by Melvyn Bragg
In Marcelle’s room she marked all the furniture. But when she went downstairs to the living room the mood she had experienced in the bedroom caught her again. She tried to fathom it. It was as if the house had become a sacred spot, she thought, that was as near as she could get even though in her secular mentality the word ‘sacred’ made her uneasy. Yet here were the things Joseph had been so proud to amass: things which meant so much less to her; things, in truth, she could discard without a single backward pang of regret.
She went to lie as she had so often done on the long sofa, to ease her back. As she examined the room she appreciated more fully than ever before that Things, especially the Things with which he had furnished their home, meant a very great deal to Joseph. It was not to show off his money – some of the objects and the books were clearly inexpensive, even cheap. Nor were they to show off his taste – some of the objects were so naïf they made her smile – the homely hodge-podge was more like an eccentric pocket museum than any thought-through collection. But it worked, she thought, because it was Joseph and she could sense still the enthusiasm in the purchases. He was the integrating factor, it was Joseph plucking at new worlds and old, eager for all things, and at last these things were special for her because they were him. She left the room as she had found it.
She had not meant to go into his study. As soon as she entered it she knew why. Her apprehension had nothing to do with Joseph, despite the study revealing a yet more essential part of his life. She sat down and wished she had not come to the house at all. The memory of that final realisation in this room of the consequences of her analyst’s death returned. She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them, widely. Inside her head was a vertigo. Natasha knew that the loss and the passionate sense of being abandoned had not been resolved. Indeed it was intensifying. Thoughts of Joseph mingled with thoughts of the woman who had been there to heal her as she felt weakness possess her.
She ordered herself to stand up. On the mantelpiece Joseph had laid out his fragments from the ancient world. She went across and made herself examine them closely even though she knew them and even though such close examination was hardly necessary. She picked up the chipped and battered Egyptian necklace. Joseph had been told it was almost four thousand years old. It was the years rather than the object which entranced him. He had told her that one day they would go to Egypt and now she longed for that journey, just Joseph and herself. Her father had talked so much about Egypt, the Sphinx and the Valley of the Kings, Luxor and Nefertiti’s Tomb, Champollion and the Rosetta Stone. He had made it seem the most desirable place on earth. This, too, was Joseph, she realised. Images of him as he had been, of them as they might have been. Why did she not stay and wait for him? Why did she not stay? He would surely return.
‘Natasha is extraordinary,’ said Julia. ‘She’s only had the house for ten minutes and she turned what I saw as a tip into an utterly charming little sort of salon and artist’s studio combined. She’s painted everything white. The furniture is from junk shops but it looks just right, far better than the clutter of the other place. She paints away and writes away and tells me she is meeting new people all the time. And Joe was there! He had come to help move in the last of the furniture and take Marcelle for an afternoon’s outing which I thought rather sad but she then announced they were all three going off to Marlow for a few days!’
‘We’ve talked about Marlow,’ he wrote to her. ‘Remember? At a time when you thought you could remember nothing at all about your mother, we talked about Marlow and you thought you could remember something. I wanted us all to have a holiday together. You would be just over five, you’d started in the junior school in Kew Gardens and I bought you a fishing net. Everything was so strained and out of joint that I play-acted as hard as I possibly could at being natural. It did not come easily. Perhaps you sensed as much in this over-hearty dad strolling along the banks of the Thames looking for a suitable fishing point, two fishing nets slung over his shoulder as if out for a hardened day’s fly fishing, you with the jar for the hopeful catch, your mother trailing us, observing us, this Happy Family. Did you sense it was false and block it out?
‘What you think you remember are the tiddlers. We struck gold in the Thames and shoals of tiddlers competed to be in our nets. Soon the jar we had brought was black with the tiddly fishlets fighting for water. We tipped them back into the river and then once again harvested those kamikaze tiddlers. And once again we tipped them back all in a high heat of daddy-daughter delight which for you I pray was real but for me looked, as your mother pointed out that evening, like an impersonation.’
Joe had gone to Marlow partly because Tim had recommended a fine riverside hotel which catered for children. ‘There’s two sorts of kids’ hotels,’ Tim said. ‘One looks after the kids and is rubbish for us. The other looks after us and is rubbish for kids. This one does both. Don’t ask me how.’
What it meant essentially was that couples could have dinner together while staff patrolled upstairs. Marcelle slept in a room connected to their own.
The dining room was full, low volume, and over-splendid for Natasha’s taste. They had a window table overlooking the river now in full spring spate. Natasha ordered so quickly that Joe correctly concluded she had no interest at all in the meal. He was nervous on this, their first night, and he took his time.
‘Wine, sir?’ The waiter was old and bored, the shoulders of his dinner jacket powdered with dandruff.
‘Number seventy-three.’
‘A very good choice, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so.’ He bowed at Joe and bowed again at Natasha. ‘Welcome to the Marlow Hotel,’ he said.
‘Do you remember Felix Krull?’ said Joe after he had left. ‘I’ve often thought it could be intriguing to be a waiter.’
‘If you are Felix Krull. And if you are a creation of Thomas Mann,’ she said. ‘And if you meet a convenient prince.’
‘A waiter is always playing a part,’ he said. ‘Slightly different to each table, different again, I imagine, in the kitchen. Always on parade.’
‘Why should you like that?’
‘Don’t you sometimes want to lead the lives of others?’
‘No. My own is difficult enough.’
‘But your own life isn’t one-faced, is it? We are all several people in one. We all contain multitudes.’
He talked on in this manner and she answered but her thoughts were a parallel monologue. Why are you behaving like this, Joseph? Why are you once again impersonating, this time an affectionate husband casually at ease with his wife? How can you? How dare you? Why do you want to preen here in public when at last we are away together for a few days on neutral ground and we could talk truth? You are frightened of the truth, Joseph. Perhaps you always have been. You insisted on buying me this silly dress in Marlow this afternoon and you do not realise that I conceded only because Marcelle was excited about it but the inexplicable thing is that you seem to think that it matters. What matters is us. Why do you evade that? You act as if nothing has changed. Everything has changed. You are across the table. You pour wine into my glass. We will go to bed together. You say you love me?
‘I do,’ said Joe. They lay in the dark, cigarettes alight, the slackness of love made bodies apparently at one. ‘I do,’ he repeated. He did.
‘I believe you,’ she said and paused a while; then laughed very gently. ‘I am pleased,’ she said, ‘that you feel you do not need to seek the same reassurance from me. Perhaps you want to be a bigamist,’ she said, ‘that is not so unusual, neither in the past nor I guess today. But you will not permit that.’ She turned away from him to stub out the cigarette. ‘Marcelle told me that she loved going fishing with you. So you see. There is always another perspective.’
Joe’s sense of the artificiality of the situation was exposed. ‘I do love you,’ he insisted.
‘I believe the words. I would like to see the actions.’
‘You said I could have time,’ and the slackness in
his body went away. He wished he were not there. He felt trapped – though it was he who had suggested it.
‘You have all the time you need,’ she said and lit another cigarette. ‘I hope you are careful with it.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘She is young. Let us say she loves you. Let us say you tell her that you love her.’ Joe froze. Natasha waited for a while and then relented. ‘You must be careful you do not make her pregnant or that she does not make you make her pregnant.’
He had no answer. His admiration for Natasha’s brave clarity added yet more to the power of the unanswerable question – how could he treat her like this?
‘When we were at Oxford at Christmas,’ Natasha said, ‘the children put on a play. They wrote it for themselves and they wrote a lovely part for Marcelle. And who was the star performer? Marcelle. She takes after you there. It is a shame you did not see her . . . It is so very good to be together, Joseph, and I try every hour to understand, to hold to my belief in your freedom and mine. But it is tiring and sleep is no longer my friend.’
‘They were in Marlow,’ said Ellen, looking up from the postcard, ‘and they didn’t tell us.’
‘I’m glad.’ Sam picked up the river scene and read the brief note. ‘They need time together to sort it out.’
‘Will they?’
‘They should be able to.’
‘But will they?’
‘If anybody can, Natasha can.’
‘You haven’t answered.’
‘There’s no certainty in these matters, Ellen.’
‘I had a feeling even on their wedding day.’
‘What can you say? There’s rough and smooth, thick and thin, there always was. We’ll see what he’s really made of now.’
‘And her. Not just him. Her as well.’
‘He can’t let somebody like her go,’ he said. ‘Nobody could. There’s only one Natasha.’
Joe had been asked to do the screenplay for a novel set in Mexico and he went there for ten days’ research. He had by this time been separate from Natasha for about nine months, and often he would tell her that he wanted to and intended to return. He had recently been sleeping most nights of the week with Helen, to whom he talked intimately much less but who understood that he was moving away from Natasha towards an eventually final separation. Each position seemed true when he was with each woman. Helen had endured Marlow though she had not been able to resist making a telephone call to him one evening when he and Natasha were in their room changing for dinner. She had supported his consistent visits to Kew and the weekend sightseeing trips into London that he now made with Marcelle.
He took Helen to Mexico half determined this would be the celebration of their union, half convinced that this would be the final few days with her, that by some process of reason she deserved this exotic trip: the paying of dues. He did not tell Natasha that they were going to Mexico.
They drove to Cuernavaca to look at the central location of the novel he had agreed to adapt. Their driver railed against the number of gods in Mexico – ‘god o’ the sun, god o’ the rain, god o’ the mountain, god o’ every damn thing’. He spent the return journey attempting to persuade Joe to buy a gun from a thoroughly reliable friend of his. They went to markets and Helen bartered to Joe’s embarrassment: the prices were low enough, the sellers too poor to begin with. They went on the boats in Mexico City and spent a long morning in the Museum of Anthropology, Joe stunned and suffocated by the sullen compulsion of the sculptures. Joe went to the communion service in the colossal cathedral across the square from their hotel.
They ate to the accompaniment of Mariachi bands and bought cheap jewellery for each other, rings and medallions for Helen and also for Joe, who soon looked like a playboy tourist. Every night they had a drink in a crowded piano bar with a long polished counter down which their glasses of tequila were skidded to them at high speed. Only towards the end of their stay did they realise that upstairs was a brothel. They drank too much tequila and suffered.
The climax of the visit for Joe was when they went to see the pyramids. He lingered over altars which had witnessed human sacrifice. Yet the most unexpected revelation was a central arena for ball games where, they were told, the finest young noblemen played for their lives. They found a sculpting of the Plumed Serpent and Helen took a photograph of him standing by it. She declined to have herself photographed there. Joe felt everywhere in Mexico pervaded and oppressed by both Aztec and Roman Catholic mysteries, Indian women squatting on the ground in markets, their eyes open wide but black, forbidding entry, and Catholic women in the cathedral, kneeling on the stone floor, their eyes closed in prayer, blind to the material world.
‘It is always difficult to know what feelings were being experienced so long ago,’ he said to Marcelle. ‘But I remember strain in Mexico. I remember feeling betrayal that I was seeing pyramids with Helen and not with Natasha, but despite the loss that had bled so much from memory as well as from the life that followed it, I think Helen and I had some happiness there and we knew in some way we were trying to build a life there.’
Julia had challenged him. ‘Why is it that you want to be apart from Natasha? What is it?’ And he had said that when he was with Helen he did not fear that the world would collapse inside his head all the time. ‘Then you have to hold onto that,’ Julia had said. ‘You must hold onto that.’ And then, ‘you ought to look after them.’
Yet at times he knew that by being with Helen and leaving behind Natasha who would have longed to be in Mexico he was doing the wrong thing. As he said it he meant it. What could explain this wrong course of action save love or weakness? But if there was something in him which simply would not do what was ‘right’, could that not mean he was wrong about right and wrong? This brought temporary relief on several occasions but could not, would never eradicate the stake-hearted conviction that leaving Natasha and Marcelle was wrong however many the excuses, however hard the course; he had failed himself and there would be no redemption. But he was with Helen. And despite all, he stayed with Helen.
Blind, blind, blind, he sent Natasha a postcard of the pyramids.
After lunch he had hoped to take Marcelle to Regent’s Park where there was a children’s boating pond next to a playground and the little girl could switch from one to the other. But August rain put paid to that. They went to a cinema in Oxford Street to see The Yellow Submarine. Marcelle called it ‘Sumbarine’. The mispronunciation became a private joke.
They arrived in Kew earlier than usual and Joe telephoned Natasha to tell her that he was taking Marcelle to the Garden Cafe for egg and chips and she was welcome to join them which she did.
She was dressed in a sari, perfect, she said, for summer. Her complexion, always pale, was white. She seemed preoccupied and said little and drank tea while Marcelle and Joe dealt with their simple meal. Joe always ate very quickly and was finished way before Marcelle.
‘Could I have one of your chips?’
‘One,’ she said. He took one.
‘Hmm. They’re really good. Can I have another?’
‘One,’ she said, enjoying the game.
‘Hmm. They’re really good. Can I have another?’
‘Don’t let him, Marcelle. Don’t let him take everything from you. Say no! Say no!’
A small cloud of embarrassment made a temporary settlement on other diners in the café.
‘It’s just a game,’ said Joe. ‘We play it all the time.’
‘I must take her home now. My back hurts.’ Natasha picked up the cup, decided against the tea and put it down rather clumsily, not quite centring it on the saucer. Joe’s eyes saw how fraught she was but there was that in him which refused to allow the observation to provoke help.
‘What was the song?’ he said.
In a clear, confident voice, Marcelle sang,
‘We all live in a yellow sumbarine, a yellow sumbarine, a yellow sumbarine.’
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Her
struggle had begun in earnest and Natasha was aware of it all the time. In luxurious and dangerous dream-moods of fierce introspection she thought she was like a knight on a quest seeking to solve apparently insoluble riddles about herself, forced to encounter monsters, to meet with failure and to experience despair. Yet the quest could not be abandoned. Something that was essentially her needed to face these dark forces, never to be a coward, however ensnared and exhausted, never to give in.
She had thought that it would be painful but not too difficult without her analyst but that was a false dawn. She had been drawn into the sources of her fear by an analyst of great skill and experience sharpened to an even finer art by her own past and by her immediate and ever-deepening empathy with her patient. In one story inside Natasha’s head the analyst could be seen as the temptress, who had lured Natasha by charms and spells into the centre of the labyrinth of the forest of her entangled memories, desires, rejections, pains, life traits. And then abandoned her. Natasha was the knight who had to rescue herself and there was no avoiding this task.
She noted this down as a summary of what was happening to her. But the story itself was all but lost in a haze, a veil made from random sensations and feelings which turned into not-quite-thoughts but were like innumerable spots of water which make up the swell of a sea, strong enough to move her to unnameable grief. Yet there was a voluptuousness too. Natasha could sit alone for hours, as she had done again and again in her adult life, locked into herself and though sad, not sorry for herself, though mourning, not self-pitying. At such times Natasha saw this interior complexity to be the best and richest way to live, the finest way to meet the impenetrable fact of this single accidental and meaningless life.
