented conversation which were like manna and made her homesick for the country she was in. When the sun began to sink over the wide sea to the west, mother and daughter walked quite freely around the town as most of the crowd had decanted into the fortress to watch the competitions of music, dancing, boules and to admire the intricate mediaeval hats and the densely embroidered aprons.

It was at this time, along the front, that she met François, drunk and alone, and she guided him protesting home and straight to his room so that their father would not discover him. He told her that his mother had said he had to leave Brittany and go south to Montpellier University in the autumn; that Alain had a friend there who had found a course he could do. He told her that he was going to run away and join the navy or become a hobo in America or hide in the houses of his new friends, anything to avoid university, he hated university, he hated everybody who went to university, they were snobs and phonies and they knew nothing and they were not pals like his new pals, they were all false.

He fell into a stupor of sleep as soon as he lay on his bed.

Isabel listened patiently. Alain had found an excuse not to attend what was clearly to be an emotional confrontation in the Prévost house in La Rotonde. Véronique was drinking her wine unusually quickly.

‘She is intolerable,' Véronique stubbed out half a cigarette. ‘She has always been intolerable. From the beginning of our marriage there was this glaring girl looking at me as if I had murdered her mother and stolen her father. She was never reconciled. When she went away to the convent school I thought, peace at last, but we had reports of her truancy and bad behaviour and Louis and I talked about her. We talked and talked, Isabel. We talked about Natasha more than all the other children added together, more than about ourselves. Natasha occupied our minds. We made plans for Natasha, we quarrelled over Natasha. We were exhausted over Natasha.'

‘I know.' Isabel watched intently, nodded, waited.

‘We had some respite when she went to Oxford although whenever she came back I felt her presence working against me. It was baleful. I
was a criminal. But, I am sorry, Isabel, she was away in another country and I was happy, yes, I was happy, and then she married but what happens? She comes back again!'

‘It is Joseph who encourages her to come, Véronique. It is Joseph.'

‘But now with François! She telephones me. Louis telephones me. Natasha says he mustn't go to Montpellier. She sounds angry one moment and quite mad, we both know she can be quite mad, at other moments. She wants him to drive a lorry and live with the men who work on the boats or whatever they do. It will be amusing for a while but what of his life, Isabel? What of his future? And Louis is angry with me. Why is he always angry with me when François is the subject? He is our son, both of Louis and me. I know François is not a scholar as Louis wants him to be. He doesn't work, he is sly, he evades all his responsibilities, he has tormented me. Like Natasha. Why? And now the two of them together. It is intolerable, Isabel. It is insupportable.'

Isabel waited until Véronique had poured herself another drink. Her own glass was still full. She spoke quietly and slowly, in contrast to Véronique's rapid and agitated delivery.

‘It is terrible for you, my sweet,' she said, ‘it has been difficult from the very beginning. It was tragic from the beginning, Véronique, and there were faults on all sides, on all sides, my sweet, we cannot forget that. And Natasha was a child. We do not know what is inherited and she can be so very like her mother that I gasp, I say to Alain, “She is born again,” but she was a baby who . . . Let us leave it there, Véronique. Time moves on. We move with it or we are lost. We are not in the confessional, we do not have to reveal everything to each other. We know what was in the past but she was the child.

‘And now, with François, well, Véronique, it was you, I have to say this, who allowed or encouraged François to go to London and live with Natasha and Joseph because that is what he did, in effect, in the first year of her marriage. She gave him so much of herself – you told me that, Louis told Alain how good Natasha and Joseph had been for François and it cannot have been easy for them, a young couple, just started, neither of them at home in London, so different, those two, held together only by the grand passion or the idea of grand passion which is very fragile when there is nothing else to support it, no family,
no common history, no common language, at the heart of it. Such a grand passion needs to be nursed. They did not know that. Joseph is very young and Natasha can be blind, her obsessions, this bad self-absorption – but they reached out their hands to François and they helped him, Véronique, and Natasha has become deeply involved with him and so there is no wonder. Is there?'

It was early evening. They were in the big room which was part of the old wall and faced east. There was a balcony outside the central window and from there a steep drop onto the rocks far below. The great stone walls kept the room cool. The two women sat face to face across a small card table. Isabel now sipped at her wine to take the dryness out of her throat. The silence built up and Isabel picked out from the next room the ticking of an old clock which Louis had inherited.

‘You were always on her side,' said Véronique, savagely.

‘That is not true,' said Isabel. ‘You are upset. I understand. But it is not true. Yes! I love Natasha like a daughter. Yes! But she is not my daughter. And Louis I love and you, Véronique. I am not on anybody's side and I think, with Alain, that François should come to Montpellier at the end of next month, he should make one last attempt, here in a part of the world that he knows and it is so much less competitive than Paris. No Louis for a start! He needs to make friends in his own class. Natasha has gone too far. I will tell her that.'

‘You will?'

‘Of course. You have to draw lines. You and Louis are the parents. Natasha is obstinate.' She took out a cigarette but did not offer one to Véronique: each was smoking her own brand. ‘But so am I.'

‘So how do I tell you this? I don't want a long build-up, I don't want the action picture. It should be sudden, like it was. François was driving back from St Malo about two weeks after we had returned to London. It was late at night and I would guess he was at least a little drunk and he loved to drive fast, just as he loved to go as fast as possible in the boat. He hit a wall, smack on. They said the death would have been instantaneous. Natasha's grief was terrible to witness.'

Grief isolated her. She was so deeply drawn into it, so pulled into its apparently infinite darkness, that nothing could come near her that was not itself claimed for this grief. Even her daughter to whose needs she ministered dutifully, whose play and mere movements could strike chords of consolation, even she was best kept at some distance emotionally, best left out of this self-consuming struggle. Ellen came to stay and took the child off her hands for hours at a time.

As for Joe his quick and earnest sympathy was inadequate, he felt, although Natasha protested that he was helpful. He did not feel it. He could not follow her. The sense of each other through feelings alone became more faint and words failed. He felt pushed away. She needed to be left alone to inhabit this circle of grief and to save herself from it. For she felt the grief could engulf and extinguish her; so much guilt at what had not been done, so much sorrow at what had not been done, so much shame at what had been done to François, so undefended. Grief blighted her feelings.

Neither then nor later could Joe come to terms with a sort of jealousy. How could Natasha's grief make him jealous? That low, vile thing, a taint on such grief. Did it mean that he was jealous of the force of feeling displayed towards another man albeit her brother, her half-brother? That was plausible though not at the heart of it, he thought. It was the grief itself, the way it possessed her as love for him had never so fully possessed her. He saw grief as the fullest expression of her feelings, the most passionate, the most unqualified he had ever seen in her and it was not directed at him.

They spent a weekend in Oxford with Matthew and Julia and Joe's anxiety dissipated by the hour as Julia's tender and teasing manner seemed to help heal Natasha. Joe was flattered at Matthew's curiosity about the metropolitan line he was following. He had assumed that his job was far below the high calling of scholarship, but Matthew displayed a close interest in it and Joe felt that what he did was acceptable. He was grateful for that. The weekend passed in undirected talk with the younger couple scarcely noticing the efforts being made by their older, wiser friends. Their daughter was commandeered by Matthew and Julia's children and she was delighted to be the little spoiled playmate.

They came back on an early evening train on Sunday, leaving Oxford in its May glory with regret: in Oxford both of them had sunk into nostalgia and Paddington Station seemed particularly grimy, soulless and unwelcoming. Joe saw that Natasha looked tired again, and the child, too, was weary, as if the weekend had been wiped out by that short journey from the university city. He decided against taking the underground. The taxi fare was just about within reach.

As they crossed over Kew Bridge, the Thames flowing softly beneath them, and came on Kew Green, the beautiful Georgian church, the cricket pitch just lately used, and swung alongside Kew Gardens towards home, Natasha's sadness sweetened. If only she could ignore the licence to unleash her implacable monsters that the death of François had given her; if only she could see what she had for what it was, fortunate in love, rich in daily life; if only she could see her life like that for more than a few illuminated moments and not look as she did at the outbursts of blossom, apple blossom, pear and most of all the cherry blossom, and think soon it will be gone, this blossom, this beauty, soon it will be dead.