Remember Me... (55 page)

‘Let us begin with your unhappiness,' said Natasha.

‘I've been unhappy before. Most people are sometimes. Unhappiness is part of it. But you struggle your way out of it or something turns up and it lifts and passes. Maybe it's chemical. Maybe it's social. Why does it have to be psychological?'

‘Don't you feel full of frustration and anger and anxieties at the way in which you deceive yourself? And me. How do you account for that? There has to be a reason and it has to be in the mind.' Natasha was vehement. ‘The mind is all we have.'

‘How do I deceive myself?'

‘Joseph . . .'

‘Joseph! What does that mean?'

‘You know.'

‘I don't.' The defiant tone of his previous answer guttered to misery.

Natasha looked at him with pity. He looked so tired. His face had an aspect of strain which was recent; you saw it most around the eyes in which Natasha had almost always looked for and found a comforting kindness; there was a paleness about his skin and his movements portrayed constant unrest. He lit a cigarette and she saw desperation even in the way he did that. He needed help, she was sure of it.

Joseph looked at Natasha with apprehension. Her looks were more as they had been when they had first met, hollow-eyed, so pale, her hair swept back again like Shelley but unkempt, and in her eyes a concentration so fierce that it unnerved him. If the analysis did this to her, she who was so accomplished at examining her own feelings, what would it do to him? He could no longer help her as once he had and that saddened him and made him feel that he had lost some of his purpose.

‘You deceive yourself,' she said, ‘because you think that you can surmount the difficulties you have and the changes which have been imposed on you without help, without even the help of your own acceptance and understanding.'

‘Everybody has changes “imposed on them” as they get older, don't they? That's what happens. That's getting older. And what's so dreadful about the changes? I like what I do, I earn more than enough to live on, we have good friends . . .'

‘Your lists sound less and less convincing. This life has wrenched you away from the paths you were originally made for.'

‘Meeting you was the cause of all that!' He smiled.

‘There are times when I fear it was,' she responded, gravely, missing the opportunity to take up his lightness of tone. ‘When we first met I thought you were like an alien. There were days when I simply hoped you would go away.'

‘Really?' Joseph was intrigued at this news. ‘You really wanted me to go away?'

‘Yes.' This time the smile came from her but it was thin, reflective, as if directed to herself rather than to him. ‘I saw nothing in a future with you but the misunderstanding which inevitably follows a mismatch. And you seemed far too young.'

‘I'm not that much younger than you.'

‘There are many ways to measure the gap between us, Joseph.'

‘I thought you were amazing,' he said. ‘You were the alien. You were the one who came from another planet. I did not know that people like you existed. They still don't. Just you.'

‘That is very kind of you.'

‘It's true.'

‘The truth is not often kind.'

‘Well. We're fine. Aren't we?'

‘You laid siege to me,' Natasha said. ‘Julia thought you were far too persistent, it was even vulgar that you kept on when it must have been perfectly obvious . . . But you came with your flowers – you still do – and your “dates”, everything you had to see in the cinema . . .'

‘And I wore you down,' Joseph said.

‘Yes.'

‘Was it only that I wore you down?'

‘Oh no . . . Oh no . . .' She stubbed out the cigarette and took another. ‘I surrendered to you. A little here. A little more. Then I grew to love you. Not completely for one or two years but Joseph . . .' she lit the cigarette with care, collecting her thoughts, poised to say something she thought of key importance, ‘if you had not rescued me I do not think I would be here now.'

She blew out a long thin stream of smoke.

‘And so you see,' she said, ‘I am laying siege to you in return.'

‘Please, Natasha.'

‘What do you fear?'

‘I don't know.' Even as he said that, a sensation of panic seized his mind and he wanted to run away. He forced himself to stay.

‘Why do you fear so much?'

‘Do I have to?'

‘My analyst grows more insistent. That is all I can say. She says that I will not be able to go where I must go without you being analysed too.'

‘What does she know about me?'

‘I have told her a great deal about you.'

‘I wish you hadn't.'

‘Joseph,' she said, ‘we have talked about this matter for about a month now and always I give up. But she is insistent.'

‘You sound frightened of her.'

‘Not frightened. Dependent and increasingly so. Which is much worse.'

‘So it's not really about me being Free or Facing up to My Demons or getting back to what I was when I bought flowers in the market at Oxford and tried to hide them as I walked through the streets. It's to help you.'

‘It is all the other things as well. Please believe me.'

‘But what it comes down to is this woman forcing you to force me to go into analysis.'

‘Is that how you see it?' She looked defeated, and her face flooded with unhappiness. ‘Is that how you see it?'

‘It sounded cruel. Sorry.'

‘It is one truth,' she agreed.

If he loved her this obstinacy was a torment to her. If he loved her then he would surely do all he could to help relieve the unhappiness that consumed her. He had to surrender. But how could he continue to protect her if he did that?

‘OK, then,' he said. ‘I'll do it.'

Natasha put her hand to her mouth and nodded. She felt such exhaustion.

‘I am grateful,' she said.

‘No, don't say that . . .'

‘I am so grateful,' she said. ‘And . . . maybe as your siege on my life was so good for me, I hope my siege over these weeks will prove as good for you. I think it will, Joseph. I'm sure it will.'

‘They get to all you television people,' his doctor said, ‘in the end.'

Joseph sat opposite him in the back room of a large semi-detached house which served as the surgery. He had come for advice. He wanted
no one to know about it and he trusted the doctor to keep his confidence.

‘What is it that makes you want to waste good money on talking to a psychoanalyst?' His large face, waxen, dolorous, bored save for the small blue eyes buzzing angrily.

Joseph was not going to tell him the truth.

‘It's all a conspiracy, you know,' the doctor said. ‘I had to do it at medical school. All they dish out is either common sense or mumbo-jumbo. Freud fleeced rich women with it and it's been a con ever since. When did you last sleep with your mother? Do you want to castrate your father? The cure, so-called, takes three years and the fact is, old boy, in three years just by living normally you can get yourself out of most mental fixes. And who needs it? Would Chekhov have written what he did if he'd been done over by a trick cyclist? Look at the way his father tried to destroy him. His father was a shit but Chekhov sorted his life out for himself. Maybe that's precisely why Chekhov was a genius. Psychoanalysis is unscientific, fashionable, mediaeval rubbish. Still. I've a friend in this game who isn't too much of a fraud. He's in Harley Street so take out your savings. I'll drop him a note although you look well enough to me, as well as anybody has any right to look if they write novels and work in the cesspit of telly.'

‘I felt cheered up by that,' Joe wrote after reading the gist of that brief medical encounter which had taken place more than thirty-five years ago. ‘His bombast reconfirmed my instinct and challenged Natasha's perspective. In the few days I waited for the call from Harley Street, I felt lifted by the saloon-bar bollocking of the pragmatic old-school English doctor. All I had to do was to remember that it was rubbish and nothing need be lost while Natasha's request would be honoured. More significantly he had admitted what I had failed to admit even to myself. For when he talked about Chekhov I remembered Ross telling me of Henry Moore who had begun to read a book which psychoanalysed his sculpture. He put it aside after a couple of pages, “I prefer not to know that,” he said. What if whatever talent I had was the result of my own efforts to orchestrate internal contradictions, to make a coherent personality out of discordance, a work of art out of gradually shaping whatever I imagined, whoever I am? And what if it is intricate and
unique to me and best cultivated in secret? How can anyone else possibly know the mind of someone better than the person who has lived with it all their lives?

‘How could what is me be re-set by the application of a rule book of generalisations drawn from the experience of others whose experiences were probably far from my own? I resisted and disputed the notion that there was one magic bunch of keys which would unlock all personalities equally. Of course we are all born, we all grow painfully, want food, shelter, sex, security, children, happiness and then we die. But it is the nuances, the variations, the singularities, the fingerprints of our lives that make us individual, and that is what most matters. How could any one system apply to every different one of us?

‘Yet as the day approached for my first visit to Harley Street, by way of Oxford Circus, like Natasha, but on Monday and Thursday so as not to bump into her on Tuesdays and Fridays, any buoyancy I had gathered from the doctor, any bravado I had garnered from my own rough-hewn recruitment of unanalysed heroes from the past, all the boosting of confidence and the exaggeration of contempt for psychoanalysis began to drain away. Natasha had embraced it. She said that she was already benefiting from it. But what would it do to me? I felt as if I were offering myself for some sort of intellectual lobotomy. What would happen when he tried to get at my mind?

‘On the first visits I lay rigid on the altar of the sofa, sacrificing myself for Natasha, I thought in moments of self-aggrandisement, and wasting time, wasting money and wasting effort as I fended off the silent pressures for speech.

‘“You don't want to do this, do you?” he said.

‘“No.”

‘He waited until I cracked.'

Joe had managed to arrange the Thursday session for the late afternoon which disturbed the pattern of his day less than the morning time on Monday. The whole business, the tube, the walk, the session, the return, could take up to three hours and that did not include, as the process
finally got under way, time for reflection or assimilation. After the session on Thursdays he went to the pub to meet Edward and the others.

Like Edward, Joe arrived there on the dot of opening time, five-thirty. The others turned up later. This day Edward was accompanied by the American poet Joe had heard about but not met. He knew she was a fine poet, an ambitious woman and the new girlfriend of the eight-year-married Edward. She drank water. They looked good together, Joe thought: Edward tall, rather square, broad-shouldered, called ‘rugged' in a recent
Observer
profile, in looks and carriage more a countryman than a town wit; she blonde, leggy, her open health and beauty framed in confidence, new world, independent.

As soon as they had secured a table in an empty corner, Christina struck.

‘I read
A Chance Defeat
and I liked it,' she said in her level gravelly sexy New England accent. ‘Tell me. Do you believe the English provincial novel carries guns any more?'

Joe's smile took a little effort to sustain. He was intrigued and rather flattered to be such a close witness to this hot literary affair between Edward and Christina. He had adjusted himself to behave in an adult way, sympathetically, over the flaunted adultery. Despite the spilling of his entrails in Harley Street less than half an hour beforehand he thought he had put on the carapace of a man of the world. Christina punched right through all that and with a smile bigger and sustained at greater length than his.

‘I mean when Hardy and Lawrence did their thing, Britain had an Empire and everybody listened. Everything that happens at the centre of an Empire is important both to those who want to join and those who want to beat it up. Even in the States we wanted to know what happened in Nottinghamshire and Wessex. Everything that mattered to you guys mattered to us guys. But will that wash any more?'

Joe nodded and then realised he was expected to reply. The daze in his mind which followed a session was usually anaesthetised in the pub by a few drinks with people who, like most (save the few in Kew to whom Natasha had unfortunately divulged it), knew nothing of the analysis. The shame at needing it had not lessened and he still feared
that, publicly known, it would be the equivalent of having a card hung around his neck declaring him to be Unclean. Now, quite suddenly in the pub it was literary bare knuckle fighting.

‘If writing's any good,' he responded, rather feebly in tone and emphasis, ‘then it doesn't matter where it's set, does it?'

‘Not in theory,' she said, crisply, ‘I agree. And never in poetry. But the novel traditionally carries the news and what's the news from the English provinces today?'

Edward was happy to sip the stiff whisky, not a referee, not a contented spectator, more, Joe realised, a corner man wanting his own contender to land the telling blows.

‘Same as usual,' said Joe, lighting up, ‘same the whole world over, births, deaths and all that stuff in between.'

‘I see what you're saying. And you're right, of course. But it seems to me that the novel has always tracked the power. I don't mean the political power necessarily although that counts. The best novelist alive could be in Finland but would anybody be as interested as the best novelist in America or Russia? No, the power I'm talking about is where the heat is. And it seems to me that you've had great novelists over here and we have too – look at Faulkner, just
look
at Faulkner! – who have quarried the provinces but it's time to move on.'