Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘I’m not a shit. Am I?’

  The word had caught him like a hook in the mouth and landed him.

  ‘Yes.’ Natasha wanted to smile at the stricken look on his face but she forbade herself that indulgence.

  ‘We have a wonderful daughter and I know that you love her but for you she is always in the way. You are making her afraid of you.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid! How can she be afraid of me?’

  ‘Because of your anger. You have become angry. Maybe it is because of the strain of too much work although you have done something like this before. Maybe you are finding it all much harder than you imagined and you are angry at yourself for not being able to force your way to succeed.’ She paused but did not hesitate. ‘I think it is deeper. There are factors I don’t know about. But now you are making me fearful too.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. That’s awful. How could I hurt you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Joseph. I did not say afraid. You will never threaten me. But I am fearful of what you are becoming. I am fearful that you are being led towards the ruin of your former and best self because you think that it is too limited and too inexperienced and too provincial in this London world that you lust after, but you are very wrong, you are horribly wrong. Sometimes you are Jekyll and Hyde to me.’

  ‘That’s ludicrous. Maybe I have been angry. I don’t know why but it isn’t unusual, I would guess, among men my age trying to make their way. But Jekyll and Hyde!’

  ‘Not very often. I exaggerated to make the point. But I can see the signs of it – and signs too that unresolved matters from your childhood are beginning to erupt into your mind and obstruct what you want to do now.’

  ‘Please, Natasha. Not that.’

  ‘Why are you beginning to do yourself harm?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘I can see it.’

  ‘But I’m not!’ He felt that a net was being thrown over him and however hard he struggled he could not get out.

  ‘I know you are.’

  ‘How can you know me better than I know myself?’

  ‘Oh, Joseph.’

  ‘Oh, Joseph! What does that mean?’

  ‘Sometimes the person outside can see more. With the eyes of love.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like love to me.’

  ‘That was lashing out. You didn’t mean that. Look at your new friends. This Tim, for example.’

  ‘Tim’s fine.’

  ‘Tim wants you to be someone else. He wants you to be his labourer. I can see you plain. You respect Jude the Obscure. Tim and the others are persuading you to act against your principles. They trade on your willingness to please and your pliability because you are so astounded to be writing a film script in the first place. They are tempting you to leave the path you have chosen and write a script of someone else’s novel, which is against your better judgement and your better nature and you hate that and you want to hate them. But you cannot hate them as well as write their script so your hatred has to be released somewhere else and that is one reason why you are so angry with us.’

  He stood up, hit, hurt, incensed. What she said was true.

  ‘That’s not true,’ he said, he shouted. ‘That’s just not true! Everybody has to change things in novels when they turn them into films.’

  ‘Not everybody. And not everybody wants to write films. And for you it is a torment because up until now you have only ever done what you believed in and that is who you truly are. That is why you will be good. But this film script! Tim! Saul! What do they matter?’

  ‘Don’t you realise? Don’t you see?’

  There was a sudden pain in Joe’s chest, a stab, a sort of cramp, he guessed, but it made his right hand reach up and clutch the area around his heart. Natasha leaped up, held out her arms to him.

  ‘Joseph. Please. I’m sorry. Joseph.’

  The pain was already easing off. Her alarm was an affirmation.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, ‘too much froth in the beer.’

  She leaned into him and he put his arms around her. For a while they stood silently and then Natasha whispered,

  ‘I love you so much, Joseph. They mustn’t change you.’

  How had this confusion in his head and heart so rapidly come on him? He held her more tightly. Everything was safe with Natasha and Marcelle, everything was as it should be. He knew that. In the end, he knew that.

  Joe took the call in the only box room of an office available for private calls. Like all the offices, it held evidence of the preferred style of genteel bookishness which distinguished the BBC Arts Department. Pisan towers of hardbacks posted by publishers from all over London teetered on floor, desk and chairs, clearly signalling a fine excess, a careless cornucopia, something of the old college, something of the eccentric stately home. It was Tim, as he had guessed it might be, and as he had feared it was not good news.

  ‘I wish we could have met face to face to talk about this,’ Joe began, unprompted.

  ‘I’m in Oxford.’

  ‘I could get there in an hour or so.’

  ‘I’m looking for locations.’

  ‘I know. We discussed them.’

  ‘Bloody good too, your suggestions,’ said Tim. ‘Look. Can’t take all day. I’ve had another discussion with Saul . . .’

  Joe waited; successive waves of fury and self-pity swept through him. How could they talk about the script, his script, when he was not there? What did they know about Thomas Hardy? Why had he not listened to them? This so-called scriptwriting was nothing to do with writing at all. It was carpentry. And even in this flash of compacted reactions he had time to remember that at school he had never been any good at carpentry.

  ‘Are you still there?’ Tim sounded urgent but unworried.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There are two or three what old Saul calls “intractables”. I’ll be quick. Sorry. It’s starting to rain and I haven’t been to – that place he ended up in yet.’ Joe refused to help him out.

  ‘Intractables?’

  ‘The women. Beautifully drawn. The intellectual one, great character, and the sexy one, the two perfectly balanced. Perfectly balanced. As we discussed. As they are.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘That’s wrong. Saul wants what he calls the sexual dynamic to play bigger.’

  ‘But that would destroy the balance.’

  ‘That’s right. I said you’d say that. And all that business of Jude teaching himself Greek and so on.’

  ‘We have to show that or where’s the story?’

  ‘I agree. Saul agrees. We’ve all been over this many times, Joe. It just takes too bloody long, old son. Somebody has to get in the scissors.’

  ‘Unless you believe he’s an obsessive autodidact the film’s dead in the water.’

  ‘Agreed. But we have to believe quicker. There are ways, Saul says, ways that old sweats, the old script doctors, learned with their mother’s milk. And the ending.’

  ‘The ending is the ending.’

  ‘I told Saul you’d say that. Correct. The ending is the ending. The children end up dead. But it’s no good sending everybody out onto the streets looking to top themselves.’

  ‘Why should they? Tragedy has the opposite effect. It’s catharsis. Look at Madam Butterfly. That’s popular enough.’

  ‘I told him you’d win the argument. But you know Saul.’

  ‘I don’t really. Not very well.’

  ‘Look, Joe, bottom line: he likes you, you’ll get paid, he’s given it to one of those old fixers who I have to say has ironed out a few other problems as well.’

  ‘Somebody else has already worked on it . . .’

  ‘Joe. This is big-time. Saul asked me, Saul told me to tell you this. You’re still on his list. He’ll recommend you. You’ll get more work. You’re still on his list. Jesus, there’s writers in Hollywood drawing their pension without getting a single script on screen. He likes you. OK?’

  ‘Can’t we talk a bit more? To
each other?’

  ‘Fait accompli, old boy. Kaput. Chin up. Call soon.’

  Joe put down the phone very quietly. No one must see how thrown he was. No one must know about this until he was ready and prepared. He had failed. He had been fired. He had muffed his great chance. He was furious and ashamed. He picked up the phone and pretended to be listening in case anyone should look in. He should have walked off after the first confrontation. He should have gone along with them. He should have sorted out that ending but it was Hardy’s ending, it was the right ending. He even moved his lips so that any gazers through the window would assume he was wholly engaged.

  He could tell no one. He had to tell someone. Natasha would be sympathetic but, fundamentally, she would be pleased. She would see it as a providential escape. She would see it as proof of his integrity. She would see it as releasing time for him to get on with his own work, wholly his own, for to do that was the sole purpose of an artist’s life. Even television, his livelihood, and hers, was only just tolerated by her, he thought. He had to hide this news from Natasha until the right moment. But how could he go back home now, early, so light still, and just sit and read and pretend? He could not bear the thought.

  It was difficult to admit this even to himself but he did: he felt like crying with frustration. To be given such an opportunity and be found wanting. To fail and on such a project. How could he look anybody in the eye again?

  He put down the phone, picked it up and dialled.

  ‘Hello. I hoped you’d still be in the cutting room. Would you like – it’s a bit short notice – in an hour or so, the Pillars of Hercules, just a drink, one drink?’

  On several occasions, since the film, he had not got home until midevening and she was not yet disturbed by that. He was falsely cheerful when he arrived, she recognised that with dismay, and he held up a bottle of red wine. He said he wanted to watch the new Dennis Potter play. They saw it through in near silence. He drank most of the wine.

  ‘That play was better than any feature film I’ve seen all year,’ he said angrily. ‘It was far more ambitious. And no selling out. Television’s far more honest.’

  Natasha tried to decode him but he kept the vital evidence hidden.

  His anger festered for two days until finally he confessed the news about the script, still angry as if in some scarcely sane way she ought to have understood what was disturbing him without his having to say anything at all. It was a situation which would recur. He could not bear to admit failure or defeat or hurt to her, but he could not bear it that she did not somehow divine the problem and help solve it. She was glad, she said, after sympathising and agreeing that Tim was treacherous. He could spend more time on the new novel he had already begun.

  She thought he had begun the new novel too soon, that he ought to have taken time off, time away from his fiction, time to dream, time to drift, but she understood. This immediate start was insurance in case the reception of A Chance Defeat was such that he would never summon up the confidence to pick up a pen again. Natasha sympathised with that and she was relieved that he was already doing what he should be doing. She was glad the film was dead.

  Once more they would write together and Natasha would know they were safe. But only, she now knew, if she could be the guardian of their flame.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  ‘We rarely took photographs of each other’, he told their daughter. ‘Neither family. Natasha’s hoard was meagre, mine mostly school snaps. A camera was not part of our baggage, more’s the pity. Of the very few we did take I can identify only one from this precise period when, looking back, our lives were eerily becalmed, like a targeted boat in a film, waiting for the killer whale to torpedo up from the deep and destroy.

  ‘Natasha is sitting in the wooden shelter in the garden of the Builder’s Arms. We fell into the habit (or I persuaded her, did she need persuasion?) of going down to Reading once a fortnight, sometimes even once a week. We would arrive early on Saturday evening so that there would be time for my mother to take her granddaughter out for some sort of treat. We would spend the latter part of the evening in the pub, invariably ending up singing “the old songs”: “Goodbye Dolly Gray”, “Pack up Your Troubles”, “Tipperary”, “April Showers”, “California!”, other Jolson favourites and a few from Bing Crosby and Sinatra, even up to Johnnie Ray and Engelbert Humperdinck.

  ‘It was an old-fashioned company. Because of two Welsh women with high soaring voices, we always finished off with hymns – “Abide with Me”, “For Those in Peril on the Sea” and “Bread of Heaven”. Around closing time, the singing would draw in almost the whole bar although they were not as used to singing as we had been in the Blackamoor and there was no piano. Natasha was not as keen on the singing as I was. I itched to be down in the bar and help start it up. She would come down about half an hour from the end and drink little but in the end she did enjoy it, I’m sure of that. She grew to like the company and they her, her strangeness, and I can see her smile as she listened to the talk. Looking back it seems a curious thing to have done, and so consistently, for a year or so.

  ‘Were these visits the need to reach out for a lifeline in my parents’ marriage, something to hold onto? Or maybe it was a declaration of “Look; Kew Gardens is a lovely place, our new friends are fine, this life of theatres and mixing with the aspiring famous is OK, but it is here, in the pub, beside the canal next to the gasometers that I find lives to be part of, to be sustained by.” Or was I testing your mother? We could have gone into London on those Saturday nights for the cost of the train fares to Reading and the drinks in the pub. “We should have gone to the opera more often,” she said later, when we had separated.

  ‘Or perhaps at its root was the desire to repay my mother. She had moved south, out of the life which had protected her and she had come, I knew, to spend her time with and to help her grandchild. The least I could do was try to match her generosity.

  ‘It was on one of those visits that the photograph was taken. By me, I think, using my mother’s camera which ate up about one roll of film a year.

  ‘I remember from that time a conversation I had with my father. More, in fact, a monologue.

  ‘He liked me to help him tidy up behind the bar before opening up on Sunday morning and I think I too liked it. It had seemed to be work when I did it with him as a boy; now it was play and I know it amused him that with my degree and what he called my “Rolls-Royce job” and the writing of which he was so proud, he could still tell me I had not wiped the bottles clean enough.

  ‘When we’d finished, we’d go out from behind the bar into the newly cleaned bar itself. My mother and Maude, who helped, and you, who got in the way to their intense pleasure, had moved on to attack the saloon bar. We’d sit and have a cigarette and he would burst with questions, believing that working for the BBC gave me access not only to everyone who mattered but the capacity to answer everything he wanted to ask. The force of it made me cringe or duck or it reduced me to shameful attempts at generalisations. I was not wise enough to understand the hunger nor sufficiently loving then to return interest with interest.

  ‘This time, though, he spoke quietly. He still had about him that coiled, almost threatening single-mindedness which even then could make me physically afraid.

  ‘“You’ve a good life,” he said, “you’ve worked hard for it, nobody can take that away from you. You’ve got where you’ve got to on your own merits. Maybe there’ll be more to come and it will get harder. You’ve some new friends, I like the people in Kew, very nice people. And your Oxford friends. You have a lovely house and most of all you have that child and there’s Natasha. She’s very special, Natasha.”’

  He paused. He now looked at his son straight on.

  ‘I’ll tell you this once. Natasha looks tired and she is not happy. I don’t know what you’re up to but whatever it is, you look after her. She needs help. I think she always will need help. And it’s down to you. You didn’t bargain for this but it’
s what you’ve got. And what she brings you – well, she’s better than one in a million, Joe. There’s nobody a patch on her. You look after her.’

  And he looked hard at his son and forced him to meet the gaze and then he patted him on the shoulder.

  ‘The photograph shows me what I failed to recognise or chose to ignore then. Natasha is utterly directed inside herself. She sits in the garden of the pub, her right leg over her left, a fairly but not fashionably short skirt. Her hair is thick and simply pushed back. She has a cigarette in her right hand and she is not looking at the camera. She was not, I think, looking out at anything in particular. She seems full of sorrow in the photograph, full of disappointment, but alert, stiff-backed (probably against the pain), trying to work out where our life or her life was going wrong and why and where she could seek the resources to repair it. She seems trapped, wounded and failing to find the way out. Perhaps she was thinking she had made a terrible mistake and yet was in too deep. I had sensed that before. Her eyes are clouded, peering, searching into the light. She seems immobilised in sadness and what I did was to take a photograph.’

  The money for writing the film was, he thought, unbelievable. Joe had been put on the bottom rung but after the agent’s percentage was paid and the tax clawback put aside, he was still left with three thousand five hundred pounds, almost three times his annual salary: bonanza. He gave two thousand to his mother to turn the scullery in the Builder’s Arms into a proper kitchen; he put five hundred pounds into a building society and then he took Natasha on a squandering spree.

  It paralleled his splurge in New York where he had bought what she thought of as rather unsuitable, trendy clothes for her, clothes that he wanted to see her in, and bulky toys at Bloomingdale’s, to be shipped home, for Marcelle, silk scarves for his mother, a heavy silver-plated lighter for his father and still the dollars would not go. There had been a fever in the spending in New York, as if he had to get rid of the wad wildly and fast to match the city. There had been a giddiness in it, a high, a need for Jack Daniels on the rocks when it was done.