Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘That is very kind of you.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘The truth is not often kind.’

  ‘Well. We’re fine. Aren’t we?’

  ‘You laid siege to me,’ Natasha said. ‘Julia thought you were far too persistent, it was even vulgar that you kept on when it must have been perfectly obvious . . . But you came with your flowers – you still do – and your “dates”, everything you had to see in the cinema . . .’

  ‘And I wore you down,’ Joseph said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was it only that I wore you down?’

  ‘Oh no . . . Oh no . . .’ She stubbed out the cigarette and took another. ‘I surrendered to you. A little here. A little more. Then I grew to love you. Not completely for one or two years but Joseph . . .’ she lit the cigarette with care, collecting her thoughts, poised to say something she thought of key importance, ‘if you had not rescued me I do not think I would be here now.’

  She blew out a long thin stream of smoke.

  ‘And so you see,’ she said, ‘I am laying siege to you in return.’

  ‘Please, Natasha.’

  ‘What do you fear?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Even as he said that, a sensation of panic seized his mind and he wanted to run away. He forced himself to stay.

  ‘Why do you fear so much?’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘My analyst grows more insistent. That is all I can say. She says that I will not be able to go where I must go without you being analysed too.’

  ‘What does she know about me?’

  ‘I have told her a great deal about you.’

  ‘I wish you hadn’t.’

  ‘Joseph,’ she said, ‘we have talked about this matter for about a month now and always I give up. But she is insistent.’

  ‘You sound frightened of her.’

  ‘Not frightened. Dependent and increasingly so. Which is much worse.’

  ‘So it’s not really about me being Free or Facing up to My Demons or getting back to what I was when I bought flowers in the market at Oxford and tried to hide them as I walked through the streets. It’s to help you.’

  ‘It is all the other things as well. Please believe me.’

  ‘But what it comes down to is this woman forcing you to force me to go into analysis.’

  ‘Is that how you see it?’ She looked defeated, and her face flooded with unhappiness. ‘Is that how you see it?’

  ‘It sounded cruel. Sorry.’

  ‘It is one truth,’ she agreed.

  If he loved her this obstinacy was a torment to her. If he loved her then he would surely do all he could to help relieve the unhappiness that consumed her. He had to surrender. But how could he continue to protect her if he did that?

  ‘OK, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’

  Natasha put her hand to her mouth and nodded. She felt such exhaustion.

  ‘I am grateful,’ she said.

  ‘No, don’t say that . . .’

  ‘I am so grateful,’ she said. ‘And . . . maybe as your siege on my life was so good for me, I hope my siege over these weeks will prove as good for you. I think it will, Joseph. I’m sure it will.’

  ‘They get to all you television people,’ his doctor said, ‘in the end.’

  Joseph sat opposite him in the back room of a large semi-detached house which served as the surgery. He had come for advice. He wanted no one to know about it and he trusted the doctor to keep his confidence.

  ‘What is it that makes you want to waste good money on talking to a psychoanalyst?’ His large face, waxen, dolorous, bored save for the small blue eyes buzzing angrily.

  Joseph was not going to tell him the truth.

  ‘It’s all a conspiracy, you know,’ the doctor said. ‘I had to do it at medical school. All they dish out is either common sense or mumbo-jumbo. Freud fleeced rich women with it and it’s been a con ever since. When did you last sleep with your mother? Do you want to castrate your father? The cure, so-called, takes three years and the fact is, old boy, in three years just by living normally you can get yourself out of most mental fixes. And who needs it? Would Chekhov have written what he did if he’d been done over by a trick cyclist? Look at the way his father tried to destroy him. His father was a shit but Chekhov sorted his life out for himself. Maybe that’s precisely why Chekhov was a genius. Psychoanalysis is unscientific, fashionable, mediaeval rubbish. Still. I’ve a friend in this game who isn’t too much of a fraud. He’s in Harley Street so take out your savings. I’ll drop him a note although you look well enough to me, as well as anybody has any right to look if they write novels and work in the cesspit of telly.’

  ‘I felt cheered up by that,’ Joe wrote after reading the gist of that brief medical encounter which had taken place more than thirty-five years ago. ‘His bombast reconfirmed my instinct and challenged Natasha’s perspective. In the few days I waited for the call from Harley Street, I felt lifted by the saloon-bar bollocking of the pragmatic old-school English doctor. All I had to do was to remember that it was rubbish and nothing need be lost while Natasha’s request would be honoured. More significantly he had admitted what I had failed to admit even to myself. For when he talked about Chekhov I remembered Ross telling me of Henry Moore who had begun to read a book which psychoanalysed his sculpture. He put it aside after a couple of pages, “I prefer not to know that,” he said. What if whatever talent I had was the result of my own efforts to orchestrate internal contradictions, to make a coherent personality out of discordance, a work of art out of gradually shaping whatever I imagined, whoever I am? And what if it is intricate and unique to me and best cultivated in secret? How can anyone else possibly know the mind of someone better than the person who has lived with it all their lives?

  ‘How could what is me be re-set by the application of a rule book of generalisations drawn from the experience of others whose experiences were probably far from my own? I resisted and disputed the notion that there was one magic bunch of keys which would unlock all personalities equally. Of course we are all born, we all grow painfully, want food, shelter, sex, security, children, happiness and then we die. But it is the nuances, the variations, the singularities, the fingerprints of our lives that make us individual, and that is what most matters. How could any one system apply to every different one of us?

  ‘Yet as the day approached for my first visit to Harley Street, by way of Oxford Circus, like Natasha, but on Monday and Thursday so as not to bump into her on Tuesdays and Fridays, any buoyancy I had gathered from the doctor, any bravado I had garnered from my own rough-hewn recruitment of unanalysed heroes from the past, all the boosting of confidence and the exaggeration of contempt for psychoanalysis began to drain away. Natasha had embraced it. She said that she was already benefiting from it. But what would it do to me? I felt as if I were offering myself for some sort of intellectual lobotomy. What would happen when he tried to get at my mind?

  ‘On the first visits I lay rigid on the altar of the sofa, sacrificing myself for Natasha, I thought in moments of self-aggrandisement, and wasting time, wasting money and wasting effort as I fended off the silent pressures for speech.

  ‘“You don’t want to do this, do you?” he said.

  ‘“No.”

  ‘He waited until I cracked.’

  Joe had managed to arrange the Thursday session for the late afternoon which disturbed the pattern of his day less than the morning time on Monday. The whole business, the tube, the walk, the session, the return, could take up to three hours and that did not include, as the process finally got under way, time for reflection or assimilation. After the session on Thursdays he went to the pub to meet Edward and the others.

  Like Edward, Joe arrived there on the dot of opening time, five-thirty. The others turned up later. This day Edward was accompanied by the American poet Joe had heard about but not met. He knew she was a fine poet, an ambitious woman and the new girlfriend of the eight-year-married Edward. She drank w
ater. They looked good together, Joe thought: Edward tall, rather square, broad-shouldered, called ‘rugged’ in a recent Observer profile, in looks and carriage more a countryman than a town wit; she blonde, leggy, her open health and beauty framed in confidence, new world, independent.

  As soon as they had secured a table in an empty corner, Christina struck.

  ‘I read A Chance Defeat and I liked it,’ she said in her level gravelly sexy New England accent. ‘Tell me. Do you believe the English provincial novel carries guns any more?’

  Joe’s smile took a little effort to sustain. He was intrigued and rather flattered to be such a close witness to this hot literary affair between Edward and Christina. He had adjusted himself to behave in an adult way, sympathetically, over the flaunted adultery. Despite the spilling of his entrails in Harley Street less than half an hour beforehand he thought he had put on the carapace of a man of the world. Christina punched right through all that and with a smile bigger and sustained at greater length than his.

  ‘I mean when Hardy and Lawrence did their thing, Britain had an Empire and everybody listened. Everything that happens at the centre of an Empire is important both to those who want to join and those who want to beat it up. Even in the States we wanted to know what happened in Nottinghamshire and Wessex. Everything that mattered to you guys mattered to us guys. But will that wash any more?’

  Joe nodded and then realised he was expected to reply. The daze in his mind which followed a session was usually anaesthetised in the pub by a few drinks with people who, like most (save the few in Kew to whom Natasha had unfortunately divulged it), knew nothing of the analysis. The shame at needing it had not lessened and he still feared that, publicly known, it would be the equivalent of having a card hung around his neck declaring him to be Unclean. Now, quite suddenly in the pub it was literary bare knuckle fighting.

  ‘If writing’s any good,’ he responded, rather feebly in tone and emphasis, ‘then it doesn’t matter where it’s set, does it?’

  ‘Not in theory,’ she said, crisply, ‘I agree. And never in poetry. But the novel traditionally carries the news and what’s the news from the English provinces today?’

  Edward was happy to sip the stiff whisky, not a referee, not a contented spectator, more, Joe realised, a corner man wanting his own contender to land the telling blows.

  ‘Same as usual,’ said Joe, lighting up, ‘same the whole world over, births, deaths and all that stuff in between.’

  ‘I see what you’re saying. And you’re right, of course. But it seems to me that the novel has always tracked the power. I don’t mean the political power necessarily although that counts. The best novelist alive could be in Finland but would anybody be as interested as the best novelist in America or Russia? No, the power I’m talking about is where the heat is. And it seems to me that you’ve had great novelists over here and we have too – look at Faulkner, just look at Faulkner! – who have quarried the provinces but it’s time to move on.’

  ‘People still live there.’

  ‘I know. Oh, I know.’

  ‘Things happen. Life goes on.’

  ‘Oh, I know. You’re right.’

  ‘And what’s a quarry got to do with writing anyway? Writing isn’t an industrial process.’

  ‘I agree with you,’ she said. ‘You say these things, then somebody comes along and writes a book that blows the thing clean out of the water.’

  ‘But you must have said it because you believe it?’

  ‘Yes. Sorry. I believe it.’

  ‘So what next? In your system. Of perpetually and opportunistically moving on to pastures new.’

  ‘Well, what next?’ She took a steady sip of the water. ‘Women writers – I know there have always been women writers but I mean self-consciously feminist writers – we are claiming more territory. The American Jews are riding high now. They’re in the saddle. Next I think the blacks, in the States anyhow, they bring us news and news we can trust because it’s fiction. Faulkner still has heat because of the blacks. Your old Empire, your Commonwealth has more and more writers demanding space for their experience. In the States the gays are gathering on the fringes and then there’s genre writing. Crime’s bigger than ever. I’m afraid the carnival’s moved on from the English provinces.’

  ‘Joe thinks you can find all human life in Wigton, don’t you, Joe?’ Edward’s intervention was neat, amusingly delivered and just what was needed to save Joe and caution Christina.

  ‘Too royal,’ Joe said. ‘A man’s a man for a’ that. Rabbie Burns, working-class poet, rare. My round.’ He went to the bar glad to leave them.

  Others came soon and the talking groups split and regrouped like amoebae until it was time for him to leave. He sought out Christina.

  ‘I meant to say how much I liked the poems in The Vanishing Point,’ he said, ‘some of them were really good.’ He quoted:

  ‘Fragments of my past

  Shards of memory cut

  The days to ribbons

  Streaming blood before me.’

  ‘I’m flattered, Joe,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And I particularly like the seven set in Concord – New England Blues.’

  ‘I grew up there,’ she said. ‘It’s a kinda picture-book and historical-cut-out little spot but it was home, you know?’

  ‘I do. Home’s good. And very good to meet you.’

  ‘You too, Joe.’ She held out her hand. ‘Read Robert Lowell. Good luck. I mean that. Good luck.’

  Why did she say that? he asked himself as he zigzagged through Soho making for Piccadilly Circus. Does she think I need good luck? Do I look as if I need such a supportive send-off? And I’ve read Lowell.

  He dwelled on the idea of his luck until he was almost home. It was, he thought, evidence of his exhausted mind that what was most likely a remark of passing American politeness he should seize so tenaciously. He used to thank his luck. A fortune teller in a fair on Hampstead Heath had once pointed out that his left hand was so criss-crossed with lines that even if he fell off at tower block he would land on his feet. He had believed her. But as the stripping away of the layers of his personality gathered pace in the analysis, he felt less sure of his luck. Had Christina intuited that? Her poems – those about mental breakdown – certainly showed her understanding of states of disturbance. Maybe she meant that luck alone could cure what luck had caused. Edward was very brazen about her, he thought: quite rightly, much more honourable than hiding her away. A woman like Christina could not be hidden away. Her boldness reminded him of Natasha. It was a pity that Natasha never came to the pub. Perhaps if he told her about Christina . . .

  On Mondays when the session was at 11 a.m. he made a day of it in London. His version of the script was now in its third draft and Saul had changed directors and brought in Tim whose Jude had not done too badly. Saul prided himself on spotting talent and on sticking with it, or at least giving it a second chance, and so far Tim and Joseph were shaping up well. Tim would keep it low budget, find good locations and not have to build expensive sets, and he would employ some of the brilliant new generation of English actors: they too were inexpensive.

  On Monday afternoons Saul would hold court with Tim and Joseph, together with his accountant and sometimes his secretary whose touch, he said, was ‘golden’: ‘If there was a female Midas Miriam would be the female Midas.’ For Joseph these two or three hours swung between hell and an education. When they picked over every line of dialogue and asked him every question they could think up about the line, the response called for by the line, the response the line itself answered to, the necessity for the line, whether it should be two lines, or three lines, or no line at all, or a rewritten line and then they would all set to and ‘rewrite’ with arthritic spontaneity, Joseph would feel as if sawdust had replaced any remaining brain cells and the sawdust was being ground exceedingly small by a wheel of granite. Saul.

  When, though, Saul would take out the long afternoon cigar and ease int
o anecdotes about the ‘legends’ he had worked with, Joe felt he had a ringside seat on history. Saul was generous with his stories, detailed, even pedantic in his descriptions of memorable scenes, the interplay between actors, a specific shot, what had been better by being left unsaid, the use of music. There was about him at these times the manner of a great teacher, rabbinical in scrutiny, worldly in reference, captivating and aware of it.

  Afterwards, Tim would steer Joe to the nearest pub to spend half the time moaning that Saul would never actually sign off on the script, the other half moaning about the financial disaster resulting from his divorce.

  Joe always walked through Hyde Park after that. He stopped now and then at a bench to make notes on what had been said. It did look as if this film would be made and with his script. He had to rein in his impatience. And Charles had hinted that parts of Occupied Territory would benefit from rewriting. He must not be impatient. How could you not rush, though, when there were no daily constraints of external routine? All the time in the world made you put extra pressure on yourself or you finished nothing.

  He would watch the planes south of Hyde Park, still quite high in this part of the city, a tolerable drone, but every single one headed for Kew Gardens, for his house, the pilot’s hand about to reach out to activate the screeching brakes.

  He always arrived home irritated at his tiredness. Natasha would be eager to hear what had happened in the analysis and the strain of not telling her everything was something he could have done without.

  It was late when he raised the subject. Perhaps he waited because, knowing there would be disagreement, he did not want to give it time to drag on. He knew that this would be no more than an opening shot but he had thought it through for months now and it had to be said. They had just watched News at Ten.

  He waited until a plane had cleared over. ‘Last Sunday,’ he said, ‘a plane woke me up before six. They say they suspend night arrivals until after six but they don’t. After that I couldn’t stop counting, wherever I was or wherever we were; in the house, out in Kew, on the towpath, round at Anna’s or Margaret’s, back in the house, I just kept counting. I was doing all sorts of other things as far as you or anybody else might have noticed but what I was really doing all day and all the time was counting the planes. It wasn’t frantic but I couldn’t get rid of it.