Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  Tim insisted that Joe give him lunch at the Garrick Club. One of Joe’s reservations lay in the existence of a strictly implemented club rule that no business be done on club premises. Tim was meeting him for business, business which had been initiated by Joe. Joe was nervous, not helped when Tim arrived without a tie and expressed over-loud thanks to the porter who produced three rather shrivelled specimens, one of which Tim declared to be ‘superb’.

  They walked up the wide staircase to the bar and Tim insisted that Joe become guide and curator. He stopped in front of so many of the paintings that Joe feared they might arrive at the bar too late. The painting of ‘Master Betty’ intrigued him most especially when Joe explained, he hoped accurately, that this boy actor had been such a prodigy at the end of the eighteenth century that both Houses of Parliament had adjourned to allow the members to attend a performance. ‘What a movie!’ said Tim, and then insisted on looking at the cabinet of curios.

  The bar was jostling full and friendly as always. Joe had entered the club not only at the bottom of the ladder but outside the pale. Now he went in with sufficient confidence and the anticipation of courteous acquaintanceship from the fleet of Garrick lunchtime regulars. Tim ordered champagne because he had heard it was served in cool silver tankards. They were soon in conversation with a publisher and an actor whom Tim knew better than Joe did, as was the case with several of those they met. They talked the news of the day. Unconsciously, perhaps, the tradition of the original coffee house, which had begat this and other clubs like it two centuries before, was still carried on.

  In the grand dining room, the Coffee Room, surrounded by Zoffany’s portrayals of famous actors in famous plays of his day, they were taken to a side table. Down the middle of the room was the Long Table, glistening with polish like all the others, but reserved for members whose duty, Joe told a questioning Tim, was to talk to whoever they sat next to.

  ‘You can’t smoke until two o’clock,’ said Joe as they sat down and, still in the character of curator, ‘there has to be no sign of any business being done. No papers, nothing like that.’

  ‘So the script stays on the deck.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who am I,’ said Tim, ‘to question the customs of centuries? But we can still talk turkey?’

  ‘Yes,’ Joe said. ‘Hypocrisy is acceptable.’

  ‘I like that! More like the old you. You’ve been a bit down lately.’

  There was always now a gallop of impatience in Joe’s head these days when he was in company. He wanted it to be over. But he held on. It had been fine so far – the familiarity and the unthreatening distractions of the club, the precise knowledge of what he could do in the next couple of hours and the known quantity of Tim had helped him to keep the threats at bay. To be told that he looked ‘a bit down’ threw him. No one must know.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said.

  ‘Probably not enough sex,’ said Tim, newly hitched after his divorce. But Joe would not play. ‘Sex sorts you out like nothing on earth. I’ve always thought you needed more of it. Being you. As I know you, that is. I’ll start,’ he said to one of the Garrick’s uniformed waiters, Jenkins, who stood unsmiling, ‘with your Morecombe Bay shrimps followed by your steak and kidney pie, all the trimmings.’

  ‘Smoked eel please,’ said Joe, ‘and calf’s liver. Thank you.’

  ‘The house red will do me,’ said Tim.

  ‘A carafe of the club claret, sir?’ Jenkins looked at Joe who nodded.

  ‘Isn’t that the Foreign Secretary over there?’

  Guardedly, Joe looked.

  ‘He’s with that journalist, what’s his name, from The Times, what’s his name? Corridors of power, Joe, this is where it all happens.’

  Does it? Joe did not want to engage. Did it?

  Already there was the pull which drew him from even such amiable banter. He needed solitude to see this attack through, if indeed he ever could get through it. Yet he also needed company. Every path bifurcated before him.

  ‘The script of her book,’ said Tim after the first course and two glasses. ‘Shall I whisper?’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘It doesn’t work. That is, it doesn’t work for me. It feels too rushed but then I thought maybe it’s too French. You’ve made it very spare.’

  ‘She writes sparely.’

  ‘But this is a script, Joe, it needs a bit of meat, a bit of colour, a bit of encouragement for the poor old director. Those shrimps were the best I’ve had for a while. What do you think?’

  ‘Obviously I think it’s OK. It will have to be worked on but what doesn’t?’

  ‘Maybe it’s too continental for my taste. I like the location – who wouldn’t want to shoot a film in Brittany? But the story’s so . . . French. If you get very lucky somebody like Truffaut might do it, although he likes to do his own stuff, or one of the newer ones. It would have to be translated of course, but Natasha could do that.’

  Joe wanted to put up a fight but it was beyond him.

  ‘So you don’t think it’s worthwhile sending around?’

  ‘Don’t take my word,’ said Tim. ‘Mind you, I think you could have a good shot at it yourself. Saul might back you.’

  ‘That’s not for me.’

  ‘Look. I don’t think your heart was in it. It’s too literary for what we do here. It might work in la France but who knows, and who knows how to crack the Frenchies? Sorry.’

  It was as well, he thought, he had said nothing to Natasha. The gift would be ungiven and unmentioned. He knew he had not the energy to pursue it further. Maybe it had never been more than a gesture.

  ‘Thanks.’ The main course arrived. ‘How’s Elizabeth?’

  ‘Elizabeth,’ said Tim, ‘will fly.’

  Afterwards Joe decided to walk up to Hampstead. It would take him about an hour. The walk would do him good. He had nothing better to do. It was a fine early autumn day. No need to take the underground. There were even more excuses he made as he headed out of Central London thinking he might diverge through Soho, wondering why he felt he would disintegrate all the time, wondering how it had come to this.

  Natasha went back to copy down the phone number. Only when she was in the house, facing the stairs, did she remember that she had already copied down the number, it was in her coat pocket. But she stood there, looking up towards the high roof with its grubby cupola, the stairs winding in a gentle spiral, stood there as long as she dared, an intruder now, no place for her now. It was in its way a tribute, the silent lingering, a time of remembrance and pause before the terrible consequences enveloped her.

  She wanted to go to Kew to see Margaret and the others or just sit in the Gardens but she needed to get back to pick up Marcelle from the nursery school. Perhaps after she had collected Marcelle they could go together. Marcelle loved seeing her Kew friends and the trip on the train was always an adventure. The relief Natasha felt when crossing the river was matched by the pleasure Marcelle took in rushing around her earliest haunts. When they left Kew, however, no matter how she tried, Natasha could not subdue a feeling of sadness and some grievance. Yet Marcelle was just as eager to return to her new place with the new friends. Joseph too liked Hampstead. It was only her.

  As Natasha left the house in Welbeck Street for the last time and again searched out a telephone box she thought she might faint. She held onto a black iron railing while the swoon of weakness went through her. She supposed these were some of the symptoms of shock.

  She phoned the number again and received the same information. She tried to prise out more, she wanted more detail, more facts, more background, information of any sort, but the kind and measured voice repeated that there was nothing more to say. She was the one who had to bring the brief conversation to a close. She told Natasha gently that she had to put down the phone. She did so and left Natasha stranded, phone in hand, the droning sound still compelling her to listen, at least the sound reminded her of contact.

  The walk to Oxford
Circus underground, the waiting for the tube, the change at Tottenham Court Road, the pretty red-tiled walls of Hampstead Station and the long clanking lift to the surface passed as in a trance. She could not bear to go home and took Marcelle to a small Italian restaurant, a favourite of Joseph’s, where the waiters spoiled the little girl and teased her playfully as she battled with spaghetti. Natasha drank several cups of coffee and barely touched her food.

  It was Joseph she needed, she realised, and needed him so much that it scared her to admit it. For he was distant from her now, on his own journey, a journey she had set him on. If she told him what had happened it would throw too much responsibility on him and besides there was in her that which did not want this fact known to anyone else in the world.

  She was quieter than usual, the waiters agreed. Very deep, though, this one, a thinker. And with an outward mask intact and imperturbable, Natasha let days and then weeks pass as she sought to find a way out, afraid she was about to collapse but unable to cry for help. Why had the analyst not left her a message? Anything. Even just ‘goodbye’.

  On Tuesdays and Fridays she caught the tube into London at the same time as before. She found places to have coffee and tried to read books on psychology though her mind merely skimmed the page, taking in scarcely anything. Writing was even harder: writing in her state emphasised the isolation, reached into the same depths as depression and needed support from a wholeness to which she did not now have any access.

  What a lonely woman despite husband and daughter and friends; what a disturbed, even distraught woman despite the material comforts, the knowledge she had, the life apparently available; yet she gave no outward sign, steady as a soldier under fire, telling no one, concealing most carefully from Joseph as he concealed his turbulence from her, telling no one, trying also to be steady under fire. So they lived in those few months approaching Christmas seeking to protect each other, seeking to protect themselves, together, apart, together . . . Further, further apart.

  ‘When, much later,’ he wrote to Marcelle, ‘you by then already a woman, with your own vocation, you were questioning me closely, I told you of the death of the analyst. You were at first struck still and speechless and then you were possessed by fury.

  ‘“Nothing after the phone call?”

  ‘“Not that I know of.”

  ‘“Nobody to help her find somebody else?”

  ‘“No. That I do know.”

  ‘“Just left her.”

  ‘You swayed as you sat, upright, clenched, but you swayed like a slender birch in a fierce wind.

  ‘“Why did the analyst not pull out when she knew she was ill herself? She was no longer capable. She must have known. Why did she continue to treat my mother? Why did she not get help for her? Why did other psychiatrists not help her patients? Who are these people? Who are they to walk away from somebody they have dismantled just as much as a surgeon opens up a body? Would a surgeon just walk away halfway through an operation? Would he not get somebody else to take over? She above all people must have known that the mind and the spirit need just as much attention as the body. Oh, oh, my poor mum. What did she do to you? And what could you do?”’

  ‘I have to tell you,’ his analyst said, ‘that Natasha telephoned me yesterday and asked if she could see me. She meant in a professional capacity. I had to explain why that was impossible. She wanted me to change my mind and she made a jolly good attempt at it. But it is out of the question. I hope you understand that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Joe was puzzled but not enough to pursue it with the analyst, not enough to mention it to Natasha. It was her initiative, she would mention it if she thought fit. So he began once more to offer to the analyst what he always thought of as his inadequate evidence. But at last he needed to talk about what was happening to him, he needed this listener.

  Yet even after this session, he thought, nothing of great consequence had happened, nothing new revealed, nothing solved, only this persisting sense of a fraudulent encounter. Even now he could not give the analyst what he knew he most wanted. He had produced only one dream. In it he had murdered and buried a girl very like the little girl he had befriended in the yard of minute cottages in Water Street where he had lived for his first few years. He had befriended this girl who had died of tuberculosis. In the dream he feared that the body would be discovered and then . . . But that could not be spun out further and besides it could lend itself to so many different interpretations, Joe thought – was it that girl? Could it be Natasha? – that it was of little or no use.

  He walked quickly up to Regent’s Park. He was relieved that the bench he had found after the previous session was again vacant. He sat near the middle and took out the small hardback edition of the Faber Book of Modern Verse edited by Michael Roberts. He had bought it in Oxfam for ninepence. Before he opened it he held it in both hands, closed his eyes and murmured:

  ‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief

  More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.’

  He stopped there. He had to take it slowly. The next four lines were the hardest to remember. ‘Comforter . . .’ He had it! On he went. Each line remembered was a pebble in the dam he must build to stop this flood drowning his mind. The second stanza he spoke out loud:

  ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

  Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

  May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

  Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

  Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

  Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.’

  He looked around the gardens, neat and ordered even in their autumn melancholy. No one was near him this mid-morning.

  He had discovered the healing of poetry and crept under it, though how and why he did not know. Nor did he know how he had arrived at the decision to attempt to learn it by heart. Once that course was taken it was as if he made a vow to himself, a vow which to break would be to break him, that he must learn poems by heart. Only by forcing himself to hold these words in his mind could there be any hope of a recovery. The exhaustion of his resources was near, he thought: he could not much longer withstand the battery of panics and fears, this unleashed inferno, this laying waste. The poems would be a shield to hold over him, maybe even in some inconceivable future, to let him advance, but he dare not think about a future. To be the comfort that served in the whirlwind. Gerard Manley Hopkins knew. What a blessing that was, Joe had thought, when he had found it: thank God Gerard Manley Hopkins knew and thank God he wrote it down.

  He turned over a couple of pages and found Yeats. ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’. It was short, like the Hopkins: it should be manageable. The real victory would be not only to remember the Yeats the next day but to be able to call up the Hopkins and the other poems also. He began to read.

  I know that I shall meet my fate

  Somewhere among the clouds above;

  Those that I fight I do not hate,

  Those that I guard I do not love . . .

  Eventually he rose to go and walked north the length of Regent’s Park, and up Primrose Hill where he stopped and turned and looked across London, such a broad and unperturbed sprawl it seemed even from this small height, nothing there to harm anybody. So why did it make him want to fly away? He opened the book.

  I balanced all, brought all to mind,

  The years to come seemed waste of breath,

  A waste of breath the years behind

  In balance with this life, this death.

  On a weekend in late October, Joseph and Marcelle went to Reading leaving Natasha behind. She had a heavy cold which gave her a bronchial-sounding cough. She assured Joseph that he was doing her a favour. She would spend most of the two days in bed. The house was warm. She would take hot drinks and the medicine prescribed. They went on the Saturday morning.

  All day she was in her dress
ing gown, unbathed, smoking, little food, coffee after coffee, in the evening hot whisky, one only. She sat on the chaise longue in Joseph’s small study. It was the warmest room in the house and, Natasha thought, the cosiest: Joseph, she thought, had a real talent for making a place cosy, the clutter of it, a portrait of himself at his best, as she had loved him and still did in this frightening interlude, and still would when both of them came through.

  Natasha rarely cried. Her griefs were dry-eyed, the tears buried too deep to be summoned. Now, as the evening closed in, as the room darkened and she did not put on the lights, as the bookshelves, the paintings and prints and curios turned to shadows of themselves, ghosting the walls, she felt the tears on her cheeks and the tears unloosed her.

  Why had her analyst done this? Why had she not asked for help? She was her friend, she was trusted by her and trusted her totally. Natasha had put herself at her mercy and now she was without friend, confidante, analyst, healer. She had wanted to be like her, responding, helping, curing: that voice, disembodied, the voice which alone answered to her own depths, called out to her in her wilderness, was gone for ever. Now she wept more and bent her head over her knees and put both hands behind her neck, wrapping herself around, trying to hold back this eruption of grief. Her friend, her guide, her analyst, her hope was gone. How could she survive alone when so many truths and secrets and unfinished work had been ripped away from her? She had no right to leave her like this. She had not done her duty! And yet . . . Natasha now remembered the recent accretion of sorrow in her analyst’s voice . . . she ought to have picked it up at the time and found a way to help . . . she remembered the strain of emotion in her words in those last sessions . . . Yet how could she not tell her? It was not right that she be abandoned without warning. It was unjust.