Remember Me... (73 page)

The phone calls between Natasha and Joe over the next weeks were on both sides acrimonious, unbridled, wounding to both of them. Frequently the phone would be slammed down and then picked up instantly after a bloodied interchange to offer an apology which as often as not fell once more into the rut of accusation often wild, always hurtful.

‘You are angry at me,' his analyst said, ‘because you see this process, this analysis, as one which, as you have just told me, has made you less guarded, less considerate, less able to be tolerant and “good-mannered”, your phrase. You see that as a loss. You say you believe that had you not come to see me and were Natasha also not in analysis then the old defences and habits would as it were fudge or “insulate” –
your word – matters and see you through. But quite obviously the old defences and habits had had their day with you. They had ceased to be of much use, as you have indicated on several occasions, for the new situation in which you found and still find yourself. You worry about what her analysis is doing to her but of course you can't ask. Well, you could, but you won't. Perhaps you might like to talk about that here.'

But Joe found nothing to say. To talk to Natasha about her analyst seemed far away from what was between them now and besides she would evade even the slightest reference to her analysis.

‘Do you have to be so root and branch?' Margaret asked her. The two women were alone in the drawing room, polishing the silver. Ross was taking advantage of a fine summer Sunday afternoon to take his own children and Marcelle to Hampton Court.

‘What alternative is there?'

‘Conciliation?'

‘The time for that was given and is now gone.'

‘Have you ever thought of talking to her? To Helen, I mean. I know it's not the usual route but when you and Joe are together you still seem, to me, you did at the party for instance, to have very much to offer each other. Maybe Helen doesn't know that.'

‘I've thought of it,' Natasha said. ‘I've thought about it often.'

She had lost weight. Curiously it made her look even more distinguished, Margaret reported to Ross, more foreign, more distant. ‘At some moments she seems very shaky,' she said, ‘at other times quite burning with a passion to follow her way. God knows what she's going through. But in the end she is always circling around Joseph.'

‘I don't want you to take out Marcelle this Sunday,' she told Joseph.

‘Why not? Last Sunday you said it was better for her to go out with Ross and his family on a trip he'd arranged and I could understand that. But not two Sundays in a row. What about Saturday?'

‘Neither Saturday.'

‘What is this?'

‘You make her too excited. She has to be calm to make her life here. She mustn't have this circus every week. It unsettles her.'

‘She seems not the slightest bit unsettled. Are you talking about her or about yourself? Marcelle and I have good times. I love seeing her.'

‘I need to clear my mind, Joseph, and I need her to understand what is happening. You have to leave me alone. You make it difficult. So does Ellen.'

‘What does my mother have to do with it?'

‘She brings too many presents, she gives her too many “treats” as she calls them. This is no good for Marcelle. I've asked Ellen not to come here again. Until matters are resolved.'

‘That's cruel.'

‘I have to take the best decisions as I see them. I do not want you to take Marcelle on Sunday. Neither Saturday.'

‘What if I just turn up?'

‘Please don't. Please don't.' I could not bear it, she thought.

‘I will,' said Joe. ‘Sunday. Between half eleven and twelve. As usual.'

After he had put down the phone Helen came in and she went to hold him but the tension coming off him was so strong she retreated, sat on the long sofa, took out a cigarette. Joe looked out of the window onto the narrow street, his back to Helen, his feelings too turbulent to master, silence his only recourse.

‘She says I can't see Marcelle.'

‘I gathered that. I was outside the door.'

‘I'm going down on Sunday. In fact I'll bloody well go down now.'

‘Maybe it would be better to sleep on it,' said Helen.

‘She can't do this. I mean . . . It's . . . Why should I not see her?'

‘Maybe,' said Helen, carefully, having thought this through for some time, ‘you ought to go back to her. Maybe that would be the best way.'

He turned and stood against the window, against the light. Helen could not make out his expression.

‘Why do you say that?'

‘You seem so unhappy. You're torn in two.'

‘What about us?'

Helen did not reply.

Could I do it? Joe thought. Could I just walk out of here now not for Marcelle but for both of them? Could I do that and prevent the inevitable wreckage that waited on divorce, all of the ripping up of their life together? I want to: so much of me wants to. It would be hard, but Helen's offer had made it possible, and was not the alternative
harder? It was harder to stay with Helen, his analyst had said. But what did ‘hard' mean? It was not to be calculated on a list or a balance sheet of Advantages and Disadvantages. It had gone so far inside him, this decision and this indecision, that there was nothing but insistent uncertainty. Oh, how good it would be to return to Kew, to Natasha, to their daughter, planes to be endured somehow, back to the place where they had made a life worth living and rescue Natasha from the pain she was in and by doing the right thing begin to resolve the sleepless consciousness of wrongdoing which made him loathe what he had become.

But he could not. He could not. He could not leave Helen. Not even to save Natasha, not even to redeem himself. Even if he had to, as he would, pay for that for ever after.

‘Let her have some time, at least,' said Helen.

Two days later a letter arrived from the solicitor asking Mr Richardson if he would desist from visits to his wife's house in Kew Gardens and until further notice desist equally for the time being from taking their daughter Marcelle away from her mother at weekends.

Once again Joe reached for the telephone but, mercifully, Natasha was not at home. Helen was out working on her film. Joe, alone at home, felt bound and gagged and trapped.

‘I'm afraid of what he'll say,' she said to Anna, in whose house she had taken refuge. ‘I'm afraid of him.'

‘You mustn't be. He's upset just as you're upset. It's awful for all your friends to see you both suffering. But he would never hurt you.'

‘I know.'

‘I am convinced he still loves you. We all are.'

‘I know that too. That's what gives me hope. His love gives me hope. And I know I will always live inside him. But what use is hope, Anna?'

‘Oh, Natasha.'

‘But I am afraid. I will go away. We will go away. Until this divorce goes through.'

‘Why don't you shelve the divorce for a while? He doesn't want it. He's told us he doesn't want it.'

‘But he must face it, you see. He has to see what the consequences
are. I have to start again with everything clear. I want to go back in the dark and find my way, this time alone and safe.'

‘She smiled,' Anna said later to her husband, ‘and I don't know why but I wanted to burst into tears . . .'

‘But of course you can come and stay with us,' Isabel wrote back. ‘Stay for summer? Stay for ever if you wish, my darling Natasha, and Marcelle too.'

But the house of Isabel and Alain was three kilometres from La Rotonde, quite isolated and, save for the two German shepherds who delighted Marcelle, there was no company for the child. She spent more and more time in La Rotonde where she soon found playmates. After a couple of weeks, despite Isabel's plea that Natasha still needed more rest and care from her, it seemed more sensible that Natasha and Marcelle move into La Rotonde.

Véronique gave them the bottom floor where the walls were at their thickest. It was cool against the heat but always rather dark. The windows were narrow slits. Sometimes Natasha felt she was in a dungeon.

Joe was bereft. Bewildered, he trailed around the humid London streets as if looking for a thread which would lead him to the answer to all his questions. He was still working on the film from the novel set in Mexico and at least half the week was spent in morning ‘script conferences' which lasted an hour or two and then left him high and dry. He did not want to go back to an empty house. Helen was working on her documentary. Sometimes he went into the London Library but its studious tranquility was unsuited to his oscillating, febrile mood. The external world was a shell he longed and threatened to break out of and yet strove to preserve intact.

He was surrounded by cinemas, galleries and museums which once would have been a refuge but now demanded too much energy. It was
hard for him to concentrate. The film script was effort enough and there he was helped by being with the producer and the director. He remained very nervous about travelling on the underground, still aware of imminent panic attacks. Although the self-imposed necessity to learn poetry had slackened he held onto it, kept at the ready like a well-cared-for weapon. And the sensation of blankness, of collapse could still overtake him. To walk the streets, however, to be a passing part of distracting, busy, city life proved to be a way to cope. Yet that summer the London streets seemed charged with too much intensity, so often on the edge of a thunderstorm.

He wanted Natasha. He wanted his analyst. He was like half a person aching, longing, crying for the other half, for the whole. Why had his analyst gone away? Why had Natasha? He felt inside her head, inside her pain, his pain; pain dominant.

The parting with wife and daughter was a brutal severance. The cut of it was raw. He reached out for them, and as he criss-crossed the West End of London, from offices to his analyst, to the library and the pubs, he was often so alive to Natasha and Marcelle that they seemed just around the corner, somewhere out there, waiting to be encountered. Yet he knew where they were and any day he could have joined them. But Helen was now his centre, however strained and bruising the effect of this separation.

Marcelle, he decided, must have a present and he came up with the idea of a hammock. It would be fun, he thought, for her and friends. There were two trees in the garden at La Rotonde between which it could be slung. He envied them the garden just as he envied them La Rotonde from the dirty steaming summer streets of London. He knew it would make Marcelle happy and a hammock was a big thing, it was something she could show off. He could see Marcelle in his mind's eye whenever he wanted to. Natasha's expression was so sad, her face more and more gaunt in sorrow, that he would turn away from it. He would remember the smile and that was unbearable. Again and again he thought that what he was doing was bad and wrong and yet he could not stop himself from doing it. He was then and would later be condemned for that.

A letter came from her, tender, brief. She was thinking of staying on after the holidays. Marcelle could attend the local school. Her back was
hurting a great deal now and Alain had recommended rest in the warmth of La Rotonde and also he had prescribed strong pills which worked wonders. Would he object? Marcelle was flourishing and she told the other children boastful stories about her English father!

Joe was determined to respond well. It was good that she was in Alain's hands, he wrote, and Marcelle would surely benefit from being at a French school and they must stay as long as they wanted, until she, Natasha, felt completely well . . .

Natasha received it as the letter of a man who would rather his estranged wife and child stayed out of his new life, the longer the better.

A friend of Helen's recommended a small hotel-pub in Cornwall, Journeys End, and they went for a few days towards the end of August. The train journey took longer than he had anticipated but it put both time and space between himself all that London had been and was, and he arrived in Cornwall in flight as much as on holiday.

The landlord who kept the bar in the deeply polished Jacobean premises was scarlet-faced and nose-purpled with rabid alcoholism. He boasted that if ever there was any untoward disturbance in his bar he brought out his double-barrelled shotgun and let loose at the walls and he pointed out several holes as proud proof. His wife, subdued and apologetic, made the place comfortable, and easy to like. Helen and Joe walked in the daytime, and after dinner went to a corner of the generally empty bar, where they played chess partly to avoid the conversational overtures of the scarlet-pimpled landlord.

Joe sent several postcards to Marcelle, on one of them asking if she had received any surprise from London.

They went for a final walk on the afternoon before they left. Perhaps it was the prospect of returning to London that jarred Joe but as they went up to the cliffs he felt unsettled and tried to draw ahead of Helen. He wanted space to resolve this. Helen, thinking he was in the mood for a more vigorous walk, stuck with him. She was still at his shoulder when they reached the top of the cliff path and the faster he walked along the edge the more Helen enjoyed the briskness of it, the feeling of
her vitality being cuffed by the high wind and the warm sun and by the recently lost urgency which had returned to Joe's step.

He stopped and looked out to the horizon a while. Then he said,

‘Do you mind if I go on by myself?'

‘Why?'

‘I don't really know . . . I just want to be by myself. I'm sorry.'

‘What is it?'

Still with his back to her he said,

‘What I really want to do is to join Natasha and Marcelle.'

‘You traitor!'

He faced her. Had the word been used only mock-seriously?

‘How can you say that?'

‘You've made up your mind. You should stick to it.'