Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  His lips were still a little blebbed. His shoulders had been blistered but had started to peel. From his knees to his shins his legs smarted and at night the pain could be acute but he had stuck at it, waiting for the day when the pink would mature to the oaken brown of the film stars and the playboys.

  He hobbled up the beach, past the small restaurant to which Alain and Isabel had taken them on their first night, rather disappointingly it had seemed to Joe at first but the way in which the Brossarts had appeared to own it, the taste of the freshly caught fish, the chef and the patron joining them for a digestif, not a table empty, convinced him that it was, to use one of Isabel’s favourite phrases, ‘très chic’. They would go there again tonight. Joe had his eye on the one grand well-ornamented restaurant in the square and he offered to take them all there – his treat – but Isabel said that she would rather starve and besides he was to pay for nothing, he was a guest.

  After he had chilled himself in a long cold shower, Natasha rubbed in the cream very gently. ‘Makes it worth it,’ he said, quoting from some obscure forgotten film and feeling adult, and she liked that. Joe declared himself ‘much better’ as they sat on the verandah sipping their drinks. All four smoked, the red tips of their cigarettes dancing like wingless insects in the twilight. In the cool approaching dusk, the sea, the mythic Mediterranean, surging and dropping back in the near distance, was the heartbeat of their evenings, Joe thought, its sonorously thrumming base line providing a sound which slowly washed your mind of the sores of the day and said, ‘This is what is; live like this.’

  The verandah before dinner was the place for the Brossarts to feel close to Natasha. It was as if they wanted to enclose her in a loving ambience which would soothe her as surely as the cream had soothed Joseph.

  From these evenings on the verandah Joe would remember sentences, fragments as they looked out to the shore. Now and then there would be arguments and the Brossarts, to Joe’s relief, were robust. Issues of the day blew up, were batted about like tennis balls and then arbitrarily dropped.

  ‘At Cambridge,’ said Alain, who dipped in and out of English with dainty self-mockery, ‘we would go into a little PUB, and sit with PINTS of beer or throw darts at the BOARD. It was very agreeable. The English know how to enjoy themselves, I think.’

  ‘My parents keep a pub,’ said Joe, diving in, but probably they knew anyway. ‘For a lot of people it’s more a place to keep warm and get out of the house.’

  ‘But that is the genius of the English,’ said Alain. ‘Everybody is cold. Nobody likes to be in the house. Voilà! You invent the PUB. You have a fire and you have warm beer – everything is solved.’

  Natasha suddenly thought of the Welsh Pony, of that moment when Joe had looked at her as if for the first time. She looked at him lovingly: Isabel noticed the look and would treasure it.

  ‘Pubs can be chic,’ she said, to tease Isabel. ‘In Oxford some of them are très chic.’

  ‘Oxford! Cambridge! English! The PUBS!’ Isabel’s voice carried; there were other verandahs at no great distance, but regardless her voice was quite loud, very clear, and the night air carried it well. ‘I am fed up with the English. Joseph is different. He is the husband of Natasha. And Joseph is not English. I have not been to Cambridge or to Oxford or anywhere in England and I will never go into a PUB to drink a PINT of beer – the thought disgusts me – but I know who is English – Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Charles Morgan, the rolled umbrella and the silly hat – that is English. Joseph is like a Breton. And Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill! – we are all supposed to worship Winston Churchill! I am for Charles de Gaulle. And Napoleon Bonaparte!’

  ‘You see how ridiculous my wife can be,’ said Alain in that tone which Natasha loved, infinite affection posing as brutal criticism, ‘she is uneducated, sadly. She was brought up in Paris society. What do you expect? Listen! Winston Churchill saved Europe from Hitler – is that not true? Joseph, you are a historian – speak.’

  ‘He will be English when he speaks about the war,’ said Isabel. ‘He cannot be trusted.’

  ‘I think that Churchill—’ Joe began.

  ‘I am sorry, Joseph,’ Isabel cut in, ‘the English have done too many massacres in France and for centuries. At my convent Sister Aquinas was excellent at history. The other sisters said she could have written a book. She said – I am sorry – that the English were Godless and enemies of the Pope. It is better not to be English, Joseph. That is enough!’

  ‘Isabel,’ said Alain, raising his glass, ‘has spoken.’

  But Isabel had not quite finished.

  ‘Véronique,’ she said, turning to Joseph, ‘she is not French. She was brought up in Lille but the family is Dutch.’

  ‘What is the logic here?’ said Alain. ‘Logic and my wife are like sheep and goats.’

  ‘Be quiet, Alain. She converted to the faith for the sake of Louis but she was brought up as a Calvinist. They are the worst.’

  ‘What is she saying now?’

  ‘Natasha understands. But, Joseph, Véronique tried very hard. She is now a good Catholic. She did everything to please Louis.’

  ‘Louis has the great skill,’ said Alain, ‘of making everybody want to please him.’

  ‘I met them together in Paris,’ said Isabel. ‘I was very young.’

  ‘Eighteen?’ said Alain as if claiming a point. ‘And the belle of Paris.’

  ‘That is not true, Joseph. Alain exaggerates like other people tell jokes.’

  ‘I have seen photographs,’ said Natasha. ‘Alain is right.’

  ‘The point is,’ said Isabel, ‘Louis and Alain – they were such friends. Together they were such good friends, so good and funny with each other.’

  ‘She will soon say she fell in love with both of us.’

  ‘For a few weeks I was in love with both of them,’ said Isabel.

  ‘Voilà!’

  ‘But then I saw that Louis would go so much further, with that brain, and Alain was much more handsome.’

  ‘That is true,’ said Alain, ‘I can agree with that.’

  ‘Natasha’s mother knew both of them too, at that time. She could be serious. Like Louis. And when they worked together in the laboratory and began to make discoveries . . .’

  ‘Very important discoveries,’ Alain said, ‘work on the adrenal gland. Serious discoveries.’

  ‘They should have had the Nobel Prize,’ said Isabel, ‘but there is always a prejudice against the French.’

  ‘Marie Curie?’

  ‘Marie Curie was Polish.’ Isabel paused for a while. The sound of the sea surged strongly in the silence.

  ‘Your mother gave Louis everything, everything. We were four together,’ said Isabel, quietly, and let the words go, as she turned her thoughts back. ‘It was very sad.’

  ‘What a brain,’ said Alain, quietly. ‘Bio-chemistry is his chief subject but physics, biology, history, especially archaeology, art; he speaks German, English as you know, Italian, Spanish and Dutch now because of Véronique; he knows Latin and Greek . . . he is like blotting paper. He reads, he looks up, he remembers!’

  ‘But he is still the Louis I met in Paris, Natasha. And he loves you, Natasha. I know he was not there very much. But still. That is not the most important thing. You are precious to him but also you remind him of Sophie and that must be hard . . .’

  ‘Véronique is formidable,’ said Alain, abruptly, ‘you would not guess she was Dutch, not for a moment.’

  ‘Alain is sometimes very stupid for such an intelligent man,’ said Isabel, and then, carefully, ‘but I like Véronique. Now. Time to eat, my children.’

  The dogs were collected from the kitchen and it was to them that Isabel directed much of her attention as they sat near the sea and ate fish caught there earlier in the day.

  The Brossarts had invited old friends, a couple their own age and their two children, Michel, on his way to becoming a surgeon, who was a little older than Natasha and had known
her for years, and his sister Andrée, Joe’s age, who was still at Montpellier University.

  As usual one or two boatmen came around and asked if anyone would like a half-hour on the sea. Alain encouraged the four young people to take up the opportunity and they went willingly into the rowing boat, lanterns fore and aft.

  Michel and Natasha sat together facing the boatman, Joe and Andrée behind them.

  Natasha was happy. These days with Isabel and Alain had sealed the new life. Joseph was accepted, and respected. He was a barricade against Véronique, he had become a friend of her brothers and sister, her father and her mother’s family and now the Brossarts had all taken to him.

  She was greatly relieved. There would be a life. She would paint, he would write and work until they could live by the writing and painting – they agreed it would take time but they were without material ambitions and their heads were full of stories of young artists who had persisted and come through.

  It was at this house, in fact on the beach, that Natasha had completed her first painting, a dour study in oil of the cliff which closed off the beach to the east. She had been living with Alain and Isabel then, for some time, after the worst troubles with Véronique and the problems with her studies and her health. Alain and Isabel had a room in both their houses which they called ‘Natasha’s Room’ and no one but she – and Joseph now, of course – was allowed to use it.

  The boatman stopped after ten minutes or so, just occasionally touching the oars, letting the little boat sway in the murmuring, swirling water. The lights on the shore were not so very distant but, Natasha thought, it was like looking into another country. Michel caught the keenness of her look and asked her how she would paint it. She reminded him that he had laughed at her first efforts; ‘Not laughed,’ he protested; ‘Yes,’ said Natasha, smiling, ‘and you were right. You were going to be a great surgeon then,’ she said, ‘and do you remember Clothilde? Well, she is in a publishing house in Paris now and some of her articles have appeared in magazines.’

  Joe tried to restrain his rapid ejection into jealousy but he could not. Of course! Michel was the man she should really have married. They were perfect together. Background, class, country, language, friends. The way she laughed was not how she laughed with him; it was so easily intimate. The music in her voice – was that there for him? Michel was clearly entranced by her, he spoke in a low voice so that Joe would not be able to hear, he leaned close, he steadied her unnecessarily, Joe thought, by putting an arm around her shoulders when the boat was only barely caught by a little breeze, he showed off to her: and she to him, Joe thought.

  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.’

  PART TWO

  TOWARDS AN IDEAL

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  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 h
ad 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.