Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘Your mother’s routine, always easily assumed, her graceful style, was now interrupted only by visits to her analyst twice a week, late in the morning of Tuesdays and Fridays, half an hour or so on the tube into Central London. For her in the early months, the analysis was a deep pleasure, for me a drama from which I preferred to be excluded.’

  For the first months, the only months, in truth, when it could be called fully operational, Joe’s routine took him over.

  He constructed it with care. He built it to last. Now that he was a fulltime writer he would waste not want not for there was a living to be made, as well, and yet somehow he aimed to combine that with the liberating ambition of following his own star, writing out of his fullest capacity whatever the risk to livelihood and critical opinion. This would be his chance to be the free artist that Natasha had inspired him to be and the only way he could see it working was to lash himself to the oars.

  He had a routine for writing, a routine for reading, a routine for exercise and a routine for family and leisure. With Marcelle it was an hour or so at the end of the day, Saturday and Sunday mornings to the park, Sunday afternoons en famille. With Natasha for talk it was the late evenings, usually after an hour or two of television. On Friday nights they went out, occasionally on Saturday nights too or they invited people round, especially Kew people where a well-knit interchange of babysitting was in place. Exercise was a brisk run-down to and around the park for about forty minutes every morning at seven-thirty followed by a cold shower to prove seriousness. If the others were up for it, breakfast together, otherwise on his own and always a boiled egg, an apple and brown toast. The day was set up.

  After breakfast he went, he ran, upstairs where he had set up a card table in the bedroom and worked from nine until one, lunch, two until five, tea, Marcelle, six to seven-thirty, Marcelle bed, supper, read or television, chat, bed, and often a last sneak back to the card table. No alcohol save on Fridays and Saturdays and not much then.

  The reading plan would later be remembered as puffed up, even absurd, but also as a salute to high-mindedness. He believed that the privilege of his liberty obliged him to seize the opportunity, and chose books of a nature more taxing than he had found time for in his previous pattern of life. Now was the time to test the best. He began with philosophy which had been part of his course at university – Aristotle, Hobbes and Rousseau had been what his tutor called ‘the unholy trinity’ on the history course – since when they had gathered dust. He began reading them once more and took on other philosophers.

  The power of their minds daunted him; the difficulty of understanding could give him a headache. Often as not he felt he was up against concepts he was not trained to grasp, but he soldiered on, thinking such strain was good, believing that what was difficult was important, pushing himself as hard as he could.

  After eight weeks he felt as fit as he had ever been, brimful of purpose, a dedicated servant to the writing and proud that he was shaping so well this potentially wayward and lumpen thing, himself. After twelve weeks the first draft of the new novel was done, the twin exhilarations of achievement and toxic solitude were helium and he would chant, ‘Better far than praise of men/is to sit with book and pen.’ He was convinced that to write and to turn what it was inside his head into words and scenes imagined only by himself was his true calling. He felt good about the work, he felt good about Natasha and Marcelle, and about himself. All life was good. It must never change.

  To counteract the noise of the planes he stuffed his ears with cotton wool which he soaked in Vaseline and when that proved only partially successful he dug around in the Portobello Road one Saturday afternoon and was eventually rewarded at a stall which specialised in artefacts for aeroplane buffs. He bought a pair of the ear protectors worn by the men who guided in the still-roaring aeroplane to its final berth. They helped but even so the planes had begun to interfere with his mind. Yet such was the spring of liberty, such the thrill of Being a Full-Time Writer, such the unexpected benefits which came in those early months just from being constantly in the same place as Natasha as in the old days in Oxford, and now with Marcelle, her gaiety, her perpetual affection, that the planes could be endured. They had to be endured, he told himself, others endured them, he should, he could, it was a price worth paying, a price always had to be paid. When on some days they switched the flight lines and passed the pain elsewhere the sense of gratitude for the peace was effervescent and that relief more than compensated, he told himself. Mind over matter, the old story.

  Those few months were the happiest in the lives of the three of them. He would weigh them up, compare, take everything into account: yes, the happiest in their brief life together. Whatever happiness was, it meant Marcelle, growing bolder, more cheerful, naughtier by the day, himself on track, and Natasha heading home.

  Natasha came to the couch a willing bride. Her analyst was an Austrian, Jewish, whose parents and remnants of her family had fled to England two years before Freud. She told her own analyst that as soon as Natasha walked into her room, late because her navigation from Oxford Circus Station to Welbeck Street had been faulty, she had recognised ‘a kindred spirit. It was quite extraordinary,’ she said, in her clear metallic voice, ‘I would almost use the phrase “elective affinity”; I knew that she needed what I had to offer. But I have to handle her with great care. I sensed that beneath the neurosis there might be a psychosis. In analysing her I find I analyse myself, which is perfect. Is it permitted to bring her into my own analysis?’

  She herself was in the fifth year of what was still a tormented process striking deep into the horror of the mid-century madness and darkness of the Holocaust, the great wound.

  When Natasha came in for the first session, apologetic but smiling, her social ease unassailable, the analyst merely indicated the couch and Natasha went to it with a nod of recognition. She lay down, looked at the ceiling, traced the worn cornicing around the large room, approved the rather threadbare character of the furnishings, and waited. She did not mind the silence, she found it comforting, an unconscious, unspoken overture. The analyst sat behind the couch, out of sight: Natasha had seen a green notebook.

  But after some time – seconds, half a minute, a little more, time in this room would always seem askew or slippery – Natasha knew there was the expectation that she begin.

  ‘I thought you would begin,’ she said.

  ‘You came to me,’ said the analyst. ‘To talk.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘It’s better I remain as anonymous as possible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I am only someone you know here in this room to help you. That is wholly who I am. Outside this room I have no existence for you.’

  ‘How sad,’ Natasha said. ‘For both of us.’

  It was a moment, the analyst later recounted, she would never forget. It was so heartfelt, she said, so simple yet so moving. This woman could simply reach out and touch her heart. She had to steel herself. Once again the silence.

  ‘Say,’ said the analyst, with some difficulty, ‘whatever is on your mind.’

  ‘But there is so much!’ Natasha exclaimed. ‘And how do I know what is most important? How can I use this time with you to the best advantage? I need to. I can only just afford it. And from what I read, sometimes the most important clue can be found in a small instance, as in a poem. Whereas if you look at it head-on it can yield nothing because it is all too big and blunt and impersonal. Is that true? I want to go straight to the depths but now I am lying here looking at your ceiling and I think, why am I here at all? I want to be here but why am I here? I know that really, I know the answer, but it is such a big answer I feel shy of speaking about it, but that is why I am here because something in me, something from my past – where else? – has made me unhappy even in the face of the happiness I now have at home, more unhappy in some ways or rather more fretful about the unhappiness as if it will endanger what has been achieved. Now that I know something
of ordinary happiness, the inheritance of unhappiness is all the more damaging. It could snatch away what I have. I can see it for what it is now. It undermines the heart and infects life. I have to drive it away now, for their sake and mine, for Joseph and Marcelle also, or they will be drawn into it, won’t they? Isn’t that what happens? It is always there, clawing at me, and now I want to surrender to it so as to understand it. That is why I am here.’

  ‘What you are telling me,’ the analyst began, the slow probing of long-compacted grief and pain began; and Natasha listened as if her life depended on it and left exhausted, emptied but disturbed into the first inklings of compulsion, all but dazed as the empty midday tube rattled out of Central London and raced towards Kew.

  Yet even as she crossed the river she was thinking of, even longing for, her next session.

  ‘She began to keep notebooks,’ Joe told her, ‘sometimes she read them to me. Casebooks would be the more accurate description. She followed herself down labyrinths. Explorations, memories and assumptions were intertwined so tightly sometimes I felt I could scarcely breathe as I listened to them. She would sit in her chair, hunched over the notes, so intent, smoking, her face drawn, what she was pursuing enthralled her. Those notebooks were the best things she ever wrote. Véronique destroyed all of them.’

  During the first three or four months of the analysis, which coincided with the first and beginning the second draft of Joseph’s novel, Natasha experienced a slow burn of satisfaction. There were anxieties which had not been there for some time; there were sudden switches of mood which could be disturbing; and there was always the fear, but the fear could now be used to look into the darkness. The satisfaction grew the more she went to the analyst. As she learned how to use the fifty minutes so she moved closer, she was sure, to the nucleus of her fears. The analysis became her prime subject and she was strengthened by it even though from her reading she knew that there would be a period of weakening, a period of utter dependence, a danger zone in which her personality having been stripped down, unravelled, exposed as illness, would be encouraged to reassemble in health, re-form through pain to a new bearable wholeness. That was months in the future. For now she was in the honeymoon period and the exhilaration of discovery made her a zealot.

  After a four-month stretch on his routine, Joseph emerged confused and disappointed in himself. He had thought that the routine would last for all time. That it stumbled and threatened to halt when he had driven through the first draft took him by surprise. What now? Revision had not the same dynamic and besides, the routine seemed arid, not as a way to write but as a way to live and surely you needed both. He could go for hours without receiving a phone call, for days without having a talk or even a chat with any like-minded group. He was proud of his dedication but the truth was that it took too much out of him. He badly missed working with others. After those first months his inner resources dried up, the book, an imagined account of the life of his grandfather in World War One, had taken more out of him than he acknowledged. He needed and wanted to drift, but he had not learned how to drift, and surely drifting was a waste, drifting could become a bad habit when you needed to earn a living, and drift where?

  They were in the garden together in the middle of a fine autumn morning. Marcelle was at the nursery school. Natasha had been to analysis the day before and Joseph too had been in town but as yet not told Natasha why. The planes were numerous, noisy, a relentless procession across the London sky, every single one, Joseph thought, targeting their house.

  ‘We don’t have to live under a flight route,’ he said, for the first time.

  Natasha let the plane go over to be heard in peace.

  ‘You’re exhausted by the book,’ she said, ‘you never take into account that writing can be exhausting. If it is not hard manual labour then, in your view, you are simply not permitted to claim any sort of tiredness.’

  ‘I was talking about the planes.’

  ‘They are on the outside. They make a noise only if we choose to hear it.’

  ‘That’s barmy.’

  ‘It is true, Joseph. It is inside our heads that the decisions are made about all of our senses and about all of our reactions to life. This noise is a nuisance but it is bearable if you choose to bear it. The important question is, why do you choose not to bear it? How does it threaten you?’

  ‘Natasha! That’s gobbledegook. I don’t choose anything. Here comes another of the bastards!’ The plane was flying low to Chiswick Bridge where it put on its squealing brakes to enter into the last lap before landing a few miles to the west. As it went over, Joseph opened and closed his mouth, miming speech, saying nothing. Natasha laughed.

  ‘You looked so funny!’

  He smiled and did it again.

  ‘The plane is gone,’ she said.

  ‘My mind refuses to believe it.’

  ‘It is fear, not noise, Joseph.’

  ‘It is noise, Natasha. It is a horrible whining, braking, screeching, regular, torturing noise about which I can do nothing while I am in this house and I think, do we have to live under a flight path?’

  ‘Marcelle doesn’t even notice them. None of the children do.’

  ‘That worries me. They should.’

  ‘I’m afraid this is classic displacement, Joseph. Those planes represent if not fear then a threat.’

  ‘To my sanity.’

  ‘It is not the planes themselves which represent a threat to your sanity.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘And sanity is too strong a word.’

  ‘How do you know that, either?’

  ‘It would be better for you to examine what is inside you. Especially the anger.’

  ‘What do I do all day but examine what is inside me? Not much at the moment. Maybe not much, period. And anger. You can’t examine anger. Anger just flares up and then it’s gone.’

  ‘You cannot deny that anger has origins in your character.’

  ‘I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You must.’

  ‘Oh no I don’t. There are things better not known – even if you could know, which I think you can’t. I don’t want to understand everything.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To find things out. Here comes another!’

  Quite suddenly he stood, threw out the remains of the coffee from his cup and left, straight through the house, out, through Kew Gardens, onto the towpath, looking up to see what he was fleeing, the sky march of the planes, his head locked as in a cramp, everything wrong but why? everything out of kilter, why? as he pounded along beside the Thames as if driven by hornets. And why had she not asked him where he had been the other day? And why had he not told her he had gone to see Saul Elstein? And why was this novel no bloody good, would never be, who was to judge, whose judgement counted, how could they live on what this would earn, should that not matter? The heights, the calling? And what was Natasha trying to do to him?

  Another plane crashed over his head as he passed two men fishing, oblivious.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You look terrible.’

  ‘I really am sorry.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing . . . I just couldn’t stand the noise, it’s stupid, I really will try, the rest of you cope, it’s just stupid.’

  ‘Don’t look so depressed, Joseph. It is not a fault of character. It’s not irresponsible.’

  ‘I found a place,’ he said, ‘I walked to Richmond and then through the meadows and noticed that the planes don’t go over the crest of Richmond Hill itself. So I went up there and wandered around until it was dark. There were no planes directly overhead. I could see them coming from Kew Gardens and see them heading over Richmond Green but they left the Hill alone, it’s off the direct flight path, I asked the man. I rang up the airport authorities, they were very helpful.’

  By now Joseph h
ad sat down in the usual armchair. Natasha sat opposite him, considered but rejected bringing him a drink or making tea: she did not want to leave him alone. He had been out for hours; Marcelle had been in bed since seven; the autumn night was well under way.

  ‘I wanted a drink but I went to buy a paper first, on one of the roads leading up to the top of Richmond Hill. There were these Small Ads and while I was waiting I read one, offering a room, in that street, just a few yards down the road, the man said, just beyond the pub. The room to let is in a small terraced house. It looks out into a bit of a yard and a wall. It’s pretty grim, really. There’s a shilling-meter electric fire, the carpet and the curtains are orange and grubby, there’s a narrow bed, the whole place isn’t much bigger than our kitchen but there’s a kettle and a table I can work on so I’m going back tomorrow morning with my cheque book, two weeks in advance she wants. She’s a rather shy old lady, she looks as if she’s been very unhappy, and she didn’t trust me an inch but she wants to let it to somebody, I assume, and it might as well be me. The thing is, there are no aeroplanes. I can work there in the day and then come back like I used to do from the BBC when the planes didn’t affect me as much. I really am sorry.’

  He got up and went into the kitchen, sank a cup of cold water, refilled it and brought it through.

  ‘I should have phoned,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all right.’ She held out her cigarettes. He took one and then stood statue still and listened for the planes.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘They stopped,’ said Natasha, ‘soon after you left,’ and her sweet giggle which might have been nervous, or tender, or both, shot through Joseph’s mind like an electric taunt.