Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  But, oh! She had loved her so much, the patience, the care, the reaching out; and always there, always ready for her, always there for her, trying to make her better. So much had been given. Poor woman. So unimaginably unhappy. So filled with unhappiness. Poor healing woman, dead.

  ‘An overdose,’ the measured voice on the telephone had said, and gone no further. ‘An overdose.’

  Natasha sobbed until she was utterly exhausted and stayed in the study throughout the night.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  ‘What do you think of it?’

  Natasha had been drowsing after reading Christina Rossetti and some of the poems in Christina Blake’s new publication. Joseph had bought the book for her as a birthday present. He wanted to arrange a dinner for Christina and Edward with Natasha and himself. Natasha was not fond of Edward and Joseph had hoped the American woman’s poetry would intrigue her enough to unfreeze an animosity which puzzled him.

  He stood just inside the doorway of the small first-floor living room, comfortingly lit by the three artful side lamps Natasha had bought in the antique emporium in the High Street. It was a room at its best at night, she thought, when the curtains blocked out the street and the magpie purchases, the oak chest, the rugs, the scattering of small antiquities, the prints and paintings and the wall of books were harmonised through her lighting and gave off a sense of a settled, thoughtful life.

  ‘Joseph.’ She focused on him and her eyes half closed. ‘You are preening yourself, like a cockatoo.’

  ‘But what do you think of it?’

  He patted the long dark brown leather coat, which fitted him so well it might have been tailored for him. The design was Italian, the style was totally of the moment, Joseph had never in his life owned or much wanted to own anything as contemporarily classical and absurdly expensive.

  ‘You look like a mannequin,’ Natasha said.

  ‘OΚ. But what about the coat?’

  ‘Fascist,’ said Natasha.

  ‘For God’s sake! How can a coat be fascist?’ He came into the room and, still coated, sat down on the armchair; Natasha lay on the sofa, cushions supporting the small of her back.

  ‘I think I can smell it,’ she said. ‘It must be the rain.’

  ‘Good leather,’ said Joseph, repeating what he had been told, ‘has its own aroma.’

  ‘I am impressed.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  He stared at her and felt a surge of belligerence.

  ‘It would do you no harm to dress up now and then.’

  Natasha looked at the long navy blue skirt, plain, unfashionable, the white blouse for all seasons, the useful cardigan Ellen had bought her for Christmas. A hand went to her rather tangled hair. She wore no make-up in the house and very little at any time. Yet she thought it an odd remark.

  ‘Do we care,’ she asked, ‘about appearance?’

  ‘Do we care,’ he mocked, ‘about appearance?’

  Joseph slung a leg over the arm of the chair and the long coat opened.

  ‘Oh, God!’ she said. ‘Are those leather trousers?’ and she giggled. On another occasion Joseph might have registered that this was the first expression of joy from his wife for several days and he would have welcomed and probably nourished it.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it? That’s the total argument. If there’s something I say you don’t like it’s “Have you been drinking?” End of interest. A few drinks and anything I say is discounted. You can think even when you drink.’ Joseph smiled: the little rhyme tickled him. ‘Thinking and drinking are not incompatible.’ But the smile, Natasha knew, was not a warm smile and it was not for her.

  ‘You have been drinking.’

  ‘So what? So bloody what?’

  Why could he not tell her that drink was medicine? Drink numbed him and he wanted to be numb. Drink gave him confidence, false? It didn’t matter, any sort of confidence was good enough the way he was. Drink slowed down his impatience, slowed down his mind. Drink made him unafraid. And loud and argumentative, yes, and it undid good and necessary constraints and things were said and done which ought to have been left unsaid and undone.

  But for that time, that brief time afloat on alcohol, he was transformed into someone he had once been, even though a drunken someone, but not the frightened, timid, internally weeping thing he had become. Even though this someone he had been was a vulgarisation of his old self it was still recognisable as an old real self who was unafraid, who was prepared to take on the world and that was at least something. It was worth it. Even though it led to a sullen dead end and crashed through dear and valued life it was, he knew, for the sake of sanity, worth it. It changed his world and it changed his character and Joseph said amen to that.

  ‘Why did you buy such clothes?’

  ‘I didn’t pay a penny for them.’

  ‘I don’t understand. They are expensive, aren’t they?’

  ‘Saul bought them.’

  It had seemed so right, so much fun, they had been walking down Mount Street in Mayfair together and Saul had dropped into one of the new fashionable shops to collect some linen shirts and seen Joseph’s expression – amusement, flavoured by slight but unmistakable lust. ‘It is a beautiful coat, Joseph,’ he said. ‘But I expect, Mark, that its future owner thinks so too.’

  ‘Its future owner,’ said Mark, a new young success about town who took no trouble to disguise his East End accent, ‘done a flit, Saul.’

  ‘Try it on,’ said Saul.

  ‘Made for him,’ said Mark. ‘And there’s trousers.’

  ‘He treats you like a little boy,’ said Natasha.

  ‘He does not!’

  ‘He takes you to dinner and uses up what you have learned, he leeches on you and takes your precious time and all you get is money we don’t really need and now these childish presents that a man would never accept.’

  He knew that what she said was true.

  ‘That’s ludicrous,’ he said, loudly. ‘It was just a whim. Why do you have to tear everything down?’

  ‘That’s unfair, Joseph.’

  ‘No it isn’t! It’s just a bloody coat. It was a gift. What’s wrong with a gift?’

  Natasha paused and remembered her gift to the analyst.

  ‘All gifts are not the same,’ she said.

  ‘Typical! Of course they aren’t. But they are, as well. Aren’t they?’

  ‘Please don’t shout, Joseph. It is bad when Marcelle hears you shout.’

  ‘So I shout. People shout. She can’t be wrapped in cotton wool. Cotton wool does more harm than shouting any day.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I remember Bob telling me, “Babies die in a sterile atmosphere.” And he’s a zoologist.’

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘Yes. No. Yes. Would you like a drink?’

  Natasha shook her head. Joseph got out the bottle of whisky from the oak chest.

  ‘I need water,’ he said and took the glass to the bathroom.

  Natasha put the volume of poetry on the floor. Some of the poems were too painful. Others she thought crude: how could such an early and high reputation be gained on work like this? The more closely she observed the world of literary reputations the more disheartened she felt. She wanted it to be so much purer and better than it was. Great literature to Natasha, even more than great painting or music, ought to be sifted for without rancour, without jealousy, with fine judgement, setting aside what did not serve but doing so in a spirit that understood the difficulty of attaining truth, the value of trying one’s best and failing.

  The last time she had met Edward, just before he acknowledged Christina publicly as his mistress, Natasha had been depressed by what she thought of as the wicked pleasure he had taken in the political manoeuvrings of Robert Frost. A poet of such stature, she believed, ought to stand aloof, provide in himself an example of the art of poetry as heroes in war provi
ded examples of soldierly courage and daring.

  She knew this was a big demand. She knew she lived in times that loved feet of clay as much if not more than minds of crystal. She knew that just as the priest was fallible and would sin so artists were what the English called ‘only human’ and would scurry around demeaningly for advantage like any other group. She knew she was expecting too much and even denying the variety and richness of nature, its contradictions between frailty and strength, honesty and corruption, tragedy and comedy, its contrariness which was what she valued in much work. Yet her ideal of how the work should be regarded and the intention behind it was rigid and she would not yield, would not, could not. Literature should soar and so should those it engaged, it should seek the sun, nothing less would do. And Christina Blake, she thought, was too knowing, seeking favour and because of that even the celebrated and unarguably powerful poems of distress were a little less than they seemed. Yet there was no denying they were impressive. She wanted to discuss them with Joseph who was very keen on the poems but it would have to wait.

  ‘We never talk now,’ she said when Joseph re-entered, minus coat, the brown leather trousers tight-fitting and gleaming in the half-light, a high-necked black sweater, long hair, fatal glass in hand, a picture, she thought, of a romantic poet, a time gone by.

  ‘We never stop.’ Once more he cocked his leg over the arm of the chair. Once Natasha would have teased him about this attitude. It rather disturbed her. There was, she thought, a needless defiance in it, a pose unnecessary and unsuitable.

  ‘We were so blind to each other at that crucial time,’ Joe wrote to their daughter. ‘How in God’s name had we come to that pass?’

  ‘We squabble,’ she said, ‘like old people who have nothing to say to each other but find some comfort in constant complaints.’

  ‘Sometimes silence is better proof of . . .’ He stopped.

  ‘Can’t you complete the sentence?’

  Joseph raised his glass and took too big a sip, she thought.

  ‘When we moved here you said there would be people like us we would meet and make friends with. Where are they?’

  The shot of whisky had restored the anaesthetic effect.

  ‘It takes time,’ he said. ‘You don’t just march up and say, “Be my friend.”’

  ‘We could have a party.’

  ‘I hate parties. I hate people coming into our house.’

  ‘You used to love them. In Kew you loved them.’

  ‘It’s as if you license people to break into your home. Just to roam around and gawp. To spy everything that you are. It’s voyeurism! No!’

  ‘Joseph.’

  She uttered his name with such despair that he was compelled to dismount from the alcohol-fuelled ride to stupor.

  She looked pale and there was about her a pain he did not want to acknowledge because he had so much of his own and yet he knew he ought to reach out to her. His name, her chosen version of his name, was a cry he could not recognise, or would not, afraid perhaps that a full knowledge of her suffering would crush him and so he flinched away, turned tail like an animal evading danger. There was nothing he could say and his name hung in the silence.

  ‘Your mother called my name and I made no answer,’ he wrote to Marcelle. ‘It would not be too much to say that my silence has rundown the years and has come back time and again as an accusation.

  ‘But why did she not tell me that her analyst was dead and by her own hand? This is not to say that subsequent events might have been significantly different. There’s no way of knowing. But not to say anything (and I have scoured the past for any evidence), not to allow there to be a hint, to give me a clue which might have set me off on a search to help her, why did she have to be so stoic and so self-harmfully stubborn? We still loved each other then. There was still no one else, that is no one I had ever for a moment thought of abandoning her for. We were being battered but the ship she had sometimes spoken of in the past, the ship of us was still intact.

  ‘Perhaps in retrospect and because of my own times of helpless dependence, I exaggerate. It could be the case that she felt she had passed through the worst and was now capable of self-analysis. Others have benefited from that process and Natasha was certainly intelligent and determined enough to do it. I’m sure some of that went on. She had studied analysis and read about it widely, much more than I had. Yet I don’t think that was the root cause. The total suppression and concealment of the fact of her analyst’s death suggest that there was a more important motive.

  ‘There was shame, I believe: that she had failed the analysis and the analyst even though the failure was not her fault. By contrast, as in other areas of our lives, I having arrived late still sailed on. There was fear, as when a small child loses its mother and is afraid of unimaginable punishment because it feels responsible for the death of the mother, even sometimes believing it has killed the mother. Above all, though, I now think there was dread. Something deeper than shame, even deeper than fear, a dread, a look into the void, a blanking out of being which says, “This must never be revealed because for the world to know this would destroy me.”

  ‘Or it was love. Her wish not to add to my own unspoken but all too obvious burden. A selfless and gallant act of love. That would be like your mother.’

  Natasha began writing Joseph letters. She would leave them on his desk in the study. He replied, every time.

  ‘Dearest Joseph,’ she would always begin. ‘You are so angry with me now and I can understand it. Your analysis must be in a crucial phase and it is so difficult to concentrate on anything else and yet you do, you work, you work. If only you could stop the work for a year or so, then we could find each other again as we were . . .’

  ‘My dearest Natasha,’ he would always begin. ‘As once we were? When? I’m not being mean. I can’t remember. I’m sure we’ve been happy. But I can’t remember it now. Past happiness doesn’t help when you really need it. More than that, I seem to forget it was ever there. And why do you want to go back all of a sudden? You were the one who was so keen to go forward . . .’

  ‘Dearest Joseph. You must face your anger with me without guilt. I know that once we have come through this all will be well and I will follow you to the ends of the earth . . .’

  ‘My dearest Natasha. I am not angry with you. I am angry. If I’m angry with anybody it’s me for making so many mistakes. Why do you always tell me what I am? And I don’t want to go to the ends of the earth! Here will do . . .’

  ‘Dearest Joseph. There was some humour there which is hopeful. All I want is for you to disentangle yourself from these complications of your past and the undigested pressures of the last few years. I like it that you are learning poetry by heart. I’m sure that’s good but even with that you blame yourself because your “target” of one new poem a day has not been met! You must let life flow through you. A real life is like a river. If we interfere too much it becomes a canal . . .’

  ‘My dearest Natasha. I’m sorry I was so rude last night. Maybe I should go away for a while until all this stuff pours out of me but not all over you. But sometimes I fear that we are so far apart and maybe I shout and curse to draw attention and to call you back. I don’t know. I have no idea about anything at all, Natasha. But I will try not to force myself to learn one new poem every one or two or even three days and I will, I promise, just be a river! Yet when I close the book and go through the poem and know that I have got it by heart I feel like someone who has been very ill and now takes a few unassisted steps. Of course I exaggerate . . .’

  ‘Dearest Joseph. It is to yourself that you are being hateful although I feel battered also. Are you trying to goad me or have I goaded you? Perhaps we should go north, to the countryside, and begin again . . .’

  Joe had suggested this to his analyst. Why don’t I just go back to Cumberland, he had said, to the village we stayed in? We could buy a cottage outright. Village life could suit all of us. There’s a bit in the bank. We could write, we
could walk, in the Lake District we could get away from all the temptations and the greed.

  The suggestion had been left hanging in the air and Joe had concluded that it was no more than an attempt to break loose from the analysis which would be cowardly, a retreat, a failure under fire in London and that too could not be lived with.

  ‘My dearest Natasha. Maybe one day we will start again, in France, in Cumberland, somewhere free of this plague which poisons what should be, shouldn’t it, a life of good fortune . . . or is our good fortune our bad luck?’

  They wrote, sometimes two or three times a day, for dear life.

  He had never drunk so much in a single evening and yet even when they got back home and he sprawled in the chair with a final whisky and a cigar, he felt not only calm but sufficiently clear-headed.

  ‘You look beautiful,’ he said.

  Natasha smiled. He had insisted that he buy her a new dress for the Gala Preview of The Glory of Elizabeth and she had gone for a simple classic line, had a hairdresser put up her hair, applied a little make-up and turned herself into –

  ‘Class,’ said Joseph, heavily.

  In his hired dinner jacket, velvet bow tie now loosed, a flop of hair on his forehead, the white silk handkerchief ballooning out of his breast pocket, whisky in one hand, cigar in the other, he was a pretender, he knew that, uneasily but arrogantly out of his class.

  ‘You look like a debauched young aristocrat,’ she said, to tease him and to please him, and she was smack on the mark. He smiled uneasily, but also smugly. ‘One of those young men who sow their wild oats but, what is it? Buckle down in the end. Buckle down.’

  ‘Buckle down . . . you know . . . this is the best bit. This – talk. Now. This – is – the – best – bit.’

  ‘You seemed to be enjoying all of it.’

  ‘You see? You don’t know me any more . . . It wasn’t that I hated it. I didn’t hate it. But I kept thinking I would explode like that puffed-up toad or shout obscenities especially when we were in the line and we all had to shake hands with Princess Margaret. Or when it started I thought I might be carried kicking and screaming out of the cinema – to be trapped in the middle of the row! – do you know that at every moment during the film, at every single moment, all I was thinking, all, was, how do I stop myself from going berserk? Calling up the poems. Isn’t that stupid? And sad? But it’s true. Now is peace. But a couple of hours ago it was the worst ever. What’s the analysis been for? My head just seems to crumble and bleed inside.’