Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘What does it do, this club?’

  ‘It’s a dining club.’

  ‘But we scarcely ever eat out and when we do we go to our friends’ houses or out with Anthony and Victoria.’

  ‘It’s an amazing place. A Morning Room, a full-size Billiards Room . . .’

  ‘But you don’t play billiards.’

  ‘. . . a unique collection of theatrical portraits. Best of its kind in the world.’

  ‘Is there such competition?’

  ‘You don’t have to pay on the spot. Just run up a bill and they send it at the end of the month.’

  ‘That’s dangerous.’

  ‘No lady members.’

  ‘How sad.’

  ‘But they can come for dinner two nights a week, I think, provided they use the back stairs.’

  ‘Then I will never come.’

  ‘And –’ He smiled. He was by now enjoying her put-downs every bit as much as she was. ‘– there’s a library. A small wonderful library. A pocket Oxford library. I can work there whenever I want to. Nobody uses it, Charles says. I’ll have it to myself! It’s perfect!’

  Natasha let that one go, without realising what the deep silence of that small dark highly polished room signified for Joseph.

  ‘Did they not object to your clothes?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Though some of them had done, Charles informed him later. But the majority on the committee, especially a couple of aristocrats, had been keen to wave him in on that account alone. New blood.

  ‘Is that where you met this Lord . . . whoever you told me about?’

  ‘Yes. He’s very keen on films.’

  ‘Oh, Joseph,’ she said, but she let it go . . .

  On their eighth wedding anniversary he took her for a mystery day out. They went on the train to Oxford early in the morning and had a Cornish pasty and a half of beer at the Welsh Pony. A bus to Henley, another to Stonor and lunch in the Stonor Arms. It was a weekday. There were only two other tables occupied but they noticed that just to approve it. They were less disturbed.

  Natasha listened as he listed what had happened to them over the eight years and murmured and nodded him on because she liked the substance it gave their lives. It was a chronology which did well enough for a conversation, it was no more than a few notches in time but somehow, for Natasha, it provided a bass line on top of which she could safely play her own variations. His hair was longer than when they had married but otherwise there was little noticeable change in him, save he was so much more confident in that dining room than he had been eight years previously. She relaxed utterly and there came into her mind happy images of the years, a sighting of Marcelle here and there, an instance, a moment, their honeymoon entrance into this very room . . . staring away from herself, past and present merging into one, what she supposed could be called a waking dream, their life, lived seriously, she thought, his life, her life: together.

  ‘What a lovely idea,’ she said, ‘to come back here, thank you, Joseph.’

  He grinned, that cocky, confident grin.

  He had intended to walk over to Fawley because of its association with Thomas Hardy but after a mile or so up the hill, through one haul of woods with another ahead of them, Natasha stopped.

  ‘Do you mind?’ she asked. The grass was thick and dry even though the sun was covered by cloud. ‘I feel tired. My back.’ She grimaced slightly and kneaded it with both hands.

  They sat and smoked and looked around the Chilterns. ‘It is so English,’ said Natasha, ‘and it is also us despite not being in Cumberland or Provence!’ They listened to the near silence. ‘No deer so far, Joseph . . . we were luckier last time with the white hart and the other deer.’

  He nodded but he had been disturbed by a hornet sound coming closer, like a motorbike in the sky. Then he spotted it. A small biplane come to loop around, doing practice rolls and dives. Joe tried to block it out. It went directly above them and then it turned and set off back on its tracks only to crawl up higher and return in a series of graceful twists. He noticed that Natasha was looking at it but without much interest and with no irritation. Joe tried to be reasonable. Someone up there was having fun. Someone up there was not breaking the law. Someone up there was perfectly entitled to make this bloody awful racket which disturbed scores possibly hundreds of people to satisfy his own selfish pleasure and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  It had been such a lovely day. Natasha’s face, the sweetest of smiles when he had led her to the Welsh Pony. Her silence so companionable, he thought, and so loving in the dining room of the Stonor Arms, at such ease together in the stroll uphill through the woods.

  ‘We have to go!’

  He jumped up.

  ‘Sorry! I’m sorry. It’s that bloody plane. It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid!’

  Natasha stubbed her cigarette in the grass and stood up, carefully, stiffly.

  ‘They ought to be banned,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Joe said, feeling wretched at his lack of control, at spoiling the afternoon, at his weakness.

  ‘I do,’ said Natasha. ‘They should be forbidden to destroy such a peace as this.’

  By the time they had reached the road, the hornet had gone elsewhere. There was not too long to wait for the bus, and the journey home was a re-affirmation.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, when they arrived home. ‘What a beautiful idea.’

  ‘Beautiful?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it was. Like you.’

  Joseph was still not home and so Natasha, unusually for her, returned to the novel after she had put Marcelle to bed.

  Clément’s total change of character, his ‘madness’ as described by an increasingly irascible Aimé, had finally proved too difficult for the cramped household to live with, especially now that Aimé had two children. He had to be taken to a local institution and after the examination and the final arrangements it was his mother who accompanied him there with the doctor who would then drive her back home. Natasha could see the car going through the bone-dry countryside, cutting through fields heavy laden with lavender. She saw it approaching La Rotonde and described the approach, but again left the village unnamed. Finally the car arrived at the asylum and Natasha found herself moved by what she next wrote about Madame Palmet.

  She found it difficult to speak without her voice trembling. ‘I must say goodbye now, Clément my love’ – she so rarely used that word – ‘you’ll be coming home soon, you’ll be well soon, you’ll be well soon. There you go now. There is the case. If you need anything you just let me know.’

  ‘Goodbye, Madame Palmet, and thank you for your kindness.’ Clément held out his hand. She took it. He would not have understood it if she had kissed him, so she did not. She would have been afraid to try because she would have cried against him and frightened him . . .

  Joseph crashed in.

  He was drunk but benign, she concluded, even before she saw him.

  ‘I’ll make coffee.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, and slumped in his armchair and sank back his head, exhausted. ‘Saul goes on and on,’ he said. ‘He took me to the White Elephant. It’s the flash film restaurant. How can you work in the White Elephant when people come across all the time and the waiters won’t leave you alone? But he does go on and on. And on and on and on.’

  Natasha returned bearing the coffee.

  He took it with such gratitude that she found to her surprise that now was the right time to ask him.

  ‘He likes the childhood bit,’ said Joseph. ‘He likes this terrified but brave girl princess in this threatening prison of a palace. He’s not so keen on the teachers but that’s all right. But about Dudley, oh God, he just goes on and on and on . . .’

  She said nothing at all and gradually he talked himself out and arrived at an oasis of silence.

  ‘Joseph,’ she said, as carefully as she was able, and, unusually for her, not looking him in the face but staring into he
r coffee cup like a fortune teller, ‘my analyst says that . . . she says that the only way . . .’ – it was even harder than she had anticipated but she could not be a coward –’ . . . for me to make real progress now is for you too to go into analysis. Not with her of course. But she believes that unless . . .’

  ‘No. Please, Natasha. I don’t want to.’

  ‘She insists, Joseph, and she says that without it I will be able to go no further and,’ she looked at him with a fear he had never seen on her face before this moment and it sliced into his conscience, ‘I have to go on, Joseph,’ she said. ‘I do not know what I will do if I stay where I am . . .’

  ‘But how can I help? I’d hate it, Natasha. You know I’d hate it. I haven’t gone on at you about it, have I, but that’s you, you’re you, I’m me, I’d hate it. What for?’

  ‘For me, Joseph. And,’ she would never flinch, ‘I think, to be truthful, for you, too. You are in some distress now and too often and because of what I am doing I cannot help you as I would like.’

  ‘What distress? It’s just work. Sometimes work makes you worry. Sometimes it drives you mad. That’s all. I’m OK. Why should I go into analysis? I’d hate it, I’d absolutely hate it!’

  She paused and her pride, her love for him, her sense of being fair and not exercising any sort of blackmail held back the words for a moment.

  ‘Why should I?’ he pleaded.

  ‘For my sake, Joseph,’ she whispered, and despite her resistance, tears threatened unbidden and she repeated, and firmly, ‘For my sake.’ She held the tears in check.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Joe did not know why he was holding out against her but he would not give in. Like much else in his mind it was unexamined. He felt rather than understood his motives, and there was no compulsion to analyse them. The force of his obstinacy was proof enough of the rightness of the decision, he thought.

  Joe was too uncertain to claim the superiority of ‘instinct’, nor did he think that the way he came to decisions and especially decisions involving feelings was better or worse than the ways of others but it was his way. He had built on it, and whatever it was that was now him had accrued through this lack of method, primitive though it might be. Over those weeks Natasha’s suggestions, her arguments, her loving arguments, her steely suggestions seemed like crude siege weapons pointlessly battering the walls of his skull.

  They were sitting in their opposing chairs, late at night, planes whining overhead, Marcelle in bed presumed asleep, Mary off for a few days. This domestic tableau had once seemed an idyll of intimacy. Increasingly Joe found it a time and a place to dread.

  ‘It is about freedom, Joseph,’ said Natasha, laying aside her book, RD Laing, The Divided Self, ‘that is why it is so fundamental.’

  Very reluctantly, Joseph put aside the Borges stories and once again entered into the lists. At the back of his mind he was timing the gaps between the planes.

  ‘There used to be a man on the BBC who always said, “It depends what you mean by ‘freedom’ or whatever the word was.” Well. It does. It depends on what you mean by “freedom”.’

  ‘I think you know.’ Natasha gave that quick sweet smile which once upon a time automatically provoked a like response. Now it seemed to taunt him.

  ‘I don’t. Freedom means different things to different people.’

  ‘Here it means,’ Natasha paused, leaned down and put the book on the floor, ‘first of all letting yourself admit all that you are, finding and admitting to the anger in you, the deep fear, the superficial anxiety and the jealousy and the envy – Melanie Klein is good to read on envy. You are both the object of it and subject to it.’

  ‘What if I admit all that?’

  What Joseph really wanted to say but could not, was, ‘Why should I admit all that? I recognise it, my bad feelings, more than you know, but what I try to do is hold them down, I try to act as if they did not exist, as if I was not somebody with these terrible feelings. Just like lust in the streets, you have to suppress it, otherwise what would stop you acting on it? You have to sort it out for yourself and take the responsibility.’

  ‘You will find it very difficult to admit all that. Bad feelings frighten you: you think they are the real you. Until you admit them you will suffer from them,’ said Natasha and Joseph yet again felt that he was being X-rayed. But how could she be so sure? ‘You see yourself as obliged to be seen as a good man, a good little boy, and so you conceal more and more of what you really are because you do not want to displease your mummy or anger your daddy, but the strain becomes too great if you do that. You distort your true self. You may even destroy your true self.’

  ‘Oh, Natasha! How do you know what my “true self” is? How do I know? Why should I want to know?’

  ‘We have to know ourselves if we are to take life seriously.’

  ‘Lots of people take life seriously without knowing themselves in the way you mean it.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s the case.’ She lit a cigarette and Joseph hoped the pause would lead to a stop. ‘And we must all start from where we are.’

  ‘Don’t we know enough of where we are for all normal purposes?’

  ‘Not if we are harmed by what we have become.’

  ‘How do we know we are harmed?’ Joseph found that he was squirming in his seat. He made himself sit still. ‘Maybe what you call harm is just experience and maybe that’s inevitable and even good.’

  ‘It is possible,’ said Natasha. ‘But not in your case. Nor in mine. We have to be as free as we can be to find the root of ourselves. That is the only way we can do our best work.’

  ‘But how do you know this, Natasha? How can you know this?’

  ‘You have to lose your inhibitions.’

  ‘Why? Maybe you need them. Maybe they are what keep you together. Maybe what you call inhibitions are just ways of coping that you learn as you grow up, and different for everyone.’

  ‘Freedom is the goal, Joseph, and you cannot deny that the past enchains you as it does me.’

  ‘As it does millions of others.’

  ‘The fact that you fight this argument so hard,’ she said, with deliberation, ‘proves to me that you need to accept it.’

  ‘How can that be? That means there’s no argument. What you say is circular.’

  ‘The unconscious exists, Joseph, disabilities of personality exist, psychoanalysis exists to dispel these. It is your neuroses which make you fail to see or acknowledge your neuroses.’

  He felt cornered, trapped, his opposition to her arguments tormentingly unavailing. Each time he pulled away from the knots of her argument they grew tighter.

  ‘You’re like a Marxist I knew at Oxford! Whatever you said about history he just insisted that all of it was always dependent on economic interests and if you said that was a limited view and argued with him he would say that was due to your immersion in economic forces. In other words, whatever you said, he was right. Same here. Another system. I don’t believe we can be understood through systems.’

  ‘Let us begin with your unhappiness,’ said Natasha.

  ‘I’ve been unhappy before. Most people are sometimes. Unhappiness is part of it. But you struggle your way out of it or something turns up and it lifts and passes. Maybe it’s chemical. Maybe it’s social. Why does it have to be psychological?’

  ‘Don’t you feel full of frustration and anger and anxieties at the way in which you deceive yourself? And me. How do you account for that? There has to be a reason and it has to be in the mind.’ Natasha was vehement. ‘The mind is all we have.’

  ‘How do I deceive myself?’

  ‘Joseph . . .’

  ‘Joseph! What does that mean?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘I don’t.’ The defiant tone of his previous answer guttered to misery.

  Natasha looked at him with pity. He looked so tired. His face had an aspect of strain which was recent; you saw it most around the eyes in which Natasha had almost always looked f
or and found a comforting kindness; there was a paleness about his skin and his movements portrayed constant unrest. He lit a cigarette and she saw desperation even in the way he did that. He needed help, she was sure of it.

  Joseph looked at Natasha with apprehension. Her looks were more as they had been when they had first met, hollow-eyed, so pale, her hair swept back again like Shelley but unkempt, and in her eyes a concentration so fierce that it unnerved him. If the analysis did this to her, she who was so accomplished at examining her own feelings, what would it do to him? He could no longer help her as once he had and that saddened him and made him feel that he had lost some of his purpose.

  ‘You deceive yourself,’ she said, ‘because you think that you can surmount the difficulties you have and the changes which have been imposed on you without help, without even the help of your own acceptance and understanding.’

  ‘Everybody has changes “imposed on them” as they get older, don’t they? That’s what happens. That’s getting older. And what’s so dreadful about the changes? I like what I do, I earn more than enough to live on, we have good friends . . .’

  ‘Your lists sound less and less convincing. This life has wrenched you away from the paths you were originally made for.’

  ‘Meeting you was the cause of all that!’ He smiled.

  ‘There are times when I fear it was,’ she responded, gravely, missing the opportunity to take up his lightness of tone. ‘When we first met I thought you were like an alien. There were days when I simply hoped you would go away.’

  ‘Really?’ Joseph was intrigued at this news. ‘You really wanted me to go away?’

  ‘Yes.’ This time the smile came from her but it was thin, reflective, as if directed to herself rather than to him. ‘I saw nothing in a future with you but the misunderstanding which inevitably follows a mismatch. And you seemed far too young.’

  ‘I’m not that much younger than you.’

  ‘There are many ways to measure the gap between us, Joseph.’

  ‘I thought you were amazing,’ he said. ‘You were the alien. You were the one who came from another planet. I did not know that people like you existed. They still don’t. Just you.’