Remember Me... (58 page)

‘One thing at a time. You have ten minutes. He said he had come to look again at the house they decided not to buy.'

‘A wholly understandable act.'

‘But he and Natasha have put in an offer for another house in Kew Gardens.'

‘People behave oddly about houses.'

‘Then he began to say how quiet our house is. He would stop speaking every now and then or say “listen” and smile at how quiet it is.'

‘As indeed it is.'

‘He mentioned the aeroplanes in Kew. Several times. They are directly under the flight path. He finds it painful.'

‘Presumably that is why they are moving.'

‘The new house is also directly under the flight path.'

‘Julia. I quite enjoy being the audience for your Poirot or Miss Marple unravellings but I think a clincher is called for.'

‘I think he is quite disturbed,' she said, quietly, ‘and I think he feels trapped because Natasha loves Kew Gardens . . .'

‘And he loves Natasha. A new twist on the fatal triangle.'

‘I felt it was serious, Matthew. The question is, before you go off to eat your disgusting wild boar or your illegal swan, ought I to talk to Natasha?'

‘Better not to.'

‘I knew you'd say that. You always do. But what if I tell you that I believe there may be some danger? They are both in analysis, you know.'

‘I didn't.'

‘Yes. And it may be doing him harm.'

‘It's outside my competence.'

‘You're not to duck it. Shall I phone her and tell her that in my view for whatever reason this aeroplane-noise business is very serious for him?'

‘It would be to interfere.'

‘Yes.'

‘And, with respect, not doubting your powers, you have not all the facts at your command.'

‘No.'

‘And they are adult, well married, intelligent, perfectly capable of working out their own lives.'

‘Perhaps. Do you remember just before they met when Natasha was mistreated by that American painter?'

‘The shit?'

‘Yes. I went up to her room one evening to make sure she was all right and she looked so terribly hurt and in despair that I feared for her. Then Joe came along.'

‘With some force!' said Matthew and looked at his watch.

‘It is terrible to see those you love unhappy.'

‘I must go.'

‘He is calling on his parents on the way back to London. Once Marcelle is in bed Natasha will be in the house as it were on her own.'

‘He may not wish her to know that he was here,' said Matthew as he stood up to leave.

‘I've thought of that.'

‘There may be other factors. After all they have lived in that place for a few years now.'

‘That too.'

‘You have to be very sure of your ground.' Matthew's tone was devoid of all levity.

‘It was you who once said that to Natasha we stood in
loco parentis.'

‘I see you have solved the problem.'

‘You'll be late for your sherry.'

‘You never cease to impress me,' he said, and went to his college feast.

‘Hampstead Heath is the opposite of Kew Gardens,' Joseph said. ‘It overlooks London from the north as opposed to sinking to the river level of the south. It's woody and hilly with small ponds, it's a pocket edition of the Lake District and kids love it – there are parks and pools, there's Kenwood House where we can go for tea and see the paintings. The Heath is vast, much bigger than Kew Gardens, you could be in the country, little paths, I used to walk there when we were in Finchley, and Parliament Hill where they fly kites.

‘It used to be the haunt of highwaymen as the coaches hauled up the hill to get out of London. Dick Turpin operated out of Hampstead Heath. And Dickens used to walk up there and have a drink in Jack Straw's Castle. The pub is still there. Lawrence lived there, so did Keats and Orwell and Constable, Ted Hughes still lives there sometimes, Ben Nicholson, Al Alvarez, Margaret Drabble, it's partly an artists' colony really, the Everyman's the best art cinema in London, all the actors drink at the Cruel Sea, you'll love it, there'll be people we already half know and you'll just love it. So will Marcelle.

‘And best of all for me, no planes, or so high you can't hear them. And best of all for you, a direct overground train to Kew Gardens, only twenty to twenty-five minutes, leaves three times in the hour.'

Her heart aching, her resolve firm, Natasha nodded and even smiled at the pleading and love in his desperately rehearsed salesmanship.

‘I can't understand,' she told the analyst, ‘why, now that we have moved, we have chosen the worst house we have seen. It is narrow and terraced and shoddy, and although it is in the middle of Hampstead most of the houses in that particular street are in sometimes dreadful disrepair. The garden is cramped and leads to a huge derelict garage. The house was previously let as bed-sitting rooms and going around it was like being a horrible capitalist about to evict people. There was an Australian woman, not young, with her mother, very old, where would they go? And one man who refused to talk or get out of his chair but simply sat there and hated us as the Irish landlady showed us around. Most of the houses in the street are like that – chopped up into single
rooms, overcrowded, and so sad. Joseph thought it had the advantage of being near the middle of what they call Hampstead Village and being over four floors enabling us to have properly separate studies. Of course it is costing far more than he anticipated to make it even habitable – no damp course, no central heating, all rooms need redecoration, the builders are poor workmen and lazy. It is horrible. And Joseph knows it. He's already looking for other houses in Hampstead but they are so small, those we can afford. And we haven't the energy to move again. But he still talks to estate agents. I won't go with him to see them. We have to make the best of it.'

The analyst waited a while and then began.

‘You are telling me that being ripped out of Kew Gardens is unbearable for you. You describe this house in terms so dramatic and even lurid that they cease to describe the house and instead they describe your own condition.' The analyst paused. She herself was very tired yet she needed all her resources to carry Natasha through this, the most important and dangerous chapter in the process. Natasha was almost wholly defenceless now and this move could not have come at a worse time. ‘The nightmare is compounded by the act of love you have made. It is love that has provoked the nightmare. Your love for Joseph has been tested and not found wanting. You can hold onto that. His search for a new house is the result of shock. Shock can be a breakthrough.'

Joseph could not work out how he had blundered into this house. Over the months he had had options on several degrees of respectability, the chance more than once to be bold and take that splendid town house on a twenty-year lease or that freestanding house surrounded by garden in one of the loveliest streets in Hampstead – out of his range but not hugely – and surely a place that would heal and comfort instead of this which made him ashamed and then ashamed that he was ashamed. It was a bit rough but that was better than soft, or snobby, wasn't it? It grounded him, he thought, and that had to be good.

His mother had detonated the shame. ‘It reminds me of Water Street in Wigton,' she said, and he not only saw immediately the run-down, cramped, crammed hovels which had in his childhood made up the poorest and the most feared street in the town, he saw it as the place in which his mother had once reluctantly and unhappily lived, and from which she had longed to escape. He saw dismay and disbelief in her look as she wandered up the shabby, dreary street and he could see her thoughts – how could he leave that lovely house in Kew Gardens for this? Or what about those beautiful houses we saw near Reading? How could he be supposed to be doing so well and end up here? – and her unspoken bewilderment and condemnation of his choice unnerved him. ‘It's as if he's gone back to where we started from,' she told Sam. ‘Back to Water Street. I can't comprehend it.'

Yet Natasha had come with him. He knew what that meant for her. And with all his might he tried to make it the place he had promised it would be. They walked on the Heath, he bought Marcelle a little boat and sailed it on one of the ponds; they wrote in their individual rooms. He became delighted with the back alleys and hidden little paths in Hampstead Village itself and on the Heath. He forced down his own dismay and attempted to crush the fear and shame the place brought on, he forced himself to bypass the foolishness of his agitated and wilful choice, and set his mind to start again and this time not to falter.

‘Increasingly the past is breaking into the present,' he wrote to Marcelle. ‘We two talk about Natasha much more intensely than before. The present reorganises the past. Memory changes all the time and is dependent not so much on past certainties stored securely but on present challenges: memory fortifies the day, it regroups continuously to accommodate the moment. So my memories of your mother change as I write. I trust a few facts – dates, the work we did, the houses, friendships – but all the ebb and flow of feeling, the flux that is life, has to be discovered and rediscovered. Some people say it is therapeutic, this exercise: I wholly disagree. If anything it is the opposite. Often the re-creation wounds deeply, it would be better left buried; it exposes old difficulties to new scrutiny which can be merciless; it brings the dead to life and between the death and the life there can be little but regret, mostly bitter, and blame for what still seems a crime more than three decades after the sentence has been passed.

‘All this is a preparation for what is to come which seems at times a remote encounter with improbable insanity. As I write this, it is a summer evening, I am in an English cottage garden. Across a wheat-field, there is a marbled white horse standing under the lush umbrella of a group of maple trees, a red kite has flown by, gliding with oblivious grace, wood pigeons loud-throatedly coo from tree to tree, the door of the garage converted into my study is open to the garden, a thick row of lavender nods slightly in the evening breeze; why summon up demons, why reach out to the spirit world of the imagination? Why not be out in that English garden with a drink, with friends, with a book, with the Proms on the radio, with the day that is today and not spend life, waste
life, on those dead days? What does it matter to anyone? Save you and me. But that is the point, isn't it? You and me. Save you and me.'

Joe hurled himself into Hampstead, sniffed it out like a pup in a new wood. He took Marcelle down the hidden ginnels and passageways, the alleys and all but secret paths which snaked up the hill towards the Georgian streets which topped the village and commanded views across the bowl of London to the Surrey hills. These narrow passageways were made for children, they wended behind churches, skirted private gardens, led to cottages hidden inside the muddle of unplanned clutter which was the character of the place. Joe thought that a knowledge of them would make Hampstead feel safe for Marcelle, while for him, unlike the open suburban order of Kew, it was a higgledy-piggledy reminder of the old alley-riddled centre of the town of his childhood.

Marcelle liked the school, a tall red-brick Victorian masterpiece of educational rectitude, and soon there were schoolfriends in the house and parents collecting them and costumes to be made for the Christmas play.

Natasha resolved not to make comparisons or lament the separation from their old friends and she stuck to it. The absolute nature of her resolve made Joseph feel the absence of complaint as an accusation. She tried very hard. While lacking the energy or the enthusiasm of Joseph who would come back with bullish comments of a ‘great little Woolworths' or a ‘real old-fashioned wood shop' or talk of Flask Walk ‘full of old bookshops' and ‘the Freemasons' Arms which has a terrific pub garden', she saw that given time it could be a place in which she could settle, in which roots could be put down even though its busyness contrasted unfavourably with ambling Kew, as did its competitive London culture with the quiet learning of Oxford. But there were quaint streets, good enough shops, a cosmopolitan character she sensed she would come to appreciate, and newspapers in many languages.

The truth was that she was tired out. The move had been frantic. The improvements in their new house had been banged up on the cheap and looked it. They had lived through its crude and stop-start metamorphosis and however Panglossian Joseph was about being lucky to have a house at all, to be in the middle of rubble and incompetence in
your own home, your private inviolable space, was wearing. And she knew that Joseph's cheerfulness was false. He was every bit as tense, upset and disturbed as she was but he refused to show it save in recurrent irritability. It was as if she herself was being gutted, clumsily, carelessly, and always far too slowly and then being put together again just as clumsily, carelessly, like someone on a battlefield just stuffing back in the spilled entrails. To both of them, the house-home had become as close as skin.

And there was to her the alien nature of the street, young men mending motorbikes, older men struggling with old cars, evidence of loneliness and transience, evidence of bare pickings, evidence sometimes of a desperation that made her long even more that the house was finally theirs, which it did not yet seem, ghosted as it was with sad departures. And when one night, late, the man who had sat dumb in his chair and hated them came back drunk to his former address and banged and banged on the door to be let in; and when a loud young party across the street ended with sexual intercourse on the pavement outside their house; and when the flat of a woman three doors down caught fire and burned to death nine of her fourteen cats; and when the motorbikes roared up the narrow canyon of the street on a warm night so that Joseph asked her if he could close the bedroom windows but she said, ‘No, this is the place you wanted, this is the sound you get'; then she wanted to run away, to run back to Kew, just to run. But she said nothing.