Remember Me... (30 page)

And how Joseph would like it! It would remind him of Wigton where, she had suggested, unsuccessfully, he ought to set a novel. She had seen a film which was set in the North of England, in a city not unlike Newcastle, and been taken by the physical and emotional similarities Joseph bore to the hero. And she had read about the working-class North being an inspiration to contemporary artists. Here in Newcastle she saw it plainly, far more dramatic, she thought, than its miniature version in Wigton. So she would be helping Joseph go back to his roots without the difficulty and embarrassment which she recognised he might have in going back to his home. And the more she imagined life here, her own life on the quayside, the more she was convinced that she too would love it, she knew she would, it was a real place, it was perfect for an artist. They would adopt a pub.

She outlined this to him as they ate a hushed dinner in the small dining room of the modest Bed and Breakfast to which BBC Personnel had directed them.

The B and B was in a crescent of semi-detached houses in Jesmond, an affluent suburb of Newcastle, cut off from the heavy industrial city by the Town Moor, an urban cordon sanitaire. They had been there for less than a week but Joe had already worked out a morning routine which included walking to work across the Moor. Despite the traffic flow along its spine, the Moor had a residual atmosphere of Northern bleak landscape which he liked. He liked the deep silence of the crescent. He liked the temptation of nothing to do in the evenings but stay in and write.

He went to see the terraced house by the Tyne the following evening. He too was taken by the locality, by the people, by the culture. In the house that was to be let he found much that was familiar but the clear sounds of television sets to the left and right of him raised worries. Perhaps the noise could be lived with. After all he had grown up above noise, the racket of a pub, and at Oxford experienced inevitable intrusion when he shared rooms.

They were all but escorted to the pub on the corner of the street, the King's Head, and Joe decided to drink nothing but Newcastle Brown Ale. It could not have been more friendly and Joe saw Natasha's eyes
glitter with pleasure at this rich new discovery. That he worked for the BBC and that she was an artist were facts relayed to all newcomers. Natasha flowered under the chatting scrutiny of interested women and the saucy glances of one or two of the younger men. ‘It's as if we have been here before,' Natasha whispered, ‘already they have made us feel like their family.'

It was a Friday, pay day, busy, intimate. Natasha, he could see, rode on the crest of it and he thought he understood why. This, she would think, was Joseph's world: this would take him back, slough off the strain of being the new creation of Oxford and the BBC, reconnect him with his past, which as she had said several times, he had to examine as a writer. He saw her eyes gleam with hope, misguided, for as the noise grew and the cheerfulness intensified and the drink began to exercise its grip, Joe realised with a sad but inflexible certainty that it would do him no good.

He would like it too much. He would be putty in their hands, invitations, drinks, friendships – he could see them coming and it would be full of ease but the privacy and the puzzling need of a writer's solitude would be difficult to maintain. Solitude, especially in a stranger, was deliberate separateness, unfriendly. The quayside prospered on community; it needed community. Pulling together was the tribal imperative.

Across the room was a young man, perhaps a year or two ahead of Joe, the sort of young man Joe had always envied. Joe had never had that poise and lack of fret. Handsome, cavalier, out for the night with good mates around the companionable pints which nudged each other on the little table. Joe learned that the gang of them worked in the shipyards together. The young man would look across at Joe now and then and nod, but it was Natasha who drew his more intense and questioning gaze.

The man was netted by her difference. She caught his eye, Joe was watching closely; and her happy openness, her unabashed difference in such company clearly stirred and intrigued the young man. He would be after her, Joe thought, when I was away at work, or even here in the pub, he would be after her; and others like him. He could not bear the thought of it. He began to reason it away. Would Natasha still be as enraptured with the place after a few weeks of this? She would soon find
out the limitations of the transitory visitor. Then there was a danger of slumming it, he thought. That would be a good argument. And he would paint the darker side of this glow. Men and women utterly disarming, hospitable to embarrassment, but quick in their quarrels, sharp at offence given or thought to be given, able to bond instantly but also able to exclude and eject just as swiftly.

As they went back across the dark Moor on the merrily lit bus, he articulated none of this to Natasha. It had been a good evening. The pub was well run, the singing at the end had been roof-raising, Natasha had been a princess for that night and she had enjoyed it. He had not the heart to tell her what he thought, not then, not the next day, not until the Sunday when he told her that the landlady of the Bed and Breakfast had a friend a few doors along, a Mrs Farr, widow of a solicitor, who let her upstairs as a self-contained flat. It had been on the market for a while because she was so picky. But for a young man in the BBC she was sure it would be available and most reasonable. Very quiet. Very quiet indeed. No parties. No pets.

It was, thought Natasha, like a tomb.

‘I thought she looked starved the moment I set eyes on her,' Ellen said, ‘and the cough on her chest is bad. She hadn't taken anything for it. We went straight from the station to the chemist.'

Sam gave her his full attention. Ellen had come back later than expected from her day trip to Newcastle and, most unusually, gone immediately upstairs, without staying to help in the pub. And she had waited upstairs until the place was cleared. She looked upset, Sam thought; and there was some anger and puzzlement. It was rare that Sam felt Ellen out of reach, and outside his understanding of her mood, but this was one such time. When she did come down, he made her a cup of tea and waited, desisting, with difficulty, from the interrogation he felt the need to undertake.

He had put coal on the fire late as it was, partly to give the kitchen more life and partly just to do something to show that a preparation had been made.

‘It's bitter over there,' said Ellen, holding the cup with both hands and sipping the tea gratefully as if it were medicine. ‘Far worse than here. They always seem to have it colder in the North-east.'

Sam lit a new cigarette off the stump of the old.

‘She seemed so sunk in herself,' said Ellen, after a long pause. ‘She couldn't have been more friendly when she met me at the station, but I could see she was having to force herself. To tell you the truth I thought that something had gone bad between them.'

Sam was disturbed by this but made no comment.

‘We went back to their flat. It's very nice. It reminded me of Miss Snaith's when Joe did the piano lessons. A lot of good old-fashioned furniture and those very quiet colours. The woman downstairs was kindness itself; she put a pot of tea and some cakes on the top of the stairs and just gave a little tap at the door and disappeared. She always does that, Natasha said. But it was cold. Natasha didn't take her coat off. It was bitter. There's a meter to be fed with shillings but you can't always have enough shillings.'

Sam had waited long enough. He spoke as evenly as he could.

‘Did you get to the bottom of what was ailing her?'

‘It was something inside her, Sam. Way inside her. It was . . . it was as if she was hardly in the room with me. She tried, she's very well mannered, she just seemed in herself, as if the rest of the world was shut out. I can't explain it. But I could feel it.'

‘When did he get back?'

‘After six.'

Sam reined himself in.

‘She just lit up, poor thing, when he walked in but he looked tired himself and wanting to eat and get on with more work. Natasha says he reads all the time when he isn't writing. He said he liked the job, he said it was the sort of job he could do for life.'

‘Did you feel anything between them?'

‘Just, as if she was far away, looking for a hand, I don't know, Sam. You would have worked it out.'

‘Do you think he was looking after her well enough?'

‘He's always been very . . . what is it?'

‘Concentrated?'

‘On himself, hasn't he? You used to say that was what got him through.'

‘It's not always the best of qualities when you're married. Especially if your wife's – what would you say she was?'

‘I wish I knew, Sam.' She was distressed but strove not to show it.

‘They should come back over here,' he said, ‘for a rest.'

‘They should.' Now at last she looked at him, her eyes filling with tears. ‘But where could we put them up, Sam? And how can we look after her when there's everything we have to do all day in the pub? She needs somewhere quiet and a normal life – and so does Joe. He's clashing himself. But what can we do for them here in the pub, Sam? Tell me that.'

Natasha went to the doctor as Ellen had urged her to do and he put her on a course of antibiotics, told her to keep warm, advised regular hot drinks and said that she would feel ‘down in the dumps' for two or three weeks.

But the physical explanation was not enough for her. Natasha was driven into herself once more to haunt regions of unhappiness she thought she had escaped; unhappiness and blank apprehension, unanswerable questions infinitely multiplied like images in opposing mirrors. For several weeks she spent much of the day in bed, depleted by the chest infection which cleared up only slowly, fearful of the bite of the hard Northern winter, phone-less, talking to no one, not even to Mrs Farr whose concern brought a tray of tea and biscuits every afternoon but whose manners dictated that she leave it on the landing at the top of the stairs and immediately retire to her own quarters.

Natasha had no energy for drawing and though she continued to read and attempted to write poetry it seemed a doleful business. When Joseph burst in from work her heart lifted, her expression lightened, but he was preoccupied. He delivered his day to her as he always had done but she saw that it was almost as much a duty as a pleasure. There were still the stories, there was still the mimicry to entertain her, but he was turning inward too and even when they shared the table in the sitting room and wrote face to face she sensed that now he would have
preferred the solitude in which she had been imprisoned all day. He read furiously, sometimes reading aloud a passage – ‘How did he do that?' ‘Listen to this' – and his writing consumed ever more of his free time and energy.

Natasha made a literal retreat from the table to one of the two large armchairs by the electric fire where she watched him, his back and head hunched over the pad. How could he be so near yet so far away? He was surely the same Joseph. He still came back to her; he loved her; she trusted him, she relied on him; too much? Was it dependence? Was the need for him too great, more than he wanted to bear? She had to be careful, she decided, as she glanced over to him and tried to stifle her cough.

And then he would look around and grin, or suddenly jump up from his chair and come across and kiss her or, best of all, say, ‘What do you think of this?' – and read a paragraph or two which she would praise and only later, a day or two later, find a moment to introduce her misgivings. ‘I've already done that,' he would usually say, or, ‘That's good. That's really helpful. Thanks,' with a hug and for a while the clouds lifted.

Joe abandoned Aeneas and his journey through the concentric circles of walls. He had managed just over thirty thousand words but as his interest flagged the prose slackened, the pace of writing dragged, the novel ran out on him in his second week in Newcastle.

He began to plan a novel with the title
The Metropolitan Line.
This would be seven interconnected stories, seven characters apparently unrelated, differing greatly in their background and class and position in the city but crossing each other's paths, at first without knowing they were doing so, but, in the end somehow (to be discovered in the writing) seen as bound together. It would be a chance to feed off his excitement at the impact of London, to write about the present, to portray a spectrum of life from the old flower seller at Charing Cross Station to the grandees he had brushed against in Broadcasting House. He could not think of a plot. He did not want a murder or a will or an accident. The plot, he decided, itching to get going, would emerge from
the characters. And this time, whatever happened, he would finish it. It would need all the energy he could dredge up.

Newcastle skewered it. Joe's attachment was to the daily local radio programme called
Let the People Speak
and he was being given a drubbing by the small scornful former Communist Arnold Baxter, its editor, whose encouragement to Joe, in an overemphatic Geordie accent, included, ‘We don't need Oxford folk to tell us what to do,' ‘You're nothing but a working-class rural Conservative in Liberal sheep's clothing – worst of both worlds,' and ‘Raymond Williams has already written everything you might attempt. There's no point.' The other two producers, John, a young Yorkshireman who'd served time on the
Manchester Guardian
, and Harold, a local man who'd been lured across to radio from the
Newcastle Journal
, told him to ignore ‘the old sod', but as they respected the old sod and conspired with him to make a programme as radical and left-wing as they could possibly get away with, Joe had the uncomfortable feeling that they rather agreed with the old sod and indeed he himself often thought that the old sod had a point.

Joe had sailed along from his adolescence on the comfortable tide of post-war Welfare State Labour. A glimpse of Oxford politics had confirmed his preference for the unexamined certainties of a political position which could effectively be shelved while he got on with his life. Life, for Arnold Baxter, was nothing but politics, hard politics. ‘Arnold makes Lenin look soft,' said John. ‘I don't know how the BBC lets him get away with it.'