Remember Me... (53 page)

It began:

Some women expect to find all the innocence of a newborn child and the daring of a war hero in one man, and they rarely get what they are looking for. Madame Palmet was lucky to have around her three men, a husband and two sons, who were so different that between them they combined most masculine virtues and defects. They had to take turns with her and if she grew weary of one of them, she too could turn around and recover her good humour with either of the other two. Aimé, the eldest son, had always been able to fend for himself. Their father, Gilbert, was reserved by nature but he too could look after his own interests. She hardly ever stopped watching for what Clément wanted, what protected him best. He was meek and mild as a lamb, he was defenceless, a twenty-four-year-old child, worse off than he had been in the early years of his life, because others found it difficult now to guess how the fears and joys of a small boy could still inhabit his fully grown body.
Madame Palmet's focus was Clément. Her husband understood and tolerated it and helped her; her son Aimé understood but found it intolerable, was often inflamed with jealousy at the amount of loving attention given his brother, a jealousy which fed his anger.

But Madame Palmet was unable to prevent herself.

Clément was totally and absolutely kind, she explained: this could not be said of anyone else.

It took Natasha some time to re-enter this world. Now it seemed too clear to her in terms she had learned in the years since she had abandoned the book. Was Clément too near Francois? Was Aimé's jealousy and foul temper and daring too like Joseph? Was Gilbert the steady present father she longed for as she longed for a Madame Palmet, an all-embracing mother? At times she thought that all three men were Joseph. Perhaps she had made a diagram. Out of that she had built a boat in which she could sail safely out of her present. But the present had changed radically since the book's initiation. Maybe this resurrection was a mistake. She studied the story.

Aimé was with a Resistance group some distance away from the farm and the story in this first part was his determination to send Clément to a small camouflaged hut in the nearby hills for fear that when the Germans, who were combing the area, came to the farm and inevitably interrogated Clément he would just as inevitably tell them all about his glamorous Resistance brother of whom he was so proud, to whom he was so devoted. He went willingly to the hut, and once a week Aimé's wife, a schoolteacher, cycled from the village, hid her bicycle and walked up the hill to bring him fresh stores, bread, wine, fruit, a few treats and a letter from his mother. Aimé's wife had taught him to read and this long patient painstaking process now saw its reward. Clément filled out his diet by netting thrushes.

A priest arrived at Clément's hut, exhausted, badly wounded in the leg, incessantly incanting, ‘Thou shalt not kill,' and Clément forgot everything that had been told him, boasted about Aimé and the Resistance, invited the man to share the small hut, fed him, nursed
him and tended his wounds with the knowledge of herbs gleaned from his mother in the kitchen and his father in the fields.

Natasha remembered that when she had read that passage out to Joseph, as they did in those days, he had been impressed by her knowledge of herbs, indeed by her knowledge of the whole of that peasant-farming life so distant, he had thought, from the haughty life she had led in the big house. She smiled as she recalled how stung she had been by his insult. ‘Haughty.' Though he would regret it and apologise immediately, he was not above a fit of venom about what he saw, sometimes, as her privileged background. But immediately he had praised, as he always did, her grace, told her how much he envied this ease with which she wrote so comprehensively about life, and gave her support. It was then that he pressed her on the reference she had made soon after they had met in Oxford, to the part her father played in the Resistance: had she not said that he helped people through the mountains on their way to Switzerland? That was what she had heard, she said, though not directly from her father.

‘Either I have a total memory loss,' he told their daughter, ‘or she simply did not talk, ever, about being a child in occupied France. Nor, just as astonishingly, did I press her to discuss that time. I can find no satisfactory explanation for this. Was I being tactful? Was she being secretive? Was I worried that I would find out something to her discredit? Was she? Was it simply a politeness, an unwillingness to re-open wounds? How we did not engage, at some time, in a conversation about what must have been the general shame and fear, the social condition of her life as a young girl in occupied France is beyond me.

‘Yet I feel sure that she discussed this with her analyst. I have no means of verifying this but I am convinced that the two women, not very far apart in years, exiles both, intellectuals both, each one seeking reparation, would find in fascism, at its extreme and at its most insidiously acceptable, a purgatory in which to spend and redeem their time. Where had this taken Natasha? What scabs were unpicked and once unpicked could the wounds revealed ever heal again? And what safely buried fears were dug up as these two women excavated the grave of Natasha's past?

‘None of that is known to me. Save through this novel. But fiction can be treacherous, especially when read as fact.

‘Nor did I ask Isabel, or Alain, and nor did they volunteer information. Perhaps they wanted to leave the dead to bury their dead. And Natasha, too, maybe she could not face it. Yet my lack of curiosity at the least seems inexplicable. To have known Natasha in wartime, that would have been to have known something essential.'

The best part of the book, she now thought, the part she could build on, the part which rekindled her imagination, was that in which after the mysterious death of the priest, Clément assumed the priest's character and talked of his former self as ‘Clément the son of Madame Palmet'. ‘Clément' in his version of his new life was dead. His mother tried to hold onto him but failed completely. Natasha read what she had written:

‘All I want to say is: this is your home, it will always be, and I am your mother, and I shall always be there.'

‘Thank you, Madame Palmet.'

‘You aren't alone, that's what I mean.'

‘No one is alone. God is with us every day of our lives. God will decide. You have been very kind to me, Madame Palmet. I cannot be your son, Madame Palmet. Clément will not come back on this earth until the Last Day.'

That made it worth going on with, she thought. What finally happened to him? What happened to a mother so strangely and cruelly losing her beloved son? The father she could not fathom. Perhaps he would be discovered in the act of writing. He never was.

After a few days Natasha was settled enough to take it on. She would make it into two parts to match the break in her life.

She decided to set the second part of the book in 1954. She wanted to start it quietly, with the mother alone, an ordinary moment. She wrote quickly. The scene must have been gathering force over the days.

Madame Palmet stopped by the small mirror which hung above the bedside table. She sometimes paused in front of windows in the same way, freezing the pattern of her daily movements. There, at windows or mirrors, she found the familiar landscape which supported the mainstream of her inner thoughts. In such moments she tried to discover what mattered most, what was important, even what was missing, and what should be forgotten. Today, as she stood there watching the lines of her face, she experienced the strange sensation that not only the mirror, the bedroom, and her own features had met many a time but that the very content of her thought too was repetition. She had already lived through that very same morning, that was her impression. The feeling was clear and powerful.

She eased herself in the hard chair. On some days no amount of cushioning could draw the deep ache in the small of her back. She would look for some more painkillers later. She wanted to stay by the book, at her post. There was more to say about a mother's love. Meantime another cigarette helped.

Marcelle was nearly her own person. Natasha had ceased to make drawings of her and there were not many photographs, but the child was loved by the mother and studied every day. It was as if Natasha as a mother assumed the scientifically trained mind of her father and catalogued and classified the child. This external vigilance took some of the burden off her internal turbulence where what seemed an infinite love for Marcelle was unjustly, unsettlingly stained by a sense of envy that she had had no mother to watch over her childhood, of jealousy that she had no father as near and fond and physical as Joseph, that there was no shadow on the child's bold sweet gaze.

Natasha was inclined to let her run wild. She checked her rarely and then very lightly. Yet Marcelle was a tie, she had not featured in the student dream of the free and unfettered artist's life. Joseph had begun
to talk of having another child, company for Marcelle, more like everyone else they knew, the expected next step, but she had resisted. She was in no hurry and in no shape, she thought, and judging by his moods, neither was Joseph.

Marcelle was so alive, climbing the fruit trees, and running free in the great Kew Gardens, spinning across the lawns fists full of bread for the ducks, perilously on the rowing boats at Richmond, so light, Natasha noted, so strong yet light, the child dancing above the waves, above the depths which reached up to claim the mother.

There were many times when Natasha still saw Joseph clearly as in the early days, as through plain glass, all in view, nothing hidden, and then she felt safe. At other times, especially since he had left the BBC, she saw him through a prism, the single simplicity of the man who had taken her by storm was broken up into a spectrum of characteristics some of which seemed not to fit the man she knew. She did not like seeing several aspects of him. She loved the whole man, that direct full-heartedness which had played such a part in wooing her. It was not that he was becoming more complicated, she would have enjoyed that, he was becoming at times uncomfortably evasive. Sometimes she said to herself, ‘Who are you?' or ‘Where is the Joseph I met?'

But these were fears she knew that she exaggerated probably because in her analysis Joseph figured so strongly and very often appeared in an exaggerated role. There were still the calm stretches, the richly aimless chats which cement a relationship.

He told her about the Reading Room in the British Museum to which he had secured membership chiefly in order to have a base away from the flight path although being in that rotunda of famous scholarship, aware of the celebrated ghosts from the past who had sat on those seats, sneaking hopeful glances to spot those who would soon enough in their turn become celebrated ghosts, could depress his self-confidence. And it made him feel too solemn. When he had checked through all the research he needed for the script on Elizabeth I, he
stopped going. He felt he had been an impostor. As he told Natasha, he thought that researching and writing a film script was not what the Reading Room at the British Museum was for. And the congregation of writers and scholars had proved claustrophobic.

Once again he tried the pubs and in the streets around the museum. Most of the shops there seemed mini-museums and Joe continued his magpie pickings with prints – Goya, Rembrandt, Degas, cheap, with no hope of future profit growth, but nevertheless real prints of Goya, Rembrandt, Degas . . . three small Egyptian statuettes, an oil lamp – Roman, first century. Surely in this place of all those in London there would be writing pubs but there was not one. Reading pubs, almost without exception. But writing still found no pub place even in the tributaries leading to the British Museum.

Back then to Kew Gardens where he forced himself to withstand the noise and some days found it tolerable especially as he walked every day for a couple of hours and headed off the flight path, and some days the traffic was light and there were days when the skies were empty, high days, holidays. Natasha had only glimpses of that struggle. She had so successfully suppressed her own disturbed reactions to what she had seen not only as an intolerably interfering noise but a threatening noise that she took it for granted that Joseph, stronger than she was in the matter of willpower, had also conquered it.

In Kew she saw him lovingly. He was relaxed with their friends, neither provoked into competition nor nervous to show off, just a friend among friends, often funny, making them laugh.

The visits to Reading were reduced: the habit of regular Saturday night outings into London was resumed. Natasha was grateful for such a reliable surface of life.

‘Charles has just got me elected into the Garrick Club,' he announced one evening. Not only did Natasha look unimpressed, she was puzzled.

‘I've told you about it. One of the great London clubs. This one was begun by the actor David Garrick, a friend of Doctor Johnson. It's for actors and lawyers mainly.'

‘Then why do they elect you?'

‘They take some writers and journalists these days.'

‘What does it do, this club?'

‘It's a dining club.'

‘But we scarcely ever eat out and when we do we go to our friends' houses or out with Anthony and Victoria.'

‘It's an amazing place. A Morning Room, a full-size Billiards Room . . .'

‘But you don't play billiards.'

‘. . . a unique collection of theatrical portraits. Best of its kind in the world.'

‘Is there such competition?'

‘You don't have to pay on the spot. Just run up a bill and they send it at the end of the month.'

‘That's dangerous.'

‘No lady members.'

‘How sad.'

‘But they can come for dinner two nights a week, I think, provided they use the back stairs.'

‘Then I will never come.'

‘And –' He smiled. He was by now enjoying her put-downs every bit as much as she was. ‘– there's a library. A small wonderful library. A pocket Oxford library. I can work there whenever I want to. Nobody uses it, Charles says. I'll have it to myself! It's perfect!'