by Melvyn Bragg
He was the best artist in the Ruskin, they all said as much. He had picked her out, the real one, he had said, not like the others. Though she had been burned before and though she knew he was careless of women, she became his wilful accomplice. He had released her, thrillingly, from her self-imprisonment. She had surrendered to his promises and been helpless when they were broken, brutally broken. She had felt herself break with them. If she looked long enough, hard enough at the portrait maybe she would understand and begin to find a way out of this darkness. Her watch told her she had been in her room for less than ten minutes. It already seemed half the night and yet she wanted only to be here in the slow time of her lair, humiliated, hurt, adrift, looking for a place she could neither see nor reach.
She had called him Robert in the French way. At first he had liked that; then he had come to hate it. Perhaps she ought to have dropped it sooner and not teased him. He did not like being teased but she liked the reaction it provoked and the animation of anger. She brooded on the portrait, looking for explanations, looking for comfort. The faint light enriched the painting, she thought. She looked at the dark window panes that needed to be cleaned. Beyond the window were slated rooftops and below it the garden adjoining other gardens, winter dead, sealed in the city of learning sunk now in sleep inside its beautiful and ancient walls of scholarship. Robert had involved her in that, too, with Jonathan, and a few American academics who threw around their ideas with a vigour that could make Natasha want to applaud. That group had gone out of her world now. Save for Jonathan, none of them had been seen since Robert had left her, without warning, just a note, a note, not even a letter.
She turned away from the portrait, put her face to the wall and huddled under the bedclothes, legs drawn up to try to squeeze out the misery by going back to unthinkingness, rocking herself slightly. There were no resources left. Misery was in every cell. Misery was her condition. It was beyond pointlessness now, even more than before. She wanted sleep. But even there, he would be waiting.
Joe walked quietly even though Don’s loud snoring signalled deep sleep. Odd it did not wake up Don himself, Joe thought: he had been disturbed awake by the dawn light through the open window and the snoring had made it impossible to go back to sleep. It was an entertaining noise, though perhaps just for a short time. Don lay splayed on his back, mouth gargoyle open, blond hair mussed over his forehead, somehow incongruous that he was snoring, too young to snore.
The drawing room was a mess and Joe was glad to tidy up, to earn his stay, take away the glasses and wash them, empty the heaped ashtrays, clean out the grate. He liked being in a room so uncramped: it emanated ease and quiet wealth.
‘Coffee?’ Don was in the kitchen. Joe had put on the kettle for tea but he complied.
‘Thanks, yes. Toast?’
‘Sure. You done all this?’ Don indicated the wine glasses washed and dried and set out neatly on the kitchen table. ‘That’s Northern British, isn’t it? Like your accent. Not really English at all.’
Joe was unaccountably nervous and he did not know whether to be flattered or piqued.
‘You guys are Celts,’ said Don, ‘so it isn’t your fault.’ He paused. ‘You have a nice smile.’ Joe felt it slide off his face. Don laughed and handed Joe the coffee. ‘Let’s go look at Ole Man River.’
They took the bus into Oxford at midday and Don insisted he came to see the poky, raffish Ruskin Art School tucked away in the back of the Ashmolean Museum. The American walked through the museum as if he owned it, Joe thought. He himself felt it was a waste not to examine some of the paintings and statues especially when he was with a real artist who could tell him about them, but Don ignored everything.
Don had produced Natasha’s address and after a pie and a pint in the Lamb and Flag, Joe went to her house which was just a few hundred yards away. He had known since he left her that he would seek her out; their loneliness was a mutual field of force. As he walked out into the grey, low-cloud winter afternoon, enjoying the bite of the cold, he sensed that she would be there waiting for him.
The shrill doorbell startled her awake but she would not go down. It would not be Robert and she wanted to see no one else. When she was sure the visitor had given up, she did go down – to the kitchen where there was food. They had asked her to give the house ‘a good clean’ while they were away and they would be back in two days. She would start after a cup of coffee. But after the coffee as she looked through the window it began to snow and the prettiness of it, the lingering flakes of white, the sweetness of the snow, the pure white life in those unstained innocent flakes made her cry and cry so hard she could do nothing until night came back.
Their daughter wanted to know more about Shelley. Joe could recite a few lines and recall some of the life, but it was how he looked that she wanted to know. ‘Hair swept back,’ he said, ‘far too long for the close-cropped male of post-war England and the style gave the poet a feminine look and Natasha’s hair was swept dashingly from her face in a similar manner. A broad high forehead. A strong nose, the “Bourbon nose” she was to call it. Face rather long and pale with a look of distinction in the slim lips and the eyes, just a little large, but so voluptuously and teasingly expressive. Even against the fire in silhouette, the candlelight had given me glimpses of the eyes and it was most likely,’ he said, ‘that it was what I saw there which would one day lead me to a life I could never have dreamed of.
‘But there were other photos from around that time,’ he said, ‘and sometimes she doesn’t look at all like Shelley. There’s none of that romantic brooding. She’s just smiling, so lovely, clear-eyed.’
He did not tell her that a disturbing dream had returned since he had begun to write, which had recurred often in his adolescence. In it he saw a dam which he had built across the river with other boys when he was seven or eight. In the field beside the dam a girl was buried, a girl he had somehow murdered, a girl he recognised. The field was always empty but he knew that one day they would arrive and dig her up.
Nor did he tell their daughter that he had sought out photographs recently as a preparation for this telling. They were in a drawer at the bottom of an old linen chest he used for storing finished work. He had not seen them for decades. There were packets of them. Some neatly labelled by Natasha, others not as neatly by himself. After just a few minutes, a look at the merest fraction, he had put them away. They were unbearable. Her look of such life.
CHAPTER TWO
He bought winter roses, deep red. Seven. The man in the market threw in the extra one for luck. The boy looked so spry, so clearly, eagerly, nervously on the gad. Joe walked through the near-empty, pre-term Oxford streets not sure whether it was better to hold the flowers down like a walking stick or up like an umbrella. He alternated. The deep red flowers were like a torch that late slate January afternoon, under the frozen busts which guarded the Sheldonian, past Trinity and Balliol, colleges now as familiar as Wigton pubs, names warm to him at last, in his final year. He turned to pass St Mary Magdalene’s of the incense and the chanting in Latin and then the Martyrs’ Memorial calm in stone where a few centuries ago red torches had burned men alive for their faith, and he headed for North Oxford and fabled dens of inimitable Oxford dons, including the two at whose house Natasha was the au pair. The Ashmolean was to his left, the Lamb and Flag pub, soon to be their favourite, to his right. On his rose-bearing journey to Natasha through the cold streets, he felt open, free, unencumbered.
His return to Wigton for the Christmas vacation had been undermined by sightings of Rachel. He decided to leave it early to come back to Oxford. To study for Finals was a good excuse, but there was also the tug of the thread of contact with Natasha from that first and only meeting. It had held through the cold break in the North and grown stronger in imagination. A phone call to Don had confirmed that Natasha was still in Oxford and had been ill over Christmas with ‘something like influenza, more a depression, I’d guess’. When he pressed the bell he put the flowers behi
nd his back.
This did not deceive Julia, who smiled but did not comment. Her smile widened when she took in his outfit: he had bought himself a canvas jacket with a fake fur collar and a pair of light brown cords, thin-ribbed and tight.
‘He looks about sixteen,’ said Julia later in the drawing room to Matthew, who was almost through his annual Christmas read of the whole of Jane Austen. He did not look up. ‘Like one of those town boys one sees on Saturday nights on the way to the dance.’
‘And very nice too,’ said Matthew, his head determinedly bowed.
‘Oh, I agree. But for Natasha? Surely . . . ?’
‘He can’t be worse than Robert.’ Still steadily moving through the prose, he added with precise dismissive conviction, ‘Robert was a shit.’
‘I disagree,’ said Julia. ‘He was a predator like a lot of men of his type at his age. He wanted an affair and then he would move on, he is a sort of sexual nomad. It was quite obvious to me.’
‘From what I gather,’ Matthew uplifted his head for a moment or two, ‘he gave wholly the opposite impression to Natasha.’
‘She always expects too much,’ said Julia. ‘And she is an adult.’
‘I’ll stick,’ said Mattthew, ‘with shit.’ And his eyes returned to the pages of Sense and Sensibility.
Julia picked up her copy of Death on the Nile.
Her accent, like that of her husband, was careful, clear, academic in its exactness, eschewing ‘upper’ but espousing pure. They would have wanted the approval of Jane Austen. Julia looked the part, Joe was to think, as he got to know her, extremely pretty, plainly served, morally earthed, amused.
‘May I ask your name?’
‘Joe, Joseph, Joe. Richardson.’
‘I presume you are a friend of Natasha?’
‘Well . . . not really . . . We’ve met. Once . . .’
‘She’s at the top of the house, the room on the left. Come in.’ She stood aside. Joe blushed as he revealed the flowers. Noting this, Julia said, ‘What lovely roses. I’m sure she’ll approve.’ He was nodded through.
‘I noticed that Lady Chatterley was sticking out of the pocket of that dreadful jacket,’ she said. ‘Rather obvious.’
‘Or merely coincidental,’ said Matthew, and read on.
‘I’ve never been in an artist’s studio,’ said Joe.
The bed was unmade as he thought it should be. The floors were bare boards, quite right, and clothes were not in a cupboard but hung on a rail in full view. There were saucers used as ashtrays and paint brushes sticking out of coffee mugs. There were two old easy chairs, one of which looked very unreliable. The sink was stashed with unwashed dishes. The day was darkening and the light was on. The central bulb was bare. Best of all, Joe thought, was the easel, on which was a canvas barely begun. None of the paintings stacked around the easel or on the walls was framed and Joe was soon to be told that none of them was finished.
To Joe the room was exotic. There was even a sloping ceiling. And Natasha fitted the part; a black dressing gown, sloppily tied, no slippers, cigarette, trying to force the stalks of the seven roses into a hastily rinsed milk bottle. Three was the limit. She snapped the stalks off the remaining four and put them in a coffee mug next to the brushes against the bare window. The milk bottle went on the small table beside her bed, displacing the plate bearing the half-eaten sandwich. Joe had never seen flowers look so artistically arranged.
‘They look great,’ he said, ‘don’t they?’
Natasha drew the dressing gown around her as she sat down and turned on a small red-shaded lamp which stood on the floor. In the ruby light the studio, Joe thought, became a set.
‘Look,’ she said, pointing to the mug of amputated roses next to the window. ‘They transform the balance of the whole room.’ She turned. ‘And those three . . .’ She looked at the three blood-headed roses in the milk bottle, arrested, for a moment, by the fact of them. The velvet heads still upright, green stalks in clear water. She could understand why painters would want to capture them though still lifes were not for her. ‘Yet you think – they’re dying. Once they are cut they begin to die,’ she murmured.
The soft rosy light from the lamp had recaptured some of the silhouetted beauty he had nursed throughout his absence. When he had come into the room he had been rather thrown by her pallor, the sweat-flattened hair, the listlessness. Now that very evidence of illness, softened and made beguiling by the low seductive light, attracted him afresh, gave him an impetus of concern.
‘Don said you hadn’t been well.’
‘Did you see Don?’
‘No. I phoned him.’
‘You spent that night at Shillingford?’
‘Yes. He put me up. It was very good of him.’
Natasha smiled at the tone: so innocent. But did that mean it was to be believed? Joe felt the appraisal.
‘I like that,’ he said, pointing to the portrait of Robert. ‘I really like that.’ He fixed his gaze on the portrait, trying to squeeze as much out of it as he possibly could. Natasha glanced at him as he stood unawares, and caught her first glimpse of an energy and an intensity which had so comprehensively drained out of her.
‘He must be a friend,’ said Joe, and there was an intimation of jealousy. ‘A good friend?’
‘He was.’
Natasha went across to the bed and sat against a heap of dented pillows.
‘Not any more?’
She looked at him and for a moment or two everything was in the finest balance. She thought she might throw out this unfeeling stranger in his stupid jacket or just cry: but she could not impose that on him. The three roses stood between them.
‘There’s some wine in a bottle by the sink,’ she said, eventually, and Joe was relieved, though he did not know why. ‘Use teacups.’
He washed them carefully, delighted again, and sat on the armchair nearest the bed. They smoked. For some time Natasha said nothing. She had pulled up her knees and wrapped her arms around them, the motion of smoking being the only movement. She wished he would go away. Tiredness was pulling her into unconsciousness like a relentless undertow and she did not want to find the means to resist it.
Joe had felt a strong scent of danger when the portrait had been discussed. It was better to say nothing. It was as if Natasha had imposed on him a sudden glimmering of wisdom. Before this encounter he would have rushed to fill every void with words. Now he sensed that he scarcely existed for her and that realisation made him breathe softly, stay still, just stay. Staying was the best he could hope for.
She looked around for the saucer to offload the collapsing column of ash and noticed him.
‘Why did you come?’
‘Don said you hadn’t been very well.’
Why had Don not come? Or any of the others who were in Oxford over Christmas? But these were weary questions, not seeking an answer. She thought less of herself even for letting them crawl across her exhausted mind. She was truly glad they had not come. She wanted none of them. But this stranger who had walked in, why had he come? Was it not just naïf, unthinking, without a history? Or had she been made sentimental by the gift of the blood-headed winter roses?
‘Thank you for the roses,’ she said and in such a way that Joe stood up to leave.
He tried to think up a telling, witty last line, but blurted out,
‘It would be great to see you again. We could go to Wild Strawberries. Ingmar Bergman. I get two complimentary tickets because I review films for Cherwell – it’s the university newspaper. Same time tomorrow?’
He would spend some time throughout the rest of the evening burning with retrospective embarrassment, closely analysing those clumsy sentences and finding every single component wrong, wrong, wrong.
Natasha made a small gesture with the cigarette. Contempt? Tiredness? Certainly it said, ‘Please go.’
He closed the door quietly and though a burden was lifted from her when he left the room, there was also the faintest regret, for his opennes
s, the excitement he tried to conceal with such limited success. That truly terrible jacket.
She took the flowers across to the bin beside the sink but then decided to keep them. Watch them die.
The smell of them brought no memories, filled her with no sweet sensation of that natural benediction which came from herbs and flowers. Freshly cut lavender was the only potion which could move her. There was that photograph of her mother holding a large bunch of lavender, smiling over her shoulder, dressed like the peasant women in Provence before the war. Natasha looked at it only rarely. It was too hard.
The sink was such a mess. She turned on the unreliable hot water tap, and looked around for washing-up powder. She had let the place go. As the water ran, she began to tidy up, slowly, moving like an old woman, prepared to quit at any time.
Much later, when she was brooding yet again on their beginnings, she came to believe that Joe’s first awkward visit may well have helped save her.
CHAPTER THREE
‘Just as shiny-faced,’ Julia reported, ‘and still that dreadful jacket.’
‘I must,’ said Matthew, who was preparing himself for Emma which he always kept until last, ‘catch a glimpse.’
‘You must. I have never seen such an appalling garment.’
‘I meant of him,’ said Matthew. ‘Dick?’
‘Joseph she calls him.’ Julia frowned. ‘Joe is much more appropriate.’
‘How would you defend that?’
‘You know perfectly well what I mean.’
