Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘Memory, Imagination and Language, those three, and the greatest of these? Together they make us what we are, perhaps even why we are, but the weak hold we have on them is never so exposed as when we try to write truth. Language, even that used by the best, is always an approximation to that changing, slithering, half-lit, half-understood complex of sensation and experience; grasping water. So many of these arbitrary expressions, perfect in their time, are eroded by time, by over-use, non-use, changed use, multiple use, burned out, quaint, dimmed, become opaque. Yet Language is at least accessible, through its nature. But Imagination? An almighty faculty which can take us back in thought to the beginning of the universe faster than the speed of light, which can lead us into ancient and alien cultures, into the hearts of strangers, into the minds of genius, and into those common sympathies which hold the world together, Imagination is like the ocean Newton saw undiscovered before him as he picked up a few pebbles of knowledge on the beach and which to understand, finally, might be to understand all things.

  ‘But of those three it is Memory, for me, now, reaching out to you, that is the most tormenting. There is no possibility and no point in trying to remember “everything” about Natasha; nor is strict remembering the way of it for me. It is too fragmented, too unreliable, unshaped, a landscape without the definition of final meaning, undermined by shame, veiled by guilt. Your mother has to be fiction and yet she has to be attached to some of my recollections which rise up from the sea bed like monsters, or erupt into an unready mind like volcanoes or are frustratingly near yet ungraspable as they are today in Paris, in this café, with spring aching to be born, but the leaves still furled, hidden in the bough.’

  You materialised quite suddenly.

  ‘You were out of this world,’ she said.

  ‘You’re early.’

  ‘I don’t want us to be late.’ She smiled down on me. Her hair usually fell free and long: for this occasion she had braided it around her head. ‘What were you writing about?’

  ‘Mum. And me. And now you.’

  You giggled. Once I had feared the sound, just a little, it felt too nervous to be good. Now I knew better; it was a ripple from that reservoir of joy you have made for yourself, despite everything, in defiance of everything, challenging everything.

  ‘When can I read it?’

  ‘When it’s done.’

  ‘What if I don’t like it?’

  ‘Then you will be its only reader.’

  She nodded, rather gravely. In the silence our agreement was sealed.

  ‘Did you and Mum go to Notre Dame?’

  ‘Yes. But only once together. She hated it.’

  But you loved it, didn’t you? As I do and as I did so uniquely that Holy Thursday evening with you. You as an adult have found and deeply drunk in a faith I drowned in so happily, blindly as a boy and since have seen fade and drain away. But now and then it revives, sometimes fleetingly, even mockingly like the moon refusing to come out clean from behind the hills of clouds but sometimes plain, bold, as it was at Vespers in Notre Dame with you a few months ago.

  I had never attended Vespers and so I expected it to be like the Anglican sung evensong observed in all the cathedral cities of Britain and executed by pupils from the cathedral choir schools, boys chosen for the beauty of their voices. Recently I had heard at evensong the choirs of Wells Cathedral and of York Minster and on both occasions been taken over by the song of the past and thoughts on the continuity and the mystery of things as those pure voices soared high into the stone ceilings, voices as they had been on these holy sites for centuries, plainsong uninterrupted in celebration and praise of God no matter what the assaults without or within the church, no matter even the indifference which produced a congregation on both those evenings fewer in number than the choir. Vast spaces of the cathedral were empty. Only the gallant few, as I saw them, huddled around the singers, as if for warmth, determined to bear witness.

  By contrast, in Notre Dame even before the service began there was the full tide of a crowd. The area cordoned off for the Vespers congregation filled up steadily and you said we had better take care to find seats, which we did in, for me, the comfort of the back row. But as we waited what I was most aware of, more than the great rose windows or the candlelight which seemed to burnish the darkness, or the surge of the stone like a growth of nature, more than the animal whisper and shuffle of the tourists and non-worshippers in the darker regions of the cathedral, was your expression, which I glimpsed, I hope, without your noticing: stern and intent and enraptured.

  The minister entered in his heavy white robes and his mitre and a junior cleric swung the incense which even reached out to us, about a quarter way up the nave. Then the organ began. I had not expected that. In our cathedrals it is often voices alone but here the great organ suffused the cathedral in sound made sacred by the place itself and I knew as I had done at times gone by that faith could be gained with no words spoken and music could be the voice of God.

  And then she began to sing.

  I had expected a choir. I had thought that the woman who stood alone and apart was about to read a passage from the Bible as, clad in a long blue cassock which looked like silk in the candlelight, she stood before a lectern which bore a book. But it was her book of songs. Her voice was crystal, single against the orchestra of chords from the organ, ringing to the vaults as might be of heaven, and she looked a little like you, more like your mother.

  Soon I abandoned any attempt to translate the words and let the voice and the organ fill me with their sounds whose intention needed no translation. I saw, I believed, standing beside you in your belief, and seeing her sing, ‘seeing’ Natasha, a messenger. I was taken over by the sacred sound, the intimations and revelations which seemed magnetised by this sound. Later I remembered, as an adolescent, standing on a cliff edge in West Cumberland, looking over the sea at a rainstorm far off, knowing it would soon reach the land on which I stood and feed the streams which filled the oceans which fed the rain clouds and that simple circularity, naïf as it might now appear, struck me then, fifty years ago, as a defining insight into the wholeness of life.

  Here, in Notre Dame, beside you, for those moments, if ever in my life I did, I believe that, in my seventh decade, I may have had a similar glimpse into the heart of things. That it was impenetrable and incomprehensible did not matter. There had been a beginning and we were still part of it and it is in us. Wherever you look in the old creation myths there is this assertion, this confidence. And when you look into the new physics of it, what is there but the same? The same Nothing Known which is also the heart of all things: fundamental essential particles as unseen as angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. It was as if I soared, I flew, for those few minutes I was resurrected and so was Natasha and through sensation I understood . . .

  And then the music stopped. Why could it not go on for ever was a childish but, to confess, a true reaction. Why could it not go on for ever?

  I did not tell you any of this then because you had your own thoughts, your own feelings which you did not want to reveal to me. Best at some crucial times not to talk. Silently, we left Notre Dame and came out to an evening calm and free, a darkening sky, the Seine flowing swiftly and I had a sudden sharp desire to eat and drink.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  On some days when Natasha went out wheeling first a pram and then a pushchair she caught a sight of herself in a shop window and wondered who this person was, so sedately pushing the child before her, so clearly one of the wife and child class of Kew Gardens, so irrevocably slotted into the expected pattern.

  It was a club you joined and there was novelty in that for someone who had carved loneliness into a sort of self-sufficiency. But she was strange, this person reflected in the window of the butcher’s shop, she seemed so calm and possessed, above all so complete, with the child, a woman fulfilled, surely? Yet what did it say about the Natasha who had just recently begun to feel confident on her own? Now sh
e was two. Something had been given by her but something had been taken from her. What if the strongest of her had gone into the child, the best of her?

  Her new friends in Kew had prepared her for the tiredness and the treadmill. Like all forewarnings, the reality had wiped the floor with the predictions and only now, more than a year on, was she beginning to recover her body fully, be more than a servant to its ceaseless demands. But they had not prepared her for this sometimes blankness of being. Who was the woman reflected in the big shop window? Was her time of being the individual she wanted to be over just as it had begun? She knew the thought was selfish but it was there and she was not going to duck it. Natasha felt that she had stepped through the glass into a different world. It was as if with and through the child she had set off on another journey entirely and discovered a way of life quite different, even alien to the one she had had, and there was no return. A solitary life had been ended and for ever. And she looked ill, spots on her forehead, pasty skin, saggy body: that was no help.

  But nor had they truly foretold the moments of sweetness, the glimpses of joy, the first words presented to Joseph, the first steps delighted in, the assuming of settled features, the knitting together of a mind, a smile, a gesture, later a question, an action. Natasha could be entranced and quite suddenly thrown high in the air as she witnessed the blind, universal process of growing. She sketched her – there was a period of months when catching the mood of the child in the sketches was her work. It was as if she had to know in every way she could what this child was like. As if her drawn record was essential lest she lose her. Or be lost to her. The intense preoccupation proved to be some counterweight to the downward plunge, sometimes it seemed the freefall of her self-confidence.

  For underneath everything was the drowning fear of not knowing. The birth had brought into her world not only her child but her mother, the mother who had left just after her own birth. How could she let that happen, get that ill, let go, leave me? There was about her own child sometimes a dread reminder of her own childhood. Yet there was hope, too, as if the baby was a messenger from out there bringing her news of what had happened, if only she could decode it.

  Joseph slept lightly now, beginning to be unsettled, as she had once been, by the relentless trail of aeroplanes over their house: so the night feed was something of a relief for him, an excuse to be awake, and it let him feel useful. He could change a nappy as neatly as she could. On weekends he took charge in the mornings and went out to the park, into the Gardens or along the river, leaving Natasha in the empty house to breathe easily and alone for a few hours. When he came home through the week, he went immediately to their daughter and Natasha was only faintly jealous, glad that the love between daughter and father seemed so intense. His love for their daughter gave her a growing conviction that she was stronger, that between them they would always hold him.

  In a year or so, she got back to her novel. Soon it became a refuge. After their daughter had been settled down they would eat supper and then sit for a while in the big battered armchairs either side of the electric fire. Unless there was something they liked on television they would read or, more rarely now, read to each other. They summarised the day, a routine which appealed to Joe at his most organised and was tolerated by an amused Natasha, who saw it as a parody of a bourgeois marriage – a description Joe had at first resented and still felt put down by.

  ‘Ross says we should get an au pair,’ he announced.

  ‘Ross says . . .’ She smiled and put aside her book. ‘Ross says . . .’

  ‘He is my boss.’

  ‘He is your current Pole Star.’

  ‘He’s given me chances.’

  ‘Only because he knows you can take them. It pleases Ross to be a patron. But he wouldn’t do it if it didn’t reflect well on him.’

  ‘That’s unfair.’

  ‘He cannot do it for love, Joseph. There must be a reason. Vanity is more accurate. He is very vain. Don’t bridle, Joseph! It can be attractive, even in a man.’

  ‘You’re so unfair! Ross McCulloch was a war hero, he did all sorts of things before he came to the BBC, he runs the whole Features Department now as well as the Arts Programme, he knows everybody yet he and Margaret ask us over to their house almost every weekend . . .’

  ‘We are part of his court. His own children are too young to provide the court he needs. You always laugh at his stories . . .’

  ‘His stories are great; he ought to write them down.’

  ‘He never will, writing is a different cast of mind. You are enraptured by his war, even though Sam and his brothers and your grandfather and his brothers all went through wars, probably harder, probably more dramatic.’

  ‘But Dad won’t talk about it. Nor will anyone else.’

  ‘Except Ross.’

  ‘He won a medal for bravery, Natasha. Why are you so antagonistic? He likes you.’

  ‘You should not have told him my background.’

  ‘He likes you anyway. Margaret has been nothing but kind since the baby.’

  ‘Margaret is not Ross. She is formidable.’

  ‘She is a friend, isn’t she? Like Claire and Anna. She is one of the Three Graces of Kew.’

  ‘Sweet Graces.’ Natasha’s smile too was sweet. ‘I am lucky with those three women.’

  ‘So, what’s wrong with Ross all of a sudden?’

  ‘Partly that he is a man.’

  ‘Natasha!’

  ‘I’ll concede that he had no say in the matter. But he is such a Man’s Man, Joseph, such an Imperial Man, such a Polite to the Ladies Man, such a Superior Being. Alors! You are not a superior being.’

  ‘He’s who he is. Why should he change just because fashions change?’

  ‘Not fashions, not fashions. It is a truth which has been emerging for generations and that truth is about women. It is an idea based on rational reality and it is the idea that is changing the times.’

  ‘So we don’t get an au pair. Why not? You get tired out. You get exhausted.’

  ‘What inspires Joseph Richardson from the Blackamoor pub in Wigton to speak so airily about an au pair?’

  ‘I was not speaking airily.’

  ‘Don’t sulk. I’ll tell you. Last week when we went to the McCullochs’ and he asked us and the others to bring something to read aloud and you very nervously read that beautiful section from this new novel of yours which is the first one that really works, what did he do?’

  ‘He was generous.’

  ‘He was patronising. And then he strolled over to those bookshelves, for all to see he was a Literary Gentleman, and plucked out Sons and Lovers and read a passage from Lawrence.’

  ‘It was terrific. It’s as good as anything he wrote. And Ross reads so well.’

  ‘Why did he do that to you, Joseph?’

  ‘He did nothing to me. We were all reading something and he read something. That’s all.’

  ‘I fear that you believe that. I don’t. He tried to put you in your place. I told him so.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Just before we left.’

  ‘Told him what?’

  ‘That he had taken advantage of your willingness to expose something raw and precious and he had tried to crush you, although,’ she laughed out loud, ‘it appears that he failed because you didn’t notice! Oh, Joseph, I do love you.’

  He felt irritated, as if he’d been patted on the head.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said, “You think that, do you?”’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘That’s all . . . and then, “Goodnight.”’

  Why could he not tell her how much pleasing this man mattered to him? How this pleasing of him was a pleasure because of his admiration for him but also a necessity if he were to retain this miraculous job which not only allowed him to make films but left him with the energy to write? Why could he not tell her that on some days in the office the fear that he might not be in favour with someone notoriously volat
ile in offering and withdrawing favours spread a panic about him which threatened to excite the violent waves of depression of his adolescence? Why could he not confess all these shameful weaknesses? Why could he not tell her that on some weekends it was impossible for him not to pass by the grand McCulloch house on the river on the off chance of seeing Ross or Margaret or catching sight of their children playing in the big garden and hope to be invited in? And that ‘in’ was safety and that this man a generation ahead of him served some inexplicable but desperate purpose? And as she, indisputably, knew so much about people, why did she not know this?

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘That is what schoolboys say.’

  He dived in.

  ‘There’s a girl in Caldbeck, she lives two doors along from the cottage we rented. You may remember her, very blonde, curly hair, rather small, Mary. When we were up over Easter her mother told me that she wanted to find a place in London because she has a boyfriend in Kent. This boyfriend, she told me, had been in some sort of reform school near by but Mary had got to know him and she was pining for him, her mother said. So if I knew anybody who would look after her she would let her go because she couldn’t bear her looking so unhappy. She’s a “good little worker”, her mother said, and “no bother, very quiet”. She couldn’t understand how she had got mixed up with a boy in a reform school, a delinquent, she said the word deliberately as if forcing herself to face the worst, but there we are. So Mary could come here.’