by Melvyn Bragg
Natasha made a literal retreat from the table to one of the two large armchairs by the electric fire where she watched him, his back and head hunched over the pad. How could he be so near yet so far away? He was surely the same Joseph. He still came back to her; he loved her; she trusted him, she relied on him; too much? Was it dependence? Was the need for him too great, more than he wanted to bear? She had to be careful, she decided, as she glanced over to him and tried to stifle her cough.
And then he would look around and grin, or suddenly jump up from his chair and come across and kiss her or, best of all, say, ‘What do you think of this?’ – and read a paragraph or two which she would praise and only later, a day or two later, find a moment to introduce her misgivings. ‘I’ve already done that,’ he would usually say, or, ‘That’s good. That’s really helpful. Thanks,’ with a hug and for a while the clouds lifted.
Joe abandoned Aeneas and his journey through the concentric circles of walls. He had managed just over thirty thousand words but as his interest flagged the prose slackened, the pace of writing dragged, the novel ran out on him in his second week in Newcastle.
He began to plan a novel with the title The Metropolitan Line. This would be seven interconnected stories, seven characters apparently unrelated, differing greatly in their background and class and position in the city but crossing each other’s paths, at first without knowing they were doing so, but, in the end somehow (to be discovered in the writing) seen as bound together. It would be a chance to feed off his excitement at the impact of London, to write about the present, to portray a spectrum of life from the old flower seller at Charing Cross Station to the grandees he had brushed against in Broadcasting House. He could not think of a plot. He did not want a murder or a will or an accident. The plot, he decided, itching to get going, would emerge from the characters. And this time, whatever happened, he would finish it. It would need all the energy he could dredge up.
Newcastle skewered it. Joe’s attachment was to the daily local radio programme called Let the People Speak and he was being given a drubbing by the small scornful former Communist Arnold Baxter, its editor, whose encouragement to Joe, in an overemphatic Geordie accent, included, ‘We don’t need Oxford folk to tell us what to do,’ ‘You’re nothing but a working-class rural Conservative in Liberal sheep’s clothing – worst of both worlds,’ and ‘Raymond Williams has already written everything you might attempt. There’s no point.’ The other two producers, John, a young Yorkshireman who’d served time on the Manchester Guardian, and Harold, a local man who’d been lured across to radio from the Newcastle Journal, told him to ignore ‘the old sod’, but as they respected the old sod and conspired with him to make a programme as radical and left-wing as they could possibly get away with, Joe had the uncomfortable feeling that they rather agreed with the old sod and indeed he himself often thought that the old sod had a point.
Joe had sailed along from his adolescence on the comfortable tide of post-war Welfare State Labour. A glimpse of Oxford politics had confirmed his preference for the unexamined certainties of a political position which could effectively be shelved while he got on with his life. Life, for Arnold Baxter, was nothing but politics, hard politics. ‘Arnold makes Lenin look soft,’ said John. ‘I don’t know how the BBC lets him get away with it.’
‘He wins prizes,’ said Harold, ‘and he would raise holy hell if they censored him.’
‘He’ll try to break your spirit,’ said John cheerfully, ‘he thinks you’re a class traitor.’
They were in the pub. At lunchtime they were always in the pub. It was Arnold’s parliament. Despite a weak head and a careful budget, Joe felt he had to turn up at least twice a week or the wrath of Arnold would extend to even more corrosive remarks on his character. ‘A bloody nancy drink,’ he said, when Joe ordered a mere half of mild ale. ‘If you can’t drink you’re no good to me.’
Throughout the time of his attachment, Joe was never sure about Arnold. Was his contempt real, or an act? Did he despise Joe as much as his words indicated or was the tongue-lashing a helpful way to knock a political education into him in double quick time? Or did he just loathe him? There were many clear and discomforting signs of that and, though not unused to being loathed, Joe was thrown. The only way through was to please the man by the work he did but it seemed the man was not to be pleased.
There was a strike in the Vickers Shipyard and Joe was detailed to bring back an interview with the spokesman for the management. John dealt with the Trades Unions, Harold did a ‘colour’ piece, interviewing the children of the strikers.
Arnold listened to Joe’s tape in his small tidy office. Joe faced him across the empty desk. After the tape ended, Arnold let a silence roll in before he pronounced.
‘No follow-up questions. No pushing him at all. Did you ask him to show you the disgraceful so-called canteen and the stinking lavatories? No? Suppose he refused? You should have gone there on your own and described them for us. You’re a reporter. Report! It’s the conditions this is about. They’re mediaeval. They would insult a Neanderthal. You let him walk all over you. Maybe we can hack thirty seconds out of it.’ He laughed. ‘For balance! For the Powers That Be.’ His laugh was a bark. ‘All you’ve brought me is the bloody balance.’
There was a pattern. Joe was despatched to talk to a Liberal councillor about the lack of books in primary schools. ‘You should have nailed him. He had no case.’ He was sent out of the city, deep into the feudal Northumbrian countryside to interview a local Conservative MP who had just been promoted into the Cabinet: ‘He pissed all over you.’ He talked to a sculptor in Durham whose abstract response to a council commission had inflamed much local opinion, including Arnold’s whose aesthetic soul was ambered in Soviet Realism; unfortunately Joe liked the work: ‘Christ, we have a bloody pansy on our hands.’ He was sent to do vox pops at the Jesmond Golf Club.
In these first weeks the height of Joe’s ambition was to earn an encouraging word. He found it difficult to question Arnold’s judgements and he was increasingly downcast at his own stupidity.
‘The trick with Arnold,’ John told him on their way to St James’s Park to see the derby match between Newcastle and Sunderland, ‘is to understand that he is totally black and white. In everything. Without fail. Workers good, bosses bad; councillors crafty or corrupt; ordinary people who complain about them honest and reliable; business, bureaucracies, government presence in all its forms, guilty until proved innocent; man and woman in the street, soul of virtue; politicians untrustworthy by definition; men in pubs and women who work in canteen, wise and dependable also by definition; revolution merely delayed a decade or so; status quo untenable and unspeakable. That’s about the size of it. Takes you a long way if you have the instincts of a dictator and the luck to run a remote and insignificant regional colony at the outer edges of BBC Radio. And of course,’ John paused and his tone changed, ‘there’s his upbringing which was truly awful, beggars belief.’ Another pause. ‘And his marriage – enough said. And, most of all, Joe, he is a bloody brilliant editor. No question. Just take it on the chin and walk on. You’ll learn a lot and what you don’t like will drop off when you get out of his range.’
‘I’m not sure I want it to drop off,’ Joe said to Natasha later that night. They had been to see This Sporting Life and Joe had found himself analysing it in Arnold’s terms. ‘I feel as if I’ve been sleepwalking about politics.’ They were in their sitting room, a last cup of tea, chairs drawn up to the two-barred fire. ‘Just taking things for granted.’
‘Why not?’ Natasha’s face was almost ghostly pale. The infection had cleared but, had Joe taken the trouble to look closely, he would have seen the persisting weakness. ‘Why not take it for granted?’
‘It seems irresponsible,’ said Joe. ‘Just leaving it to others.’
‘We have to leave most things to others,’ said Natasha, ‘that’s how civilisation works.’
‘But all of us are involved in politics. Whether w
e acknowledge it or not.’
‘That is your dreadful Arnold talking.’
‘He said something like that. But I believe it for myself.’
‘No you don’t. You just want to please him. Even when he is not here you want to please him. You are practising on me!’
‘That’s unfair.’
‘You want to write novels, Joseph. That is enough. You must leave the politics for others. The BBC is beginning to possess you.’
‘I can’t just give it up.’
‘You must be more indifferent. Like the poet in London who came in to work so late and left so early. Not like Arnold who torments you most likely out of envy.’
‘What could he envy about me?’
‘Joseph. Sometimes you are blind.’
‘I like it here,’ he said. ‘When I’ve done the television attachment I’m going to see if I can be transferred back to the North.’
‘To play at politics?’
‘To do something for the community. I’ve put somebody like that in the new novel.’
‘You’d be frustrated. And how do you know you would be any good at it?’
‘You can say that about everything I’m doing.’
‘But the writing is what you want to do, it comes out of you, it is your decision taken alone and not influenced by Arnold. Any Arnolds.’
‘You’d probably get on well with him.’
‘I don’t want to meet him. I’ve seen what he’s done to you.’
‘What’s that?’
‘He’s upset you. And why? Because he is a bully and you are inexperienced but very willing and therefore easy to bully. I would tell him that if I did meet him.’
‘I bet you would.’
He smiled and her returned smile was irresistible.
‘I bet you would,’ he repeated. He looked at her intently. ‘You’re very tired, aren’t you? And you’re thinner.’
‘I’m getting stronger now. As long as you stick to what is true in you we will come to no harm.’
‘I still want to come back to the North,’ he said as he moved towards her.
‘You have never left it,’ she said, as he kneeled in front of her and began to caress her. ‘Perhaps you never will. But you must try.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
‘I shall miss them,’ said Julia. They had lodged with the Stevenses for three weeks while searching for a place in London. ‘The house is less fun. I fail to see why they could not find a place in Oxford. Natasha would love to live here. And the train takes scarcely more than an hour and a quarter.’
‘But then,’ Matthew attended to the glasses of whisky, ‘as he explained, with the tube and the walking at both ends it would be about four hours a day in transit.’
‘He could read on the train.’
‘He could. But clearly even that was not sufficient temptation. And the journey would not be inexpensive.’
‘Kew Gardens sounds perfectly adequate,’ Julia conceded as she took the whisky, ‘it will give us a chance to visit the Botanical Gardens. Natasha said that rather a crowd of BBC people live there or thereabouts because of its proximity to the studios.’
‘In work proximity is all,’ said Matthew. ‘Here’s to proximity.’ He lifted his tumbler.
‘Joe has the air of someone who gets good luck.’ Julia sipped the whisky and grimaced. It was too strong. ‘Unfortunately, those are the ones who tend to come a cropper sooner or later. A bit like hubris and nemesis.’
The house in Kew Gardens was semi-detached, built between the wars on the site of a once locally famous orchard. The patch of garden boasted two apple trees and one pear tree. It was just around the corner from the station which would take Joe the few stops to a destination from which he could walk to work in the television studios in the west of London. The house was handy for an elegant Edwardian parade of shops sufficient for all normal domestic purposes, plumped out with a second-hand bookshop, two junky antique shops, a restaurant and a café with tables outside. It was about five minutes from Kew Botanical Gardens and ten minutes from a particularly lush bend of the Thames.
It was Natasha’s third English suburb. It never occurred to her to include Oxford. It still took some understanding, so whisperingly tidy, so quiet, hushed by the ubiquitous avenues of trees, so uniform, so organised, so toy-like in architecture, so empty by day and emptier by night; the placid playground, the tranquil shops and the regular dashes of keep-out privet, kilometres of privet, the gardens all tended trim yet unshowy, the suburbanites somnambulistic whether strolling to the tennis courts or strolling towards the river with obedient dogs or strolling towards well-mannered gatherings; such admirable tolerance, such niceness which must, she thought, given what she knew from an often bombastic Joseph of the violent history of England, be a pose: but why? Perhaps, she wrote to Julia, that could be her mission: to uncover the secrets of the English-speaking suburb. Julia could give her tips on how Agatha Christie would proceed. But she took much more notice of Kew Gardens than she had done of Finchley or of Jesmond. For in Kew they bought a house and planted their life together.
To buy a house was something of a shock to both of them. BBC Personnel advised it and a London friend of Louis to whom he recommended that Natasha turn for advice had said, ‘In England it is always bricks and mortar.’ Natasha was impressed by the man’s authority and eased into this unexpected move by the thought that it would please and reassure her father. Joseph was struck with the revelation that paying rent was getting nothing back whereas taking out a mortgage on your own house was both a canny and a morally defensible investment. They bought three bedrooms, two living rooms, one small kitchen, bathroom and cloakroom for four thousand and two hundred pounds. It went through without a glitch. Joe could raise two thousand and seven hundred and fifty as a mortgage against his salary. Louis released a good proportion of Natasha’s trust to make up the rest. The trust had brought her a modest income for several years, less than half of Joe’s earnings, but it had made an important difference. Now it was depleted but everyone agreed the house was bricks and mortar surety.
The previous owner had died in the house at a great age, leaving behind him slabs of Edwardian furniture, several rejected by his almost equally aged relatives. Because Joe saw both convenience and a bargain, they bought the dead man’s bed (‘Every bed’s a dead man’s bed,’ he said, ‘unless it’s new and we can’t afford that’); they bought the dead man’s three-piece suite, the dead man’s dining table and six chairs, his garden tools and two very large prints of battles – Waterloo and Trafalgar – which Natasha thought was typical of Joseph.
The rest of their furniture was flung together from the overflowing cheaper junk shop in the nearby parade outside the station. The shop was run by a curly-haired blond actor and his straight-haired blonde sister, an actress; neither of them regularly employed. The business flourished because of their charm and their guile at offering to clear the heaped remains of domestic imperial days from the Victorian and Edwardian villas of Kew. These were being steadily drained of their once affluent owners and the objects unwanted by relations made good junk for young homeowners.
The novelty of the purchase refreshed the two of them and for that alone Natasha was persuaded that it was acceptable. How on earth they had come to buy a house was wholly unexpected but so was much that had happened since she had met Joseph. But this! Property? How had they become bourgeois? What had they lost? Yet, she reassured herself, they could always sell it. They were not trapped. They were still free. The argument was weak, she accepted that too.
The Thames was no distance and the Thames ran to be painted. She saw it through the work of Monet and as the spring and summer warmed the suburb she felt confident enough to take out her watercolours and found a safe harbour on the towpath beside the wall of the Gardens. The Gardens themselves were priceless. Fenced, patrolled, ordered, deeply secure and full of fantasy, they became a refuge. One penny was the entrance fee and that royally trifling sum clicked you t
hrough the iron turnstile into a man-planted Garden of Eden, only two centuries old. The gigantic Palm House and the Temperate House brought exotic and luxuriant plants from the Tropics. The rose garden bloomed in a gentle Englishness she was growing to love. But it was the exotic which most drew in Natasha, the camellias and magnolias, the great planting of giant redwoods, and the Mediterranean garden, and the tall, incongruous Pagoda which always made her smile.
Two sites were special: one was the lake which a pair of black swans ruled with such serene beauty – Natasha could dream on them for hours, finding comfort and endless mystery in their tranquil, stately movement. Then there was the artist of the Gardens, Marianne North, whose gallery of watercolours drawn from her bold Victorian journeys to rarely visited corners of the globe filled Natasha with awe and not a little envy. Would she ever have the resources to be as independent as that? How strong in herself that woman must have been, she thought, and how fortunate – or was it determined? – in the fulfilment of her calling. She would stare for minutes on end at photographs of the dumpy little artist, clothed, bedecked, like Queen Victoria, looking for clues.
She needed refuge in the first months chiefly because of the aeroplanes. When they bought the house they had not taken the planes into account. Soon it was as if they pursued her. The house was under the flight path six miles out from London’s Heathrow Airport, and just above them the planes braked and wheeled and made for a runway. Natasha began to fear the planes. ‘I keep thinking they are carrying bombs,’ she told Joseph, ‘I keep thinking they will explode over us. I keep seeing the mushroom cloud.’ Though he had the concern to comfort her or try to talk her some way out of it, she knew that he did not really understand.
