Remember Me... (20 page)

He tried to continue to answer Andrée's questions about the Royal Family but less and less of his mind was engaged until he felt none of it was. He was blocked out with this almost tearful rage and certainty. She ought to be married to Michel! She would really have preferred to be married to Michel. Everyone in France they had met secretly knew that. He found that breathing was an act he had to think about. While Andrée posed urgent questions about Princess Margaret, his mind which had locked itself in a closed chamber tried to let something penetrate from Andrée. But most of all he had to instruct his mouth to suck in the air, the heavy salty air and then expel it. Yet it threatened to suffocate him. He took off his shirt and sandals and trousers and dived into the sea and swam as fast as he could, swam feeling a fool but swam as he had done in the baths in Wigton, swam to get away from himself.

When he was far enough away he lay on his back, looked at the stars. His marriage was a terrible mistake. They had nothing deeply in common – nothing of the richness she had so instantly with Michel. He turned face down and held his breath, floating like a drowned man. The boat came over.

He would not get back into the boat, swam behind it back to the beach. ‘It is the sunburn,' said Alain, when he arrived back at the little restaurant, ‘it has driven him a little mad, a mad Englishman.'

‘Go, now, to the house,' Isabel commanded, ‘here are the keys. Go and change and shower, you must go.'

Despite his protestations, Natasha insisted on coming with him, along the beach, up the steps and onto the narrow path which took them to the house.

‘What is it, Joseph?'

‘I wanted to swim. I got very hot. That's all. It was great in the water. It got rid of the sunburn.'

‘Is that all?'

‘What else could there be?'

That was not how Joseph talked. And he was acting as he had not acted before. Alain had told her where to find the painkillers. He took
two. They went onto the verandah, still warm, though Joe shivered a little even in his dry clothes.

‘We should go in.'

‘Let's stay out here. The sound of the sea is . . . you know. Let's stay here.'

A final, an almost convulsive shiver shook through him.

‘Better,' he said. He breathed very deeply and again and then again, deeply for the pleasure, for the reassurance of it. ‘Sorry,' he said, and reached out in a rather blind way to take her hand.

He is jealous, Natasha realised. I should have been more careful. He is a jealous man. I should have known that before. He is a man of honour. He wanted to fight Robert. He is more foreign now, away from Oxford. I have to understand him, these violent responses.

They were to take the plane back from Marseilles and Alain and Isabel drove them there. Isabel was subdued, as was Natasha. Joe, who sat in the front next to Alain at Isabel's insistence, kept up a cheerful banter with the handsome doctor whose friendship was so light and easy.

At the airport, Isabel took him aside, very deliberately.

‘Now, Joseph,' she said, ‘everybody thinks you are a good choice for Natasha. So do I. You are young but you are strong. And you love her, that is true?'

She looked at him so intently that Joe felt that he had to blink but to blink would be to let her down.

‘Yes,' he said, in a rather choked voice, ‘I do.'

‘Good. That is good. Now promise one thing. You promise?'

‘Yes.'

‘You must bring her to us if she is ever very unhappy. Ever. You understand? She must come to us. She is very, very precious to us. Do you promise to bring her?'

‘Yes, I promise.'

‘Good,' said Isabel; she paused; her eyes, he saw, were moist. She leaned forward, she kissed him on both cheeks and hugged him for a moment. ‘Good,' she repeated. ‘
Alors! Bon voyage
to the two of you.'

Natasha stood in her black dressing gown, looked through the french windows into the small North London suburban garden and watched the wind move the long tresses of the big willow tree. Sometimes the wind was so low that the delicate branches scarcely shifted, but even in that bare movement Natasha found a warm pleasure; and when the wind rose to lift and sway the elegant green October leaves she broke into a smile at the gentleness of the effort and at a sight so endlessly mesmerising, like waves breaking on a shore.

Joe had left for work half an hour ago; bolted a spartan breakfast, seized a fierce embrace, slammed the door of their downstairs flat and raced through the streets and across the park to the tube. She knew the path he took, it was the first lap of their route into the heart of London.

She wished they lived in the city, but she liked Joe's commanding impetuosity too much to resist his insistence on this remote suburb. They had stayed a few nights with his Oxford friend James and his parents in a house in Hampstead Garden Suburb whose interior displacement of books, good furniture, paintings, things inherited and well spotted in sales in the early days of a marriage, had been comfortably in tune with the houses of her father and that of the Stevenses. James's father knew a local estate agent who, in the spirit of helping a young couple, offered them for a low rent what he considered to be a bargain, in Finchley – two rooms, a kitchen and bathroom on the ground floor with a garden in a ‘nice quiet road'. Joe had been ready to accept sight unseen. Natasha had doubts – which had grown – but Joe's carelessness about where and how they lived, though it could also
be interpreted as a sort of selfishness, an inattention to her needs and wishes, charmed her. It was what she thought of as part of his innocence.

Now he was gone for the day and his loss sucked the flat into an emptiness which was not lonely, she reassured herself, nor was it sad: he was gone only to return, and with gifts, his talk of the day.

The other fine tree in the garden was a tall chestnut, which, together with the willow, blocked the view of the end and part of the sides of their small lawn and gave the garden an unusual privacy, even shrouded it, an effect intensified by the thick ivy which clustered over the rickety wooden fences. She watched brown and yellow leaves drop from the chestnut, lit her second cigarette of the day, took a sip of the tepid coffee, and decided what better was there to do for the next few minutes than stand and stare and let a happy boredom, a comfortable melancholy, grow into a poem.

The aunts had given them as a wedding present a handsomely bound set of the great French poets and she was reading Verlaine and Rimbaud, the more avidly perhaps because their physical world and the world of their poetry was so far from these regiments of neat, quiet, opaque, moat-gardened, semi-detached English houses standing in obedient formation on lifeless streets.

She had wandered around Finchley several times and acknowledged what she admired as the English tranquillity of it, the order in the shops, the lack of Gallic expostulation, the politeness which she thought verged on indifference. There were no cafés in which she could sit and read or write and the pubs, unlike those in Oxford, seemed forbidding. Natasha had attempted to find some sort of recognition and failed. There was a sense of foreignness here so extremely different to her own experiences of France and Oxford that no comparisons could be plucked at, no threads unravelled what must surely be, behind the gods of tidiness and discretion, a life, lives, equal to those she had known elsewhere. She knew only a morsel of England. This suburb was an England on which she had no purchase. That there were bridge evenings and coffee mornings, choirs, sporting clubs, active religious persuasions, communities of scholars, a subterranean network of associations and all the hobbied clutter of English suburban life was
unknown to her, and without knowing how to advance into it, she retreated.

The flat was adequately furnished. She had set up her easel in the sitting room but little painting had been done. Upstairs there was a couple encountered once on the doorstep. The man, very thickset, shaven-headed, brown-skinned, had abruptly announced himself as Felix, an Austrian, an engineer; then he introduced his dark silent companion as Rebecca, a Jewess whom he had met at the engineering company at which he worked.

Later, Natasha told Joe that Felix was certainly German and Rebecca was not Jewish, and besides her hair was dyed black. Joe at first argued – how could she know? – and then he took her word for it. She could see that he was not interested and she let it go. His new life enveloped him completely.

Two things happened. A robin settled on the rotting old bench at the back of the garden. Natasha loved its puff-chested perkiness, that red blaze and proud strut, the eager peck of its head and the sense of lightness. She tried to will it to stay until she had enjoyed all its pert show of life. When it flew away she felt a small sadness.

But then two grey squirrels scampered so swiftly across the branches of the chestnut tree she was beguiled by their graceful urgency. What had brought it on? Were they being pursued? Were they racing back to deposit the plunder of the morning? Was one hunting down the other? Or, like the arrival of the robin and the intermittent gusting of the wind, was it inadequately human to look for patterns and consequences. Things happened. Look at her own life.

She turned to the unmade bed and decided to warm up her coffee and settle there. The flat was cold. It was grey outside. Joe's imprint would still be on the sheets.

Perhaps there was a poem. The surging tresses of the willow, playthings of the wind, the robin and the squirrels, Joseph's absence, the solid broad chestnut sadly shedding its past, the yellow-brown leaves, dead, pocking the lawn in the morning silence of the suburb: all her present life was there.

The train was already quite full when Joe got aboard in the open heights of East Finchley. London down in the Thames basin was once again braced for the invasion of the commuters as the tubes droned into the metropolitan reservoir of labour. Mostly men, all reading, all silent, Joe included, as he gutted
The Times
, part of his job, to be done before he reached the office. It became more difficult to manoeuvre the large sheets of newsprint as the train filled up, still mostly men, yet more silence, as if rehearsing their prayers or their curses before the offices of the day.

The train seemed to speed up and rattle more loudly when it went underground and Joe ticked off some stations, old acquaintances: Golders Green and Evelyn Waugh; Hampstead Heath and Lawrence, Keats and Constable; Camden Town, Sickert and Dickens; and Mor-nington Crescent, the title, he thought, of a murder mystery; Warren Street, was that Mrs Warren? And ‘Farewell Leicester Square' down to Charing Cross of the road of the bookshops, heaven of a sort. Here he dismounted, walked quickly up the Strand and felt on the way to becoming a Londoner, loving London Town, past the Savoy Theatre of Gilbert and Sullivan, facing Fleet Street, St Paul's beyond, round the Aldwych to Bush House, the BBC World Service, which transmitted trusted news – he never failed to think on this with a childish imperial pride – to more than a hundred nations in their own languages: the truth centre, Joe thought, the Greenwich Mean Time of the honest state of the world.

Every time he went through the modest BBC entrance next to St Clement's, Joe was exhilarated, taken over by the romance of the place, the ambition, the reach, his imagination infested with the thought of sentences and sounds in so many tongues unleashed around the globe twenty-four hours every day. Bush House, as he soon learned, was staffed by exiles from tyrannies, escapees from prisons, refugees from persecution, intellectuals of planetary distinction, a Salvation Army of humanity dedicated to nothing but the truth, to telling it like it was, to slaying the dragon of propaganda wherever it breathed its blighting fire. He always ran up the broad and palatial stairs, too impatient to wait for a lift, as if running to escape the imaginary policeman who would tap him on the shoulder and tell him that his time was up, that he had to get
a real job, vividly aware of the belief in these early months that chance alone had landed him in this wonderful cathedral of radio, a place of unique rectitude, this first attachment as a BBC trainee. And George Orwell had worked there.

The meeting of the European Services Unit, to which he had been assigned, began at nine-thirty. By 10 a.m. the agenda had been ticked off, the stories had been decided on and distributed among the five writers. At first Joe ran alongside one of these, like a puppy terrier on a hunt tied to its mother. Only after several trials and errors was he unleashed alone and then on the gentler slopes. Out into morning London or to a library to pursue information, a five-hundred-word script to be delivered at three-thirty and corrected by the Head of Department, invariably to be rewritten by four-thirty and scanned once more and tweaked one final time, deadline five-thirty. It would then be translated into forty-two languages and broadcast over the next twenty-four hours. At first that prospect inhibited Joe to a point of near paralysis and then he became secretly intoxicated at the thought of his words flying all over Europe.

Prompt at five-thirty the walk back to Charing Cross, this time along the Embankment, to see the flowing Thames and feel the ripples of so much of his history. In the distance up river Westminster Bridge, Wordsworth and the Houses of Parliament; down river, wastelands, T.S. Eliot, where once the Globe had stood, and the White Tower of royal tyrannies and tortures, the few Wren and Hawksmoor churches unbombed and St Paul's, God-saved intact. Inside Bush House he was inside a polyglot global orchestra, outside he was in England's great city, a city of singing birds, and bloody acts, and in imagination alive, electric, it seemed to Joe, in every alley, in every square, in every street.

No, when Natasha looked at him sceptically, he was not exaggerating, not about any of it. There was no space for scepticism. No, he protested to her, his reaction was not excessive: this was how it was. Everything was special. Even the Bush House canteen, which was the only feeding ground for all who worked there, held a unique democracy of nationality, class, creed and colour which satisfied Joe deeply. It was the home of the True Word, a resurrected Pentecostal speaking in many tongues. It was high seriousness, he told her, born from a certainty of high purpose, knowing that what was said on the airwaves in London
did indeed influence what was thought elsewhere and did affect what was done or could be undone even in the most savage crucibles of struggle. This was the power of the Word, Joe excitedly told Natasha, this was the New Word and like the Old Word, like the First Word, it came out of space, and went into darkness bringing light.