by Melvyn Bragg
It was impossible to talk to their daughter about any of that, out of which, a few years later, she was created. Memories of their early frequent love-making came back unsummoned. They seemed so innocent; too innocent, it was to prove. It was an innocence that stoppered curiosity, baulked at unfettered sensuality, left questions, over time, to fester. But for now, for some years, it was enough, it was the physical seal, and it was sweet and loving.
Joseph was to be trusted, she told herself. He was like one of the village boys she had played with in La Rotonde, the brother of Martine her best friend, an open-faced, cheeky, sure-grounded boy, guileless, she thought.
Joseph would not harm her.
Robert had to be annulled. All he had done and not done had to become the past in her body as she so longed for it to be in her mind. She had to be brave: and to be brave, again, as his urgent but boyish love-making threatened comparisons with Robert. Yet, she thought, Joseph would carry no danger, Joseph could be controlled.
That night, after he had gone, that first night, Natasha felt the possible dawning of a new life. She lay in her room in the dark and, unusually, turned on the radio, found a performance of Fidelio and let herself be dissolved into it.
Joe skimmed the ground as he went back to Mrs Harries’s. He had not realised the burden of the emptiness. Natasha gave him everything and he felt almost mad with it. He would move in with her. They would never be parted. There was a new world now, a world fulfilled and for ever with Natasha.
Natasha stood in her black dressing gown at the window. Her feet grew colder on the bare floorboards. Darkness outside, darkness in the room, afloat on the genius of Beethoven. She smoked and peered intently through the glass, seeking to order her thoughts and feelings and take on this tide of energy which Joseph brought to her. This love, this new beginning which would not be denied.
CHAPTER FIVE
Jonathan came into Natasha’s room like a man condemned.
Joe was there. He had become a fixture after their first coupling. For Joe such love and sex meant marriage and despite the moral straitjacket of Oxford, England in 1961, he had decided a semblance of that could start now. Matthew and Julia had become resigned to the rattle of the rickety bed late at night, followed by Joe thundering down the stairs to race back to his digs. ‘There are several reasons why I ought to disapprove, but I find that I don’t,’ said Matthew.
‘Natasha is almost normal and occasionally even cheerful, which is a miracle,’ Julia said, ‘so what can one say? You can smell it on them.’
Jonathan too was to report that he could ‘smell it on them’. He thought of waiting until Joe left but soon realised that Joe would never leave him alone with Natasha.
He would accept nothing to drink.
Natasha and Joe looked at him expectantly.
‘I come bearing a message,’ he said, slowly, eventually, reluctantly.
They waited.
‘A friend,’ he looked at Natasha pleadingly, then at Joe without success, then at the ceiling. ‘A mutual friend of ours – that is Natasha’s and mine – is back from abroad and would like,’ one final pause, one more moment in which the bad news was not yet delivered, ‘to see you . . . Tomorrow . . . For a drink . . . In the White Horse . . . At one.’
Natasha went still. Joe tried to read her expression but failed. She wanted both of them to go. The news came as an act of aggression. Now that she and Joe were lovers she had begun to believe the affair with Robert was buried, or at least beginning to retreat from her present mind and move into the past, be anaesthetised, to be coped with. But how could it be? It roared back through her. She made such a taxing effort to reveal nothing of the turbulence of her feelings in front of the two men that she felt dizzy with the strain of it.
‘Natasha?’ Joe’s voice came from far away. She could not open her mouth to reply in case a cry came out of it and she did not want him to hear that. She just wanted both of them to go away.
‘I’ll leave.’ Jonathan heaved himself slowly to his feet. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger. I told him to phone but he point blank refused. He said that either Julia or Matthew would answer and they were not reliable. He said something more colourful than that but “not reliable” covers the case.’
He went out in silence and his deliberate tread on the stairs accentuated their own continuing dumbness.
Joe’s gaze sought out the portrait of Robert. ‘You don’t have to go,’ he said.
She did. She had to go whatever the consequences.
‘I shall just see him this last time,’ she said.
‘Not if you don’t want to.’
Natasha looked at him with such complexity in her expression that Joe stepped back. He felt hit in the solar plexus by this. From somewhere, though, from stubbornness and the certainty and power of happiness, he recovered. ‘You meet him at one. I’ll turn up at two.’
Again she looked and this time Joe knew she was pleading with him and he knew he ought to give in and make it easier for her, but he stood his ground.
Robert looked older than his portrait, darker and more thickset. Joe had not anticipated that. It made sense of course – he had been a GI and put in military service like so many of Joe’s contemporaries, an experience he regretted that he had missed. There was something else, Joe thought; a worldliness, the feeling that if he had not done it all, he had done a good deal of it and from the way he gave the once-over to Joe, he knew a greenhorn when he saw one. Natasha introduced them, without apparent emotion.
Natasha was dressed in the Cossack style Joe most admired. There was a Paisley neckerchief and a broad silver-looking bangle on her wrist and her face was without pallor – from her time with Joe? From this reunion? Her beauty winded him. He pulled up a chair in the quiet corner of the pub Robert had chosen.
As Robert had just returned from Spain Joe had thought he might crash in with Orwell on the Civil War or Picasso’s Spanish influences or was he for or against bullfighting. As Robert was an American Joe had thought he might ask him about the new young President Kennedy or the Arms Race. As Robert was an artist he had thought to ask his opinion of Van Gogh or Pop Art. He had also rehearsed other options. None now seemed appropriate. That the two people before him had been physically locked together was something he had to block out. This man was a visitor, maybe a guest, just passing through.
‘Natasha tells me you’re a film critic.’
‘Where do you come from?’
‘The South.’
‘I thought so. Gone with the Wind. It’s a great accent. Tennessee Williams.’
‘And what’s your accent?’
‘I’m from the North.’
Robert nodded, uninterested.
‘Well now. We got each other just about taped. I’m a Southerner. You’re a Northerner. You English get an accent and that’s all you need. Right?’
‘Not really. Not always. Not necessarily. There is something in what you say.’
‘I’m relieved to hear it.’
Joe laughed. The drawl was so attractive. So was Robert, he conceded. The black leather flying jacket was glamorous and indicated a style and experience way beyond Joe’s reach. His thick black hair was too long by the Oxford undergraduate standards adopted by Joe, who had come to the university sporting just such a rock and roll cut. A fear of nonconformity had led him to be shorn. He liked the way Robert looked. Robert, he thought, would court nonconformity.
‘Try one of these?’
Robert offered Joe a Camel cigarette. He lit an extra one in his own mouth for Natasha and passed it over to her. Joe’s stomach clenched and he tried not to look as she put it in her mouth. The shock of fury and jealousy wiped out all sympathy.
‘How long will you be here?’
‘Now that depends.’
On what? Too obvious.
‘Did you do much work in Spain?’
‘That depends on what you call work.’
Joe’s temper was unsuccessfully bridled.
&nbs
p; ‘I would have thought it was obvious enough. Work’s work, isn’t it?’
‘Depends again.’
One more ‘depends’, Joe thought, and I’ll be allowed to blow up.
‘You mean work doesn’t necessarily need to have an end product. I see,’ Joe said. ‘You can think, or just dream, I suppose, if you’re an artist. That can count.’
‘On the button.’
The patronising tone was like a jab to the jaw. Joe came back.
‘What sort of art do you do?’
‘You could call it a kind of Abstract Expressionism.’
‘But what do you call it?’
Natasha laughed, a small, quiet laugh, but unmistakably a laugh which to Joe sounded like applause.
Robert looked at Joe as if he were about to hit him.
‘Natasha and I were engaged in a private conversation.’
Joe stubbed out the Camel and took out one of his own.
‘What I am saying, Joe, is why don’t you just hurry along and leave us be?’
‘Why don’t you?’
Robert had trouble keeping calm. Joe leaned back a little; out of range, he hoped.
‘What about tonight?’ Robert said to Natasha, deliberately cutting Joe out.
‘Tonight,’ said Joe, ‘we’re going to see the new Fellini at La Scala.’
‘We could have a meal together,’ said Robert, looking intently at Natasha.
‘I’ve got the tickets,’ said Joe, ‘and booked a restaurant for afterwards. Spanish.’
Robert turned slowly and said with measured sweetness,
‘Why don’t you just fuck off, sonny boy?’
That was the uppercut. Joe was unprepared for it. What did you do when somebody told you to fuck off? In Wigton you would be expected to fight. But in Oxford? And with an American?
‘I have to go,’ said Natasha. She stood up as she spoke the words and held out her hand to Joe.
For a moment he could not believe he had been chosen. Then he too stood. Should he say something? Surely he had to say something after being sworn at.
‘I’m late,’ Natasha said to Joe and her hand drew him away.
This time it was Robert who laughed.
Later Joe thought of the many cutting, devastating comments he could have made. Sentences that would kill. But he had said and done nothing.
Natasha scarcely spoke as they went back to the empty afternoon house where she sped upstairs, took off her clothes and made love to Joe more furiously, more fiercely than she had ever done before, murmuring ‘Joseph’ which profoundly moved and inflamed him.
They sat back against the pillows for some time in silence, a blanket shielding them against the cold which was mitigated only slightly by the two-bar electric fire. They were in a sweat of satisfaction.
‘Do you think I was a coward?’
‘I thought it was bold of you to come to the pub.’
‘Did you?’ Joe was relieved.
His simple-seeming question sought out more comfort.
‘Yes.’ She looked around for the saucer and found a resting place for her ash on a heap of butts.
Joe waited in vain for more. He was reluctant but determined to face up to his failure. ‘When he told me to fuck off. Shouldn’t I have hit him?’
‘Why should you do that?’
‘I don’t know. But I felt as if I should. And,’ he pushed on, ‘when I didn’t, I felt that I’d been a coward.’ Further. ‘I’ve been a coward before, so I recognise it.’
‘Oh, Joseph!’ Natasha leaned across and kissed him on the cheek; the blanket slid down and he saw her breasts. ‘You are not a Sicilian. My honour was not at stake. Nor was yours.’
‘But it felt like that. And I just walked away.’
‘It was I who walked away. You came with me.’
‘That’s even worse.’
He spoke so gloomily. Natasha was moved by him as she had never been. She stubbed out her cigarette, did the same with his, and eventually, more quietly, they made love again. When they had finished, Natasha held onto him, her own courage strengthened. Both his strength and his weakness could nourish her; already she saw, valued and loved that.
‘He is a cruel man,’ she said.
Her face rested against his throat. She did not want to look at him while she said what now must be said whatever the consequences. The sentence put Joe on alert. If Robert was a ‘cruel man’, why had she gone with him? Why had she done that fine painting of him? Surely a work like that had to come out of deep feeling. Didn’t all great art? Why had she insisted she had to meet him?
‘At first I didn’t realise he was cruel.’
Joe tried not to get tense. This was fair enough. He had told her about Rachel. Somehow he had to keep Robert out of this bed, this room, see him as a figure in her story only.
She had to risk telling him. He was serious and deserved the truth.
‘I ought to have told you sooner,’ she began, ‘but I thought Robert was gone for ever . . . Perhaps it would have made you less . . . determined . . .’ She paused and it was as if every pore in her body was sensitised to the slightest tremor of retreat on his part: none came. She concentrated and tried to speak evenly.
Robert, she said, had pursued her for more than a year. Or, she thought he had. There had been other women; his friends said that he treated the women in the Ruskin School of Art like his personal harem. But Natasha had kept her distance, partly to show that she was not a member of the harem and partly because she knew that she must not trust him.
But he had ‘captured’ her: the word was emphasised. She wanted to live with him, he said he wanted to travel the world with her. He would be her twin soul in the pure pursuit of painting. She fell under his spell.
He began to neglect her. That was bad enough. Then he told her, with increasing bluntness, that she was not sufficiently passionate as a lover. She discovered that he told others this too. He further humiliated her by publicly turning his attention to a young English rose who had drifted into the Ruskin from a finishing school in Florence. There had been a scene after a life class where he had told her, loudly, in front of their friends that she had to leave him alone. Finally, she said, very quietly, there had been her attempts to win him back, even pleading with him. He had gone to Europe, to get away from her, he said, although she did not wholly believe that.
She did not tell Joseph about the still-unhealed wound of failure nor of the scarcely bearable pain of that rupture. It was, in any case, impossible to describe. That a separation could cause such insistent physical agony . . . that it could go on, and on, through the day, through the night, a malign infection occupying every moment, crushing her with the awareness of her own failure, leaving her with a weight of misery and loss she thought that she would never be able to shift. Nor had she been able to do so – until she met Joseph. He dissolved in a pride of love for her when she said that: to be of such importance in her life, to be of such use.
‘When you met him, I knew if I walked away with you, he had lost his power over me. You have freed me from him.’
And then she fell silent, fearing that his love for her might now be fatally impaired by the confession, fearing it the more because this young foreign implacable suitor had become so swiftly the keystone in the building of her new life.
Joe let a silence help him absorb both her story and what he could breathe in like air itself, her continuing distress. He felt that he had been admitted to the deepest and most private corner of her soul. He could feel what it had cost her to make that confession and the love that was growing for her was now steeled with an all but worshipping admiration. Insofar as the confession could be uttered in a neutral manner, it had been. There was no sobbing, no self-pity. She had offered him the freedom to walk away.
Pity, engulfing pity was what Joe felt. But responsibility as well. She had put herself in his hands and that was a sort of real love, wasn’t it?
And as for the pain of it, he felt it pass into him
from her, he felt some of the weight of it light on him and he was glad. It more strongly bound them, that he could bear some of her pain. In those moments the love which had grown in the vague blind ways of inexperience and impatience, as much in the fear of not succeeding as by the usual rules of desire, took on the possibility of a new dimension, of sharing pain and truth and of being open to the understanding of what was most intimate and perilous about the nature of someone else.
Joe lay there after her challenge, her confession, and wave upon wave of warm feelings swept through his body and his mind with a certainty of exhilaration twin to the surge of sexual fulfilment. If he knew anything at all in this tidal rush then he knew he would never leave her, nor she him.
CHAPTER SIX
‘I think you may prove to be very lucky,’ David said. ‘She’ll lever you away from that charming but clinging background of yours and set you free. I see you as a pair of refugees, exiled from your own countries, out to find a new life. I’m rather pleased with that!’ He giggled and his brief intense look as always made Joe feel uniquely appreciated.
They were in the Cadena, fashionable with the artistic and intellectual crowd, taking mid-morning coffee and biscuits which David, plumping out, ate instantly. Joe sat back. David cast some sort of spell on him; in his company he felt cradled.
‘May I?’ He took one of Joe’s biscuits, swept his eyes around the room, ceaseless searchlights, spotting and docking, and then returned his gaze to someone who, for a short time, would be his plasticine. But also someone he respected, puzzled over, wanted to befriend. ‘Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with your clinging background,’ he spoke through the biscuit, ‘on the contrary,’ a wistful smile, ‘everything you tell me about it makes it sound enviably desirable but you have to let it go now or you’ll end up going back there as an outsider, a schoolteacher or something, very nice too, but I think you can do something other, not better, “other”. To me Natasha proves it. Your interest in her, to use an anaemic word for the PASSION of it!’ a sudden loud ear-catching laugh, ‘is telling you what I am telling you. She won’t let you go back.’
