Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘To you.’ He raised his glass and she took her cue. ‘And to your great, great novel. It really is great, I was telling them in the pub. It’s great! To success for it and long life and everything you want for yourself, Natasha.’

  He reached out to clink glasses and so did she. For some moments she was overcome with shyness and silencing pleasure.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and then, ‘and thank you for all this.’ She looked around. ‘It is a lovely place for a celebration.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ The trace of anxiety revealed how much he must have fussed over its selection: matters like this always fussed him.

  ‘Yes.’ She reassured him and now she meant it. ‘This is perfect, Joseph.’

  This time his smile was more of a grin, cocky, confident.

  ‘They do avocado with prawns,’ he said. ‘That’s my starter.’

  After they had ordered he brought her tales from the literary front. Natasha, still cherishing the smile and the true feeling behind this event, scarcely listened at first. She shielded that previous moment like a candle flame in the wind, wanting to watch it burn for every last second. She let him praise what he saw as these soon-to-be-famous young writers who met regularly now in that pub. He was dazzled, she thought, partly by what they said but more by the very fact of it, the literary clique in the London pub, the glamour of being with published writers, himself also a published writer, somehow in an exclusive court, recognisable only to initiates, special persons, chosen and distinguished by this rare and quite frankly rather superior fact of having a book published.

  The writers he had just left drinking literature in the pub were, he believed, wise beyond their years, their words and works were weighed in the great balance of books and should be taken seriously. They had direct access to Creativity, they had Obsessions and their pronouncements were full of Fine Distinctions, they were Severe on Those Who Failed the Great Cause of Writing and Writers, the brotherhood. And they were fun, they were intellectuals, they were the metropolitan wits.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Natasha, ‘but I think they are no more intelligent or cultured than our Kew friends, none of whom has published a book. It is wonderful to publish a book, Joseph, but it is not an entitlement to automatic respect. Don’t look crestfallen. It is just my opinion. I think in your heart you agree with it. I have heard you say the same about your friends in Cumberland. There are other matters of value, you know that, you tell me that. People have thought great thoughts and lived rich lives without writing a book: even, I remember you arguing with James, without necessarily reading a book. Sometimes I fear for you that you idolise these new friends too much. They are too cynical for me. But you will always accept it first before you regret it later, that is your way. Some of them are just playing the game of being writers. To be called a writer is their passport into society. They may be no worse for that, and it is a harmless game, but you are not like that, Joseph, and you would do better to keep your distance. They will never nourish you. And they live best in a world of criticism with which I know you find it difficult to cope.’

  That final sentence was so accurate that he could dig out no reply. It was true, he hated the hostile criticism he sometimes encountered, it made him writhe. Sometimes because he thought it was justified, sometimes because it was wrong, always because it was a public humiliation and in an area in which the rules said that he was not allowed to fight back. To fight back which, in Wigton, was to prove yourself strong was, in London, to show yourself weak. And he writhed under the stupidity of that edict of turning the other cheek. He stuck to it but it demanded too much from him at this stage and for Natasha to refer to it was to stoke both shame and anger. Best if she had not mentioned it. The truth, being spoken, made him feel that not just Natasha but everybody knew of this weakness.

  ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘I’ve spoiled it for you. Yet the criticism you receive isn’t very severe, it isn’t much at all, Joseph, and it doesn’t matter. The good reviews outweigh the bad and people you respect admire what you do and they say so . . .’ And all that was the case but the demons had been unloosed and she could see, through his transparent expression, the tussle he was having to thrust them away, not let them ruin her celebration and yet he wanted to brood on them and feed fantasies of revenge.

  ‘You won that prize,’ she said.

  ‘What does that prove?’

  ‘Some of your new pubby friends are vandals, Joseph.’ She looked to jolt him out of it. The conversation was conducted in hushed tones, not wanting to disturb the pretensions of the restaurant. But here Joseph did raise his voice.

  ‘Oh, Natasha! Vandals?’

  ‘Artistic vandals.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ He took a gulp of the cold Pouilly-Fuissé, cheered up by what he saw as an exaggeration which could be disputed.

  ‘They pull down what they can’t appreciate. They prefer to destroy. They steal significance from art to enhance their own importance.’

  ‘No they don’t. They just don’t. They write stuff. Sometimes good stuff. And they take it seriously even if they drink a bit. Writers drink, most writers, some writers, some of the time, they drink: and even if they do lash out at others, so what? Sometimes it’s necessary, it’s funny, it does no harm.’

  ‘It does.’ Natasha was firm. ‘And you are straining to become one of them. It is not you. You once read out to me that D.H. Lawrence said that Pornography was doing the dirt on Sex. Was that it? Well, that kind of witches’ kitchen does the dirt on literature.’

  ‘That’s rubbish! How do you know? They take it more seriously than anything. You’ve only met them once or twice. And they think you’re terrific. Why don’t you come more often?’

  ‘You know that I would not rush into London at the end of an afternoon for a drinking session. Besides, it is a man’s club. Women are welcomed but not equals. The conversation condescends.’

  ‘That’s just not true.’ It was, he knew that, but he shook his head at her accusation. ‘I like them,’ he concluded, sturdily. ‘And I admire the way that some of them are trying to make a living by just writing and reviewing.’

  ‘That is admirable, I agree,’ said Natasha, in her happiness too deep on this night to take any argument to the wall. She added, ‘You should do that.’

  ‘I can,’ he said, feeling bold. ‘I can afford it now.’

  ‘You must.’

  ‘The first two have come out in paperback in America and Germany and it all works out. I’ve calculated my pension fund comes to two hundred and seventy-two pounds and ten shillings and they’ll let me withdraw that. There’s the five hundred pounds in the building society. We’ve got enough for a year, living carefully.’

  ‘You’ve been a business man!’

  ‘I enjoyed it.’ Her smile flattered him to the core. ‘The guys said I might get some reviewing but the problem is that that’s writing. The great thing about television is that it’s the opposite of writing.’ He took another mouthful of the white wine, most of which he alone had consumed. ‘In television you’re a team. Nobody can do it alone. In writing, being alone and doing it alone and on your own terms, finding your own voice, is the point. There isn’t any other point. Whatever the result. That’s the point.’ His head was now pleasantly thickened by the cold sweet alcohol. ‘So you see?’ he concluded.

  ‘When will you do it?’

  Until this moment it had been a dreaming calculation, an itching reproach to a way of life he sometimes feared betrayed a lack of true commitment, even though his Brief Lives of Contemporary Writers told him that many novelists had harnessed their fiction to necessary remunerative work in the outside world. But the romantic notion, diktat, of dedicated isolation was a great temptation. Natasha’s question was a gun to the head. He wanted to please her. He always wanted to impress her.

  ‘Soon,’ he said, out of alcohol and bravado. ‘Very soon.’

  ‘Joseph,’ she lifted her minimally employed glass, ‘to you. I
have waited for this. To you.’

  His glass was empty. She leaned over and poured him most of her wine and once more their glasses touched. He ordered a brandy and a créme brulée. Natasha had coffee.

  He wanted to tell her the true reason why he had decided to leave the security and enjoyment of the BBC, but it would tilt into boasting. The fiction he was writing, set among people who had mostly been represented in literature, until recently, as servants, caricatures, objects of sentimentality, walk-ons, ciphers, fodder, had to be drawn with as much sympathy and complexity as those whose more privileged lives so powerfully commanded the heights of so much English literature. This task as much as the re-emerging lure of solitude needed more time and effort.

  ‘Ellen once told me,’ she said, ‘that when you were a little boy, in the war, when your father was away, you would wake up singing to yourself, or whistling.’

  ‘Did she? Did I?’

  ‘I hope that is still inside you. I hope you never lose that.’

  He deliberately turned the conversation away from the analysis he feared might be imminent.

  ‘I liked whistling. Everybody whistled then. Why did it disappear? I’ll whistle to you on the way back home.’

  Though the Two Plums and Three Cherries slowly shed its customers, they stayed on. Natasha was determined to follow through her decision, taken earlier that day. It was as yet unrevealed to Joseph, drifting, sweetly drunk.

  They picked at the past with the amused tolerance of parents looking down on the peccadilloes of their children. They spoke once again about the party thrown by Saul Elstein at the Georgian manor house he had bought in Oxfordshire and how Natasha had become so uncomfortable with the hugging, the kissing and the thronging of famous actors and actresses, big-name directors, writers, politicians, painters and a few star-struck aristocrats, that she had retreated to the fastness of the vegetable garden. She had been joined by another Frenchwoman, Sophie, equally on the run. Their native language and their native land cascaded over the neat English rows of good greens – ‘I always wanted a country house and a vegetable garden,’ said Sophie, ‘et voilà!’

  The women talked rapidly as if engaged in a forbidden pleasure until both agreed with regret that they must return to a scene neither of them much liked. But, and Joe loved this, as Sophie Elstein explained, although she was ‘the new wife’ and of little importance in the world which came out of Saul’s Technicolor past and his recently divorced connection with English high society, still she ought to be at her husband’s side, ‘although I am only French’, when the guests came to say goodbye. ‘Although I am only French’ became a catchphrase between Natasha and herself for a while. The two women had met since then at Sophie’s invitation, twice, for lunch in Mayfair. Natasha had enjoyed her compatriot’s company but not enough to return the invitation.

  Mostly, though, on this last lap, in the restaurant and on the walk back, his arm slung around her shoulder, and in the hush of their sitting room, Natasha wanted to talk about him and draw him out of the darker flash of mood in the restaurant. She feared his dips into depression: it was too much like herself; she saw it as her duty to save him from them.

  She humoured him and recounted again his reaction in the little village church when she had refused to stand or kneel during Anthony’s wedding but sat throughout, wilfully obtrusive and therefore unforgivably drawing attention to herself and to him, Joseph thought. Anthony said it made the wedding.

  Or when, at a publisher’s dinner, one of the older men had quietly, a whisper, complimented Joseph on his complexion and with utter naivety he had ascribed it in solemn terms to his mother. Even Natasha had joined in the laughter at his earnestness and the flustered expression of the questioner who had thought to slip in the compliment on the sly. Or when she had caught Joseph in their bedroom, dancing madly and alone to pop music from the radio – ‘You looked possessed,’ she said, ‘like a shaman.’

  Like his increased vanity, she saw it as a mere response to the mood of the moment, a tasting of the superficiality of the age, a passing self-indulgence. It was no more than a game to him, she thought, following a fashion of the times. He wanted to play many parts, as he wore several different costumes, one day a velvet dandy, the next a frock-coated parody of the city, the next a celluloid gypsy. As Natasha saw it he was play-acting, safe in anonymous London, and she understood his need to try different roles, to re-cast himself for this life, so full of temptations. But he was safe, she thought, he was strong. She rested on that. Whatever the costume, the character would not change. She relied on that. For the moment he wanted to bask in the shallows, to follow the running of the deer. And maybe simply to entertain her, to show off his paces. Neither of them sensed the dangers of this flirtation on the boundaries of his personality.

  Just before they went upstairs she said what she had saved up for last. She came close to him and let him wrap his arms around her, benevolent, trancelike, and for a minute or two they rocked together, just a little, almost as if steadying themselves.

  ‘Thank you, Joseph,’ she said, focusing on his blurring eyes. ‘Not just for the dinner. But for the book. Yes. Like the exhibition. And before that the examination. Without you I would not have written this book. With you maybe I will write more.’

  ‘You will,’ he said, uncomfortable with the intensity. ‘You would have done anyway. You’re the cleverest, the best, everybody knows that.’

  She had left it too late. He would not even remember in the morning. She went up to look on Marcelle.

  ‘And so for a while we flowed on with that current,’ he wrote, ‘which seemed good for us, easy to yield to, disposed in our favour, taking us from the remote and chance confluence of our first encounter, onto what seemed a plain of rich meadows with miles of life and miles of time all before us. To our friends, we could have seemed to lead a charmed life, Natasha and Joseph, now competing, now connecting, always spoken of as a pair, now in battle, now in concord. Joseph and Natasha. Ripe for the fall.’

  For even as they had walked home on that night through the empty suburb, the last planes low in the sky, the grand houses in their lush avenues asleep and secure, Joseph taking a gallant shot at whistling the old favourites, the marching songs, ‘Goodbye Dolly’, ‘Tipperary’, the whistle rather diffuse, replaced by soft singing of ‘La Mer’; even as Natasha rejoiced in the young man she had met at Oxford, still, she believed, unchanged, still at her command, still bound to her; even with the scarcely digestible reality of publication, of becoming a presence, however marginal, in the world of fiction in which they had wandered through others’ books for years; and all that, and Marcelle, and friends, and all that; even then it is possible to say and with some certainty that the seeds of destruction were being planted.

  Nor was this to be by any external force. They came from within, from the past, from the encounter with old selves, from the bold, possibly hubristic, attempt to stare out old terrors, old fears, suppressed depressions. Joe, energised by a determined but poorly thought through notion of where his future lay, was to leave routines which from a disturbed adolescence onwards had meant so much to him, done so much for him, kept his day in formation, his mind in discipline. He would attempt to fly free and alone. And Natasha, who meant to tell Joseph of her decision that night but delayed it because she sensed it would take away from the innocent pleasure of the celebration, had finally decided to go into analysis, to re-examine herself, to sink as deeply into her past as she dare, to claim it back, whatever the risk.

  PART FOUR

  THE FALLOUT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  ‘At the time I thought I was living the dream,’ he wrote, ‘but I was stoking up the nightmare. The phrase “self-destruct” had just come into the language, old as an idea but new on the tongue, freshly minted for our day. There was a frenzy about what I did, like that type of sexual attraction which threatens madness denied physical satisfaction. I’m aware that I’ve said very little about sex. Difficult,
to a daughter, and difficult to calculate its role in the scheme of things.

  ‘My guess is that I took it for married granted and although I was very likely too stripling for her and although her exoticism was erotic, I had fantasies unsuitable for her and affronted her, from time to time, with an appetite for sexual experiments and adventure reaped from the more unbuttoned novels of the day. She must have longed for that sense of centred manhood she admired in the men who drank in the bar in La Rotonde, or in the confident and uncluttered sexual poise of a cinema hero of hers – Jean Gabin, a man without doubts about his manhood, a man to whom sex was calmly in its place. My guess is that your mother also took it for married granted most of the time. We thought it no matter of central concern.

  ‘The passion and the will were concentrated on the work and the routine. “You’ll have to get a routine,” Ross told me when we met in the Kew Arms and I told him I was leaving the job. “Every artist I’ve met had a routine. It’s either an amount of work a day or set hours, bank-clerk hours sometimes, night owl for others, that’s the best advice I can give you – get a routine.” Ross raised his half of bitter and smiled. “Then stick to it. That’s the tough part. Otherwise it’s the bottle or the bed. Good luck.”

  ‘I had at that time a very powerful inclination to seek out Ross for advice on everything, for reassurance, just for his mere presence, as if being in his company somehow validated my position in this strange broadcasting planet where work was not real work and privileged access was not earned and the playing fields of the artistic Etons of England were yours in which to roam at liberty. Or perhaps there was a simpler explanation: his uninhibited war-fired strength attracting my peace-coddled vulnerability.

  ‘Yet that is not altogether true. He liked to call on me as an equal or at least a sounding board, a sparring partner at weekends, someone to drop in on. Perhaps he represented security and in that bountiful but alien world I needed it. Later I was to discover that he too in his youth had suffered depressive setbacks and so that could have been the cord between us. But when he said that I had to have a routine I followed his advice as dutifully as any official taking his instructions from the Emperor of China, as eagerly as a young acolyte bowing to an injunction from the Pope: it was the Law and it would see me right and I followed it with great hope.