by Melvyn Bragg
Then he was out of the enchantment of the university and into the swathes of semi-detached houses which shored up the city, home of legendary Oxford landladies like his own, Mrs Harries, who had told Roderick and himself on their arrival that she would ‘brook no nonsense’.
Walking often lifted his mood. There was a settlement inside himself which came from steady solitary walking, a physical clarification that could exercise its way to an experience of happiness, a rhythm which could reach into a reservoir of calm. It encouraged thought. He could understand why Wordsworth liked to compose his poems while he was walking, the beat of the heart, the breath of the stride, the beat of the line.
By the time he put the latchkey in Mrs Harries’s lock his anxiety was dissipated. He would find a way to meet Natasha again. Whatever she did, he would not let her go.
CHAPTER FOUR
Their daughter wanted to know precisely when they had fallen in love. Joe wanted to find a dramatic moment. Something wild and romantic, to smile over and cherish, a gift to one who had suffered so much, a light in the dark inheritance. Most of all she needed something to smile over, to remember fondly, to see her parents as young, younger than she was now, in Oxford as she was, wonderfully in love then, everything finally worth it because of that. Joe was tempted. Julia had later described what he did in those early days as ‘a siege’ and been quite funny about his brazen dogged unsnubbable visits, sometimes two, even three times a day. But that was not enough; that did not deliver what his daughter needed. Roderick could tell funny stories about covering for Joe when, as the love affair developed, he failed to turn up at his digs and Mrs Harries went ‘madly puritanical’; but that was later. It was the beginning she longed to know about, the seed of it, as if so much that was to happen would be understood and could be forgiven if only their beginning could be claimed as pure and marvellous.
He would retell the story of first seeing her beside the fire. He would tell of his first visit to her mother’s ‘artist’s studio’ and elaborate on its garret bohemianism, its thrilling resemblance to the studio of Modigliani which he’d seen in a French film. He would describe the first meal and even point out the little Spanish restaurant. But falling in love had happened without Joe recognising it. Perhaps he was still nervous after Rachel. Perhaps he wanted it so much that he dare not look it fully in the face. Or he took his cue from Natasha, who was distant in those early weeks, as if seeing him short-sightedly.
It was Natasha who controlled those days. Joe sensed that to crash in would be to destroy whatever small connection had been made. She was so far away from him. Her eyes were sometimes kind, sometimes teasing, but mostly they were clouded in concentration on herself, straining to combat and vanquish the reality of her abandoned state. They were eyes that wanted no one to look at them because they feared the pain would be too clear and too shameful. Only later did he realise that he had seen her always in those early weeks through a veil of pain. They were eyes that could seem to want to be closed in peace and for ever and whose expression, when Joe did catch it unawares, sliced to his heart.
He had to wait some time until he knew for certain they were in love, he said, because of your mother. It was not the beginning that mattered. But she would not be deterred and he did his best. He could joke that this older, more distinguished and experienced Frenchwoman of a mixed European ancestry simply did not recognise the obstinate country courtesy of the Northern grammar-school arriviste. There was even some pleasure to be had as Joe played up the story of the rustic lump and the courtly lady and there was a truth there. But he knew it was a waste of time to look for truth in the beginning.
Many years later he made a radio programme called Not One Truth. There was religious truth through divine Revelation, the truth in the genes, Galileo’s truth that the book of the universe was written in the language of mathematics, the truth of the historical method, Keats’s ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, truth as relative, as analysis, as physics, as reason, as fiction and finally as unknowable. The routes to private truth were no less numerous. Yet a single answer was always longed for by those, like their daughter, who thought all life would be made understandable if only they could see and hold the one key.
The start of the love that came to lock together Natasha and Joe in a dance of life and then of death had to come from her. Joe was willing. At that stage in his life Joe was longing to fall in love, it was a condition that had recurred after Rachel and more than likely it was the lack of response from Natasha in those first weeks, her very emptiness, which spurred him on and gave him courage. Had there been resistance perhaps he would have fallen away quite soon as he had done during the past year on his few tentative forays back into the ring.
What he tried to tell their daughter was that Natasha had no wiles, she had no agenda, she had no English baggage of ‘placing’ him. When she gave him her attention she possibly saw a rather blurred young Englishman who had loomed out of an undergraduate Oxford she scarcely knew, and certainly not in young men such as Joe. There was from her no categorisation after the English fashion. In that undemanding ambience, Joe’s confidence grew.
‘What did Mum think of you when she first met you?’ He had an answer to that yearning question only years later and even then he was sure that he knew it only in part. ‘Not much, at first,’ he said. ‘She thought of me very little at first and in the landscape of her mind I was way in the background, I was that small figure in the far distance only there to prove a point about perspective. I don’t know if she thought of me at all then.’
From the beginning, Joe was eager to spend his energy on her as recklessly as a rich suitor lavishes gifts, but it was better than that, Natasha thought, because he did not give any signal she could recognise of looking for a reward. Now and then he attempted a kiss but proved too shy. Once or twice she caught him looking at the bed with a cautious hope, easily deflected. What he seemed to want was to look after her. Her only previous experience of that was deep in the unwanted past, two loving friends of her mother, ages ago in Provence.
But this was different. He was younger than her, she felt safe in that, as if the age gap was a sure layer of security, enabling her to control him, and yet he as it were ‘mothered’ her. Even fussed over her. He took her to London to see West Side Story, recommended by James, a friend, a classical scholar who had become bored with Classics and left the university more than a year ago. They had continued to keep in contact. He bought the train tickets, pre-planned the day in some detail, went to a small Italian restaurant in Hampstead (also recommended by James, who lived there), clucked over their poor seats in the half-empty matinée and stealthily stole to better seats after ten minutes or so, using the pretending-to-go-to-the-Gents’ manoeuvre. He even asked her if she ought not to be wearing a coat in this weather! She did not have a coat. She only just prevented him from buying some hideous garment in the January sales. She insisted on the adequacy of her old black leather jacket and soon he took a liking to it. Very gradually his attentions, for they could be chastely and rather formally described in that word, began to touch feelings in her she had thought dead.
‘Your mother trusted me, I think,’ Joe said to their daughter, ‘that was the heart of it. And she was right.’ He paused and sought to engage with the look in his daughter’s, her mother’s, eyes. ‘And she was wrong.’
Joe introduced them with pride.
‘David Green – David knows everything about who’s who in Oxford; Natasha Prévost.’ He had described her to David at length one evening in David’s enviable Georgian rooms in St John’s Street.
Joe had chosen the bar of the Randolph which David liked and which for Natasha was conveniently across the road from the Ashmolean. To Joe it suppurated exclusivity and made him uncomfortable but his determination was that David and Natasha know and like each other and if it had to be the bar of the Randolph then that was the price. It was not part of his experience, a clubby male bar casually crowded with the latest inherit
ors of Brideshead, informal in expensive sports jackets, cravats and cavalry twill trousers.
David watched him go across to the bar with what Natasha construed as a possessive amusement.
‘He is your marionette?’ said Natasha.
‘He is yours,’ said David.
She liked his boldness. David Green was rather large, constantly in movement as if physically uneasy but the movements seemed choreographed; his hair black and long, his face generous and expressive, mouth thin, vivid, rate of speech rapid, emphatic, punctuated by giggles which Natasha came to delight in.
‘Let me say this at once,’ said David, ‘while Joe’s at the bar (I know you prefer Joseph). He described you perfectly but what I had not been prepared for was a certain hauteur which makes you rather nearer my class than his although I do know they order things differently in la France.’ He pronounced ‘la France’ in the French way.
Natasha was yet some time away from being fond of David and he had moved too fast on a first encounter.
‘Je m’excuse, mais in France we do not fly to conclusions with so little proof.’
‘Ah! La logique française.’
‘Non. Good manners, anglais.’
‘Touché.’
‘Joseph is very fond of you.’ Natasha looked at him steadily. ‘He is not difficult to impress.’
‘His unguardedness, which I love, and his defencelessness may be a little more seductive than you imagine.’
‘Seductive? I don’t think so.’
‘I am probably wrong. I’m told I make rather a habit of it.’
‘Told?’
‘People!’ He waved his hand at the early evening crowd in the bar. ‘Critics.’
‘Are you on the stage?’
‘Ah!’ said David, relieved at Joe’s arrival. ‘The drinks.’ For Natasha and himself halves of bitter, for David a cocktail.
David sipped at the cocktail almost distastefully. Joe was to realise that David did not really enjoy drinking and his aim was to avoid being an outsider by imbibing steadily but as little as possible. As he sipped, an action which necessarily gave him pause, his eyes swivelled around the room and lit up at several recognitions which his eyebrows and the ends of his otherwise occupied lips acknowledged; the manoeuvre was done with some speed so as not to appear rude but it was clear to Natasha that there was a greed or more like a need for it and that softened her towards this otherwise swashbucklingly dominant figure.
‘You’ve caught me out,’ David said, reading into her glance. ‘My little weakness.’
‘You enjoy it,’ said Natasha.
‘That’s the only point in having a weakness.’
Natasha nodded in recognition at the effort that David was making.
‘He was a star, you know,’ David said, waving both hands as if he were about to transform Joe into a Hollywood icon. ‘They made a film and Joe wandered around looking significant although we could never quite fathom what he was being significant about.’
‘Alienation,’ said Joe, promptly, quite enjoying the role into which David had cast him.
‘Much better if it had been about class, and your exile from your class,’ said David. ‘Alienation is far too European and middle class for you. Joseph and I went on the Ban the Bomb march together last Easter,’ he said to Natasha, ‘with the jazz bands and Bertrand Russell, with vicars and MPs and playwrights, all very English, very village English, like a garden fete, and the conversation among the undergraduates in the evenings would often revolve around this word “alienation”. I thought they should stick to class. Now there’s a subject.’
‘You see yourself as his guide, don’t you?’
‘I,’ said David, giggling, ‘am his Virgil, guiding him through the Oxford circles of hell.’
‘This is a very boyish hell, David.’
‘So it seems this evening. You should see them scent blood and bay at the sound of breaking glass – Evelyn Waugh is reliable on that.’ He paused. ‘Let me tell you something.’ Another mite of a sip and a rapid smile from those long curvaceous lips and he leaned forward, voice guarded. ‘In my first week here at Oxford, four of us met in my rooms for tea. We had never met before. Each of us had been to a different public school. In less than an hour we discovered that we knew about sixty people in common – in their case often sisters and cousins but in all our cases friends we’d met through school chums or at London parties or wherever. It’s a caste . . . England is a hierarchy of courts and clubs and this handsome cadre may be tolerant and amused by the Joes of this world but, as a group, they do not rate or like or understand his world. Individuals can be an exception, of course.’ His smile melted Natasha’s resistance. ‘But Joe’s background is very foreign, slightly threatening, coarse, and less attractive than, say, that of any roughneck from the old colonies. He is, unfortunately for them, English, and being at Oxford theoretically one of “them” but he is clearly not, until he converts and adopts their religion, but even then . . .’
‘Why should Joseph need a guide to that?’ Natasha asked. ‘And how can it matter? Class is of no importance in the real world.’
‘Of course you are right,’ he said, and changed the subject.
Soon David left, all but danced away, full of beaming affection for both of them, his drink barely touched, on his way to the first of three parties that evening. Natasha and Joe soon followed. She too had scarcely touched her drink.
Natasha had to be back by seven to babysit the three Stevens children; Joe went to eat in college.
When he came back the children were headed for bed. The boys were aged eight and six, the girl four. Joe’s contribution was to romp with them and make them too excited to want to go to bed. Natasha sent him down to the kitchen, with which he was now quite familiar. He made a pot of tea and read more of Justine while he waited.
‘David’s great, isn’t he? And it doesn’t show but he knows a heck of a lot.’
Natasha was drawn in. Joe could sense it. He sat as still and alert as a hare, all but trembling at this particle of slight but crucial development. She offered him a cigarette and let him offer her a light.
‘I think he is a good man,’ she said, exhaling the perfectly even column he could never quite match. ‘But . . . horribly nervous.’ Which is why I can trust him, she thought.
‘Nervous?’ Joe shook his head, plunged in. ‘David Green goes to more parties than anybody else in Oxford according to Parson’s Pleasure. They poke fun at him sometimes.’
‘He needs those parties,’ Natasha said. ‘He likes you.’
‘I like him. He got me the job on Cherwell. We met at the party after the film preview and he asked me back to his rooms. We talked until about five o’clock in the morning. About everything. He says he talked about the Old Guard and I talked about the New Wave! He asked me if I wanted to be the film critic for Cherwell, I said if he thought I could do it, and that was that! He’s in with everybody.’
‘Is he?’ Natasha kept her tone neutral. ‘I like him,’ she said.
‘That’s great! I could see he liked you. He’s the first of my friends you’ve met. They’ve all been yours so far. And I bet you’ll like Roderick and Bob as well.’
‘Are you making me part of a family, Joseph?’
‘Why not?’
His cocky look was flirtatious and Natasha felt as if she had been touched gently on the cheek. For the first time Joe felt that he was more than just attendant on her.
‘You have kind eyes,’ she said. The compliment disconcerted him. For a moment he did not know where to look. He was not used to it. He could rarely if ever remember his mother paying him a direct compliment. Yet there was a subversive feeling of pleasure. What if she were right?
He knew he ought to return the compliment and he wanted to but it was too difficult. She had the loveliest smile he had ever seen.
‘You told David a lot about yourself that night in his rooms.’
‘Yes.’ About Rachel, of course. And the pub he had
grown up in. His parents. The small town of Wigton. His friends back home. His ambition to make films. Much of which he had repeated over the past weeks to Natasha.
‘He would want to know everything about you,’ Natasha said, quietly, ‘I can see that.’
‘He talked to me about himself as well,’ said Joe, ‘it wasn’t just one-sided.’
Natasha waited. Joe was a little reluctant. Had it been confidential? But then, nothing should be kept secret from Natasha.
‘One thing that will surprise you,’ he said, dropping his voice. ‘He isn’t really English. His father is German, was German, was killed in the war but before that he got his mother and David out, because she’s Jewish. They have well-off relatives over here and they pay for his education.’
Natasha took another cigarette.
‘Poor boy. German father. Jewish mother. English public school. And now, Oxford.’
‘He did say he was got at a bit. But he joked about it.’
‘I see. So he is taking his revenge now, in a most intelligent and very risky manner.’ She laughed to herself. ‘I like David. He is daring them.’
A few days afterwards, in the mid-afternoon, when the children were being taught at their respective schools and Matthew and Julia were doing research at their respective colleges, they made love. It took Joe by surprise.
In fact, when it became clear that Natasha would go to bed with him Joe panicked. He went downstairs to the lavatory where he tried unsuccessfully to pee. Back upstairs he suggested a glass of wine ‘Before . . . before . . .’ Natasha poured half a teacup for him which he knocked off like beer. He was too nervous to notice her mood, too fearful of fatal failure, consumed wholly by the desperate hope that it would be big enough, that he could last long enough and she would not laugh or be disappointed and leave him. What he had been male-groomed to think he wanted most about a relationship he now wanted least. She stripped, without coquetry, and slid into the rickety bed. Joe tugged at buttons, cursed socks, hesitated at underpants. She was French. She was an artist. She was unknown.
