Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ said Jessica, enjoying Joe’s flailing.

  ‘Tripe. Anyway. Who knows? And who cares? I think his cave drawings are better than Picasso’s. Picasso probably nicked them. You all do.’

  ‘Artists?’

  ‘Yes. Look how they robbed Africa. Modigliani. A man in Paris showed me the evidence years ago.’ Natasha was puzzled at the surly tone of personal resentment.

  ‘I bet you think women should know their place as well.’

  ‘What place? What’s women got to do with it? I like women.’

  ‘No you don’t. Not strong women. Not women who argue back.’

  ‘What do you know? Anyway, what’s it got to do with art? You just jump about.’

  Jessica applauded. ‘Come to Cumberland to see the world in a nutshell!’

  ‘Why not? That’s what you do, isn’t it? Paint these hills to be all hills and all moods and all everything.’ He reached out for his second malt and Natasha forced herself not to warn him off it. ‘A grain of sand, Jessica,’ he waved the malt whisky, ‘remember that we see the world in a grain of sand.’

  ‘Blake was a depressive,’ she said. ‘He was seriously unhappy.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake! Was Turner, who is miles better than Blake, was Turner depressive?’

  ‘We don’t know enough.’

  ‘That’s always your cop-out.’ Joe brooded for a few moments but inside the muddied stirrings of his mind the moments seemed an age of contemplation. ‘The trouble is you can say what you like because nobody knows and all I’m saying is that the opposite of what you say is just as true like most so-called famous generalisations: the opposite is always just as true.’

  ‘You’re unhappy but you won’t admit it,’ said Jessica, whose slender body was fortified and steadied, it seemed at this stage, by alcohol. She swept back the second brandy.

  ‘Beddy byes?’ said Alex, his hopes of a conquest deflated.

  ‘You are very, very unhappy,’ said Jessica and she held his eyes in her gaze as intensely as a hypnotist. ‘And until you admit it you’ll write nothing any good.’

  ‘Admit what?’

  The bravado in his tone alerted Natasha.

  ‘Admit it,’ said Jessica sotto voce. ‘We’re twins, Joe. And polar opposites. Admit it.’

  ‘Admit what?’

  This time it was more of a plea and Natasha remembered that her best friend and bridesmaid, Frances, now in America, had spoken of seeing the ‘shadows’ around Joseph and she had dismissed the insight as merely part of Frances’s psychic indulgence. But undoubtedly, now, the shadows were gathering over him. He was losing something of himself. It was unlike anything she had seen in him before.

  ‘Confess the suffering. Admit the pain.’ Jessica beat her hands on the arm of the chair.

  Natasha saw a face of Joseph which was new to her. It had loosened. There was some fear in it and an unmistakable violence. Even his voice had changed, thicker toned, coarser.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ he said, picking out the monosyllable with great care. ‘I mean – it’s not true.’

  But as he spoke particles of fracturing memories swirled through his mind and he was infested again by the distress of adolescent years when he was imprisoned in panic, distraught, when his consciousness drifted uncontrollably away from his body and took away the life of him, when he saw a spot of light which was him, his soul, his being, hover above him, threatening to leave him for dead.

  He thought that had gone for good. Even now it was impossible for him fully to admit to himself, let alone articulate to anyone else, what had been a severe depression, a breakdown, which for almost two years had made him febrile, afraid of solitude, afraid of cracking into a howl of desperation, helplessly isolated in that small town just a few miles away. But how could he call out? Be such a baby. Be such a coward. And who would listen or understand? Time, the shedding of skins through growing adolescent strengths, work. Rachel and now Natasha had cauterised that, he thought, he believed, he needed to believe.

  He looked at Natasha, puzzled, holding on, breathing in shallow gasps, mouth slackening: he looked at Natasha for faith.

  ‘I can see . . .’

  ‘No!’ Natasha held up her hand to Jessica and pushed it towards her as if she were physically warding off a curse. ‘No!’ They held each other’s look.

  Suddenly Jessica relaxed. A sweet and gentle smile transformed her face to innocence. She blew Natasha a kiss. ‘Come to my room,’ she said to Alex. ‘Bring brandy.’

  And with another blown kiss to Natasha and a triumphant look at the downcast lolling head of Joe, she left them, quickly followed by a greatly confused Alex bearing brandy.

  The barman came across with a large glass of water. Natasha nodded her thanks and indicated he should retreat. She waited for Joseph to look up. She knew something now that she had not previously known about him. She knew the fear that was all but suffocating him. When he did look up, so helpless, so ashamed, she could have wept. This was another Joseph, this was a different man, stripped bare.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ‘In the first years, Kew Gardens was very good for us. Once your mother (as I came to think at tremendous expense of willpower) had overcome or repressed the fears triggered by the sound of the braking, descending aeroplanes, she found a mooring safe until the waters rose to a flood. She seemed happier for a longer period, her friends would say, than at any time in her life. The darkness was still in her but because I was away much of the day and because, I now realise, she saved up or at least waited for my return, to talk, to be together, to express all that spirit and vivacity that was hers, I did not see much of the darkness and when it revealed itself as fatigue or a clinging cold or a lustreless depression, I was always confident I could help her through it. I revelled in being able to help her, acting not as the flawed and disturbed man I knew myself to be but as someone whole, strong, further strengthened by helping one who was weaker. And I loved her so much.

  ‘I remember getting off the tube at Kew Gardens and stepping out to get home, longing to put the key into the door to hear her voice and see her walk towards me and me to her, that small hall made a trysting place night after night. We continued to dwell, on one level, in an atmosphere of idealism which, I now think, was not only unsustainable but carried the seeds of destruction within it; for any falling away came to seem to be a fundamental failing of the marriage. Yet one of the most powerful attractions between us was that the marriage allowed and encouraged this idealism, that was at its core, for her always and for me equally in the early years. And it was so good: it was so fine, our attempt to find and capture the best of life.

  ‘We continued to read out passages of our books to each other. We were austere and high-minded in our artistic tastes and judgements to an extent that to outsiders might have hit caricature and been sneered at but to us was the only way to live. Our judgements on events, works, people, were unforgiving and although we disagreed often enough we were together inside our own bubble of exhilarated certainties which, again to outsiders, could have seemed arrogant and foolish but to us were goals to be pursued, truths to be grasped, the world as we found it to be thought through. In this she led.

  ‘There were other levels. Of course. There were two people boxed in together playing Blind Man’s Bluff, bumping into the furniture of our old lives, grappling with the stranger who was often more evident than the lover. There were two uprooted exiles. I wanted her to remain my ideal, older, wiser, more stern, richer in history and character: she, I think, wanted me to become her project, younger, apparently malleable, innocent, responsive to guidance. I could make her laugh, both at me and with me. She could always make me smile in admiration.

  ‘Was our high-mindedness merely overreaching conceit? Did it become hubris? It was serious, believe me; it felt real. But maybe it was a fond falseness, tempting nemesis, too long sealed off, waiting to be exposed and crumble in the light.

  ‘We were convinced that readi
ng great literature would lead us to great thoughts and teach us how to write great works ourselves; we, or rather Natasha, had that capacity of the refined intellectual to find in the most mundane exchange a key which would turn it into an abstract discussion. That was what mattered. We enjoyed adequate means and on that basis were mutually unworldly, not contemptuous of but uninterested in a life of getting and spending.’

  ‘It really was like that,’ he told their daughter, knowing very well that overemphasis could be counter-productive, but wanting to make sure she knew at least how much it meant to him to tell her.

  ‘At that time we seemed to spin around each other closer and closer in perfect gravity.’

  Julia had said on her first visit to Natasha, ‘London suburbs are all right for children – they know nothing else – both Matthew and I grew up in a London suburb. But for adults? I think not.’ Natasha was pleased as the months went by to discover that her experience contradicted Julia’s pronouncement. Perhaps she was reliving a missed part of her childhood. Perhaps, she thought, we all have to spend part of our adult lives filling in the unexperienced but necessary parts of our childhood in order to make us fit for present purpose. There was a feeling of tolerance and kindness in the Kew suburb and something of a child’s dream landscape in the exotic amplitude of the Gardens. She drifted through them in the early months again and again, soothed by the fantasies of juxtapositions and lulled into a waking sleep by the eternal flow of the Thames.

  She made three women friends, none of whom had an untroubled past, all of whom were in varying stages of quiet retreat, holding on, quick to appreciate Natasha as a soul mate, carefully coming to trust and love her and see that despite her high style, she too had lacunae, forbidden places, had seen an abyss. Through these women a network began to grow. Joe brought a couple of the fabled television people into play, and a neighbouring older sculptor and his wife, a potter, became friendly. The immediate neighbours invited them round for drinks. It was good that they arrived in Kew in a warm spring and set up house in a decent summer when people could move around for tea or more occasionally a drink in gardens which had once been orchards and sit under the fruit trees as the fruit began to move from green to ripeness.

  Natasha did watercolours for a while and Joe suggested he ask the local bookshop if he would let her have an exhibition there, but she was not at all enthusiastic. It would, she thought, be too intrusive of her in this community which, she hoped, would eventually become hers. There needed to be caution. Any sort of local prominence would set her apart. And besides, she wanted to write, this had always been her first love, she told him.

  She started for the first time to write fiction and put her poetry aside. The time needed to attend to it and the inevitable sinking into herself in order to find the images to meet the sound and the sense she wanted took her on her first constructive journey towards the remote radiation, the fission of her past. She could sit alone at the kitchen table half the day and not write a word and yet feel that the life of the day had been unwasted. She decided to write in English.

  To some observers when she came out to shop in the parade or sit and drink a coffee, generally alone, outside the station buffet which opened onto the parade, or when she drifted towards the Gardens and the river, she seemed abstracted, aloof, rather like the black swans, sometimes undrawn by the custom of the small polite passing smile, nerveuse, well skilled at concealing the pressures within, ethereal even, but someone looked out for, a remarked-on, complex figure in the easy English suburban landscape.

  David had suggested they meet ‘just the two of us’ before dinner, ‘any old pub will do very nicely, pubs have been a conspicuous gap in my life recently’. Joe fussed for a while and then settled for a pub on Kew Green beyond the Georgian church, beyond the picture-postcard cricket pitch. It was still warm enough to take their drinks outside on a deck overlooking the river.

  ‘Long time no see,’ said David, hitting the first word with mocking emphasis. He raised his gin drowned in tonic, took a small sip and enveloped Joe in an intense gaze of greeting. He had led them to the edge of the deck. There was only one other table occupied and that some distance away. He accepted Joe’s offer of a cigarette.

  ‘I’m glad you’re drinking beer,’ he said.

  ‘I’m only doing it to fit your stereotyping.’

  ‘Not a bad way to disguise oneself,’ said David, ‘though not an option for me, I’m afraid. Not in England.’

  ‘No absinthe?’

  ‘Now, now.’ He looked intently at Joe, to Joe’s flattered embarrassment. ‘Rather strained. Be careful. You don’t have to do everything at once. Natasha will tell you that. Excited with life. Life good?’

  ‘Life good. You?’

  ‘Agony, but one soldiers on.’ He puffed on his cigarette as if he wished he did not really have to smoke. ‘Africa is every bit as marvellous as I knew it would be. The people there must be the most charming and luckless in the world. But all one can see in the future are disasters and corruption and rip-offs by Western colonists in new capitalist clothing. It will get much worse. Everyone says that. Everyone who knows. Until the Africans take it in their own hands. And one is helpless. It will take generations.’

  ‘Have you been to South Africa?’

  ‘Inspirational. The anti-apartheid movement is so noble, Joe, it makes you almost proud to be human except that apartheid itself is so despicable it makes you ashamed to be human. I think a lot depends on what’s happening in America with the Freedom Movement and Martin Luther King. If he can change America then it will be another shot that will ring around the world. The days of apartheid will be numbered. You ought to be there, Joe, it would open you up.’ He smiled, that quick, wide Mephistophelean smile.

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘Oh yes. But do you really think so? No. So let me not be tedious about it. Your turn.’

  Joe delivered his update as quickly as he could, anxious to ask David more about Africa.

  ‘And the writing?’

  ‘I sent off a novel, to Nelson and Chapel. The Metropolitan Line.’

  ‘A distinguished publisher. A perfectly acceptable title. And?’

  ‘After six weeks,’ Joe had told this to no one but Natasha, ‘it came back with a nice enough letter. Plot too thin, this good, that OK, the other not so good, politics too obvious and an intrusion, cannot publish it as it stands, if you want to discuss further please contact.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No. He was right. It was an effort not a novel. I’ve started another.’

  ‘Set in the North.’

  ‘Wait and, I hope, see.’

  ‘I can “see” already. Ju-ju. I saw your little film on the two Northern painters. Quite good, I thought. I could have done without the arty bits, the Bergman and Renoir references and such. I rather prefer cinema verité, but this was made with love and well crafted.’

  ‘That was the cameraman. And the film editor. And the programme editor. He polished up the rough cut.’

  ‘Never mind. I saw you in it throughout and it had your name on it at the end. That will do. The overture has been played. The programme’s editor is Ross McCulloch, isn’t it? He’s rather famous. Was it he who gave you your job?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s a bouquet in itself.’

  ‘It was only because I told him I didn’t want to work in television, I preferred radio, but the traineeship dictated I had to do some television and I said I would only do an arts programme. It made him laugh.’

  ‘Always a good ploy: laughter puts people off their guard. The Foreign Office ought to run courses in it.’

  ‘He lives near here. He has a big house on the river.’

  ‘I believe I met him once, years ago, at the Partons’. Do you know them? They have a truly astonishing collection of African art. Henry Moore was there. Who else do you see? Who have you met on your metropolitan line?’

  Joe was only too pleased to answer and in
passing to boast. He told David about Peter Mills, the older trainee, former President of the Oxford Union, and hell bent on a political career; of Edward, a poet, who had also overlapped at Oxford, now running a poetry magazine on the radio; Arthur, again from Oxford, already a staged playwright; Anthony, Oxford yet again, who was surely destined either to storm the West End theatre or just as surely become the rising new British director in Hollywood, and . . .

  ‘Let me interrupt,’ said David. ‘I presume there are one or two more from Oxford and others from other universities, all met through the media network?’ Joe nodded. ‘It’s what I have christened “generational kinship”,’ David continued. ‘I’m rather pleased with the phrase. You are attracted to each other not through blood or class or even those old school ties but through talent and attitude. These people and others like them will stay with you now for the duration. You knew none of these people when you were at Oxford – not that it matters but I knew all of them – but what is important is that this new medium is bringing about a sort of cadre with connections and recognitions and mutual similarities very like the more traditional tribes. What is exciting is that it has suddenly gained a critical mass, like the old aristocracy, the real old aristocracy, though of course not as significant, yet. Fascinating! And, Joe, there you are, caught up in it, and all through no fault of your own!’

  ‘Of yours.’

  ‘Very likely. How gratifying to have one’s little theories proved. One can understand why Einstein always had a smile on his face. We must go now. Natasha will think us rude.’

  ‘She’s quite . . .’

  ‘Not quite, very, good mannered. Which is one, only one, of the reasons I adore her. Quick, quick! How far?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes if we step on the gas.’

  ‘That far! I suppose the exercise will do me no lasting harm.’ He put down his scarcely touched drink. ‘It’s so good to see you, Joe.’