by Melvyn Bragg
‘You keep saying we know nothing,’ said Joseph, ‘but that is a sort of easy defeatism, isn’t it? Look at what we have found out. Look at what we learn every day about other peoples and other cultures. Look at the moon landing and a hundred and one inventions that would have been thought miracles. Look at the discovery of DNA. You could say we know not too little but too much for us to take in.’
‘Facts, yes; mountains of new facts. But what do we know, other than in the broadest brush strokes, most of which are just generalisations, what do we really know of what concerns us, you and me, now, of what we are truly thinking and feeling, matters that concern so many others who want to know about their feelings with precision. They need to know because it could be vital for how they lead their lives or whether they lead their lives. “To be or not to be, that is the question.” It is always the question. Yet how can we answer it save in an unsatisfactory and general way? The poorest, most fragile human being can want “to be” so badly – I remember when you read to me the ending of The Grapes of Wrath when she who had only the milk in her breasts gave it to him who had nothing but hunger in his belly. Even in worse extremes of deprivation there are people who will fight to live. Yet there are others, who would seem to the poor and the starving to have everything that life could bestow, who will decide “not to be”.’
As she said this, the hand that held the cigarette clenched and the cigarette broke. She gathered it and stubbed it out without losing a beat of her fluency. ‘So how do we know what happens in our minds, how to answer that simplest question, to live or not to live, and why are there only individual answers and even then are we sure they are all the answer? So I maintain we know little of what we are inside us, Joseph, even though we know more and more about what is outside us. Love, truth, freedom, they are words but they are also slogans, often merely slogans and I am tired of all slogan words save one – freedom.’
‘Tired of love, tired of truth?’
‘At the moment, Joseph, yes. I can find neither although I believe you want to give me both.’
‘How can I convince you?’
‘By what you do.’
‘I’m doing my best.’
‘But it is not best for me, Joseph. At the moment and I believe it will only be at the moment, for a short time, she is giving you what I cannot give you. You will not admit that because you do not want to hurt my feelings but, Joseph, you hurt my feelings more by this silent stubbornness. Just as you have hurt them by your half-drunken rants on occasion – which often you forget completely overnight and for which when you remembered you apologised. But your anger is verbally physical. I am not used to that. It is a rage against all you think you have suffered. There are words that stay, words that scar. And now you plead silence.’
‘How can I tell you when I don’t know myself?’
‘It is your duty to know. You have had enough time now.’
‘But I don’t.’
‘You are either being stubborn or concealing something, both, I suspect.’
How could he say that when he was with Helen he did not feel that the world inside his head was going to collapse?
There was awkwardness when he was with Helen, a tug of reluctance, an unreality, the guilt at betraying Natasha, intensified by her knowing about it. This could poison his new-found land. Yet he knew that he loved Helen, but found it very difficult to say this to Natasha. When he was with Helen and her happily opinionated iconoclastic friends he often loved and missed Natasha. He missed her careful thoughtfulness, her singularity and he missed her respect for solitude in which to work through an idea. When with Natasha he could long for Helen.
But there was a tide, and it was the tide of the times, and Helen rode it and took him with her. With Helen the terrors of disintegration, which would never leave him as long as he lived, calmed down because of what they felt for each other and the radiance of Helen began to turn him away from that which wanted him to destroy himself and began to bear him out to a different sea.
‘I am aware,’ he told Marcelle, ‘that this book will do little justice to Helen. When you write fiction, characters operate on their own rules in a world made for them. And in some cases, most of the energy is spent with no consideration of balance or fairness. This is for you, Marcelle, and it is about your mother.
‘To describe the power of feeling that Helen and I developed for each other after a start which could have been casual but never was; to begin a new story that still goes on, a story you have watched and been part of, just as the story you most want to know about is in its final struggle, is too much for me and, I suspect, for you.
‘But something serious happened with Helen, a gravitational pull in a direction away from your mother. It was as if Natasha and I, after circling each other so closely had been fatally jolted, flung off course like planets disturbed by a sudden shock attack. We were left without being able to find a sure way to keep together. We were wrenched, torn away from each other, pulled into what both of us feared but neither, finally, could halt.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
Anything he said would disturb Natasha and he did not want that. Anything he said would betray Helen and he did not want that. His silence was helpless and Natasha recognised that.
‘Well,’ said Natasha, ‘that is as near as you will get to being honest, I expect. So I thank you.’
She went for another drink, her third, unusual for her, and poured one for Joseph who sat looking miserable.
‘Poor Joseph,’ she said. ‘To love two women! For you it is a sin. But really to love two women, as I think you may do now, and you are someone who can love well – that is hard.’
Natasha paused for some time and then, after a quick smile, she said,
‘I will not bind you, Joseph, neither through guilt nor through a marriage ceremony. We met as free people and to be free is the most important thing of all. If you have the opportunity to be free then you must take it or what is life for? We are artists. Maybe we, maybe I am an artist mainly to be a free person and I found art because it is where great freedom is possible. In our marriage we have begun to lose our freedom, Joseph. Other matters seemed more important. But to me nothing is more important. I want my freedom and I want you to have your freedom. I cannot be free and wait for you every night like the wife of a sailor in Brittany looking out to sea for the return of her husband, always worrying that he might be dead. I cannot be free when my mind is filled with dreadful thoughts about you and this craving to live together as we used to. And I cannot be free if I feel that I am imposing on you, Joseph. Your freedom helps mine. So I will leave you now. I will leave this house and Marcelle and I will stay with our friends in Kew until you have made your decision in freedom. That is what you must do. I think it is your duty, even. And I will look for my freedom too and I will hope, my darling, that this freedom brings back a love that means more to me than all the world.’
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
For Marcelle the return to Kew was as good as a holiday. She piled into the games, the park life, the last term of the Barn Church Nursery with the enthusiasm of a visitor and the confidence of an old hand. She slept on a camp bed in the same room as the two children who had been her best friends since friends had featured. Anna and Natasha kept the house cheerful at least when Marcelle was around. She did not hear the long late-night discussions, she saw no tears, she was protected by those good friends from the streams of sadness which could flow from Natasha.
Natasha wanted to exercise her new freedom immediately but she was hemmed in. The responsibility for Marcelle which she had assumed without much expense of energy when Joseph was around to help now bore down on her despite Anna’s support. Anna and her family could not have been more supportive but the constant sympathy became stifling. How could she possibly complain faced as she was by such loyalty? But in order to make her new life work she had to find a way to carry out her determination to be a free spirit. And her back was getting worse. Some
times she walked bent over. She wanted to hide away and rest, let it mend.
‘I’m looking for a place to rent,’ she wrote to Joseph. ‘It is not a good feeling to go once again to estate agents and look at details of houses in Kew. It seems as if I am reliving a life that has passed on. I must find somewhere. Anna is so generous but this can only be a temporary resting place. And I must revise this novel. I have begun writing poems again and I want to return to painting but to take it more seriously now. I just let it go over the past few years and for no good reason . . .’ I must be true to my old self, she thought, I must get back to the time before I met him. She did not write that down, aware it would hurt his feelings.
Joe first rushed through her letters and then re-read them very carefully, looking for clues. He missed her badly. He found it sad and strange to be in their house alone. Save for the occasional couple of days he had never lived in their house alone. He expected Natasha to let herself in at any time or Marcelle to be in the garden, on the swing. He walked warily from room to room glancing in to make sure they had not become occupied since he had last looked in. He did not like to eat there. Yet after a night with Helen he would still walk back, cutting a curve across north-west London, with the instinct of a homing pigeon.
‘We could meet in Kew Gardens on Sunday,’ he wrote. ‘If you like I’ll pick you up at Anna’s in the late morning. We could take Marcelle into the Gardens or down to the boats at Richmond and find somewhere to have lunch and talk. Would that be OK?’
When they met he had trouble remembering why they had parted. What they did together was always what they had done together previously and the very repetition of the act seemed to carry the promise that life would go on as before because that was what was happening.
‘It was so hard to leave you,’ he wrote. ‘When we came back to Anna’s and you said “come in”, I wanted to and yet something held me back. I walked to the station with so much of me, of my feelings, still with you and Marcelle. Even the planes seemed tolerable but then I was catching a train to take me away from them.’
Natasha tried not to plead with him to stay. She did though wish sometimes that he did not come to see them so regularly, did not come with that embarrassed eagerness which disarmed her, did not seem to understand that a distance had been established and ought to be respected. It was when he was with her that she missed him most. He was present and close but separate now, unbearably. She wanted time alone, she needed it to build this new life for herself. Even Marcelle could be an encumbrance.
‘You must not feel guilty about Marcelle,’ she imagined her analyst saying to her. ‘You have told me how much liberty you give to Marcelle and how well she plays with the children of your friends and how pleased they are to receive her. Even so she is at this time a burden. It is not unusual nor is it unnatural for parents to find their children a burden although it is often very difficult to admit it. Procreation in our society at let us call it your level has severed itself from many of the bonds of necessity. Yet protection and nurture are still essential. What you are really telling me is that Marcelle was your gift to Joseph’s sense of securing a bourgeois life for which you had little inclination. Now that you want to go back to rediscover your single bohemian self much that Joseph has brought you seems a mistake. It gets in the way. Even Marcelle who is now your sole responsibility however often Joseph comes to see you.’
‘You must not allow your love of guilt to get in the way,’ she told Joseph. Marcelle was with friends in order to give them time together. On a wet autumn late afternoon there were few options. They had settled for the station café, almost empty at this time. They sat in a corner with tea and digestive biscuits. Joseph kept his voice low; Natasha spoke at her normal pitch which seemed loud in the rather bare utilitarian café.
‘Guilt,’ she continued, ‘has dragged you down. You want to be bold and you have been bold but then guilt creeps in and snares you. You want to tell the truth and reap the cleansing that comes from that but by perverse thinking you fail to tell the truth because your guilt fears it will hurt me but you are the one who is hurt by these lies and that makes you angry, and angry with me, of course.’ She smiled, that quick dart of smile which could still melt his heart. ‘You are guilty because you are more fortunate than your parents and their parents, you are guilty because you are doing the work you want to do and not the work you have been made to do, and you are guilty because you think you are mistreating Marcelle and me and in one interpretation you are.’ This time she laughed. ‘That is the only guilt I can excuse. The rest you must banish.
‘Your analyst should be giving you more help. Guilt has become a straitjacket. It seems to me that since you have few educational or financial or social barriers blocking you, this guilt has arrived to do duty for them all. Perhaps your peasant history is written so deeply inside you that you were made a creature of the habit of being oppressed by whatever circumstances. Your analyst ought to help you.’
‘You keep fishing about my analyst,’ said Joseph, taking the opportunity to switch away from her own analysis of his character before which he had always been in defenceless agreement. ‘You know I don’t like talking about it. I never ask you how your analysis is going, do I?’
Natasha nodded, drew on the cigarette, again let the opportunity for confession pass. That single reference opened up the sore. She stayed silent. She had to concentrate on Joseph.
‘Look,’ he whispered, leaning towards her, head bowed over his tea, not seeking out her glance, ‘it’ll be all right, really.’ He swallowed to ease the sudden dry throat. Once again a mechanism in his brain had focused on the aeroplanes. ‘I don’t know what it is. It was good of you to leave and give me time on my own and I can see why you did it. Why should you put up with what I’m doing? I just barge on with my selfish life. And sitting here I can’t work out why we’re not together, Natasha.’
‘Why do you always give me hope?’
‘Because I love you. And you know that.’
‘There are differences now,’ she said. ‘There are great differences and hurt that only great love or a wise tolerance can heal and make good. You need time alone to decide who you are, Joseph. I want time alone too.’
He sat before her, unhappy, on edge, vulnerable. She too found this meeting in the station buffet a strain, even a public humiliation, a place which forbade the intimacy they were most in need of.
‘We have nowhere to go,’ she said.
‘Don’t say that!’
‘I mean here, Joseph, now, in Kew, nowhere to be privately together.’
‘I thought that was what you wanted to have a rest from.’
‘It would be good to be reminded of what we were and what we could be again. How long do you think this affair of yours will last?’
He found no response. The screeching of the planes, the pull inside him, now for Natasha and home, now for a different life and Helen, such huge forces they seemed to be, like two mingled oceans fighting to be separate. How could these forces seem so vast inside him?
‘I don’t know,’ he whispered. ‘But I do love you.’
‘I know that, Joseph.’ Her voice was steady. ‘But that is not an answer.’
‘A month or two?’
He wanted to leave. He wanted to run.
‘Or three or four? Why two?’
‘It’ll sort itself out. I know it will.’
‘Meanwhile . . .’ she began and then checked herself. ‘That is good for me too,’ she said, resisting the temptation to talk more, to talk to Joseph as if he were her dead analyst. ‘But there is sex. I miss the sex. And the warmth of intimacy.’
‘Well, there’s . . .’
‘Poor Joseph. I cannot come back to Hampstead for sex and we cannot ask our friends to let us have a bedroom for an hour or so, can we?’
‘Well, I suppose . . . it would be . . .’ And suddenly the idea of making love to Natasha seemed like a solution.
‘It will have to wait,’ she sai
d. ‘And we are too old now to find places in the open air.’
‘We used to.’
‘You sought them out,’ said Natasha. ‘Sometimes on those walks I was aware that all you were doing was appraising the density of various hedges and bushes.’
‘That was good,’ he smiled. Life between them would be fine.
‘You are such a romantic and such an idealist,’ she said. ‘But now that isn’t enough.’
‘Why not?’
‘We need analysis now, Joseph, to repair the inevitable failings of idealism and romanticism.’
‘Yours seems to be working much better than mine,’ he said. ‘All mine does is repeat back to me in a different version what I’ve already told him.’
Once again Natasha braced herself against the threat of telling.
‘It is very important that you stay with your analysis,’ she said, ‘that, above all.’ And with me, she thought, and with me.
It was always so awkward to part. Natasha wanted him to come back with her even though Marcelle would not be there. Joseph wanted to go with her but the prospect of intimacy was suddenly too difficult to manage. Natasha took on board the prospect of his eventual departure in front of others which was humiliating. She wanted to be with him, just to be with him. She knew that had she insisted he would follow her: he had done so before, but that kind of loyalty was not worthy of them, she thought.
In her mind’s eye she saw him get on the overground train she herself had caught so often from Kew back to Hampstead, the first few friendly stations and then the grim industrial landscape around Willesden and she felt the pull of his reluctance, could imagine the power of his attachment to her still holding as he stared out of the carriage window and saw her walk through Kew to the house of their friends, a path taken so often by both of them. Yet somewhere on the journey he would not be leaving her but travelling to meet Helen. Each knew that the other was thinking like thoughts. In the manner of their parting they expressed an unmistakable and loving union and held onto that until the next time.
