Remember Me... (56 page)

‘People still live there.'

‘I know. Oh, I know.'

‘Things happen. Life goes on.'

‘Oh, I know. You're right.'

‘And what's a quarry got to do with writing anyway? Writing isn't an industrial process.'

‘I agree with you,' she said. ‘You say these things, then somebody comes along and writes a book that blows the thing clean out of the water.'

‘But you must have said it because you believe it?'

‘Yes. Sorry. I believe it.'

‘So what next? In your system. Of perpetually and opportunistically moving on to pastures new.'

‘Well, what next?' She took a steady sip of the water. ‘Women writers – I know there have always been women writers but I mean
self-consciously feminist writers – we are claiming more territory. The American Jews are riding high now. They're in the saddle. Next I think the blacks, in the States anyhow, they bring us news and news we can trust because it's fiction. Faulkner still has heat because of the blacks. Your old Empire, your Commonwealth has more and more writers demanding space for their experience. In the States the gays are gathering on the fringes and then there's genre writing. Crime's bigger than ever. I'm afraid the carnival's moved on from the English provinces.'

‘Joe thinks you can find all human life in Wigton, don't you, Joe?' Edward's intervention was neat, amusingly delivered and just what was needed to save Joe and caution Christina.

‘Too royal,' Joe said. ‘A man's a man for a' that. Rabbie Burns, working-class poet, rare. My round.' He went to the bar glad to leave them.

Others came soon and the talking groups split and regrouped like amoebae until it was time for him to leave. He sought out Christina.

‘I meant to say how much I liked the poems in
The Vanishing Point,'
he said, ‘some of them were really good.' He quoted:

‘Fragments of my past

Shards of memory cut

The days to ribbons

Streaming blood before me.'

‘I'm flattered, Joe,' she said. ‘Thank you.'

‘And I particularly like the seven set in Concord –
New England Blues.'

‘I grew up there,' she said. ‘It's a kinda picture-book and historical-cut-out little spot but it was home, you know?'

‘I do. Home's good. And very good to meet you.'

‘You too, Joe.' She held out her hand. ‘Read Robert Lowell. Good luck. I mean that. Good luck.'

Why did she say that? he asked himself as he zigzagged through Soho making for Piccadilly Circus. Does she think I need good luck? Do I look as if I need such a supportive send-off? And I've read Lowell.

He dwelled on the idea of his luck until he was almost home. It was, he thought, evidence of his exhausted mind that what was most likely a remark of passing American politeness he should seize so tenaciously. He used to thank his luck. A fortune teller in a fair on Hampstead Heath had once pointed out that his left hand was so criss-crossed with lines that even if he fell off at tower block he would land on his feet. He had believed her. But as the stripping away of the layers of his personality gathered pace in the analysis, he felt less sure of his luck. Had Christina intuited that? Her poems – those about mental breakdown – certainly showed her understanding of states of disturbance. Maybe she meant that luck alone could cure what luck had caused. Edward was very brazen about her, he thought: quite rightly, much more honourable than hiding her away. A woman like Christina could not be hidden away. Her boldness reminded him of Natasha. It was a pity that Natasha never came to the pub. Perhaps if he told her about Christina . . .

On Mondays when the session was at 11 a.m. he made a day of it in London. His version of the script was now in its third draft and Saul had changed directors and brought in Tim whose
Jude
had not done too badly. Saul prided himself on spotting talent and on sticking with it, or at least giving it a second chance, and so far Tim and Joseph were shaping up well. Tim would keep it low budget, find good locations and not have to build expensive sets, and he would employ some of the brilliant new generation of English actors: they too were inexpensive.

On Monday afternoons Saul would hold court with Tim and Joseph, together with his accountant and sometimes his secretary whose touch, he said, was ‘golden': ‘If there was a female Midas Miriam would be the female Midas.' For Joseph these two or three hours swung between hell and an education. When they picked over every line of dialogue and asked him every question they could think up about the line, the response called for by the line, the response the line itself answered to, the necessity for the line, whether it should be two lines, or three lines, or no line at all, or a rewritten line and then they would all set to and ‘rewrite' with arthritic spontaneity, Joseph would feel as if sawdust had replaced any remaining brain cells and the sawdust was being ground exceedingly small by a wheel of granite. Saul.

When, though, Saul would take out the long afternoon cigar and ease into anecdotes about the ‘legends' he had worked with, Joe felt he had a ringside seat on history. Saul was generous with his stories, detailed, even pedantic in his descriptions of memorable scenes, the interplay between actors, a specific shot, what had been better by being left unsaid, the use of music. There was about him at these times the manner of a great teacher, rabbinical in scrutiny, worldly in reference, captivating and aware of it.

Afterwards, Tim would steer Joe to the nearest pub to spend half the time moaning that Saul would never actually sign off on the script, the other half moaning about the financial disaster resulting from his divorce.

Joe always walked through Hyde Park after that. He stopped now and then at a bench to make notes on what had been said. It did look as if this film would be made and with his script. He had to rein in his impatience. And Charles had hinted that parts of
Occupied Territory
would benefit from rewriting. He must not be impatient. How could you not rush, though, when there were no daily constraints of external routine? All the time in the world made you put extra pressure on yourself or you finished nothing.

He would watch the planes south of Hyde Park, still quite high in this part of the city, a tolerable drone, but every single one headed for Kew Gardens, for his house, the pilot's hand about to reach out to activate the screeching brakes.

He always arrived home irritated at his tiredness. Natasha would be eager to hear what had happened in the analysis and the strain of not telling her everything was something he could have done without.

It was late when he raised the subject. Perhaps he waited because, knowing there would be disagreement, he did not want to give it time to drag on. He knew that this would be no more than an opening shot but he had thought it through for months now and it had to be said. They had just watched
News at Ten.

He waited until a plane had cleared over. ‘Last Sunday,' he said, ‘a plane woke me up before six. They say they suspend night arrivals until after six but they don't. After that I couldn't stop counting, wherever I was or wherever we were; in the house, out in Kew, on the towpath, round at Anna's or Margaret's, back in the house, I just kept counting. I was doing all sorts of other things as far as you or anybody else might have noticed but what I was really doing all day and all the time was counting the planes. It wasn't frantic but I couldn't get rid of it.

‘Then I began to time the space between the planes so that I could work out when they might be coming and try to disconnect myself for those small spans but they vary even though they seem to come like clockwork, they vary as if to stop you predicting them. There were hundreds. There were pauses now and then and I thought – they've stopped. Then they came back. Two hundred and eighty-three aeroplanes went over our house last Sunday, flying low with brakes full on, and part of my mind spent all that day locked against the noise so that it didn't blow out my brains or make me run away again.

‘Two hundred and eighty-three times I heard the plane, I braced myself against the plane, I tried to make whatever is inside this skull into a second layer of armour plating inside the bone and when the plane sound left, and as I imagined it sail over those great conservatories in Kew Gardens, across the Thames, I got ready for the next one. We ate meals, we went on a walk, we had tea in the garden at Anna's, we watched the play on television, we read, we wrote, Marcelle was seen and heard and for her and for you, I'm sure, it was a good day but for me it was two hundred and eighty-three aeroplanes ripping through my mind as they are doing now and Natasha, why do we have to keep living here?'

She saw a pleading face, puffy from the too much drink he took more regularly now.

‘We love it here,' she began, fearfully.

‘Yes.'

‘Our friends, Marcelle's friends . . .

‘Yes.'

‘Others . . .'

‘I know . . . Others cope . . . I know.'

‘Where would we go?'

‘We could try Richmond Hill. They don't seem to pass over there.'

‘No!' Natasha made an awful decision, obstinately held to. ‘If you want to move, we move. Not just a few hundred yards.'

‘It's further than that.'

‘We have to think it over.'

‘I have. Hundreds of times. Here it comes again . . . Why should we spend our life under a flight path when we could sell this place, buy another place and not be under a flight path?'

‘This is where you brought me. This is where I have settled.'

‘I know. I'm sorry.'

‘You have settled here too.'

‘I have.'

She saw the dejection but she was too occupied fighting her own alarm to take it into account.

‘Can you not give it another try? Can you not go more to that library in the club?'

‘I could. But I can't go every day. People don't. Don't ask me. They just don't.' And it's cut off there, he wanted to say, it becomes just odd sitting alone in a club library, in a beautifully furnished and polished room full of rare books I feel self-conscious, which is fatal. It's no place for me to write what I want to write and I'm not telling you this because you'll ask why it isn't and I don't know. And I always have to come home. There are weekends. And until midnight they're here most days, beginning again at six.

‘I have to think about this.'

I have to talk to my analyst is what she really meant, Joseph thought, and said nothing.

‘Please do,' he said and closed his eyes as another plane screamed over. ‘Please. Do.'

All their Kew friends seemed to take Joseph's side. ‘Bloody nuisance, aren't they?' or ‘Such a fantastic difference when we have a weekend off' or ‘Friend of mine in a flat in Baker Street says they are getting worse even there.' But Joseph felt that he had been found wanting: even sympathy appeared critical. ‘Don't blame you. Thought of moving ourselves' or ‘If it weren't that the kids were settled in school here . . .' Joseph squirmed.

When their Kew friends were more than usually cheerful under the flight path he wanted to crawl into a corner. Even when an escapee from Kew said, ‘It drove me mad too, get out before it traps you, get out before you're hooked,' Joseph still thought, but it's only him, look at all the others who endure it, look at what is being endured everywhere you look – what are a procession of noisy planes?

So again he tried to bear it. As his defences were being dismantled by his analyst so to prove his independence and his will he would test himself in Kew: holding out against the planes was the test. If he could stop counting them or act out indifference to that howl in the sky then he would be better able to resist the offensive of the analyst.

At the same time, they began the search for a new house.

There were times when he could not pass an estate agent's office without peering at the photographs of available houses and collecting sheets of information from all over London. For the rest of his life Joe could closely connect with many districts in London through the memory of visiting a house unbought. It was a journey to the interior of the middle-class metropolis and the more Joe saw the more cosy and hand-finished and neat their own house seemed in Kew. Years later he could still
remember a large elegant double-volumed drawing room in Chelsea (too expensive), ‘a gem of a place' (but no garden for Marcelle) perfectly situated next to the Kensington Public Library, a big end-of-terrace house near Notting Hill (but next to a pub), an excellent house in Chiswick but the planes came over almost as low as in Kew. So it went on for more than two months while Natasha worked on her book and Joe worked on the script and anxiously saw his novel through the proof stage and began to do a little more radio. Looking for a house became their way of life.

Natasha played fair. It would be unjust to make it simple and say that he rushed in with eager urgency and she somehow always found a way to block it. There were at least two houses she liked and said so and would have gone for. But at the back of his mind, Joe thought they were too show-off. They were too big a leap, too much of a statement, too uncomfortable to live with. It was Joe's vacillation in these two cases which passed by the opportunity.

His guilt at what he feared he was doing to Natasha made him read into her remarks and expressions an attitude which was not always there. Instead of accepting her willingness and building on her determined cooperation he kept looking for and, as he thought, finding the regret, the projected sense of loss, the sadness. It was Joe who extended the process and made it weary by misreading Natasha, by fearing too much for her, by letting his own never-absent guilt unnerve him. Joe who even at those two sunniest moments, when the way seemed clear, conjured up a shadow and drew back. Joe who decided after several weeks to make a further attempt to find a quieter place in Kew itself.