Remember Me...

by Melvyn Bragg

  ‘Yes. Of course you are.’

  ‘You wouldn’t lie, would you?’

  ‘No. You’re a wonderful mother.’

  ‘Marcelle is like you. Even Isabel says so.’ She paused. ‘What are you writing?’

  ‘Still the film.’

  ‘You always wanted to write films, didn’t you, when we first met? And so you have.’

  ‘Natasha?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I come to see you both tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Not . . . now, now.

  ‘Whatever suits you.’

  ‘Yes.’ She waited. ‘Tomorrow.’

  Another plane went over.

  ‘Tomorrow, then.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  She put down the phone gently and sat very still. Joe said to Helen,

  ‘I should go down to see her now.’

  ‘You should,’ Helen said.

  ‘Yes . . . I should.’

  But he believed tomorrow would be fine, would even be better. Yet he should have gone. Her life would have changed, would it not? If he had gone. And just to see her again. To be with her, her love, her great self, their unity again. He should have gone. For the rest of his life he should have gone.

  He did not go. He does not go. He does not go.

  Before Margaret left she said, two or three times, ‘Why don’t you come round and spend the night with us? It’s always such a bother when you come back to a cold home at this time of night.’

  But Natasha’s mind was incapable of accepting such simple, kind help. Joseph would call back. And besides there were thoughts clouding her mind, thoughts or intimations of thoughts or echoes and calls and imprints from other times which she wanted to let possess her, be immersed in, float and fathom.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, and Margaret kissed her cheek and went out, reluctantly.

  Marcelle came down and ate some bread and half an apple and then, cross at her mother’s silence and tears, went off to bed by herself.

  So at last she was alone. This was it then, this everything, this nothing. Particles of dreams, splinters of nightmare, colours of happiness, here, there, the slow swirl of it all so full of life, and that was all, that was everything, it was done. It was finished. The swirl quickened and became a tightening spiral pulling her down as she wept without feeling the tears and knew less and less, heard no calls of love, gone now. She went to her room and shut the door. There was no lock. She put a chair under the door handle and jammed it tight. That was for Marcelle, that must have been for Marcelle. And finally the fury.

  ‘It’s Margaret.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No. No! Please. No!’

  Margaret closed her eyes and forced herself on.

  ‘I’m afraid . . .’

  ‘No. Oh, please NO. Don’t say it. Please God. Don’t. No!’

  ‘Natasha’s dead.’

  ‘NO. NO. Please say she isn’t. Please say that. Say she isn’t. Please.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  He took Marcelle into Kew Gardens later that afternoon. Margaret had given her bread and they went to the big pond to feed the ducks. It was here that he had imagined he would tell her what had happened. She had given no indication that she knew even though when Margaret had gone round in the morning she had found the bedroom door ajar. Joe watched her carefully but there was no sign of distress. Margaret had taken her away and she had spent the day with her children. Now the little girl stood at the edge of the water unafraid as the ducks crowded around her and clacked their hard beaks for the morsels she distributed: she liked to spin it out.

  Joe sat on a bench. What would he say to her? It had seemed right, this open familiar place, and as he had anticipated there were not many people in the Gardens at this time on a weekday. But there were a few and even the few seemed to undermine his will. Another plane went over, the ducks clacked loudly, this was not the place after all, he decided, and when the bread was finished he took her hand and they walked towards Kew Green to the church which was empty and, after the outside light, quite dark. They walked together down the nave towards the altar. Now that he was here, now that there was no way out, Joe felt such a pressure of weariness that when he sat down he needed it, his life had drained away.

  Marcelle wanted to explore but he put his hand on her shoulder and she stayed. The silence of the church crushed him.

  ‘Marcelle,’ he began, but at the mere mention of her name he thought he would crack. He could not stop now. ‘Mummy has not been well. She’s kept it secret because she did not want to upset you, or to frighten you. She’s, your mummy, is, I’m afraid that she died during the night. She’s dead now, Marcelle. That means you won’t, we won’t, neither of us, ever see her again.’

  The little girl looked up at him. She saw her father’s face tremble against sorrow and her own face began to imitate his. It was too much for her to imagine, he thought. He let the silence be.

  ‘Mummy was still asleep this morning,’ Marcelle said finally. ‘Before Margaret came.’

  Margaret had told him that in one of what eventually proved to be several phone calls to people, Natasha had asked Margaret to come around as early as possible in the morning to look after Marcelle as she had to go into London.

  Joe closed his eyes hard and waited.

  ‘I shouted through the door and I tried to wake her up. So I went downstairs and then Margaret came.’

  ‘She was fast asleep then, Marcelle.’ And you missed the worst of it, he knew that, from everything about her; thank God for that at least.

  ‘I couldn’t wake her up,’ said Marcelle and looked up at him, trying, he thought, to be helpful.

  ‘No one could,’ he said, finding it too hard. ‘Nobody can wake her up now. She’s gone.’

  ‘Will she never come back?’

  No. No. Though then and for ever he wanted it. No.

  Joe could not speak but finally he shook his head.

  Marcelle began to understand. She caught something of her father’s grief. In the empty church they sat silently, his arm around her small shoulders. There was a violent strain across his chest as if it would burst open, as if his heart was forever broken.

  Ellen had gone to London immediately. Sam waited until the day before the funeral. He would go in the afternoon, meet Ellen in Kew later and she would travel back to Reading, taking Marcelle. It had been agreed that it would be better for her not to endure the funeral, a decision Marcelle later thought a mistake. Ellen would look after her, Sam would go to the funeral. But before that there was one thing he had to do and alone.

  Joe’s instructions were clear. Turn right outside Richmond Station. After a hundred yards or so turn right into a crescent. The funeral parlour was on the right, impossible to miss.

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Her father-in-law.’

  ‘Of course . . . your son telephoned.’

  Sam was led to a door which was gently opened and after he had entered the room it closed gently behind him. The coffin was at the other side of the room, four tall unlit candles one at each corner, a chair beside it, just like in a hospital, Sam thought. He stood for a while, not wanting to approach it. He had a sudden desperate need for a cigarette, saw there were two ashtrays on the table and lit up. He had not anticipated what he might be in for but it was tougher than he could have imagined. He stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and went across to the chair.

  Her face was so white and looked so cold. Her hair, he saw, had thinned, making her high forehead even more prominent. Her closed eyes did not bring peace to her face.

  ‘Why didn’t you come and talk to me?’ he said. ‘I would have helped you. I would have done anything in the world for you. I’d hoped that somehow you knew that.’

  Sam did not cry. Men who had led his life did not cry. His heart, though, ached, ached, as it had done from the moment he had been told. It was a pain that would never altogether go away.


  ‘I wish . . .’ he said, but stopped. There was nothing more to be said.

  When Sam had collected himself he left quietly and nodded his thanks, not wanting to speak. Walking slowly, like a very old man, he made his way back to the station.

  Ross and Margaret had made their house available for the day of the funeral. That was where the mourners would meet. After the service in the crematorium the congregation would be invited back. Natasha had told Joe long ago that she wanted to be cremated ‘on a funeral pyre’, she had said, ‘while you sail on’. Joe was seeking permission to place the urn behind the altar in the church on Kew Green.

  Louis and Véronique came an hour earlier than everyone else. Isabel had taken ill at the news and could not travel and Alain would not leave her by herself. Of the household Joe had met at Natasha’s aunts’ house only one person was still alive and she had followed Louis’s advice that the journey would be too taxing for her. Véronique had thought it better that the children did not come. Louis was the only one there of French blood.

  Margaret brought them coffee in the small sitting room at the front of the house. She left them, Louis, Véronique, Joe. This was the first time they had been together since Louis’s and Véronique’s arrival late the night before. Véronique, Joe thought, looked much more distressed and anxious than he had thought she would. Louis was grave. He had embraced Joe when they had met and Véronique had kissed him on the cheek but Joe felt that he was about to be charged with the death of Natasha. There was no defence.

  After the explanations about Isabel and the others, after the appreciation expressed for Ross and Margaret, Louis said, in his careful English, ‘Natasha created a hostile world.’ He looked at Joe so directly that Véronique might have felt excluded. ‘Ever since she was a child it was the same. Of course her mother dying when she was still a baby had a great effect. That was very unfortunate for her. But when I married Véronique it did not get better. It even got worse. It was always Natasha against the world.’

  Joe recognised that the core of this held part of a truth he would have recognised but he found that he wanted to challenge what Louis said and question it. Yet as Louis went on developing the point as he would a thesis, Joe checked himself. This was Natasha’s father who had known her much longer and presumably much better than he had. This was a burial day.

  ‘So you see,’ said Louis, ‘at some time or other it was inevitable that she would feel that the world would turn against her even more strongly than it usually did. All that was missing was a crisis.’

  No, thought Joe, she was not such a victim. She was not weak. And there may have been a hostile world but she also had a world of friends whom you will see, people who thought she was marvellous, beautiful, unique. As I did. As I do.

  ‘It will be very difficult for you to go into her house for the next few days,’ said Véronique. ‘If you give me the keys I will go there and put it in order. I remember Natasha saying that you could get annoyed at her untidiness and even such a small thing can be distressing at such a time.’

  She held out her hand and Joe handed her the keys.

  The crematorium was packed. The service, too short, too plain, Joe thought, was yet charged with such grief and loss that few dared catch another’s eye. The reception in Ross’s house was by contrast an affair of support with their friends, from Oxford, from Kew, from Joe’s work, from Natasha’s recent acquaintanceship. There was a hum to it, and life was even now beginning to move on. Joe could not bear it. He sought out Ross.

  ‘I want to say something about Natasha.’

  Ross looked at him closely as if he were inspecting one of his men before battle.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure, old boy?’

  ‘Yes. It’s as if . . . it’s as if there’s something to be ashamed of and I don’t want it to be like that. It isn’t, it shouldn’t be like that.’

  You are the one, Ross did not say, who is ashamed.

  ‘OK. Have a drink. I’ll give you two or three minutes, then I’ll give you the signal.’

  The speech was not good.

  ‘I remember only a little of what I said,’ he told Marcelle. ‘I felt a hundred angry eyes and cries of shame and disgrace only barely withheld. But this was not the parting for Natasha. I wanted to tell them what they all knew about her but which was being excluded because of the terrible nature of her death. I hope I said how wonderful she was and how much can be made even of a short life and they all knew that, they were here because of that and I told them how much she knew they had given her. I remember that I said . . . I said I had loved her very much and still did. And then I just choked and stopped and no one said anything until my father, whom I had not noticed standing behind me, tapped on my arm and I followed him to where the drinks were. People left us alone together for a few moments. He poured two whiskies, handed me mine and looked at me so intently that I feared the blow. “That took guts,” he said. He raised his glass an inch or two. “There’s marriages break down without it leading to this,” he said. He saw I needed help. His own grief had to wait, his true judgement for ever buried.

  ‘“She deserved so much better,” I said. “I was not good enough for her. Or strong enough, you would say.”’

  Sam did not reply.

  ‘I should have looked after her,’ Joe said. And that was the seal on it, the guilt determined and, he thought for ever after, undeniable, and, as it proved, crippling.

  James hung around to travel back to Hampstead with Joe. He would go to Reading in the morning to pick up Marcelle.

  The two friends took the over ground train as Joe and Natasha had done so often. They said very little but Joe was grateful for the company. Yet it seemed so strange, Natasha’s death, the familiar stations, still there. He was still shaken from what had not been said, but what he had imagined they were thinking in Ross’s house. Opinions were on the loose. Edward Worcester had said it was ‘an act of revenge’. Saul’s wife had said that Joseph had ‘killed Natasha’ . . .

  They got off at Hampstead Heath and walked up towards Joe’s house where Helen would be waiting.

  ‘Why don’t you come in?’

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ said James, ‘I’ll pass. It must have been a hell of a day for you.’

  ‘Yes . . . thanks.’

  They stood at the bottom of the steps that led up to the house which was thrown into dramatic relief by a nearby streetlight. Joe was reluctant to lose James, his long friendship, knowing Natasha from the start, his link with the day of the funeral. In the back of his mind Joe had believed the funeral would point towards an ending. It was starting to dawn on him that there would be no ending.

  ‘There are so many ways to look at this,’ James said, his words rather tentatively offered, his style even more formal than usual. ‘One is to say that Natasha has let you go. She always wanted freedom for both of you and now she has given you yours. I think that could be called an act of love.’

  It was offered to give more ease. It was received like the final and finishing punch. They shook hands and Joe slowly levered himself up the steps of his house to Helen. How could anyone live on after such an act of love?

  Joe raged with hunger to talk about Natasha. He wanted to know what she had been like before him, without him, how she had seemed with him, what people had thought of her, what she had said about him, how his relationship with her had been perceived. The perception of their marriage to his frantic mind and guilty soul sometimes seemed as important as the reality of it. He wanted to know everything about Natasha and what their friends had thought about himself and Natasha. Yet he was and remained throughout his life only occasionally able to raise the courage to ask about her, even with good friends. But in the beginning he forced himself to talk with them: brief conversations, embarrassed summaries, but attempts which met with sympathy though little that could ease the pain for more than a few minutes. It always came back to the conversation with himself and the pain would have no end.

&nbs
p; He feared above all that he would be thought of as someone merely seeking acquittal and there was a truth in that. He wanted everyone who had ever known Natasha to tell him that he need not feel this guilt, that it was not wholly his fault. He longed for absolution and yet would have accepted none. Shame and guilt branded his character from then on. He had, he thought, helped bring about an unnatural act and there was no natural way in which he could be absolved. How could he have done that to such a woman? He thought of writing to her analyst but his own analyst advised him against it. Soon it would be time for him to leave the analysis. That too pulled him down but he would leave, he decided, he would not cling on. It was time to let go.

  He struggled hard to keep up a front, to deliver, do things, be anaesthetised by activity. But his success was limited.

  Julia invited him to Oxford. She specified lunch when Matthew would be in college. They ate frugally in the dining room and she offered Joe white wine although she drank none herself. Afterwards they went upstairs into the living room, scene of almost all her late-night conversations with Matthew.

  She built up the fire, accepted his offer of a cigarette, poured coffee and said,

  ‘You look absolutely terrible. That’s no surprise.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, rather slurred, she thought, already, ‘it’s been . . .’

  ‘I didn’t approve of what you did,’ said Julia, ‘the split-up, but these things happen. We have friends in the same boat. Natasha was always extremely difficult. But I did not approve. There was Marcelle to consider. I thought you behaved very badly.’ There was no accompanying smile to soften what she said.

  ‘I could tell . . .’ He took a sip of the coffee and then returned to the wine. ‘This house is very quiet,’ he said. ‘It’s always seemed extra quiet.’

  ‘Yes. They knew how to build. But what Natasha did was wrong. She should not have done it. What she did has blighted your lives, both you and Marcelle and Helen. It has blighted all your lives.’

  He could find no response. If it were true, it altered a balance and by making her less white made him less black. But if it were true it was a lifetime’s curse.