by Melvyn Bragg
Natasha eavesdropped on bits of the local broadly accented conversation which were like manna and made her homesick for the country she was in. When the sun began to sink over the wide sea to the west, mother and daughter walked quite freely around the town as most of the crowd had decanted into the fortress to watch the competitions of music, dancing, boules and to admire the intricate mediaeval hats and the densely embroidered aprons.
It was at this time, along the front, that she met François, drunk and alone, and she guided him protesting home and straight to his room so that their father would not discover him. He told her that his mother had said he had to leave Brittany and go south to Montpellier University in the autumn; that Alain had a friend there who had found a course he could do. He told her that he was going to run away and join the navy or become a hobo in America or hide in the houses of his new friends, anything to avoid university, he hated university, he hated everybody who went to university, they were snobs and phonies and they knew nothing and they were not pals like his new pals, they were all false.
He fell into a stupor of sleep as soon as he lay on his bed.
Isabel listened patiently. Alain had found an excuse not to attend what was clearly to be an emotional confrontation in the Prévost house in La Rotonde. Véronique was drinking her wine unusually quickly.
‘She is intolerable,’ Véronique stubbed out half a cigarette. ‘She has always been intolerable. From the beginning of our marriage there was this glaring girl looking at me as if I had murdered her mother and stolen her father. She was never reconciled. When she went away to the convent school I thought, peace at last, but we had reports of her truancy and bad behaviour and Louis and I talked about her. We talked and talked, Isabel. We talked about Natasha more than all the other children added together, more than about ourselves. Natasha occupied our minds. We made plans for Natasha, we quarrelled over Natasha. We were exhausted over Natasha.’
‘I know.’ Isabel watched intently, nodded, waited.
‘We had some respite when she went to Oxford although whenever she came back I felt her presence working against me. It was baleful. I was a criminal. But, I am sorry, Isabel, she was away in another country and I was happy, yes, I was happy, and then she married but what happens? She comes back again!’
‘It is Joseph who encourages her to come, Véronique. It is Joseph.’
‘But now with François! She telephones me. Louis telephones me. Natasha says he mustn’t go to Montpellier. She sounds angry one moment and quite mad, we both know she can be quite mad, at other moments. She wants him to drive a lorry and live with the men who work on the boats or whatever they do. It will be amusing for a while but what of his life, Isabel? What of his future? And Louis is angry with me. Why is he always angry with me when François is the subject? He is our son, both of Louis and me. I know François is not a scholar as Louis wants him to be. He doesn’t work, he is sly, he evades all his responsibilities, he has tormented me. Like Natasha. Why? And now the two of them together. It is intolerable, Isabel. It is insupportable.’
Isabel waited until Véronique had poured herself another drink. Her own glass was still full. She spoke quietly and slowly, in contrast to Véronique’s rapid and agitated delivery.
‘It is terrible for you, my sweet,’ she said, ‘it has been difficult from the very beginning. It was tragic from the beginning, Véronique, and there were faults on all sides, on all sides, my sweet, we cannot forget that. And Natasha was a child. We do not know what is inherited and she can be so very like her mother that I gasp, I say to Alain, “She is born again,” but she was a baby who . . . Let us leave it there, Véronique. Time moves on. We move with it or we are lost. We are not in the confessional, we do not have to reveal everything to each other. We know what was in the past but she was the child.
‘And now, with François, well, Véronique, it was you, I have to say this, who allowed or encouraged François to go to London and live with Natasha and Joseph because that is what he did, in effect, in the first year of her marriage. She gave him so much of herself – you told me that, Louis told Alain how good Natasha and Joseph had been for François and it cannot have been easy for them, a young couple, just started, neither of them at home in London, so different, those two, held together only by the grand passion or the idea of grand passion which is very fragile when there is nothing else to support it, no family, no common history, no common language, at the heart of it. Such a grand passion needs to be nursed. They did not know that. Joseph is very young and Natasha can be blind, her obsessions, this bad self-absorption – but they reached out their hands to François and they helped him, Véronique, and Natasha has become deeply involved with him and so there is no wonder. Is there?’
It was early evening. They were in the big room which was part of the old wall and faced east. There was a balcony outside the central window and from there a steep drop onto the rocks far below. The great stone walls kept the room cool. The two women sat face to face across a small card table. Isabel now sipped at her wine to take the dryness out of her throat. The silence built up and Isabel picked out from the next room the ticking of an old clock which Louis had inherited.
‘You were always on her side,’ said Véronique, savagely.
‘That is not true,’ said Isabel. ‘You are upset. I understand. But it is not true. Yes! I love Natasha like a daughter. Yes! But she is not my daughter. And Louis I love and you, Véronique. I am not on anybody’s side and I think, with Alain, that François should come to Montpellier at the end of next month, he should make one last attempt, here in a part of the world that he knows and it is so much less competitive than Paris. No Louis for a start! He needs to make friends in his own class. Natasha has gone too far. I will tell her that.’
‘You will?’
‘Of course. You have to draw lines. You and Louis are the parents. Natasha is obstinate.’ She took out a cigarette but did not offer one to Véronique: each was smoking her own brand. ‘But so am I.’
‘So how do I tell you this? I don’t want a long build-up, I don’t want the action picture. It should be sudden, like it was. François was driving back from St Malo about two weeks after we had returned to London. It was late at night and I would guess he was at least a little drunk and he loved to drive fast, just as he loved to go as fast as possible in the boat. He hit a wall, smack on. They said the death would have been instantaneous. Natasha’s grief was terrible to witness.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Grief isolated her. She was so deeply drawn into it, so pulled into its apparently infinite darkness, that nothing could come near her that was not itself claimed for this grief. Even her daughter to whose needs she ministered dutifully, whose play and mere movements could strike chords of consolation, even she was best kept at some distance emotionally, best left out of this self-consuming struggle. Ellen came to stay and took the child off her hands for hours at a time.
As for Joe his quick and earnest sympathy was inadequate, he felt, although Natasha protested that he was helpful. He did not feel it. He could not follow her. The sense of each other through feelings alone became more faint and words failed. He felt pushed away. She needed to be left alone to inhabit this circle of grief and to save herself from it. For she felt the grief could engulf and extinguish her; so much guilt at what had not been done, so much sorrow at what had not been done, so much shame at what had been done to François, so undefended. Grief blighted her feelings.
Neither then nor later could Joe come to terms with a sort of jealousy. How could Natasha’s grief make him jealous? That low, vile thing, a taint on such grief. Did it mean that he was jealous of the force of feeling displayed towards another man albeit her brother, her half-brother? That was plausible though not at the heart of it, he thought. It was the grief itself, the way it possessed her as love for him had never so fully possessed her. He saw grief as the fullest expression of her feelings, the most passionate, the most unqualified he had ever seen in her and it
was not directed at him.
They spent a weekend in Oxford with Matthew and Julia and Joe’s anxiety dissipated by the hour as Julia’s tender and teasing manner seemed to help heal Natasha. Joe was flattered at Matthew’s curiosity about the metropolitan line he was following. He had assumed that his job was far below the high calling of scholarship, but Matthew displayed a close interest in it and Joe felt that what he did was acceptable. He was grateful for that. The weekend passed in undirected talk with the younger couple scarcely noticing the efforts being made by their older, wiser friends. Their daughter was commandeered by Matthew and Julia’s children and she was delighted to be the little spoiled playmate.
They came back on an early evening train on Sunday, leaving Oxford in its May glory with regret: in Oxford both of them had sunk into nostalgia and Paddington Station seemed particularly grimy, soulless and unwelcoming. Joe saw that Natasha looked tired again, and the child, too, was weary, as if the weekend had been wiped out by that short journey from the university city. He decided against taking the underground. The taxi fare was just about within reach.
As they crossed over Kew Bridge, the Thames flowing softly beneath them, and came on Kew Green, the beautiful Georgian church, the cricket pitch just lately used, and swung alongside Kew Gardens towards home, Natasha’s sadness sweetened. If only she could ignore the licence to unleash her implacable monsters that the death of François had given her; if only she could see what she had for what it was, fortunate in love, rich in daily life; if only she could see her life like that for more than a few illuminated moments and not look as she did at the outbursts of blossom, apple blossom, pear and most of all the cherry blossom, and think soon it will be gone, this blossom, this beauty, soon it will be dead.
There were three letters – all for Joe – from the Saturday delivery. After he had carried the cases upstairs and then carried the child up to her room and helped her into bed, and after Natasha had gone up to talk to her, as she did, in adult terms, which intrigued Joe, and he had put on the kettle for tea, made tomato and ham sandwiches and switched on the television, decided against it, found some music on the radio and flopped into one of the armchairs, only then did he open his mail.
He had been put into contact with a literary agency by Ross McCulloch. The agency had handed the unsolicited manuscript to one of the younger men. The two men had met in Soho for lunch. Eight weeks had passed since that encouraging lunch.
The letter said the novel had been accepted by a ‘small but very respectable publisher’.
Joe felt that if you could have a blow to the solar plexus that caused a sickness of pleasure rather than pain, this was it. He read the brief but exuberant letter again. And then again. And when Natasha came down into the room he read it once more just to make absolutely certain.
He poured out two cups of tea. Natasha did not take sugar. They sat across from each other at the small table which was quite big enough for the small kitchen, still painted in cream and brown, unredecorated like the rest of the house. He offered her a sandwich and she took it but out of politeness, he thought, not appetite. He passed her the letter.
She read it, looked up with a quick full smile which swept all the fatigue from her face and then she read it again. ‘It’s good,’ she murmured, over the letter, ‘it’s so good, Joseph.’ He too smiled now: it was becoming more real. It was good, wasn’t it? She handed it back to him and with rueful honest envy said, ‘I’ve been writing for so much longer than you have. How did you do that?’
There was no appropriate response he could find and a vague guilt clouded his mind. If they lived in France she would have been published way before him. Writing in English handicapped her, yet her French style, she said, had become corrupted by the years of English speaking. ‘Sorry,’ he said, meaning it.
She forced down the competitive reaction which she knew was unjust and could see threatened to spoil his moment. Her tone grew warmer and more passionate.
‘How can you be sorry? You must be very pleased. Aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ feeling anything but.
‘It’s wonderful,’ she said.
‘I’m sure yours will do better.’
‘We have no wine in the house,’ said Natasha.
‘I’ll take you out tomorrow night,’ he said. ‘Mary’ll be back by tea time.’
‘Congratulations,’ said Natasha, raising her cup. ‘Are you sure now that you like the title?’
‘Don’t you?’ Joseph raised his cup in acknowledgement.
‘Well . . .’ she said, emphatically, ‘the first title was more poetic, I think . . .’
‘I’ll change it back,’ he said, smiling, relieved to give her something. ‘To both of us.’
‘No. To you, Joseph. To the success of A Chance Defeat.’
The cups touched carefully at the lip and they drank the tea.
The advance on the novel was one hundred and fifty pounds. The agent took ten per cent. The remainder was payable in two halves, sixty-seven pounds and ten shillings on signature of contract, the second half on publication. The first purchase he made with the first half of the payment was to buy Natasha a pair of tall church candlesticks, sworn by the dealer in the Portobello Road to be seventeenth century or earlier, Venetian, possibly spirited away. The candlesticks were embellished with small mirrors of a thick glass, allegedly, the dealer claimed, among the earliest of their kind. He put them on the mantelpiece where they looked absurd, Natasha thought, much as she liked their worn grandeur.
And yet they soon settled into the clutter that Joseph was accumulating. Everything – save the glorious antique candlesticks – scooped from the back of a junk shop or the final knock-down price on a late afternoon stall, a Papuan harpoon, a damaged Egyptian necklace of real age, rows of leather-bound, mostly split-spined books, a large oak chest described as an armour coffer decorated with rudely drawn men in high bowler hats, a gilded mirror lacking a fair bit of its gilding, scuffed oils, a faded kelim rug which, Joseph thought, brought in the romance of the East.
It was almost a tribute to her father’s house, Natasha thought; yet in some way it was not in imitation but in competition with her father’s scrupulous and admired collections. He brought her father closer than ever before, she thought, but on his own terms. This all-purpose unconscious competitiveness was an aspect of Joseph with which she could sympathise, though it annoyed him when she mentioned it. But from one or two of his remarks, she had also to consider that his collecting might be something else, an attempt, shoe-string as it was, to make a home in which she would feel at home. It had nothing of the cosy utilitarian efficiency of his own past. If this insight were correct, it was an homage; another example of his love, like the bunches of flowers, an attempt to treat her in a way which he thought befitted her.
What could she do? He got so much pleasure from these objects. To see his pleasure pleased her. To spurn these cheap but occasionally charming objects would be to spurn something in him. And yet it was again turning her towards a past she had thought herself well and for ever rid of. She put the candlesticks on the oak armour coffer. Joseph told her it made all the difference. She slung the kelim over the sofa: he said it made the room into a Turkish boudoir. His appreciation energised her. He insisted she hang some of her own paintings and covered the walls of the hall with her drawings of their daughter. She felt applauded. She painted the hall white, and then she painted the kitchen . . .
Joe had known from the beginning what he intended to do with the remaining thirty pounds of the first part of the advance. The certainty had arrived without forethought. It surprised him, it puzzled him, but he knew he would go through with it.
Often on a Saturday afternoon, Joe would head off alone. He went to the park with the child in the morning and after lunch walked on the towpath through Richmond, through Kingston, sometimes further, following the Thames upstream, boats passing by, a kindly English mystery about life on the river, its own world. This was the only time in the w
eek he was fully alone. He would let himself rove for three or four hours and come back nicely tired, ready for an evening’s writing or an outing. On Sunday afternoons they would go together all three into Kew Gardens, like the bourgeoisie of Paris, Natasha said, taking the air in the Bois de Boulogne. But Saturday afternoon had become his own time.
Recently his route had changed. He would catch the underground and go to Soho or Kensington or, most favoured, the King’s Road in Chelsea, an area still notable for its artists and bohemians but increasingly famous for its boutiques, its fashions, the new plumage, female and male plumage, which was tumbling onto the streets to the accompaniment of young cash in the pocket. Rock and roll and its progeny were on the jukebox and everywhere on the King’s Road there was the mesmerising dazzle of a sudden power of Youth. The black and white of Joe’s past was overlaid by this Technicolor; the establishment he had accepted was mocked or bypassed; the ubiquitous hat was increasingly discarded, replaced by ubiquitous hairstyles that were like hats. James had characterised it as the age of the poseur and the pill and of More: More sex, More liberty, More variety, More sensation, More music, More dancing, above all, More dancing.
Over the past few years, as this mushroomed around him in London though not in Kew Gardens, Joe had become infected by it, although ‘poisoned’ would later seem a more suitable word. He was increasingly like the boy with his nose pressed to the big plate-glass window of a shop full of toys and treats he had been told he must never enjoy and could never afford, fatally consumed by longing. Now the glass was melting.