by Melvyn Bragg
But he could not. He could not. He could not leave Helen. Not even to save Natasha, not even to redeem himself. Even if he had to, as he would, pay for that for ever after.
‘Let her have some time, at least,’ said Helen.
Two days later a letter arrived from the solicitor asking Mr Richardson if he would desist from visits to his wife’s house in Kew Gardens and until further notice desist equally for the time being from taking their daughter Marcelle away from her mother at weekends.
Once again Joe reached for the telephone but, mercifully, Natasha was not at home. Helen was out working on her film. Joe, alone at home, felt bound and gagged and trapped.
‘I’m afraid of what he’ll say,’ she said to Anna, in whose house she had taken refuge. ‘I’m afraid of him.’
‘You mustn’t be. He’s upset just as you’re upset. It’s awful for all your friends to see you both suffering. But he would never hurt you.’
‘I know.’
‘I am convinced he still loves you. We all are.’
‘I know that too. That’s what gives me hope. His love gives me hope. And I know I will always live inside him. But what use is hope, Anna?’
‘Oh, Natasha.’
‘But I am afraid. I will go away. We will go away. Until this divorce goes through.’
‘Why don’t you shelve the divorce for a while? He doesn’t want it. He’s told us he doesn’t want it.’
‘But he must face it, you see. He has to see what the consequences are. I have to start again with everything clear. I want to go back in the dark and find my way, this time alone and safe.’
‘She smiled,’ Anna said later to her husband, ‘and I don’t know why but I wanted to burst into tears . . .’
‘But of course you can come and stay with us,’ Isabel wrote back. ‘Stay for summer? Stay for ever if you wish, my darling Natasha, and Marcelle too.’
But the house of Isabel and Alain was three kilometres from La Rotonde, quite isolated and, save for the two German shepherds who delighted Marcelle, there was no company for the child. She spent more and more time in La Rotonde where she soon found playmates. After a couple of weeks, despite Isabel’s plea that Natasha still needed more rest and care from her, it seemed more sensible that Natasha and Marcelle move into La Rotonde.
Véronique gave them the bottom floor where the walls were at their thickest. It was cool against the heat but always rather dark. The windows were narrow slits. Sometimes Natasha felt she was in a dungeon.
Joe was bereft. Bewildered, he trailed around the humid London streets as if looking for a thread which would lead him to the answer to all his questions. He was still working on the film from the novel set in Mexico and at least half the week was spent in morning ‘script conferences’ which lasted an hour or two and then left him high and dry. He did not want to go back to an empty house. Helen was working on her documentary. Sometimes he went into the London Library but its studious tranquility was unsuited to his oscillating, febrile mood. The external world was a shell he longed and threatened to break out of and yet strove to preserve intact.
He was surrounded by cinemas, galleries and museums which once would have been a refuge but now demanded too much energy. It was hard for him to concentrate. The film script was effort enough and there he was helped by being with the producer and the director. He remained very nervous about travelling on the underground, still aware of imminent panic attacks. Although the self-imposed necessity to learn poetry had slackened he held onto it, kept at the ready like a well-cared-for weapon. And the sensation of blankness, of collapse could still overtake him. To walk the streets, however, to be a passing part of distracting, busy, city life proved to be a way to cope. Yet that summer the London streets seemed charged with too much intensity, so often on the edge of a thunderstorm.
He wanted Natasha. He wanted his analyst. He was like half a person aching, longing, crying for the other half, for the whole. Why had his analyst gone away? Why had Natasha? He felt inside her head, inside her pain, his pain; pain dominant.
The parting with wife and daughter was a brutal severance. The cut of it was raw. He reached out for them, and as he criss-crossed the West End of London, from offices to his analyst, to the library and the pubs, he was often so alive to Natasha and Marcelle that they seemed just around the corner, somewhere out there, waiting to be encountered. Yet he knew where they were and any day he could have joined them. But Helen was now his centre, however strained and bruising the effect of this separation.
Marcelle, he decided, must have a present and he came up with the idea of a hammock. It would be fun, he thought, for her and friends. There were two trees in the garden at La Rotonde between which it could be slung. He envied them the garden just as he envied them La Rotonde from the dirty steaming summer streets of London. He knew it would make Marcelle happy and a hammock was a big thing, it was something she could show off. He could see Marcelle in his mind’s eye whenever he wanted to. Natasha’s expression was so sad, her face more and more gaunt in sorrow, that he would turn away from it. He would remember the smile and that was unbearable. Again and again he thought that what he was doing was bad and wrong and yet he could not stop himself from doing it. He was then and would later be condemned for that.
A letter came from her, tender, brief. She was thinking of staying on after the holidays. Marcelle could attend the local school. Her back was hurting a great deal now and Alain had recommended rest in the warmth of La Rotonde and also he had prescribed strong pills which worked wonders. Would he object? Marcelle was flourishing and she told the other children boastful stories about her English father!
Joe was determined to respond well. It was good that she was in Alain’s hands, he wrote, and Marcelle would surely benefit from being at a French school and they must stay as long as they wanted, until she, Natasha, felt completely well . . .
Natasha received it as the letter of a man who would rather his estranged wife and child stayed out of his new life, the longer the better.
A friend of Helen’s recommended a small hotel-pub in Cornwall, Journeys End, and they went for a few days towards the end of August. The train journey took longer than he had anticipated but it put both time and space between himself all that London had been and was, and he arrived in Cornwall in flight as much as on holiday.
The landlord who kept the bar in the deeply polished Jacobean premises was scarlet-faced and nose-purpled with rabid alcoholism. He boasted that if ever there was any untoward disturbance in his bar he brought out his double-barrelled shotgun and let loose at the walls and he pointed out several holes as proud proof. His wife, subdued and apologetic, made the place comfortable, and easy to like. Helen and Joe walked in the daytime, and after dinner went to a corner of the generally empty bar, where they played chess partly to avoid the conversational overtures of the scarlet-pimpled landlord.
Joe sent several postcards to Marcelle, on one of them asking if she had received any surprise from London.
They went for a final walk on the afternoon before they left. Perhaps it was the prospect of returning to London that jarred Joe but as they went up to the cliffs he felt unsettled and tried to draw ahead of Helen. He wanted space to resolve this. Helen, thinking he was in the mood for a more vigorous walk, stuck with him. She was still at his shoulder when they reached the top of the cliff path and the faster he walked along the edge the more Helen enjoyed the briskness of it, the feeling of her vitality being cuffed by the high wind and the warm sun and by the recently lost urgency which had returned to Joe’s step.
He stopped and looked out to the horizon a while. Then he said,
‘Do you mind if I go on by myself?’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t really know . . . I just want to be by myself. I’m sorry.’
‘What is it?’
Still with his back to her he said,
‘What I really want to do is to join Natasha and Marcelle.’
‘You traitor!’
He faced her. Had the word been used only mock-seriously?
‘How can you say that?’
‘You’ve made up your mind. You should stick to it.’
‘It isn’t like that, Helen.’
‘Why not? It is for me.’
‘I have to see them.’ Her accusation had felled him.
‘Well, do it.’ Helen paused. ‘But I’m not walking back by myself.’
As they went more slowly along the cliff edge and it curved inland on a path that would eventually loop them back to the hotel, it began to rain. Neither of them was dressed for it. Neither of them complained or even commented. Joe was fast in himself. Helen knew she could not reach him.
‘I heard your mother that day,’ he said to Marcelle. ‘I can still remember it clearly. Such things had happened once or twice before in my life when I was young but they were long buried in embarrassment and anxiety at their over-strangeness. “Heard” will have to do although I know it summons up ideas of ghostly voices and mediums bringing messages from beyond the grave. But it is certain sure. As soon as I began to walk on that morning I felt that I had to go to your mother. There are many ways to explain it away and of course sometimes I believe that it was all my invention and not Natasha’s intervention but all that I can tell you is that thinking on it again and again it will not be easily explained away and in the end what I experienced was your mother’s calling me, calling me back. It was also physical, her hands reaching out to mine to pull me to her; I was consumed by it, it was as real as the rain, Marcelle. I offer it for what it is. But I did not go.’
They got to the hotel later than they had intended, still not a word spoken, and Helen went directly to one of the two bathrooms along the corridor. Joe undressed and perched his soaked clothes on the radiators. He dried himself down with a towel which he then tucked around his waist. When Helen returned he was asleep.
‘We’ll just be in time for dinner,’ she said when she woke him, later. She had covered him with a blanket. ‘I’ll go ahead.’ She held up the small travelling chess set. ‘Shall I take this?’
Joe looked at her. She was calm, grounded, fresh-faced from the walk, her blonde hair shampooed. It was time to surrender to the fact that he was in love and unthreatened.
‘Best of three,’ he said.
‘There was a period of time, towards the end of our marriage, when we wrote letters to each other by the score,’ he told Marcelle, ‘two or three times a day. As if speech had failed us or we did not trust it or we did not want to see on the other’s face the effect of what we said.
‘In France, Natasha began a frenzy of writing, sometimes poems or fragments of poems, mostly letters, all unposted. These are a few excerpts, fragments even, that might explain . . .
‘She wrote to Ross’s wife, Margaret, who had become more of a close friend to her since her return to Kew. “I am in France partly because I am so tired, my back, but mostly because in London I cannot bear people to know how much I love Joseph . . . I feel that it is only by accepting the idea of getting to the core I mentioned earlier that our relationship can be accepted again and the point is whether or not Joseph can bear it or doesn’t want to chance it. It is also perfectly clear that unless I do extreme violence to myself, I could not stop loving him in a million years. Also I have to face up to the fact that my love for him is extraordinarily demanding as it goes on pursuing the deepest of his self as the most important part of him. This pursuit is rather obsessive perhaps, but I do not see myself pursuing much else with the same conviction as far as he is concerned. I would like to think that this doesn’t make me a loser in other aspects of him. At the moment it seems to be so . . .”
‘That was handwritten, clearly, neatly, early on. This, later, to me (only a small part of a “piece” which covered thirty-four pages), was much more loosely written . . . “I want to tell you how sorry I am about this time apart and how sorry I am too about all those hurtful things that have been between us. I wish I had never hurt you, that I had never failed you, that somehow I had been able to give you only happiness and good but I know I have not done that. I love you deeply, I miss you. I feel that everything I do is connected with loving you well, loving you badly, and somehow my mind and soul go in circles around you straining somehow to find answers, to stop asking questions, to love you and be your love. You have given me so much, you have given me life. I long to see our hands join in trust . . . ”
‘Quite abruptly the writing changes again and dwindles into a still neat but cowed small script. “I have not been well for a few weeks and I think it would be much better if I had a rest for two or three months . . . Perhaps we could meet then in a much calmer way. You are so upset and angry with me. My ambitions in life are to write and paint, mother my child and be with the man I love.”
‘There are poems. Mostly unfinished, lines slashed with corrections and changes. This, I think, is the last, written in a scrawling tormented script.
‘Bewildered,
Blinded by the lighting of grief
Debreasted
Neutralised
I lay on the sand where heat had warmed
Where earthy grain had never failed
Even there I lost the last touch
The ability to go to sleep.
I saw you walk over the sky
I saw you had gone.’
The surge of acceleration took Natasha by surprise and pressed her into the pit of the seat. Her back hurt but only a little: Alain had prescribed well and given her ample supplies to reduce the pain over the next few weeks. She looked at Marcelle who had the window seat and was nose-pressed to it watching every moment of the earth sinking beneath her gaze. She had grown even in the two months in Provence, Natasha observed. She was practically self-sufficient now. Natasha did not look at her too intently or for too long. Tears were too near the surface for that.
When the No Smoking signal was gone she lit up. Véronique had tried to help by introducing certain disciplines – the most persistent and public of these was her insistence that Natasha give up smoking. The number of cigarettes she consumed was way beyond reason, she argued, and the ghostly pallor of her skin showed that those cigarettes had a visible effect on her health. Besides, Véronique argued, if she could exercise willpower in this matter, she could do so in others. Natasha had tried her best to go along with it, fearing to antagonise Véronique, even seeing in the diktat a kernel of real concern which moved her. But now she smoked, and ordered whisky.
The plane droned north. Her tiredness was beyond sleep. But the cigarettes and the alcohol, the presence of Marcelle and the security of the aeroplane brought to her tortured mind an interval of relief. And Joseph would be at the airport, waiting for her, she was sure of that. She had written to him. And then who knows? Who knows?
Soon the plane would pass over Paris and then swing west, over Brittany, and across the Channel to England to which she had fled so long ago now, too tired to work out how long ago. And met Joseph. And others. But Joseph who had loved her from the beginning and still loved her, she knew that, but it was difficult for him as it was difficult for her. Soon those difficulties would diminish and they would meet again and he would bring flowers.
When they came through Customs she restrained herself. It would not do to seem too eager. It would not do, and yet her heart beat faster and she could not wait until their suitcases arrived and they went into Customs and out the other side where Joseph would be waiting. She was so very tired now but the break would have restored his mind, of that she was utterly certain, as she had told him in the unposted letter. She knew him so well, she knew him because she loved him and he undoubtedly loved her.
There was a small crowd waiting for the passengers. It was not easy to pick him out. She must not be impatient. She stood for some time while the greetings and the welcomings went on all about her.
Finally when she was all but alone, she looked for directions to the train into London. Oh, Joseph . . .
Marcelle sniffed around the house to resettle herself and then went into Natasha’s bedroom where there was a small television. Natasha was too weary to go upstairs. She shuffled through the post hoping: but there was nothing. She put on the electric fire and waited . . . A plane went over low, screaming, and she looked up, startled. What would it do? She waited. Another came, just as low, and she put her hands to her ears. It was such an apocalyptic sound.
She reached for the phone but before she dialled the number, she steadied herself. It took great effort. It would not do to seek pity. She sipped from the neck of the half-bottle of whisky she had bought on the plane. Then she dialled.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Natasha,’ she said, and waited.
‘Are you back?’
‘Yes . . . Yes I am.’
‘Good.’ He turned to Helen and mouthed ‘Natasha’. ‘How’s Marcelle?’
‘Marcelle?’ Natasha could find no reply. ‘Joseph. You do think I am a good mother, don’t you?’
