by Melvyn Bragg
She began, in her search for safety, to turn loneliness into a sort of contentment. She needed a distance. There were nights in summer in the evening when they were in the West End and the humidity was too uncomfortable for her, the crowds too pushy, the air too fetid, the meaning of the noise too scrambled, when she would look at him and see him as an animal in the metropolitan jungle, open to it, charged by it, prowling the pavements like a forest floor, and in those moments she would wonder who he really was.
It went beyond London. He became infatuated, as Natasha saw it, with a boxer called Cassius Clay and in telephone calls to his father they would become hyperbolic about his qualities, using words, Natasha thought, that ought to be reserved for serious matters. He became friends with an Irish poet and novelist, a Proustian who told Natasha he envied her the French. His shy but secure confidence in the quality of his work from which he could quote was more mysterious to the fugitive, insecure Joe than the tomb of Tutankhamen. Joe admired the work and the man in equal measure. He taught in a school in Shepherd’s Bush, near the television studios, and they drank together in the local pubs or spent the occasional Saturday afternoon at a football match. Joe would bring back to Natasha the man’s sayings on writers old and new and judgements to which he submitted with a deference which annoyed her.
There seemed no end to his interests. The sex scandals set in Cliveden and the upper-class exploitation of call girls intrigued him, the struggles of the British Labour Party excited him, the glamour and tragedy of Kennedy’s America and the fight of the Freedom Riders absorbed him. To Natasha’s dismay he found a capitalist aesthetic in James Bond after he had seen From Russia with Love and when he read A Clockwork Orange, which she thought arid, he was, at least for a time, convinced it proved that inside the bloom of London the worm was devouring the bud.
His protean curiosity or, as she sometimes thought, his itch-greed for everything, impressed, exasperated and depressed her by turns but there was always the redemption. He would come back home and moments after he had delivered the news of the day, like a messenger in a Greek drama, it would be erased and the time would be theirs as it had been from the beginning. Or on Saturday morning he would go, with Natasha, but more often and with her permission on his own, and wander through the Gardens, out onto the towpath, up to Richmond and back along the Thames to return as cleansed, as Natasha saw it, as if he had been through the several rooms of the bath houses of Rome. They would have lunch, wash up together, sit around, read, write, talk and prepare to go out, or see their friends in Kew, which is what they did at weekends. If they were going to a party he would buy a bottle of Blue Nun at the off-licence next to the station. They would swap notes on the way back and on Sundays they would write and walk together beside the river, his arm slung around her shoulders.
The question came from such a distance and was so matter-of-fact that Natasha thought she might have imagined it. They were in bed, the curtains drawn back, the late summer night warm, the last aeroplanes homing across the sky, the last cigarette, the last moments before sleep. They had made love and lay naked in the heat under a single sheet, pillows propped, bodies touching, a time when they intermingled on the slide into sleep and wanted to stretch each minute to catch every last drop of this day. So she did not reply.
Nor did he, for some minutes, repeat the question. It had not been calculated. It came casually to his lips. It was innocent, a question out of Eden, natural, he might have said, and, once formulated, inevitable. Nor could it be withdrawn once released. It was the genie out of the bottle, it was the next hill that had to be climbed, the road they had to take. But he left the silence alone. It was good to lie quietly in the dark after making love. It was good to realise it was good. It was only when he had stubbed out his cigarette and turned on his side to sleep that he said again, ‘Why don’t we have a child?’
She had no idea how to reply. In the art college, to have a child, if considered at all, was a way of declaring that your ideals and ambitions had been put aside, permanently most likely. The notion of ‘starting a family’ was not on the agenda. It featured in none of the possible female scenarios for a future after the art college. The assumption was that a child would be the woman’s total responsibility; so many examples of women artists proved that, and unless the life were immensely well protected or the mother intolerably selfish, the child would surely claim all the effort, focus and energy that belonged to the work.
More than that, for Natasha, there was an intimation of doom compounded of her knowledge of her mother’s experience and of her need to seize this changing time with Joseph to stabilise herself. There was also a deep and tender regret that without, as she guessed, thinking much about it, Joseph wanted to bring to an end the life the two of them led. He wanted to close the chapter on their time of good fortune, a time that had turned both of them, in their different ways, she thought, to the sun, to a recognition of what life could give to them at their best. That would go. It might be replaced by better, but this miracle of respite and renewal, of just the two of them, would be over. So casually asked; and he did not wait for an answer. Soon she heard the deep steady breath of his sleep.
When they talked about it later she could not accept this mixture of casualness and persistence. There was a time in any marriage to have a child, he seemed to think; and now that they were settled in their own house, and with his regular job, the time had arrived. Was that all?
When she was alone, Joseph at work, back again on the routine of phoning her in the middle of the day but leaving her with reliable stretches of solitude, she tried hard to imagine life with a child. But the pictures she could summon up were troubling. These were days of unrest. She walked through the Gardens, under the Ruined Arch, towards the Pagoda, across to the lake to seek out the black swans, as if seeking for an answer, to rove among the redwoods, as if their ancient ancestry would bring her wisdom. She visited and revisited all her favourite places, as if it was here, in the cultivation of some of the extremes of nature, that a resolution would be offered to her.
Joseph did not pursue her. He did not make her feel that there was a deadline. Now almost thirty she went along with the assumptions of the day that her best child-bearing time was behind her and future uncertainty was already in view. But he did not need to stalk her. The idea itself did that.
Kew Gardens had in these three years wrapped around her until at last she felt that she was home. She loved to cross the river on the way back from London. Then she was safe. She loved the circumscribed unchanging gentle shopping parade, the silent ripple of the Thames which curled around and cradled the suburb, the trace of orchards and the comfort of sufficient means. Her three new friends had children and when she confessed that she and Joseph were considering this, all three smiled, all three warned her of the storms of change which would transform her life, of the tiredness and the depression. But she saw the look in the eyes, the expression on the faces of all three when a child was scooped up. They had taken that path and seemed to say, look before you leap, but leap you will.
But there was dryness in the throat and the impossibility of knowing what would happen to Joseph, to herself, to what had been . . . Did you have to have children? she wondered. It seemed unnatural to ask the question, even subversive. She realised it could be a question that Joseph would not be able to accept. In this he was still on the rails of his past. He saw it as an essential stage in the proper progression of their married life.
But did you have to? What greater power decreed it, now, in a world where many thought there were too many children, a civilisation, she thought, too preoccupied for children, her new country, one in which many people she had known seemed interested in divesting themselves as soon as possible of the presence of and the responsibility for the children they had. These points were made in a tentative way in the sentences they would exchange from time to time, Joseph waiting, Natasha like a wild horse on the end of a long rope, gradually tiring, gradually slowing down, comi
ng closer and closer to his unmoving centre.
So they began to make love for a child. Natasha put away bad thoughts. These were urgent couplings. Somehow their sexual passion for each other became wholly uninhibited with the possibility of a child growing in the womb. The time came when Natasha conceived and, Joe thought, everything was as it should be.
Isabel arrived a week after the news reached France. Joe had expected she would stay at a hotel but she declared herself very happy to lodge at the house which she praised save for the bathroom which she deplored and the kitchen which she thought wholly inadequate. The Spartan spare room was judged to be perfectly good, even chic. The gardens front and back drew unexpectedly favourable comments and the melange of furniture, pictures, books and well-spotted junk was described as quite suitable. The parade was agreeably English but she failed to understand why there were no real cafés. The Botanical Gardens were allowed to be ‘superb’ and she bought several postcards. She took her time: days passed by in lovely aimless gossip with Natasha, who proved to be, Isabel reported to Alain, a surprisingly proud guide to the glories of the suburb and Isabel equally surprisingly declared herself to be impressed by the way the English did things in their suburbs.
Eventually, as Natasha had anticipated, the time came to engage. Although it was a warm summer’s day, Isabel preferred to be inside, the french windows open, onto the lush, rather unkempt garden. She was dressed for St Tropez, Natasha thought; the high silk pastel-coloured neck scarf, the beautifully cut cream silk blouse, the equally well-cut trousers, the sandals revealing toenails scrupulously painted to match her fingernails and her hair given some attention that morning (‘She was not altogether terrible’) at English hands in Richmond. Natasha was dressed rather floppily in a loose summer frock, boldly striped, green and white. Both women smoked. The intense silence indicated that the moment had come.
‘You look well, my sweet,’ said Isabel. ‘You are not much disturbed by the event, are you? Alain told me that. He said the first few weeks were strange but not so serious.’
‘Serious yes,’ said Natasha, and laughed. ‘Not strange. What is strange,’ it was only to Isabel she could confess this, ‘is that at times I feel truly excited. I walk with care, guarding the child.’
‘And other times?’
‘There are other times for everyone,’ Natasha said and did not confess those times when it seemed an unyielding undercurrent would drag her away, into a predatory darkness.
‘You look so very like your mother now, more than ever. When I lost your mother I lost part of my heart. It’s true. I don’t exaggerate. She was my special friend and my idol.’
‘I wish,’ said Natasha, in a measured tone, ‘I so much wish I had known her.’
‘Me too, my sweet.’ Isabel drew heavily on the cigarette. ‘Oh yes, Natasha: me too.’
Isabel did not know whether she had the right to say what she thought most needed to be said. She had the courage, but courage was easy, she had told Alain. All you had to do was to stop thinking. Did she have the right to tell Natasha everything about her own birth and about her mother’s reaction to the pregnancy, at the time and her life afterwards? Did she have the responsibility? The pause was marked: Natasha felt a shrouding of apprehension.
‘It will make your life difficult, this child,’ said Isabel. ‘Was it an accident?’
‘No.’
‘But it was Joseph who insisted.’
‘Yes . . . but I agreed. He says it will make our life richer.’
‘He adores you. You adore him. So to refuse him was impossible. What else could you do?’
‘Say no.’
‘It’s not too late for that.’ Isabel looked and then looked away and breathed out a stream of smoke which went unwaveringly into the shafts of sunshine from the garden, into the silence.
‘You are a Catholic, Isabel.’
‘I am. And I am a good Catholic. But you are not.’ She paused. ‘So there we are.’
Natasha felt dizzy. She waited for more.
‘What are you saying?’
‘I have said it, Natasha. And I have said it because it is you I must protect. Joseph is good but young: your friends are good but they know nothing about you. You know what I am saying.’
Natasha was too ashamed to confess that it had floated across her mind. Not uncommon, her doctor had said, not at all especially in the first weeks. You have been invaded, he said, and you want to regain your physical integrity: that is one of the inevitable reactions. His words had helped as had a conversation with one of her Kew friends which had confirmed what he said. But Isabel!
‘Is that what you came to say?’
‘Partly.’
Natasha felt the coolness turn to a feeling of dread.
Isabel lit a fresh cigarette.
‘But I said no more. I felt I had not the right to continue, Alain,’ Isabel said, when she returned home. He went across to hold her as she began to sob, the stiff, awkward movements of the shoulders of one who so very rarely cried, whose stoicism was her character. ‘How could I tell her when she was there in this little English house, so proud of her life and looking so well, Alain, more beautiful as pregnant women can be, how could I risk the destruction of that peace she said she had found in that love for Joseph?’
‘It is better left alone,’ he said. ‘I have always said to you, let the past rest in peace.’
‘But it is her past, Alain, and what if it returns to hurt her?’
‘She has friends,’ said Alain, holding her gently, knowing that there were so many layers, of Natasha’s mother, of Natasha’s childhood, of Natasha and Isabel and of Isabel’s own thwarted longing for a child of their own. ‘It is not your responsibility,’ he said, ‘if to anybody, that falls on Louis.’
‘But he will do nothing.’
‘Well then,’ said Alain, ‘the Good Lord was with you, my sweetest Isabel, because doing nothing is sometimes the best course of all and I am proud that you did nothing and that you left Natasha secure.’ He took her slender fingers and held them to his cheek.
‘You will forgive me,’ said Isabel as they waited for the taxi.
‘With you there can never be anything to forgive,’ said Natasha. ‘I understand why you tested me. Sometimes you have to be tested.’
‘You are very precious to me, Natasha.’
‘As you to me.’
‘Why don’t you come to live in France? Near by. In the sun. A writer is a gypsy, no?’
‘Maybe. Some day, I hope. That would be good.’
Natasha went with her to the airport and stood at the departure gate for some time after Isabel had disappeared to catch her flight home.
‘She’s so beautiful!’ Ellen’s eyes were almost wild, tear-washed, smile-deepened, full of wonder. She had scarcely been able to contain herself on the journey back home. Sam had to be fully informed.
‘She’s just the loveliest baby! She looks like a little girl already, not, you know, squashed up. And Natasha is so nice with her. You can see it. Joe complains of being tired more than she does! The birth wasn’t easy, two days, but you would think it was Joe who had been through it! Oh, Sam! She’s just wonderful!’
Ellen’s a girl again, Sam thought, she’s the girl I courted, she’s the young woman I married, she’s the woman who flung herself into my arms when I came back from the war.
‘I want to go back right away. I would have stayed on but an aunt of hers was on the way from France. But I will go back as soon as I can.’
Sam thought she was going to dance around the kitchen. She was transformed.
‘And I decided. We have to be nearer. Not London. I couldn’t tolerate living in London. But somewhere nearer. They are so far away, Sam, and so expensive to get to. You have to get somewhere nearer to them.’
‘Ellen! You? Leave Wigton?’
‘But, Sam,’ she burst out in tears of happiness and relief and pride, ‘Sam – they’re our family. She’s our family!’
�
�So here we are,’ said Alain, reading once again from Natasha’s letter, ‘“She is like a rosebud. Voilà! I cannot believe she is with us. I cannot believe I have done this.” You see! A triumph.’
‘I will go again in two or three months.’
‘You were right in what you did not say, Isabel. You were right to take the opportunity to say nothing.’
PART THREE
LONDON CALLING
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
‘And always there is the fear that I do not do her justice,’ he wrote, ‘and always there is the suspicion that I take the easy way and merely condemn Joe.’ There were only two other tables occupied in the glass front area of the café. He thought, but could not be certain, that he and Natasha had come here on their first visit to Paris. He could spread himself. The coffee and cognac for old times’ sake; the pen and pad; and on the other side of the glass, thronging the pavement on this Holy Thursday where once there would have been pilgrims, there were now tourists, their secular descendants, guide books for prayer books, souvenirs for relics, worship unbroken. He was waiting for their daughter. She wanted to take him to Vespers in Notre Dame. She had lived in Paris in a retreat for a month. Now it was over. He waited for her with something akin to the anticipation with which he had waited many years ago for her mother.
‘She is still here,’ he wrote, ‘in 2005, more than forty years on from that first visit. Sometimes I feel the city cobwebbed in our memories. I look for the spot where we waltzed along the banks of the Seine and I sang “Under the Bridges of Paris”: it doesn’t matter that I can’t find the precise spot, it is the looking for it. I write this in a café in Rue des Ecoles next to the Sorbonne, and can see your mother arriving, as you will soon arrive, looking so like her now. You have matured into her, even similar gestures, how could you have picked them up so young? Your eyes lit with an inner delight or mischief, that rather long, rather serious face gentled into warmth by the flickering smile, the grace of you, of her, in Paris, in which we did not come to live . . . Should I have made that happen for her, for you, for me? I sit and wait for you and write in a café like a philosophical Frenchman, and try again to find the truth of it for you.
