Remember Me... (46 page)

She closed her book and waited until prompted by her action, Joseph obediently did the same with his. His eyes were not only tired, she thought: there was something else there, some misery. She could not unearth it but it fed her unease.

Like an overture, a plane braked overhead, unusually low, unusually screeching and loud. Joseph grimaced and glanced at the ceiling.

‘How many's that, just since I came back?'

‘You're tired.'

‘A bit.'

‘You're always tired these days.'

Joseph recognised the truth of that, resented it and said nothing.

‘And it is here, in this house, where the consequences are suffered.'

Joe was miles away. He was worn out by the arguments over the shape and particularly the ending of the film script. The death of the
children seemed to him essential. Saul and now Tim were not so sure. In television Ross was giving him increasing responsibility which was an opportunity but also a burden: he had been set to work on BBC2, a new channel which devoured programmes from a small and inexperienced staff. And then there was the pull of London, the temptation of sin, the greed for it all, the self-justification, the self-accusation. He took a sip of beer and remembered the Jack Daniels.

‘Every time in the last weeks you have come back from work,' Natasha said, steadily, ‘and into this house you have told me off or you have snapped at your daughter or at both of us. I understand that on occasion a marriage is and has to be the place where you are licensed to be your worst self, where you can be your opposite. But it cannot go on. Matthew would say you were a bit of a shit.'

‘I'm not a shit. Am I?'

The word had caught him like a hook in the mouth and landed him.

‘Yes.' Natasha wanted to smile at the stricken look on his face but she forbade herself that indulgence.

‘We have a wonderful daughter and I know that you love her but for you she is always in the way. You are making her afraid of you.'

‘Don't be stupid! How can she be afraid of me?'

‘Because of your anger. You have become angry. Maybe it is because of the strain of too much work although you have done something like this before. Maybe you are finding it all much harder than you imagined and you are angry at yourself for not being able to force your way to succeed.' She paused but did not hesitate. ‘I think it is deeper. There are factors I don't know about. But now you are making me fearful too.'

‘That's ridiculous. That's awful. How could I hurt you?'

‘I'm sorry, Joseph. I did not say afraid. You will never threaten me. But I am fearful of what you are becoming. I am fearful that you are being led towards the ruin of your former and best self because you think that it is too limited and too inexperienced and too provincial in this London world that you lust after, but you are very wrong, you are horribly wrong. Sometimes you are Jekyll and Hyde to me.'

‘That's ludicrous. Maybe I have been angry. I don't know why but it isn't unusual, I would guess, among men my age trying to make their way. But Jekyll and Hyde!'

‘Not very often. I exaggerated to make the point. But I can see the signs of it – and signs too that unresolved matters from your childhood are beginning to erupt into your mind and obstruct what you want to do now.'

‘Please, Natasha. Not that.'

‘Why are you beginning to do yourself harm?'

‘I'm not.'

‘I can see it.'

‘But I'm not!' He felt that a net was being thrown over him and however hard he struggled he could not get out.

‘I know you are.'

‘How can you know me better than I know myself?'

‘Oh, Joseph.'

‘Oh, Joseph! What does that mean?'

‘Sometimes the person outside can see more. With the eyes of love.'

‘It doesn't sound like love to me.'

‘That was lashing out. You didn't mean that. Look at your new friends. This Tim, for example.'

‘Tim's fine.'

‘Tim wants you to be someone else. He wants you to be his labourer. I can see you plain. You respect
Jude the Obscure.
Tim and the others are persuading you to act against your principles. They trade on your willingness to please and your pliability because you are so astounded to be writing a film script in the first place. They are tempting you to leave the path you have chosen and write a script of someone else's novel, which is against your better judgement and your better nature and you hate that and you want to hate them. But you cannot hate them as well as write their script so your hatred has to be released somewhere else and that is one reason why you are so angry with us.'

He stood up, hit, hurt, incensed. What she said was true.

‘That's not true,' he said, he shouted. ‘That's just not true! Everybody has to change things in novels when they turn them into films.'

‘Not everybody. And not everybody wants to write films. And for you it is a torment because up until now you have only ever done what you believed in and that is who you truly are. That is why you will be good. But this film script! Tim! Saul! What do they matter?'

‘Don't you realise? Don't you see?'

There was a sudden pain in Joe's chest, a stab, a sort of cramp, he guessed, but it made his right hand reach up and clutch the area around his heart. Natasha leaped up, held out her arms to him.

‘Joseph. Please. I'm sorry. Joseph.'

The pain was already easing off. Her alarm was an affirmation.

‘It's nothing,' he said, ‘too much froth in the beer.'

She leaned into him and he put his arms around her. For a while they stood silently and then Natasha whispered,

‘I love you so much, Joseph. They mustn't change you.'

How had this confusion in his head and heart so rapidly come on him? He held her more tightly. Everything was safe with Natasha and Marcelle, everything was as it should be. He knew that. In the end, he knew that.

Joe took the call in the only box room of an office available for private calls. Like all the offices, it held evidence of the preferred style of genteel bookishness which distinguished the BBC Arts Department. Pisan towers of hardbacks posted by publishers from all over London teetered on floor, desk and chairs, clearly signalling a fine excess, a careless cornucopia, something of the old college, something of the eccentric stately home. It was Tim, as he had guessed it might be, and as he had feared it was not good news.

‘I wish we could have met face to face to talk about this,' Joe began, unprompted.

‘I'm in Oxford.'

‘I could get there in an hour or so.'

‘I'm looking for locations.'

‘I know. We discussed them.'

‘Bloody good too, your suggestions,' said Tim. ‘Look. Can't take all day. I've had another discussion with Saul . . .'

Joe waited; successive waves of fury and self-pity swept through him. How could they talk about the script, his script, when he was not there? What did they know about Thomas Hardy? Why had he not listened to them? This so-called scriptwriting was nothing to do with writing at all. It
was carpentry. And even in this flash of compacted reactions he had time to remember that at school he had never been any good at carpentry.

‘Are you still there?' Tim sounded urgent but unworried.

‘Yes.'

‘There are two or three what old Saul calls “intractables”. I'll be quick. Sorry. It's starting to rain and I haven't been to – that place he ended up in yet.' Joe refused to help him out.

‘Intractables?'

‘The women. Beautifully drawn. The intellectual one, great character, and the sexy one, the two perfectly balanced. Perfectly balanced. As we discussed. As they are.'

‘That's right.'

‘That's wrong. Saul wants what he calls the sexual dynamic to play bigger.'

‘But that would destroy the balance.'

‘That's right. I said you'd say that. And all that business of Jude teaching himself Greek and so on.'

‘We have to show that or where's the story?'

‘I agree. Saul agrees. We've all been over this many times, Joe. It just takes too bloody long, old son. Somebody has to get in the scissors.'

‘Unless you believe he's an obsessive autodidact the film's dead in the water.'

‘Agreed. But we have to believe quicker. There are ways, Saul says, ways that old sweats, the old script doctors, learned with their mother's milk. And the ending.'

‘The ending is the ending.'

‘I told Saul you'd say that. Correct. The ending is the ending. The children end up dead. But it's no good sending everybody out onto the streets looking to top themselves.'

‘Why should they? Tragedy has the opposite effect. It's catharsis. Look at
Madam Butterfly.
That's popular enough.'

‘I told him you'd win the argument. But you know Saul.'

‘I don't really. Not very well.'

‘Look, Joe, bottom line: he likes you, you'll get paid, he's given it to one of those old fixers who I have to say has ironed out a few other problems as well.'

‘Somebody else has already worked on it . . .'

‘Joe. This is big-time. Saul asked me, Saul told me to tell you this. You're still on his list. He'll recommend you. You'll get more work. You're still on his list. Jesus, there's writers in Hollywood drawing their pension without getting a single script on screen. He likes you. OK?'

‘Can't we talk a bit more? To each other?'

‘Fait accompli, old boy. Kaput. Chin up. Call soon.'

Joe put down the phone very quietly. No one must see how thrown he was. No one must know about this until he was ready and prepared. He had failed. He had been fired. He had muffed his great chance. He was furious and ashamed. He picked up the phone and pretended to be listening in case anyone should look in. He should have walked off after the first confrontation. He should have gone along with them. He should have sorted out that ending but it was Hardy's ending, it was the right ending. He even moved his lips so that any gazers through the window would assume he was wholly engaged.

He could tell no one. He had to tell someone. Natasha would be sympathetic but, fundamentally, she would be pleased. She would see it as a providential escape. She would see it as proof of his integrity. She would see it as releasing time for him to get on with his own work, wholly his own, for to do that was the sole purpose of an artist's life. Even television, his livelihood, and hers, was only just tolerated by her, he thought. He had to hide this news from Natasha until the right moment. But how could he go back home now, early, so light still, and just sit and read and pretend? He could not bear the thought.

It was difficult to admit this even to himself but he did: he felt like crying with frustration. To be given such an opportunity and be found wanting. To fail and on such a project. How could he look anybody in the eye again?

He put down the phone, picked it up and dialled.

‘Hello. I hoped you'd still be in the cutting room. Would you like – it's a bit short notice – in an hour or so, the Pillars of Hercules, just a drink, one drink?'

On several occasions, since the film, he had not got home until midevening and she was not yet disturbed by that. He was falsely cheerful when he arrived, she recognised that with dismay, and he held up a bottle of red wine. He said he wanted to watch the new Dennis Potter play. They saw it through in near silence. He drank most of the wine.

‘That play was better than any feature film I've seen all year,' he said angrily. ‘It was far more ambitious. And no selling out. Television's far more honest.'

Natasha tried to decode him but he kept the vital evidence hidden.

His anger festered for two days until finally he confessed the news about the script, still angry as if in some scarcely sane way she ought to have understood what was disturbing him without his having to say anything at all. It was a situation which would recur. He could not bear to admit failure or defeat or hurt to her, but he could not bear it that she did not somehow divine the problem and help solve it. She was glad, she said, after sympathising and agreeing that Tim was treacherous. He could spend more time on the new novel he had already begun.

She thought he had begun the new novel too soon, that he ought to have taken time off, time away from his fiction, time to dream, time to drift, but she understood. This immediate start was insurance in case the reception of
A Chance Defeat
was such that he would never summon up the confidence to pick up a pen again. Natasha sympathised with that and she was relieved that he was already doing what he should be doing. She was glad the film was dead.

Once more they would write together and Natasha would know they were safe. But only, she now knew, if she could be the guardian of their flame.

‘We rarely took photographs of each other', he told their daughter. ‘Neither family. Natasha's hoard was meagre, mine mostly school snaps. A camera was not part of our baggage, more's the pity. Of the very few we did take I can identify only one from this precise period when, looking back, our lives were eerily becalmed, like a targeted boat in a film, waiting for the killer whale to torpedo up from the deep and destroy.

‘Natasha is sitting in the wooden shelter in the garden of the Builder's Arms. We fell into the habit (or I persuaded her, did she need persuasion?) of going down to Reading once a fortnight, sometimes even once a week. We would arrive early on Saturday evening so that there would be time for my mother to take her granddaughter out for some sort of treat. We would spend the latter part of the evening in the pub, invariably ending up singing “the old songs”: “Goodbye Dolly Gray”, “Pack up Your Troubles”, “Tipperary”, “April Showers”, “California!”, other Jolson favourites and a few from Bing Crosby and Sinatra, even up to Johnnie Ray and Engelbert Humperdinck.