Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  Natasha dropped off Marcelle at the nursery school in Flask Walk and tacked up Hampstead High Street peering around her. Her eyesight was good but at times she could seem very short-sighted, peering, as if the world were too dangerous to be taken wide-eyed. She tried to get bearings. What would she latch onto? What would become one of those often unassuming spots which somehow make you feel safe and at home? She trailed up the hill scanning the unbusy street, glancing into the little courts and mews and walks, eventually turning right at the underground station and walking up Heath Street. On her left were some stone steps. She went up them as they twisted like an eccentric staircase and led her to the Mount, the top of the Hill, the little Georgian crown unordered but harmonious, not unlike La Rotonde. It was a place easy to love.

  Why had Joseph not chosen the house here? They had looked at one but he had heard the boom of traffic far below from a main road and that had scared him off. These narrow traffic-free alley-streets soothed her and she followed one which led to an immense, once grand, now neglected, Victorian gothic churchyard. She could do watercolours here: that churchyard could yield a lot. But the distant noise deterred him, fatally.

  Natasha came back into Hampstead by way of Mount Vernon and the Queen Anne splendour of Church Row, the sort of place where Ellen thought they ought to live and which they could have afforded, just, had Joseph not been determined to squirrel away some of his film earnings for a rainy day. The thrift was admirable but she wished he had been bolder. Yet Natasha applauded the common sense of what Joseph had tried to do and, more surely, she believed that an over-consideration of material circumstances was little more than an attempt to duck the real issues. So she wandered around Hampstead on that morning, a tourist, a stranger, trying to make it familiar, steadily suppressing the strong undertow of sadness for lost Kew.

  ‘Natasha! How are you?’

  She turned in the direction of the voice but recognised no one.

  ‘Over here!’

  Natasha focused. She was on the broad pavement at the High Street end of Perrin’s Court, having just passed what she did not yet know was Hampstead’s sole bohemian outdoor conversational venue, the Coffee Cup, a few tables under a permanent canopy outside a small restaurant.

  ‘How are you?’

  He had left his table and was in front of her.

  ‘James!’

  The name came to her with relief. James. And suddenly it was Oxford again and the early days in London, the magazine in Finchley, the beginning of James’s wildly improbable but successful career as a writer of popular songs, a friend. They shook hands.

  ‘Would you like a coffee?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He ushered her to the small and uncomfortable wooden seats.

  ‘Why are you alone?’

  James smiled and felt a swell of warmth at her directness.

  ‘Howard has just left. I stayed to pick up the bill.’

  ‘Howard . . . he writes the music. We’ve lost touch.’

  He ordered for both of them.

  ‘Geography,’ said James in that church voice Natasha so liked and liked all the more now that it stood at such odds with his vernacular popular lyrics. ‘Underestimated. Geography is a great maker and breaker of friendships. But now that you live here we shall get together again. We’ve been in Israel for a few weeks. Howard has family there.’

  ‘Joseph thought he might go there.’

  ‘Everyone should,’ said James. ‘It’s quite remarkable. One envies the kibbutz system without actually wanting to live on one. And Howard’s friends – so intelligent. Do you like Hampstead?’

  Natasha decided to avoid an answer.

  ‘I’ve just been up at the top on the Mount,’ she pointed.

  ‘That’s where we live.’

  ‘Together?’

  ‘Yes. We share a house, we share a job, but we don’t share a life!’ He laughed. ‘A well-practised answer with the merit of being true. The house is small but it’s somehow inspirational up there.’

  Natasha nodded.

  ‘I took The Unquiet Heart with me to Israel,’ said James. ‘Many congratulations. I loved it. I thought the young man was particularly finely drawn and Brittany came alive. It made me want to go there.’

  ‘So the book had its uses.’

  ‘It really is very good to see you,’ he said, as the coffee was placed in front of them. ‘How is Joseph? One reads about him now and then.’

  ‘Changing,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t we all?’

  ‘No. Most of us grow older on the basis of what we are. Change is different.’

  ‘I see it as inevitable,’ said James. ‘Especially if you move from one world into another.’

  ‘Like you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘And Joseph.’

  ‘But you have not changed,’ she said.

  ‘How disappointing.’ His warm affectionate laughter reassured her.

  ‘He seems . . . uncentred,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said James, ‘when you look at the trajectory. But the last time I saw him, when he came to that launch just before our Israel trip – you couldn’t make it, I remember – he seemed buoyant.’ Even overexcited, James could have added, even hyper.

  ‘Yes. He can’t believe his life,’ said Natasha.

  ‘That could lead one to be a little unbalanced.’

  ‘It leads to overconfidence and lack of confidence.’

  ‘That’s not unusual on the pop scene either,’ said James, ‘in fact I’d say it’s characteristic. And in many ways Joe is very much part of that generation if not of that specific strand in it.’

  ‘Is it so easy to sweep people up in the generalisation of “a generation”?’

  ‘It is relevant,’ said James, ‘especially, I think, this one. Bright working-class boys, early success, coming up to London, the music thing, the drugs thing, the sex, the sense of the world changing from one’s fate to one’s oyster!’ He laughed. ‘Instant pop sociology has become rather a weakness of mine.’

  ‘Sometimes I think that Joseph could have been homosexual.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘When you study his background.’

  ‘I see signs of a sort of pervasive sexuality, an erotic sensibility in some of his work and mannerisms, but I would describe that as feminine, not homosexual, and not uncommon, especially now.’

  ‘“Especially now”. Isn’t it merely a boast to claim that we live in a “special” age?’

  ‘Perhaps. All I can say is that this feels like one for me and for many others and across the old class barriers: it’s the sort of bonding you read about in a war but this time it’s a bonding in liberation of several varieties.’

  ‘Hedonism,’ said Natasha.

  ‘I was rather perturbed by one remark he made when we met,’ James said. ‘He told me he wanted to go to Vietnam.’

  ‘And you say he is buoyant? To go to Vietnam is a proof of buoyancy?’

  ‘I took issue with him, of course,’ said James, while still ruminating on Natasha’s reference to Joe’s sexuality, ‘but he insisted he needed to test himself. I’m sure “test” was the word. I pointed out he would have no accreditation, he had no experience as a war correspondent and it could in one sense be seen as merely voyeuristic.’

  ‘The voyeurism charge would check him,’ said Natasha. ‘Sometimes he seems to want to go into orbit or he believes he is already in orbit.’

  That was enough, she decided. It was becoming disloyal and besides the cause of much of his recent uncharacteristic behaviour could well be tracked back to the analysis, she thought, which he was undergoing at her request and on her behalf. She must take on that responsibility and accept the consequences.

  ‘We shall meet again,’ said James. ‘What a pleasant prospect.’

  ‘You remember that song we heard on the Arab radio station,’ said Howard, the moment that James came into their music room.

  ‘The
Egyptian one?’

  ‘Yes. But listen.’ Howard picked at a soulful melody on the guitar. ‘Almost exactly the same. But what I’ve played is Gaelic.’

  ‘How extraordinary.’

  ‘Now if you sort of splice them together you get this.’ Once again Howard played and this time for James images of remote islands in great seas, of Celtic crosses and god-haunted streams were superimposed on the deserts and dunes, the camel caravans and Bedouin of his romantic Arabia.

  ‘It’s not our usual style,’ said James.

  ‘Exactly.’ Howard, already besotted by this composition, could not resist playing it quietly once more as they talked on.

  ‘I’ve just seen Natasha,’ said James. ‘It could be her.’

  ‘A woman alone.’

  ‘A woman alone, in a pavement café; in Paris? At some crisis point thinking on life, how she arrived where she is, what choices she had.’

  ‘I could slow it down a bit,’ said Howard.

  ‘No. That won’t be necessary. We could give the song a name, the name of the woman.’

  ‘It is extraordinary, isn’t it?’ said Howard. ‘Egyptian and Gaelic.’

  ‘Natalie would be a good name,’ James said. ‘When we meet her she’s drinking coffee . . .’

  Isabel and Alain liked to have ‘les Richardsons’ to themselves and this time they went for lunch to Roussillon where there was a serviceable restaurant and a large open-air public swimming pool to which Joseph took Marcelle immediately after the main course.

  ‘She is adorable, your Marcelle,’ said Alain as they sat back with their cigarettes and coffee. ‘A little English rose.’

  ‘For me she is completely French,’ said Isabel, ‘except for the language, but already she is learning. You should have made her bilingual, Natasha.’

  ‘That’s what Joseph wanted.’

  ‘It is always the man who has the common sense,’ said Alain.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Alain. Were you asleep? It was I who suggested it. Alors!’

  ‘Two languages can be a disadvantage,’ said Natasha. ‘They are to me. I feel frustrated. My English will never be good enough. My French is not necessary in London. I am between two worlds.’

  ‘But Joseph tells me your English is superb,’ said Alain. He indicated that he wanted the bill. ‘He says the critics were marvellous.’

  ‘But it is only in English!’ said Isabel. ‘When will it be translated?’

  It had been rejected by three French publishers and Natasha was sore on the subject.

  ‘These things take time, Isabel.’

  ‘Patience, Isabel,’ said Alain. ‘Or read English.’

  ‘Joseph’s books are not in French either,’ said Isabel, ‘it’s too bad.’

  ‘I am going to see the swimmers,’ said Alain.

  ‘We will stay here out of the sun,’ said Isabel, ‘I have been waiting for you to go.’

  ‘You see how I am treated by my wife?’ said Alain. ‘I am not appreciated.’ ‘Go away. I want to talk to Natasha.’

  They watched his elegant figure saunter out of the cool restaurant, put on his English Panama hat and turn towards the swimming pool.

  ‘Now then, chérie, said Isabel, ‘what is it . . . ?’

  Alain watched Joseph and Marcelle with keen pleasure. At this time on the hot Provençal afternoon the pool attracted only the hardiest, the town boys and girls, the sons and daughters of the peasant families, children and adolescents exploiting their freedom while parents took a siesta before calling them back to help with the perpetual work. Joseph seemed so at home there, Alain observed, and nodded to himself at that observation, proving as it did his theory of ‘reversion to type’. He winced at the amount Joseph exposed himself to the sun but he was among equals in sun worship around the pool. Only Alain and a couple of others near his age took advantage of the rather tatty municipal parasols.

  Joseph was teaching Marcelle to swim at the shallow end, holding her tenderly under the belly, telling her to kick out her legs, to pull with the arms, or Alain assumed that was the case. Then they would stop and he would hoist her onto his shoulders and stride into deeper water where he would throw her high in the air and she would shriek with joy, spread-eagled against the sky, seeming to hang motionless for a moment before falling down into his strong grasp and shouting, ‘Again! Again!’ They waved at Alain and he felt both sad and happy at the pleasure this surrogate family brought him.

  ‘He swims like an otter,’ he said to Isabel as they had their last drink before bed. The doors were still wide open onto the deep Southern warmth of Provence. The sound of the crickets cascaded into the room.

  ‘She is not happy, Alain.’

  ‘It will pass.’

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘The first forty years of marriage are always unhappy.’

  ‘Alain!’

  ‘Unhappiness may be our basic condition.’

  ‘She sees a psychoanalyst.’

  ‘That makes everyone unhappy.’

  ‘You are impossible! Joseph, also, sees a psychoanalyst.’

  ‘That,’ said Alain and he paused, his tone changed, ‘is not good.’

  ‘You see!’

  ‘Not the two of them.’ Alain took a sip of the whisky. ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘Nothing serious. What do you expect? For someone of Joseph’s type, London is a box of chocolates.’

  ‘He is young.’

  ‘I agree. So does Natasha. Basically she feels that he is doing so many new things and fears he may be out of control.’

  ‘He is having a success,’ said Alain. ‘Natasha may find that difficult. History repeats itself. Look at her mother and Louis.’

  ‘I hadn’t considered that,’ said Isabel. She took another cigarette and shivered slightly. ‘I hadn’t considered that at all.’ She drew deeply on the cigarette. ‘Could you close the door, my sweet, soon there will be a breeze coming down from the mountains.’

  At La Rotonde itself, the little fort on the peak of the village, Natasha and Joseph sat close and looked at the stars, bright, diamond, beguiling. It was time they meandered back down the hill but neither wanted to leave this Crusaders’ rallying point. Joseph’s mind was tired: it felt heavy as if he had a severe cold combined with a severe hangover; it felt deadened.

  Natasha, the red tip of her cigarette the only point of light in the near darkness, was struggling against the feeling of loss at her absence from her analyst. She had not discussed this with Joseph. He did not take well to discussion of analysis but it would have helped if she knew that he too was suffering from this summer-vacation withdrawal. Her analyst had warned her she would, as on previous occasions, but it was worse this time. Natasha reasoned herself through it. They would be back in London in about a week and merely a week after that they would be back in analysis. One day at a time.

  ‘Remember when I said we should stay here and live here?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Natasha. It had been circling in her mind too and she smiled at the coincidence: they could still be twin souls.

  ‘We should have done it,’ he said.

  ‘Look at what you would have missed, Joseph.’

  ‘We should have done it.’

  ‘What do you say? “It’s never too late.” ‘

  ‘But it is,’ he said.

  She could find nothing to say in reply.

  The first time it hit him with its full force was on Shepherd’s Bush underground station. He had been to see friends at the BBC to discuss the possibility of working on a new arts magazine programme. Lunch in the bar had been noisy, beery, full of gossip with old pals, worlds away from his solitudes. He envied what he might have been had he stayed in the BBC and left the bar cheerful at the prospect that he might in some way rejoin that communal part of his past.

  Shepherd’s Bush Central Line station was all but deserted on the autumn afternoon. He did not have long to wait for the train.

  As he heard it come closer through
the tunnel it was as if a massive magnetic force began to pull him towards the edge of the platform, drawing him towards the tracks, overwhelming his resistance, and as the noise grew louder the strength of the pull grew and he found himself swaying, helpless, about to be taken fatally forward by it and then the train broke out of the tunnel and charged towards him. He backed away, he had to push himself back, against nothing but air but it took all his will, all his might to back away until he met the wall and pressed himself against it as the train braked loudly to a stop. The doors opened. He could not move. The doors closed. He waited until the train had gone. Keeping close to the wall he found the exit and took the stairs. The grey light of day made him blink. He would find a bus. He looked around at the strange world which was the same as the world before he had gone underground.

  That was how it began.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  There was only one course of action and he had to take it. He held onto that. He waited for the bus, saw it draw up, made no move, saw it pull off and then began to walk into Central London.

  The city air seemed uniquely oppressive. He stopped at every crossing and looked right, left, right again, remembering the childhood code, and then he would repeat the movements and only when it was completely clear would he cross the road, carefully, like an old man uncertain of his balance. He walked slowly up the gentle gradient to Notting Hill Gate and then the length of the Bayswater Road to Marble Arch. He thought he might go into Hyde Park in the hope that it might begin the healing he had ascribed to the effect of the countryside which he had sought as an adolescent when in similar fear of being unhinged. But the space was too alien. He might find himself isolated. He sheared away from that. Here in the streets there were people everywhere who could be called on.

  He passed Tyburn and tried to re-activate his shocked mind by remembering who had been hanged there after having been drawn and quartered and dragged out of the city in the Elizabethan golden age, but he could not call up the energy. He walked on, the gentle gradient now downhill as he went the full length of Oxford Street, until he arrived at Tottenham Court Road tube station. There, without breaking step, he went down, back into the underground. Sam would have told him he had to do this.