by Melvyn Bragg
‘And you,’ said Joe, with equal warmth.
‘Well, that’s all right, then. Onward!’
David had brought them James Baldwin’s Another Country – ‘which I cannot recommend highly enough. He writes beautifully and what he says is very important.’ Joe felt challenged. ‘A friend of mine is trying to arrange for us to meet when I go back through Paris.’
‘Paris,’ said Natasha.
‘Joe’s very clever to hide you both away in Kew Gardens,’ said David, ‘this is where exotic flora grow best, after all.’
In Oxford there had been one favoured cinema. In London there were many and they could ride the tube to the urban villages of Hampstead, Chelsea and Kensington and right into the dazzle of options in the West End. Their London was first mapped by its cinemas. As the masterpieces from Europe continued to roll in, idols discovered at Oxford and the directors or auteurs made up what was later seen as a golden age – Truffaut and Polanski vied with new films from Resnais, De Sica, Antonioni, Fellini, Bunuel, Renoir and Bergman.
It was at this time that Joe began to appreciate qualities of those shoals of American and English films he had in his youth seen so intensely, carelessly, the ‘flicks’, and absorbed unselfconsciously. Was he perhaps the more directly affected because of that? He discussed this with Natasha. Perhaps unconscious education was the deepest, the purest. She too believed that primary and self-found images penetrated more strongly when there was no analytical barrier, nothing but the acceptance of pure sensations, a direct feed to the unconscious. Joe saw some truth in that although he thought that in her case exactly the opposite obtained. And critical selection had to come in somewhere. But he recognised that for example the most fruitful factor in what might be called his musical education and certainly his love of music was not the hours spent under the unforgiving tutelage of Miss Snaith, the piano teacher, nor even his attempts at Oxford and since to try to assess the classics. It was those hours, daily, yearly, spent singing in various choirs as a boy, singing authentic plainsong and nineteenth-century anthems, singing psalms and hymns often of haunting melody, but basically just singing, letting the music directly take over his mind without filter and be returned to the air umoderated by anything but a basic, unthinking mechanical skill.
A key to the bounty of their lives in London was the BBC Arts Department’s willingness to provide, on receipt of two modestly priced stubs, a full return on theatre though not cinema tickets. It was, as it would continue to be, Xanadu. In one year what they saw included Uncle Vanya, John Gabriel Borkman, The Father, The Seagull, Six Characters in Search of an Author, St Joan, Othello and Hamlet; they saw new plays by Beckett, Pinter, Orton, Osborne, Arden and Wesker; occasionally they went with new friends and would eat afterwards at the French Club just off St James’s, a small, literary enclosure, aristocratically connected, to which they were introduced by Anthony, the television drama director, and his wife Victoria, a painter who became a friend of Natasha. Then back, a race to the underground and to domestic Kew, inflamed.
On nights in they would set aside time to watch television, and Joe became addicted to the drama, often worked on, directed and written by people he saw around the studios, which added a dimension of privilege to the viewing. Joe saw on the screen a British new wave which portrayed much of the society he had left behind. Natasha built up a picture of Britain whose humour and harshness were new to her; dramas whose anger activated Joseph’s rage, comedies which would wring him dry of a laughter so infectious that she had to join in however foreign it could all still seem. He identified with so much of it!
At that time his undirected chameleon nature intrigued her. As he reached out blindly for his own voice, the powerful voices of others poached his mind again and again. He would come out of Chekhov wanting to be true and lyrical and tragic all at once; he would come out of Beckett wanting to find the bare knuckle of his prose; he would come out of Strindberg blaming himself for being so lily-livered about basic passions – where was Greed? Where was Vengeance? Where were Lust, Envy, Power, the tectonic plates of our nature? He would come out of Ibsen looking around for the Great Moral Issues of the Day. He would come from the realistic drama on television wanting to join that conquering group of committed social dramatists. He would come out of Shakespeare thinking he ought to give up.
Every writer, on stage, in television, film and novels had a seasoning which Joe saw was their key individuality. He knew that all that mattered in the end was to find a way to express individuality, to give your own unique testament, your mind-print, whatever it turned out to be, otherwise what was the point of writing? But how did you seek it? Did you know when you had found it? And If and When you found it, would it be good enough? The novel he was now writing, set in Cumberland, The Kingdom Was Lost, could bring him to a fever of excitement but also to a sickness of anxiety as he wrote and, for the first time, grimly re-wrote, striving to put the sound in his head into words on the paper. He would come to bed late and want to wake her to talk and make love and Natasha knew he needed that.
Natasha seemed to have a much surer inner voice, he thought. There was far less struggle. She had finally decided to take the advice she had given to Joseph and she went back towards her own childhood – not to the roots of it, not to the private pain, skirting that pain, but to the time of the aunts, the breaks in the clouds when they took her up. She wanted to write about Isabel and Alain but they were too dear to her; she feared that she would hurt them by writing about them in the rather mocking way in which she described the provincial unease of her aunts. She laid a melodramatic plot, the preventable and deceitfully reported death of a child and the ending aimed to shock.
She was unlike Joseph who was sometimes all but overcome with agitation to be published. Let it take its time, she thought, let it grow. And she told herself that writing in English helped. It made her think harder. That was good. It gave her a distance from the wholly French and familiar material. Joseph helped her whenever she asked for help. The pride he took in her work never faltered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Joe got the job but, as if to show him that this would make his life tougher and not easier, Ross made him sweat. He was now in the ring equally with the established producers to get his next commission. He was told that Borges was too intractable; that King’s College Choir was too familiar through its Christmas carols; that Graham Sutherland was too obvious and Maria Callas too dangerous. He became desperate and suggested Elvis Presley and the White Takeover of Black Music. This was considered to be outside the programme’s brief. He wanted to suggest the new sound, the city sound of British music, the Beatles, the Stones, but he did not have the nerve. Yet it was a new pulse in the land.
Joe sensed it, like others, like swallows sensing the time to fly south. It made him want to dance. It passed Natasha by. The music did not make her want to dance and Joe discovered, by omission, how much over the last few years he had missed dancing. Yet he could always be persuaded by what she loved. He deferred to her taste almost invariably. When they went back to Paris, she took him to club-cafés around the Sorbonne or in the narrow streets of romantic entrapment on the Left Bank and there they drank wine while the confident heirs of Brassens and Brel, of Piaf and Greco sang their poems accompanied by an acoustic guitar or an accordion. They embraced their audience with effortless ease in the balladeer music and words that were in proud direct descent from the mediaeval troubadours of old independent Provence, now melded to the body of France. Joe was taken over by them.
On his return from their holiday in Paris he suggested a film on French Chanson which was accepted. Natasha was proud of her country’s songs, moved that Joseph should want to make a film about them and excited to spend ten unexpected days in Paris with him and the crew in a hotel in the Rue Jacob. She went to the ‘concerts’ in the cafés but on most of the days she met her friends or made for the Café Flore to write in public like a true Parisienne. Though he was studying she sought out Franç
ois and encouraged him to play truant. He seemed to have lost all the ground made up in London, and she grieved at his wasted expression, the hopelessness in his eyes.
Twice she took him to the filming. Once in the run-down and unsettling area around the site of the Bastille, the second time in the great city market of Les Halles. They went at dawn, heard the broad provincial accents and saw the workmen, the onion soup, the brandy and the raw expressive French hands and faces. Joseph was collecting snippets of conversation, groupings, portraits, assembling, he hoped, a common Frenchness to intercut with one of Brassens’s songs. Natasha could scarcely have been happier. This was a France she could embrace, the true France, she thought, France of the meat and the wine, of bread and earth. Joseph was impressively preoccupied, she thought, fussing but determined to get what he wanted, talking to the crew about every shot, dreaming of Les Enfants du Paradis. François was heartbreakingly happy, taken up by Alex, who let him look through the viewfinder, slap the clapperboard, carry completed rolls of film over to the assistant cameraman and help with the improvised cart which was to enable Joe to do a tracking shot. François was filmed sitting at a table, drinking coffee and brandy like a true worker. He was treated as an adult by these important English film makers. On that chilly morning the boy was as near the fulfilment of his life as he ever was to be and Natasha’s heart ached to see it.
‘We are at our wits’ end,’ said Véronique. She had invited Natasha to lunch at a restaurant near the church of St Germain, on the Boulevard St Germain. It was the sort of place Natasha had been taken to only on special occasions and yet she felt more at ease in its intact art nouveau interior than her stepmother, who pushed her food away hardly touched, impatient to get out a cigarette, nervous of this meeting.
‘I think it is a mistake to ask him to do the baccalaureate yet again,’ said Natasha.
‘What else is there? He said he wants to go into the navy which is absurd, but even if he did, there would be more examinations and François cannot pass examinations. Louis tells me I must deal with it.’ She lifted up her cigarette in a gesture which Natasha interpreted as untypically dismissive of her father. Véronique had never been so intimate.
‘Had he nothing to suggest?’
‘You know your father. If one cannot pass examinations there is nothing to be done.’
‘Why don’t you see if he can join a film company? Something very basic to start with. Something on the technical side, to do with cameras or sound recording or the lights. He would love that.’
‘How can I organise that?’
‘Doesn’t my father know someone?’
‘Not in the cinema. I think he stopped going twenty years ago! Of course he respects what Joseph does. He has always said that Georges Brassens articulates the French language as well as Charles de Gaulle himself.’
‘I don’t think Joseph knows any French film makers.’
‘You and Joseph have done enough. I still think it was too much to give you the responsibility of François when you had just got married. How could I do that?’
‘I was glad to do it . . .’
‘The only suggestion Louis has made – and this was very reluctantly advanced – is that François go to the laboratory in Brittany and help there for some months. They have a little boat to collect specimens. They make experiments . . .’
‘Why not?’
‘What would it lead to?’
‘It might make him happy,’ Natasha said. ‘It would give him time.’
‘He has no more time.’
‘How can you say that?’
‘I don’t like the Brittany idea . . .’
‘She doesn’t like Brittany,’ Natasha said to Joseph as they finished their wine later, in what had become the crew café in the Rue de Seine, ‘because she fears my father has a mistress there.’
‘Crikey!’
‘Why else were we always forbidden to go?’
‘Tons of reasons. I can’t imagine your father . . . with . . . anybody else.’
‘Everybody does it, Joseph.’
‘Everybody?’
‘In Oxford, didn’t you realise? Among the dons.’
‘Do they?’
She liked to shock him.
‘It isn’t too terrible,’ she said.
‘Except if you’re at the receiving end.’
‘It’s common in France. It’s almost compulsory among the elite.’ She smiled.
‘Really?’
‘They say it’s the most sophisticated way to keep a marriage fresh.’
‘How can that be?’
‘I love you looking so bewildered, Joseph.’
Where did that take the argument? She often did that. Cut him off through a mix of flattery and put-down which confused him.
‘Maybe it will work for François,’ said Joe, recovering his equilibrium with difficulty. Her revelation and the authoritative appendices had lodged like a dart, ‘– just being away from home can help to set you up and straighten you out.’
‘Did that happen for you?’
Natasha never looked away when she asked a question. He loved her directness; he was proud of it, it was yet more evidence of her singularity. It could, though, force him to own up when he would much rather have kept silent or fudged it.
‘Not really.’
‘First you had Rachel. By then you had friends and all the Oxford things. Then me.’
‘François will find friends,’ he said in diplomatic ignorance.
‘Will he? I hope so. The easiest way to solve a problem is to think of what you yourself would do – not what the problem person could do. That is what you have done. Never mind. Let’s see if we can get him to Brittany. All they want, all they have wanted for years, is to get him off their hands. I can understand my father and pardon him. Not her. Not his mother.’
She felt a shadow of sadness as they smoked and listened to the fragments of sound drift down the narrow streets; Paris turning out the lights. As she saw it, what she thought of as his surface achievements, the external magnets of his television life, gave him a carapace of character which was ebullient and full of fun and which he could not wait to share with her. Yet, she believed, this was not the real Joseph, not her Joseph, and not as nourishing of their joint life as when they sat in the opposing armchairs in front of the electric fire and read great literature; or discussed and tried to understand Antonioni in the tube on the way back from La Notte; or stared, with contrary reactions, at the mediaeval religious paintings in the National Gallery. It was at these times that she was absolutely convinced that she saw the real Joseph. She saw him as someone from the lower depths reaching up and out for more light, more inner knowledge. This external world of film crews and television deadlines and rushing around for ‘stories’ was not the Joseph she wanted. Nor was it Joseph at his best.
She knew how he saw her. He still shone with love. He also, since the first visit to France, counted her a prize, as someone not won but delivered by fortune. He loved to tell and retell the story of their so amazingly nearly not meeting. He could calculate the probabilities against that meeting in fractions until, he said, they reached infinity. She knew that he could not always contain his surprise at her pedigree and word of it leaked out to one or two of his friends. She forgave him that, but it was a pity. It did not help her. On this night, as they walked down the street towards the River Seine and looked over to l’Ile de la Cité, was she safe enough to let him go away, into his own new arena of activity and ambition? She had to: he would not go far, she thought, and soon he would come to know, once and for all, what she knew, that their lives would be fulfilled only with each other and doing what was most essential to them.
On the embankment they watched the waters of the Seine flow brokenly under the lights, watched in close silence. Natasha looked down onto the river bank itself and remembered how they had danced under the bridges of Paris. Not so long ago.
His audacity and his ambition could exasperate her. He t
ook on a film about a classical conductor. For the rehearsals he was allowed four film cameras which he directed simultaneously through a sound link-up to each of the four cameramen. He worked from a score.
‘What do you know about reading a score?’
‘I learned the piano. I was in choirs.’
‘But this is Mahler; and Stravinsky.’
‘People help. You just rehearse it,’ Joe said, doggedly, not wanting to admit his own growing apprehension. There were an awful lot of lines and an awful lot of notes on those lines.
‘You played the piano as a boy. How can that be enough?’
‘Well,’ said Joe, cutting off her argument before it turned him to jelly, ‘I’m stuck with it now.’
And after the film was transmitted and she praised him, he said, ‘So there!’ and laughed loudly and ringingly and she was lifted into his triumph like a kite by the wind.
She came with him on his raids into the bigger world; Peter rushed them down by train to see the declaration of the result of a crucial marginal by-election which, he prophesied, if it swung Labour’s way, could be the harbinger of a long-awaited election victory. Anthony and Victoria invited them to post-Bloomsbury gatherings of extraordinarily well-mannered and intimately interconnected writers and painters. Edward took them to what he called ‘a good old Soho dump of a pub’ to meet some of the university iconoclasts ripping into the establishment in a new satirical magazine which had been founded in the Oxford of Joe’s time there. James ushered them back to Oxford to hear a lecture by Robert Graves, the newly elected Oxford professor of poetry, whose historical novels Joe had gobbled up at school. They queued for Nureyev and sought out a performance by Ashkenazy and Barenboim and Jacqueline du Pré; and went to what was promised to be a Turning Point production at the Royal Court. Portobello Road on a Saturday afternoon seemed a unique market for someone seeking out cheap yards of battered but once finely bound editions of The Lives of the Poets or Walter Scott or Dickens. And in all this Joe in some way grasped he was blindly following the pulse of a new beat in the land, a new sound, a new promise in the old bulldog blood. It was not Natasha’s city but it beckoned to Joseph. There came a time when she was able to stay at home alone as often as go with him, unwilling to spend or waste the energy on what she sometimes saw as little more than the incidental aspects of life even though they were harvested by Joseph with scything intensity.
