Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  One night she awoke sobbing and he held her until she was calm, amazed by the force of her distress. He suggested they move house but she thought he did not mean it and saw it as a test. Now he began to ask her about the planes when he came back from work. She construed his kindness as pity and she could not bear that, so it became a task for her, to conquer this fear, to blank out not only the sound but the riot of alarm brought about by the high steel whining sound of the planes braking overhead.

  She set herself to work at it, to erase Joseph’s pity, and by constant exercise of will she gradually began to succeed. It was tiring. She concentrated so hard through the days that there was in those first months little energy for her own work, but she knew, in some way even more important than proving herself to Joseph, that this had to be survived. It was hard, it took a great deal out of her, but she was encouraged by the belief that she could not have done it before she met Joseph. She drove the fears deeper into her mind, into the pit of her mind, until they lay with the other terrible fears, but, she thought, inert, safe unless unleashed by new monsters.

  And in this struggle the Botanical Gardens and the Edwardian parade became her allies, the earthed powers of her daily life, people in shops who smiled at her, the old lady who read the Daily Telegraph so intently, chain-smoked and took mid-morning coffee about the time she did, the ‘resting’ actors in the junk shop, the talkative polo-necked idealist in the bookshop, the greengrocer and the butcher, the black swans and Marianne North’s gallery, the ticket collector who was invariably chatty when she stood on the small platform waiting for the tube to take her into London and to Joseph, the lush meanders by the river.

  ‘They seem to have settled in rather well,’ said Julia after a day trip.

  ‘And the house?’

  ‘Hideous, but Natasha has made it look rather bohemian. Against heavy odds. She has a touch.’

  ‘She has the gift,’ said Matthew, as if correcting her, but refusing to look up from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He could and had to finish it before bed.

  ‘She tells me that Joseph, as she calls him, had promised her an instant circle of friends from the BBC who also live there. But little sign as yet.’

  ‘Takes time.’

  ‘We went into Kew Gardens. They were breathtaking. She is very lucky to have them. She’s made some rather good watercolours.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘But I still feel . . .’

  She did not badger him for a response, knowing precisely the peculiar compulsion which could rivet you to finishing a book. But she left her Silent Spring unopened and sat back to comb the day and try to dig up clues to explain her persisting unease.

  ‘It was in Kew Gardens that our love for each other grew and was wholly realised,’ he told their daughter. ‘I now believe that, after a few months, your mother began to feel totally safe and when I imagine her now in that house, in the street and in the Gardens, or by the river and with our friends in those early years, I see how contentment made her beautiful. I look at the few photographs that remain from those days, seeking out shadows but what I see is happiness. I find it unbearable that I destroyed that as on so many days since I am convinced I did. Her smile in the photographs even now so many years later makes me smile in return, as it did many others, just for the life, the wit her eyes conveyed, the shine of her. She told me, “You have infiltrated my heart.” Then she would laugh and turn away.

  ‘Kew was where she did her best work, where both of us made a serious start on our journey into fiction. We were full of hope, unfearful of failure, expecting very little, the doing was what mattered, her painting, our writing and reading each other’s work; living in the dream, I suppose, of being artists, although I could never find the confidence to describe myself as an artist. Natasha could. Natasha was. There were new friends, there was, there really was, you must believe me, settled happiness and most of all there was, three years after we arrived, you.

  ‘In the English classical suburban reaches of Kew Gardens we played out the parts we were inventing for ourselves. You think you shape your life. Even when circumstances lift you up on a wholly unpredicted tide and deposit you somewhere you’d never thought of, you still think that in some way this was engineered; by yourself. The idea that we are little more than flecks of spray on the tides of time or randomly rearranged particles remains hard to take, however intellectually convincing, as do all other theories proving the relentless demotion, even demolition, of our significance in the scheme of things. But then, young, together, we thought we owned our lives.

  ‘I had not counted on being seduced by my attachment to the Arts Department. After work I still set off back home as soon as I could, making excuses not to join the “one last drink before you go” crowd, eager to be with Natasha and the novel. But in the mornings I was eager, perhaps just as eager, to get to work, to be in the cutting rooms or on location or in a script conference or in the canteen listening to the arguments brought on by the previous night’s programmes, programmes which seemed to the producers to be of crucial importance to the mind and spirit of the nation, of the world of mankind itself! For the first time since leaving school and my home town I felt inside a society. Different though it was, hoisted into a new class in one heave as I was, I had been raised up into the mongrel media middle-class club and I was at home.’

  His traineeship was coming to an end. It had been a time without ambition. He had been shuttled around the BBC, ‘taught’ by being chucked in at the deep end, provided with no lifebelt, and left to the devices of a faith in common sense, talent and proof of both through work. What he might do in the future rarely troubled him. But now the traineeship was coming to an end.

  ‘I have to get a real job in the BBC. It’s the only way I can make films,’ he said to Natasha. They were in their garden, in the shade of the pear tree, late Saturday afternoon, only a few planes, the arrival routes shared more equally over West London during the weekend, the weekend a prime time for being together. His earnestness made her smile, as it always did, and it slightly annoyed him, but his conviction rather disturbed her.

  ‘You write,’ she said, ‘you spend hours writing, here, in the evenings, this morning, tomorrow much of the day.’ And we are together, bound in word and in deed and in our own private world. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘I need a job,’ he said, ‘I have a mortgage to pay.’

  ‘We agreed we would sell the house as soon as one of us said that.’

  ‘We need a wage coming in. One of us has to work. I can make these films for television, don’t you see, as the job I do. It’s not films for the cinema but it’s films all the same. And films that everyone can see if they want to. They can be good. Two of the television directors I know have gone on to make feature films.’

  ‘You told me they weren’t as good as their television films.’ The notion of Joe planning to go even further away alarmed her. ‘And what do you know about feature films?’

  ‘I could learn.’ He smiled at her. ‘It’s a job, Natasha. And to do that I need to be a producer.’ He did not admit the strength of the need for this job, its sudden imperative. This was the world he now so much wanted to be part of, whatever Natasha said or however much he agreed with her.

  She did not pursue it. The day was too good to spoil and besides how could he resist? She knew that he had dreamed of heroes and adventures, of happy love and effortless laughter in the Palace Picture House in Wigton as a boy; at university he had discovered cinema and written about it and made an attempt to copy it and since then his enthusiasm had not abated. And now he had the opportunity to make films ‘that everyone can see if they want to’, he said, meaning back home, meaning back there, for those who thought he had left them behind for something better. How could she, why should she resist him in this? And what would be the use? His fretful, determined, must-succeed urgency was too strong for her.

  And yet his decision to go for the post of producer, to get the key
to the magic kingdom of film-making and to convince her on that warm healing suburban late afternoon with the evening mapped out and the Sunday promising a day of perfect unity, felt like a warning, that the world out there, his world, was beginning to exercise a fateful magnetic pull, away from her.

  Joe sweated out the weeks before the interview for the producer post. He was still a dogsbody. He made tea. He carried props. He was sent on errands at crucial times and so he missed seeing the director for whom he was working set up some of the best shots. He showered the editor with suggestions and learned to live with the punch when they came back rejected. He was keen, he was willing, he was everything they wanted him to be and was unaware that it was not what he did but his energy and passion for the whole notion of the thing that impressed them and even endeared him to them. The breakthrough came when they accepted a suggestion and said he could direct the film. If he got through that, he would be given the job.

  It was a film based on two painters in the North of England. One was a coal miner, whose work he had seen when he was in Newcastle. The directness of the work – men crowded at the pit face, men walking along the cinder track pre-dawn to the early shifts, the lights from the silhouetted pit making the telegraph poles look like crosses on the road to Calvary, men in pubs, work-worn faces, exhausted lungs, but no surrender, laughter like small-arms fire all around the drinking trenches. This work reached back into the past of Joe’s family and though he understood that his reaction was visceral rather than aesthetic the ‘rawness’ and ‘grittiness’ of this subject, as one of the other producers acknowledged, got it through at the programme’s ideas meeting.

  He vaguely sensed that both he and the painter were being patronised, and yet even if he had been keenly aware of it, the imperative was to get an idea accepted. The other subject was a young woman of widely noted beauty, the daughter of a miner from Cumberland, born quite near Joe’s town. She was already a London ‘name’ with the in-crowd, who paused for a while in their pursuit of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art and Action Painting to admire and admit her violent disturbed landscapes, which were of the mountains of the Lake District painted as if under the influence of drugs, illness or nightmares.

  He would intercut the two films, he proposed; the whole would last about twenty minutes. He put aside his writing to work out the shots, the story-board, the style. It would, he decided, and Natasha agreed, be appropriate to employ a different style for each film. He was so unselfconsciously enraptured, Disque Bleu at the ready, the auteur, that Natasha could deny him nothing and this time she did not tease him, even when he fantasised about the cinematic influences he could bring to bear. The miner would be grainy, Italian Realism, De Sica, an overall sense of dark oppression redeemed by bursts of painting, the night lights at the pit head and the telegraph poles become crucifixions.

  The miner’s daughter would be lyrical, something of Renoir, a touch of the fantasy of Truffaut, could there be a hint of Fellini? And yet the photography of the mountains themselves (he would ask the artist to take him to her favourite mountain locations to make drawings, on large white sheets, in thick black charcoal which matched her long jet hair) would be brooding, with a Wuthering Heights feel to it, Bergmanesque, as would the interviews, not so much interviews as big close-up statements, unsmiling, no ingratiation. The choice of music took him hours but in the end he settled for ‘Nimrod’ played by the Grimethorpe Colliery Brass Band for the miner and ‘The Lark Ascending’ for the miner’s daughter. The Miner and the Miner’s Daughter: an uncompromisingly Lawrentian title, he thought. The twenty-minute length was a problem: it could, he thought, be at least three times as long.

  He asked Natasha to join him for the filming in Cumberland. They stayed at a small hotel a few score yards from Bassenthwaite, the most northerly lake. On the last night they had a crew dinner. Jessica, the artist, the guest of honour, stick thin, ate little and drank steadily. Joe, unusually, drank several glasses of red wine and was merry. The film was good. The world was good. The world could get no better. Alex Foster, the cameraman, had saved his skin; the reports back from London on the rushes were encouraging, he was in Cumberland and he was with Natasha. Jessica had contradicted rumour and been cooperative and read passionately two passages from Van Gogh’s diaries which, Joe thought, slotted in like the final piece in a jigsaw. He was twenty-four, he was a film director, he loved Natasha, he loved the crew, he was in a posh hotel, he was amazed that he was him, here, now, walking on a tightrope to the bar for the last round and not yelling or singing, despite the bells of jubilation pealing inside his skull.

  Alex, the cameraman, stayed for a last drink. He had devoted more than usual attention to photographing Jessica, especially in the close-ups. Her wide-boned, taut face, the big dark brown eyes made darker by black mascara, that long crow-black hair, had attracted him strongly and her flirting had stirred anticipation. Though she looked like a chiselled remote beauty, her accent still proudly bore the sound of her Northern childhood and Alex found encouragement in that: earthy.

  Jessica had been warm to Natasha from the moment they met. Joe had told her about Natasha’s painting and Jessica, in her mid-thirties a few years older and key stages further on in her career, took equality and a painterly comradeship so unpatronisingly for granted that Natasha, who had expressed doubts about joining them on the filming, found her doubts dissolve and even seem a little shameful, having prejudged someone to their disadvantage. Nevertheless she had followed only a small percentage of the filming, preferring to find a place of her own in which to sketch, or to read in the old-fashioned, oak-beamed lounge of the small distinguished hotel.

  Joe brought back a double whisky for Alex, a large brandy for Jessica, nothing for Natasha who had merely sipped at her third glass of wine, and for himself a malt whisky, his first, a Glenfiddich recommended by the barman.

  ‘Here’s to Jessica,’ he said, and accepted her offer of a Black Sobranie.

  ‘Happy days,’ said Alex, raising his glass and looking very directly at Jessica, ‘but for somebody like you, I expect every day is happy.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Jessica took such a pull at her brandy that Joe feared she might want more.

  ‘Artists,’ said Alex, shaking his greying head, ‘do what they want to do. Result – happiness.’

  ‘You’re an artist,’ she said, ‘are you happy?’

  ‘I just take the pictures,’ he said, ‘the best that could be said is that it’s a bit of a knack.’

  ‘I disagree,’ she said, drank again and looked at Joe, who looked across at the barman who understood and brought another. ‘Photographers call themselves artists – look at Robert Frank, look at Cartier Bresson. And film cameramen do more than they do. But are you happy? If you are happy you can’t be an artist. All artists have to be unhappy.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Joe. He sipped the elatingly light malt whisky and considered the matter closed.

  ‘It is not rubbish,’ said Jessica in a level tone recognised as anger by Natasha.

  ‘OK. We’re all unhappy now and then. But to say an artist has to be unhappy, how can you generalise?’

  ‘Disturbed might be better,’ said Jessica, finishing the brandy as the next arrived on the table, ‘or depressed, flawed in some way, or wounded. Or all of them together, most likely. And the greater the flaws and the deeper the wounds the better the artist. Look at Van Gogh. Look at Kafka. Look at John Clare. Look at Nijinsky. Cheers.’

  Natasha saw that Joe was drunk. She saw also a stubborn look about him now, a look, she feared, which indicated the clouding of reason through the poison of alcohol.

  ‘Look at Jane Austen,’ he said. ‘Look at Henry Fielding. Look at Picasso if you want. And nobody said Shakespeare was “wounded” or “flawed” or “depressed”. He just got on with it.’

  ‘We know nothing about the private lives, the real lives of those people,’ Jessica said, sitting bolt upright on her chair. She looks like a witch, Alex thought, a beautiful wic
ked witch. ‘Whenever we do find out anything about them we always discover that they have been traumatised.’

  ‘Not all.’ Joe sipped again: it went down so sweetly. ‘Not all.’

  ‘All. All who are any good.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Natasha sought a neutral exit. She rather agreed with Jessica, but Joe was already becoming flustered.

  ‘She agrees with me,’ said Jessica and gave Natasha a loving smile. ‘But she doesn’t want to say so.’

  Joe smiled at what he saw as flattery.

  ‘Natasha always says what she thinks,’ he said.

  ‘I think,’ said Natasha, as truthfully as she could, ‘that the roots of all creativity are so tangled and dark that any attempt to identify them, using a single method, is bound to be unsatisfactory.’

  ‘There you are,’ said Joe.

  ‘She agrees with me,’ said Jessica.

  ‘Couldn’t both of you be right?’ Alex turned to the bar and pointed to his empty whisky glass and also to Joe’s much diminished malt.

  ‘You absolutely know I’m right, though,’ Jessica said, ‘don’t you, Natasha?’

  ‘Look,’ said Joe, with only a slight slur, ‘you are absolutely not right. Not absolutely right. What about cathedrals? They’re the best art. Or those Egyptian statues. Whoever was depressed building a cathedral or a sphinx unless he was a poor sod of a slave? Then he was just unhappy with life, full stop. Because he was a slave. Not because he was an artist, which he was. It was being an artist that kept him going most likely, although he wouldn’t be allowed to think of himself as an artist, not in those days, poor sod. And was the man in the Lascaux Caves traumatised? That’s the question. Was he?’