by Melvyn Bragg
‘Is he like you?’
‘You ask some blunt questions, Natasha. Is he like me?’
‘Is he?’
‘We had very different “bringings-up”. Life was just harder in my time. Not that Joe – well, not that Joe didn’t have his problems.’
‘What problems? Was it to do with being different?’
‘Do you think he is different?’
‘How else could he have come out of here?’
‘More hard-working, I’d say, than different. And determined.’ He paused. ‘A bit different.’
‘What were these problems, Sam?’
Whenever she said his name, Sam felt a weakening. The more so in this case as she accompanied it by slipping her arm through his. She was a little taller than he was, but the reach of their stride was in perfect unison. There was that about her which touched Sam to a tenderness he must once have felt for Ellen, he told himself, but perhaps not even for her. There was some mixture of frailty and boldness in Natasha, as if there were no defences but no fear either and yet she called out for protection. She was a woman you could gladly spend a lifetime getting to know.
‘He found things a bit of a strain,’ he said, ‘at times.’
‘The examination work?’
‘Not so much that, more what it was leading to.’
‘Or leading from?’
Sam nodded. She was always onto it.
‘He was a good swimmer,’ Sam said, as they passed by the Public Baths, built, she noticed, in the warm sandstone which was, she thought, the best feature of the town’s architecture.
‘Have I married a hero?’
‘You don’t have to tackle anybody when you swim.’
‘I have not seen him confrontational.’
‘Both of you took a lot on trust.’
The drizzle strengthened. As if to shield her from it, he held her arm a little more tightly.
‘He often tells me that you could have done what he has done.’
‘Does he?’ Sam was almost stopped in his tracks. ‘Does he now?’
‘He says he thinks you’re cleverer than him. He also admires you for fighting in the war in the Far East. But he says you can’t talk about it.’
‘Does he?’
‘You seem amazed.’
Sam said nothing but pressed her arm gently; to stop.
‘Were you scarred by the war, Sam?’
‘Very likely.’ He paused. ‘Sometimes I think Ellen and Joe had the worst of it.’
‘Why was that?’
‘You can probably work it out better than I can, Natasha. I haven’t got the psychology.’
‘You mean you don’t want to . . . He’s very confident,’ Natasha said, and waited to be challenged.
‘I’m glad you find him so,’ he said. ‘I can’t give him any maps for where he is or where he’s going. Mine ran out long ago. But he’ll need all the help going.’
‘Why?’
‘You know why, Natasha. He’s finding places he’s no idea of and . . .’
‘Yes?’ He’s about to say, ‘He’s weak,’ she thought.
‘He’s very lucky, to my mind,’ Sam said, most deliberately, eyes straight ahead, ‘to have you by his side.’
Natasha was moved. I have found another father, she said to herself. Or rather, I have found Sam, my father-in-law. Joe had to be rooted in Sam, hadn’t he? ‘Will you tell me about – Burma? It was terrible, wasn’t it?’
And Sam told her, freely, as he had never told Joe who, when he learned of it, was both proud of his wife’s drawing blood from that stone and envious of her closeness to his father.
A few days later on his people tour, Joe took Natasha to the cattle auction to witness the Tuesday Sale. They sat at the back of the crowded arena, a wooden structure, roof, walls and bare-board seats, a circular central sand-floored space for the display of the cattle. Here beasts turned into money following the chant of the high priest, Josh Benson, auctioneer. His rapid half-sung drone from the altar of his desk summoned the faithful to buy. ‘I have ten bid, ten bid, ten bid, ten bid ten, bid ten, eleven, twelve, twelve bid twelve and thirteen, I have thirteen bid, thirteen bid, thirteen bid, fourteen, fourteen bid, fourteen bid, over there fifteen, I have fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, I have seventeen bid, seventeen bid, seventeen, I have . . .’
Natasha was entranced by the sound and Joe directed her to the faces, all topped by a flat cap, real Cumbrian faces, Joseph whispered, some concentrated, some cunning, some nursing pain, but strong faces, he pointed out to her afterwards, faces you saw again and again in the district, careful, world-worn, Northern, Norse, faces of farming men whose way of life had changed so little and stretched back unbroken beyond biblical years. Joseph, she thought, you are a fathomless romantic about your own past.
‘I’m his Uncle Colin.’ They were outside the Co-op: Joseph had paused there and for a moment Natasha had feared he might take her in to face more introductions. Instead Colin, to whom he had referred a little and guardedly, popped out, clad in black motorcycling leather. ‘I expect he’s been trying to avoid you and me meeting up.’
‘No I haven’t!’
Colin did not take his eyes off Natasha. Always hit them right between the eyes, that was his tactic. He transferred the brown carrier bag to his left hand. ‘Stores,’ he explained, and held out his right. ‘Bonjour, anyway. Parlez-vous. I expect you think Wigton’s a dump.’
‘Not at all.’
‘It isn’t a dump!’ Joe was indignant.
‘Joe always defends the little place,’ said Colin, his eyes still ‘fixing’ Natasha, unaware that this amused her. ‘But then he doesn’t live here any more.’
‘There are very nice people here,’ said Natasha and looked at Joseph to release herself from Colin’s absurd attempt at a ‘spell’.
‘They’ll be nice to you,’ said Colin, ‘they know you’re here today, gone tomorrow. They can afford to be nice to you.’
‘That’s not fair!’
‘Look at me,’ said Colin. ‘I’ve got a lifestyle that’s a bit different. Most of them wouldn’t know a lifestyle from a turnip. I like soul music. Glenn Miller’s the limit for this lot. And television game shows. It’s desperate here, mademoiselle, and I bet you won’t come back in a hurry.’
‘We are in Caldbeck,’ Natasha said, helplessly.
‘Good God! Has he taken you to Caldbeck?’
‘It’s a grand little place.’
‘You,’ jabbed out Colin, at last turning his full-frontal attention to his nephew, ‘have sent me neither a letter nor a postcard in more than a year. You’ve got above yourself, Joe Richardson, and I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. You’ve lost yourself. Au revoir, missus, and all the very best.’
He was gone.
‘He was looking for a door,’ Natasha said, as they watched him go, ‘so that he could slam it.’
‘He has his bad times,’ said Joe anxiously, a little shaken. Colin could still shake him.
‘It can’t be easy being a homosexual in Wigton,’ she said.
Joe’s head seemed to turn in slow motion. To his knowledge, nobody had ever called Colin homosexual. If he himself had ever suspected it, the prospect of his mother’s anger, and the iron-bound hoops of Victorian small-town hypocrisy, would have forbidden it to be articulated into thought, let alone spoken out loud, and on the streets and by a stranger to the place.
‘Yes.’ He swallowed very hard. ‘Perhaps you’re right but maybe, my mother, her half-brother . . .’
‘I won’t say anything to Ellen. Sam will know everything of course.’
There began in Joe a slow unravelling and recovering, a path to be followed deep into his childhood, words, looks, actions, suggestions, promises, invitations, to be reviewed: the whole jigsaw to be remade. For years he had denied that Colin, who had tickled him to hysteria and thrown him in the air until he was exhausted, who had sulked over card games and used his superior years and his status as Ellen’s half-brother to
dominate Joe, had any mark of homosexuality about him. When Natasha said, later and helpfully as she thought, that there must have been both fear and obligatory kinship warmth in his relationship with Colin and that must have shaped some of his dealings with men subsequently, Joseph refused to consider it and she let it pass. He had his own hidden cellars as she had and the doors were best not forced.
There were other shops to go into to meet friends of his who had taken up their family business, Johnston’s Shoes, Saunderson’s Hardware, Alan at the paper shop, William in the café. Then there arrived a memorable encounter, just before six, with the shops shutting down and the thirteen pubs opening up, Diddler arrived, zigzagging over the pavement, tipsy, from the tips from his jobs around the busy auctions, without his teeth as it was a working day, dressed like the gypsy he was, and one whose day had gone too well, but his gummy smile a beam of joy to Joe.
‘Joseph!’ He managed to come to a halt beside the Old Vic and used the wall as a prop. His hands had not moved from his pockets. ‘Is this the lucky lady, Joseph?’
‘It is. Natasha, this is Diddler. Diddler, Natasha. My wife.’
‘Well now,’ the old man heaved himself away from the wall and appeared to consider which hand to take out of the pocket. The left emerged. ‘Congratulations now, missus. There we are. Another Mrs Richardson and may I say if you live up to the boy’s mother you’ll have nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘Diddler and my father were brought up in the same buildings.’
‘Down on Vinegar Hill. The council’s destroyed them now. But I did well out of that one, Joe, and you and your da helped me with the slates and the lead and all. Still making money while it stays safe in the yard.’
‘Joseph has talked about you,’ Natasha said, remembering part of Joseph’s rhapsody the previous day about this old gypsy as proof of the living archaeology of the town, where ancient scavengers still roamed.
‘Has he now? What’s he want to talk about me for?’
‘He talked about having rides on your cart.’
‘The old flat cart. I’ve still got it, Joe. And I’ve still got the horses, never fear about that. His father was a little gamecock,’ said Diddler, ‘frightened of nothing and nobody, Sam Richardson.’
‘We went to the auction and into the Market Hall,’ said Joe.
‘Too dear, Joseph, too dear for ordinary folk. Now then. I know I should be offering you a present, but I made a bad move in the Lion and Lamb. The oldest trick in the world and I fell for it. A market fella out from Hexham way. You couldn’t sub me a couple of bob for a day or so?’
‘Yes. Here.’ Quits, Joe thought.
‘That was easily done, missus. If I’d known it was going to be that easy, I’d’ve asked for five. Never mind. So. Blessings on your house.’
And with a sidestep and a right swerve and a pinpoint forward lurch he left the damp, cold streets and toppled into the warm snug of the Old Vic.
‘Sadie will be sorry to have missed you,’ Ellen said, ‘but they took her into hospital last week.’
‘What is it?’
‘They can’t say.’
The three of them were in the kitchen, uninvaded at this hour. Three regulars kept Sam frustratingly trapped in the bar. In the darts room the Pearson brothers were practising for an evening of challenge games. The lights in the singing room were off, the fire unlit.
Ellen looked at them and saw they were happy. So why was there this tinge of sadness, too selfish to admit? When she and Sam talked at the end of the night, she said, ‘We could take a pub down South, Sam, to be near them. Especially when they have a family. We’ll be too far away then.’
Sam nodded – Ellen would never move – and went back to Catch-22.
They borrowed bicycles and strayed up into the bare hills whose blankness and grandeur, emptiness and splendour of shapes made them such a necessary landscape for Joe. When Natasha, more or less unprompted, also declared for them and admired them in much the same terms, it was as if a rare gift had been fully appreciated. And she sketched the hills, bold lines encompassing mass, a close-up of a stone wall, a tipple of fell tops running towards the horizon, and clouds. She became obsessed with clouds but never satisfied, even angry at herself, finally, to Joe’s consternation, tearing up every one of the cloud sketches.
On their last morning he took her up to the spectacular hidden waterfall on the southern rim of Caldbeck. It was called the Howk. It looked as if a particularly stubborn glacial finger had been so reluctant to be withdrawn north, to be called back by the Gods of the Arctic, that it had gouged out this great raw cleft now deep in woods.
The noise of the waterfall was as thrilling as the sight, Joseph said, and Natasha nodded, once again happy in his happiness. They walked up the narrow slippery path beside the fall and the force of water. At first Joe tried to tell her about other waterfalls described by Wordsworth and Southey and the gothic tales set around them. She nodded but did not encourage him. He understood: he too wanted to be alone on this cliff of fall.
Natasha was absorbed in this radiant sight: the white perpetually changing chutes of water, the spray sometimes catching the winter sun through the trees and sparkling with colours, the trees above them, bare-boughed, stripped of all leaves, in mourning. Words were no use, too certain for this unceasing motion of water and light, words would only hold back the flow of these sensations alchemising into imagination, into a dream of life. Did this represent the life she could have with Joseph?
At the top of the fall they looked down at the way they had come. The waterfall hit the black rocks and split into furious strands, foaming between those disruptive obstacles. Natasha put her arm around Joseph’s waist and leaned her head on his shoulder. Often enough when the chance arose, they had made love in the open, always instigated by Joseph. Now, having grown so much closer to him on his home ground, it was she who wanted the seal of sex.
But, though he put his arm around her, though he drew her close and kissed her, there was no more. A little later, when they were circling the village for the last time, she thought she understood why it was so. He must have made love to Rachel there.
By indirections, over patient months, she found out that had been the case and she was impressed that he had kept the place faithful to the girl of his youth.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
François brought Natasha a project; himself. When she met him at Victoria Station on that smog-stricken late January afternoon, she was first moved to pity at the small slight figure so timidly looking out for her and then, when his wasted face lit up at the sight of her, the pity turned to love. Someone had to love him, had to, she thought, as the nakedly relieved face pressed towards her through the crowd and she felt the imminence of unexpected tears at this trust, this hope, this delivery of himself into her hands. He has never known love, she thought, not the love without question that Joseph gives to me, not the love that is a rock. She would give him that.
In the weeks and months that followed (he stayed for almost a calendar year in London), Natasha dedicated herself to this task. She saw the afflicting effect of her stepmother, she saw the impatient neglect of their father, she saw prejudice and lack of charity, she saw ignorance and lack of understanding. There was something of herself in François. They had tried to box and straitjacket her too; she would never forget that.
She did not calculate the harm that might come to her from going back into a time of her life from which she had jaggedly liberated herself with such a protracted and wounding effort. Joseph offered her a bridge back to her past but it would only serve, she had told herself, for a little while. It would prove her worth to her father and confound her stepmother and indulge Joseph, so dazzled by her old world, so blind to it. But this bridge, she believed, was nothing but a drawbridge, to be hauled up whenever she had a mind. François was a road which drove into the heart of her darkness. To help François thoroughly was to risk reactivating the terrified misery of her childhood and yet she did not
hesitate: from the moment she saw him on Victoria Station she reached out to save him.
She watched over him. When he returned in the mid-afternoons from l’Ecole Normale in Kensington, he came back not to his lodgings eighteen doors down the street, but to her, to her kitchen or the garden as spring grew warmer, to tea or coffee around the table or under the willow, to chat for hours sometimes but only rarely about his work, mostly about himself, the story of himself, free at last to tell his heroic anecdotal autobiography, portraying himself as cunning, shrewd, a swashbuckler. Or he would recount jokes, he collected jokes; and then occasionally there would be grandly shallow adolescent generalities about international affairs.
‘He wants so much to be like our father,’ she told Joseph for whom she assumed François was as inexhaustible a subject as he was to herself, ‘he has opinions on everything. Sometimes I suspect he may be parodying my father. No world event can arise without François giving it the benefit of his reflections. They are rarely more than one sentence long but stated with ambassadorial authority.’
Joe soon found that he would unconsciously time these conversations. He liked François and was pleased to be the sort of man who could do such a favour for his wife’s family and he was glad, glad and grateful, that, when he thought of Natasha in the cold Finchley flat while he was embraced in work, she was not alone. Yet despite this, there was a little jealousy; that François should now threaten him as the centre of Natasha’s attention. He tried to deflect this by reminding himself that brothers and sisters were uncharted territory to him and had their own rules which were part of a wholly different engagement. He suppressed the occasional irritation of envy when he arrived back tired to the sound of fresh voices, unworn by the railroad of daily slog however much he enjoyed it. His work was a pleasure but even work-pleasure could be tiring and that was confusing. Everywhere simplicities were on the retreat. He loved his work but sometimes it took too much and he resented it even though he could not believe his luck.
So sometimes when Natasha talked about François he shamefully counted the minutes until he could change the subject without hurting her feelings or move away and get to his writing. He could see how much it meant to her that François was growing happier and that she was the cause, she was the giver; he could see that it made her bloom, to be the giver. ‘He talks about his life,’ she said, ‘but in such a way that even he must know I know he is fibbing. He does so little, that is the truth. He appears to have no friends. He goes to the cinema. It’s good for him that so many French films are shown in London. He’s interesting about films – not like you – but from his own viewpoint. The films are always related to his own life. He could be the hero, he derides the bad men, he would not make that stupid mistake, he doesn’t believe someone could do that. It’s refreshing after all that Nouvelle Vague film criticism. And of course he is always talking about the breasts of the actresses.’
