Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  London was more decorous. A fine coat imposed on Natasha who had to surmount a lifetime’s opposition to this kind of gift, a seventeenth-century oak dowry chest bought in one of the streets off the Portobello Road, and cushions, chosen by Natasha from one of the new boutiques, Indian, elaborately worked; she wanted one. Joe bought four. For Marcelle there was a bright pillar-box-red tricycle. It had a bell whose sound became a daily cheerfulness. After the spree Joe insisted on the Ritz for dinner: he smoked a cigar. Natasha decided that the whole affair was in the end an entertainment but even her teasing could not undermine Joe’s pleasure at so extravagantly overdoing it. The cigar was too strong and too long for him, but he persisted.

  And there had to be a party for their friends. But how could you word the invitation so that it told people not to ‘bring a bottle’? It was always on the invitations for such herd parties. But the point on this occasion, as Joseph in his nouveau plutocratic mode explained to Natasha, was that bottles be not brought. He would supply the bottles. He had to supply the bottles. Good bottles. For their friends. That was the point.

  Amused by the mixture of self-parody and benevolence, and this evidence that his naïf enthusiasm was intact, Natasha joined in and suggested that she would discreetly secrete the brought bottles and Joseph could serve, without undue pride in the label, the inevitably more expensive wines he would import from the off-licence next to the station. She would also, she said, do more than nuts and crisps and olives for the buffet. ‘Push the boat out,’ he said, ‘when it’s gone it’s gone.’

  ‘You want to get rid of it,’ said Natasha. ‘You want to wash your hands of it. That’s good.’

  David always dropped them a card announcing his return dates in London and the party was arranged to suit him.

  ‘You want to show off to him,’ said Natasha.

  ‘I don’t! I like him, that’s all. And he likes parties.’

  ‘You want to gossip with him afterwards.’

  ‘You keep telling me what I want to do.’

  The invitation list was ambitious. All the new Kew friends, including Ross and Margaret; James, David, Bob, Roderick, Matthew and Julia from Oxford, Peter the politician and other new colleagues from the BBC, including from the World Service, Anthony and Victoria, Charles of course, and, after a deep breath, Tim Radley and his wife, a literary cluster including two literary critics he had met while doing a programme on L.P. Hartley, and an arts editor who had appeared in the programme he had made on David Jones. There was a novelist some years older already sporting a swagger reputation who had been sent an advance copy of Joseph’s novel and, for reasons which Joseph could not quite trust, been keen to cultivate the younger man; there was the Irish writer already famous with a second novel which Joe thought was miraculously Chekhovian, the sculptor and his wife who lived locally, and finally an invitation to Saul Elstein, expecting an elegant refusal which came by return of post.

  When they and a few others royally invited at the last minute piled into the small, overlit, semi-detached, furniture-cleared-to-the-walls, primed-for-party house, Joseph could have been Beau Nash supervising the great balls at Bath, he could have been hosting the salons patronised by Proust or feasting on the conversations of the elite at Garsington. He still took his wine too quickly and soon he was in that state just bubbling below full consciousness, a state of dreamily blurring euphoria.

  Was it at this party that Natasha told the rather grand wife of the senior literary critic who held out her glass and said merely, ‘Another drink’ to ‘Get it yourself, the wine’s in the kitchen’? Was it on this occasion that Joseph had an overlong and damaging disagreement with the more junior literary critic, ‘a rising star’, that middle-class people like him could never really understand either pop music or football however hard they tried and anyway why should they want to colonise working-class pursuits when they had so many of their own? It certainly was here that Bob Romford explained the art of fly fishing and in particular the art of making artificial flies to the Polish Head of the European Service in such detail that the man declared he would do a programme on the subject to prove what the English were still made of. James bumped into a radio producer who left with the promise that he would listen to the demo records and see if he could get airtime for them and he did.

  Joseph floated on what he thought of as a river of key cultural references. The names bobbed up like corks in a bath: Picasso, Norman Mailer, Harold Pinter, Philip Larkin, John Updike, Dennis Potter, David Mercer, Narayan, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, John Cage, the latest story about Kingsley Amis, the latest Bacon exhibition – he was as drunk on the names as on the glasses of wine. The older novelist with the swagger reputation was never to forgive Natasha after she told him that she thought he was a negative influence on Joseph after his attempt to flirt with her. ‘It was the clumsiness,’ she said, ‘and the lack of tact which is typical of your negativity.’

  Tim got drunk, ‘like Jude’, he said.

  David helped with the washing-up and the three of them had a final glass.

  ‘Perfectly satisfactory,’ said David, ‘it’s so hard to give a really good party with such a quota of mere acquaintances if you know what I mean, but this one worked. The people from the World Service were distinguished and quite new to me, one doesn’t meet them anywhere else. Matthew and Julia are stars of course and I liked Anthony, just outside my circle at Oxford. I know a little about his film-making, well spoken of. Only a couple from, as it were, the older families but they hardly seemed out of place at all. Charles is pukka and very personable. Your Kew friends, charming, what else would one expect? Very glad to meet Tim Radley: disappointing in person but a real eye as a director. Ross McCulloch – much better than anticipated, much better, he listened, he did not seek to dominate, and your new television friends, fun, certainly. A good mix. As the only International Socialist present I can state that objectively.’

  ‘So we passed the test?’ said Natasha, laughing. ‘Oh, David, you are so wonderfully absurd. Please don’t ever change.’

  David’s return cannonade of laughter bounced around the room.

  ‘You make me feel so deliciously embarrassed,’ he said.

  ‘And silly, I hope.’

  ‘Silly?’ The swirl of the large dark expressive eyes, the hands thrown up in surrender, the laughter commanding. ‘For you, Natasha – silly.’ He took a small sip of the Pouilly-Fumé. ‘But a good party is hard to give. Don’t underestimate that.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ asked Joe, very near sleep and wanting only that the party be praised, interminably.

  ‘I do. I really think so.’ David looked at his watch. ‘The last tube is at twelve-twenty. I’ve checked.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Natasha.

  ‘You know me too well. I can’t afford to miss it. Taxis to Kew are prohibitive.’

  ‘I thought it got better,’ said Joe, finding a swollen tongue an impediment, ‘the longer it went on.’

  ‘That new media kinship class,’ said David, ‘it’s beginning to cohere. Perhaps around you two.’

  ‘No,’ said Natasha, firmly, soberly; and repeated, ‘no. We don’t want that.’

  ‘Don’t we?’ Joe shook his head. ‘Great crowd,’ he said. ‘Peter’s great, isn’t he? He’ll be Prime Minister. Wait and see.’

  ‘Some people go to these things every night of the week,’ said Natasha. ‘How can they?’

  ‘Now, now, it was a good party.’

  ‘It was a very good party,’ said Julia as they took their nightcap, even though the journey back from London meant that they were running about two hours late on their unobtrusively observed daily schedule.

  ‘I particularly enjoyed talking to the young poet – Edward Worcester. An intelligent man. He was up at Merton.’

  ‘I thought the Tim character was terrific,’ said Julia. ‘So irreverent. He’s making a film about Jude the Obscure.’

  ‘Did you tell him your theory about the perfect balance betw
een the two women?’

  ‘I did. He said that had been taken into account.’

  ‘The chap from the European Service, Konrad, Polish, impressive. We don’t have his type in Oxford. More’s the pity.’

  ‘We do well enough here,’ said Julia.

  ‘They’re rather a brilliant couple, no? He’s come on well and Natasha was on good form.’

  ‘I disagree,’ said Julia. ‘You always had a blind spot about Natasha. But to be fair she told me that she and Joseph, as she still insists on calling him, had had a sort of face to face in Reading, which in my view they visit far too often, and that it cleared the air somewhat.’

  ‘They’ll have their ups and downs. We had.’

  He took out a cigarette. ‘I feel the party as it were secures them in their position in their new society,’ he said. He raised his glass.

  Joseph wanted to have a final final drink in the garden. Natasha, temperate as always, sat with him to be the audience for his relief, pride and pleasure, but mostly, she knew, relief. Before the party he had been almost frantic with anxiety. He had threatened to walk off, to disappear, to cancel it. It was such an extreme mood, new in her experience of him and she needed time to extract its meaning. Why did it matter to him so very much, so viscerally? What was happening to him? And yet, when the party had begun, his mood had swung completely. Perhaps he needed the over-anxiety to stimulate the adrenal gland, she thought. Perhaps it laid his ghosts. But why was he so exaggeratedly insecure?

  ‘No planes,’ he said, having stayed silent a while. ‘The night lifts the siege.’

  ‘You’ll soon learn to ignore them. The rest of us do.’

  ‘That’s what annoys me. The rest of you do. Or you say you do.’

  He took a swig more than a sip of the warm white wine.

  ‘Saying it often enough can help make it happen,’ Natasha suggested.

  ‘That’s for babies, isn’t it?’

  ‘You were on good form, Joseph.’

  ‘Was I? Really?’

  ‘Yes. Matthew commented on it. He said you were rather brilliant.’

  ‘Did he? Matthew. Really?’

  Flattery, though sought for, fuddled him into silence. Natasha too, having diverted him, preferred silence. The night-time suburb, saturated in green, with heavy trees, thick bushes and lawns by the hundred, reinforced their own silence.

  She wanted to think about herself. She wanted to continue a process begun years before but only now, in this marriage, allowed the oxygen it needed. She wanted to concentrate on her writing, her work, her art. She longed to become the artist she knew she could be. The time was right for it. Joseph had allowed that confidence to grow. He was broad-shouldered, indefatigable, flustered by the fray into which he was willingly led, bruised by the encounters he could not bear to miss, forever failing fully to grasp the danger of the new worlds that floated into his life, but going on, going on, obstinate and bull-like going on, she thought, and giving her all she could ever reasonably want from a man. It would not be too much to say he enabled her to be free: and she must return that gift to him.

  ‘You need have no fear, Joseph,’ she said, and drew deeply on her cigarette. ‘I believe you are innocent at heart and whatever you do that you think is a sin will not be a crime. It is the intention that makes the crime. Your intentions are pure and I will always be here.’

  He said nothing. He felt X-rayed. He felt wholly understood by Natasha. Her certainty could disconcert and sometimes torment him but there was no mistaking the power her understanding exerted on him: or the subjection he felt in its grip.

  ‘I do love you, you know,’ he said heavily. ‘I’ll always love you. I always think I’m so lucky to be with you.’ He nodded. ‘Just imagine if we’d never met. What then? A life without you?’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ‘There was a willing current in our lives during the next year or two,’ he wrote to their daughter, ‘and mostly we went with it, we let it flow through our hearts and bear us along, striving to achieve what we thought was good. The friendships, the obligations, the love that was still there between us which was deepened through you was more than enough. It was rich when you looked around, when you made comparisons with others wherever, whoever they were. We were fortunate.

  ‘Our friends in Kew were and remain good friends and their children were and are still your friends and all three of us knew that at the time. Your mother did teach and help on two mornings a week at the Barn Church. I joined the tennis club and was one of those convenient members below the average so that playing against me could be a useful warm-up and a fortifying victory. Natasha did some watercolours in the Gardens but the writing overtook the painting and her new friends urged her on. There were modest parties between the families, most commonly tea parties at weekends where all the children piled into the garden, the parents withdrew and for a couple of hours it felt rather like a kibbutz.

  ‘I continued the forays into London on some Saturday afternoons, pollinated and unnerved by that buzz and a pressure of temptations and opportunities; sometimes it became difficult to distinguish between the two. Yet I was like a homing pigeon sent far from base, not in distance but in culture, always beating back south, across the Thames, safely home to Kew. Or like a kite which your mother played out until it soared unseen above the clouds and yet at the end of the day it would be safely reeled in. It must have been around this time that Natasha said, “You take all you want in London, I’ll have Kew.” The insight and the clever encapsulation were typical; but I’m sure I argued against the neatness of the division.

  ‘For I too was deeply fond of the unintensive suburban pleasures of Kew and Natasha loved coming into London as long as it was with people she trusted. She trusted Anthony the drama director, a colleague at the BBC, and his wife Victoria, the painter. They had the kindly courtesies of their class, Natasha’s class, at ease in their world, thoughtful, funny, surprising, and your mother took to them, and they to her, immediately and unreservedly. There was happiness in the theatre-going with them and occasionally the dinners afterwards in that rather louche club off St James’s. And in Peter, too, she found a friend although she rarely failed to tease him about his political views. James of course, and David when he visited London and one or two others. There were many good days, calm days, days of equanimity and no outwardly visible drama, days when nothing much happened, maybe those were the best days, when nothing much happened save our lives lived together, life just trickling through the uncounted hours. Looking back it was a time of unacknowledged contentment.

  ‘We went to La Rotonde in the summer and for one holiday we returned to Cumberland for a week in the cottage in Caldbeck and Natasha was feted by my old friends, an exotic. And every morning you fed the ducks. Your mother and I wrote; we wrote and wrote. My first two novels had come out before Natasha finally completed what was to be her debut published work. Charles acted as her agent and there came the day when he sent her a letter, a publisher found, and her joy was deep. So was mine. She wanted it so much, I realised, when she got it: she needed it and now, armed with the publication of her first book, the object of desire, she felt finally equipped to take on her deeper, forbidden past.’

  The restaurant was called Two Plums and Three Cherries and it had recently opened on Kew Green, near the church. Joe had heard it was expensive and fashionable; perfect for his purpose. He arranged to meet Natasha there as he had work to do after office hours. This, though not habitual, was no longer unusual. The ‘work’ would be in a pub. The pub would be peopled with Edward Worcester and other young poets and novelists who hung around with him, partly from Edward’s certainty of purpose, partly because of his powers of patronage as the producer of a literary radio programme. The work would be thirsty and Joe would float away towards the underground station wishing he had the time to walk home and clear his head. But it was not habitual, it did not much disturb Natasha. Nothing like as much as his sometimes dazed, imploded return from Saturday
afternoon rambles in London. She saw the city clawing him down into its grip and knew that he was troubled by what he saw as a multitude of options that bewildered but also excited a sensibility that recognised them as dangers.

  ‘It’s great, isn’t it?’ he said, looking around the festooned restaurant when she arrived a few minutes later than him.

  Natasha smiled and nodded: the nod was a cheat but it enabled her not to say what he least wanted to hear. The place was dreadful. Poor imitations of Impressionists crowded the walls, pink tablecloths, pink napkins, little red candles in vast brandy glasses on the tables, crystal glasses, posies, gleaming silver-plate cutlery, the quiet but unignorable thrum of fashionable droning quasi-mystical music and the smug air of being bang up to the new mood of the moment.

  ‘I thought you’d like it,’ he said. ‘I’ve ordered something special.’

  Joseph was a little flushed but it became him, she thought. It gave his tousled look the necessary youth. His velvet jacket and overlarge tie fitted the restaurant well; her quietly cut summer dress, bought for her publication party (sherry, olives, nuts, begun at six and all over by seven-thirty, fourteen people accommodated in the editor’s office), looked rather plain in that company, she noticed. Two Plums and Three Cherries had drawn in the more fashionably conscious from a rich suburban catchment area. Or did her dress look rather old? Did she? Sometimes it seemed that Joseph was getting younger and the gap between them widening. The intermittent pain in her back made it hard to keep an ageing strain from her face; though she was not currently troubled. She had taken extra painkillers.

  Two flutes of champagne arrived and Joseph beamed. It was such a smile! She was disarmed by his smile. It was wholly without guile or reserve, it was from the heart, even from the soul, she thought, it was the expression of a still untainted and innocent love which only Joseph had given her.