Remember Me... (59 page)

There was Joseph, pretending: she thought. Pretending that he liked Hampstead more than she was sure he did; pretending to like the house when she knew he hated it; pretending to find the people in the street ‘real'; pretending to a fondness for the street itself, the shoddy tumble of a cheaply run-up Edwardian terrace.

Joseph was running out of himself. That which had taken him to university, to the marriage, to writing, to a family, to films and to money enough for him to be unloosed from a salaried anchor, was draining away. Or so he gleaned and assumed from his analyst. And so he noted from his tougher more successful acquaintances who laughed whenever the old Joe's naivety was exposed, who simply did not believe in his sometimes slow truths and gauche honesty. He needed recharging for the
next lap. Analysis was at the core of it, he decided, and he was now in its grip to such an extent that when the analyst said that he was going away for a month's holiday, Joe counted the days, as he had done at Oxford when parted from Rachel, counted them down until they would meet again, counted them sometimes by the hour.

Yet on the surface, whatever it was that made him enabled him to get by. The final script on Elizabeth was delivered and accepted.
Occupied Territory
was received better than his previous novels. A television director bought the option to make it into a film. He went to a few literary launch parties and was always edgy which translated into too much quick drink followed by boasts or muted belligerence; but he coped. Tim told him to widen his experience and suggested strip clubs in the afternoons and dodgy bars in the evenings. Joe felt there were lives he was missing and yet the life he was leading was full. He smoked more. He was drunk more often. He went to football matches with Edward and the clasp of the crowd seemed the best thing on offer. His success led him to feel embattled.

Natasha dropped off Marcelle at the nursery school in Flask Walk and tacked up Hampstead High Street peering around her. Her eyesight was good but at times she could seem very short-sighted, peering, as if the world were too dangerous to be taken wide-eyed. She tried to get bearings. What would she latch onto? What would become one of those often unassuming spots which somehow make you feel safe and at home? She trailed up the hill scanning the unbusy street, glancing into the little courts and mews and walks, eventually turning right at the underground station and walking up Heath Street. On her left were some stone steps. She went up them as they twisted like an eccentric staircase and led her to the Mount, the top of the Hill, the little Georgian crown unordered but harmonious, not unlike La Rotonde. It was a place easy to love.

Why had Joseph not chosen the house here? They had looked at one but he had heard the boom of traffic far below from a main road and that had scared him off. These narrow traffic-free alley-streets soothed her and she
followed one which led to an immense, once grand, now neglected, Victorian gothic churchyard. She could do watercolours here: that churchyard could yield a lot. But the distant noise deterred him, fatally.

Natasha came back into Hampstead by way of Mount Vernon and the Queen Anne splendour of Church Row, the sort of place where Ellen thought they ought to live and which they could have afforded, just, had Joseph not been determined to squirrel away some of his film earnings for a rainy day. The thrift was admirable but she wished he had been bolder. Yet Natasha applauded the common sense of what Joseph had tried to do and, more surely, she believed that an over-consideration of material circumstances was little more than an attempt to duck the real issues. So she wandered around Hampstead on that morning, a tourist, a stranger, trying to make it familiar, steadily suppressing the strong undertow of sadness for lost Kew.

‘Natasha! How are you?'

She turned in the direction of the voice but recognised no one.

‘Over here!'

Natasha focused. She was on the broad pavement at the High Street end of Perrin's Court, having just passed what she did not yet know was Hampstead's sole bohemian outdoor conversational venue, the Coffee Cup, a few tables under a permanent canopy outside a small restaurant.

‘How are you?'

He had left his table and was in front of her.

‘James!'

The name came to her with relief. James. And suddenly it was Oxford again and the early days in London, the magazine in Finchley, the beginning of James's wildly improbable but successful career as a writer of popular songs, a friend. They shook hands.

‘Would you like a coffee?'

‘Thank you.'

He ushered her to the small and uncomfortable wooden seats.

‘Why are you alone?'

James smiled and felt a swell of warmth at her directness.

‘Howard has just left. I stayed to pick up the bill.'

‘Howard . . . he writes the music. We've lost touch.'

He ordered for both of them.

‘Geography,' said James in that church voice Natasha so liked and liked all the more now that it stood at such odds with his vernacular popular lyrics. ‘Underestimated. Geography is a great maker and breaker of friendships. But now that you live here we shall get together again. We've been in Israel for a few weeks. Howard has family there.'

‘Joseph thought he might go there.'

‘Everyone should,' said James. ‘It's quite remarkable. One envies the kibbutz system without actually wanting to live on one. And Howard's friends – so intelligent. Do you like Hampstead?'

Natasha decided to avoid an answer.

‘I've just been up at the top on the Mount,' she pointed.

‘That's where we live.'

‘Together?'

‘Yes. We share a house, we share a job, but we don't share a life!' He laughed. ‘A well-practised answer with the merit of being true. The house is small but it's somehow inspirational up there.'

Natasha nodded.

‘I took
The Unquiet Heart
with me to Israel,' said James. ‘Many congratulations. I loved it. I thought the young man was particularly finely drawn and Brittany came alive. It made me want to go there.'

‘So the book had its uses.'

‘It really is very good to see you,' he said, as the coffee was placed in front of them. ‘How is Joseph? One reads about him now and then.'

‘Changing,' she said.

‘Don't we all?'

‘No. Most of us grow older on the basis of what we are. Change is different.'

‘I see it as inevitable,' said James. ‘Especially if you move from one world into another.'

‘Like you?'

‘Yes,' he nodded. ‘And Joseph.'

‘But you have not changed,' she said.

‘How disappointing.' His warm affectionate laughter reassured her.

‘He seems . . . uncentred,' she said.

‘I'm not surprised,' said James, ‘when you look at the trajectory. But
the last time I saw him, when he came to that launch just before our Israel trip – you couldn't make it, I remember – he seemed buoyant.' Even overexcited, James could have added, even hyper.

‘Yes. He can't believe his life,' said Natasha.

‘That could lead one to be a little unbalanced.'

‘It leads to overconfidence and lack of confidence.'

‘That's not unusual on the pop scene either,' said James, ‘in fact I'd say it's characteristic. And in many ways Joe is very much part of that generation if not of that specific strand in it.'

‘Is it so easy to sweep people up in the generalisation of “a generation”?'

‘It is relevant,' said James, ‘especially, I think, this one. Bright working-class boys, early success, coming up to London, the music thing, the drugs thing, the sex, the sense of the world changing from one's fate to one's oyster!' He laughed. ‘Instant pop sociology has become rather a weakness of mine.'

‘Sometimes I think that Joseph could have been homosexual.'

‘What makes you say that?'

‘When you study his background.'

‘I see signs of a sort of pervasive sexuality, an erotic sensibility in some of his work and mannerisms, but I would describe that as feminine, not homosexual, and not uncommon, especially now.'

‘“Especially now”. Isn't it merely a boast to claim that we live in a “special” age?'

‘Perhaps. All I can say is that this feels like one for me and for many others and across the old class barriers: it's the sort of bonding you read about in a war but this time it's a bonding in liberation of several varieties.'

‘Hedonism,' said Natasha.

‘I was rather perturbed by one remark he made when we met,' James said. ‘He told me he wanted to go to Vietnam.'

‘And you say he is buoyant? To go to Vietnam is a proof of buoyancy?'

‘I took issue with him, of course,' said James, while still ruminating on Natasha's reference to Joe's sexuality, ‘but he insisted he needed to test himself. I'm sure “test” was the word. I pointed out he would have
no accreditation, he had no experience as a war correspondent and it could in one sense be seen as merely voyeuristic.'

‘The voyeurism charge would check him,' said Natasha. ‘Sometimes he seems to want to go into orbit or he believes he is already in orbit.'

That was enough, she decided. It was becoming disloyal and besides the cause of much of his recent uncharacteristic behaviour could well be tracked back to the analysis, she thought, which he was undergoing at her request and on her behalf. She must take on that responsibility and accept the consequences.

‘We shall meet again,' said James. ‘What a pleasant prospect.'

‘You remember that song we heard on the Arab radio station,' said Howard, the moment that James came into their music room.

‘The Egyptian one?'

‘Yes. But listen.' Howard picked at a soulful melody on the guitar. ‘Almost exactly the same. But what I've played is Gaelic.'

‘How extraordinary.'

‘Now if you sort of splice them together you get this.' Once again Howard played and this time for James images of remote islands in great seas, of Celtic crosses and god-haunted streams were superimposed on the deserts and dunes, the camel caravans and Bedouin of his romantic Arabia.

‘It's not our usual style,' said James.

‘Exactly.' Howard, already besotted by this composition, could not resist playing it quietly once more as they talked on.

‘I've just seen Natasha,' said James. ‘It could be her.'

‘A woman alone.'

‘A woman alone, in a pavement café; in Paris? At some crisis point thinking on life, how she arrived where she is, what choices she had.'

‘I could slow it down a bit,' said Howard.

‘No. That won't be necessary. We could give the song a name, the name of the woman.'

‘It is extraordinary, isn't it?' said Howard. ‘Egyptian and Gaelic.'

‘Natalie would be a good name,' James said. ‘When we meet her she's drinking coffee . . .'

Isabel and Alain liked to have ‘
les
Richardsons' to themselves and this time they went for lunch to Roussillon where there was a serviceable restaurant and a large open-air public swimming pool to which Joseph took Marcelle immediately after the main course.

‘She is adorable, your Marcelle,' said Alain as they sat back with their cigarettes and coffee. ‘A little English rose.'

‘For me she is completely French,' said Isabel, ‘except for the language, but already she is learning. You should have made her bilingual, Natasha.'

‘That's what Joseph wanted.'

‘It is always the man who has the common sense,' said Alain.

‘Don't be ridiculous, Alain. Were you asleep? It was I who suggested it.
Alors!
'

‘Two languages can be a disadvantage,' said Natasha. ‘They are to me. I feel frustrated. My English will never be good enough. My French is not necessary in London. I am between two worlds.'

‘But Joseph tells me your English is superb,' said Alain. He indicated that he wanted the bill. ‘He says the critics were marvellous.'

‘But it is only in English!' said Isabel. ‘When will it be translated?'

It had been rejected by three French publishers and Natasha was sore on the subject.

‘These things take time, Isabel.'

‘Patience, Isabel,' said Alain. ‘Or read English.'

‘Joseph's books are not in French either,' said Isabel, ‘it's too bad.'

‘I am going to see the swimmers,' said Alain.

‘We will stay here out of the sun,' said Isabel, ‘I have been waiting for you to go.'

‘You see how I am treated by my wife?' said Alain. ‘I am not appreciated.' ‘Go away. I want to talk to Natasha.'

They watched his elegant figure saunter out of the cool restaurant, put on his English Panama hat and turn towards the swimming pool.

‘Now then,
chérie
, said Isabel, ‘what is it . . . ?'

Alain watched Joseph and Marcelle with keen pleasure. At this time on the hot Provençal afternoon the pool attracted only the hardiest, the town boys and girls, the sons and daughters of the peasant families, children and adolescents exploiting their freedom while parents took a siesta before calling them back to help with the perpetual work. Joseph seemed so at home there, Alain observed, and nodded to himself at that observation, proving as it did his theory of ‘reversion to type'. He winced at the amount Joseph exposed himself to the sun but he was among equals in sun worship around the pool. Only Alain and a couple of others near his age took advantage of the rather tatty municipal parasols.

Joseph was teaching Marcelle to swim at the shallow end, holding her tenderly under the belly, telling her to kick out her legs, to pull with the arms, or Alain assumed that was the case. Then they would stop and he would hoist her onto his shoulders and stride into deeper water where he would throw her high in the air and she would shriek with joy, spread-eagled against the sky, seeming to hang motionless for a moment before falling down into his strong grasp and shouting, ‘Again! Again!' They waved at Alain and he felt both sad and happy at the pleasure this surrogate family brought him.