‘There isn’t just one truth,’ he began.
‘Joseph! This is a simple truth. It is not easy for me to say this, Joseph, but you are having an affair.’
‘Yes.’
‘It is obvious, and very painful for me.’
‘Then why insist that we talk about it?’
‘It would be even better not to continue with it.’
Better for you, Joseph thought, but dared not say.
‘Better, that is, for me,’ said Natasha. ‘What is she like?’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘Why not?’
He could not articulate an answer. But surely something and someone so private ought not to be hauled up for examination even by Natasha. The matter was supposed to be secret, secrecy was part of its potency, kept secret it could thrive and maybe harm no one, take away the secrecy and it came out of the dark into a light in which it would be destroyed or destroy.
‘I’m sure you’ve told her what I’m like.’
He had.
‘So this would be English fair play.’
‘I said you were great. I said you were a wonderful writer and painter and much cleverer than I am. And that you looked . . . distinguished.’
‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘“Distinguished”.’
‘It’s true. And I did say that. All of it.’
‘You are such a poor liar, Joseph, though you try very hard. But you are not lying now. Poor girl. I presume she is younger than you.’
‘There’s about a five-year difference,’ said Joseph. ‘About the same as between us.’
‘So you are the one between,’ she said. ‘How did she respond when you told her I was a paragon?’
‘Fine . . . Peter had told her much the same, she said.’
‘Oh. She works with Peter.’
‘She’s a researcher.’
‘What does she research?’
‘Politics, usually; and social issues. That sort of thing.’
‘Presumably she went to university and is full of life as the unencumbered are and she wears a miniskirt.’
Yes to all three, thought Joseph, but he was damned if he was going to answer.
‘I’ll have one drink,’ he said. ‘Just the one.’
‘Joseph. You are light years away from being an alcoholic. I have known alcoholics. You are an occasionally excessive and silly drinker, that is all. Drink what you must. I’ll join you.’
‘Why aren’t you angry?’
‘I like to surprise myself,’ she said. And I won’t cry. And I am very angry.
‘Look,’ he handed her the whisky, ‘why don’t we just let it drift?’
‘Drift where? And what do I do while this drift of yours is going on?’
‘I come back home, don’t I?’
‘Should I applaud?’
‘So you are a bit angry.’
‘Am I, Joseph? Do you want me to be?’ She raised her glass. ‘A la vôtre!’
‘Just leave it alone, Natasha. Please.’
‘What does she feel about it?’
‘We don’t talk about it. She doesn’t push me.’
‘That will be a relief to you for a while. In any case it is a good tactical position.’
‘It isn’t like that. Can we stop talking about it?’
‘You admit infidelity. You expect acceptance. You plead for silence.’
‘I wasn’t pleading.’
‘You are grasping at straws.’
‘I’m here. You’re here. Marcelle is upstairs. This is what is.’
‘You’re certainly pleading now. What you have just said is meaningless although you probably imagine it to be profound.’
‘Is an affair the end of the world?’
‘Our world? No. Not necessarily. Not at all. Except,’ she paused, ‘you have a fatal tendency to fall in love. This is usually shallow and temporary like a pang of infatuation. But I fear that this might be different. If you are really in love it is dangerous.’
‘I am in love with you, Natasha. You know that.’
‘I do,’ she said and sipped at the whisky. ‘And I believe that I will always know that. But I am not what I was when we met and, more dramatically, neither are you. Would you fall in love with me were we to meet for the first time tomorrow evening?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you, Joseph,’ she smiled. ‘I know you mean it. But would you? And would I? You had so many simple but important qualities then and sometimes I see that time and success have overlaid them.’
‘You can’t really talk about me having success, Natasha.’
‘The television. Novels published. An important film made. It did not please all of the public or all of the critics but it was bold. I think we can say that Sam and Ellen and even your friends from university would use the word “success”. But it has disturbed you, and uprooted you. It has made you defensive and belligerent, neither of which you were when we met, and left you marooned in your own no man’s land.’
‘You’ve always excelled at dissecting me. But other things have changed and some of them are liberating. Letting more life in and taking on as much out there as I could manage. You’d call it overreaching probably, greed if you like; or even worse; I don’t want to talk about that.’
‘Do you talk about that with her?’
‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘A very little. Very very little. When I feel a bit odd, she sort of tells me to take a couple of aspirins.’ He smiled. ‘Not really – but she has not gone down our route and when I say I talk very little about that I mean it, Natasha, I don’t want to take it there.’
‘So she is the comfort and the refuge. I am the confession box and the rubbish dump.’
‘Why do you turn it against yourself? You’ve changed just as much as I have. You wanted to change. You went into analysis on purpose to change. Yet why is it that sometimes I think you haven’t changed at all. When I see you smiling, even a little, even just trying to smile, I think, that’s Natasha, that’s her. And there’s the inadequacy I feel in front of your serious sense of life. I’ve always felt that but it didn’t much matter because there was a rough and ready equality between us. Not now. Your ideals soar above mine: so do your morals. And you are so deep in your analysis that I feel like an outsider. Your affair is with your analyst.’
Natasha wanted so badly to tell Joseph of the death of the woman into whose hands she had delivered herself but even now she held it in. It was a question of honour. To divulge that now would be to take unfair advantage. Pity must play no part in this. Neither of them should be the nurse to the other, she thought, and yet this reference to her analysis caught her unawares and almost threw her. It was daily more difficult to deal with that loss. Her best efforts had so far been unsuccessful. Joseph’s reference brought panic into her throat.
‘And I don’t ask about that, do I?’ he continued, seeing an analogy helpful to his case. ‘I don’t scrutinise you about your affair.’
‘Joseph!’
‘It’s not so much different. Unless. Unless you believe that physical attention, well, sex is, of itself, vital. Then what you are saying is that to have sex is to be in love.’
‘For you, Joseph, in this case, I may be mistaken,’ she said, and stood up to go across for another drink, ‘I think it is. When it isn’t you dislike yourself for it. You don’t dislike yourself now. You believe that love is central to sex, don’t you?’
‘It’s what you believe that counts,’ he said and held out his glass for her to pour a measure. She stood above him as she spoke:
‘I think, although this might be changing in the present circumstances, but I think that I will always hold onto the conviction that the intention in our hearts is what most matters and you have no intention to betray me or to hurt me, I know that, and therefore sex elsewhere, I must accept, does not fundamentally matter however much pain it gives.’
‘Are you sure . . . ? Are you really sure?’
The words came quietly, even dreamily, as if from some retreat deep within, from a life being led in darkness, away from the light of the day’s events, a life which had begun to claim her in the analysis and one by which she found herself fearfully entranced, a landscape of dream deserts and oceans, of timelessness and ancient forests in which her mind seemed to roam through the history of the earth itself, a fugitive from the present.
‘Of course I am,’ he said.
‘You sound like a true and stout-hearted Englishman, Joseph.’
They talked to each other more often and more clearly over the next weeks than they had done since the first few years when they had put together a life cut wholly to their best intentions. Sometimes in those early times it had seemed to him that while he was out at work she had been waiting and preparing all day for his arrival home, saving up for an intimate and lengthy discussion. Her preoccupation with him had been flattering and mostly he had been a willing accomplice. Now it was a strain, though still for him too a compulsion. The stakes had become much higher. The game being played out was serious. Yet in this combustible context for some weeks they talked on. Joseph drank sensibly, Natasha her usual restrained self, both smoked voraciously.
‘I had hoped you would have come to a decision by now,’ said Natasha after a month or so. ‘You, I presume, hope that you will never have to come to one at all.’
He did not want to admit that this was true.
‘What do you think love is, Joseph?’
‘Oh, God!’
‘Is it not a question you should answer?’
‘How can you answer it?’
‘You write about it.’
‘That’s different.’
‘Evasion with you is a high art, Joseph. Why not risk an answer?’
‘Caring for somebody, wanting to live with them, being attached to them physically, believing they think those things too.’
‘Does that mean you love me?’
‘But you prefer to be with Helen, don’t you? You love two people now.’
‘I’m with you, now, and every night.’
‘Why should I love someone who prefers to be with someone else and only comes here to keep up appearances?’
‘What appearances? Who cares, save us?’
‘What we have been taught to do, that is what cares. Our past cares. What our parents might think of us or our friends, a little, but most of all what our own moral conscience thinks of us. You care about what you think of yourself, Joseph, and it’s a great obstacle for you.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I don’t,’ said Natasha. ‘I now think that all the knowledge we have of our essential selves is guesswork or mere acceptance of clichés or a work of the imagination. Of why we think what we think we know so little. We grope around. We look as your Bible says “through a glass darkly”. I’ve always loved that phrase. One day it might all be clear: I wish I could have been born for that day.’
‘You keep saying we know nothing,’ said Joseph, ‘but that is a sort of easy defeatism, isn’t it? Look at what we have found out. Look at what we learn every day about other peoples and other cultures. Look at the moon landing and a hundred and one inventions that would have been thought miracles. Look at the discovery of DNA. You could say we know not too little but too much for us to take in.’
‘Facts, yes; mountains of new facts. But what do we know, other than in the broadest brush strokes, most of which are just generalisations, what do we really know of what concerns us, you and me, now, of what we are truly thinking and feeling, matters that concern so many others who want to know about their feelings with precision. They need to know because it could be vital for how they lead their lives or whether they lead their lives. “To be or not to be, that is the question.” It is always the question. Yet how can we answer it save in an unsatisfactory and general way? The poorest, most fragile human being can want “to be” so badly – I remember when you read to me the ending of The Grapes of Wrath when she who had only the milk in her breasts gave it to him who had nothing but hunger in his belly. Even in worse extremes of deprivation there are people who will fight to live. Yet there are others, who would seem to the poor and the starving to have everything that life could bestow, who will decide “not to be”.’
As she said this, the hand that held the cigarette clenched and the cigarette broke. She gathered it and stubbed it out without losing a beat of her fluency. ‘So how do we know what happens in our minds, how to answer that simplest question, to live or not to live, and why are there only individual answers and even then are we sure they are all the answer? So I maintain we know little of what we are inside us, Joseph, even though we know more and more about what is outside us. Love, truth, freedom, they are words but they are also slogans, often merely slogans and I am tired of all slogan words save one – freedom.’
‘Tired of love, tired of truth?’
‘At the moment, Joseph, yes. I can find neither although I believe you want to give me both.’
‘How can I convince you?’
‘By what you do.’
‘I’m doing my best.’
‘But it is not best for me, Joseph. At the moment and I believe it will only be at the moment, for a short time, she is giving you what I cannot give you. You will not admit that because you do not want to hurt my feelings but, Joseph, you hurt my feelings more by this silent stubbornness. Just as you have hurt them by your half-drunken rants on occasion – which often you forget completely overnight and for which when you remembered you apologised. But your anger is verbally physical. I am not used to that. It is a rage against all you think you have suffered. There are words that stay, words that scar. And now you plead silence.’
‘How can I tell you when I don’t know myself?’
‘It is your duty to know. You have had enough time now.’
‘But I don’t.’
‘You are either being stubborn or concealing something, both, I suspect.’
How could he say that when he was with Helen he did not feel that the world inside his head was going to collapse?
There was awkwardness when he was with Helen, a tug of reluctance, an unreality, the guilt at betraying Natasha, intensified by her knowing about it. This could poison his new-found land. Yet he knew that he loved Helen, but found it very difficult to say this to Natasha. When he was with Helen and her happily opinionated iconoclastic friends he often loved and missed Natasha. He missed her careful thoughtfulness, her singularity and he missed her respect for solitude in which to work through an idea. When with Natasha he could long for Helen.
But there was a tide, and it was the tide of the times, and Helen rode it and took him with her. With Helen the terrors of disintegration, which would never leave him as long as he lived, calmed down because of what they felt for each other and the radiance of Helen began to turn him away from that which wanted him to destroy himself and began to bear him out to a different sea.
‘I am aware,’ he told Marcelle, ‘that this book will do little justice to Helen. When you write fiction, characters operate on their own rules in a world made for them. And in some cases, most of the energy is spent with no consideration of balance or fairness. This is for you, Marcelle, and it is about your mother.
‘To describe the power of feeling that Helen and I developed for each other after a start which could have been casual but never was; to begin a new story that still goes on, a story you have watched and been part of, just as the story you most want to know about is in its final struggle, is too much for me and, I suspect, for you.
‘But something serious happened with Helen, a gravitational pull in a direction away from your mother. It was as if Natasha and I, after circling each other so closely had been fatally jolted, flung off course like planets disturbed by a sudden shock attack. We were left without being able to find a sure way to keep together. We were wrenched, torn away from each other, pulled into what both of us feared but neither, finally, could halt.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
Anything he said would disturb Natasha and he did not want that. Anything he said would betray Helen and he did not want that. His silence was helpless and Natasha recognised that.
‘Well,’ said Natasha, ‘that is as near as you will get to being honest, I expect. So I thank you.’
She went for another drink, her third, unusual for her, and poured one for Joseph who sat looking miserable.
‘Poor Joseph,’ she said. ‘To love two women! For you it is a sin. But really to love two women, as I think you may do now, and you are someone who can love well – that is hard.’
Natasha paused for some time and then, after a quick smile, she said,
‘I will not bind you, Joseph, neither through guilt nor through a marriage ceremony. We met as free people and to be free is the most important thing of all. If you have the opportunity to be free then you must take it or what is life for? We are artists. Maybe we, maybe I am an artist mainly to be a free person and I found art because it is where great freedom is possible. In our marriage we have begun to lose our freedom, Joseph. Other matters seemed more important. But to me nothing is more important. I want my freedom and I want you to have your freedom. I cannot be free and wait for you every night like the wife of a sailor in Brittany looking out to sea for the return of her husband, always worrying that he might be dead. I cannot be free when my mind is filled with dreadful thoughts about you and this craving to live together as we used to. And I cannot be free if I feel that I am imposing on you, Joseph. Your freedom helps mine. So I will leave you now. I will leave this house and Marcelle and I will stay with our friends in Kew until you have made your decision in freedom. That is what you must do. I think it is your duty, even. And I will look for my freedom too and I will hope, my darling, that this freedom brings back a love that means more to me than all the world.’