Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  If Helen and Joe were defined by any one thing in their first weeks together, it was by dancing. Helen wholly embraced the music of her generation and the Stones, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Credence Clearwater, Bob Dylan and others ignited her personality into a dancing, smiling happiness, and Joe came to this unthinking ambience of pleasure as to an oasis. She taught him the new dancing freedom. They danced in her room at the flat, they danced at the regular noisy weekend parties, they danced in the cheap discos some of Peter’s gang would make for: dancing shaped them. It was the time when dancing apart from one another, separate and yet in communion, had become the fashion, an elaborate courtship ritual, curiously chaste in the new context of permissiveness, allowing each to weave variations, fanciful, parodic, camp, apart and yet together often by no more than an exchange of glances, dancing together even though entire songs could fly by without them so much as touching each other.

  It allowed for public exhilaration without the curse of showing off. It allowed the music to flood the mind, to establish a chemical bliss of mindlessness, draw out all the inhibitions by its sweet marauding sirens of rhythm and melody, and in that dancing Joe’s panic could find no place, his fragile confidence and damaged consciousness was soothed as if mesmerised through the music and the dance and steered towards a state of healing where the words he uttered were not poems hard learned and held onto like fingerholds on a rock face but the simple words of songs which came wrapped in singable melodies driven by a rock beat which pumped nerve energy.

  Dancing became Joe’s passion. Dancing was an escape from the old. Dancing began to mend him and the more flamboyant the steps and poses the more earthed he felt, at least for the duration of the dance. It did not end his fears. But dancing with Helen, it only worked with Helen, reintroduced him to high youthful sensations of being alive, of being him, on the planet, for these moments, a sort of static wildness such as he had experienced as a boy and even into manhood until the world he had chosen to reach out for with all his might had proved too much and closed over him. Now he had to get out of that. Freedom was dancing with Helen.

  At Christmas Natasha and Marcelle went to Oxford. Julia and Matthew’s three children again adopted Marcelle as their little sister and competed for the attention of their young guest. To be released from perpetual vigilance and in the amplitude of this large and friendly house made Natasha realise how tense she had been over the past months. It was neither a religious nor was it a hypocritical household but the lack of a Christmas tree and general Victorian seasoning was compensated for by a spirit of good cheer, a Dickensian uplift of spirits which made its own Christmas with the exchange of inexpensive presents, usually books, the observance of a big meal on Christmas Day, and the undiscussed but collective decision to call out to each other on Christmas morning, ‘A merry Christmas, why not?’

  Natasha was given her former room. The daughter of the family, the only daughter, who was six years older than Marcelle, claimed her as a Christmas sister, and took her captive into her own bedroom.

  Other au pairs had come and gone. The current occupant, who was German, had returned home for the holidays but despite the changes inspired by the years between her younger and her present self, Natasha soon felt the room to be her own again. She kept the curtains open. She looked over Oxford back gardens. She had brought her sketchbook and did some work. The bed was the same narrow bed. Julia had put flowers in the room. It was a room of such powerful memories that Natasha sometimes felt drugged on them and at other times lost in them, like a child in the dark forest in a fairy tale.

  It was not in her nature to draw up lists or come to conclusions about how far she had or had not come since Joseph had first arrived at her door, not in her character to make calculations of achievement. To Natasha life was the fathomless and seductive past or a permanent present which hovered above it and which took all the attention she had to spare from the perpetual threat of a downward spiral into the dominating unrecoverable personal history that hypnotised her. So to Natasha the past and present in this attic room were seamless. She found sad pleasure in the overwhelming presence of Joseph and looked hard, as for months after his death she had looked at the jar of shells collected by François, at the two paintings she had brought up from the cellar, reading their lives in them despite her rational dismissal of such illogical fortune-telling ways. She found solitude there for hours on end and believed that it helped restore some equilibrium.

  ‘She looks terribly tired,’ said Julia.

  ‘But not unwell, I think,’ said Matthew, putting aside with some relief an article he was correcting: it ought, he felt, to be rewritten and his decision to put it aside for conversation with Julia confirmed that it would be.

  ‘Do you think he’s behaving badly?’

  ‘Not really.’ Matthew picked up his whisky but paused. ‘I think that whatever has come between them is serious. Unfortunately these things happen.’

  ‘I agree. But you never anticipate they’ll happen to people you know. Or I don’t. She talks about him ceaselessly, analysing him, I really should say, and torments herself about this Helen.’

  ‘They are two serious adults with a dreadful problem,’ said Matthew. He would begin the article again immediately, the following morning. Already he saw how he could both shorten it and make it more telling.

  ‘She’s moved into this awful little flat back in Kew.’

  ‘She told me she rather liked it.’

  ‘I asked her to describe it. It sounds godawful. And insanitary.’

  ‘Ah.’ He took out a cigarette. It could be rather effective, he thought, to begin the article where in its present form he had concluded it.

  ‘I thought that he would be an old-fashioned, working-class sticker,’ Julia said.

  ‘I think that the adhesive of his class wore off some time ago.’

  ‘But what about Marcelle? He has a duty to her.’

  ‘Indeed. But in Marcelle one sees a very bright well-balanced child—’

  ‘Which speaks volumes for Natasha—’

  ‘I grant you that. But as we know once passion has its way nothing is too sacred to escape sacrifice. Literature is full of examples.’

  ‘Literature is no guide to morality. I just want common or garden fidelity and if not absolute fidelity then the outward appearance and exercise of fidelity until real fidelity finds its way back which with these two I’m sure it will.’

  ‘I admire what he writes and what he does,’ said Matthew. ‘I admire what she writes too. But in their work they stand well apart from each other.’

  ‘Only if you read their fiction as autobiography which I cannot believe you do.’

  ‘It can be a fine line,’ said Matthew and held up his whisky. The pieces had fallen into place. If he still had the energy he once had he would have begun again now, even at this late hour.

  ‘It is,’ said Julia, ‘impossible to help.’

  ‘Except to provide shelter, if I may use that word,’ said Matthew, ‘which you, we, are doing now.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Natasha at the railway station. ‘I feel such a lot better.’

  They were on the platform. Marcelle was still in thrall to her new ‘sister’ who had taken her to buy a comic to read on the train. There was some snow but not enough to excite the children. Oxford Station seemed designed for bleak partings.

  ‘Don’t you feel like just hitting him and telling him to come to his senses? I’m sure I would.’

  ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t, Julia . . .’ Natasha smiled and for that moment Julia thought, yes, she is better than when she arrived, she will cope with this, she has the strength. ‘He has to find and then obey his free will.’

  ‘Isn’t it rather dangerous to let him try?’

  ‘There is nothing else that matters,’ Natasha said, firmly, and suddenly Marcelle was upon her, waving the comic, flushed from the cold, brimming with life, holding out her arms to be lifted up.

  Joe stayed in London for
Christmas. Everything about it felt wrong. He had promised Helen they would go to a fashionable disco on Christmas Eve but he did not know any. The place he came across, off Bond Street in Mayfair, was empty when they arrived even though he had taken as he thought sophisticated care not to appear until after ten o’clock. They danced alone on the tablecloth-sized floor to the usual music but without any of the usual joy. The disco filled up slowly with a smart enough but by no means fashionable crowd, a few of whom danced but in the same subdued way as Helen and Joe as if this were simply a way to get through a rather desperate Christmas Eve. They lost heart and left just after midnight and took almost an hour to find a taxi which would agree a price to take them to Helen’s flat where they drank too much wine, made determined but unsatisfactory love and slept the sleep of the drunk with hangovers waiting at dawn.

  On Christmas Day they walked all but silently on Hampstead Heath. Joe felt utterly dislocated, aware that he was offering Helen a sad present which promised little joy. She ought to be with one of the gang he had met at that first meeting. She deserved a better life than he could give her. There would be no rest from the past. Joe felt wretched and vowed to himself that it was over. It would be better for Helen, only the family counted, he wanted to be back with Natasha and all the company and life they had gathered up together.

  ‘What do you think? It’s perfect, isn’t it?’

  Natasha looked at him as if she were showing off a desirable villa. They were in a street in Kew which curved from outside the tennis courts to Kew Green, a street of small terraced houses once inhabited by working families, now being sequestered by young professionals who saw a cheap chance to get on the property ladder in a desirable area. The cottages were originally two rooms up and two down, but time, hygiene and gentrification had brought additions to some of them – a kitchen and another bedroom stuck on at the back jutting into the small garden, an inside lavatory, central heating – and here and there, embellishments – new cornicing, the installation of a marble fireplace, and parquet flooring, which set off Eastern rugs to great advantage.

  They went in. It felt to Joseph to be not so much unoccupied as abandoned. Grime ruled. The kitchen looked like a scrapyard. A worrying stink possessed the stale air.

  ‘It’s less than three thousand pounds,’ said Natasha, uttering the sum of money very shyly. She had left all that to him, he realised. This simple utterance was said, he knew, to prove her new independence.

  They stood in the front room which was bare and empty and yet cramped. Two cardboard boxes dominated the floor, the least distressing of the general litter. In the fire grate were a heap of ashes covered in soot. The light cord hung from the ceiling: light shade, bulb and socket had been removed. A floorboard in front of the fireplace had been torn up for no reason Joseph could comprehend.

  ‘I would knock this wall down,’ she said. ‘That would make a double cube. Marcelle can have her own bedroom upstairs. The little room at the back faces north which is perfect for a studio. You can visit us here, you see?’

  Her gaze was so intense that Joseph turned away and pretended to be interested in the windows.

  ‘And if we . . .’ Again her shyness – a new and heart-breaking characteristic – appeared in her words and she could not complete the sentence which he completed for her.

  ‘. . . live together again,’ he said.

  ‘Yes . . .’ What was stopping him doing it now?

  ‘But, Natasha, I’m sorry, it’s stupid, the planes, it’s impossible. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, until we are together again it will be somewhere for Marcelle and me to live. It would be so nice to have a home and not be with friends or in that flat with others. I know it is a lot of money.’

  ‘I can manage. I’ll remortgage Hampstead. Anyway, half of Hampstead is yours.’

  ‘Could you . . .’ and there entered into her tone and her expression a desperation and an embarrassment which Joseph had never seen or heard before, ‘could you buy it all at once? So that we can be safe here. Is it possible to do that?’

  ‘Yes.’ Please don’t plead, my darling Natasha, he wanted to say. Please don’t try to get round me. Just ask. Why to God are we standing in this forsaken room discussing this and not together as we were and should be for always I don’t understand, Natasha.

  ‘I could pay for the changes. The alterations. I still have a little money left.’

  ‘No. I’ll . . . It’ll be OK. I’m sure. Anyway.’ He continued, ‘But won’t this make it more difficult for us? Wouldn’t it be better if you stayed in that flat for a while longer until I sort it out?’

  ‘I thought of that at Christmas when I was in my old room in Oxford.’ Still the intent look, painfully expectant, ‘and I thought, well, he has had several months now and I am very tired. I must be practical. I have my own work to do. Marcelle needs a base. We are safe in Kew, among our friends, we are safe here. And then I found this little house. Pissarro lived in this street when he came to London. So you see?’

  He nodded. He could no longer trust himself to speak. How could he leave her when she needed him so much?

  Fear of what would happen if he stayed. Fear of survival. Fear. Something was happening that would make an irreversible change; it was as if he could see a most terrible storm approaching but he felt paralysed. Why could he not find a compromise now, this day, this hour?

  Suddenly she looked away from him and began picking at a white handkerchief she was holding. He realised what all this was taking out of her and went across to hold her. They stood as one.

  ‘I miss the warmth of you,’ she said. ‘Just this.’

  ‘It will be fine,’ he said. ‘Honestly, Natasha. I want it to be fine for us.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I know . . . But for now, just hold me . . . Just let us be like this.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  ‘Take whatever you want,’ Joseph had said. ‘I can be out all day if that will help. Take whatever you want.’

  Natasha walked up the gentle hill from the station, Hampstead Heath to her right and on her left a row of Georgian cottages bright-white-faced in the mid-morning, mid-winter sun. She peered at the long lawned gardens which led to the pavement on which she walked. The triangle of pastoral playground reserved for younger children in which Marcelle had played, the tranquillity of the streets which led from the station up into the centre of Hampstead, the charm of this hilly colony made up a place which given time and peace she felt she could have come to like. Or was this sentimentality? She had made a hard decision. She had to steel herself to keep it.

  Even their street was redeemed by the fine grey morning light and Natasha, who had not experienced the stain of Ellen’s puzzled shame which had so unnerved Joseph, could find for the sad decline of an aspiration to gentility a certain melancholy affection. Morning light and absence laid many of the demons.

  She went up the steps and found that her hand trembled as she put the key in the door. She twisted it one way and then the other without sufficient force and for a brief moment she feared that she had been for ever locked out. She saw herself as if in a painting on the top of five stone steps, a nervous woman in a long, black, rather Russian coat Joseph had bought her, a red woollen scarf slung around her neck, hair hastily brushed but appearing to be stylishly cut. Barred out? Breaking in? It could be a painting by one of the Camden School which would be appropriate, she thought, here in the Borough of Camden, and as she experienced the thought the key clicked, the door opened and she stepped into the narrow hall and shut the door very quietly behind her. Quiet was all around her. She let the brief and sad history of the house settle on her as she tried to slough off the feeling of being a trespasser. Would Joseph be there? She wanted him to be there.

  ‘Joseph?’ It was no more than a whisper.

  Where to go first?

  She walked towards the stairs and carried on up to the first floor and then up to the two small slope-roofed attic rooms. In one of them she had ho
ped to set up her studio. It was about a third the size of her attic room at Oxford but attics for Natasha were always a haven. Joseph had bought her a couple of posters. One of them was from the Tate Gallery, advertising the paintings of Turner and showing Morning among the Coniston Fells which, as well as being the Lake District and by the British painter Joseph most admired, showed, he told her, an ascent to paradise in a working landscape and she smiled at the memory of how he had deeply hugged to himself that combination of ordinariness and sublimity. The other poster carried a few lines from Wordsworth, printed big and in black against a hard blue sky streaming with white cloud.

  No motion has she now, no force,

  She neither hears nor sees

  Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course

  With rocks and stones and trees.

  She stared at it for a while and then reached out and took it down and rolled it up carefully. She thought she could hear him recite those words. Once upon a time he had liked to speak poetry aloud to her. It was a performance wrapped in self-satisfaction but nonetheless truly felt and she had been feted by it. There was a terrified emptiness in her. What was she to do? Who would help her now? This house had been hers, his, theirs. There was a desperate hollowness, but what could she do, orphaned by infidelity.

  She had already taken the easel and paints. There was nothing more she wanted to take from that room, nothing she wanted to mark for the removal men.

  At the bedroom door she stood for some time but did not enter. The bed was neatly made, Joseph would have made it, but unslept in, she thought, for some time. She conjured up a picture of Joseph and herself asleep in that bed and shivered, she could not decide why. At the loss? At the memory of pleasure? Of pain? At the pretence of a love in marriage? It was such an ordinary bed. There was a pair of nineteenth-century French gilt mirrors on the wall, each bearing two candle holders; their elegance had caught her eye and their state of disrepair had made them affordable. Joseph had loved them and once or twice he had lit the candles and brought wine to bed. She had intended to take them but they made the room. She had not the heart to do it.