Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  This time Paris was a movie. Everything in the riddle of small streets on the Left Bank, streets and alleys which were a direct though hugely more elaborate cousin of the streets and alleys mapped on his mind from Wigton, reminded him of French films. It was as if the very narrowness of the streets, their intimacy, represented his state of mind as they had in childhood and radiated a sensation of security and magic. There was one thin little street which housed seven cinemas. It was like seeing all the da Vincis in the Louvre. He framed shots for his own instant films by making screen squares with his thumbs and index fingers. He thought he spotted a location for this or that scene from the wave after wave of films of the French directors whose work had been thrown onto the shores of his university culture.

  Then he saw the photograph of Memphis Slim. It was in a window at the bottom of an excessively narrow street called Le Chat Qui Pêche which led away from the left bank of the Seine. Memphis Slim was a hero. Joe’s ambition had been to play the piano like Memphis Slim. Though diffident about declaring his sense of kinship with the blues – if you’re white, not all right – it was visceral. When the bluesmen sang and played, the sounds and sometimes the words came out of a soulful darkness Joe recognised and into a light he wanted. At first he thought the photograph was for sale, memorabilia or a promotion for a jazz shop in a city which had embraced black jazz for decades. But it was an advertisement for Memphis Slim. He was in Paris. He would play here, down those steps, in that cellar, first set nine o’clock. Memphis Slim.

  Joe raced back to get Natasha . . .

  She watched him across the small table furnished with an ashtray and a vase with three red paper roses, gradually becoming as drawn to Joseph even as enraptured by him as he was by the music of Memphis Slim. How could Joseph let himself go like that, so immediately? She had seen it in Notre Dame, she had seen it when they were watching films together. She studied this man, this young husband who could give so much so deeply and she sensed as before that the quick of life had moved out of him and was soldered outside himself, this time onto the sound of the piano player. She recognised his experience of it. She knew what it was to be enveloped by his concentration, sealed inside it, captured by it but a willing prisoner and less and less happy to be free of it.

  She glanced around the bare room. About half full, at most. Younger people. The older crowd would come to the eleven o’clock or the one o’clock sets and they would be better, she guessed, for connoisseurs (Joseph, she knew, would not have worked that out). This audience was reverentially young, they could have been in a chapel, scarcely a sound interfered with the music of Memphis Slim. But suddenly there were palms clapping hard and Joe turned to her, eyes ablaze, ‘How about that? This is IT! He’s a genius, isn’t he?’

  They had ordered two small glasses of red wine. Natasha had taken a sip and would drink no more. Joe threw back his glass as a Russian would his vodka. He looked around for a waiter, saw one, held up his empty glass like, he thought, an habitué, like, as Natasha thought, a tourist, and then turned back immediately as the heavy bass ‘Celeste Boogie’ began. They were on the edge of the meagre dance floor. To Joe, this was the key table, the table taken by gangsters and Rita Hayworth, the table to which stars were ushered by an obsequious dinner jacket.

  Just on ten, after ‘Frankie and Johnnie’, in which Joe needed heavy self-restraint not to sing along, after the last rolls of the wrist, the upright man at the baby grand concluded, stood up, bowed, stepped out of the spotlight and walked in the direction of Joe and Natasha.

  ‘You were great!’ Joe said. ‘Très, très bon,’ in case English was somehow out of order. ‘Magnifique.’

  ‘Merci.’ The man paused for a moment and offered a small bow to Natasha.

  ‘Would you like – voulez-vous avoir un verre du vin?’ Joe’s request came out of the blue. It surprised him. He glanced around to see if somehow he had become the instrument of a ventriloquist. Memphis Slim?

  The man glanced into the now half-lit room and waved; Natasha, who followed his glance, saw a blonde white woman at a table by the wall at the back. He then pulled up a chair. He had come out of his screen, Joe thought, and now they were in Joe’s movie.

  Natasha offered him a cigarette. Why, Joe said to himself, could I not have thought of that?

  The pianist gently prised the packet from her fingers. ‘English,’ he noted. ‘You English?’

  ‘French.’ She took the cigarette he offered her from her own pack.

  Joe lit up a Disque Bleu.

  ‘You French?’

  ‘English.’

  ‘I like that,’ said the pianist and in his hand was a heavy silver lighter out of which there torched a flame fit to burn down the jazz club. Joe and Natasha leaned forward for the fire and thanked him.

  His drink arrived, unordered. A large Jack Daniels. He picked up the glass.

  ‘What do you say in England?’

  ‘Down the hatch.’

  Natasha and Memphis Slim looked at Joe, then at each other, and laughed.

  ‘Down the hatch,’ they said, in a ragged unison, and Joe clinked glasses with his hero.

  Now what did he say?

  ‘You live here?’ the pianist asked Natasha.

  ‘No. London.’

  ‘London’s good. Good if you like grey. I passed through London.’

  ‘Did you ever meet Big Bill Broonzy?’ said Joe.

  He raised the bourbon.

  ‘To Bill,’ he said. ‘The Man.’

  Joe finished off his second glass with a hiccup-inducing gulp.

  ‘Want me to pat you on the back?’

  Out of the contorted frenzy trying to disguise itself as nonchalance, Joe shook his head.

  ‘You play beautifully,’ said Natasha, drawing him away from Joe, whose blotched hiccuping face looked ready to burst open.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

  ‘Do you,’ said Joe, a tormented gasp, ‘play the same,’ tears in the eyes, ‘variations every night?’

  ‘I let it flow, son, I let the fingers do the walking and the music do the talking.’

  ‘That’s lovely,’ said Natasha.

  Joe trusted himself only to nod. But his nod was vigorous. Memphis Slim glanced over Natasha’s shoulder.

  ‘Well now, people,’ he said. ‘My little lady’s given me the call.’ He picked up his glass, only one modest sip taken, and stood up.

  ‘Will you be here for the next set?’

  ‘No,’ said Natasha, even as Joe was swallowing the last hiccup and ready to relaunch his questions. ‘We have to eat.’

  ‘We all have to eat. A bientôt?’

  ‘Peut-être. Mais, merci infiniment.’

  ‘You take care,’ he said to Joe. And he was gone.

  A few minutes later Natasha manoeuvred Joe into getting the bill, out of the cellar and up onto the street where the cold December air smacked into his face and seemed to wake him from a trance.

  ‘I had to get the hiccups.’

  ‘It didn’t show. I’m sure he didn’t even notice,’ said Natasha, taking his arm firmly and walking towards the nearby Boulevard St Michel. ‘He knew you were a real admirer. That’s why he joined us.’

  ‘Did he? Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolument.’

  ‘That’s why he joined us?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘He’s great, isn’t he? Isn’t he terrific? Memphis Slim.’

  ‘Formidable,’ she said, ‘they are brave, these blacks.’ She steered him towards a restaurant. ‘But we must eat.’ She did not remind him that he had ripped her away from a dinner carefully prepared for them by Véronique, who had not insisted and done so with grace, which had left Natasha more admiring of her than she wanted to be.

  Joe would not be rushed.

  ‘Let’s go and look at the Seine,’ he said. ‘It is our last night, after all. We can always eat.’

  So they strolled under the trees, on the very bank of the river, the lights bobbing in the d
ark gliding water, calm down there almost under the city. Joe thought he would call his film Ill Met in Paris. There would be this brilliant young woman, an artist who had run away from home as a girl and, after adventures only revealed in fragments as the film went on, after rejection and near starvation, after humiliation and poverty which had led her to sleep under the bridges of Paris alongside the dangerous clochards, the tramps who found the bridge their only roof, an Englishman, not unlike himself, but an Englishman in a state of existential ennui would be loitering with ominous purpose on the very bank along which they now walked arm in arm, and see coming towards him, this shadow, this dark creature, walking away from the taunts of the clochards, and . . .

  ‘What are you thinking about, Joseph?’

  ‘Why don’t we live in Paris? You could write and paint here so much more easily. I could write a film.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, instantly.

  ‘Joseph? You have the BBC.’

  ‘But look at Paris.’

  Natasha admitted only much later that she too had dreamed of that on their Christmas visit. She knew that Joe could be the catalyst enabling her to come home, to her friends, to her language, to her city. Maria Troubnikoff had told her of a little apartment in her district, very cheap. Perhaps she could get into the Collège des Beaux-Arts, which would please her father.

  ‘There’s a BBC office in Paris,’ said Joe. Natasha felt a rush of hope.

  ‘Could you work there?’

  ‘I could work there.’

  The moment he said that, Joe knew that the bureaucracy would not allow it. He had been taken on by the BBC as a trainee to follow a route laid out for him by them. There could be no other route. Even his short experience of the corporation had given him enough insight to fear the consequences of challenging their plans.

  ‘Are you sure, Joseph?’

  She tried to ask it casually. They were nearly opposite the end of l’Ile de la Cité furthest from Notre Dame. The few cars were no more than a pleasant hum over the high river wall. They were alone on this stretch. Joe had been thinking he would have an accordion play over this passage. But Natasha’s silence after her question brought something of her seriousness to bear on him. It demanded a truthful response.

  ‘I don’t suppose I could get a position right away,’ he said. ‘To be honest. But later, if things go well, there’s no reason I shouldn’t try to get a transfer here. In a year or two. I could try then.’

  ‘I can’t ask you to promise,’ said Natasha. ‘A promise can be a curse. But, well, I am glad.’ She paused. ‘Thank you.’

  In the low dabbing light from the widely spaced lamps, he could not see her eyes, but from the tone of her words he saw her expression and was moved by it. He would return: he swore that to himself. He would bring her back to Paris. At times, not on great occasions, just at small turning times, she could pierce him to the root.

  He took her in his arms and she clung to him. It was as if they had been lost and now were found but feared that soon they could be lost again. They stood in that tight unmoving embrace a few yards from the river for no more than a minute or two but it seemed an age and when they uncoupled there was a sense of frailty, the one without the other.

  ‘Now we must eat,’ said Natasha.

  They turned and headed back the way they had come, walking quite quickly, holding hands lightly, and then Joe swung his arm, swinging hers with it, feeling self-conscious even in the semi-dark of a foreign city, but in his mind’s eye seeing them there, at large in Paris, the bite of the cold air giving yet more life to their life.

  ‘I would have a song from Edith Piaf over this bit,’ Joe said, ‘or maybe Georges Brassens would be better. Let’s waltz!’

  He took her in his arms and he sang ‘Sous les Ponts de Paris’ and they waltzed, just a few turns, just a few yards, but they waltzed on the banks of the Seine in sight of Notre Dame.

  ‘You’re mad, Joseph,’ she said, ‘you’re completely mad.’

  Under the bridges of Paris, they danced on under the bridges of Paris, they whirled, one-two-three, one-two-three, they danced until the cold air tingled in their lungs and they ran out of breath. Natasha loved him singing to her, no one else had ever done that, singing in his English French as they danced that night, ‘Sous les Ponts de Paris’.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It was in Cumberland that Natasha understood how different Joseph was. It was there that was planted the seed of what would become her intense study of him.

  When the train passed Watford Joe said,

  ‘This is further north than you have ever been.’

  Natasha looked out of the window, indifferent to what she thought of as the indifferent landscape. She was insulating herself in fiction. The Stevenses had sent her A Severed Head for Christmas, written, they said, by a good friend of theirs, and she had just got round to reading it. The story in the book happily blanked out the story of their journey into Joseph’s birthland.

  When the train pulled into the metropolis of steam called Crewe Station, he said,

  ‘We are now entering Another World. The North.’

  They were lucky, he thought, to be sharing their second-class compartment with just two others, respectable middle-aged women travelling together but mercifully, Joe thought, as absorbed in their books as Natasha and himself. One of them was reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and the only semblance of a conversation they had had was when she passed the book over to her friend with her index finger on what was probably a particularly felicitous paragraph. This was read silently; a smile was enough to convey appreciation and approval. Joe was determined to finish Catch-22 before Carlisle. He had bought it for his father.

  When the train stopped in Wigan and overlooked the town, Joe said, fiercely, ‘That is as fine a townscape as I’ve seen. Not just the look of it. What it’s been through.’

  This time Natasha looked with interest. She saw from the height of the train a forest floor of chimney pots, every one streaming with smoke; she saw what seemed to be miles of identical terraces, small brick houses with small back yards and small front doors opening directly onto ugly narrow streets. The late winter light was already waning and she saw it through gloom and greyness. She saw no one on the streets. It was poor, uniform, dull and, she thought, beyond all aesthetic redemption. What did he mean by ‘fine’? But when she glanced at him she observed that he was as wrapped up in it as she had been and there was no irony in him. His voice had been fierce; his look was affectionate. Natasha kept her reservations to herself and plunged back into the more familiar world of Iris Murdoch.

  As the train left Carnforth after a brief stop, Joe put aside Joseph Heller’s novel, unable to resist the landscape. It was near dark but the big skies and the bare-pelted hills held onto the light and to Joe the slow chug of the train, as it went up the mountain which fortified his home county against the South, was like the overture to a magnificent performance. Seeing how absorbed he was, Natasha tried to see it through Joe’s expression which was rapt, as if he were at a film. The hills were smooth, shapely, she thought, but very bare. Now and then a fast-running silver stream slashed through a slender ghyll. There were only a handful of farms, down in the valleys. The sky was cloud-steely, taking no colour from the masked setting sun, but adding, she could see, to the wholeness of this scene, the sense of sombre grandeur, of outpost. He looked at her, and broke into a grin and reached for her thigh, touching it only for a moment so as not to offend the two ladies travelling together to Glasgow.

  At the top of Shap Fell, Joe said,

  ‘Cumberland ahoy. Sit back!’

  The tons of steel were pointed due north and went steeply down at over a hundred miles an hour as the engine swooped to the plain, swerved on the curved lines through Penrith and full speed across the flatlands to Carlisle.

  ‘I was born here,’ Joe said as they stepped onto the platform.

  ‘Home.’

  ‘N
o. Wigton’s home.’

  They had less than an hour to wait for the country train to complete the last ten miles of the weary three-hundred-mile journey. From Wigton Station they walked up into the town, in the dusk, passing muffled figures, every one of whom greeted them without breaking step.

  Natasha’s first impressions of Wigton were polarised.

  ‘You are like a hunting dog, Joseph,’ she said, ‘one who has picked up a scent and becomes more frenzied the stronger the scent grows.’

  True. He was alight.

  On Station Road they were passed by a small marching band singing ‘Glory Glory Hallelujah’ as they returned to the Salvation Rooms after their Saturday night missionary work at the end of Water Street. The main street was poorly lit and all the shops were shut. When they finally heaved their luggage through the door of the as yet unbusy pub, Natasha was met by a flurry of embarrassment, over-attention and offers of provision. They went into the kitchen where an early customer was drinking a pint of bitter. Joseph went into the bar to talk arrangements with Sam. The kitchen, the stranger later explained to Natasha, was the best room in the house; beer a penny dearer, but more of a homely room than a pub. There was also a darts room and a singing room.

  ‘Just for singing?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  And then a bar – men only. The stranger asked her if she would like a drink but she refused and then felt she had been impolite but could find no words to retrieve the situation.

  Others came in over the next hour or so while she tried to eat a meal prepared in the scullery by Ellen. Natasha experienced a rather fearful shyness. The accents were warm, the expressions on the faces were tolerant and cheerful, there was nothing but kindness and yet she felt she was on shifting sands. The very kitchen became macabre, so many smiling faces, how could she judge them? So many kind questions, how could she answer them? So much food to be publicly consumed while others watched, how could she eat? How could she not eat? Joseph seemed oblivious to this public feeding. Natasha saw only certainties, a solidity, a deep foundation for Joseph, a good childhood, she thought, one which was firm, one which she had never had. By contrast it sent her back to her own childhood uncertainties, the unsmiling faces, the lack of solidity. Who was she here, and why?