Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘Then I began to time the space between the planes so that I could work out when they might be coming and try to disconnect myself for those small spans but they vary even though they seem to come like clockwork, they vary as if to stop you predicting them. There were hundreds. There were pauses now and then and I thought – they’ve stopped. Then they came back. Two hundred and eighty-three aeroplanes went over our house last Sunday, flying low with brakes full on, and part of my mind spent all that day locked against the noise so that it didn’t blow out my brains or make me run away again.

  ‘Two hundred and eighty-three times I heard the plane, I braced myself against the plane, I tried to make whatever is inside this skull into a second layer of armour plating inside the bone and when the plane sound left, and as I imagined it sail over those great conservatories in Kew Gardens, across the Thames, I got ready for the next one. We ate meals, we went on a walk, we had tea in the garden at Anna’s, we watched the play on television, we read, we wrote, Marcelle was seen and heard and for her and for you, I’m sure, it was a good day but for me it was two hundred and eighty-three aeroplanes ripping through my mind as they are doing now and Natasha, why do we have to keep living here?’

  She saw a pleading face, puffy from the too much drink he took more regularly now.

  ‘We love it here,’ she began, fearfully.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Our friends, Marcelle’s friends . . .

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Others . . .’

  ‘I know . . . Others cope . . . I know.’

  ‘Where would we go?’

  ‘We could try Richmond Hill. They don’t seem to pass over there.’

  ‘No!’ Natasha made an awful decision, obstinately held to. ‘If you want to move, we move. Not just a few hundred yards.’

  ‘It’s further than that.’

  ‘We have to think it over.’

  ‘I have. Hundreds of times. Here it comes again . . . Why should we spend our life under a flight path when we could sell this place, buy another place and not be under a flight path?’

  ‘This is where you brought me. This is where I have settled.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You have settled here too.’

  ‘I have.’

  She saw the dejection but she was too occupied fighting her own alarm to take it into account.

  ‘Can you not give it another try? Can you not go more to that library in the club?’

  ‘I could. But I can’t go every day. People don’t. Don’t ask me. They just don’t.’ And it’s cut off there, he wanted to say, it becomes just odd sitting alone in a club library, in a beautifully furnished and polished room full of rare books I feel self-conscious, which is fatal. It’s no place for me to write what I want to write and I’m not telling you this because you’ll ask why it isn’t and I don’t know. And I always have to come home. There are weekends. And until midnight they’re here most days, beginning again at six.

  ‘I have to think about this.’

  I have to talk to my analyst is what she really meant, Joseph thought, and said nothing.

  ‘Please do,’ he said and closed his eyes as another plane screamed over. ‘Please. Do.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  All their Kew friends seemed to take Joseph’s side. ‘Bloody nuisance, aren’t they?’ or ‘Such a fantastic difference when we have a weekend off’ or ‘Friend of mine in a flat in Baker Street says they are getting worse even there.’ But Joseph felt that he had been found wanting: even sympathy appeared critical. ‘Don’t blame you. Thought of moving ourselves’ or ‘If it weren’t that the kids were settled in school here . . .’ Joseph squirmed.

  When their Kew friends were more than usually cheerful under the flight path he wanted to crawl into a corner. Even when an escapee from Kew said, ‘It drove me mad too, get out before it traps you, get out before you’re hooked,’ Joseph still thought, but it’s only him, look at all the others who endure it, look at what is being endured everywhere you look – what are a procession of noisy planes?

  So again he tried to bear it. As his defences were being dismantled by his analyst so to prove his independence and his will he would test himself in Kew: holding out against the planes was the test. If he could stop counting them or act out indifference to that howl in the sky then he would be better able to resist the offensive of the analyst.

  At the same time, they began the search for a new house.

  There were times when he could not pass an estate agent’s office without peering at the photographs of available houses and collecting sheets of information from all over London. For the rest of his life Joe could closely connect with many districts in London through the memory of visiting a house unbought. It was a journey to the interior of the middle-class metropolis and the more Joe saw the more cosy and hand-finished and neat their own house seemed in Kew. Years later he could still remember a large elegant double-volumed drawing room in Chelsea (too expensive), ‘a gem of a place’ (but no garden for Marcelle) perfectly situated next to the Kensington Public Library, a big end-of-terrace house near Notting Hill (but next to a pub), an excellent house in Chiswick but the planes came over almost as low as in Kew. So it went on for more than two months while Natasha worked on her book and Joe worked on the script and anxiously saw his novel through the proof stage and began to do a little more radio. Looking for a house became their way of life.

  Natasha played fair. It would be unjust to make it simple and say that he rushed in with eager urgency and she somehow always found a way to block it. There were at least two houses she liked and said so and would have gone for. But at the back of his mind, Joe thought they were too show-off. They were too big a leap, too much of a statement, too uncomfortable to live with. It was Joe’s vacillation in these two cases which passed by the opportunity.

  His guilt at what he feared he was doing to Natasha made him read into her remarks and expressions an attitude which was not always there. Instead of accepting her willingness and building on her determined cooperation he kept looking for and, as he thought, finding the regret, the projected sense of loss, the sadness. It was Joe who extended the process and made it weary by misreading Natasha, by fearing too much for her, by letting his own never-absent guilt unnerve him. Joe who even at those two sunniest moments, when the way seemed clear, conjured up a shadow and drew back. Joe who decided after several weeks to make a further attempt to find a quieter place in Kew itself.

  So again he walked the streets of the suburb logging the precise flight paths, and asked shopkeepers, landlords and even passers-by whether this precise flight path was frequently used, how it compared to one a quarter of a mile or two hundred yards away. He would stand still on the pavement, look at his watch and then look at the sky; make a note, move on. A surveyor of noise. Now and then there seemed hope – a cottage near the Green was a sort of island, a house towards Barnes seemed to stand between flight paths.

  ‘There’s a house in Kew Road,’ said Natasha, ‘one of those detached houses. Anna said she’d been in one and they are very well built, practically soundproof.’

  ‘They’re on the same flight path as us.’

  ‘But they’re Victorian, and they have cellars. You could work there.’

  She smiled. She had not asked him the direct question. She had no need. She knew that he wanted to please her.

  The cellars were large, windowless and cold.

  ‘They are quiet,’ she said when they went across the road and gazed at the house they had rather shyly looked through, feeling, as always, more voyeurs than potential purchasers.

  ‘It’s out of our range,’ he said. ‘I’d have to do another script.’

  They stood, hand in hand, Natasha scarcely daring to look at him, Joseph not daring to say no. Was he to spend much of the rest of his life in those cellars? Well, why not? What did it matter where he worked? To make it harder, there were no planes that night and this broad and tree-lined avenue of sol
id middle-class grandeur, which led in a royal fashion to the Gardens, appeared perfect.

  ‘The garden is so big,’ she said, ‘Marcelle will love it.’

  ‘It is a real English house,’ she said.

  ‘We need never move again,’ she said. ‘Look how strongly it stands. Like a castle.’

  Joseph’s throat was dry. He had difficulty easing it. Recently, now and then, the mere drawing in of a breath had become a demanding exercise.

  ‘Can we, can I, there’s a couple more I’d like you to see, can we think about it?’

  ‘It is perfect,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ He swallowed with some effort. ‘I can see it is.’

  ‘You need not blame yourself for bringing pressure to bear,’ her analyst said, speaking more slowly than usual, her voice matching the exhausted expression Natasha had caught sight of when she came in. ‘Undoubtedly from what you tell me he is the sort of young man who will be putting pressure on himself in his analysis. He will perhaps still be ashamed of doing it at all, though that will go. He will fear it, of course. And he will fight to stay in control of the analysis, which of course cannot happen. The aeroplanes, I agree with you, are only a sign, they objectify the pain he is re-experiencing from his past. Nevertheless we must accept that for Joseph they are also real, and they are especially real at present and they must be respected.’

  ‘Can I have two more weeks?’ he asked her.

  He based himself in Reading and looked for houses near the mainline railway station into London. Sam now had a car and drove Joe around for three afternoons while he sifted through the properties on offer. On two of the afternoons Ellen went with them.

  ‘There’s some beautiful houses,’ she said to Sam after Joe had gone back to London.

  ‘You’ve no idea, have you, until you see them. The money in those houses!’ she said. ‘I could’ve lived in any of them.’ The well-tended, handsome Thames valley cottages, houses and mansions had been to Ellen like a vision from Hollywood. To think that Joe might live in one of them was not easy to assimilate. They were, no argument, a cut above.

  ‘Natasha’s not as keen as he is,’ said Sam. ‘She doesn’t want to be in the sticks.’

  ‘She doesn’t look well,’ said Ellen. ‘Her eyes were as if she was running a temperature. They glittered. Didn’t they?’

  Sam had thought that Natasha was on the edge of tears.

  ‘Joe looks as bad in his own way. He can’t keep still. And did you see how he kept looking at her? It was as if he was a bit frightened of her.’

  ‘What you’ve told me,’ said Joe’s analyst, ‘is that to use your own expression you’ve entered into a phase of “chronic indecision”. And I take your phrase “interiority complex”. When you started looking for houses you said that you would have been happy to have taken the first one that fitted the bill but somehow that didn’t happen. You don’t quite want to blame Natasha for this but you do point out that it’s been in your character to just take whatever turns up. And you believe that has worked for you. Yet you have always said that Natasha has better taste and more discrimination than you have. You fear she is imposing that to slow the process down or even stop it. Yet you also contradict that. Now you complain that you can’t make your mind up at all.

  ‘You tell me there’s a possible place in Kew, there were two houses in Goring near Reading, quite convenient for London and one of them was “perfect”, your mother said, in fact she told you that when you were very small and she cleaned houses – in the war – she used to take you to a house just like that. Now you say that Natasha seems to be losing interest and you don’t have the strength to make the decision alone. You are afraid that she won’t help you. You say it’s the unstoppable noise that has “bled you weak” – your expression again.’

  ‘He is taking so long to decide,’ Natasha said to her analyst, ‘that I can’t believe any more that he wants to do it. If Joseph really wanted to move he would have moved by now. That is what he is like. There was one house we saw in Goring which was perfect. I would not have wanted to be stuck out there while he travelled into London, I would fear what he might do there alone, and we know no one at all in Goring. But the river is so beautiful and Joseph liked the fact that it is a small and cosy little town and it is near Oxford for me. But he kept asking me instead of making up his own mind.’

  ‘Julia suggests we try Oxford,’ Joseph said.

  ‘Is this the last place? We’ve looked enough now surely.’

  ‘Yes. This is it.’

  ‘Of course you must come back to live here,’ said Julia as she gave them tea. ‘It would be lovely to have you here, you know Oxford and you like it. How could anyone not? I’m sure you can write as well here as anywhere else and people say the train to London is acceptably reliable. I’ve heard you can do quite solid reading on the journey.’

  The one house in their range was a semi-detached in North Oxford occupied by five students. It was in an advanced state of disrepair and full of unsweet smells.

  ‘It needs a total overhaul,’ Joe said.

  ‘Why don’t you do it a room at a time?’ Julia suggested. ‘It could be fun.’

  ‘Oxford,’ said Natasha as they went to see it for the second time later that afternoon, ‘is a place of good omens for us. I could go back to the art college part time. Julia says that there are several writers in Oxford, some of them dons, you won’t lack for company. I’d feel safe here when you went to London or abroad.’

  ‘But look at it,’ he said as they stood across the road and gazed at the red-brick pile with its peeling paint and student sense of the transient. ‘It would cost a fortune to make it decent.’

  ‘You want everything too neat and tidy, Joseph! Remember that you are allowed to be a bohemian. We could leave some of the rooms for rent.’

  ‘I don’t want to live in a commune.’

  ‘Where are your socialist principles, Joseph?’ She laughed and later he thought that the laugh was a small flame he ought to have nourished. She had not laughed as freely and spontaneously as that for some time. But he ignored it in this time of chronic indecision. Perhaps her eagerness raised fears that she would meet young lecturers and artists when he was not in Oxford, that her status as a well-reviewed novelist (‘Disciplines insight with a classically taut construction,’ The Times had said of The Unquiet Heart) would see her into circles not as enthusiastic about him. It could be that a gust of jealousy blew out the flame . . .

  Two weeks later they came out of the estate agent’s in Kew Gardens having made their offer for the house in Kew Road. Natasha was radiant. The bloom on her face emphasised to Joseph the tension which had dragged her down over the past few months.

  ‘Thank you, Joseph,’ she said. ‘From the bottom of my heart. I must pick up Marcelle now.’ Her look of love and gratitude fortified him.

  He stood there for a few minutes after she had gone, the small railway station, like a country stop, behind him, and in front the little plaza already tapestried in memory. The junk shop where they had bought much of their furniture, the bookshop and the little café which coyly put out a few tables on the pavement on hot days, the shops where Natasha was known now, the bank from which he still drew his modest few pounds of ‘spending money’ on Saturday mornings, the cigarette machine sometimes a last resort late in a night’s writing, and in front of him, beyond the shops and the tree-lined road in which they would now live, the great Gardens, and beyond them, the towpath, the Thames, and around and about, their friends, and he knew that he was lucky and if Natasha’s happiness meant some sacrifice it would be worth it. He felt good.

  It was the right decision. He breathed it in and relaxed, let go, and just then, even lower than usual, what appeared to be a vast whale of metal ripped through the sky directly overhead and he thought that his head would explode with the pain of it, all tolerance instantly gone, all resistance worn down by now, brain lacerated raw, mind unhinged while sound possessed it, defenceless as the met
al screamed west, and soon there would be further invasions and they would never stop.

  He wanted to cover his ears with his hands but that would have made him too conspicuous.

  ‘I am aware of other lives going on untold,’ he wrote to their daughter. ‘They will have to wait for another time.

  ‘For instance I have not told you enough about our friends in Kew who stay our friends to this day or the friends from work who made up a rather buccaneering meritocratic metropolitan gang at that time. We were engaged with both groups and there was seeding of what have proved long loyalties. I did not know then that two couples among our friends were having a bruising passage in the struggle of their young marriages or that fear of failure and failure itself were not uncommon.

  ‘My guess is that they returned a good-mannered blind eye to us. We made efforts when with them and it is more than likely that being with them helped. It could be for a spell that it was our friends who kept us together.

  ‘But there was a normal busy English suburban, privet-hedged, private-gardened life to be thankful for on good and on bad days. Although Natasha and I were sunk into real and assumed difficulties of being, the uncharted worlds of what we “really” were and what we might have been, I know that we played our parts in the central drama of that group in Kew Gardens, which was the parenting of the children, a job for which none of us was prepared, by which all of us could be exhausted, but in which most of us found some pleasure and no little achievement in getting through it. In Kew the children defined the group. In London the lack of children defined the group.

  ‘Your mother increasingly regarded London with suspicion, as a corrupting, unprincipled force, but it was something I was part of and I always thought that, oddly, Natasha could have coped with it better than me, but she turned her back on it. She was certainly feted by some of them – her brilliant but slightly idiosyncratic English, her rapidity of response whether sure of her ground or not, the amused anticipation with which she greeted people who were clever and threatening. Still, though less relentlessly, the films, the theatre, the bring your own bottle parties, still the feeding of the ducks, still the playground, the towpath.