Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘But you don’t show it,’ said Natasha, seeing his need for calm. ‘Doesn’t that make you feel good about yourself?’

  He laughed. She was his analyst now. Maybe they were safe in those roles. He felt a sudden lift of confidence.

  ‘What did Saul tell me you said to him? You’d liked the film but it wasn’t as good as my novels. And what did he say?’

  ‘He said, “You want him back, Natasha, all French women want their man under their control.”’

  ‘And you said?’

  ‘I said, “That is just another fantasy which serves the infinite male ego.”’

  ‘That’s right. That’s what he said. “The infinite male ego.” He liked that.’

  ‘I like Saul. I think I understand Saul.’ I think, she did not add, I may understand him a little better than you do; your hero worship and over-eagerness to please rob you of insight.

  ‘Still, you shouldn’t have said it. And you definitely shouldn’t have told Tim’s new lady that she was the spitting image of his wife.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘There are things best left unsaid.’

  ‘Not to Tim.’

  ‘He likes you.’

  ‘No he doesn’t. Nor do I want him to.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Joseph and felt the whisky sweet on the tongue. ‘Then the party after the film!’ he said. ‘That was a bit better because I could move around.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Natasha.

  ‘I saw you sitting talking to that – who is he?’

  She mentioned the name of a film critic.

  ‘What did he think of it?’

  ‘He liked it.’

  ‘But will he write that?’

  ‘I didn’t ask.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Paris, mostly, he’s a Francophile.’

  ‘You should’ve moved around.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s what you do at parties like that. You move around. Was he interesting?’ Why was this happening? Why had she not responded to his confession of an attack of madness?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you were all right, then.’

  ‘Oh, Joseph!’

  ‘Oh, Joseph.’

  ‘What can we do to be happy again?’ she asked and waited for an answer.

  Joseph finished the whisky, made the decision not to have another and felt a welling of tears. He stubbed out the cigar.

  ‘I don’t know, Natasha. I wish I did. I really wish I did.’

  ‘The film was good,’ she said. ‘The dialogue was very good. I told that to Saul.’

  ‘Did you? Did you really? Anyway it’s the acting that makes films. Not directors. I used to think that. Certainly not writers. The dialogue’s . . . I don’t know. A pastiche at best.’ Suddenly he looked exhausted, she thought, too tired for the night, too tired for his years and for his life.

  ‘You think actors are in control because you can’t bear not being in control. That’s why you are really a novelist. Novelists can be rulers. But, Joseph, why don’t you believe me? You are too strange. When we went to the theatre last week you were angry with me and later you told me it was because of a bad review in the TLS which I had not even read. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I wish I did . . . the actors make it. They always do. I used to believe in auteurs when we met.’

  ‘You look like an actor,’ she said, ‘in that dinner jacket.’

  ‘I wanted to be an actor once. Good place to hide.’

  We are beginning to talk as we used to, she thought. Her yearning for him grew so strong she wondered that he could not feel the force of it across the silent sidelit room: but he was asleep.

  For at least an hour Natasha sat and watched over him. She smoked. She scarcely took her eyes off him. She had to learn what had become of him and what he had become. He had become too important to her, she thought, and she must tread very cautiously not to scare him off. He was only a few feet away and yet miles apart from her. The task now was to reel him in. The task now was to meet again. Whatever the bruises she loved him. Whatever his faults and the casual woundings she saw her life in him. She examined him minutely and called up that which had been good between them, summoned up the successes of their past, felt less lonely than she had done for some time in this vigil, postponing and postponing again the time when she must wake him up.

  ‘No worst, there is none.’ He had read the poem to her and it was this phrase that looped in her mind. No worst? What if that were true?

  PART FIVE

  AGAINST THE SUN

  CHAPTER FORTY

  ‘Much later,’ he wrote to Marcelle, ‘Natasha’s Kew friends were to say that she had told them that she had begun to like Hampstead. As well as joining up again with James and Howard we met Oliver, who lived in the next street, a friend from Oxford, a man with whom I had been on the university tour of The Tempest in Germany. He and his wife had a daughter the same age as Marcelle – that was sufficient for a reunion. Oliver’s wife was Polish, a lecturer in East European Studies; he himself had gone into the Treasury. He was a tenor in the Parish Church choir, a trustee of the library. The four of us, or rather the six of us, could have made a unit, a nucleus, a beginning, the first building block, and Oliver, who had been born in Hampstead, was happy to take us into his relaxed, welcoming society.

  ‘The friends in Kew said that although Natasha could have a look of sadness, which was not new, she seemed after two or three months to be reconciled, ready to get to grips with a new life though pleased to keep contact with the old. They knew no more than I what had happened to her analyst. She had shouldered that alone. My own analyst, when he finally learned the truth, said it was “the worst thing an analyst can possibly do to a patient”. Yet Natasha found the strength to keep that to herself, which must have eaten away at her. The question recurs for ever. Why did she not let somebody know?

  ‘As for me, Marcelle, I have stressed the drunken oaf and he was certainly one of me. Another was the shivering isolated wretch trying to keep sane through the poetry of others. Another was the man drowning in a lost embrace. But work got done, not with the effectiveness of before, but it got done, and life went on, from the getting up in the morning to the lying down at night, with Natasha beside me, often planets apart as we tried to rest in that bed, our lives on separate tracks and yet still side by side, still able to reach out and touch each other.’

  ‘Come along,’ said Peter, ‘you might get some material.’

  ‘I’ve been out of things for a while now.’

  ‘It’s exciting!’ Peter Mills summoned his skills of persuasion, outstanding at Oxford when he had won the presidency of the Union, honed with the BBC where he edited a political programme, now finely tuned as he searched for a constituency in which he could stand as a potential Labour MP. But Joe was easily persuaded. He was wax to Peter’s seal of purpose. It was as if his character was empty, waited to be animated. And this invitation promised protective company and a chance to slip out of the perpetual, exhausting, unmanly obsession with himself.

  They had met outside Bush House where Joe had been recording the book programme on which he appeared intermittently, whilst Peter was revisiting his old department in which he had worked at the same time as Joe.

  ‘Happy days,’ said Peter as they walked quickly down the Strand towards Whitehall. Joe nodded. Peter was happy days. They had met several times since he had left the BBC, he had even at one stage thought he might buy a cottage near Peter’s tenanted family cottage in Derbyshire, so positive and untroubling and outwardly beamed was Peter’s company, so invigoratingly one hundred per cent his engagement with the times he lived in, so infectious his twinkle-eyed enthusiasm, even on this short walk as he all but skipped along, as open to the big wide world as Joe over the past years had made himself all but closed to it.

  ‘We’re off to tame the running dogs of capitalism,’ Peter said, and giggled, with his rather goblin s
mile, which warmly split a long face made severe by the large nose. ‘We’re trying to set up a Royal Commission to look into the future responsibilities of television and, you watch! We’ll do it!’

  By the time they arrived at the House of Commons, Joe felt he had begun to shed one or two of his self-absorbed skins. The meeting was to start at seven o’clock and Big Ben began the strokes. Peter always cut it fine. Life had to be squeezed dry.

  ‘They’ve given us one of the big committee rooms,’ he said as they trotted through the St Stephen’s entrance and along to the Central Lobby where they were directed to the broad stone staircase.

  As they ran up the stairs, two at a time, Peter now muttering, ‘These meetings always start late, TV people are never punctual, they always start late,’ Joe wanted to look around this palace of legislation, this mother of parliaments, this forum of democracy and do as Peter had invited him to do, take notes or at least let something sink in. But they were now in full gallop and the notes would have to wait.

  The committee room was crowded with people of Joe’s generation and he felt enlivened to be among them. He felt as if he had walked into a lighted room after too long in the twilight. This was where his lot lived out serious, energetic, extrovert lives, far from the brooding, self-consuming inwardness of his own existence which seemed by contrast misguided, out of touch. There was a buzz, there was a feeling of important activity, there was a murmur of appreciation for Peter.

  Joe felt that he had walked into a revivalist meeting. A vivid and noisy congregation of the faithful was gathered together waiting to hear the word. Issues which had once been alive to Joe were here again, full on, arguments over a social structure and a political system which could be changed and for the better and by them in this large committee room, windowed onto the Thames, about to be addressed by a Labour Cabinet minister.

  Joe let much of it go over his head. He was more absorbed by the congregation than the preacher. Besides the shock of the normal winded him. These were the people he would have been part of had he stayed working full time in television. They were a new battalion, largely, he would guess, grammar-school-educated, like himself, many of them first-generation university graduates, scholarship produce delivered by enabling Acts of Parliament in the 1940s, and now bound together by the generational kinship David had spoken of.

  They were young adults confident in their new identity and in the medium to which they gave their best energies and which increasingly was to give them an influence beyond their traditional class reach. But most of all, Joe thought, they were young people who saw themselves on a mission to unleash their high-mindedness through the new technology. It was as if he had opened a door in space and discovered a parallel universe which was also his own. These were his lot. It was a revelation and for a few moments he had no fear, no panic, no vertigo.

  There was polite applause for the Cabinet minister which segued into a warm growl of expectation as Peter got up to speak. His friend was a fine orator, Joe thought, with something Gladstonian about his delivery. The Oxford Union had drilled Peter in the ways of parliamentary discourse but it was the man’s own passion which gave the words their authority; and the laugh, even the giggle, which now and then both punctuated the speech and punctured any pomposity.

  Peter’s background was all but identical to that of Joe himself and he made a note to himself to write the outline of a novel in which someone like Peter would seize the opportunity, get onto the political ladder and slash and struggle his way to the top, to be Prime Minister and a Prime Minister whose ‘peasant’ past would never be abandoned. Loyalty to the past would be the charge to all his policies. Peter, he fantasised, was the very man to change a country so painfully uprooted from Empire and still bound in all the entanglements of increasingly redundant traditions. As he thought of the novel Joe smiled; it was at that moment, she said later, when she had first noticed him ‘smiling to himself’.

  ‘What we are here for may seem to some of small concern,’ Peter began quietly. ‘Those who rule over us want the status quo to continue in television as in so much else. They are the status quo. They want us to be grateful and obedient and uncomplaining and the greatest of these three is uncomplaining.’

  As Peter swept on, Joe felt both impressed and daunted. How could you have the confidence to stand up and talk so fluently without notes to so many of your contemporaries, the sharpest judges? Peter seemed to have a control over a situation which would have been utterly impossible for Joe. He envied Peter’s fluency. He flinched at the thought of himself being pressed into such service. Yet not long ago he could have made something of a fist of it. Again he saw the gap he had let grow between his immolated self and the world as it was for his lot.

  ‘But television will not play their game. Because there’s money in television. Because in its short life television has become the constituency of the people of this country and not the other way round. Because television is a truly democratic medium. And because people like you want to use television to make trouble for the powers that be and for the powers that should not be. We want to make the sort of trouble that brings about change and improvement to replace the change and decay we see around us now.’

  Peter’s voice rose; his eyes glittered. He laughed. ‘Don’t worry. No one is asking you to fight on the beaches. In the streets? Well. Demonstrate at least. Because they do not realise what you instinctively realise which is that the medium will not be a domestic pet any more. It is on the way to becoming a monster. A money-making monster and also a monster of hidden and not so hidden propaganda. All of us here want it to be another sort of monster. Our monster. A monstrous regiment for good. And for that we need the television channels old and potentially new to serve the Public Interest.

  ‘That is why we are all here this evening. That is why we will press this government and future governments to set up a Royal Commission. That is why we will lobby and pester and argue our case. Those of us who make the programmes and who have the best interests of the viewers at heart will have our voices heard and if we are resolute and if we do not give in, our voices will prevail.’

  Later in St Stephen’s Tavern, there was an unattractive and long ringing sound. ‘That’s a division bell,’ said Peter, rather proudly. ‘The MPs can be drinking here and the bell goes for a vote and they can be in the lobbies within the allotted time.’

  ‘Division Bell,’ said Joe. ‘Not a bad title.’

  ‘I’m surprised there’s nobody from Parliament I know in here.’ Peter was a little disappointed. St Stephen’s Tavern was not living up to expectations.

  ‘I’m not surprised with your gang here. They’ve probably scared them off.’

  ‘You are looking,’ said Peter, gazing around with affection at the vivacious clusters of young media men and women raising the conversation in the pub towards a pitch of unintelligibility, ‘at the vanguard of a new Britain.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just you wait,’ he said. ‘If you’d stayed in television you would feel it in your bones as I do. Hello!’ He waved across the room and followed the wave. ‘Back in a minute.’

  His departure was too abrupt. Joe had, even in that brief time, become too dependent on his friend. Abandoned he felt giddy. But he could not, he would not let himself down. He felt suddenly physically feeble. The rapid transition unnerved him.

  He steadied himself against the bar and sipped at the pint of bitter. The flush of engagement he had felt in the committee room had already waned and without Peter he found the crowd in the big bar, the unclouded faces and the wall of noise, intimidating. He focused on memorising the new poem. ‘How do you know that the pilgrims track,/Along the belting zodiac . . .’

  ‘What were you smiling about?’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Not now. You’re just muttering to yourself now. Back in the meeting. Before Peter spoke. You just sat there with a grin on your face.’

  Joe tried to remember. He had begun to sink back int
o the well of himself and this interruption on top of the ever-increasing volume of the ‘vanguard of a new Britain’ disturbed him.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I’m Helen, one of Peter’s researchers. I know who you are. Peter talks about you.’

  Joe held out his hand. The hand that took it was short but broad and strong. The handshake was a moment of pause. The eyes that met his were blue-grey, beautiful and calm. Her skin had the fair complexion that went with her blonde Anglo-Saxon hair, worn loose and long and flung back over her shoulders. Her mouth was entirely sensuous, curved like a bow, unsettling, he thought, until there came that open smile of unthreatening warmth and confident companionability. She was dressed in what Joe thought rather a student hippie fashion, a puff-sleeved cream blouse, a fawn waistcoat, a short fawn skirt, knee-length shiny brown boots. Later she would put on a white wide-brimmed hat; the hat suited her, and gave the outfit a charge: her own style.

  ‘I saw your film,’ she said. ‘Not the Elizabeth one. I haven’t caught up with that. The Nijinsky. When I was at school. Our music teacher used to take us to the ballet. I thought it was terrific. Especially the slow motion.’

  I must go now, he thought.

  ‘What are you researching?’

  ‘I’m trying to set up a programme about different types of protest,’ she said, frowning. ‘The sit-ins, the marches, the usual picketing stuff, even letters to the editor signed by dozens. To be honest I’m not getting very far. There’s not very much new except maybe the sit-ins.’