Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘Why do you think I wrote that letter?’

  ‘Because you were proud: of me, and of this borrowed splendour and of yourself.’

  ‘I knew none of this when I met you. You were just lonely and unhappy.’

  ‘And you rescued me!’ She smiled, her good humour entirely restored. Joseph’s crestfallen expression was too young to bear any more chastisement.

  ‘I didn’t set out to rescue you.’

  ‘But you have done.’ She stood up and came across to him and pulled him to his feet. ‘Don’t sulk, Joseph.’ She put her arm around his neck and stayed until he felt forced to look at her. And her smile, the sweet, intelligent softness of love in her eyes, the clarity of her as always abashed and seduced him.

  ‘It is a very big bed.’

  He looked: the canopy, the curtains, the luxury so inappropriate for them, he thought.

  ‘I liked that single bed in Oxford better.’

  ‘That is inverse snobbery, Joseph.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it was better.’

  Over the next two, the last two days, Natasha was as loving to him as she had ever been. It was noted by Isabel with relief and approval, by Véronique with scepticism, and by the younger children with ribaldry as Natasha declared public tendernesses. But the waters did not quite close over.

  On the last afternoon they – ‘the children’ – went for a walk into the town and then back to the house by the most meandering route they could find. Natasha and François soon dropped behind. Joe liked being left alone with the younger ones. Natasha was not there to tease him and they appreciated his adequate French, indeed they seemed rather astonished by it, that of all people an Englishman had mastered their precious tongue. Joe revelled in these inherited siblings. He had no responsibility for them; he was as occasional as a shooting star and they revered him as the English husband of their artistic and rebellious sister. It was easy to show off and there seemed no harm in it. Joe found genuine happiness in his time with the children. There seemed to be no way to lose, no penalties. He fed them opinions, banalities, elementary historical facts, curiosities from English life and they leaped up like young dolphins, taking the fish every time. In their company Joe felt rejoined to the family from which Natasha’s censure had threatened to sever him.

  Natasha and François fell behind and in the extensive grounds they lost contact with the others and made their own way. François was sad and the weight of his sadness pressed down on her.

  ‘You can always come back to see us in London.’

  ‘Maman says no. Enough.’ His right hand made a chopping gesture. ‘Anyway, you are going to the North now.’

  ‘The BBC is like the army,’ said Natasha. ‘Now Joseph has to go to the Roman Wall for a few months.’

  ‘I will be near the exams then.’ François did not look at her. She felt she was abandoning him and it was insupportable. ‘They will be even less inclined to let me go.’

  ‘I’ll come over to Paris,’ said Natasha, ‘I’ll come every month.’

  ‘No.’ François let his cigarette fall and ground it out. ‘They will not like that.’

  ‘Who cares?’

  His smile was a reproach. He took her arm.

  ‘Do you remember Papa telling us about the Pétomanes? The men who farted tunes? He told us that his father took him to see them in a circus.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I always thought he was making it up. But it is true! I saw a little film of them. Five of them. Five fat types bending over and farting in tune. They even did the Marseillaise.’ He looked at her rather dreamily. ‘It was magnificent.’

  Joe stood at the head of the grand stone staircase which swept up to the main doors. He felt proprietorial. But when he caught sight of François and Natasha there was a pass of anxiety. They walked together so closely, holding tight to each other, meandering, talking so intensely, so confidentially, so excludingly. They did not look up or look ahead. He was unnoticed. In the twilight they could seem to be clinging together as if each needed the other, just to go forward.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ‘Come in and close the door, pet,’ he said, ‘it’s cold outside.’ Natasha hesitated. The wind whipped off the River Tyne, whistled in from the north-east and bit through her coat. The unrelenting dourness of the terraced, dark-brick cottages which opened onto the narrow pavement made her apprehensive. The poverty and pinched faces she had seen in the streets which tumbled down from the castled city to the river had moved her but reinforced her sense of being a total outsider. Yet the old man’s knobbly face, his smile enriched by the gleaming false teeth, the warmth of tone and the strange reassurance in the word ‘pet’ drew her across the threshold and straight into what appeared to be both a kitchen and a living area, the two striking features of which were the black fireplace, polished like an exhibit, Natasha thought, and on a table next to it, a television set.

  ‘Sit down, pet,’ he said, ‘you can have my chair by the fire. Just prod the dog. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  He disappeared into what Natasha recognised, from her holiday in Caldbeck, as the back kitchen and after prodding the dog which slid off the armchair sinuously as a snake, she sat down; it was very comfortable. She would like a dog, she thought, suddenly back in her childhood when her dog had been her only friend; she would like a dog for company while Joseph strode out to this work of his which took so much, too much, from so many of their days.

  ‘Aa haven’t made it too strong,’ he said, ‘that’s an acquired taste. The biscuits were fresh baked yesterday. I’ve put some toast on. It’s starvation out there.’

  As far as Natasha was concerned she might have been in a cave in the middle of a mountain somewhere in the weirdness of Eastern Europe. Yet she felt safe. Even in that short time she was aware of the practice of kindness.

  ‘When me sister lost her man she had a bad turn,’ he explained. ‘Well, she took it bad, put it that way, pet. She was always bothered with her nerves, that’s why myself and the wife (she’s doin’ her afternoon stint, she’ll be sorry to have missed you), that’s why we were pleased when she moved in next door particularly since they couldn’t have bairns. That seemed to prey on her, you know.’

  The lilt and pattern of speech, and occasional words that she did not recognise, wove a spell. His face, she now saw, was lumped by scars, decorated with thin black lines, she noticed, and wanted to ask him about it. This must have been what Joseph had experienced, she thought, this daily, hourly, percolation of affection just in the warmth of the words, this comfort: how lucky Joseph had been, she thought, probably for the first time, how lucky if he had this. She felt unnerved by the instant warmth and by his immediate confession.

  ‘The upshot is she’s had to go away. Well, pet, truth to tell, she’s been put away.’ The scarred face seemed close to instant tears and then the moment passed. ‘So we decided to let the house, three months maximum.’

  ‘Three months is all we need.’

  ‘It’s the spit of this place but I’ll take you round when you’ve finished your tea. Where you from?’

  ‘France.’

  ‘A long walk home, then.’

  Natasha laughed.

  ‘I like it here.’

  ‘Your sentence is only three months, pet.’ He smiled broadly, a smile was never far from his lips. ‘Most of us up here are lifers. Aa’ve allus fancied Gay Paree, ooh la la, and French champagne.’

  Next door was indeed the twin. After a tender farewell, Natasha, now warm as the toast, spent an hour or so alongside the Tyne, intrigued by the network of steep steps and small houses, the shops and the pubs, the painterly possibilities of the ill-lit streets, the boats in the river, the ceaseless background surging sound of that warm-throated, long-rubbed guttural dialect. She could wander around and sketch. She could get a dog. People on the street, strangers, greeted her already, a stranger. After a few weeks she would walk in the security of kindly acquaintanceships, she thought, and be part of th
is quayside world.

  And how Joseph would like it! It would remind him of Wigton where, she had suggested, unsuccessfully, he ought to set a novel. She had seen a film which was set in the North of England, in a city not unlike Newcastle, and been taken by the physical and emotional similarities Joseph bore to the hero. And she had read about the working-class North being an inspiration to contemporary artists. Here in Newcastle she saw it plainly, far more dramatic, she thought, than its miniature version in Wigton. So she would be helping Joseph go back to his roots without the difficulty and embarrassment which she recognised he might have in going back to his home. And the more she imagined life here, her own life on the quayside, the more she was convinced that she too would love it, she knew she would, it was a real place, it was perfect for an artist. They would adopt a pub.

  She outlined this to him as they ate a hushed dinner in the small dining room of the modest Bed and Breakfast to which BBC Personnel had directed them.

  The B and B was in a crescent of semi-detached houses in Jesmond, an affluent suburb of Newcastle, cut off from the heavy industrial city by the Town Moor, an urban cordon sanitaire. They had been there for less than a week but Joe had already worked out a morning routine which included walking to work across the Moor. Despite the traffic flow along its spine, the Moor had a residual atmosphere of Northern bleak landscape which he liked. He liked the deep silence of the crescent. He liked the temptation of nothing to do in the evenings but stay in and write.

  He went to see the terraced house by the Tyne the following evening. He too was taken by the locality, by the people, by the culture. In the house that was to be let he found much that was familiar but the clear sounds of television sets to the left and right of him raised worries. Perhaps the noise could be lived with. After all he had grown up above noise, the racket of a pub, and at Oxford experienced inevitable intrusion when he shared rooms.

  They were all but escorted to the pub on the corner of the street, the King’s Head, and Joe decided to drink nothing but Newcastle Brown Ale. It could not have been more friendly and Joe saw Natasha’s eyes glitter with pleasure at this rich new discovery. That he worked for the BBC and that she was an artist were facts relayed to all newcomers. Natasha flowered under the chatting scrutiny of interested women and the saucy glances of one or two of the younger men. ‘It’s as if we have been here before,’ Natasha whispered, ‘already they have made us feel like their family.’

  It was a Friday, pay day, busy, intimate. Natasha, he could see, rode on the crest of it and he thought he understood why. This, she would think, was Joseph’s world: this would take him back, slough off the strain of being the new creation of Oxford and the BBC, reconnect him with his past, which as she had said several times, he had to examine as a writer. He saw her eyes gleam with hope, misguided, for as the noise grew and the cheerfulness intensified and the drink began to exercise its grip, Joe realised with a sad but inflexible certainty that it would do him no good.

  He would like it too much. He would be putty in their hands, invitations, drinks, friendships – he could see them coming and it would be full of ease but the privacy and the puzzling need of a writer’s solitude would be difficult to maintain. Solitude, especially in a stranger, was deliberate separateness, unfriendly. The quayside prospered on community; it needed community. Pulling together was the tribal imperative.

  Across the room was a young man, perhaps a year or two ahead of Joe, the sort of young man Joe had always envied. Joe had never had that poise and lack of fret. Handsome, cavalier, out for the night with good mates around the companionable pints which nudged each other on the little table. Joe learned that the gang of them worked in the shipyards together. The young man would look across at Joe now and then and nod, but it was Natasha who drew his more intense and questioning gaze.

  The man was netted by her difference. She caught his eye, Joe was watching closely; and her happy openness, her unabashed difference in such company clearly stirred and intrigued the young man. He would be after her, Joe thought, when I was away at work, or even here in the pub, he would be after her; and others like him. He could not bear the thought of it. He began to reason it away. Would Natasha still be as enraptured with the place after a few weeks of this? She would soon find out the limitations of the transitory visitor. Then there was a danger of slumming it, he thought. That would be a good argument. And he would paint the darker side of this glow. Men and women utterly disarming, hospitable to embarrassment, but quick in their quarrels, sharp at offence given or thought to be given, able to bond instantly but also able to exclude and eject just as swiftly.

  As they went back across the dark Moor on the merrily lit bus, he articulated none of this to Natasha. It had been a good evening. The pub was well run, the singing at the end had been roof-raising, Natasha had been a princess for that night and she had enjoyed it. He had not the heart to tell her what he thought, not then, not the next day, not until the Sunday when he told her that the landlady of the Bed and Breakfast had a friend a few doors along, a Mrs Farr, widow of a solicitor, who let her upstairs as a self-contained flat. It had been on the market for a while because she was so picky. But for a young man in the BBC she was sure it would be available and most reasonable. Very quiet. Very quiet indeed. No parties. No pets.

  It was, thought Natasha, like a tomb.

  ‘I thought she looked starved the moment I set eyes on her,’ Ellen said, ‘and the cough on her chest is bad. She hadn’t taken anything for it. We went straight from the station to the chemist.’

  Sam gave her his full attention. Ellen had come back later than expected from her day trip to Newcastle and, most unusually, gone immediately upstairs, without staying to help in the pub. And she had waited upstairs until the place was cleared. She looked upset, Sam thought; and there was some anger and puzzlement. It was rare that Sam felt Ellen out of reach, and outside his understanding of her mood, but this was one such time. When she did come down, he made her a cup of tea and waited, desisting, with difficulty, from the interrogation he felt the need to undertake.

  He had put coal on the fire late as it was, partly to give the kitchen more life and partly just to do something to show that a preparation had been made.

  ‘It’s bitter over there,’ said Ellen, holding the cup with both hands and sipping the tea gratefully as if it were medicine. ‘Far worse than here. They always seem to have it colder in the North-east.’

  Sam lit a new cigarette off the stump of the old.

  ‘She seemed so sunk in herself,’ said Ellen, after a long pause. ‘She couldn’t have been more friendly when she met me at the station, but I could see she was having to force herself. To tell you the truth I thought that something had gone bad between them.’

  Sam was disturbed by this but made no comment.

  ‘We went back to their flat. It’s very nice. It reminded me of Miss Snaith’s when Joe did the piano lessons. A lot of good old-fashioned furniture and those very quiet colours. The woman downstairs was kindness itself; she put a pot of tea and some cakes on the top of the stairs and just gave a little tap at the door and disappeared. She always does that, Natasha said. But it was cold. Natasha didn’t take her coat off. It was bitter. There’s a meter to be fed with shillings but you can’t always have enough shillings.’

  Sam had waited long enough. He spoke as evenly as he could.

  ‘Did you get to the bottom of what was ailing her?’

  ‘It was something inside her, Sam. Way inside her. It was . . . it was as if she was hardly in the room with me. She tried, she’s very well mannered, she just seemed in herself, as if the rest of the world was shut out. I can’t explain it. But I could feel it.’

  ‘When did he get back?’

  ‘After six.’

  Sam reined himself in.

  ‘She just lit up, poor thing, when he walked in but he looked tired himself and wanting to eat and get on with more work. Natasha says he reads all the time when he isn’t writing. He said h
e liked the job, he said it was the sort of job he could do for life.’

  ‘Did you feel anything between them?’

  ‘Just, as if she was far away, looking for a hand, I don’t know, Sam. You would have worked it out.’

  ‘Do you think he was looking after her well enough?’

  ‘He’s always been very . . . what is it?’

  ‘Concentrated?’

  ‘On himself, hasn’t he? You used to say that was what got him through.’

  ‘It’s not always the best of qualities when you’re married. Especially if your wife’s – what would you say she was?’

  ‘I wish I knew, Sam.’ She was distressed but strove not to show it.

  ‘They should come back over here,’ he said, ‘for a rest.’

  ‘They should.’ Now at last she looked at him, her eyes filling with tears. ‘But where could we put them up, Sam? And how can we look after her when there’s everything we have to do all day in the pub? She needs somewhere quiet and a normal life – and so does Joe. He’s clashing himself. But what can we do for them here in the pub, Sam? Tell me that.’

  Natasha went to the doctor as Ellen had urged her to do and he put her on a course of antibiotics, told her to keep warm, advised regular hot drinks and said that she would feel ‘down in the dumps’ for two or three weeks.

  But the physical explanation was not enough for her. Natasha was driven into herself once more to haunt regions of unhappiness she thought she had escaped; unhappiness and blank apprehension, unanswerable questions infinitely multiplied like images in opposing mirrors. For several weeks she spent much of the day in bed, depleted by the chest infection which cleared up only slowly, fearful of the bite of the hard Northern winter, phone-less, talking to no one, not even to Mrs Farr whose concern brought a tray of tea and biscuits every afternoon but whose manners dictated that she leave it on the landing at the top of the stairs and immediately retire to her own quarters.

  Natasha had no energy for drawing and though she continued to read and attempted to write poetry it seemed a doleful business. When Joseph burst in from work her heart lifted, her expression lightened, but he was preoccupied. He delivered his day to her as he always had done but she saw that it was almost as much a duty as a pleasure. There were still the stories, there was still the mimicry to entertain her, but he was turning inward too and even when they shared the table in the sitting room and wrote face to face she sensed that now he would have preferred the solitude in which she had been imprisoned all day. He read furiously, sometimes reading aloud a passage – ‘How did he do that?’ ‘Listen to this’ – and his writing consumed ever more of his free time and energy.