Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  The films were the only part of the deal to which Joe found he rather objected. It was unfair, it was impolite, but he did not like to go to films with both François and Natasha. The two of them went on their own in late afternoons and that was fine. Even when they did go, the three of them, Natasha’s attention was not on the film, not on him, but on François’s reactions. After Last Year in Marienbad for instance, whose puzzle Joe had tried to solve when they came home, he had been irritated that his ideas were so raucously dismissed by François, who was supported by Natasha’s teasing laughter.

  ‘It is peculiar what is inherited,’ she said. ‘We know about my father’s memory. Yours is strong too though not in the same areas, more to do with your own history than History. But François’s memory is equally formidable. Except it is mostly for jokes. Often rude jokes. Some are quite funny. I can spend whole afternoons with him and most of the time he is telling me jokes. He told me he reads books of jokes, they pass them round in l’Ecole – but his retention of those jokes is phenomenal. So it is there, you see, it is all in place. It just has to be redirected.’

  ‘You sound like your father,’ said Joe.

  ‘No! My father only respects certain sorts of knowledge. I respect the mind that can reach out for knowledge. He has never allowed François to have a mind because François does not follow his rules.’

  ‘But you also want François to follow a path he’s clearly not keen on.’

  ‘How do you know what he is keen on?’

  ‘He told me once that most of all he would like to drive big lorries,’ said Joe.

  ‘They would not let him do that.’

  ‘Why not? Why don’t you make him feel it’s OK to want to drive big lorries? Would you be ashamed of that?’

  ‘That is unfair, Joseph! That is very unfair.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘That is very unfair. And untrue.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Sometimes he looks so lost. Do you think it really helps him to be out of his own country? You’ve told me how much you miss about France and the language – and your English is wonderful, you’ve been here for years, you have friends, you have me. He’s adrift here, isn’t he? He’s alone but for us. He’s an exile.’

  ‘Exile can be good. You are an exile. I saw that when we were in Wigton. The language they speak, that you once spoke, you no longer speak. The society you lived in is not the society you live in now. Your expectations and ambitions have changed utterly. You have to find new bearings in this new world. Even Sam can’t help you. You are an exile in London, it is another country, and it does you good.’

  ‘Does it?’ Onto the screen in Joe’s mind flowed images of the ceaselessly expanding opportunities and riches of this life, this work, this London, the current pulling him towards strange and unknown seas. ‘But I have to do it. Is it the same for François? Does it do him good?’

  ‘It will.’

  ‘Do you mean, you will make it be good for him?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ She needed help. ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, immediately, and his affirmation, spoken as he looked at her with all the love he could muster, released in her a smile of contentment.

  ‘I cut François’s hair today,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to cut yours?’

  ‘It’ll save a bob or two.’

  ‘He has learned to sing “Hit the Road, Jack” in English. You should ask him to do it for you. I know he can’t sing, but . . .’

  ‘I’m glad he’s here,’ Joe said and did not add, ‘for your sake more than for his because he gives you a purpose, when I am gone.’

  ‘Looking back,’ Joe told their daughter, ‘roving the city for broadcasting material, and by that token given a passport to enter otherwise forbidden reaches of society, door after door would open. There were treasures, secrets and the flattering corruption of privilege. London began to draw me in, a willing victim, tempting, enthralling, poisoning, transforming. I was half in bondage to it and half the untutored Goth raiding Rome in lust for its loot. I could not wait to get at the city, and work was a carnival.

  ‘The traineeship entailed postings around the BBC and after the World Service I was sent to the Headquarters – Broadcasting House, standing like a battleship in Portland Place in Central London, a bulldog building, shaped to rule the airwaves the world over. My job, in the Features Department, I was told, was to be a dogsbody. Some dogs!

  ‘There was a radio producer who was a poet, for whom I worked on his translation and production of Goethe’s Faust. Save on production days he strolled in grandly at about half ten or eleven, strolled across to the pub just before one o’clock, strolled back about three, napped, penned, moved off smartly at five-thirty and his fine poems, the radio productions and the translations were somehow hatched in the mellow interstices, and leftovers of earning time. He said, “What are you writing?”

  ‘“A novel.”

  ‘“I can’t read novels,” he said, “too long. Let’s go to the George for a drink.” These and other of his sayings I harvested for Natasha.

  ‘There was another full-time poet-producer, rather peppery, perpetually sensitive to his inadequate place in the poetic pecking order. There were two historical biographers, a writer of radio ballads and verse dramas in the tradition of Dylan Thomas, who himself had quite recently worked in the department which had commissioned his verse-drama Under Milk Wood. There was a diffident, all but blind author who would one day finish the autobiographical fiction of his childhood in a great house in Ireland and see it meet wholly unanticipated success. Finally there were those whose reputation in the war years had forged their names in radio legend, legends that were already, unbearably, fading fast in the glare of television.

  ‘Yet for all their air of the dilettante and their extra-curricular preoccupations, I saw that they were careful men, unsparing in their criticism if the job of creating word pictures was not done with flair and love, meticulous over the beat of a cut on the tape. Sometimes I felt surrounded by fathers.

  ‘All of them were surpassed by their boss, a man of the proportions and the intellectual generosity of Orson Welles, the Big Daddy, magnificent in his command, who held easy rule over these idiosyncratic, often eccentric, sometimes pub-stewed talents, a big, warm, divorced, lonely, puzzled man fatally undermined by the unforeseen gear change of technology. His life’s work was bypassed. Radio, which still was dominant among the world’s listeners, had lost most of its domestic power. Like a thief in the night, television had stolen away millions of its British congregation, and despite outposts of resistance, these were felt to be the last days of the Radio Raj. The viceroy was redundant.

  ‘He took a fancy to your mother and me and in those months he made it his business to dip us into otherwise inaccessible experiences. We were bundled off to Chichester to see Uncle Vanya and dined in a restaurant afterwards with Laurence Olivier. We were taken to meet a retired ambassador in a villa in St John’s Wood which impressed me out of my skin but made Natasha laugh at what she called its pretentiousness. I think he rather fell in love with her but oddly I was never jealous. I liked that he liked Natasha. She enjoyed it too, she treated it like a session with foils. Perhaps as he was so old (in his fifties!) and fat, I never dreamed, in the infinite stupidity of youth, that he could ever be competition. Or was I rather intimidated and therefore over-accommodating?

  ‘Your mother was not as interested in my new colleagues as she had been in the epic figures from the World Service. Perhaps François now took up more of the slack. Perhaps I noted it as a first small act of separation. But in truth I scarcely needed her or anyone else as an audience. The work, the life, was more like a dream than a real world and dreams need no greater audience than one.

  ‘For a long time, until habit set in and familiarity dulled surprise, I found it very strange that the work was not hard. Work was supposed to be hard: that was what work was. Work was tough and unfulfilling. Before work “you don’t know you’re born”, the
men would say, and therefore school was “the best time in your life”. Work was the end of childhood, the end of play. Work was your battle with the world to earn and deserve your place in it. That was your grandfather’s world,’ he told their daughter, ‘and way back down the line into our unrecorded past.

  ‘But this? This was sitting around talking or pottering in the belly of London or playing, in effect, in the studios of Broadcasting House. Because the Radio Raj was closing down, those of us who came in young and willing had the run of the place. We were permissive scavengers. Our juvenile programmes got on the air, heady stuff. Perhaps we were comforting evidence, to be grasped at, to be held onto by the beached survivors, that young people still wanted to work in this medium, that its former glories would not be abandoned. So to be young in radio at that time was Liberty Hall.

  ‘From that blunt-nosed grey building, I caught buses and tubes and walked to record programme material, and the first wave of what London could mean began to break over me. An initial gentle wave by comparison with the engulfment of a few years later, which would unbalance and undermine me, but even in the early days there was the feeling of being exposed to the pull of great tides moving with their own purposes, somewhere out there, in the deep of the city. There was a sense of being in a place of oceanic shifts, which could overwhelm you, of fathomless potential, a place which could disturb and metamorphose you and in which you could lose yourself in the pleasure and the poison of it.’

  Joe panicked. In a blink of time he passed from calm to fear. He had been detailed to work on local news for a week and the producer had asked him to ‘stay on’ until 6.30 p.m. and read out, ‘live’, the short continuity link which would bring the listeners back from the regional opt-out into the national Home Service. Joe sat – alone for almost half an hour sealed in a small windowless basement studio, headphones clamped to his ears, the microphone square before him, the three lines of continuity script on the table in front of him. He knew them by heart; he could not remember a word.

  He began to feel that he was moving rapidly out of himself, that his mind was leaving his body. He had experienced this intensely and for long periods in adolescence but for some years now he had been largely free of it and grown bolder and careless and pushed himself further, unfearful, liberated. Now, in this solitary incarceration, it was back, as if an alien virus had somehow slid into that small cell, as if it had been forever lurking but at this time of over-exhilaration, over-confidence and nervousness, had found him at his most vulnerable and reasserted its powers.

  Joe wanted to run out of the studio. He wanted to tear off the headphones and go. But how could he? Who would say those words? There would be silence. He would be to blame. And he could not let them down. The big studio clock ticked its relentless Greenwich Mean Time. The programme he was listening to went on, thankfully, but it would soon be over, he would have to say those words. He tried to take a deep breath but his throat was too dry and tight. This thing that was him was unloosed. How could he talk? The regional programme ended. It was him, alone, before millions of the unseen, now. The green light flashed on.

  The words were uttered, they got out there, somehow, they were said.

  He left the building as fast as he could. It was a spring evening. There was no drama in the sky to match and perhaps ease his fears. Portland Place looked placidly the same. All Souls’ Church looked elegantly the same. Yet he walked along plain old Mortimer Street to good old Goodge Street tube station feeling scooped out. He had not the nerve to take the lift down to the tube, so he walked north, up Tottenham Court Road, up to Chalk Farm, passing the purposeful faces of others just going about their business, so calm they all seemed, how could they be so calm?

  ‘I heard you,’ said Natasha.

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘You sounded nervous,’ she said. ‘I would have been terrified.’

  ‘I was nervous,’ he confessed, with some relief, although he would say no more and tell her nothing of that.

  ‘François brought some bottles of German beer,’ she said. ‘For you too. He doesn’t like English beer.’

  ‘I’d really like one.’

  He went into the garden. François was sitting on a kitchen chair under the willow tree. He waved and smiled. Joe felt a rush of affection for him.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, and raised his glass.

  It was still best, they agreed, when they were together, at the kitchen table, writing, or reading aloud to each other, drawing on the apparently limitless oxygen of their love for each other, filling a reservoir of friendship, floating on the deep feelings that flowed between them, set for life.

  James’s magazine had folded after nine issues – ‘They will become collectors’ items,’ said James, defiantly prophetic, ‘they will be seen to be crucially before their time.’ Natasha was still working on the poems and translations she would have sent in. She had forwarded some of her work to two other, well-established magazines and their rejections had halted her.

  ‘You just have to keep on,’ said Joe, ‘they’ll get it. And, “Better far than praise of men, is to sit with book and pen”.’

  ‘Yes.’ It was happiness enough to work on the poems sitting in that kitchen with Joseph.

  He was attempting to complete a novel. He had made two starts, failing after chapter two on the first and chapter five on the second. This time he was determined to complete it. Mondays to Thursdays he got up at six to do a couple of hours before setting off for work; Friday was a day off writing; the weekend was his own agenda; writing first, then films, now and then a bottle party. Increasingly they went to see a play for which, it had been broken to him at the BBC, he could reclaim the money spent on two tickets. He began to see the work of his own generation on the stage just as he saw it on the screen.

  This novel had begun as a diagram. He had drawn seven concentric circles. When he had seen the diagram he had been flooded, he thought, with insights and inspiration. He was now on chapter three and had no idea where it was going or what he was doing with it. So far Aeneas had made a telling series of moves, so had others, including Lucifer and King Arthur; there was an unknown, perhaps an unknowable dark power within the shadows of the cave in the centre circle. There was a woman faced by seven walls or tests as she, like Aeneas, attempted to move from the outer edge to meet him in the cave. She alone would know how to interpret the shadowed power and discover its secret. Each circle had to represent a key stage in the development of man (all plucked from a book of mythology remaindered in the Times bookshop underneath Bush House) and while it was not overtly religious it had the solving of the mystery of meaning as its quest. It was a struggle. It sprawled. It was inexplicably, even mystically, satisfying. It threatened to take over the rest of his life.

  ‘François had a good joke today,’ Natasha said, as the clock indicated that the last cup of coffee was due before the reading in bed replaced the writing in the kitchen.

  ‘Not another dirty one.’

  ‘No. And they are not all dirty. They are Rabelaisian. I bought you Rabelais. You should read it.’

  ‘I have.’ The stack of classics he had set himself to read in order to compensate for reading History instead of English Literature was substantial. ‘Well, I’ve dipped into it. Very rude. Very gross. Much farting.’

  ‘It was the diet. Like Aristophanes. Beans, my father said. But it’s a classic so you don’t object.’

  ‘I don’t object to François’s jokes either.’

  ‘You do!’ She was delighted. ‘You can be a prude, Joseph, or is it a prune?’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘Your denial is so feeble.’

  ‘Prune or prude?’

  ‘A man goes to a doctor. He is in pain. He taps his finger on his forehead. “Doctor,” he says, “it hurts here.” He taps his finger on his heart. “Doctor, it hurts here”; on his left knee, “and here”; on his right knee, “and here. What have I got?”’ The sweetness of Natasha’s smile inevitably elic
ited a like smile in Joe. ‘“You have a broken finger,” the doctor said.’

  They laughed, though whether at the joke, or her awkward telling, at the happiness it had given to François to relate and Natasha to receive and retell, or whether just at the fact that they were there, the two of them, embarked on a life together. They could never know. Natasha watched him closely, and her heart opened: she really was in love, and she trusted him.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Eventually, he found a postcard in the small town which took its name from the Chateau. It was black and white and the Chateau looked rather gloomy but the mass of it, the splendour of the crescent, the French seventeenth-century power and style of it was unmistakable.

  He went to a bar. It was empty. The town, ruled into a perfect grid, was desolate, it seemed, and silent, not in the least ‘Christmassy’. Joe had wandered away from the twilit fairy-tale Chateau, found himself at the great elaborate iron gates, pushed on, to explore the town, but found nothing of interest except the postcards. He bought two: one to keep, one for his parents.

  The coffee, the waiter and even the Armagnac were scarcely festive. There was much grandeur about the Chateau to which Natasha’s father, in his new position as Rector of the university, had the right of access as his official holiday residence, but it felt no more Christmassy than this leaden town. He had thought a Roman Catholic country would make more of the birth of Christ than a northern Protestant people, but not here, not deep in central France.