by Melvyn Bragg
Joe had told Natasha that he wanted to write novels and so he needed a job which would give him free time or at least leave him the energy to dig out the time. Joe was a close student of those potted biographies of writers posted on the back of paperbacks and his general impression was that the best thing to do to prepare yourself for literature was to dunk yourself in work often as far removed from writing as conceivable. Be a hobo, a bartender, a lumberjack, a salesman, unemployed, a soldier, a sailor, a waiter, work in a bank, in an office, in an exotic location or, more attainably, be a schoolteacher. He had tried for a form of schoolteaching by applying to the Workers’ Educational Association whose purpose was to offer academic courses to working people in the evenings. Joe had told the panel that this sounded perfect for a would-be writer. The day would be free for writing and he could work for the WEA from tea time onwards. He did not get the job.
There were times when Natasha and Joe tried to imagine themselves bumming around Europe, washing dishes, taking any old work, sleeping on warm Mediterranean beaches. It was tempting. They would have lived a dream and that, he would reflect as time went by, could have delivered wholly unanticipated riches.
But Joe was still too provincial, too nervous and too programmed for that. Maybe he could have grown into it. Maybe he would have opted for it had he not so unexpectedly landed a job in broadcasting. Maybe beachcombing would in the end have provided more time, more insights, brought in more of the world.
He had been to two preliminary BBC interview panels and he had made the final short list. He was pleased but Natasha just laughed and said what did it matter, jobs were not important, only art and finding out how to live were important. Her cavalier certainty dispelled his anxiety.
It was odd not to be sick with anxiety as another hurdle approached: anxiety had been his adrenalin. All the scholarship trials had been preceded by severe, even neurotic anxiety and agitation. But she relieved him from that and after spending a night with her he was truly carefree in an empty compartment on this bright May morning, on his way to London for the interview. He read a copy of The Times and glanced out of the window as the lush countryside rolled past. He rarely read newspapers. The Times had been bought only because he had forgotten to bring the current paperback which was usually stuffed into his jacket pocket; perhaps it was not there because unconsciously he heard his mother telling him not to ruin his best suit.
As the train clickety-clicked over the points, he felt excitement, an excitement wholly fed by the new dimension into which he had been rocketed when Natasha had said the profits of her exhibition were for the honeymoon which meant that she would marry him and the earth did an extra spin. Nothing could be better than life lived on the oxygen of his love for Natasha and now, he dared say it, hers for him. Everything was better, the sky was more vivid and interesting, the fields teemed with sheep and cattle, the Thames was spangled in glittering patterns of shifting sunlight, hedgerows bloomed the blossoms of May: life was music.
His mood could not be punctured even by the devastating smile of the Honourable Nicholas Taunton who was chairing the BBC Selection Board. Joe was to learn that the Honourable Nicholas had a skin so fine that nothing but silk could be endured next to it. The smile said to Joe – truly pleased to meet you but not our type – ‘Do sit down and smoke if you wish.’ Taunton led with what he thought was a rather good-length question on the implication of the vote of the white electors of Rhodesia. Fortunately, Joe had read the same article in The Times as the Honourable Nicholas Taunton appeared to have scanned and his regular sparring with Malcolm Turney enabled him to engage in an adequately robust exchange to the smiling disappointment of the chairman.
Adam Maxwell came next. He believed that the British Empire had been built on rugby as played in the public schools and the universities. Joe was the only one of the final candidates who had played the game. Joe had talked sport with his father and with his friends for much of his life, and Adam Maxwell, who feared that sport might not be high on the BBC agenda, was grateful that the young man put so much vim into their exchange. Mr Plumpton, an alcoholic from Administration in a wide-striped, three-piece suit, a regimental tie and red socks, lobbed him a wholly anticipated package that he lobbed to everyone alike. Why do you want to join the BBC? Which are your favourite programmes? Describe and discuss. What do you think of the objectives of Lord Reith – ‘To inform, to educate and to entertain’? What did you most enjoy in your years at Oxford? Joe had been told by the university appointments officer that the point about this package was on no account to seem to be clever. Lob must be met with lob.
Joe quite enjoyed it while observing as much as he could of the over-ornate room, the Board’s manoeuvring, the accents of the interlocutors which threw into relief his own Northern burr. He was already putting together a mimicked retelling for Natasha to whom he always reported his adventures of the day.
‘You have studied History,’ the voice was low, even guttural, but passionate; a different voice altogether, a voice that immediately put Joe on the alert. It came from the only man who had not yet spoken, Martin Abrahams, a heap of thick black hair, an olive skin, heavy spectacles, collar too tight, tie knot too small (like his father’s, Joe thought, a hard small knot), a man exuding independence, ‘and you have talked about politics and sport and the university activities and so on. But there is always literature. What would you say is the difference between James Joyce and Samuel Beckett?’
Joe took a breath. He had read no Beckett and of Joyce only A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But he had seen Waiting for Godot and remembered in the discussion afterwards the brilliant analysis of Brian, a young scholar who was now a don. And Joyce’s Ulysses had been given a reading at the college in play form as Bloomsday. Yet he liked the question. The way it was put. Tentatively, probing his own thoughts rather than delivering a hasty summary, Joe began to explore the territory. He confessed his initial bewilderment at Beckett, the slow understanding which came through his talk with others and the growing realisation of the layers of meaning in the pared-down mystery of the piece. Then he talked of how the portrait of the young ‘artist’ in James Joyce was at once so foreign and yet so autobiographically familiar, especially the religious forces at work. He spoke quietly and, unsure of himself, was always aware of Martin Abrahams, nodding, helping him along. Joe was reminded of Turney, who, when he had clearly done his best in an essay but not got there, would reach out a hand and pull him to the shore.
‘Do you write?’
‘Yes.’ Joe felt the admission forced out of him: it was too public a place to confess that and besides, what value did his writing have?
‘Poetry.’
‘Used to. At school.’
‘Short stories now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
‘Any questions for us?’ said the Honourable Nicholas, who had leaned back with an elegant du Maurier cigarette during the final exchange. ‘We’ve gone rather over our time, I’m afraid. One question.’
‘When do we get to know?’
‘Good question,’ said Adam Maxwell. Mr Plumpton, his bloodshot eyes avoiding contact, provided the official answer.
As Joe left the room he looked across to Martin Abrahams, but he was slumped in his chair, scribbling on the pad provided.
‘I found out he was a writer,’ Joe told Natasha. ‘He writes about modern literature. He was very like the Brian I told you about – the way his mind worked.’
When they met, about a year later, in the BBC canteen, Martin Abrahams said, ‘I got you that job, you know. You’d aced the Honourable Nicholas on the Rhodesian thing. Adam had been impressed by the talk on rugby. But Plumpton and more emphatically Nicholas were against. Together they thought they were unstoppable.’
Ensconced now on the payroll, up and running, Joe, though winded, could afford a man-to-man smile.
‘But,’ said Martin, ‘it was the first – and last! – time I’d been on such a selection boa
rd. Grace Powell-Hastings was supposed to do it but she had to rush off to the dentist. I was the stand-in. You were number seven, I think. I was bored out of my skull and by then I realised that I did not count for very much with those people. So I decided to count. Like you, I was off their class radar.’
‘And,’ Joe’s throat was now a little dry, ‘you picked me.’
‘Yes. I picked you!’ Martin laughed. ‘Do you regret it?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’ Martin nodded. ‘Neither do I.’
He took his tray of lunch to an empty table in the far corner.
Luck begat luck like a genealogy in the Old Testament. The luck of the article in The Times, the luck of Martin, the luck of remembering what had been said in his college rooms two years before in that discussion on Beckett; but behind it all, he told their daughter, was her mother, who had given him something of the ruling style that was respected in such a forum; she was his true luck, she was his own lady of luck.
‘That was what I said to myself, to Natasha and to our friends. And that is what I say to you. And yet, sometimes, I think what began as gratitude and expressed itself constantly did not tell the whole truth. Possibly not the greater portion of the truth. As if I wanted to heap all praise on her, credit any success to her, honour her with the responsibility for any progress I made in order to hold her fast, willing to erase my share, embedding myself in her, to possess her.’
Frances looked at the layout of the Tarot cards with an unease she found it hard to dismiss. This was the third time they had worked out against Natasha: the first time had been of no significance; the second worried her and she had fudged the explanation; this time, as the same end loomed, she took avoiding action and swept the cards into a patternless heap.
‘I’m bored,’ she said, ‘you’ve been very patient.’ She gathered up the cards. ‘It’s light enough still. Let’s go for a walk in the garden.’
Gardens, more like. Frances’s house, twelve miles outside Oxford, had been in her family since the early seventeenth century. The severe almost Spartan Jacobean style of the house had resisted all the temptations of progress: there were no eighteenth-century appendages, no nineteenth-century follies and as for the twentieth century, it scarcely showed its head. The only two concessions were the gardens, re-designed in the eighteenth century on the prevailing scientific principles of the day and regarded as the supreme example of that period. And there was a large conservatory, built just after the Great Exhibition but tucked away behind the famous walled rose garden which now contained not a single rose as Frances’s father disliked them. The house was not open to the public. Despite swingeing post-war taxation, the rents from the farms on the estate managed to keep it going. These were allied to a spectacular miserliness and a tenacious devotion to the inheritance by Frances’s family, a cadet branch of one that had arrived in England alongside William of Normandy.
Frances had taken several of her art-college friends there on more than one occasion but Natasha had been the most frequent visitor. Her father liked to practise his ‘awful French’ on her. Her mother noted with approval how appropriately Natasha fitted in.
They took the two Jack Russells which bolted across the great lawn and made for Blood Wood yelping with predatory pleasure the moment they struck the undergrowth.
The moon was not yet up, the sky an English soft grey rain-washed canopy of high clouds barely moving, it seemed, and on the ground the silence of a landscape which could appear immovably peaceful, ordered and kind, masking with evening grace a history often cruel and unforgivable.
‘You know you’re my best friend at the Ruskin, perhaps anywhere . . .’ said Frances. They were approaching the lake. Neither had spoken; Frances had been screwing up her courage, Natasha had been drifting into a deeply reinforcing state of contentment. Frances’s words brought her rather reluctantly back to the surface of the present. She drew on her cigarette, a small burning spot in the darkening air, like an imp in the night.
Frances said no more until they came to the lake and sat on the steps of the artfully concealed boathouse. Frances too lit up. The lake was glass calm.
‘I just want you to be sure,’ she said. ‘Robert had such an impact on you. I think I know you very well. We have a lot in common, don’t we?’
‘Robert’s gone now.’
‘And then Joe came along.’
‘Yes,’ Natasha laughed. ‘And then Joseph came along. And he would not go away! And he did not want me to go away!’
‘We all like him, and it’s clear what he feels about you; but, marry him? The rebound thing. Now? Why marry? Why now?’
Natasha threw the burning remains of the cigarette into the lake.
‘Sometimes I know,’ she said, ‘sometimes I know nothing.’
She wrapped her arms around her knees and gazed across the water to the twilit beech woods on the other side, gazed intensely as if a voice would come across the lake or a figure rise out of the water and give her the answer, the answer sought by everyone, the single simple answer that ends all questions.
‘Why not wait?’
Frances was tempted to reveal the warnings in the Tarot cards which had, among other insights, predicted that after a few years of tranquillity, there would be catastrophe. She believed in the cards, but Natasha, she knew, had no such faith.
‘He is so determined,’ Natasha smiled, ‘there are no shadows around Joseph.’
‘Are you sure? I can see shadows.’
‘That is his shyness. Or his nervousness. Now and then he is overcome by that.’
‘No.’ Frances repeated carefully, ‘I can see shadows.’
‘He is a Romantic and he is a Realist, both at the same time. But more a Romantic. If he were here he would want to talk deep thoughts.’
Frances laughed.
‘Yes. It is funny,’ said Natasha. ‘But it is not funny at the same time. In fact, I love it.’
‘Rather earnest.’
‘That can be attractive, Frances. Sometimes seriousness is the most seductive.’
‘Do you think,’ Frances trod with the greatest care, ‘he sees you, from his own background, let us say, as something of a “catch”?’
‘I am a poor art student whose father is a teacher in France.’
‘Is that what he believes?’
‘Of course.’
‘He certainly proved himself with the exhibition,’ Frances admitted. ‘I’ll give him that.’
‘He wants to help me . . . He wants to help me all the time. I think I trust him.’
‘Only think?’
‘What else is there?’
She looked across the water towards the trees darkening, just a rim marking their tops outlined against the sky: shades of darkness all around. Her landscape. Were there names for all those different shades of darkness?
The nightscape enveloped her and seemed to enter into her mind, seemed in a way to join her mind, to make what was within her part of that which was without. There was no distinction. Her thoughts floated on those velvet shadows, her imagination was calm; the water, the sky, the silence, the grass beneath her, the breath of her life were all one and she longed for this state of pure completion to go on, on, on for all time.
Joseph floated to the surface of her thoughts. After Robert she had begun to drown and she could find in herself no resistance. Joseph had given her another chance, perhaps the final chance. The ripple of that thought disturbed her back into the present and she waited for Frances to say something, to start again.
But Frances left off and after a while she whistled up the terriers and the two women ambled back towards the house, yellow-lit in a couple of windows, a floating fortress of stone, yet solid in the changing times.
‘You haven’t asked me to be your bridesmaid,’ said Frances as they reached the house.
‘Can you have a bridesmaid in a register office?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Frances!’ Natasha turned, and with a rar
e impulsive gesture, took her friend by the shoulder and kissed her hard on the cheek. ‘Thank you! That is so lovely.’
In her room later that night, Frances took out the Tarot cards, wanting to break their spell. But she dare not try them again, and returned the mystical, disturbing picture messages to their drawer.
‘There was bad luck too,’ Joe told her. ‘But when you have really good luck then even bad luck somehow works for you. The good luck absorbs it and eliminates the negative.’
Two days before his final exams he found himself covered in small, hard, red lumps.
Glandular fever, the doctor said, hospital isolation room, immediately.
Psychosomatic, said Julia, quite common at Finals.
Unlikely to be psychosomatic, said Turney, not the type.
They are lumps, said Natasha, horrible little red lumps, not imaginary lumps.
A vicar who had suffered and survived glandular fever was his invigilator and brought along the examination papers every day at 9.30 a.m., left for lunch at 12.30 and returned at 2 p.m. to stay until 5 p.m. He sealed up and took away Joe’s essays after elaborately licking the thick gum on the envelope with a long doggy tongue. He was a chatty man and the three-hour silences were difficult for him to bear. He was also inordinately fond of hot chocolate and at least twice in every session he would ask Joe if he would like ‘a little pot of their first-rate hot chocolate’. Joe always agreed and tried not to look up and catch the vicar’s doleful eye, pleading for a little conversation. But three hours for four examination questions were barely enough and although the nurse had provided a solid bed table, lying in bed was not the optimum position for the speed writing required.
It was hot and he kept open the french windows while he swotted in the evening. On three successive evenings his room was invaded by a drunken Scottish anaesthetist who liked to talk about skiing. He never stayed for much more than an hour.