by Melvyn Bragg
‘I thought she might attempt this before. Before she met you.’
Joe waited.
‘It was an adolescent thing. Perhaps I ought to have taken it more seriously. I want to tell you that both Matthew and I are of the opinion that through you her life was extended.’
Joe could not take that in. Not then, not ever and yet like a cross touched by the faithful for some hope, he would reach out for it throughout his life.
‘Do you think so?’
He meant: ‘Could you please say that once again.’
‘I do. We both do. I thought I had so much to tell you,’ said Julia. ‘But I’ve considered it so often that I’ve as it were boiled it down to essentials. The chief thing now is for you to look after yourself so that you can look after Marcelle. At the moment you are letting yourself go rather badly, in my opinion.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Which train are you catching? I could always run you to the station.’
‘I’ll walk. I like walking.’
‘I remember Natasha used to complain that you walked too quickly for her . . .’ She smiled a little, but the sadness would not be denied. ‘How did it come to this? You were so wonderful together . . .’
‘To be rather brutally honest,’ David said and looked around, although there was no one in the Morning Room of the Garrick Club this early in the evening, which was why Joe had chosen it as a location for their meeting, ‘I was surprised when you got together in the first place. Don’t get me wrong. I loved Natasha. Better to say I “adored” her: she was one of those sorts of people who provoke those sorts of statements.’ He smiled, sadly. ‘Perhaps only in me. Gosh!’ He sipped at his gin and tonic. ‘What a very grand room this is . . . that’s Thackeray in the corner, isn’t it? I remember reading somewhere . . . he was a famous member, wasn’t he? And Dickens? It’s very like a stately pile, isn’t it, a rather grand country house that’s seen better days and been tugged into London as its last berth. I must say it’s a style I admire enormously although being a good socialist I ought to frown on it.’
David was just back from Mozambique and before Joe could head him off he delivered what at another time Joe would have devoured and admired as a brilliant résumé of the condition of that country.
‘. . . and it was that which caused me to miss the funeral,’ he said. ‘I’m told it was very moving. Of course it would be.’
‘Why,’ Joe drove himself to say, ‘were you surprised when we got together?’
‘Well now. I could see how Rachel fitted into your life. I suppose I could see that it had to end although I don’t know enough about these matters and it always struck me as rather odd that when she as you say “finished it”, you didn’t sooner or later go back and reclaim her. That could be to do with the working-class virgin thing. But Natasha? Yes, you were very much in love but it was a mismatch. You were chalk and cheese. She was Cartesian and of the mind; you, well,’ he paused for effect and his manner was roguish, ‘let us say you are religious and of the heart.’
‘But as you say,’ – Joe wanted more: anything would do – ‘we did love each other.’
‘Ah well,’ said David, ‘what is this thing called love?’
‘The thing is . . .’ even to David this was hard to say, ‘I think that I did it. I can’t get it out of my mind. Whatever anybody says or whatever excuses are offered up, I believe that I am to blame.’
‘Blame,’ said David, very firmly, ‘is not the issue. If you had stayed together it could have been even worse. I am firmly persuaded that you would both have perished. I would go so far as to say that you intuited that and it was for that key reason that you dared not go back to her. It was basic self-preservation on your part, I believe. Natasha had a pact with death. That is a real consideration. Her will was very firm and so is yours. Separation was probably the only option. Unhappily, tragically, it triggered a series of consequences in Natasha which overpowered her while you managed to survive.’
Joe was silent and for some moments. He was being offered a prospect of eventual resolution: but it was too late.
‘Natasha telephoned me just before she went to France,’ David said. ‘She asked me to go to the French Embassy with her for their Fourteenth of July party. I assume she was on the list because of her father and I know you’ve been several times but I hadn’t and of course I wanted to help. She dressed beautifully, something rather courtly, I thought, decidedly at odds with the Fourteenth of July, but absolutely right for the French Embassy. It was there that she said to me, “You have a face that has suffered so much, no one will want to hurt it again.” That is the last thing I remember her saying. And after an hour or so I noticed that she was peering at the room, you know, of course you know how she half closed her eyes. I needn’t have been there. And I thought – she’s bored with life, she gave off unmistakably a cosmic ennui.’
Joe let himself absorb what David had described and then said,
‘But why? Who had pushed her there?’
‘It’s possible to know only a part of the picture,’ David said, ‘the part you knew is so important to you that you think it is the whole picture but it never is.’
‘But to . . . to . . .’
‘Kill herself.’ For the first time in Joe’s experience of him, David took a substantial drink and then set on the table the glass which he always liked to have in his hands. The playfulness, that long smile which seemed a release from the captivity of a man staked out against hurt, was replaced by an expression of such severity that it was as if a mask had been pulled off. ‘You want to be helped,’ he said, looking straight ahead but not looking directly at Joe. ‘And I want to help. So I will tell you this. The only person I’ve told this to is my very best and closest friend whom I met at school.’ He paused, but only for a moment. ‘Both my parents committed suicide. My father just after I was born, just after he got out of Germany. My mother eight years later. I have always blamed myself and it has been a waste of life. And sometimes when I am alone, I feel as I know you feel, that I must follow them. But it must be resisted. Blame is not the issue. It is not the issue. It must be resisted.’
After taking Marcelle down the street to the primary school at New End, Joe came back to make his breakfast. Helen had left for work while he had been out. He made the toast and coffee and carried them from the galley kitchen up into his study where he could look out at the strip of garden. There were three letters, a telephone bill, a note from his publisher and a letter from the solicitors who were dealing with Natasha’s affairs.
‘As you are aware, your wife made no will despite our best efforts and this has occasioned and will continue to occasion delays. However we consider it quite proper in all the circumstances to forward to you the enclosed letter, addressed to yourself, given us by your late wife some four months ago . . .’
The writing on the envelope was not as firm as her usual hand but it was perfectly legible. ‘To my husband,’ it read, ‘Joseph Richardson. To be sent to him on the occasion of my death.’
So how could he open it? Tell me, Natasha, he said inside his mind, tell me how I can open it? Four months ago. Before you went to France.
‘Dearest Joseph,’ it began and his eyes blurred.
In the event of my death I know that you will be a good father to Marcelle. I know you love her and I can rely on you without qualification. She is a lovely child who loves you dearly. But I must ask you to ensure that she keeps in contact with our friends and their children in Kew. These are people who know and love her deeply and it is important that she keeps in close contact with them.
As for me, at this time I do not feel well, Joseph. My back is a continuous drain of my strength but more than that my analyst took her life almost a year ago and I fear the effect on me has not been good. It is tiring without her. While without you it is an abyss.
Yet my love for you is unimpaired. You brought me great happiness and I am grateful for that. What will happen now is beyond me.
Natasha.
&nb
sp; CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
‘I asked my analyst if I could stay on with him a while longer,’ he told Marcelle. ‘I was fearful of everything again, of being alone, of crowds, of the underground, of loud noises, of an imminent liquefaction of my brain. Work helped; work could blot up feelings and wipe out thought for a while; work had become such a habit in my life that thankfully it could continue on a sort of automatic pilot and even though the results reflected that, at least it was work, it annulled some of the hours, it was time spent with matter unconnected with what was really happening. Helen was always there, bracing herself against her own shock, loyal, loving. And there was you. You were the heart of it now, for all of us. We watched over you.’
They were in La Rotonde. Joe and Helen had brought Marcelle there every summer. She would stay with the family, Joe and Helen would find somewhere in a nearby village and come across to La Rotonde now and then. Every year Louis had been as welcoming to both and as interested in discussion as he had always been. Véronique, although uneasy with Marcelle, had accepted the arrangement with resignation. For Alain and Isabel it was the crux of their summer.
Decades passed by; more than thirty harvests of lavender; the village was reclaimed by heritage, La Rotonde restored, the Crusaders’ Tower transformed into a chic rendezvous for seasonal concerts of early baroque music. A studio for pottery and ceramics opened and flourished; the bakery closed down. Yet the place itself, even tidied up, never lost its unique attraction, Joe thought, and even though he still walked in sadness up the pathways between the houses carved out of the mountain’s rock, there was still the charm of the place, an unfailing melody.
Louis and Véronique were dead. Alain had suffered a long time from lung cancer and died at Easter. Joe had been filming in America, unable to get to the funeral. Now in the summer they had come to see Isabel. It was too much trouble for her to accommodate them. Marcelle stayed with an old childhood friend, who was married with two children. Joe and Helen also stayed with friends some kilometres away near Bonnieux.
Isabel had said firmly that she would like to have lunch with them on their last day. The evening before, they went to her house for drinks, a tradition introduced by Alain, who called it ‘the bon voyage farewell to our dear English friends’ and at which he always, with a little pomp, served champagne.
The local taxi brought Isabel into the village for lunch. She came every weekday. It was her main meal. At the weekends she ate what had been prepared for her by the housekeeper who had been with her for more than thirty years. As usual, Isabel looked beautiful: old, arthritic in the hands, but still slim, upright, a stick to make doubly sure, fine make-up, clothes, hair, perfect, as she strolled from the taxi, the dogs obedient beside her. She had that great beauty which never goes however far it fades.
Bertrand’s was now the only place to eat in La Rotonde. Isabel came late, partly because her morning took time, partly because Bertrand preferred the place to be emptying when she came to her corner seat with the two German shepherds. As often as she could she ate outside under the awning where there were only two tables and from which she looked up into the village.
After the coffee had been served, after Bertrand’s two staff had gone home and he himself was taking a siesta, Isabel asked Joe, Joseph she called him, to move a little nearer to her. Helen looked away across the lavender fields and gave them the intimacy Isabel wanted. Isabel lit a cigarette and sipped a little coffee. For a while there was nothing said. Then she looked away and held out her left hand. He reached out to hold it. She spoke as always in clear old-school French, and did not rush, for Joseph’s sake.
‘You see,’ she began, ‘I do not want to live now that Alain is gone. It is only for the dogs. They have been faithful to me for so many years. If they were to go . . . My life is over now. It is not important. I am very old, and Alain was the love of my life. But you should know some things. Now. Too late. You should have known them years ago. We make mistakes.
‘You must know that Natasha’s mother, who was my dearest friend, whom I adored completely, was determined to be the equal of Louis. And in those early years she was. They were so fine, they worked together in the laboratory, we all knew how important their work would be. And then Natasha was born and it was not an easy birth. A few weeks after the birth, Sophie died. She did not take good care of herself. She was in a terrible depression. She believed that the beautiful partnership between Louis and herself was at an end. She could not be convinced this need not be so.
‘Louis, poor Louis, was distraught and he took a housekeeper, what else could he do? She came from the next village, Banon. Janine. She was a malign person. She was young, a peasant, pretty enough and when she saw she could not get Louis she turned on Natasha. This was discovered when Natasha was five years old and Alain was treating her. But it was too late. The damage was done.’
She released his hand to take another cigarette.
‘Véronique was good for Louis but not for Natasha. Natasha was extremely difficult. They sent her away to convents and she would run away. She refused to take her examinations. She accused Véronique of mistreating her. She made terrible accusations against Véronique. Alain said they were intended for Janine. I loved Natasha, but for Véronique, and when her own children came, it was too much.
‘Louis? Louis was doing what Louis always did. He arrived on the scene, he announced perfect solutions and he went back to his laboratory. He was the man he was and Alain said he had never met anyone whose memory was so perfect. I once told Louis that he should have been a monk. I was serious. The relationship between Véronique and Natasha became so intolerable that they could not be in the same room together. And when Natasha went to England, Véronique rejoiced. It is a stepmother problem, Joseph, and your chére Helen will know that. You are strong, and so is Helen and so now is Marcelle. But Natasha . . . They let her go to England.
‘After some years in England Alain and I believed that Natasha had found her way. And when you arrived, Joseph, we thought she was safe at last. She truly loved you and we saw that you truly loved her.’
She turned to him, for the first time. For some moments she held his faltering gaze and then she smiled. ‘You were our hope, Joseph, and for some years she was very happy, and so were we, Joseph; so were we. Thank you for that.’
She turned away again to hide the emotion and Joe held her hand more tightly.
‘You have to know what happened when she came here for that last summer. Alain thought she was very ill. Not just the terrible back which he said should have been operated on years before! Sometimes she could scarcely walk. But it was her whole psyche, Alain said. But there was Marcelle to occupy which helped her and even in that gloomy room Véronique gave her she could rest. She talked about you, Joseph, she talked to Alain and me about you night after night after night, and sometimes of Helen of whom she was unbearably jealous, so jealous she tried to avoid mentioning her. But chiefly it was of you, not criticising you but explaining you, saying what you had done together, making plans for what you would do again when what she called your “madness” passed.
‘But there was the terror of you also. She thought you might not give her any money. She thought you might abduct Marcelle. When you sent a parcel for Marcelle, she would not go to Banon, the post office there, to collect it because . . . she said it might be a bomb. Alain collected it and then she was overcome with pleasure that you had sent Marcelle such a present, but what she wanted, Joseph, was a letter from you saying you wanted to live together again. She wrote all the time in her notebooks, and letters to you, which she was afraid to post. What she longed for was for you to arrive, just like that, to come to La Rotonde out of the sky and I can see her now, standing on that balcony and looking out into the countryside as if by looking alone she could bring you back to her. It broke my heart.’
Isabel stubbed out the cigarette.
‘Véronique made her give up smoking to strengthen her character, she said. I thought that it was s
tupid. Then the time came when Alain had to return to his laboratory in Marseilles, Louis and Véronique had to go back to Paris. I said I would stay with her but Véronique and Louis considered that Natasha would be better in England and certainly Marcelle would be happier with her friends and it was time for her to return.
‘Louis and Véronique were our dear friends, Joseph, and they remained our dear friends until their death but they were wrong. The night before the flight Alain and I came to La Rotonde and tried to change their minds. Our voices were so loud that Marcelle must have heard us and poor dear Natasha sat between us, looking from Louis then to me and then back to Louis, so sweetly, trusting us. I think now that her beautiful soul was broken. She was helpless. We should never have let her go, poor darling. We abandoned her . . .’
She let go of his hand and now Joe turned away. His chest ached from holding in the sound of sobbing. Natasha . . .
‘There is one final matter,’ said Isabel. ‘I collected some of her writings after she left, to keep them safe for her. Many of them were illegible or unfinished. And all of them in English, Joseph: for you.
‘But they were too sad, I thought. I gave them to Véronique who, I think, destroyed them. Save for a few lines. They are in this envelope. I have waited for the right time. Now it has come.’
She handed him one of her elegant envelopes, well sealed, and then, without fuss, embraced both Helen and Joseph and wished them ‘bon voyage’.
After Isabel left, Joe and Helen walked leadenly up through the spiralling village towards La Rotonde, where he had agreed to meet Marcelle. Helen left him alone and went to buy some lavender.
The sky was blue and without cloud from horizon to horizon. The men playing boules nodded as he passed by and he sought out a quieter path, outside the mediaeval wall, and with increasing weariness he walked up the hill through the cypress trees. Isabel’s words had felled him. Natasha was everywhere about him in La Rotonde. The village seemed to hold her spirit and at every turn on this terrible walk away from Isabel, he dreamed to see Natasha, alive, the smile. ‘Please be there,’ he asked her, ‘just for one moment together.’
