Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  So I need to watch him and watch over him, she thought. He must always be in my sights although he must never feel leashed. He must stay true to what I have found in him or both of us will be lost.

  And now I can live for my own sake, she thought, and now I must, for her sake. I was becalmed in the shadows for so long they became my natural habitat. I liked to hide from the light, as if looking at the sun would burn me, as if exposure would reveal a terrible nakedness. I wanted to slip through the world in a shroud, as if constantly prepared for the end, even longing for it, drugged by the fumes from the corpses of my lost lives. Joseph led me out of that. He came into my underworld and took me from it but I was waiting for him, I must have been, I was ready to attempt to climb out of the darkness that had been made for me and by me and try with all my strength to live unhidden out here, in the sun, in the light for this brief life.

  I want that now, she thought, I want to live all I can and for that I must guard Joseph and for that I must face myself, she vowed, however hard that is, not be a coward, pick off the scabs and look at the wounds. Maybe writing will help. Maybe writing will be enough.

  She shuffled through the pages of the novel. Joseph had given her the title. He had made a film about Tennyson’s In Memoriam and when they had discussed the novel, he had suggested The Unquiet Heart. She loved it. She had typed out two verses as the epigraph. It always reassured her to read them.

  I sometimes hold it half a sin

  To put in words the grief I feel;

  For words, like Nature, half reveal

  And half conceal the Soul within.

  But, for the unquiet heart and brain,

  A use in measured language lies;

  The sad mechanic exercise,

  Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

  ‘To write like that!’ he had said.

  Joseph often used that phrase. Ever since she had met him he would read out a passage and smile at its accuracy or its beauty and shake his head and say, ‘To write like that!’ She loved him saying that; the sense of awe, and of contest. And on he went. He plunged through setbacks as an animal in flight will plunge into a dangerous river, she thought, and then attempt to scale heights beyond his strength, dismayed, exhausted but always seeking the route. Joseph existed by saying yes. Sometimes she was fearful for him, but she would catch his fall. She was strong now, through her own life, through him. She trusted him utterly to take her as she was . . .

  It was past noon. The planes, barely heard by her now, droned over. Mary had taken Marcelle to the shops. Soon she would be old enough to go to the crèche which Anna had established for her own children and those of her friends in the vestry of the nearby Barn Church. Natasha liked the name Barn Church. She liked its association with the remains of old farms, the orchards, the English pastoral which had once lapped here against the banks of the Thames. Kew would be her castle and within it she would be free. Through these few friends she was sufficiently part of it, as much as she wanted to be. Joseph’s attempts to extend their circle and turn it into a place where they could know ‘everybody’ had been opposed by Natasha, often bluntly, often publicly, and earned her a reputation for rudeness. But Natasha had no anxiety whatever on that score. To be liked by mere acquaintances was not an ambition. To have to spend time with strangers was unsettling.

  Anna had suggested that if she wanted to she could help out at the Barn Church one or two mornings a week, teach art to the children. That was worth talking about. Anna was a friend.

  After lunch she would go and see another friend, Margaret, Ross’s wife, who had revealed that she was in analysis. Natasha was intrigued. Julia had mentioned two of her friends in Oxford who had gone into analysis. Julia thought it a waste of time and money and humiliating public evidence of a lack of character. Natasha was not so sure. In one of Joseph’s bulk buys off the cheap stall outside the Kew Bookshop she had found The Interpretation of Dreams and was overcome by it. Her attempt to apply it to Joseph had met with English empirical scorn, but she had expected that and infuriated him more by talking about ‘denial’. Margaret had said she was getting a great deal from her analysis and had volunteered to recount the experience to Natasha.

  There would be tea, there would be a walk in the Gardens with the child sturdily rushing over the shaven grass, bread to be remembered for the ducks, the two red-beaked black swans catching the eye as always, all so peaceful, English as she liked it. English that made no demands. For the heart of England she referred to the social and country-house landscapes of P.G. Wodehouse, to whose work she had been introduced by Matthew. ‘Metaphors miraculous,’ he said. It was enough to be in England, enough to live among it and write in it every day.

  She looked again at the opening lines of the new chapter.

  Brittany. Silver buckles on the men’s shoes, lace bonnets on the women’s heads. Tunny and mackerel fishing, in the old days large butterfly sails that roamed across the seas from Ireland and Africa, now engine-pulled ships with deep-freezes and radio contact still using the same routes. Yellow and black sou’westers, rubber boots, wooden clogs. Inland, the haystacks, the sour Breton cider apples, the naïfe village calvaries and the lichen-bitten steeples. Everywhere the granite stone of Brittany.

  He was in a film, he was in scores of films and he was the star. It was called Joe Richardson Hits New York. Joe Richardson dances down Fifth Avenue. Joe Richardson helicopters among the skyscrapers. Joe Richardson sails past the Statue of Liberty and meets the Battery at the foot of Manhattan. He eats the deli sandwich the biggest mouth on earth could not bite whole. He sees the yellow cabs and takes one just for the hell of it and asks to be driven ‘around the block, two or three blocks’. The black iron fire escapes cladding the grimy brick apartments in Greenwich Village in the dawn light are peopled by gangsters and private eyes, Forty-Second Street is shiveringly dangerous, sex the flaunt, the business, guns the law, hurry on, no eye contact, and the Hudson, the boat around the island, the nearness of the forests, home to Indian tribes from childhood matinées, and Central Park, the lung of it, tempting to test yourself against it after dark, safer to walk down the deep canyons of skyscrapers, bookshops open until midnight, MOMA, the Empire State, bars serving beer late, and the movie street names, Lexington, Grand Central Station, Wall Street, signs to Brooklyn and the Bronx, Madison Avenue, Manhattan, New York. In those few days Joe never failed for a moment to experience being in the celluloid dream, having been here before, his imagination film-fed from America since his childhood induction twice weekly at the Palace Picture House. Jazz, rock, blues America was his adopted soul.

  He played the New London Dandy. The new Englishman abroad. His King’s Road gear, still worn rather self-consciously and with discretion in London, was here, he thought, wholly appropriate. He was allowed to dress up for the part. Who cared? The bottle-green velvet jacket, the lacy cravat, the flared trousers and Cuban boots or, another day, the mock frock coat and striped trousers, the ruffle-fronted shirt, the hair daring to grow longer, cavalier, girlish, fashionable. It had never crossed Joe’s mind until these last months that he would want to be fashionable, let alone enjoy it, let alone be able to afford it. But fashionable was expensive no more; not to the young. A mass market had commercialised and democratised fashion. And here was the Mecca of the mass market.

  The land of Liberty! Joe thought he could see it in the faces on the streets. And of Democracy! He felt he could sense it in the poise, the conversations, in ordinary people who looked as if they owned the place. His darker knowledge, the Great Depression, McCarthy, union smashing, the genocide of the Indians and the racial intolerance of the blacks was blotted out by the energy he felt hit him from the openness and the beat of the city, from the gridded streets and the wide accommodating avenues, exciting energy, optimistic, ambitious new energy, where what was new was good.

  He had been lifted out of drizzling London and flung across an ocean into another world, a world that, he thought, had been waiting for him as
he for it.

  ‘You are,’ said Tim, ‘like a fart in a trance. I am very surprised you haven’t met yourself coming back.’

  He raised his glass. They were in the Oak Room Bar in the Plaza. Tim had been given a double room overlooking Central Park. Joe was in a cubby-hole at the back. Joe had been an afterthought.

  ‘So.’ Tim was two sheets to the wind. But it was near midnight and what was a red-blooded Englishman new to the place to do but prop up a bar and drink Jack Daniels and put the world to rights. ‘What were today’s Adventures of the Cumbrian Candide? Jack Daniels on the rocks for my wide-eyed young friend. He wants to become a Success, you know, but he’ll never admit it.’ The barman, old, owlish, heavy-eyed, delivered a minimal nod and let loose the whisky.

  Joe watched it waterfall into the tumbler and clenched his stomach. He’d already had a few beers. He tried to summon up a response which would entertain his friend. He owed Tim a lot. Including this. He liked him. Should he? Tim was wholly out for himself. Was he changing into someone like that?

  ‘I,’ said Tim, ‘before you summon up the expurgated version of your day, will tell you about mine.’ Once again he raised his glass. He was in a loop of toasts. ‘Saul,’ said Tim, ‘good old Saul seems to want to go for it. He wants to make the movie. God knows why.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘He’s always taken chances,’ said Joe, sipping at the irresistibly sweet liquid, ‘I looked him up. He’s never really been a typical Hollywood producer. Even so.’

  ‘Trust you to look him up. Even so what?’

  ‘Jude the Obscure.’

  ‘God knows.’ Tim shook his head, gloomily even.

  ‘He wants to . . .’ It was too improbable even to articulate.

  ‘He wants to make it. Low Budget but the land of Plenty, I tell you, my son, after starvation BBC television budgets. He’ll produce it himself.’

  ‘Well,’ said Joe, winded. A feature film produced by Saul Elstein, who had since the war worked with legends – the word bobbed up into his brain, no other would do – legends.

  ‘He’s an Anglophile, that’s why,’ said Tim. ‘Do you know he joined the Royal Air Force during the war? I bet you didn’t look that up. And he ran a circus in Canada for three years. Then he married the daughter of Lord Whatsit – that will be in Who’s Who even though they’re separated; and he worked with Tennessee Williams and Brando and Olivier and such – I bet they’re in the book. But this English thing.’ Tim was puzzled. ‘What he sees in us I do not know. But archetypal. Jude the Obscure. That’s what he called it. Archetypal. Barman! A final replelli— replemish— Thank you.’

  A feature film! Joe wanted to be somewhere alone. He wanted to fly. He wanted to start work now. Stop drinking. Remember Jude under the influence.

  ‘His new lady loved the Nijinsky film. That’s why we’re here. His new lady. Here’s to the new lady,’ he said, for the umpteenth time. ‘She’s a big balle-o— ballet—’

  ‘Balletomane.’

  ‘Smart arse. Fancies Nureyev. Fat chance. Cheers!’

  ‘When does he want us to start?’

  ‘You know when he took us to that deli on Broadway and said he liked your script and his literary friend had liked your book?’

  Joe choked on embarrassment and trusted himself only to mutter something that sounded like ‘nnnhmm’.

  ‘Well,’ said Tim, ‘he told me that had sort of clinched it.’

  He held Joe’s gaze in what he clearly intended to be a solemn and binding moment.

  ‘That’s why I asked him to fly you over here.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t thank me.’

  Who then?

  ‘He gave me this.’ Tim pulled out a wad. ‘A wad,’ he said, ‘I’ve always wanted to pull out a wad. Especially an American wad. This –’ he thought he was lowering his slurred but still strong voice, ‘is fifteen hundred dollars. Not on account, Saul said. For a few presents.’ He picked at the notes with peering, finger-licking care. ‘Three hundred for you. For you three hundred. You’ve only got tomorrow.’

  ‘You needn’t.’

  ‘I know I needn’t. Don’t tell me I needn’t. I know I needn’t. When can you start?’

  ‘Next week.’

  ‘Won’t Ross want more notice than that?’

  ‘I needn’t tell him. I’ll just get on with it.’

  ‘And still make the arts stuff?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have a routine? One more? Last one.’

  ‘OK, then.’

  ‘Martin!’ The same barman came over patiently. ‘We close in five minutes,’ he said.

  ‘Residents,’ said Tim and looked at Joe triumphantly: not the slightest blemish in the pronunciation.

  ‘You can move to the lobby, sir. Same poison?’ He poured even as he asked the question.

  ‘Room 211,’ said Tim. ‘Two-one-one.’

  Joe braced himself for this ‘last one’. But a swarming head and a restless sleepless sweaty night in his cubby-hole in hot New York were a small price to pay.

  ‘What’s your routine, then? All writers have a routine. It’s their secret. Spill the beans.’

  ‘I try to get up just before six, five days in the week, and write for a couple of hours before setting off for work. Doesn’t always work out, but . . . anyway I try to make it. I go over it when I come back, write as much as I can at weekends. When that routine collapses I start to write after supper and go on until I’m knackered. Of course it’s great that Natasha writes as well. It wouldn’t work without her.’

  ‘You’ve got to tell me what it’s like being married to a Frenchwoman one of these days. Are you onto another novel? You are. I remember. Alison told me you were. Got your end away with her yet? Of course you have.’

  A denial would be pointless. Tim would not be convinced.

  ‘I’ll put the novel aside,’ said Joe, lying. He knew he would be incapable of not tinkering with it.

  ‘Your funeral,’ said Tim. ‘I don’t give a sod how you do it as long as you do it and it works. By their fruits you shall know them. Ross won’t like it. You doing a film. He’s OK, Ross.’

  The check appeared on the counter at about the last moment that Tim was capable of seeing and signing it. He gave the barman ten dollars.

  ‘Makes me feel good,’ he said. ‘Tipping. Over-tipping’s even better.’

  They walked to the lift slowly and circumspectly, as if considering every step along the way, as if thoughtful and abstracted, as if dead drunk. Before he stepped out to make for the minibar in 211, Tim said,

  ‘Truth will out, my friend. I panicked a bit in London and wanted you to be here for when he got going on Jude. Saul knows his stuff, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He does. I’m a bit worried about what he said about the ending.’

  ‘What’d he say? Jude the Obscure, he said, a story for our times, a story for the poor, a story for the immigrant, a story for those who dream. See. I remember. Bloody good, Joe.’

  ‘Bloody good, Tim.’

  Natasha had been waiting for this for some weeks. She wanted to make sure that she had the evidence. She wanted to give Joseph a chance to pull out of it. She wanted to feel less distracted by the pain in her back which had begun soon after the birth and lately returned with greater intensity. Her local doctor, a literary man, had waved it all away, prescribed painkillers, advised exercise and used most of their time together to give her his opinion of Chekhov’s short stories. A couple of years earlier he had failed to spot that Joseph had an infected kidney, which was only discovered when he had undertaken a medical for insurance on the feature film. England, Natasha concluded, does not look after itself very well: it is sauve qui peut.

  They were home where she most liked to be. It was late on a warm summer evening, the windows open to the garden, despite the growl of the planes. Joseph was sprawled in his armchair, Couples newly embarked on, the third revision of the film script
sprayed about his feet, cigarette, glass of beer; and she herself, on the other armchair, his mirror image, her Nathalie Sarraute for his John Updike, her own novel at her feet, cigarette, coffee. The cushion in the small of her back helped the painkillers. The strain on Joseph’s face had not eased for some weeks, nor would it, she thought, with the relentless redrafting of the script and the weekly grind of the new arts programme. If any time was right this was it.

  She closed her book and waited until prompted by her action, Joseph obediently did the same with his. His eyes were not only tired, she thought: there was something else there, some misery. She could not unearth it but it fed her unease.

  Like an overture, a plane braked overhead, unusually low, unusually screeching and loud. Joseph grimaced and glanced at the ceiling.

  ‘How many’s that, just since I came back?’

  ‘You’re tired.’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘You’re always tired these days.’

  Joseph recognised the truth of that, resented it and said nothing.

  ‘And it is here, in this house, where the consequences are suffered.’

  Joe was miles away. He was worn out by the arguments over the shape and particularly the ending of the film script. The death of the children seemed to him essential. Saul and now Tim were not so sure. In television Ross was giving him increasing responsibility which was an opportunity but also a burden: he had been set to work on BBC2, a new channel which devoured programmes from a small and inexperienced staff. And then there was the pull of London, the temptation of sin, the greed for it all, the self-justification, the self-accusation. He took a sip of beer and remembered the Jack Daniels.

  ‘Every time in the last weeks you have come back from work,’ Natasha said, steadily, ‘and into this house you have told me off or you have snapped at your daughter or at both of us. I understand that on occasion a marriage is and has to be the place where you are licensed to be your worst self, where you can be your opposite. But it cannot go on. Matthew would say you were a bit of a shit.’