Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  Sur l’onde calme et noire où dorment les étoiles

  La blonde Ophelia flotte comme un grand lys,

  Flotte très lentement, couchée en ses longues voiles . . .

  On entend dans les bois lointains des hallalis.

  ‘It’s difficult,’ she said, ‘to find English rhymes.’

  They were so close to each other now that he caught in her reading an intimation of the fine shading of regret, that she had stepped outside her own language, that she, who loved to talk and write, was for ever committed now, through him, to a foreign tongue. Though it had been her decision, he could see it as his fault, even his guilt. What a loss, he sensed, a distant chord that would grow in time as he realised that the loss of language was the loss of a world.

  ‘So . . . ?’

  On the tranquil dark water, where the stars drown,

  Ophelia floats white as a lily

  Floats gently, slowly, in her long gown . . .

  From the distant woods you hear the sound of ‘les hallalis’.

  ‘“Hallalis” is so good – I can’t find a good English word.’

  ‘Why do you need to?’

  ‘It should be “sleep” not “drown”.’

  ‘Drown’s better,’ he said. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  There was something wild in his gratitude, she thought. She must protect him yet let him be free. She looked at him carefully and then said, as if extracting a solemn promise,

  ‘This is it, isn’t it, Joseph? This is enough.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘This is everything. Just this.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In the late December dusk of Paris, seated defiantly out of doors, like many others of their age, at the big café next to the Pont St Michel, they could have been taken for just another couple of students who had spilled down from the Sorbonne at the end of the day to relax and take in the first night-lighting of the city, to postscript gossip to another academic day. But Natasha would now never study in the university so beloved of her father, nor would her half-brother François, she had concluded. Her half-brother sat with his pastis and Gitane, blissfully vacant, exempt from effort by the presence of Natasha. François did not need conversation.

  The figures that criss-crossed by, the lights on the Seine and the growls of the traffic were more than enough to line his mind with contentment. He was with a sister he loved and the sole person in his family and among his friends, as she realised, who did not look at him and say in that look, ‘Why are you a failure?’ ‘Why do you not make greater efforts?’ ‘Why do you so miserably let down your parents and humiliate them?’ ‘What happened to that Prévost boy?’ But Natasha’s eyes said, ‘I like being with you, François. Just as you are. Let’s have a drink or go to a movie and talk, if at all, aimlessly.’ To be alone with Natasha was, for this bewildered teenage boy, physically undersized, something strained about his poor skin, to be alone with his bold sister Natasha was a balm and all he wanted was to sit there, time without end, and watch the daylight finally drain away and take with it the unacknowledged welts and bruises of a constantly criticised life . . .

  ‘I am afraid, Joseph, that it will be too hard for you both,’ said Véronique. She had waited until Joe and Louis had finished polishing a speech Louis was to deliver in English at a conference in Copenhagen. Louis had gone into the university for a final hour. Natasha was out with François. Véronique pounced on Joseph. They sat in the large, elegantly furnished drawing room – which Louis would it be? he wondered. He saw it as a set more than a room. Gilbert the butler had served them drinks, cocktails, at Véronique’s suggestion, hers barely touched, Joe’s already all but supped. ‘You are just beginning on your marriage and marriage is hard enough without extra burdens.’

  ‘François won’t be actually living with us,’ he said, encouragingly, wanting to please.

  ‘But Natasha wants him to live near by. She said she thought there might even be lodgings in the same street as yours.’

  Véronique took out a cigarette, American, and Joe took this as permission to light up a Disque Bleu.

  ‘François is unfortunate,’ she said, ‘Louis is so . . . distinguished and from François, the first boy, so much was expected and demanded. And he has been a fool. He will not work. He only pretends to be stupid, I am convinced of that.’

  The harshness of the last three sentences embarrassed Joe into an alert silence. Véronique followed suit and for some moments they sat as if each feared to break it.

  ‘England could change him,’ she said. ‘The English are very practical.’ Joe nodded. ‘They decide to do something – they go out and do those things.’ Joe nodded once again. ‘He will be away from . . . us.’ She took up her glass and sipped. Joe finished his off, felt urgently that another would ease this tension but did not know how to ask.

  ‘It would be a very important gift to his father and to myself.’

  Joe saw his way. He was powered by one of those unaccountable gusts of fearless and often treacherous confidence magnified since he had been sure of Natasha.

  ‘I like François,’ he said, glowing in the role of gift-bearer, healer. ‘He’ll be good company for Natasha. The sooner he comes the better.’

  ‘My husband,’ said Véronique, quietly, ‘believes that he can find him a place in the Ecole Normale in London, to begin in January.’

  ‘We’ll have found somewhere for him to live by then.’

  ‘You are so good for Natasha,’ said Véronique. ‘We are all very grateful to you.’

  Joe’s humble smile, she thought, was a touch that of a simpleton.

  ‘It has to be done,’ she concluded, and Joe stood up, recognising that the conversation or the audience was over. He sought to formulate some reassuring, worldly, unpatronising parting line, but it eluded him.

  Time on his hands! He ran down the stairs and out into the streets of Paris, always choosing the narrowest as he tacked towards the Seine, expecting and so partly seeing a city seething with spectacle, a carnival of vivacious Parisiennes, Les Enfants du Paradis . . .

  ‘Did you see La Dolce Vita?’ said François, out of the blue, as they walked back arm in arm, up the youthful and animated Boulevard St Michel.

  Natasha nodded. ‘Joseph wrote about it for a new magazine. We disagreed on it. I thought it was fun, but pretentious. Joseph loved it.’

  ‘What tits!’ said François. ‘Quelle poitrine!’

  He looked daringly at her with a sort of amazement, a wonder that such a bosom should be, that he should have been allowed to see the bosom and that he could admit this out loud to a glamorous woman, even though she was his sister.

  ‘Come to London, François,’ Natasha said, and turned her face away a little as his smile conveyed such unbearable relief. ‘Come to London with us.’

  The following evening, Natasha and Joe walked arm in arm past the bouquinistes which after half a dozen previous lootings he had to force himself to pass without a pause, all but averting his eyes as if these trunks of books were ladies of the night to whose temptations he had to blind himself. The nearer they drew to Notre Dame the more resolute was his stride until he felt that he and Natasha were being drawn ever more strongly by invisible beams magnetising the mothy dusk of the evening, being pulled towards the force of faith and sculpture on the spectacular, figure-embossed, twin-towered west front of the cathedral, willed on by its sacred power.

  Joseph went into the cathedral as into a meeting with an old, ever-faithful friend. When he had worked in Paris for a few weeks before going to university, Notre Dame had been a prime destination. He loved the crepuscular murmurings of prayers emanating from the small congregation in that vast space, a gallant survival of witnesses, he thought, and the quiet respectful people moving behind pillars, gazing into side chapels, filling the cathedral with an echoed whispering, seeking everything from a rest, or a shelter, to an affirmation of divinity, a miracle. The guiding invisible power was made visible in the vaulting, the rose wi
ndows, the testimony of prayer-slaked stone and rich embroidered glass all announcing that this was the true and timeless God’s house.

  Natasha kept a step or two behind him; this, her childhood faith, and this the cathedral of her city, she now considered to be a museum rather than a House of God and the call to worship in such a place had been repelled long ago. Now its religiosity seemed a dead weight. She was aware of its cultural importance but even that pressed down on her. Quite simply she wanted to be out of this mediaeval candlelit gloom, away from the confession boxes which looked to her like little torture chambers, away from the bleeding Christs and the imploring women of Christ, away from the menace of absolute faith. But she stayed beside Joseph at once polite and intrigued by the drug this seemed to be for him. Where was his mind? she wondered. And yet again, as one sensation after another seemed to possess him, who is he?

  ‘I would like to come to mass on Christmas Eve,’ he said, as they came out into the dark city air which to Natasha seemed life-salvingly fresh. ‘I won’t be able to take a Roman Catholic communion but it would be great to be there. It’s so . . .’ He paused. He was bowed down by the fact of being in that place with Natasha, on that evening, a pinnacle of privilege.

  ‘My stepmother comes here,’ Natasha said, ‘usually alone. My father says that he will go but he rarely does. I am like him.’

  ‘So you won’t go? How can you not? On Christmas Eve.’

  ‘Because of my religion,’ she smiled. ‘My atheism, Joseph, forbids it.’

  ‘But Notre Dame. The music.’

  ‘The music I can listen to on the radio.’

  He took her arm firmly and almost marched her to the east end of the cathedral. ‘How can you not believe when you have been in a place like that?’

  ‘I have been in other places, Joseph, and not “believed” in them either. And not expected to believe. Anyway, God is dead, the Catholic Church is too wealthy to be good and most of the priests are corrupt.’

  ‘How can you prove that?’

  ‘My father says that most of them were not good in the war, Joseph. And some were very bad. What did they do to stop the fascists?’

  ‘There’s always evil.’

  ‘Not evil. That is a religious word. “Bad” will do. Or “rotten”. Or “cowards”. Or just men who found a comfortable life in a faith which does not need principles.’

  ‘Here!’ he said. ‘Look!’

  They stood, his arm around her waist, their breath fogging the clear cold air, staring up.

  The flying buttresses were lit up and Natasha smiled at the spectacle. This gigantic spider-legged set of stone props holding up the great weight of the east end of the cathedral was, she understood, clear proof to Joseph of faith at work.

  ‘We don’t know who built this,’ he said. ‘Good artisans, that’s all. But I think they are finer than all modern sculpture. And they were done out of faith.’

  ‘Where can you see proof of that?’

  ‘Why else did they do it?’

  ‘For a wage.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘For pride.’

  ‘Why not for faith?’

  ‘Perhaps they were persuaded by the propaganda.’

  ‘Did no one have faith? What about Chartres? You can’t deny that was built purely because of faith.’

  ‘It was a sort of organised hysteria. They knew no better.’

  ‘Do we?’

  ‘We can doubt and disagree without being persecuted.’

  ‘But do we know better?’

  ‘Yes. We know that God does not send down plagues. Plagues come from viruses. We know that God does not cause floods or famines. We know that if there is such a God,’ she turned to him, her face set, ‘I know that if there is such a God I want nothing to do with Him and I will certainly not bow to Him or pray to Him or worship a monster who creates a world like this one.’ She paused and smiled. ‘Poor Joseph. You don’t like this.’

  Joe was offended but he was also impressed.

  ‘So what do you believe in?’

  ‘Why do I have to believe?’

  ‘If you don’t believe in anything, what’s the point?’

  ‘I do not like this word. But if you force me to use it, I believe in you and me, Joseph. I believe we should help François. I believe that some people I have known were cruel and hateful. I believe the world is full of wrong but some right too, but I don’t need the pomp of Notre Dame for that. Notre Dame gets in the way. It is too complicated. It is a dictatorship of belief. It takes us up too many unnecessary paths.’

  ‘So the flying buttresses are just an accident?’

  ‘A glorious accident, Joseph.’

  ‘You believe in art, don’t you?’

  ‘Believe?’

  ‘So why is the greatest art a by-product of religion?’

  ‘Because what we call art is like the bacteria which will keep alive in anything, no matter what, or when. Art is not belief, Joseph, but it is us, it tells us what we are and what we could be and if it has to feed off religion or atheism, off democracy or tyranny, it will. Art is one of the essential messages we send to each other but we don’t know why. We will never know.’

  ‘I still have an occasional yearning for the certainty and the testing mysteries of religion. At that time I was far nearer the heat of an adolescent infatuation, even a love for it. I thought I had put it aside but it was still raw and Notre Dame murmuring with history and prayer had revived that.

  ‘I did not know until later,’ he told their daughter, ‘that however much she smiled, your mother’s argument with religion was a passion. I did not realise much until many years later. Perhaps this was because we had spent so little time together before the marriage. There was not the time to doubt, the time to pause, the time to look, look away, the time to question and wait for answers. But once our marriage was made, certain assumptions soon set in, with me, at any rate. It was like being mantled in a livery made for you before your time. Marriage was the uniform of your new status. There were fundamental assumptions about Married People, about what they had closed off and what they could take for granted, part of which was that they had somehow come to know everything important, everything worth knowing about each other just by the act of getting married.

  ‘Once you were married you no longer needed to exercise any curiosity because the fact of marriage proved you accepted everything about the other and because of that acceptance you knew everything you needed to know. I am sure now that I was far too bound up with myself and with my idea, or idealisation, of Natasha to take enough care to know more, to probe more deeply. Perhaps there was a suspicion that if I probed too deeply I would find what I did not like, what I did not want to experience. That would be hard and marriage existed to make life easy. Perhaps I suspected already the schisms to come. We are all tempted to see ourselves as prophets in the past. We like to think that our lives are foretold, that a special destiny works slowly through us. It was a culpable failing then not to recognise how serious her lack of faith was for her. I should have teased out the causes and the consequences of her total denial of faith. But I breezed along, we breezed along, Paris, Christmas week, just married, snowed under with good fortune and on the way to the apartment of Maria Troubnikoff, Natasha’s closest friend, a White Russian, who had invited other friends around to meet me.

  ‘They seemed so dazzling, maybe because their French was so dazzling and so rapid. They were like starlings. They found out that I could keep up a little, soon assumed that I could keep up a lot and sped into higher and higher gears of word play and references to French actors and singers and comedians which left me marooned, but contented to see Natasha so brilliant in this company, the language illuminating her character in ways I simply had not seen before. She was the most dazzling of all, I thought, she was the centre of energy; her eyes laughed, her gestures were quick and fluent: she was another self. Her language gave her access to the whole of her life. From that evening I believ
ed increasingly that her exile from the French language left her unbearably lesser and lonely, underlined the loneliness she carried like an inheritance. Language much more than painting was her great love and her great loss. At the time I may have had an inkling that I was somehow responsible for this; now I feel it strongly.

  ‘When they did slow down and include me it was to talk about politics because that was what the BBC brought them. But here I felt even more of a stranger because they were consumed by the Algerian question; the bizarre intellectual alliance between Sartre and de Gaulle, his promises of withdrawal, the influence of Ben Bella’s Hunger Strike and the rumours of torture. Apart from floundering in a shallow pool of generalisations, trying to honour the reputation of the BBC by appearing knowledgeable, I had nothing of any significance to contribute and I was embarrassed and consequently frustrated. I remember talking afterwards to Natasha and saying, out of pique, perhaps, that Algeria seemed ‘rather provincial’ compared with the world-encompassing Ban the Bomb arguments and marches back in London. I remember saying that because she turned on me, scorned the Ban the Bombers, Bertrand Russell and all his tribe of angry writers, described them as fantasists and praised the reality and complexity of the actions and discussion on this French post-colonial debacle. The English, she said, would never mount such a profound debate. I was worse than an idealist, she said, I was a Romantic and they had caused all the problems. I never forgot that. I thought it was brilliant of her to have said that.

  ‘But I did not take it on board. Again, likely as not, I did not understand. I was probably unshaken. Post-war England to me seemed so emphatically to have the high ground in any comparison of national virtue or achievement that her pride in the French way was simply, arrogantly, mistakenly not to be taken seriously. Perhaps it was there that I had the first intimation that I was such a long way from understanding her. Hindsight will be Satan, throughout this account.’

  On Joe’s first visit to Paris, made in the months before he went to university, the city had been a living museum. It seemed to him that some of the finest artefacts in the world had been herded up and penned in solely for his education and in that short time he had fed on them at first with indiscriminate greed and then, he liked to think, with more of a gourmet’s taste buds, as he returned again and again to chosen sites and picnicked on favourite Impressionist paintings, grazed on grand sculptures, entombed himself happily face to face with inscrutable objects from enthralling but impenetrable ancient civilisations.