by Melvyn Bragg
They walked, arm in arm. They had split the flight routes for the Saturday evening so the planes were fewer. Even so after the first half-dozen, Joseph was unnerved at this debilitating reminder, but said nothing as they strolled like other well-married local couples to the blazing lights in the house of Ross McCulloch, on the bank of the Thames.
‘I’m so glad you could come!’ Margaret had flung open the door, releasing a warm chorus of conviviality into the night air. ‘Natasha! You look marvellous! You could be on the way to Versailles.’ She kissed Natasha on both cheeks and when she turned to Joseph she held his hands and looked at him with deliberation. ‘It’s so good to see the two of you together.’
Joseph felt himself clench. Margaret reminded him of Helen. The same corn-blonde hair unsullied by hairdressers, untroubled by curls; the rather round Anglo-Saxon face, eyes of a similar colour though without the defining grey of Helen, the same full smiling dash at life.
‘You’ll know most people,’ she said. ‘BBC, Kew, family, a few others.’
The ‘others’ were a selection from those Ross worked with. David Attenborough was talking to Ross himself, John Schlesinger and Peter O’Toole appeared, Joseph thought, to be talking to each other but simultaneously, Liz Frink he recognised, and Harold Pinter and Dan Jacobson, Ken Russell was talking with Tim, who waved and then bowed, an action clearly directed at Natasha. Most of the others were either the close brotherhood of BBC executives or producers from whom Joseph felt rather exiled. There were some old friends from the area and as the Kew contingent heard of their arrival both Natasha and Joseph were overwhelmed by the sympathetic and welcoming attention paid as to prodigals returned to the fold.
The buffet, laid out in royal style and rich portions, was served in the large room that overlooked the river. Natasha who wanted nothing to eat and Joseph who was tempted on all sides by the display of feast became separated. During the next hour or two he went from conversation to conversation like someone in a gavotte. These circulations of conversationalists replaced the formal dancing which had once served the same purpose in a house such as this, he thought. They went from one new talking partner to another, a touch, a few paragraphs, a promise to meet again, another whirl.
Joseph soon found himself part of it. The talk stayed on the unchallenging slopes of the news of the day, or with BBC people dipped into the ever-fascinating topic of BBC internal politics; one or two people referred favourably to his work which he knew could have been little more than social politeness but nevertheless made him feel real as a writer. Tim said, ‘We two can talk any old time . . . I’ve got a few more to get round. That Helen of yours is sex in boots. And bright.’
Sarah said, ‘That was a great dinner. I’ve talked to Helen, we’ll all do it again soonest. Is she here?’
Joseph kept an eye on Natasha. Much of the time she had sat talking to a man with heavy spectacles, a boyish haircut and a brown corduroy jacket that looked as if it had been passed down from his father.
‘This is Jeremy,’ she said, when Joseph finally got across to her. ‘He runs the bookshop. I work there sometimes.’
‘More times, I hope,’ said Jeremy, who held out a soft hand for Joseph to shake. ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m rather new, I’ve just taken the place over in the last few months.’ Jeremy looked at Natasha whose gaze was fixed on Joseph. ‘I think I need another drink. You?’
‘No thank you,’ said Natasha.
When Jeremy left them, Natasha stood up and said, a little too loudly, Joe thought, ‘Why have you left me alone for so long?’
‘Just . . . moving around. You seemed all right with Jeremy.’
‘Sometimes just to be near someone who cares for you is enough. But I came here with you.’
‘At a party like this,’ Joseph adopted a whisper to try to influence and reduce the volume, ‘aren’t we supposed to mix?’
‘Only if you choose to do. Which you did.’
‘Well, we’re together now. Did you have anything to eat? The food is delicious, especially that salmon.’
‘Why do you talk about salmon?’
Joseph laughed.
‘Natasha. Please. I’m sorry. I’m here. They’ve opened the french windows. Let’s go outside.’
‘What for, Joseph?’
We should never have come, he thought.
‘Why did we come?’ she said and her eyes blazed at him. But when he looked away she checked her manners.
‘There is a large bowl of fruit salad,’ she said. ‘We could eat fruit salad.’
When the guests had finally gone and Ross and Margaret mulled over the evening he said,
‘I overheard them talking. One of them will have to give in.’
‘She looked beautiful,’ said Margaret.
‘I thought she looked exhausted,’ Ross said. ‘And he’s in some sort of limbo.’
‘I’m still glad they came.’
‘I’m glad we went,’ said Natasha when they got back to her house.
‘So am I . . .’ he said, and added, ‘and it was good to walk there together and be there and now best of all come back here with a small history between us,’ he said, loving her, and only a little drunk.
‘Why do you still give me hope?’
She lit the candles and turned on the electric fire.
‘I must phone for a taxi.’
‘I must get some wine.’
Natasha poured out the wine.
‘Thank you,’ she said and raised the glass. ‘I wanted you to take me there.’ She sipped. ‘It is curious, isn’t it, that sometimes when people try to be kind and are kind and say kind things you could scream. I suppose that is what is meant when they say, “I don’t want any pity.” I felt rather a lot of pity tonight.’
‘So did I. But they were, they are kind.’
‘They want us to be back together,’ said Natasha.
I wish I had more energy, Natasha thought. I am failing just as I want to be on my way to succeeding. Look at him. He is so nervous, ready to jump off that seat and run away at any second. Yet throughout the evening, both self-consciously and unconsciously he has been loving, his old self as the saying is.
His old good self. Not the self that seemed to grind me into his family’s past as if I needed my nose rubbing in it! Not the self that now and then shouted and sometimes frightened me because he would have no better way than anger to resolve problems he had never thought to meet. Nor the selfish self who could hurt so casually. But the self that always said and knew that he was sorry for that and could mend our lives at will. The self that had served and protected me. The self that encouraged me and cheered me on and tries hard to be a good father to Marcelle. The self that was just there most of, often all of, the time, content to go through life alongside me, expressing disbelief now and then that such luck should have come his way. The self that loved me enough to be with me. And there could be more of that, Natasha believed. She wanted to reach out for that Joseph at this moment and for him to reach out for her. It did not matter that he had fallen away from what he could be. What mattered to her was that he could still, she believed, be true to himself as she had found him. And true once again to her.
‘Why,’ he said, into the late-night, plane-free silence, in the cave of shadows promising resolutions which the candles conjured up, ‘why did you not just come back to the Hampstead house? You and Marcelle. I kept thinking when I was walking home – they’ll be there. And I didn’t think, not once, Natasha, I didn’t think – that’ll be terrible, there’ll have to be a scene, I just thought – they’ll be there. Why not? The place was empty for months. They’ll be waiting, I thought, time and again, the two of them. And when you weren’t, I thought – why not? Why not just come back? What would I have done but accept it? We could have started again.
‘I know you gave me my freedom. That was an amazing thing to do. That was you, Natasha. Only you. Nobody but you would have done that and so thoroughly. But you know I am in analysis, just as you a
re, and you know what that means and how weak it makes you. In one way I think it has the same effect as bloodletting for fever in the Middle Ages. The freedom you gave me was just too much for me. I’m not that good, Natasha, I’m not strong, sometimes this last year or two I’ve been jelly. And I’m not any sort of saint who was able to take this perfect freedom. It was too big a gift for me, Natasha. Or too big a test. Maybe that’s nearer the truth. And I failed that test, Natasha. But, tell me – why didn’t you just come back home?’
The tears which came to his eyes were not matched in hers because all her remaining resources were trying to hold out against the great tide of darkness which broke inside her sweeping away, it seemed, everything she had tried to guard. Why had she not done that? Simply that. And been saved? But now the wreckage of her life was swept down into depths she could not contemplate.
Joseph went across to her. She looked up at him with such sorrow. How could he bear to let her suffer such sorrow? She raised her arms to him.
‘Can we go to bed?’ she whispered. ‘Together. I can’t bear it, Joseph. And it will help me.’
After they had made love they clung to each other desperately like two people trying to force life to fire once again between them. Then he moved uneasily away from her and she knew he wanted to leave her. He was not brave enough. He had lost himself and now finally she must lose him too. Out of her darkness she said,
‘You must go.’
How could he go? he thought, and she thought, how could he leave her?
As Joseph moved away, Natasha became conscious of her wedding ring. She turned away from him and as he dressed she tugged at the ring which seemed stuck fast but though it hurt her finger she persisted. When he came across – to kiss her one last time? To say goodbye? To apologise? To lie? – she turned, seeming quite calm, and held it out to him. He did not want to take it. She looked at him directly and with the courage that always moved him. He took the ring. She turned away and held on until finally she heard him leave the house.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
‘I think that there are some people who are driven by the Furies,’ he wrote to Marcelle, ‘and your mother was one of them. The Furies come out of an abyss to pursue you to your fate, they press your darkest destiny on you. Natasha whose need for me, as I was to learn from others, was turning into an obsession, came out of that visit like one hounded. Her only escape, it must have seemed to her then, was to rediscover and reclaim the person she had originally set out and sworn to be. Her only survival would lie in being unswervingly true to herself. The self she was before she met me.
‘A few weeks later, without any preamble, divorce papers were posted to Hampstead. What did I feel? I am trying not to exaggerate but it is difficult not to. In the circumstances, given that I was by then living with another woman, some of my reactions were preposterous but they were nonetheless sane for that and even sincere, that treacherous word. I was outraged. I was hurt. I was blind furious. I was scared. I was out of my depth.
‘I rang Natasha immediately and let loose – I am sure although I cannot remember a word – a hurricane of anger, and it was on that call, I am more sure of this, that I used a term which Tim had fed me and used in his own divorce – “A marriage does not mean you have security for life”. There’s shame. Natasha was not strong enough for that. Natasha had not been hardened to verbal violence. No mitigation has been able to redeem that. It was plain nasty. But to me divorce came like a threat to life, the unanticipated papers landed on the mat like a blow.’
‘I asked her not to pursue a divorce,’ said James. ‘She telephoned to talk to me and I went to Kew to discuss it with her. I tried to tell her it would do no good. You would not be able to cope. I told her I was sure you would eventually come back to her. Better not to push it. Better to wait at least until you had finished your analysis. I’ve known about that for some time, by the way. Natasha told me months ago and to return confidence for confidence, I am myself seeing not an analyst but a therapist once a week. I find it very interesting. But Natasha is totally determined to cut you out of her life and begin again. Yet she can talk of little else but you, you and Helen, with a terrible jealousy, you and her, why you are as you are, how you could change. It is very distressing to see how much she wants you back and realises what she has lost. That’s the nub of it. And she believes that her life as an artist has been sidetracked. She is now in what I can only describe as a sort of frenzy of creativity.’
The more as her work did not prosper as she would have wished. Her second novel had been reviewed less well than the first, not an unusual experience but painful nonetheless. Victoria’s gallery had declined to offer her a one-woman show and their suggestion that she might wait for a few months and take part in their summer show when six new artists exhibited had been turned down by Natasha in favour of a small gallery in Richmond in which the exhibition had been more a declaration of intent than the London launch of a new painter which she wanted. Joe had not been invited.
James’s further efforts to recreate some goodwill on both sides were unsuccessful.
The phone calls between Natasha and Joe over the next weeks were on both sides acrimonious, unbridled, wounding to both of them. Frequently the phone would be slammed down and then picked up instantly after a bloodied interchange to offer an apology which as often as not fell once more into the rut of accusation often wild, always hurtful.
‘You are angry at me,’ his analyst said, ‘because you see this process, this analysis, as one which, as you have just told me, has made you less guarded, less considerate, less able to be tolerant and “good-mannered”, your phrase. You see that as a loss. You say you believe that had you not come to see me and were Natasha also not in analysis then the old defences and habits would as it were fudge or “insulate” – your word – matters and see you through. But quite obviously the old defences and habits had had their day with you. They had ceased to be of much use, as you have indicated on several occasions, for the new situation in which you found and still find yourself. You worry about what her analysis is doing to her but of course you can’t ask. Well, you could, but you won’t. Perhaps you might like to talk about that here.’
But Joe found nothing to say. To talk to Natasha about her analyst seemed far away from what was between them now and besides she would evade even the slightest reference to her analysis.
‘Do you have to be so root and branch?’ Margaret asked her. The two women were alone in the drawing room, polishing the silver. Ross was taking advantage of a fine summer Sunday afternoon to take his own children and Marcelle to Hampton Court.
‘What alternative is there?’
‘Conciliation?’
‘The time for that was given and is now gone.’
‘Have you ever thought of talking to her? To Helen, I mean. I know it’s not the usual route but when you and Joe are together you still seem, to me, you did at the party for instance, to have very much to offer each other. Maybe Helen doesn’t know that.’
‘I’ve thought of it,’ Natasha said. ‘I’ve thought about it often.’
She had lost weight. Curiously it made her look even more distinguished, Margaret reported to Ross, more foreign, more distant. ‘At some moments she seems very shaky,’ she said, ‘at other times quite burning with a passion to follow her way. God knows what she’s going through. But in the end she is always circling around Joseph.’
‘I don’t want you to take out Marcelle this Sunday,’ she told Joseph.
‘Why not? Last Sunday you said it was better for her to go out with Ross and his family on a trip he’d arranged and I could understand that. But not two Sundays in a row. What about Saturday?’
‘Neither Saturday.’
‘What is this?’
‘You make her too excited. She has to be calm to make her life here. She mustn’t have this circus every week. It unsettles her.’
‘She seems not the slightest bit unsettled. Are you talking about her or about yours
elf? Marcelle and I have good times. I love seeing her.’
‘I need to clear my mind, Joseph, and I need her to understand what is happening. You have to leave me alone. You make it difficult. So does Ellen.’
‘What does my mother have to do with it?’
‘She brings too many presents, she gives her too many “treats” as she calls them. This is no good for Marcelle. I’ve asked Ellen not to come here again. Until matters are resolved.’
‘That’s cruel.’
‘I have to take the best decisions as I see them. I do not want you to take Marcelle on Sunday. Neither Saturday.’
‘What if I just turn up?’
‘Please don’t. Please don’t.’ I could not bear it, she thought.
‘I will,’ said Joe. ‘Sunday. Between half eleven and twelve. As usual.’
After he had put down the phone Helen came in and she went to hold him but the tension coming off him was so strong she retreated, sat on the long sofa, took out a cigarette. Joe looked out of the window onto the narrow street, his back to Helen, his feelings too turbulent to master, silence his only recourse.
‘She says I can’t see Marcelle.’
‘I gathered that. I was outside the door.’
‘I’m going down on Sunday. In fact I’ll bloody well go down now.’
‘Maybe it would be better to sleep on it,’ said Helen.
‘She can’t do this. I mean . . . It’s . . . Why should I not see her?’
‘Maybe,’ said Helen, carefully, having thought this through for some time, ‘you ought to go back to her. Maybe that would be the best way.’
He turned and stood against the window, against the light. Helen could not make out his expression.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘You seem so unhappy. You’re torn in two.’
‘What about us?’
Helen did not reply.
Could I do it? Joe thought. Could I just walk out of here now not for Marcelle but for both of them? Could I do that and prevent the inevitable wreckage that waited on divorce, all of the ripping up of their life together? I want to: so much of me wants to. It would be hard, but Helen’s offer had made it possible, and was not the alternative harder? It was harder to stay with Helen, his analyst had said. But what did ‘hard’ mean? It was not to be calculated on a list or a balance sheet of Advantages and Disadvantages. It had gone so far inside him, this decision and this indecision, that there was nothing but insistent uncertainty. Oh, how good it would be to return to Kew, to Natasha, to their daughter, planes to be endured somehow, back to the place where they had made a life worth living and rescue Natasha from the pain she was in and by doing the right thing begin to resolve the sleepless consciousness of wrongdoing which made him loathe what he had become.
