Remember Me... (48 page)

‘I did. He said that had been taken into account.'

‘The chap from the European Service, Konrad, Polish, impressive. We don't have his type in Oxford. More's the pity.'

‘We do well enough here,' said Julia.

‘They're rather a brilliant couple, no? He's come on well and Natasha was on good form.'

‘I disagree,' said Julia. ‘You always had a blind spot about Natasha. But to be fair she told me that she and Joseph, as she still insists on calling him, had had a sort of face to face in Reading, which in my view they visit far too often, and that it cleared the air somewhat.'

‘They'll have their ups and downs. We had.'

He took out a cigarette. ‘I feel the party as it were secures them in their position in their new society,' he said. He raised his glass.

Joseph wanted to have a final final drink in the garden. Natasha, temperate as always, sat with him to be the audience for his relief, pride and pleasure, but mostly, she knew, relief. Before the party he had been almost frantic with anxiety. He had threatened to walk off, to disappear, to cancel it. It was such an extreme mood, new in her experience of him and she needed time to extract its meaning. Why did it matter to him so very much, so viscerally? What was happening to him? And yet, when the party had begun, his mood had swung completely. Perhaps he needed the over-anxiety to stimulate the adrenal gland, she thought. Perhaps it laid his ghosts. But why was he so exaggeratedly insecure?

‘No planes,' he said, having stayed silent a while. ‘The night lifts the siege.'

‘You'll soon learn to ignore them. The rest of us do.'

‘That's what annoys me. The rest of you do. Or you say you do.'

He took a swig more than a sip of the warm white wine.

‘Saying it often enough can help make it happen,' Natasha suggested.

‘That's for babies, isn't it?'

‘You were on good form, Joseph.'

‘Was I? Really?'

‘Yes. Matthew commented on it. He said you were rather brilliant.'

‘Did he? Matthew. Really?'

Flattery, though sought for, fuddled him into silence. Natasha too, having diverted him, preferred silence. The night-time suburb, saturated in green, with heavy trees, thick bushes and lawns by the hundred, reinforced their own silence.

She wanted to think about herself. She wanted to continue a process begun years before but only now, in this marriage, allowed the oxygen it needed. She wanted to concentrate on her writing, her work, her art. She longed to become the artist she knew she could be. The time was right for it. Joseph had allowed that confidence to grow. He was broad-shouldered, indefatigable, flustered by the fray into which he was willingly led, bruised by the encounters he could not bear to miss, forever failing fully to grasp the danger of the new worlds that floated into his life, but going on, going on, obstinate and bull-like going on, she thought, and giving her all she could ever reasonably want from a man. It would not be too much to say he enabled her to be free: and she must return that gift to him.

‘You need have no fear, Joseph,' she said, and drew deeply on her cigarette. ‘I believe you are innocent at heart and whatever you do that you think is a sin will not be a crime. It is the intention that makes the crime. Your intentions are pure and I will always be here.'

He said nothing. He felt X-rayed. He felt wholly understood by Natasha. Her certainty could disconcert and sometimes torment him but there was no mistaking the power her understanding exerted on him: or the subjection he felt in its grip.

‘I do love you, you know,' he said heavily. ‘I'll always love you. I always think I'm so lucky to be with you.' He nodded. ‘Just imagine if we'd never met. What then? A life without you?'

‘There was a willing current in our lives during the next year or two,' he wrote to their daughter, ‘and mostly we went with it, we let it flow through our hearts and bear us along, striving to achieve what we thought was good. The friendships, the obligations, the love that was still there between us which was deepened through you was more than enough. It was rich when you looked around, when you made comparisons with others wherever, whoever they were. We were fortunate.

‘Our friends in Kew were and remain good friends and their children were and are still your friends and all three of us knew that at the time. Your mother did teach and help on two mornings a week at the Barn Church. I joined the tennis club and was one of those convenient members below the average so that playing against me could be a useful warm-up and a fortifying victory. Natasha did some watercolours in the Gardens but the writing overtook the painting and her new friends urged her on. There were modest parties between the families, most commonly tea parties at weekends where all the children piled into the garden, the parents withdrew and for a couple of hours it felt rather like a kibbutz.

‘I continued the forays into London on some Saturday afternoons, pollinated and unnerved by that buzz and a pressure of temptations and opportunities; sometimes it became difficult to distinguish between the two. Yet I was like a homing pigeon sent far from base, not in distance but in culture, always beating back south, across the Thames, safely home to Kew. Or like a kite which your mother played out until it soared unseen above the clouds and yet at the end of the day it would be
safely reeled in. It must have been around this time that Natasha said, “You take all you want in London, I'll have Kew.” The insight and the clever encapsulation were typical; but I'm sure I argued against the neatness of the division.

‘For I too was deeply fond of the unintensive suburban pleasures of Kew and Natasha loved coming into London as long as it was with people she trusted. She trusted Anthony the drama director, a colleague at the BBC, and his wife Victoria, the painter. They had the kindly courtesies of their class, Natasha's class, at ease in their world, thoughtful, funny, surprising, and your mother took to them, and they to her, immediately and unreservedly. There was happiness in the theatre-going with them and occasionally the dinners afterwards in that rather louche club off St James's. And in Peter, too, she found a friend although she rarely failed to tease him about his political views. James of course, and David when he visited London and one or two others. There were many good days, calm days, days of equanimity and no outwardly visible drama, days when nothing much happened, maybe those were the best days, when nothing much happened save our lives lived together, life just trickling through the uncounted hours. Looking back it was a time of unacknowledged contentment.

‘We went to La Rotonde in the summer and for one holiday we returned to Cumberland for a week in the cottage in Caldbeck and Natasha was feted by my old friends, an exotic. And every morning you fed the ducks. Your mother and I wrote; we wrote and wrote. My first two novels had come out before Natasha finally completed what was to be her debut published work. Charles acted as her agent and there came the day when he sent her a letter, a publisher found, and her joy was deep. So was mine. She wanted it so much, I realised, when she got it: she needed it and now, armed with the publication of her first book, the object of desire, she felt finally equipped to take on her deeper, forbidden past.'

The restaurant was called Two Plums and Three Cherries and it had recently opened on Kew Green, near the church. Joe had heard it was
expensive and fashionable; perfect for his purpose. He arranged to meet Natasha there as he had work to do after office hours. This, though not habitual, was no longer unusual. The ‘work' would be in a pub. The pub would be peopled with Edward Worcester and other young poets and novelists who hung around with him, partly from Edward's certainty of purpose, partly because of his powers of patronage as the producer of a literary radio programme. The work would be thirsty and Joe would float away towards the underground station wishing he had the time to walk home and clear his head. But it was not habitual, it did not much disturb Natasha. Nothing like as much as his sometimes dazed, imploded return from Saturday afternoon rambles in London. She saw the city clawing him down into its grip and knew that he was troubled by what he saw as a multitude of options that bewildered but also excited a sensibility that recognised them as dangers.

‘It's great, isn't it?' he said, looking around the festooned restaurant when she arrived a few minutes later than him.

Natasha smiled and nodded: the nod was a cheat but it enabled her not to say what he least wanted to hear. The place was dreadful. Poor imitations of Impressionists crowded the walls, pink tablecloths, pink napkins, little red candles in vast brandy glasses on the tables, crystal glasses, posies, gleaming silver-plate cutlery, the quiet but unignorable thrum of fashionable droning quasi-mystical music and the smug air of being bang up to the new mood of the moment.

‘I thought you'd like it,' he said. ‘I've ordered something special.'

Joseph was a little flushed but it became him, she thought. It gave his tousled look the necessary youth. His velvet jacket and overlarge tie fitted the restaurant well; her quietly cut summer dress, bought for her publication party (sherry, olives, nuts, begun at six and all over by seven-thirty, fourteen people accommodated in the editor's office), looked rather plain in that company, she noticed. Two Plums and Three Cherries had drawn in the more fashionably conscious from a rich suburban catchment area. Or did her dress look rather old? Did she? Sometimes it seemed that Joseph was getting younger and the gap between them widening. The intermittent pain in her back made it hard to keep an ageing strain from her face; though she was not currently troubled. She had taken extra painkillers.

Two flutes of champagne arrived and Joseph beamed. It was such a smile! She was disarmed by his smile. It was wholly without guile or reserve, it was from the heart, even from the soul, she thought, it was the expression of a still untainted and innocent love which only Joseph had given her.

‘To you.' He raised his glass and she took her cue. ‘And to your great, great novel. It really is
great
, I was telling them in the pub. It's great! To success for it and long life and everything you want for yourself, Natasha.'

He reached out to clink glasses and so did she. For some moments she was overcome with shyness and silencing pleasure.

‘Thank you,' she said, and then, ‘and thank you for all this.' She looked around. ‘It is a lovely place for a celebration.'

‘Do you really think so?' The trace of anxiety revealed how much he must have fussed over its selection: matters like this always fussed him.

‘Yes.' She reassured him and now she meant it. ‘This is perfect, Joseph.'

This time his smile was more of a grin, cocky, confident.

‘They do avocado with prawns,' he said. ‘That's my starter.'

After they had ordered he brought her tales from the literary front. Natasha, still cherishing the smile and the true feeling behind this event, scarcely listened at first. She shielded that previous moment like a candle flame in the wind, wanting to watch it burn for every last second. She let him praise what he saw as these soon-to-be-famous young writers who met regularly now in that pub. He was dazzled, she thought, partly by what they said but more by the very fact of it, the literary clique in the London pub, the glamour of being with published writers, himself also a published writer, somehow in an exclusive court, recognisable only to initiates, special persons, chosen and distinguished by this rare and quite frankly rather superior fact of having a book published.

The writers he had just left drinking literature in the pub were, he believed, wise beyond their years, their words and works were weighed in the great balance of books and should be taken seriously. They had direct access to Creativity, they had Obsessions and their pronouncements were full of Fine Distinctions, they were Severe on Those Who Failed the Great Cause of Writing and Writers, the brotherhood. And they were fun, they were intellectuals, they were the metropolitan wits.

‘Perhaps,' said Natasha, ‘but I think they are no more intelligent or cultured than our Kew friends, none of whom has published a book. It is wonderful to publish a book, Joseph, but it is not an entitlement to automatic respect. Don't look crestfallen. It is just my opinion. I think in your heart you agree with it. I have heard you say the same about your friends in Cumberland. There are other matters of value, you know that, you tell me that. People have thought great thoughts and lived rich lives without writing a book: even, I remember you arguing with James, without necessarily reading a book. Sometimes I fear for you that you idolise these new friends too much. They are too cynical for me. But you will always accept it first before you regret it later, that is your way. Some of them are just playing the game of being writers. To be called a writer is their passport into society. They may be no worse for that, and it is a harmless game, but you are not like that, Joseph, and you would do better to keep your distance. They will never nourish you. And they live best in a world of criticism with which I know you find it difficult to cope.'

That final sentence was so accurate that he could dig out no reply. It was true, he hated the hostile criticism he sometimes encountered, it made him writhe. Sometimes because he thought it was justified, sometimes because it was wrong, always because it was a public humiliation and in an area in which the rules said that he was not allowed to fight back. To fight back which, in Wigton, was to prove yourself strong was, in London, to show yourself weak. And he writhed under the stupidity of that edict of turning the other cheek. He stuck to it but it demanded too much from him at this stage and for Natasha to refer to it was to stoke both shame and anger. Best if she had not mentioned it. The truth, being spoken, made him feel that not just Natasha but everybody knew of this weakness.