by Melvyn Bragg
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘No, thanks. I’ve got one over there with my friends. Would you like to meet them?’
‘Yes . . . but not now if you don’t mind. I’m late home already.’ She nodded, smiled and turned away. He watched her go and wished he had taken up her invitation.
He sought out Peter.
‘I must go. It’s been terrific.’ He heard an echo of Helen’s voice, the use of that word.
‘A few of us are meeting at my place on Saturday morning to make placards for Sunday’s women’s march. It won’t be a big turn-out so it’s important we get as many people as possible.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Do.’ Peter escorted him towards the door. ‘It’s good to see you again. We’d lost touch.’ Peter nodded at Helen’s group. ‘All the gang will be there.’ They were on the pavement. ‘How’s Natasha?’
‘Fine.’
‘I liked her novel very much. You’re quite a cottage industry.’
‘I suppose we are.’
‘Don’t forget us in the real world. And Natasha’s very welcome, of course.’
‘I’ll see . . . Thanks again.’
Peter went back into the fray, leaving Joe at once relieved and vulnerable. All pressure unnerved him now. He decided to walk along the Embankment to Charing Cross. He could catch the tube directly to Belsize Park. He had stopped going to Hampstead underground. There were fewer steps at Belsize Park. The walk by the river should steady him for the tube.
So she thought that the Nijinsky was ‘terrific’.
‘Have you always been useless?’ she asked.
Joe looked up. He was sitting on the floor leaning against the wall watching Peter’s flat turn into a domestic factory dedicated to the artefacts of protest.
Helen was holding the two placards he had worked on. One had already come loose from its nails, on the other the slogan was daubed so ineptly that ‘Equal Pay’ had become ‘Equal Pa’.
‘I was never any good at carpentry.’
‘OK. But what about this?’
‘Or art.’
‘Most of the paint is on your pullover.’
‘It’s old. I took precautions.’
‘Can you make tea?’
‘Definitely.’
‘We’re all parched,’ she said, and swung her head in the direction of the kitchen. ‘You aren’t useless on purpose, are you?’
‘Certainly not!’
‘That’s all right then.’ She smiled and the smile activated him. He stood up and made for the kitchen, glad to be out of the mêlée.
After the initial fun of the start of the march, he began to look around him. They were walking through the City of London. Helen was holding her placard and, on command, joined in the chants of defiance which pealed through the empty City streets and rang around the empty offices. A few policemen walked grumpily alongside the marchers.
‘You don’t look up enough in a city, do you?’ he said. ‘Of course you don’t often get the chance to walk down the middle of the road in broad daylight. But there are all sorts of styles and curiosities up there. Look at what they’ve done to that bank. It’s just a bank but they obviously felt they had to give it authority by way of neo-classical architecture; why did that make it a better bank? I suppose it proved they had good taste and if they had good taste in one matter . . .’
‘What do we want?’ yelled someone at the front.
‘Equal pay!’ the marchers yelled back.
‘When do we want it?’
‘Now!’
Helen raised her placard and shook it at the bank.
‘Joe,’ she said, ‘we’re supposed to be on a march. You’re embarrassing.’
‘I’m sorry. Really. I’ll shut up.’
‘You don’t have to shut up.’
‘I’ll join in the chants.’
‘They’re not chants.’
‘I’ll shut up.’
‘Don’t do that,’ she said, and took his arm.
‘OK.’ Joe felt a rush of self-consciousness and said, stiffly, ‘Do these demonstrations do any good? I mean equal pay’s so obvious, can’t it just be discussed and agreed?’
‘There have been no advances in this country without protests.’
He nodded: she looked even better when she was serious.
‘What do we want?’
‘Equal pay!’
‘When do we want it?’
‘Now!’
‘You joined in,’ she said, and laughed.
‘I’m a lifelong feminist,’ he said. ‘Ask my mother if you don’t believe me. Of course the word was not invented then, but words often arrive rather late for the purpose. Some never arrive.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The real thing,’ said Joe, ‘ask Peter.’
‘Peter never told us you were a bit bonkers. Ask your mother?’
Joe liked that. It was as if he had been handed a safety cushion. There was something cushioning about her lips. She was the real world.
Natasha had been pleased to see Joseph go off with Peter and take part in the march. It gave her two days in Kew. She stayed overnight on the Saturday and Joseph came down to join her and entertained them with stories of placards and the march in prospect and Peter’s speech. He did not mention Helen. Natasha was happy to be with their old friends, old times, Joseph more in command of himself, talkative, funny. They slept together more closely that night than on any night for months.
It seemed to have a course ordained. There was no straining. There was another march but mostly it was evening meetings with varying fractions of the gang. There was the worst meal Joe was ever to have in his life at an Italian restaurant in Westbourne Grove; a night in a traditional jazz pub where conversation was mime and semaphore; a couple of other evenings in pubs in and around Soho. It was in the Marquis of Granby, a rather plush-red-velvet pub in Cambridge Circus, in which they found themselves the last of the pack and had a quiet half for the road. Afterwards they walked towards Leicester Square. Joe decided he could not go down into the underground with Helen watching him so he hailed a taxi and he took her to her flat in Kilburn, a flat she shared with two other researchers. Her bedroom, he thought, was a cross between a library and a sitting room; the bed was pushed tight into a corner and covered with cushions to double as a settee.
Some weeks later when Joseph came home late and subdued, Natasha said,
‘We ought to talk, Joseph.’
‘Yes.’
‘You think it will hurt me to know.’
‘Yes.’
‘You hope it will just come and go without you having to say or to do anything.’
He paused. Whom would he betray?
‘That’s the hope.’
‘But now you are not sure.’
‘I still love you, Natasha. You and Marcelle. You’re first.’
‘I know that . . . Marcelle knows that.’
‘Can’t we not talk? I mean not talk.’
‘I have to talk, Joseph. It is too difficult for me not to talk.’
Both of them smoked. Neither drank. The street was quiet, the things in the room wrapped them in their past.
‘I don’t know what to say. Well, I do know what to say. But . . . Natasha . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘We are together. Now. Here. Why does anything else matter?’
‘Because we have to face the truth, Joseph. Then we can understand why we will stay together. What is hidden becomes dangerous. We both know that. We have to talk.’
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
‘There isn’t just one truth,’ he began.
‘Joseph! This is a simple truth. It is not easy for me to say this, Joseph, but you are having an affair.’
‘Yes.’
‘It is obvious, and very painful for me.’
‘Then why insist that we talk about it?’
‘It would be even better not to continue with it.’
Better for
you, Joseph thought, but dared not say.
‘Better, that is, for me,’ said Natasha. ‘What is she like?’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘Why not?’
He could not articulate an answer. But surely something and someone so private ought not to be hauled up for examination even by Natasha. The matter was supposed to be secret, secrecy was part of its potency, kept secret it could thrive and maybe harm no one, take away the secrecy and it came out of the dark into a light in which it would be destroyed or destroy.
‘I’m sure you’ve told her what I’m like.’
He had.
‘So this would be English fair play.’
‘I said you were great. I said you were a wonderful writer and painter and much cleverer than I am. And that you looked . . . distinguished.’
‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘“Distinguished”.’
‘It’s true. And I did say that. All of it.’
‘You are such a poor liar, Joseph, though you try very hard. But you are not lying now. Poor girl. I presume she is younger than you.’
‘There’s about a five-year difference,’ said Joseph. ‘About the same as between us.’
‘So you are the one between,’ she said. ‘How did she respond when you told her I was a paragon?’
‘Fine . . . Peter had told her much the same, she said.’
‘Oh. She works with Peter.’
‘She’s a researcher.’
‘What does she research?’
‘Politics, usually; and social issues. That sort of thing.’
‘Presumably she went to university and is full of life as the unencumbered are and she wears a miniskirt.’
Yes to all three, thought Joseph, but he was damned if he was going to answer.
‘I’ll have one drink,’ he said. ‘Just the one.’
‘Joseph. You are light years away from being an alcoholic. I have known alcoholics. You are an occasionally excessive and silly drinker, that is all. Drink what you must. I’ll join you.’
‘Why aren’t you angry?’
‘I like to surprise myself,’ she said. And I won’t cry. And I am very angry.
‘Look,’ he handed her the whisky, ‘why don’t we just let it drift?’
‘Drift where? And what do I do while this drift of yours is going on?’
‘I come back home, don’t I?’
‘Should I applaud?’
‘So you are a bit angry.’
‘Am I, Joseph? Do you want me to be?’ She raised her glass. ‘A la vôtre!’
‘Just leave it alone, Natasha. Please.’
‘What does she feel about it?’
‘We don’t talk about it. She doesn’t push me.’
‘That will be a relief to you for a while. In any case it is a good tactical position.’
‘It isn’t like that. Can we stop talking about it?’
‘You admit infidelity. You expect acceptance. You plead for silence.’
‘I wasn’t pleading.’
‘You are grasping at straws.’
‘I’m here. You’re here. Marcelle is upstairs. This is what is.’
‘You’re certainly pleading now. What you have just said is meaningless although you probably imagine it to be profound.’
‘Is an affair the end of the world?’
‘Our world? No. Not necessarily. Not at all. Except,’ she paused, ‘you have a fatal tendency to fall in love. This is usually shallow and temporary like a pang of infatuation. But I fear that this might be different. If you are really in love it is dangerous.’
‘I am in love with you, Natasha. You know that.’
‘I do,’ she said and sipped at the whisky. ‘And I believe that I will always know that. But I am not what I was when we met and, more dramatically, neither are you. Would you fall in love with me were we to meet for the first time tomorrow evening?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you, Joseph,’ she smiled. ‘I know you mean it. But would you? And would I? You had so many simple but important qualities then and sometimes I see that time and success have overlaid them.’
‘You can’t really talk about me having success, Natasha.’
‘The television. Novels published. An important film made. It did not please all of the public or all of the critics but it was bold. I think we can say that Sam and Ellen and even your friends from university would use the word “success”. But it has disturbed you, and uprooted you. It has made you defensive and belligerent, neither of which you were when we met, and left you marooned in your own no man’s land.’
‘You’ve always excelled at dissecting me. But other things have changed and some of them are liberating. Letting more life in and taking on as much out there as I could manage. You’d call it overreaching probably, greed if you like; or even worse; I don’t want to talk about that.’
‘Do you talk about that with her?’
‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘A very little. Very very little. When I feel a bit odd, she sort of tells me to take a couple of aspirins.’ He smiled. ‘Not really – but she has not gone down our route and when I say I talk very little about that I mean it, Natasha, I don’t want to take it there.’
‘So she is the comfort and the refuge. I am the confession box and the rubbish dump.’
‘Why do you turn it against yourself? You’ve changed just as much as I have. You wanted to change. You went into analysis on purpose to change. Yet why is it that sometimes I think you haven’t changed at all. When I see you smiling, even a little, even just trying to smile, I think, that’s Natasha, that’s her. And there’s the inadequacy I feel in front of your serious sense of life. I’ve always felt that but it didn’t much matter because there was a rough and ready equality between us. Not now. Your ideals soar above mine: so do your morals. And you are so deep in your analysis that I feel like an outsider. Your affair is with your analyst.’
Natasha wanted so badly to tell Joseph of the death of the woman into whose hands she had delivered herself but even now she held it in. It was a question of honour. To divulge that now would be to take unfair advantage. Pity must play no part in this. Neither of them should be the nurse to the other, she thought, and yet this reference to her analysis caught her unawares and almost threw her. It was daily more difficult to deal with that loss. Her best efforts had so far been unsuccessful. Joseph’s reference brought panic into her throat.
‘And I don’t ask about that, do I?’ he continued, seeing an analogy helpful to his case. ‘I don’t scrutinise you about your affair.’
‘Joseph!’
‘It’s not so much different. Unless. Unless you believe that physical attention, well, sex is, of itself, vital. Then what you are saying is that to have sex is to be in love.’
‘For you, Joseph, in this case, I may be mistaken,’ she said, and stood up to go across for another drink, ‘I think it is. When it isn’t you dislike yourself for it. You don’t dislike yourself now. You believe that love is central to sex, don’t you?’
‘It’s what you believe that counts,’ he said and held out his glass for her to pour a measure. She stood above him as she spoke:
‘I think, although this might be changing in the present circumstances, but I think that I will always hold onto the conviction that the intention in our hearts is what most matters and you have no intention to betray me or to hurt me, I know that, and therefore sex elsewhere, I must accept, does not fundamentally matter however much pain it gives.’
‘I could never leave you.’
‘Are you sure . . . ? Are you really sure?’
The words came quietly, even dreamily, as if from some retreat deep within, from a life being led in darkness, away from the light of the day’s events, a life which had begun to claim her in the analysis and one by which she found herself fearfully entranced, a landscape of dream deserts and oceans, of timelessness and ancient forests in which her mind seemed to roam through the history of the earth itself, a fugitive from the pres
ent.
‘Of course I am,’ he said.
‘You sound like a true and stout-hearted Englishman, Joseph.’
They talked to each other more often and more clearly over the next weeks than they had done since the first few years when they had put together a life cut wholly to their best intentions. Sometimes in those early times it had seemed to him that while he was out at work she had been waiting and preparing all day for his arrival home, saving up for an intimate and lengthy discussion. Her preoccupation with him had been flattering and mostly he had been a willing accomplice. Now it was a strain, though still for him too a compulsion. The stakes had become much higher. The game being played out was serious. Yet in this combustible context for some weeks they talked on. Joseph drank sensibly, Natasha her usual restrained self, both smoked voraciously.
‘I had hoped you would have come to a decision by now,’ said Natasha after a month or so. ‘You, I presume, hope that you will never have to come to one at all.’
He did not want to admit that this was true.
‘What do you think love is, Joseph?’
‘Oh, God!’
‘Is it not a question you should answer?’
‘How can you answer it?’
‘You write about it.’
‘That’s different.’
‘Evasion with you is a high art, Joseph. Why not risk an answer?’
‘Caring for somebody, wanting to live with them, being attached to them physically, believing they think those things too.’
‘Does that mean you love me?’
‘Yes. You know I do.’
‘But you prefer to be with Helen, don’t you? You love two people now.’
‘I’m with you, now, and every night.’
‘Why should I love someone who prefers to be with someone else and only comes here to keep up appearances?’
‘What appearances? Who cares, save us?’
‘What we have been taught to do, that is what cares. Our past cares. What our parents might think of us or our friends, a little, but most of all what our own moral conscience thinks of us. You care about what you think of yourself, Joseph, and it’s a great obstacle for you.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I don’t,’ said Natasha. ‘I now think that all the knowledge we have of our essential selves is guesswork or mere acceptance of clichés or a work of the imagination. Of why we think what we think we know so little. We grope around. We look as your Bible says “through a glass darkly”. I’ve always loved that phrase. One day it might all be clear: I wish I could have been born for that day.’
