Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  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.

  When he telephoned Natasha at lunchtime, as he did every day, and thought of her in the hallway at that payphone, and felt close because he could ‘see’ every detail, the red and grey squared lino, the chipped banisters of the staircase, the dark varnish on the doors, he spilled over with the news of the morning and the brilliance of those for whom he worked: Konrad Syrop, Ludwig Gottlieb, Tosca Fyvel, world aware and alert to all its nuances of political climate, readers of journals in German, Polish, French, Italian and Czech. Joe could scarcely believe that he was in such company, and every one a published author, he told her, more than once, bookmen all. They were not allowed into the secret of his own writing ambitions but there they stood before him, examples.

  He basked in the uninhibited love these immigrants had for England. You must not write about it as a worn-out, merely historical place, they said, entertained by his enthusiasm; this is a fine and free country, this is an important example so many other countries look to. It was as if to them he was an heir to all this and must be well advised of its qualities. They became his wise guardians. His own patriotism was encouraged and justified, by men of harrowing experience and foreign intellectual vigour. He was on ether.

  Every two or three days when he thought they needed refreshing he bought Natasha a small bunch of cheap flowers at Charing Cross Station from an old scarlet-faced, multi-layered flower seller, beside wh
ose small stall was a card: ‘An Original Cockney Flower Girl’. He tried to protect the offering on the journey home while absorbed in a novel, as the train rattled under the city making for the open air of the northern suburb. He was at once drained by the day and full of it, longing to see Natasha and tell her everything. Sometimes as he came through the door, before he kissed her, he sang out, ‘Shantih, shantih, shantih.’

  He came into the flat, she wrote, ‘like a burning bush’. His face had been smacked into colour by the rapid march from the station in the darkening autumn air; his eyes devoured her with delight. Most days she had spoken to no one save him on that one telephone call since he had left the cold flat in the morning. He always made for the kitchen. The two bars of the electric fire in the smallest and warmest of the rooms seemed, she thought, a mere accompaniment to his warmth. He laid his day at her feet, retailing the ways of the world outside to a lover confined, and in doing so the walls of the flat dissolved and Natasha allowed herself to be captured by this bigger picture he brought to her as a tribute which not to receive with pleasure would have been unkind. For it meant so much to Joseph, she saw that clearly. And he wanted it to mean as much to her. Any demur was overwhelmed by the ardour of his reports. These evening disgorgements were, she came to think, in their way, his love letters.

  ‘I would like to show you Paris,’ she said one night. She was dreamy-eyed at the prospect of taking him along the Seine, through the intricate innocent Left Bank streets of a curtailed childhood and youth which in truth had allowed her little space to roam, but the vision of the two of them dawdling arm in arm through the city, her city, suddenly captivated her. ‘It’s something I could give to you,’ she said, and saw that he too was ensnared: it was so simple to ensnare him.

  Joe was within a moment of reminding her that he had spent weeks in Paris before going to Oxford, that he had raked the museums and raided the churches, that he had sat in a café in the Boulevard St Germain and written – only a letter to his girlfriend, true, but still written in a café like a true French writer, Disque Bleu, cognac and all, and that he had even witnessed in the Bois de Vincennes one night a peppering of gunfire between Algerian rebels and the police. But she had spoken of Paris in a tone which claimed it as hers and just in time he drew back and let it be: and already he anticipated seeing it through her eyes.

  ‘My father has written a letter,’ she said. It was a few days old now; she was uncertain what to do about it. ‘I think you have made a big impression on both of them, Joseph.’ She smiled and he was reassured that she meant what she said. ‘I think both of them are anxious to send François to l’Ecole Normale here in London, as soon as possible. It is not working out with him. He is such a sweet little guy. They persecute him! Why does he have to pass exams? Why do they make him miserable? Who cares about exams!’

  Her sudden vertical take-off into anger was impressive.

  ‘He wants us to go to see them at Christmas. Why should I go back there? I hate them!’

  ‘Not your father.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor all the others save . . .’

  ‘For Her! But she kills me.’

  ‘We enjoyed La Rotonde.’ He had told Natasha at the time that he had found her stepmother sympathetic. And, he could have added, I thought she was perfectly pleasant to you.

  ‘We did. But . . .’ Why should she tell him of the wounds that had opened up? He did not deserve that. This marriage in this strange new place was a good start; she wanted to hold onto that.

  ‘You want to go to Paris,’ she said, accusingly, forgetting her earlier invitation.

  ‘I could meet your Paris friends. You’ve said a lot about them. They sound terrific.’

  ‘Yes.’ She was suddenly deflated by his clever diversion. ‘And they want to see you. Joseph,’ she said, and then, taking in a sharp breath, ‘I think that I should look for an art college.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To keep up with my drawing. You need a life class for that.’

  ‘But you know how to draw. And you were at the Ruskin for years. You can paint here. You can have that front room to yourself.’

  She noted the tremor of panic under his voice.

  ‘I could meet other people and painters.’

  ‘We meet people.’

  ‘Your friends.’

  ‘Our friends.’

  ‘People I meet at art college could be our friends too.’

  ‘You write here as well as paint.’

  ‘I could find a college in London and we could travel together on the tube and meet for lunch and travel back together.’

  Joe nodded but with no enthusiasm and she knew again that she had hit the nerve of his jealousy. She would come back to this plan, she assured herself, although she wanted to avoid hurting him.

  ‘I bought sausages,’ she said. ‘They look disgusting but you have said so much about your sausages.’

  ‘Cumberland sausages?’

  ‘These are Finchley sausages. Cumberland was too far to go.’

  As they made supper he chattered his way through the day as if nothing had disturbed the evening and she complimented his memory and slyly provoked him to more mimicry. The kitchen table boasted four chairs but two of them had early on been relegated to the cold, heavy and rarely used front room. Joe insisted that the sausages were grilled to the point of Boy Scout charcoal and she stood back, unapologetically amused at his unselfconscious scraping off a layer of the charcoal. There was a small mound of frozen peas and cauliflower bought for want of any more appetising-looking vegetable. They drank water. Joe tucked in as he always did with no other comment than ‘This is good.’ He accepted two of her three sausages but only after he was convinced when she told him that she had eaten too much at lunch.

  ‘James is coming round tomorrow,’ he announced; he had saved this up. ‘With Howard. They were at school together in Hampstead. They edited the school magazine there and they want to start up a little magazine.’ He pushed the empty plate away and sank the water. ‘James wants me to write for it and’ – this was the best of it – ‘they want you’ – he did not say that he had suggested it – ‘to design, do a painting for, whatever, the cover and’ – this was the knockout – ‘let them publish your poems!’

  Natasha loved him.

  ‘What will you contribute?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’re discussing it. Film reviews? A sort of diary from Bush House? I don’t know.’

  ‘Your stories.’

  ‘Oh no! They don’t know I write short stories. Only you know that. Please don’t tell them.’

  ‘Let me read them.’

  ‘No. Please. Please don’t tell anyone.’ He offered her a cigarette as if asking her to sign a treaty. She took it and his panic passed. Soon she would make real coffee and the table would be cleared for writing and life would be almost unendurably perfect. ‘La Règle du Jeu’s on at the Academy in Oxford Street,’ he said. ‘I thought we might see it again; we could go on Saturday for the five o’clock. Peter’ – Peter Mills, a colleague at Bush House, much admired by Joe, another winner of a traineeship, a man whom Joe had seen at a distance at university when he was an unapproachable president of the Oxford Union – ‘has invited us to a bottle party in his flat in Paddington.’

  ‘I like Paddington.’

  ‘Because you could just jump on a train to Oxford?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her smile was a little rueful. ‘And because it is in the middle of London.’

  ‘Peter says it’s a hole.’

  ‘Peter is a politician.’

  ‘Peter says what we have here is exactly what we need.’

  ‘How can Peter possibly know that? But he has an opinion. You see – he is already a politician.’

  ‘He will be,’ said Joe, rather grimly. ‘At Oxford they said he could even become Prime Minister.’

  ‘All your geese are swans, Joe.’

  After they had washed up, they wrote. At first, Natasha had employed a
second-hand and stubborn typewriter but Joe could not bear the noise of it and had moved to the front room. There was no argument but she had put the typewriter aside after two days. He moved back into the kitchen with her.

  This was their best time. The kitchen was small and snug, barely furnished, a haven, she thought. Just them. Joseph worked at a story she would not be allowed to read: she worked at a poem he would nag her into reading aloud. Sometimes he would read poetry to her, Eliot, Yeats, Lawrence . . .

  The autumn deepened. There would be many nights like this. They were in a boat, she thought, the two of them, in a lighted place in the dark, drifting purposefully though with no dominating ambition, drifting in the dark of London, of England, of the world itself and sufficient together, she thought, building up the mutual strength which would protect them from all invaders. The silence and the private worlds shared, brought out the best in them, she believed, gradually expelling all that had harmed them, finding and making a unique contentment.

  ‘Read it to me, then,’ he said, tired now, past eleven, but not wanting the evening to be over.

  ‘I can’t finish it.’

  ‘I know you did something, though. Didn’t you?’

  ‘I began to translate a poem of Rimbaud. You remember my father asked you to read to us in English from Hamlet? That is why I chose this poem.’

  ‘Go on, then. In French first.’

  She smiled at his eagerness, his love, her certain intuition that this, for him, was all that it was and for ever.