Melvyn Bragg, the writer and broadcaster, has given the first full account of his first wife's suicide and how the tragedy has cast a long shadow over his life.
In a thinly disguised novel based on true events, the Labour peer tells how when he postponed going to see his estranged wife, she killed herself after making arrangements that their six-year-old daughter would not discover her body.
"The death of Lisa never stops," Bragg, 68, told The Sunday Times in an exclusive interview ahead of this week's publication of the book, Remember Me.
Bragg, the "face of the arts" on television for 30 years, married Lisa Roche in 1961 just after he had graduated from Oxford. She came from an aristocratic French background and was five years older than the working-class Bragg, whose parents ran a pub in Wigton in Cumbria (he is titled Lord Bragg of Wigton). Her death 10 years later was a tragedy for Bragg, for Roche's own family and especially for the couple's only child, Marie-Elsa.
Remember Me is a moving account of his relationship with Roche. The events in the book are almost as they happened in real life with only the names changed.
The book itself is dedicated "In Memoriam L.R". This is Lisa Roche. And although it has this dedication, Bragg says that he has essentially written it for Marie-Elsa. Now aged 40, she was ordained last year as an Anglican priest.
"I would never have written it without her agreement and approval," said Bragg, who has presented ITV's The South Bank Show since 1978. "And yet I have also never jibbed from talking to Marie-Elsa about her mother. In fact she told me that reading the book and learning even more than I had told her before has been a great help as she had for many years before not been able to remember much, if anything, of her childhood. She is now, I'm pleased to say, a strong woman who works in a tough part of London as a priest."
The book uses the device of the main protagonist Joe (Bragg) talking and writing in the present day to his daughter, Marcelle (Marie-Elsa) about his life with Natasha, the name he gives to Roche in the novel.
Since Roche's suicide 37 years ago, Bragg has long felt both guilt and remorse, partly because he did not go to her the night before she took her own life. By now separated from Bragg and living in Kew, west London, where they had spent most of their marriage, Roche had telephoned him that evening to ask if he could come over.
Although she did not demand that he came that night, it was clear that she wanted to see him. They agreed on the telephone that he would come over the next day. Bragg was by then having a relationship with Cate Haste, who subsequently became his second wife and is now Lady Bragg.
There never was a "next day" for Bragg and his first wife. As soon as he was told of her death that afternoon, he immediately went to Kew by taxi.
The circumstances of her death are particularly poignant. In the novel Bragg writes of Natasha (Lisa) going to her bedroom that night, shutting the door and, because 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".
A paragraph later in the novel, it is implicit that Natasha has taken her own life. In reality, Roche had arranged for her daughter to be picked up at seven the next morning by a child-minder to be taken away for the day so she would not find her mother dead. "It was Lisa's friend who then went around that afternoon because she could get no reply by phone," said Bragg this weekend.
Bragg, who also presents Radio 4's In Our Time, said that he had not written the book as a cathartic exercise. "The idea of something like this being therapy is absolute rubbish," he said. "It just makes things worse.
It's stirred up stuff so that I've thought again and again: why didn't you just leave it alone? You were managing."
Yet Bragg, who wrote at least seven draft versions before he felt satisfied, does not regret the book's publication: "I don't wish I hadn't written it. But it has sort of muddied up something I was keeping suppressed. I think it has made my life, and the lives of other people, a lot more difficult."
To millions of viewers and listeners, Bragg comes over as a suave and assured broadcaster. But friends say this public persona masks an often very different private individual. They say he needs constant reassurance that his work, whether broadcasting or the 28 books he has written over four decades, is of the highest standard and also acknowledge that there can be a moody Melvyn, with fears bubbling not far beneath the surface.
At the end of Remember Me, where Joe has gone back to Natasha's family home in France long after her death, he writes a touching note to Marcelle to "try my best to bring Natasha home to you". Joe says: "Time is said to heal all wounds. Well, it doesn't always, Marcelle; in some cases it deepens them."
