Joe did not know why he was holding out against her but he would not give in. Like much else in his mind it was unexamined. He felt rather than understood his motives, and there was no compulsion to analyse them. The force of his obstinacy was proof enough of the rightness of the decision, he thought.
Joe was too uncertain to claim the superiority of ‘instinct’, nor did he think that the way he came to decisions and especially decisions involving feelings was better or worse than the ways of others but it was his way. He had built on it, and whatever it was that was now him had accrued through this lack of method, primitive though it might be. Over those weeks Natasha’s suggestions, her arguments, her loving arguments, her steely suggestions seemed like crude siege weapons pointlessly battering the walls of his skull.
They were sitting in their opposing chairs, late at night, planes whining overhead, Marcelle in bed presumed asleep, Mary off for a few days. This domestic tableau had once seemed an idyll of intimacy. Increasingly Joe found it a time and a place to dread.
‘It is about freedom, Joseph,’ said Natasha, laying aside her book, RD Laing, The Divided Self, ‘that is why it is so fundamental.’
Very reluctantly, Joseph put aside the Borges stories and once again entered into the lists. At the back of his mind he was timing the gaps between the planes.
‘There used to be a man on the BBC who always said, “It depends what you mean by ‘freedom’ or whatever the word was.” Well. It does. It depends on what you mean by “freedom”.’
‘I think you know.’ Natasha gave that quick sweet smile which once upon a time automatically provoked a like response. Now it seemed to taunt him.
‘I don’t. Freedom means different things to different people.’
‘Here it means,’ Natasha paused, leaned down and put the book on the floor, ‘first of all letting yourself admit all that you are, finding and admitting to the anger in you, the deep fear, the superficial anxiety and the jealousy and the envy – Melanie Klein is good to read on envy. You are both the object of it and subject to it.’
‘What if I admit all that?’
What Joseph really wanted to say but could not, was, ‘Why should I admit all that? I recognise it, my bad feelings, more than you know, but what I try to do is hold them down, I try to act as if they did not exist, as if I was not somebody with these terrible feelings. Just like lust in the streets, you have to suppress it, otherwise what would stop you acting on it? You have to sort it out for yourself and take the responsibility.’
‘You will find it very difficult to admit all that. Bad feelings frighten you: you think they are the real you. Until you admit them you will suffer from them,’ said Natasha and Joseph yet again felt that he was being X-rayed. But how could she be so sure? ‘You see yourself as obliged to be seen as a good man, a good little boy, and so you conceal more and more of what you really are because you do not want to displease your mummy or anger your daddy, but the strain becomes too great if you do that. You distort your true self. You may even destroy your true self.’
‘Oh, Natasha! How do you know what my “true self” is? How do I know? Why should I want to know?’
‘We have to know ourselves if we are to take life seriously.’
‘Lots of people take life seriously without knowing themselves in the way you mean it.’
‘I’m not sure that’s the case.’ She lit a cigarette and Joseph hoped the pause would lead to a stop. ‘And we must all start from where we are.’
‘Don’t we know enough of where we are for all normal purposes?’
‘Not if we are harmed by what we have become.’
‘How do we know we are harmed?’ Joseph found that he was squirming in his seat. He made himself sit still. ‘Maybe what you call harm is just experience and maybe that’s inevitable and even good.’
‘It is possible,’ said Natasha. ‘But not in your case. Nor in mine. We have to be as free as we can be to find the root of ourselves. That is the only way we can do our best work.’
‘But how do you know this, Natasha? How can you know this?’
‘You have to lose your inhibitions.’
‘Why? Maybe you need them. Maybe they are what keep you together. Maybe what you call inhibitions are just ways of coping that you learn as you grow up, and different for everyone.’
‘Freedom is the goal, Joseph, and you cannot deny that the past enchains you as it does me.’
‘As it does millions of others.’
‘The fact that you fight this argument so hard,’ she said, with deliberation, ‘proves to me that you need to accept it.’
‘How can that be? That means there’s no argument. What you say is circular.’
‘The unconscious exists, Joseph, disabilities of personality exist, psychoanalysis exists to dispel these. It is your neuroses which make you fail to see or acknowledge your neuroses.’
He felt cornered, trapped, his opposition to her arguments tormentingly unavailing. Each time he pulled away from the knots of her argument they grew tighter.
‘You’re like a Marxist I knew at Oxford! Whatever you said about history he just insisted that all of it was always dependent on economic interests and if you said that was a limited view and argued with him he would say that was due to your immersion in economic forces. In other words, whatever you said, he was right. Same here. Another system. I don’t believe we can be understood through systems.’
‘Let us begin with your unhappiness,’ said Natasha.
‘I’ve been unhappy before. Most people are sometimes. Unhappiness is part of it. But you struggle your way out of it or something turns up and it lifts and passes. Maybe it’s chemical. Maybe it’s social. Why does it have to be psychological?’
‘Don’t you feel full of frustration and anger and anxieties at the way in which you deceive yourself? And me. How do you account for that? There has to be a reason and it has to be in the mind.’ Natasha was vehement. ‘The mind is all we have.’
‘Joseph . . .’
‘Joseph! What does that mean?’
‘You know.’
‘I don’t.’ The defiant tone of his previous answer guttered to misery.
Natasha looked at him with pity. He looked so tired. His face had an aspect of strain which was recent; you saw it most around the eyes in which Natasha had almost always looked for and found a comforting kindness; there was a paleness about his skin and his movements portrayed constant unrest. He lit a cigarette and she saw desperation even in the way he did that. He needed help, she was sure of it.
Joseph looked at Natasha with apprehension. Her looks were more as they had been when they had first met, hollow-eyed, so pale, her hair swept back again like Shelley but unkempt, and in her eyes a concentration so fierce that it unnerved him. If the analysis did this to her, she who was so accomplished at examining her own feelings, what would it do to him? He could no longer help her as once he had and that saddened him and made him feel that he had lost some of his purpose.
‘You deceive yourself,’ she said, ‘because you think that you can surmount the difficulties you have and the changes which have been imposed on you without help, without even the help of your own acceptance and understanding.’
‘Everybody has changes “imposed on them” as they get older, don’t they? That’s what happens. That’s getting older. And what’s so dreadful about the changes? I like what I do, I earn more than enough to live on, we have good friends . . .’
‘Your lists sound less and less convincing. This life has wrenched you away from the paths you were originally made for.’
‘Meeting you was the cause of all that!’ He smiled.
‘There are times when I fear it was,’ she responded, gravely, missing the opportunity to take up his lightness of tone. ‘When we first met I thought you were like an alien. There were days when I simply hoped you would go away.’
‘Really?’ Joseph was intrigued at this news. ‘You really wanted me to go away?’
‘Yes.’ This time the smile came from her but it was thin, reflective, as if directed to herself rather than to him. ‘I saw nothing in a future with you but the misunderstanding which inevitably follows a mismatch. And you seemed far too young.’
‘I’m not that much younger than you.’
‘There are many ways to measure the gap between us, Joseph.’
‘I thought you were amazing,’ he said. ‘You were the alien. You were the one who came from another planet. I did not know that people like you existed. They still don’t. Just you.’
‘That is very kind of you.’
‘It’s true.’
‘The truth is not often kind.’
‘Well. We’re fine. Aren’t we?’
‘You laid siege to me,’ Natasha said. ‘Julia thought you were far too persistent, it was even vulgar that you kept on when it must have been perfectly obvious . . . But you came with your flowers – you still do – and your “dates”, everything you had to see in the cinema . . .’
‘And I wore you down,’ Joseph said.
‘Yes.’
‘Was it only that I wore you down?’
‘Oh no . . . Oh no . . .’ She stubbed out the cigarette and took another. ‘I surrendered to you. A little here. A little more. Then I grew to love you. Not completely for one or two years but Joseph . . .’ she lit the cigarette with care, collecting her thoughts, poised to say something she thought of key importance, ‘if you had not rescued me I do not think I would be here now.’
She blew out a long thin stream of smoke.
‘And so you see,’ she said, ‘I am laying siege to you in return.’
‘Please, Natasha.’
‘What do you fear?’
‘I don’t know.’ Even as he said that, a sensation of panic seized his mind and he wanted to run away. He forced himself to stay.
‘Why do you fear so much?’
‘Do I have to?’
‘My analyst grows more insistent. That is all I can say. She says that I will not be able to go where I must go without you being analysed too.’
‘What does she know about me?’
‘I have told her a great deal about you.’
‘I wish you hadn’t.’
‘Joseph,’ she said, ‘we have talked about this matter for about a month now and always I give up. But she is insistent.’
‘You sound frightened of her.’
‘Not frightened. Dependent and increasingly so. Which is much worse.’
‘So it’s not really about me being Free or Facing up to My Demons or getting back to what I was when I bought flowers in the market at Oxford and tried to hide them as I walked through the streets. It’s to help you.’
‘It is all the other things as well. Please believe me.’
‘But what it comes down to is this woman forcing you to force me to go into analysis.’
‘Is that how you see it?’ She looked defeated, and her face flooded with unhappiness. ‘Is that how you see it?’
‘It sounded cruel. Sorry.’
‘It is one truth,’ she agreed.
If he loved her this obstinacy was a torment to her. If he loved her then he would surely do all he could to help relieve the unhappiness that consumed her. He had to surrender. But how could he continue to protect her if he did that?
‘OK, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’
Natasha put her hand to her mouth and nodded. She felt such exhaustion.
‘I am grateful,’ she said.
‘No, don’t say that . . .’
‘I am so grateful,’ she said. ‘And . . . maybe as your siege on my life was so good for me, I hope my siege over these weeks will prove as good for you. I think it will, Joseph. I’m sure it will.’
‘They get to all you television people,’ his doctor said, ‘in the end.’
Joseph sat opposite him in the back room of a large semi-detached house which served as the surgery. He had come for advice. He wanted no one to know about it and he trusted the doctor to keep his confidence.
‘What is it that makes you want to waste good money on talking to a psychoanalyst?’ His large face, waxen, dolorous, bored save for the small blue eyes buzzing angrily.
Joseph was not going to tell him the truth.
‘It’s all a conspiracy, you know,’ the doctor said. ‘I had to do it at medical school. All they dish out is either common sense or mumbo-jumbo. Freud fleeced rich women with it and it’s been a con ever since. When did you last sleep with your mother? Do you want to castrate your father? The cure, so-called, takes three years and the fact is, old boy, in three years just by living normally you can get yourself out of most mental fixes. And who needs it? Would Chekhov have written what he did if he’d been done over by a trick cyclist? Look at the way his father tried to destroy him. His father was a shit but Chekhov sorted his life out for himself. Maybe that’s precisely why Chekhov was a genius. Psychoanalysis is unscientific, fashionable, mediaeval rubbish. Still. I’ve a friend in this game who isn’t too much of a fraud. He’s in Harley Street so take out your savings. I’ll drop him a note although you look well enough to me, as well as anybody has any right to look if they write novels and work in the cesspit of telly.’
‘I felt cheered up by that,’ Joe wrote after reading the gist of that brief medical encounter which had taken place more than thirty-five years ago. ‘His bombast reconfirmed my instinct and challenged Natasha’s perspective. In the few days I waited for the call from Harley Street, I felt lifted by the saloon-bar bollocking of the pragmatic old-school English doctor. All I had to do was to remember that it was rubbish and nothing need be lost while Natasha’s request would be honoured. More significantly he had admitted what I had failed to admit even to myself. For when he talked about Chekhov I remembered Ross telling me of Henry Moore who had begun to read a book which psychoanalysed his sculpture. He put it aside after a couple of pages, “I prefer not to know that,” he said. What if whatever talent I had was the result of my own efforts to orchestrate internal contradictions, to make a coherent personality out of discordance, a work of art out of gradually shaping whatever I imagined, whoever I am? And what if it is intricate and unique to me and best cultivated in secret? How can anyone else possibly know the mind of someone better than the person who has lived with it all their lives?
‘How could what is me be re-set by the application of a rule book of generalisations drawn from the experience of others whose experiences were probably far from my own? I resisted and disputed the notion that there was one magic bunch of keys which would unlock all personalities equally. Of course we are all born, we all grow painfully, want food, shelter, sex, security, children, happiness and then we die. But it is the nuances, the variations, the singularities, the fingerprints of our lives that make us individual, and that is what most matters. How could any one system apply to every different one of us?
‘Yet as the day approached for my first visit to Harley Street, by way of Oxford Circus, like Natasha, but on Monday and Thursday so as not to bump into her on Tuesdays and Fridays, any buoyancy I had gathered from the doctor, any bravado I had garnered from my own rough-hewn recruitment of unanalysed heroes from the past, all the boosting of confidence and the exaggeration of contempt for psychoanalysis began to drain away. Natasha had embraced it. She said that she was already benefiting from it. But what would it do to me? I felt as if I were offering myself for some sort of intellectual lobotomy. What would happen when he tried to get at my mind?
‘On the first visits I lay rigid on the altar of the sofa, sacrificing myself for Natasha, I thought in moments of self-aggrandisement, and wasting time, wasting money and wasting effort as I fended off the silent pressures for speech.
‘“You don’t want to do this, do you?” he said.
‘“No.”
‘He waited until I cracked.’
Joe had managed to arrange the Thursday session for the late afternoon which disturbed the pattern of his day less than the morning time on Monday. The whole business, the tube, the walk, the session, the return, could take up to three hours and that did not include, as the process finally got under way, time for reflection or assimilation. After the session on Thursdays he went to the pub to meet Edward and the others.
Like Edward, Joe arrived there on the dot of opening time, five-thirty. The others turned up later. This day Edward was accompanied by the American poet Joe had heard about but not met. He knew she was a fine poet, an ambitious woman and the new girlfriend of the eight-year-married Edward. She drank water. They looked good together, Joe thought: Edward tall, rather square, broad-shouldered, called ‘rugged’ in a recent Observer profile, in looks and carriage more a countryman than a town wit; she blonde, leggy, her open health and beauty framed in confidence, new world, independent.
As soon as they had secured a table in an empty corner, Christina struck.
‘I read A Chance Defeat and I liked it,’ she said in her level gravelly sexy New England accent. ‘Tell me. Do you believe the English provincial novel carries guns any more?’
Joe’s smile took a little effort to sustain. He was intrigued and rather flattered to be such a close witness to this hot literary affair between Edward and Christina. He had adjusted himself to behave in an adult way, sympathetically, over the flaunted adultery. Despite the spilling of his entrails in Harley Street less than half an hour beforehand he thought he had put on the carapace of a man of the world. Christina punched right through all that and with a smile bigger and sustained at greater length than his.
‘I mean when Hardy and Lawrence did their thing, Britain had an Empire and everybody listened. Everything that happens at the centre of an Empire is important both to those who want to join and those who want to beat it up. Even in the States we wanted to know what happened in Nottinghamshire and Wessex. Everything that mattered to you guys mattered to us guys. But will that wash any more?’
Joe nodded and then realised he was expected to reply. The daze in his mind which followed a session was usually anaesthetised in the pub by a few drinks with people who, like most (save the few in Kew to whom Natasha had unfortunately divulged it), knew nothing of the analysis. The shame at needing it had not lessened and he still feared that, publicly known, it would be the equivalent of having a card hung around his neck declaring him to be Unclean. Now, quite suddenly in the pub it was literary bare knuckle fighting.
‘If writing’s any good,’ he responded, rather feebly in tone and emphasis, ‘then it doesn’t matter where it’s set, does it?’
‘Not in theory,’ she said, crisply, ‘I agree. And never in poetry. But the novel traditionally carries the news and what’s the news from the English provinces today?’
Edward was happy to sip the stiff whisky, not a referee, not a contented spectator, more, Joe realised, a corner man wanting his own contender to land the telling blows.
‘Same as usual,’ said Joe, lighting up, ‘same the whole world over, births, deaths and all that stuff in between.’
‘I see what you’re saying. And you’re right, of course. But it seems to me that the novel has always tracked the power. I don’t mean the political power necessarily although that counts. The best novelist alive could be in Finland but would anybody be as interested as the best novelist in America or Russia? No, the power I’m talking about is where the heat is. And it seems to me that you’ve had great novelists over here and we have too – look at Faulkner, just look at Faulkner! – who have quarried the provinces but it’s time to move on.’
‘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.’
‘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.’